Practising Place: A Critical Approach to Localism

This paper draws on empirical data from my doctoral research on the changing nature of inner city community development work. The professional identity of the community worker emerged in the 1970s and is linked to other emergent identities - the resident activist, social activist and community activist. Inner city community development work is in a state of flux and requires new investigative and analytical tools to help make sense of both its past, present and future. There are now more agencies and actors who would claim to be involved in community development and community building in inner city environments. Whilst it is clear that governing patterns have considerably challenged the role and the potential of what were once considered radical or alternative community development approaches, I argue that it is still possible to identify areas for productive engagement and development through what I have called practising place

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead