Resilient ecological solutions for urban regeneration

There is a need for biological conservation at the global scale, and urban conservation has the potential to support the delivery of this wider goal. Despite historic trends, efforts are underway to protect and enhance the quality, quantity and accessibility of green infrastructure within cities, including biodiversity features within new developments. However, there are questions over their long-term persistence and function. This paper applies an urban futures resilience analysis to a case study site to illustrate how such concerns may be explored and addressed in practice. The analysis identifies vulnerable sustainability solutions and clarifies the aspects that may be improved. The results suggest that the resilience of these solutions is questionable, even though resilience has clearly been considered. In particular, future compliance with, and enforcement of, planning conditions is questionable. The resilience of these ecological solutions may be improved by including some redundancy, designing for low maintenance, incorporating microclimate buffers and locating features in areas unlikely to be subject to future disturbance. The establishment of endowment funds or other dedicated funding mechanisms should also be explored. The paper also recommends that a futures-based resilience analysis be included within the development planning process

Increased GFAP immunoreactivity by astrocytes in response to contact with dorsal root ganglia cells in a 3D culture model

Failure of repair mechanisms in the injured CNS is widely attributed to the inhibitory environment of the lesion site, most notably the formation of the glial scar which forms a physical and physiological barrier to axon regeneration. We developed an in vitro 3D cell culture model to investigate the response of astrocytes to cells found at the inhibitory interfaces formed following damage to the spinal cord. CellTrackerTM labelled dissociated DRGs were seeded onto astrocyte-populated collagen gels and maintained in culture for 5 days. Astrocytes near the DRG interface showed marked GFAP up-regulation and adopted a reactive morphology which was observed up to 1mm away. Intensity of GFAP fluorescence at this interface was 3 fold higher than that seen away from the interface or in controls (astrocyte only gels). Furthermore, the presence of DRG conditioned medium was not capable alone of eliciting this response. In conclusion this model may provide a useful tool for understanding reactive astrogliosis in response to cells found at inhibitory interfaces following spinal cord or dorsal root injury. The contact between astrocytes and satellite cells may be enough to induce astrocyte reactivity and formation of the gliotic scar, or this contact may induce the secretion of a soluble factor which is not released from DRG cultures under physiological conditions

Biology, Ecology, and Management of Deer in the Chicago Metropolitan Area W-87-R-8, Annual Job Progress Report

Annual Job Progress Report July 1, 1986 - June 30, 1987 issued September 28, 1987. Includes Appendix A: Helminthic and protozoan parasites of white-tailed deer in urban areas of northeastern Illinois, Jose G. Cisneros; Appendix B: Recommendations for a cooperative new initiative on urban deer management for Cook County, Illinois; Appendix C: Recommendations for deer removal on O'Hare International Airport.Report issued on: 28 September 1987INHS Technical Report prepared for Illinois Department of Conservation Division of Wildlife Resource

Lifeguard: Local Health Awareness for More Accurate Failure Detection

SWIM is a peer-to-peer group membership protocol with attractive scaling and robustness properties. However, slow message processing can cause SWIM to mark healthy members as failed (so called false positive failure detection), despite inclusion of a mechanism to avoid this. We identify the properties of SWIM that lead to the problem, and propose Lifeguard, a set of extensions to SWIM which consider that the local failure detector module may be at fault, via the concept of local health. We evaluate this approach in a precisely controlled environment and validate it in a real-world scenario, showing that it drastically reduces the rate of false positives. The false positive rate and detection time for true failures can be reduced simultaneously, compared to the baseline levels of SWIM

Legitimating Inequality: Fooling Most of the People All of the Time

Over the three decades leading up to the crisis of 2008, inequality dramatically increased in the United States and Great Britain. What stands out, but is seldom noted, is that this occurred within democracies where the relative losers -- the overwhelming majority -- could in principle have used the political system to block or reverse rising inequality. Why did they not do so? A glance at history reveals that peoples have only very infrequently contested inequality because they were led to believe that their inferior status in terms of income, wealth, and privilege was just, that it was not really so bad, or that it was necessary for their future wellbeing. Ideological systems legitimated a status quo of inequality, or in more modern times even increasing inequality. This article surveys the manner in which inequality has been historically legitimated, first predominantly by religion, then predominately by economic thought. Attention is then focused on the manner in which contemporary economic science and its popular interpretations in the media have served to legitimate inequality in the U.S. since the mid-1970s. The paper concludes with a reflection on the unique conditions that enable the legitimation of inequality to be delegitimated.Ideology, class power, utility of poverty, trickle down, vertical social mobility

Reply to M. Horiguchi et al

No abstract available

The Principal Principle Implies the Principle of Indifference

We argue that David Lewis’s principal principle implies a version of the principle of indifference. The same is true for similar principles that need to appeal to the concept of admissibility. Such principles are thus in accord with objective Bayesianism, but in tension with subjective Bayesianism. 1 The Argument 2 Some Objections Me