Fringe Belts and Fixation Lines. is the Urban Jigsaw the best way of meeting contemporary planning needs?

Conzen’s early Post War work on urban morphologies (Whitehand 1988, 2007) remains relevant, but the process it describes deserves more criticism than evident in most current attempts to reform or evaluate the performance of Town and Country Planning in the UK. Simple mapping of urban change shows that blocks of land are often developed or redeveloped together, creating and over time adapting a complex urban mosaic. This tends to incorporate adjacent countryside and to change the use of large sites previously occupied by transport, industry and other activities that no longer use this land (schools, hospitals, playing fields, allotments, retail parks, military facilities…). Where such sites are in effect abandoned, and not made available for alternative uses for some years or decades, this process may be critically described as ‘urban fallow’ (Clark 1985, 2001). Changes to the UK’s long established Planning system under New Labour and Coalition administrations emphasise a few favoured rhetoric goals (sustainability, localism, climate change), but offer limited opportunities for popular engagement with, or criticism of, the planning process. This tends to facilitate or require most residential and other larger scale new construction to fit into the big blocks of land allocated for particular types of development. Resulting in a jigsaw pattern with urban morphology characteristics similar to those identified by Conzen, Whitehand and others

Commercialisation of innovations from the UK National Health Service

The potential opportunities offered by developing innovative ideas from staff within the UK National Health Service (NHS) was recognised in 2000 and this paper describes a regional organisation, Medipex, which was set up to undertake technology transfer and commercialisation of innovations from the NHS in Yorkshire. The approach adopted by Medipex has been shown to be a successful model for the commercialisation of IP, obtaining private sector investment and winning external recognition after its first three years trading. Analysis of the outputs demonstrates that though the majority of ideas emerge from service use, the innovations that have high-value commercial potential emerge from research undertaken in the hospitals

Irish Sea Coastal Stakeholder Engagement in NW England consultation, participation, strategic purpose and rhetoric. Do you reap just what you sow?

The creation of a holistic more inclusive approach to marine management could be positively influenced by the development of well structured and sincere Stakeholder Engagement and Public Participation (SEPP) processes. However poorly designed frameworks and processes lacking sincerity may engender skepticism, mistrust and create barriers in the attainment of a thriving and diverse coastal economy During 2009 a public participation and stakeholder engagement policy has been used by government agencies, Defra and the Department of Energy and Climate Change to gauge public opinion within the marine and coastal environment of the Irish Sea. This concerns the development of Irish Sea Conservation Zones and the UK’s Nuclear Newbuild programme. Both issues have complex dynamics regarding their environmental, economic, societal and sustainability aspects. This paper studies two contrasting styles of SEPP deployed during this critical ‘first contact’ stage by a participatory observation approach and assesses how this phase may affect the development of the engagement process and how this may affect a project’s outcome

The subnuclear localization of tRNA ligase in yeast

Yeast tRNA ligase is an enzyme required for tRNA splicing. A study by indirect immune fluorescence shows that this enzyme is localized in the cell nucleus. At higher resolution, studies using indirect immune electron microscopy show this nuclear location to be primarily at the inner membrane of the nuclear envelope, most likely at the nuclear pore. There is a more diffuse, secondary location of ligase in a region of the nucleoplasm within 300 nm of the nuclear envelope. When the amount of ligase in the cell is increased, nuclear staining increases but staining of the nuclear envelope remains constant. This experiment indicates that there are a limited number of ligase sites at the nuclear envelope. Since the other tRNA splicing component, the endonuclease, has the characteristics of an integral membrane protein, we hypothesize that it constitutes the site for the interaction of ligase with the nuclear envelope

'Visitor Moorings for UK Small Craft: a Dangerous Neglect?', paper presented at Marine & Coastal Policy Forum, Plymouth University, June 22nd – 24th, 2011

Please see the attached poster which was given at a SBNE research event at the University of Central Lancashire the week before the paper was presented in Plymouth

Horticultural Studies 1999

Horticultural Studies 1999 is the second edition of a Research Series dedicated to horticultural programs in the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences. This publication summarizes research, extension, and educational activities that serve horticultural industries and interest groups in Arkansas. The goals of this publication are to provide relevant information to the growers and end-users of horticulture crops in Arkansas and to inform the citizens of Arkansas and the surrounding region of activities related to horticulture

Horticultural Studies 1998

Horticulture connects with people in many ways including an enhanced awareness concerning the importance of fruits and vegetables in our diet. The health benefits of such a diet is gaining wide recognition throughout the public and will likely provide tremendous opportunities for research, education and business development. Significant faculty additions and programmatic efforts were made to the university’s fruit and vegetable programs in 1998

Averaging forecasts from VARs with uncertain instabilities

A body of recent work suggests commonly–used VAR models of output, inflation, and interest rates may be prone to instabilities. In the face of such instabilities, a variety of estimation or forecasting methods might be used to improve the accuracy of forecasts from a VAR. These methods include using different approaches to lag selection, different observation windows for estimation, (over-) differencing, intercept correction, stochastically time–varying parameters, break dating, discounted least squares, Bayesian shrinkage, and detrending of inflation and interest rates. Although each individual method could be useful, the uncertainty inherent in any single representation of instability could mean that combining forecasts from the entire range of VAR estimates will further improve forecast accuracy. Focusing on models of U.S. output, prices, and interest rates, this paper examines the effectiveness of combination in improving VAR forecasts made with real–time data. The combinations include simple averages, medians, trimmed means, and a number of weighted combinations, based on: Bates-Granger regressions, factor model estimates, regressions involving just forecast quartiles, Bayesian model averaging, and predictive least squares–based weighting. Our goal is to identify those approaches that, in real time, yield the most accurate forecasts of these variables. We use forecasts from simple univariate time series models and the Survey of Professional Forecasters as benchmarks.Economic forecasting ; Vector autoregression

(WP 2010-02) The Demand for Historic Preservation

Historic preservation is commonly used to protect old buildings and neighborhoods from deterioration. In 1981, the City of Milwaukee established a historic preservation commission to develop and maintain a local register of places with historical importance to the area. The commission also reviews all applications for historic status as well as any requests for exterior alterations. As such, there are numerous rules and restrictions that are imposed on property owners once it has been declared a historic site. Thus, while historic designation can serve to internalize the externalities in neighborhoods with historic buildings, it also imposes costs on homeowners who wish to make improvements to their homes. This paper uses a hedonic model to estimate the impact of historic preservation on the sale price of a single family home in the Milwaukee area. Preliminary results show that the impact of historic preservation is positive when it is significant, with the average impact at 26.6%. However, there was significant variation between districts, with the impact significantly positive in 13 of 22 districts used in the sample. Specifically, the positive impact ranged between 11% and 65%, holding other factors constant. None of the 22 districts had a negative and significant impact. An evaluation of spillover effects reveal that just over one third of them displayed positive and significant spillover effects, whereas 21% had negative and significant spillover effects. The remainder were insignificant. An important question is what factors influence this variability in historic preservation effects. The eventual goal of this research is to extend our preliminary analysis to two stages using a recently developed method that employs spatial econometric methods to solve the unique identification problems inherent in hedonic models (Carruthers and Clark, forthcoming in Journal of Regional Science). This will permit us to determine the specific factors that influence these premiums. While the spatial estimates presented in this preliminary work do not permit a two-stage model, we did explore whether implicit prices appear to be correlated with the household income and racial makeup of the neighborhoods in which they are located. The findings show little evidence that the implicit values of historic districts are correlated, but the implicit price associated with historic district spillovers was positively correlated with both neighborhood measures