London's Industrial Land: Cause for Concern?

Housing required to meet the projected population growth is rapidly swallowing up London’s industrial land. London Plan projections suggest that manufacturing and industry is in decline, so industrial land will soon not be of much use to the city and can be gradually developed in a process of ‘managed release’. But it may be that the destruction of London’s infrastructure of employment land will have a detrimental and unpredictable impact on London’s present status as a world-leading business hub and have unexpected negative implications for Londoners who live and work in the city. The paper draws on a review of existing literature and research, as well as evidence presented from grassroots organisations in response to the Further Alterations to the London Plan. It argues that manufacturing is changing, but it is not dead. Smaller manufacturers whose work cannot easily be replicated overseas are flourishing and the UK remains the 6th largest exporter on the planet. Industrial land also accommodates diverse industrial activities and infrastructure aside from manufacturing, as well as small creative and service sector businesses, voluntary and community organisations, who benefit from the relative affordability and flexibility of premises on industrial land, which are increasingly difficult to find elsewhere given London’s rampant property market. Together these activities provide vital support to London’s economy and residents, and contribute to London’s diversity, vibrancy and overall status as a World City – as London continues to grow, it will need more (not less) of these goods and services. The evidence presented demonstrates that on-going loss of industrial land is being driven largely by real estate speculation rather than deindustrialisation. However, evidence for the actual state of industrial land - who does business there, how those businesses are linked together and embedded in the places they occupy - is thin on the ground. This lack of information means the impact of this loss of industrial land is a worrying mystery; the current move away from separating industrial land towards mixed use in London’s built environment – both on ideological grounds and in response to housing need – needs to be much better understood. There is an urgency to this. The UK Government has proposed to further deregulate the planning system to facilitate conversion of industrial land to housing without the need for planning permission. Concern is particularly acute in London where differences between industrial and residential land values are likely to drive redevelopment if Permitted Development Rights are extended. We may be blindly heading towards a situation where London becomes a densely packed, high value residential dormitory, instead of a vibrant global city

Revealing local economies in London: methodological challenges, future directions

The economy of London is often characterised as global, productive and competitive on a world stage, the engine of the nation. It is also experienced daily by workers and other citizens driving vehicles, serving in shops, caring for each other, cleaning, starting businesses and struggling to succeed or even survive. The city’s economy generates immense wealth but also alarming levels of in-work poverty. Official accounts of the economy tend to emphasise high-productivity sectors, increasingly concentrated in office blocks in the centre, while half the activity is distributed through the city and made up of small enterprises and interlocking sub-contractors. The pressure on these activities is increasingly intense because of the inflated prices which land commands if shifted into use for housing development. Thus there has been a great deal of displacement in recent decades and there is growing controversy about how much workspace London can afford to lose. Furthermore the economy faces two major uncertainties in the next few years: the revision of business rates which threatens many enterprises and the consequences of Brexit, via changes in the terms of trade, inflation and curbs on labour mobility. Researchers at UCL’s Bartlett School have just published the report on a small research project evaluating the various ways in which the diverse economies of London are understood, studied and planned for. Principal findings of the research are that Top-down studies of the London economy fail to connect with the growing number of Borough-level and bottom-up studies of economic activity in localities. This seriously weakens policy-making. Community groups and local business networks often have a strong understanding of the inter-connections between activities but these tend not to be assimilated into policy studies. Some standardisation of methodologies used in local studies would help to build a strategic picture and would generate the kind of local audits which need to preceed and inform policy decisions. Statisticians, planners and economists need to give more thought to some of the key concepts and categories which are used or needed in the analysis and understanding of local economies at various scales. There is great potential for productive discussion among statisticians, planners and economists at the various levels of government, resident and business communities in localities, and researchers. A shared repository of studies is needed so that best practice can more easily be shared and to avoid each study reinventing the wheel. Longitudinal studies of workers, firms and localities are never done but are essential if policy is to be adequately grounded in an understanding of how the city’s economies interact and how planning can optimise conditions for all concerned. The report is by Dr Jessica Ferm, Dr Ed Jones and Prof Michael Edwards who have collaborated with the Just Space network of community organisations

