Retrofitting homes for a recessionary era; energy efficiency retrofitting services (EERS) sector characteristics and routes to increased activity

Within the UK, energy efficiency improvements within the existing housing stock is a key area in which governments have attempted to increase rates of activity to boost carbon reduction and end user cost savings. The most recent UK policy, the Green Deal, was a pay as you save scheme, linking the capital cost of improvements to ongoing energy bill payments. The success of this policy was limited, with minimal uptake in comparison to expectations. This research investigates the viewpoints of retrofit industry practitioners, to assess their experiences of working under the Green Deal, and evaluate what pathways could be available to move forward into the future. UK and German based individuals interviews were used to compare experiences, along with UK group interviews and focus groups to develop findings via a grounded theory approach, to illuminate possible future strategies for UK retrofit. Key findings suggest EERS expansion is most successful if policies are designed more holistically; UK policies show strategies which focus on simply the property and not the occupants have their disadvantages. Therefore, a move away from marginal financial incentives, such as the Green Deal's loan structure, to a wider consideration of how policy tools interact with supply chains and end users, would enable increased impact. Precise strategies identified to achieve this include; EERS sector members providing an attractive investment prospect to customers external to any government subsidy, linking of energy efficiency improvements with more standard property upgrades, and an increase in training levels to increase professionalism

The best-laid plans : tracing public engagement change in emergent Smart Local Energy Systems

To be fair, acceptable and ultimately successful, decentralised energy projects involving technological innovations require engagement with users, local communities and wider publics. Yet relatively few studies have adopted a dynamic, temporal approach to understand how publics are engaged with as projects develop over time. We address this gap by researching three case studies of ‘Smart Local Energy System’ (SLES) demonstrator projects involving combinations of power, heat and transport technologies funded under a UK government programme. Guided by literature on public engagement methods and rationales, as well as how users and communities are framed by stakeholders, we track engagement approaches over time from stages of project initiation to technology deployment. Engagement defined as communication and consultation predominates over participation and community empowerment, with instrumental rationales used to frame publics as consumers enabling technology deployment. Disruptions to engagement attributed to external factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic and BREXIT were interpreted both positively and negatively, including the implications of disruptions for social inclusion and fairness. The potential for SLES to catalyse broader social transformations in a context of environment and climate emergency is discussed

BMQ

BMQ: Boston Medical Quarterly was published from 1950-1966 by the Boston University School of Medicine and the Massachusetts Memorial Hospitals

Doping dependence of the Neel temperature in Mott-Hubbard antiferromagnets: Effect of vortices

The rapid destruction of long-range antiferromagnetic order upon doping of Mott-Hubbard antiferromagnetic insulators is studied within a generalized Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless renormalization group theory in accordance with recent calculations suggesting that holes dress with vortices. We calculate the doping-dependent Neel temperature in good agreement with experiments for high-Tc cuprates. Interestingly, the critical doping where long-range order vanishes at zero temperature is predicted to be xc ~ 0.02, independently of any energy scales of the system.Comment: 4 pages with 3 figures included, minor revisions, to be published in PR

Preferable, contextual and sustainable… climate futures for Ecological Citizen(s)

The responsibility for sustainable futures extends beyond individual disciplines, necessitating the adoption of diverse approaches across various fields. Water pollution is at epidemic levels, valuable materials go to landfill, ocean detritus grows, many people are disconnected from green space, and biodiversity is plummeting. We need new modes of climate futures, championing citizen agency. Societies require cross-collaborative, inclusive approaches to navigate climate future challenges. We seek to foresee ‘climate futures’ that signpost challenges, unpicking(appropriate) opportunities, benefits, and pitfalls. Through an Ecological Citizenship lens, the authors traverse situations, through preferable futures. It is an entry point for transition design, creating climate tangibility surrounding our everyday lives. The article unpicks and communicates ‘preferable futures’, conceptualising how Ecological Citizenship could be deployed. We report on workshops which yielded insights from different organisational perspectives. Insights were illustrated for public audiences. Narratives navigate ecologically engaged forms of citizenship

People, place and purpose: Place-based approaches to ecological citizenship

Humanity faces serious challenges in the coming decades: climate change, biodiversity loss, growing inequality, and more. These systemic global crises cannot be tackled in isolation because they are all interconnected. But our systems are not fit enough to deliver a good balance of environmental and social goals. We have a collection of rules and norms that reward some behaviours and punish others. In their current form, our systems seem to incentivise overconsumption, degrade communal bonds, and destroy natural wealth. But this is not inevitable or unavoidable; it is simply how our socio-economic structures have evolved to operate. The researchers in this project believe that place-based approaches and community engaged arts practices around the theme of sustainability, can enable a growing network of ecological citizens. In this paper we will explore how through creative arts practices, sharing ideas, thoughts, and questions and learning from best practices at a local, national, and international level from a variety of partners can create sustenance for a community-based network. Ways of building a network of new and existing place-based arts research and knowledge exchange which has the potential to include children and young people in the decision-making process, will be considered. We will consider how examples with embedded creative practice, such as community growers/larders/kitchens, forest schools etc., support partnership working within place-based projects. We will also discuss a people-centred approach to helping stakeholders, children, and young people, to make transitional choices, mitigate against negative consequences and empower local agency, in different localities. We will aim to show how diverse groups of people can begin to make impactful change through for example, community-focused approaches and community-led practices, activism and collective learning, advocacy, and design thinking in projects. We are defining ecological citizenship as accessible activities and skills which establish sustainable practice(s) and/or address ecological inequalities. This is also encompassed in our approach to the project, to our contextual surroundings, materials we use (and more) as an act of citizenship towards each other and the ecosystem

