Results of routine testing of organic food for agro-chemical residues

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. Consumers expect organic foods to be free of agro-chemical residues. Organix Brands plc. routinely test organic food ingredients for agrochemical residues using independent test laboratories. In the past year 243 batches of ingredients were tested and low levels of agro-chemical residues were found in 21% of samples. These residues can arise in organic food through environmental contamination, processing contamination or even the fraudulent use of agro-chemicals on organic food. Food containing agro-chemical residues can enter the organic system because of limitations in the organic rule

Connecting community to a post-regeneration era

This chapter aims to bridge the discussion of the history of community in urban regeneration with the rest of the book. It does this by advancing a central argument- that urban policy has entered a post-regeneration era- along with a specific discussion of the Connected Communities programme. The chapter begins by outlining how and why the era of urban regeneration came to an end, building on the discussion in chapter two, with a specific focus on the combination of broader socio-economic structures and ideological decisions that have shaped urban policy since 2010. The ideas of localism, city mayors, big society and de-centralisation are all considered, along with practical developments such as the National Planning Policy Framework. These agendas and events are then used to understand the Connected Communities programme and the way that its focus, specifically on co-production and co-development with communities, has come to represent the leading edge of academic research in this area

Benchmarking database systems for Genomic Selection implementation

Motivation: With high-throughput genotyping systems now available, it has become feasible to fully integrate genotyping information into breeding programs. To make use of this information effectively requires DNA extraction facilities and marker production facilities that can efficiently deploy the desired set of markers across samples with a rapid turnaround time that allows for selection before crosses needed to be made. In reality, breeders often have a short window of time to make decisions by the time they are able to collect all their phenotyping data and receive corresponding genotyping data. This presents a challenge to organize information and utilize it in downstream analyses to support decisions made by breeders. In order to implement genomic selection routinely as part of breeding programs, one would need an efficient genotyping data storage system. We selected and benchmarked six popular open-source data storage systems, including relational database management and columnar storage systems. Results: We found that data extract times are greatly influenced by the orientation in which genotype data is stored in a system. HDF5 consistently performed best, in part because it can more efficiently work with both orientations of the allele matrix

Valuing Academic Perspectives

First paragraph: This report summarises a number of evaluative studies carried out in the neighbourhood of Wester Hailes, Edinburgh in the summer of 2014 by a team of academics, as part of a wider Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Connected Communities project Valuing Different Perspectives (VDP).1 The overall project sought to use a range of evaluative perspectives to the study of a number of previous AHRC Connected Communities projects: Community Hacking 2.0, Ladders to the Clouds, and the Communities Within Spaces of Flows projects.2 The projects produced diverse outputs for the local community: a totem pole; a social history walking "code book"; wall plaques (in preparation); the renewal of the local newspaper The Wester Hailes Sentinel as an online ‘hyper-local' news source, The Digital Sentinel; and a local partnership called Our Place in Time. The earlier Connected Communities projects also supported the local housing association (Prospect Community Housing [PCHA]) in continuing their use of the social history Facebook page From There to Here

Not seeing the carbon for the trees? Why area-based targets for establishing new woodlands can limit or underplay their climate change mitigation benefits

Acknowledgements: The James Hutton Institute is supported by the Scottish Government’s Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS). This research was funded through both ClimatexChange and two strategic Research Programs (2011-16 and 2016-21). The authors acknowledge the assistance provided by other staff – Marie Castellazzi, Nikki Baggaley, Allan Lilly (The James Hutton Institute); Jo Smith (University of Aberdeen); Philip Taylor, Duncan Ray (Forest Research).Peer reviewedPublisher PD