'Visitor Moorings for UK Small Craft: a Dangerous Neglect?', paper presented at Marine & Coastal Policy Forum, Plymouth University, June 22nd – 24th, 2011

Please see the attached poster which was given at a SBNE research event at the University of Central Lancashire the week before the paper was presented in Plymouth

Fringe Belts and Fixation Lines. is the Urban Jigsaw the best way of meeting contemporary planning needs?

Conzen’s early Post War work on urban morphologies (Whitehand 1988, 2007) remains relevant, but the process it describes deserves more criticism than evident in most current attempts to reform or evaluate the performance of Town and Country Planning in the UK. Simple mapping of urban change shows that blocks of land are often developed or redeveloped together, creating and over time adapting a complex urban mosaic. This tends to incorporate adjacent countryside and to change the use of large sites previously occupied by transport, industry and other activities that no longer use this land (schools, hospitals, playing fields, allotments, retail parks, military facilities…). Where such sites are in effect abandoned, and not made available for alternative uses for some years or decades, this process may be critically described as ‘urban fallow’ (Clark 1985, 2001). Changes to the UK’s long established Planning system under New Labour and Coalition administrations emphasise a few favoured rhetoric goals (sustainability, localism, climate change), but offer limited opportunities for popular engagement with, or criticism of, the planning process. This tends to facilitate or require most residential and other larger scale new construction to fit into the big blocks of land allocated for particular types of development. Resulting in a jigsaw pattern with urban morphology characteristics similar to those identified by Conzen, Whitehand and others

Irish Sea Coastal Stakeholder Engagement in NW England consultation, participation, strategic purpose and rhetoric. Do you reap just what you sow?

The creation of a holistic more inclusive approach to marine management could be positively influenced by the development of well structured and sincere Stakeholder Engagement and Public Participation (SEPP) processes. However poorly designed frameworks and processes lacking sincerity may engender skepticism, mistrust and create barriers in the attainment of a thriving and diverse coastal economy During 2009 a public participation and stakeholder engagement policy has been used by government agencies, Defra and the Department of Energy and Climate Change to gauge public opinion within the marine and coastal environment of the Irish Sea. This concerns the development of Irish Sea Conservation Zones and the UK’s Nuclear Newbuild programme. Both issues have complex dynamics regarding their environmental, economic, societal and sustainability aspects. This paper studies two contrasting styles of SEPP deployed during this critical ‘first contact’ stage by a participatory observation approach and assesses how this phase may affect the development of the engagement process and how this may affect a project’s outcome

Commercialisation of innovations from the UK National Health Service

The potential opportunities offered by developing innovative ideas from staff within the UK National Health Service (NHS) was recognised in 2000 and this paper describes a regional organisation, Medipex, which was set up to undertake technology transfer and commercialisation of innovations from the NHS in Yorkshire. The approach adopted by Medipex has been shown to be a successful model for the commercialisation of IP, obtaining private sector investment and winning external recognition after its first three years trading. Analysis of the outputs demonstrates that though the majority of ideas emerge from service use, the innovations that have high-value commercial potential emerge from research undertaken in the hospitals

Grounding, mental causation, and overdetermination

Recently, Kroedel and Schulz have argued that the exclusion problem—which states that certain forms of non-reductive physicalism about the mental are committed to systematic and objectionable causal overdetermination—can be solved by appealing to grounding. Specifically, they defend a principle that links the causal relations of grounded mental events to those of grounding physical events, arguing that this renders mental–physical causal overdetermination unproblematic. Here, we contest Kroedel and Schulz’s result. We argue that their causal-grounding principle is undermotivated, if not outright false. In particular, we contend that the principle has plausible counterexamples, resulting from the fact that some mental states are not fully grounded by goings on ‘in our heads’ but also require external factors to be included in their full grounds. We draw the sceptical conclusion that it remains unclear whether non-reductive physicalists can plausibly respond to the exclusion argument by appealing to considerations of grounding

The subnuclear localization of tRNA ligase in yeast

Yeast tRNA ligase is an enzyme required for tRNA splicing. A study by indirect immune fluorescence shows that this enzyme is localized in the cell nucleus. At higher resolution, studies using indirect immune electron microscopy show this nuclear location to be primarily at the inner membrane of the nuclear envelope, most likely at the nuclear pore. There is a more diffuse, secondary location of ligase in a region of the nucleoplasm within 300 nm of the nuclear envelope. When the amount of ligase in the cell is increased, nuclear staining increases but staining of the nuclear envelope remains constant. This experiment indicates that there are a limited number of ligase sites at the nuclear envelope. Since the other tRNA splicing component, the endonuclease, has the characteristics of an integral membrane protein, we hypothesize that it constitutes the site for the interaction of ligase with the nuclear envelope

The Accountability and Independence of the Auditors-General of Australia: A Comparison of their Enabling Legislation

This paper compares the enabling legislation of the nine auditors-general of Australia from perspectives of public-sector accountability and auditor independence. Following on from the Joint Committee of Public Accounts (JCPA) 1989 and 1996 reports, and in particular English and Guthrie (2000), this study finds general similarities in the enabling legislation for all auditors-general, and striking similarities between the legislation of the commonwealth and Victoria. The policy implications of this study's findings are that for all auditors-general provisions in their enabling legislation could be further strengthened

Horticultural Studies 1999

Horticultural Studies 1999 is the second edition of a Research Series dedicated to horticultural programs in the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences. This publication summarizes research, extension, and educational activities that serve horticultural industries and interest groups in Arkansas. The goals of this publication are to provide relevant information to the growers and end-users of horticulture crops in Arkansas and to inform the citizens of Arkansas and the surrounding region of activities related to horticulture