Building future societies? A brief analysis of Braga’s school bus project

This paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of implementing trans- port policies that meet home to school (and vice versa) mobility needs of children and young people. Over the last few years families’ mobility has been given increasing attention. One of the most investigated aspects is home to work mobil- ity. Nowadays there is an urgent need to study and propose intervention measures regarding children’s mobility to school. In fact, studies show that the car is the preferred mode of transportation in Portugal. This trend has undoubtedly negative social, environmental and health consequences. Based on an evaluation study on the School Bus project in Braga (a research- intervention activity of BUILD-Braga Urban Innovation Laboratory Demonstrator), this paper discusses the difficulties in implementing sustainable mobility initiatives, pointing out anticipatory mea- sures that can be taken in medium-sized cities in order to stop the expansion of children’s transportation by car, and give them back spaces in the cities.UIDB/00736/202

Quantitative Analysis of Serum Procollagen Type I C-Terminal Propeptide by Immunoassay on Microchip

BACKGROUND: Sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is one of the most frequently employed assays for clinical diagnosis, since this enables the investigator to identify specific protein biomarkers. However, the conventional assay using a 96-well microtitration plate is time- and sample-consuming, and therefore is not suitable for rapid diagnosis. To overcome these drawbacks, we performed a sandwich ELISA on a microchip. METHODS AND FINDINGS: The microchip was made of cyclic olefin copolymer with straight microchannels that were 300 µm wide and 100 µm deep. For the construction of a sandwich ELISA for procollagen type I C-peptide (PICP), a biomarker for bone formation, we used a piezoelectric inkjet printing system for the deposition and fixation of the 1st anti-PICP antibody on the surface of the microchannel. After the infusion of the mixture of 2.0 µl of peroxidase-labeled 2nd anti-PICP antibody and 0.4 µl of sample to the microchannel and a 30-min incubation, the substrate for peroxidase was infused into the microchannel; and the luminescence intensity of each spot of 1st antibody was measured by CCD camera. A linear relationship was observed between PICP concentration and luminescence intensity over the range of 0 to 600 ng/ml (r(2) = 0.991), and the detection limit was 4.7 ng/ml. Blood PICP concentrations of 6 subjects estimated from microchip were compared with results obtained by the conventional method. Good correlation was observed between methods according to simple linear regression analysis (R(2) = 0.9914). The within-day and between-days reproducibilities were 3.2-7.4 and 4.4-6.8%, respectively. This assay reduced the time for the antigen-antibody reaction to 1/6, and the consumption of samples and reagents to 1/50 compared with the conventional method. CONCLUSION: This assay enabled us to determine serum PICP with accuracy, high sensitivity, time saving ability, and low consumption of sample and reagents, and thus will be applicable to clinic diagnosis

Expert perspectives on the role of the bus in school travel

Permission is granted by ICE Publishing to print one copy for personal use. Any other use of these PDF files is subject to reprint fees.Millions of children travel to and from school each day as part of their daily routine, contributing to increased congestion and traffic on the roads. This paper examines the role of the bus within school travel and reports the views of current professionals in the school travel industry gained from interviews with school travel experts in the UK. The findings suggest that parents, schools, local authorities and bus operators are the key stakeholders, while the children are relatively minor players despite being the main users of the system. The key issues facing the sector concern costs to government and users, institutional and political factors, and social issues around the behaviour of children on buses. The interviewees all see a prominent place for buses in school travel, both now and in the future

Quantifying the impacts of subsidy policies on home-to-school pupil travel by bus in England

In the current economic climate, the British Government is revising a whole range of policy sectors to highlight areas where savings and cuts can be made. The policy of subsidising home-to-school transport for pupils who live beyond a set distance from the school which they attend has been in place since 1944 and this policy costs local authorities in England over £1 billion a year. The aim of this paper is to examine the outcomes of policy choices facing Government relating to subsidising the transport of pupils travelling between home and school. Specifically, the paper employs a multilevel modelling technique to develop a series of relationships between bus usage by school and the level of spending by local education authorities on home-to-school bus travel provision while controlling for other factors such as school quality, land-use patterns and various proxies for household incomes. The results suggest that there is a differential effect of funding on the total school-level bus mileage for primary (aged \textless11), secondary (aged 11-16) and post 16 schools. It is found that if local authority school budgets for bus travel provision were removed, then school-level bus mileage in England would decrease by 16, 27 and 10 % for primary, secondary and post 16 schools respectively. It is hoped that the results of the study will help inform practitioners and policy makers to select the policy responses that are most appropriate