Expression of lymphoid structure-associated cytokine/chemokine gene transcripts in tumor and protein in serum are prognostic of melanoma patient outcomes

BackgroundProinflammatory chemokines/cytokines support development and maturation of tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS) within the tumor microenvironment (TME). In the current study, we sought to investigate the prognostic value of TLS-associated chemokines/cytokines (TLS-kines) expression levels in melanoma patients by performing serum protein and tissue transcriptomic analyses, and to then correlate these data with patients clinicopathological and TME characteristics.MethodsLevels of TLS-kines in patients’ sera were quantitated using a custom Luminex Multiplex Assay. The Cancer Genomic Atlas melanoma cohort (TCGA-SKCM) and a Moffitt Melanoma cohort were used for tissue transcriptomic analyses. Associations between target analytes and survival outcomes, clinicopathological variables, and correlations between TLS-kines were statistically analyzed.ResultsSerum of 95 patients with melanoma were evaluated; 48 (50%) female, median age of 63, IQR 51-70 years. Serum levels of APRIL/TNFSF13 were positively correlated with levels of both CXCL10 and CXCL13. In multivariate analyses, high levels of serum APRIL/TNFSF13 were associated with improved event-free survival after adjusting for age and stage (HR = 0.64, 95% CI 0.43-0.95; p = 0.03). High expression of APRIL/TNFSF13 tumor transcripts was significantly associated with improved OS in TCGA-SKCM (HR = 0.69, 95% CI 0.52-0.93; p = 0.01) and in Moffitt Melanoma patients (HR = 0.51, 95% CI: 0.32-0.82; p = 0.006). Further incorporation of CXCL13 and CXCL10 tumor transcript levels in a 3-gene index revealed that high APRIL/CXCL10/CXCL13 expression was associated with improved OS in the TCGA SKCM cohort (HR = 0.42, 95% CI 0.19-0.94; p = 0.035). Melanoma differentially expressed genes positively associated with high APRIL/CXCL10/CXCL13 tumor expression were linked to tumor infiltration by a diverse array of proinflammatory immune cell types.ConclusionSerum protein and tumor transcript levels of APRIL/TNFSF13 are associated with improved survival outcomes. Patients exhibiting high coordinate expression of APRIL/CXCL10/CXCL13 transcripts in their tumors displayed superior OS. Further investigation of TLS-kine expression profiles related to clinical outcomes in larger cohort studies is warranted

Exploring UK medical school differences: the MedDifs study of selection, teaching, student and F1 perceptions, postgraduate outcomes and fitness to practise.

BACKGROUND: Medical schools differ, particularly in their teaching, but it is unclear whether such differences matter, although influential claims are often made. The Medical School Differences (MedDifs) study brings together a wide range of measures of UK medical schools, including postgraduate performance, fitness to practise issues, specialty choice, preparedness, satisfaction, teaching styles, entry criteria and institutional factors. METHOD: Aggregated data were collected for 50 measures across 29 UK medical schools. Data include institutional history (e.g. rate of production of hospital and GP specialists in the past), curricular influences (e.g. PBL schools, spend per student, staff-student ratio), selection measures (e.g. entry grades), teaching and assessment (e.g. traditional vs PBL, specialty teaching, self-regulated learning), student satisfaction, Foundation selection scores, Foundation satisfaction, postgraduate examination performance and fitness to practise (postgraduate progression, GMC sanctions). Six specialties (General Practice, Psychiatry, Anaesthetics, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Internal Medicine, Surgery) were examined in more detail. RESULTS: Medical school differences are stable across time (median alpha = 0.835). The 50 measures were highly correlated, 395 (32.2%) of 1225 correlations being significant with p < 0.05, and 201 (16.4%) reached a Tukey-adjusted criterion of p < 0.0025. Problem-based learning (PBL) schools differ on many measures, including lower performance on postgraduate assessments. While these are in part explained by lower entry grades, a surprising finding is that schools such as PBL schools which reported greater student satisfaction with feedback also showed lower performance at postgraduate examinations. More medical school teaching of psychiatry, surgery and anaesthetics did not result in more specialist trainees. Schools that taught more general practice did have more graduates entering GP training, but those graduates performed less well in MRCGP examinations, the negative correlation resulting from numbers of GP trainees and exam outcomes being affected both by non-traditional teaching and by greater historical production of GPs. Postgraduate exam outcomes were also higher in schools with more self-regulated learning, but lower in larger medical schools. A path model for 29 measures found a complex causal nexus, most measures causing or being caused by other measures. Postgraduate exam performance was influenced by earlier attainment, at entry to Foundation and entry to medical school (the so-called academic backbone), and by self-regulated learning. Foundation measures of satisfaction, including preparedness, had no subsequent influence on outcomes. Fitness to practise issues were more frequent in schools producing more male graduates and more GPs. CONCLUSIONS: Medical schools differ in large numbers of ways that are causally interconnected. Differences between schools in postgraduate examination performance, training problems and GMC sanctions have important implications for the quality of patient care and patient safety