Breaking the link between disability and child and whanau poverty

In New Zealand, disabled children are more likely to live in a oneparent household than are non-disabled children. The primary carers of disabled children have a higher unemployment rate than oneparent households in general. As a result, households with disabled children are significantly more likely to experience income poverty. This is not the case in the United Kingdom, where households with disabled children tend not to be at greater risk of income poverty. A key factor in preventing a greater risk of income poverty is the higher disability-related allowances in the United Kingdom: the median payment rate is almost three times higher than the New Zealand equivalents. There is a clear case for increasing the payment rate of the New Zealand disability-related allowances. There is also a clear case for an overhaul of support for households with disabled children to better enable carers/parents to work and to provide more equitable and effective support

Increasing Awareness of First Episode Psychosis

Presented at the 2022 Virtual Northwest Medical Research Symposiu

Chem# - Semantically Enriched Linked Open Chemical Data

The problem: Vast quantities of chemical data (e.g. crystal structures, NMR spectra, experimental reports) are generated every day. The majority of this data is never published, and the data that is published is fragmented,trapped in legacy formats and difficult to discover. The solution: Semantically Enriched Linked Open Chemical Data: browsable, searchable, discoverable and interpretable by humans and machines alike, using standardized extensible data formats (Chemical Markup Language) and technologies (HTTP, RDF).Funded by JISC

Disability: the Living Standards Framework and Wellbeing in New Zealand

Disabled people and their whänau have poorer outcomes across a wide range of wellbeing and living standards measures.1 Yet disability analysis does not appear to be well integrated into government decision making on wellbeing. This article builds a framework for understanding disability in a wellbeing context by using the Treasury’s Living Standards Framework and Sophie Mitra’s human development model for disability and health. One of the most important aspects of Mitra’s model is the interaction between resources and structural factors. Structural factors, such as an inaccessible built environment, force disabled people to spend more resources to get the same outcomes as nondisabled people. Publicly funded disability support is essential to counteract these structural factors. We also need to improve the usability of the four capitals for disabled people and their whänau to reduce these structural barriers

Intra-system uniformity: a natural outcome of dynamical sculpting

There is evidence that exoplanet systems display intra-system uniformity in mass, radius, and orbital spacing (like "peas in a pod") when compared with the system-to-system variations of planetary systems. This has been interpreted as the outcome of the early stages of planet formation, indicative of a picture in which planets form at characteristic mass scales with uniform separations. In this paper, we argue instead that intra-system uniformity in planet sizes and orbital spacings likely arose from the long-term dynamical sculpting of initially-overly-packed planetary systems (in other words, the giant impact phase). With a suite of $N$-body simulations, we demonstrate that systems with random initial masses and compact planet spacings naturally develop intra-system uniformity, in quantitative agreement with observations, due to collisions between planets. Our results suggest that the pre-giant impact planet mass distribution is fairly wide and provide evidence for the prevalence of dynamical sculpting in shaping the observed population of exoplanets.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to MNRAS Letter

The political economy of passing climate change legislation: evidence from a survey

Climate change is now a major aspect of public policy. There are almost 500 identified climate change laws in the world’s leading economies. This paper reviews the main domestic factors that drive this legislation. The analysis is based on a unique dataset of climate legislation in 66 national jurisdictions for the period 1990–2013. We find that the passage of new climate laws is influenced by several factors. One important factor is the quantity and quality of previous legislation: the propensity to pass more laws decreases non-linearly with the stock of existing legislation, but increases in the presence of a strategic “flagship law” that sets an overall framework for climate policy. Contrary to widespread belief, political orientation is not a decisive factor. We find no significant difference in the number of laws passed by left-wing and right-wing governments, except perhaps in Anglo-Saxon countries. However, left-leaning governments are more inclined to pass laws in difficult economic times. Despite these elements of bipartisanship, political economy factors still matter: In democracies climate laws are less likely to be passed immediately before an election and legislation is aided by a strong executive that can take on vested interests

Development of a soil respiration isotopic sampling system

The rate of carbon turnover in soil is a balance between the input of carbon by plants through their roots and associated fungi and the loss of carbon due to plant and microbial respiration, oxidation and leaching. Soil carbon dynamics are notoriously difficult to measure, and being able to separate total soil respiration into its autotrophic and heterotrophic components would help understanding of carbon cycling processes. Where autotrophic respiration originates from roots and their associated mycorrhizal fungi, using newly fixed carbon, and heterotrophic respiration originates from the breakdown of older soil organic matter. By calculating the δ¹³C signature of respired CO₂ (the ratio of the abundances of C isotopes ¹²C and ¹³C) it is possible to determine whether it is of heterotrophic or autotrophic origin. In this study a 6 chamber, constant CO₂ concentration measuring apparatus was developed to determine both the rate of CO₂ efflux and to collect undisturbed CO₂ samples for isotope analysis. This apparatus was tested using live soil samples with different δ¹³C values (-22 ‰ to -27 ‰) and respiration rates (2 – 8 µmol m⁻² s⁻¹) obtained from various locations in New Zealand. Testing involved taking samples using the respiration apparatus, then incubating the same samples in a bag, and then comparing the two. There was no difference between the results from the soil respiration apparatus and the bags (R²=0.96, p=0.0002). Twelve microcosms including soil and grass were extracted from a newly converted dairy farm and placed into in growth cabinets. Diurnal courses of partitioned soil respiration were made over 24 hours with constant soil temperature to eliminate temperatures effect on soil respiration. Half were then covered with 90% shade cloth for 12 days to test if a reduction in light (and therefore newly fixed carbon) would have any effect on soil respiration. There was a significant reduction in soil respiration, yet no detectable change in the δ¹³C of soil respired CO₂ under heavily shaded treatment. There was however there was a shift towards heterotrophic dominated respiration. This shows that while L. perenne is resilient to surrounding conditions it is susceptible to change if exposed to different conditions for prolonged periods of time. The use of this new technique in the field will allow improved understanding of factors effecting soil C efflux