The community waste sector and waste services in the UK: current state and future prospects

YesTheory predicts that the voluntary or community sector will contribute a range of services that are not delivered by the state or private sectors. This paper examines the changing contributions of the community waste sector in the UK to reflect upon these claims. A rosy picture of the community waste sector is presented from research on the sector in 2002, with a growing number of organisations carrying out a range of services, drawing on multiple and diverse sources of funding. More recent evidence, and information drawn from outside the sector, however, suggests that regulation, competition, and changes to funding regimes are putting the sector under considerable pressure, such that it is likely to change, and that some parts of it will contract. In terms of the claims from theory, the paper finds evidence that the community sector can and has been innovative in the services it provides and the way that it provides them, though similar innovations may emerge from the private and public sectors. The sparse evidence on participation and recycling rates in kerbside and civic amenity sites are equivocal on whether the sector provides enhanced communication as theory would predict. Overall, the paper highlights the difficulty in achieving direct comparisons between the waste sectors without specific focused research for this purpose. It concludes that the challenge for European, national and local government is to influence the necessarily constructed waste markets in a way which will enhance rather than discourage service providers to innovate in the waste material collected, and to communicate effectively with the public whom they serve. Such policies promise to encourage the effective delivery of sustainable waste services from all three - public, private and community - sectors

Periodicity of mass extinctions without an extraterrestrial cause

We study a lattice model of a multi-species prey-predator system. Numerical results show that for a small mutation rate the model develops irregular long-period oscillatory behavior with sizeable changes in a number of species. The periodicity of extinctions on Earth was suggested by Raup and Sepkoski but so far is lacking a satisfactory explanation. Our model indicates that this is a natural consequence of the ecosystem dynamics, not the result of any extraterrestrial cause.Comment: 4 pages, accepted in Phys.Rev.

E-consultation: evaluating appropriate technologies and processes for citizens' participation in public policy

This report sets out to explore the reality of consultation as a form of citizen participation in policy development in Ireland, North and South. It investigates processes of consultation, the only form of participation that is a legal requirement of policy making, with a view to assessing their value as supporting tools of citizen centric governance. In addition a key objective of the research was to support the development of citizen driven government by identifying how Information Communication Technologies could support, develop or deepen the participation of citizens in policy development through that same consultation requirement. In particular, it was hoped to identify e-consultation processes and technologies that are most appropriate to the needs of diverse local communities and to find the best ways to apply these to support citizen driven democracy. The research team is both interdisciplinary and action orientated. The authors come from diverse academic backgrounds such as sociology, political science, information management, community development and even marketing! However, they at least share in common a commitment to democratic experimentalism (Unger, ), which involves working with what we have on offer to enrich democratic institutional possibilities by finding and building the zone where there is overlap between the conditions of practical progress and the requirements of individual development, where whatever is proposed responds to the felt needs and aspirations of ordinary citizens

Information dynamics algorithm for detecting communities in networks

The problem of community detection is relevant in many scientific disciplines, from social science to statistical physics. Given the impact of community detection in many areas, such as psychology and social sciences, we have addressed the issue of modifying existing well performing algorithms by incorporating elements of the domain application fields, i.e. domain-inspired. We have focused on a psychology and social network - inspired approach which may be useful for further strengthening the link between social network studies and mathematics of community detection. Here we introduce a community-detection algorithm derived from the van Dongen's Markov Cluster algorithm (MCL) method by considering networks' nodes as agents capable to take decisions. In this framework we have introduced a memory factor to mimic a typical human behavior such as the oblivion effect. The method is based on information diffusion and it includes a non-linear processing phase. We test our method on two classical community benchmark and on computer generated networks with known community structure. Our approach has three important features: the capacity of detecting overlapping communities, the capability of identifying communities from an individual point of view and the fine tuning the community detectability with respect to prior knowledge of the data. Finally we discuss how to use a Shannon entropy measure for parameter estimation in complex networks.Comment: Submitted to "Communication in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation

