Problems of global governance: port-state control and ILO conventions

This paper is an early report of an ESRC-funded comparative study of port-state enforcement of international regulations on seafarers’ health and safety. The study involves the shadowing of inspectors on their ship inspections in the UK, India and Russia, plus interviews with inspectors and key industry stakeholders in the three countries, and involves collaboration between Cardiff University, the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai and the International Labour Office in Geneva. However, the comparative analysis will not be complete until April 2004 and this paper simply provides an early report on the UK data. The idea for this study grew out of the attendance of Tony Lane and myself at the 29th meeting of the Joint Maritime Commission (JMC) at the ILO in Geneva in January 2001 which launched ‘The Geneva Accord’, the resolution to consolidate into a single convention all the various operative ILO regulations on seafaring, some of them stretching back to the inter-war period. Without in any way wishing to detract from the great worth of this task of consolidation, it was evident to me at Geneva that almost everyone attending that meeting believed that the main problems of global governance in the shipping industry lay not in inadequate regulation, but in inadequate enforcement. SIRC provided the background research papers for that Geneva meeting (ILO, 2001); it is hoped that, once the work of consolidation of the conventions is complete, the JMC may consider anew the problems of enforcement and that these findings will provide some background information to assist in this task. Certainly it is the case up to now that the practice of port-state control has received hardly any research attention, with Hawkins’s (1999) interview study of practice in the Asia Pacific Region providing the only comparative data

The placenta, maternal diet and adipose tissue development in the newborn

Background: A majority of adipose tissue present in the newborn possess the unique mitochondrial protein, uncoupling protein (UCP1). It is thus highly metabolically active and capable of producing 300 times more heat per unit mass than any other organ in the body. The extent to which maternal obesity and/or an obesogenic diet impacts on placental function thereby resetting the relative distribution of different types of fat in the fetus is unknown. Summary: Developmentally the majority (if not all) fat in the fetus can be considered as classical brown fat, in which UCP1 is highly abundant. In contrast, beige (or recruitable) fat which possess 90% less UCP1 may only appear after birth, as a majority of fat depots undergo a pronounced transformation that is usually accompanied by the loss of UCP1. The extent to which this process can be modulated in a depot-specific manner and/or changes in the maternal metabolic environment remain unknown. Key Messages: An increased understanding of the mechanism by which offspring born to mothers possess excessive adipose tissue could enable sustainable interventions designed to promote the abundance of UCP1 possessing adipocytes. Ultimately, this would increase their energy expenditure and improve glucose homeostasis in these individuals

The instrumental use of technical doubts: technological controversies, investment decisions and air pollution controls in the global shipping industry

In principle, the installation of emissions abatement technology (otherwise known as scrubbers) on ships would reduce air pollution and premature deaths from disease and allow vessels to save costs by continuing to burn cheap high-sulphur residual fuel oil. But very few scrubbers have been installed. A recent House of Commons Select Committee Inquiry was unable to decide between the competing technical claims of scrubber manufacturers and ship operators, over whether scrubber technology was sufficiently 'mature' for present installation. From the perspective of science and technology studies, this paper draws on interviews with stakeholders and written and oral evidence to the committee to argue that this was a dispute which foregrounded technical arguments for investment decisions that were actually being made on economic grounds. Where scientific/technical closure is a matter of communal understanding rather than technical demonstration, technical doubt can be used instrumentally for economic reasons to delay closure

Rationale, design and conduct of a comprehensive evaluation of a school-based peer-led anti-smoking intervention in the UK: the ASSIST cluster randomised trial [ISRCTN55572965]

No abstract available

Contribution of problem drug users’ deaths to excess mortality in Scotland: secondary analysis of cohort study

Objectives To examine the “Scottish effect”—namely, the growing divergence between mortality in Scotland and England that is not explained by national differences in levels of deprivation—and, more specifically, to examine the extent to which the Scottish effect is explained by cross national differences in the prevalence of problem drug use

Patterns in injury reporting

This paper considers injury data obtained from 16 anonymised maritime administrations. Evidence is examined of reporting biases which militate against the aggregation of different administrations’ datasets. Some important dimensions of reporting bias are analysed. Taking two different large maritime administrations, evidence is presented indicating that injuries are systematically under-reported in general cargo ships, compared to other types of trades, and that injuries are systematically under-reported by some crew nationalities within a given maritime administration. The paper concludes that there is a clear need to invest in studies of the social processes of shipboard injury reporting, if we are to be able to interpret seafarer injury statistics

Cold-induced beigeing of stem cell-derived adipocytes is not fully reversible after return to normothermia

Beige adipocytes possess the morphological and biochemical characteristics of brown adipocytes, including the mitochondrial uncoupling protein (UCP)1. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are somatic multipotent progenitors which differentiate into lipid-laden adipocytes. Induction of MSC adipogenesis under hypothermic culture conditions (i.e. 32°C) promotes the appearance of a beige adipogenic phenotype, but the stability of this phenotypic switch after cells are returned to normothermic conditions of 37°C has not been fully examined. Here, cells transferred from 32°C to 37°C retained their multilocular beige-like morphology and exhibited an intermediate gene expression profile, with both beige-like and white adipocyte characteristics while maintaining UCP1 protein expression. Metabolic profile analysis indicated that the bioenergetic status of cells initially differentiated at 32°C adapted post-transfer to 37°C, showing an increase in mitochondrial respiration and glycolysis. The ability of the transferred cells to respond under stress conditions (e.g. carbonyl cyanide-4- phenylhydrazone (FCCP) treatment) demonstrated higher functional capacity of enzymes involved in the electron transport chain and capability to supply substrate to the mitochondria. Overall, MSC derived adipocytes incubated at 32°C were able to remain metabolically active and retain brown-like features after 3 weeks of acclimatisation at 37°C, indicating these phenotypic characteristics acquired in response to environmental conditions are not fully reversible