Development management and localism: Zeitgeist or lasting change?

The spatial planning approach has become accepted as the progressive theoretical and professional currency in England following the 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act. The reforms which followed sought considerable change in the remit of planning and the approach to community engagement. However, an often overlooked component of the spatial planning approach is development management; and yet it is potentially of most relevance to the challenges of neighbourhood planning and community resilience. Development management focuses upon outcomes (i.e. meeting needs) rather than outputs (the implications of permitting/refusing development - normatively related to the regulatory ‘DC’ function). The methodological approach is based around a more varied and multi-faceted concept than in the reactive past. A key part of this relates to the way in which community participation occurs and decision making takes place. This artcile discusses the concept that empowering communities through early engagement, support for community led initiatives/plans, Local Development Orders, and enhanced delegated decision making at the Parish level are examples of localism before Localism, and highlight the contemporary relevance of the development management approach. It is suggested, therefore, that rather than requiring a planning revolution, the current changes represent an opportunity to firstly recognise and secondly utilise existing tools to support community planning. Implementing further significant change in the planning system may not be in anyone’s best interest, least of all for the resilience of those communities it seeks to empower.This article explores the evolution of the development management approach and its significance in the context of the proposed neighbourhood planning systems, including Neighbourhood Plans and Development Orders, the Community Right to Build, and community engagement and participation methods

Planning decision-making: Independence, subsidiarity, impartiality and the state

This paper explores recent changes that involve the Planning Inspectorate in England, considering as part of this the relevance and value of independence and impartiality in effective decision-making, together with a consideration of the significance of these changes in the context of localism and the subsidiarity narrative. To inform this debate, this paper focuses upon the value of having an independent body for planning decisions through a comparison with the Planning Appeals Commission (PAC) in Northern Ireland. The paper points towards the potential need for change in the structural approach and arrangements of the system in England, drawing particularly upon the PAC as a potential model for consideration

Efficient Measurement Error Correction with Spatially Misaligned Data

Association studies in environmental statistics often involve exposure and outcome data that are misaligned in space. A common strategy is to employ a spatial model such as universal kriging to predict exposures at locations with outcome data and then estimate a regression parameter of interest using the predicted exposures. This results in measurement error because the predicted exposures do not correspond exactly to the true values. We characterize the measurement error by decomposing it into Berkson-like and classical-like components. One correction approach is the parametric bootstrap, which is effective but computationally intensive since it requires solving a nonlinear optimization problem for the exposure model parameters in each bootstrap sample. We propose a less computationally intensive alternative termed the ``parameter bootstrap\u27\u27 that only requires solving one nonlinear optimization problem, and we also compare bootstrap methods to other recently proposed methods. We illustrate our methodology in simulations and with publicly available data from the Environmental Protection Agency

Tone-in-noise detection deficits in elderly patients with clinically normal hearing

One of the most common complaints among the elderly is the inability to understand speech in noisy environments. In many cases, these deficits are due to age-related hearing loss; however, some of the elderly that have difficulty hearing in noise have clinically normal pure-tone thresholds. While speech in noise testing is informative, it fails to identify specific frequencies responsible for the speech processing deficit. Auditory neuropathy patients and animal models of hidden hearing loss suggest that tone-in-noise thresholds may provide frequency specific information for those patients who express difficulty, but have normal thresholds in quiet. Therefore, we aimed to determine if tone-in-noise thresholds could be a useful measure in detecting age-related hearing deficits, despite having normal audiometric thresholds

Accounting for Errors from Predicting Exposures in Environmental Epidemiology and Environmental Statistics

PLEASE NOTE THAT AN UPDATED VERSION OF THIS RESEARCH IS AVAILABLE AS WORKING PAPER 350 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON BIOSTATISTICS WORKING PAPER SERIES (http://www.bepress.com/uwbiostat/paper350). In environmental epidemiology and related problems in environmental statistics, it is typically not practical to directly measure the exposure for each subject. Environmental monitoring is employed with a statistical model to assign exposures to individuals. The result is a form of exposure misspecification that can result in complicated errors in the health effect estimates if the exposure is naively treated as known. The exposure error is neither “classical” nor “Berkson”, so standard regression calibration methods do not apply. We decompose the health effect estimation error into three components. First, the standard errors are too small if the exposure field is correlated, independent of variability in estimating the exposure field parameters. Second, the standard errors are too small because they do not account for variability in estimating the exposure field parameters. Third, there is a bias from using approximate exposure field parameters in place of the unobserved true ones. We outline a three-stage correction procedure to account separately for each of these errors. A key insight is that we can account for the second part of the error (sampling variability in estimating the exposure) by averaging over simulations from the part of the posterior exposure surface that is informative for the outcome. This amounts to averaging over samples of the posterior exposure model parameters, a procedure that we call “parameter simulation”. One implication is that it is preferable to use a parametric correlation model (e.g., kriging) rather than a semi-parametric approximation. While the latter approach has been found to be effective in estimating mean exposure fields, it does not provide the needed decomposition of the posterior into informative and non-informative components. We illustrate the properties of our corrected estimators in a simulation study and present an example from environmental statistics. The focus of this paper is on linear health effect models with uncorrelated outcomes, but extensions to generalized linear models and correlated outcomes are possible

Reduced-rank spatio-temporal modeling of air pollution concentrations in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis and Air Pollution