Stochastic modelling of reaction-diffusion processes: algorithms for bimolecular reactions

Several stochastic simulation algorithms (SSAs) have been recently proposed for modelling reaction-diffusion processes in cellular and molecular biology. In this paper, two commonly used SSAs are studied. The first SSA is an on-lattice model described by the reaction-diffusion master equation. The second SSA is an off-lattice model based on the simulation of Brownian motion of individual molecules and their reactive collisions. In both cases, it is shown that the commonly used implementation of bimolecular reactions (i.e. the reactions of the form A + B -> C, or A + A -> C) might lead to incorrect results. Improvements of both SSAs are suggested which overcome the difficulties highlighted. In particular, a formula is presented for the smallest possible compartment size (lattice spacing) which can be correctly implemented in the first model. This implementation uses a new formula for the rate of bimolecular reactions per compartment (lattice site).Comment: 33 pages, submitted to Physical Biolog

Individual Exposure to NO2 in Relation to Spatial and Temporal Exposure Indices in Stockholm, Sweden: The INDEX Study

Epidemiology studies of health effects from air pollution, as well as impact assessments, typically rely on ambient monitoring data or modelled residential levels. The relationship between these and personal exposure is not clear. To investigate personal exposure to NO2 and its relationship with other exposure metrics and time-activity patterns in a randomly selected sample of healthy working adults (20–59 years) living and working in Stockholm. Personal exposure to NO2 was measured with diffusive samplers in sample of 247 individuals. The 7-day average personal exposure was 14.3 µg/m3 and 12.5 µg/m3 for the study population and the inhabitants of Stockholm County, respectively. The personal exposure was significantly lower than the urban background level (20.3 µg/m3). In the univariate analyses the most influential determinants of individual exposure were long-term high-resolution dispersion-modelled levels of NO2 outdoors at home and work, and concurrent NO2 levels measured at a rural location, difference between those measured at an urban background and rural location and difference between those measured in busy street and at an urban background location, explaining 20, 16, 1, 2 and 4% (R2) of the 7-day personal NO2 variation, respectively. A regression model including these variables explained 38% of the variation in personal NO2 exposure. We found a small improvement by adding time-activity variables to the latter model (R2 = 0.44). The results adds credibility primarily to long-term epidemiology studies that utilise long-term indices of NO2 exposure at home or work, but also indicates that such studies may still suffer from exposure misclassification and dilution of any true effects. In contrast, urban background levels of NO2 are poorly related to individual exposure

Caregiver perceptions of children who have complex communication needs following a home-based intervention using augmentative and alternative communication in rural Kenya: an intervention note:Home-based intervention using AAC in rural Kenya

A high level of unmet communication need exists amongst children with developmental disabilities in sub-Saharan Africa. This study investigated preliminary evidence of the impact associated with a home-based, caregiver-implemented intervention employing AAC methods, with nine children in rural Kenya who have complex communication needs. The intervention used mainly locally-sourced low-tech materials, and was designed to make use of the child's strengths and the caregiver's natural expertise. A pretest-posttest design was used in the study. Data were gathered using an adapted version of the Communication Profile, which was based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) framework. The non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test was applied to data from the first two sections of the Communication Profile-Adapted. Qualitative analysis was conducted on the final section. The data provided evidence of statistically significant positive changes in caregiver perceptions of communication at the levels of Body Structure and Function, and Activities for Communication. Also, analysis of the Participation for Communication section revealed some expansion to the children's social activities. The potential impact of the home-based intervention would benefit from investigation on a larger scale. Limitations of the study are discussed