Investigating chemoresistance in relapsed/refractory B cell non-Hodgkin Lymphoma

PhD ThesisPaediatric B-cell non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (B-NHL), namely Burkitt lymphoma and diffuse large B cell lymphoma, is successfully treated in the majority of patients in the UK at the cost of debilitating toxicity. For patients who undergo disease progression the prognosis is dire, with salvage rates as low as 20%. Previous studies have identified putative markers of disease progression, but none are currently used in the clinic. There is a clear need for usable markers of relapse/refractory disease at diagnosis for paediatric B-NHL with the aim to stratify patients and identify new potentially targetable genes and pathways. Copy number analysis of 162 patients from the CCLG and published data identified genomic aberrations associated with disease progression: 17p copy number neutral loss of heterozygosity (CNN-LOH), 3q29 amplification and 17q CNN-LOH. 17p CNNLOH was a prognostic marker with a hazard-ratio of 5.6 (95% CI 2-16, p=0.001, Cox proportional hazard method). TP53 was investigated further using a combination Sanger sequencing and whole-exome sequencing. TP53 aberrations were present in 52/95 cases, with biallelic abnormalities conferring poorer outcomes. Biallelic TP53 aberrations were also associated with complex chromosomal abnormalities, including a novel aberration termed 13qplex. Copy number analysis of 105 endemic BL patients treated in Malawi showed that prognostic aberrations in sporadic BL are present but not prognostic in endemic BL. TP53 aberrations were identified in endemic BL and were not associated with relapse, however biallelic cases had an inferior overall survival. Investigating 11 diagnostic and relapse pairs demonstrated that TP53 status drives evolution of chemo-resistant disease. BLs with TP53 aberrations at diagnosis exhibited linear evolution, while TP53 normal cases had early-diverging patterns of progression and acquired TP53 aberrations at relapse. We report TP53 as an important prognostic marker in paediatric B-NHL that confers higher risk of disease progression and may help inform treatment decisions allowing for the possibility of new treatments

Promiscuity and the Evolution of Sexual Transmitted Diseases

We study the relation between different social behaviors and the onset of epidemics in a model for the dynamics of sexual transmitted diseases. The model considers the society as a system of individual sexuated agents that can be organized in couples and interact with each other. The different social behaviors are incorporated assigning what we call a promiscuity value to each individual agent. The individual promiscuity is taken from a distributions and represents the daily probability of going out to look for a sexual partner, abandoning its eventual mate. In terms of this parameter we find a threshold for the epidemic which is much lower than the classical fully mixed model prediction, i.e. $R_0$ (basic reproductive number) $= 1$. Different forms for the distribution of the population promiscuity are considered showing that the threshold is weakly sensitive to them. We study the homosexual and the heterosexual case as well.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Epidemic spreading in lattice-embedded scale-free networks

We study geographical effects on the spread of diseases in lattice-embedded scale-free networks. The geographical structure is represented by the connecting probability of two nodes that is related to the Euclidean distance between them in the lattice. By studying the standard Susceptible-Infected model, we found that the geographical structure has great influences on the temporal behavior of epidemic outbreaks and the propagation in the underlying network: the more geographically constrained the network is, the more smoothly the epidemic spreads

Ecological model of extinctions

We present numerical results based on a simplified ecological system in evolution, showing features of extinction similar to that claimed for the biosystem on Earth. In the model each species consists of a population in interaction with the others, that reproduces and evolves in time. Each species is simultaneously a predator and a prey in a food chain. Mutations that change the interactions are supposed to occur randomly at a low rate. Extinctions of populations result naturally from the predator-prey dynamics. The model is not pinned in a fitness variable, and natural selection arises from the dynamics.Comment: 16 pages (LaTeX type, RevTeX style), including 6 figures in gif format. To be published in Phys. Rev. E (prob. Dic. 96