There is growing evidence in the epidemiologic literature of the relationship between air pollution and adverse health outcomes. Prediction of individual air pollution exposure in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funded Multi-Ethnic Study of Atheroscelerosis and Air Pollution (MESA Air) study relies on a flexible spatio-temporal prediction model that integrates land-use regression with kriging to account for spatial dependence in pollutant concentrations. Temporal variability is captured using temporal trends estimated via modified singular value decomposition and temporally varying spatial residuals. This model utilizes monitoring data from existing regulatory networks and supplementary MESA Air monitoring data to predict concentrations for individual cohort members. In general, spatio-temporal models are limited in their efficacy for large data sets due to computational intractability. We develop reduced-rank versions of the MESA Air spatio-temporal model. To do so, we apply low-rank kriging to account for spatial variation in the mean process and discuss the limitations of this approach. As an alternative, we represent spatial variation using thin plate regression splines. We compare the performance of the outlined models using EPA and MESA Air monitoring data for predicting concentrations of oxides of nitrogen (NO$_x$)-a pollutant of primary interest in MESA Air-in the Los Angeles metropolitan area via cross-validated $R^2$. Our findings suggest that use of reduced-rank models can improve computational efficiency in certain cases. Low-rank kriging and thin plate regression splines were competitive across the formulations considered, although TPRS appeared to be more robust in some settings.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOAS786 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Planning and health: Defining the limitations of regulation and the discretionary context at the micro/site scale

Planning, at its most basic, is about making better places. In recent years, there has been a positive renewed focus on strengthening the links between planning and the promotion of well-being and good health outcomes. This is a welcome emphasis with origins relatable to the health narrative in the 1909 Housing and Town Planning Etc. Act. Within the post-1947 Town and Country Planning Act context, planning in some respects regressed to a land-use and infrastructure focus, with health considerations limited to physical-health infrastructure provisions and environmental/amenity considerations. This relatively recent 'reuniting' of planning and health is one way in which planning has been expressly identified as central to the ability of the state to improve the quality of life of the people. This is based on two implicit assumptions. First, that the characteristics of the built environment have an impact on the health of the population, and second, that planning, via its current policy, regulatory and legislative provisions, has the right tools to achieve positive on-the-ground changes in relation to this. The first aspect of this is well established through a public-health evidence base; the second, however, remains substantively under-researched as part of a broader lack of attention paid to the regulatory or development management aspect of planning. This article begins to address this deficit by examining the manner in which issues of health are or are not encompassed in decision making on the site scale by looking at appeal decisions into the location of fast-food outlets. By so doing, it challenges some of the assumptions inherent in policy aspirations and calls for a renewed and detailed investigation of the tools needed to achieve such good intentions on the ground

Credibility without legitimacy? Informal development in the highly regulated context of the United Kingdom

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd As the first contribution in this Special Issue's section on “informality in developed contexts”, this paper explores notions of legality, legitimacy and credibility in the United Kingdom (UK). By drawing on credibility theory, the paper analyses two examples of informal development, the ‘Plotlands’ and Low Impact Development (LID); historic and contemporary respectively, the paper demonstrates that even within a context of extensive government control and relatively well funded state planning apparatus, informal development occurs. Moreover, even here, this informal development can carry credibility, problematizing notions of legitimacy because they are outside of the state sanctioned boundaries of acceptable development. This in turn raises questions about the ways in which the state defines and polices what it considers legitimate development. Not only can both Plotlands and LID claim credibility through their temporal and spatial persistence- through their function not form- they can make claims about the value of the way of life they are promoting. Both examples actively articulate ideas of self-reliance and sufficiency against discourses of urbanisation and the centralisation of regulation and control of land use. In so doing, they challenge the assumed universal legitimacy of a benevolent state and its power to render such developments and lifestyles illegitimate

Gli effetti del salicilato sulla funzione uditiva: neurotossicità ed acufene

Il salicilato, precursore dell’aspirina, è un farmaco antipiretico, analgesico ed anti-in ammatorio molto diffuso nella pratica clinica. Gli effetti del salicilato sulla funzione uditiva sono noti ed includono, quando somministrato ad alti dosaggi, acufene ed ipoacusia. In periferia, la somministrazione acuta di salicilato induce una riduzione d’ampiezza dei prodotti di distorsione delle otoemissioni acustiche (DPOAE) e del potenziale d’azione composto (CAP), prevalentemente per le basse (<10 kHz) e per le alte (>20 kHz) frequenze; è interessante come questa alterazione corrisponda alla tonalità dell’acufene indotto sperimentalmente nell’animale, che varia tra i 12 e i 16 kHz. La somministrazione cronica induce invece un aumento transitorio dell’ampiezza dei DPOAE ed una up-regulation dell’mRNA e dell’espressione proteica della prestina. In vitro la tossicità del sodio salicilato si evidenzia prevalentemente a livello dei neuroni del ganglio spirale inducendo, a dispetto delle ben note proprietà antiossidanti, un rilascio paradosso di radicale superossido che avvia la catena apoptotica. A livello centrale, il salicilato ha la capacità di alterare la trasmissione GABA e serotonino-mediata inducendo iperattività in speci che popolazioni neuronali. Molto interessanti sono gli effetti a livello della corteccia uditiva e dell’amigdala laterale dove è stata documentata, in seguito alla somministrazione sperimentale di salicilato, una variazione delle frequenze caratteristiche neuronali con una conseguente alterazione della tonotopia siologica, specialmente per le frequenze centrali (10-20 kHz). Nell’uomo gli effetti ototossici del salicilato, oltre ad ipoacusia transitoria ed acufene, includono una diminuita discriminazione verbale e dif coltà nell’integrazione temporale