Markovian Dynamics on Complex Reaction Networks

Complex networks, comprised of individual elements that interact with each other through reaction channels, are ubiquitous across many scientific and engineering disciplines. Examples include biochemical, pharmacokinetic, epidemiological, ecological, social, neural, and multi-agent networks. A common approach to modeling such networks is by a master equation that governs the dynamic evolution of the joint probability mass function of the underling population process and naturally leads to Markovian dynamics for such process. Due however to the nonlinear nature of most reactions, the computation and analysis of the resulting stochastic population dynamics is a difficult task. This review article provides a coherent and comprehensive coverage of recently developed approaches and methods to tackle this problem. After reviewing a general framework for modeling Markovian reaction networks and giving specific examples, the authors present numerical and computational techniques capable of evaluating or approximating the solution of the master equation, discuss a recently developed approach for studying the stationary behavior of Markovian reaction networks using a potential energy landscape perspective, and provide an introduction to the emerging theory of thermodynamic analysis of such networks. Three representative problems of opinion formation, transcription regulation, and neural network dynamics are used as illustrative examples.Comment: 52 pages, 11 figures, for freely available MATLAB software, see http://www.cis.jhu.edu/~goutsias/CSS%20lab/software.htm

Solving the chemical master equation using sliding windows

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The chemical master equation (CME) is a system of ordinary differential equations that describes the evolution of a network of chemical reactions as a stochastic process. Its solution yields the probability density vector of the system at each point in time. Solving the CME numerically is in many cases computationally expensive or even infeasible as the number of reachable states can be very large or infinite. We introduce the sliding window method, which computes an approximate solution of the CME by performing a sequence of local analysis steps. In each step, only a manageable subset of states is considered, representing a "window" into the state space. In subsequent steps, the window follows the direction in which the probability mass moves, until the time period of interest has elapsed. We construct the window based on a deterministic approximation of the future behavior of the system by estimating upper and lower bounds on the populations of the chemical species.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In order to show the effectiveness of our approach, we apply it to several examples previously described in the literature. The experimental results show that the proposed method speeds up the analysis considerably, compared to a global analysis, while still providing high accuracy.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The sliding window method is a novel approach to address the performance problems of numerical algorithms for the solution of the chemical master equation. The method efficiently approximates the probability distributions at the time points of interest for a variety of chemically reacting systems, including systems for which no upper bound on the population sizes of the chemical species is known a priori.</p

[Supplemental data] Composition, isotopic fingerprint and source attribution of nitrate deposition from rain and fog at a Sub-Arctic Mountain site in Central Sweden (Mt Åreskutan)

Material suplementario para artículo científico.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ciencias Básicas::Facultad de Ciencias::Escuela de FísicaUCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Básicas::Centro de Investigaciones Geofísicas (CIGEFI

Multicenter phase II study of plitidepsin in patients with relapsed/refractory non-Hodgkin&apos;s lymphoma

This phase II clinical trial evaluated the efficacy, safety and pharmacokinetics of plitidepsin 3.2 mg/m2 administered as a 1-hour intravenous infusion weekly on days 1, 8 and 15 every 4 weeks in 67 adult patients with relapsed/refractory aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Patients were divided into two cohorts: those with non-cutaneous peripheral T-cell lymphoma (n=34) and those with other lymphomas (n=33). Efficacy was evaluated using the International Working Group criteria (1999). Of the 29 evaluable patients with non-cutaneous peripheral T-cell lymphoma, six had a response (overall response rate 20.7%; 95% confidence interval, 8.0%-39.7%), including two complete responses and four partial responses. No responses occurred in the 30 evaluable patients with other lymphomas (including 27 B-cell lymphomas). The most common plitidepsin-related adverse events were nausea, fatigue and myalgia (grade 3 in <10% of cases). Severe laboratory abnormalities (lymphopenia, anemia, thrombo- cytopenia, and increased levels of transaminase and creatine phosphokinase) were transient and easily managed by plitidepsin dose adjustments. The pharmacokinetic profile did not differ from that previously reported in patients with solid tumors. In conclusion, plitidepsin monotherapy has clinical activity in relapsed/refractory T-cell lymphomas. Combinations of plitidepsin with other chemotherapeutic drugs deserve further evaluation in patients with non-cutaneous peripheral T-cell lymphoma. (clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT00884286)