Experts challenge government on special needs reforms
October 31, 2011
Academics, activists, young people, parents and carers will debate government plans to involve parents in the assessment process and introduce a legal right to give them control over funding for their child’s support. The proposals, which are laid out in a Green Paper published in March 2011, claim to give parents a greater choice of schools, along with the power to set up special free schools in their communities.
The proposed changes would fulfil a promise by the coalition government to ‘prevent the unnecessary closure of special schools, and remove the bias towards inclusion’. But event organiser Professor Dan Goodley, at Manchester Metropolitan University, argues that such measures would lead to the greater isolation of disabled children.
“There never has been a bias towards inclusion,” he said. “Disabled children are already more likely to face isolation and unfair treatment, and we know that disabled children are currently more likely than their non-disabled peers to be excluded from mainstream school, and to be set apart in their communities.”
“Our big fear is that more and more disabled kids will be taken out of mainstream schools and put into special schools,” he added. “We could end up with disabled kids being pushed even further away from their communities than they are now.”
Professor Goodley and colleague Dr Katherine Runswick-Cole are drawing on previous research funded by the ESRC called ‘Does every child matter, post Blair?’ The project’s findings show that disabled children and their families continue to suffer exclusions in their day-to-day lives in schools, hospitals, social care and in their leisure activities.
The research also found that narrowing definitions of what represents a ‘normal’ childhood are helping to create increased discrimination and belittlement for disabled children. Expectations for disabled children are low and, despite recent changes in policy and practice, many children are still being denied the opportunity to fulfil their potential.
The debate comes as the government embarks on a period of testing its proposals in local areas from September 2011. The Department for Education plans to set out detailed plans to implement the reforms by the end of the year.
“There are no easy answers, but time is right to debate inclusion,” said Professor Goodley.
For further information contact
Professor Dan Godley
Email: d.goodley@mmu.ac.uk
Telephone: 0161 247 2526
ESRC Press Office:
Danielle Moore
Email: danielle.moore@esrc.ac.uk
Telephone 01793 413122
Jeanine Woolley
Email: jeanine.woolley@esrc.ac.uk
Telephone 01793 413119
Notes for editors:
1. Time to end the bias towards inclusive education?
Organiser: Professor Dan Goodley, Manchester Metropolitan University
Date: 5 November 2011 14.00-16.00
Venue: Museum of Science and Industry, Liverpool Road, Manchester
Audience: Suitable for parents/carers, practitioners, academics and representatives from charities and disabled people’s organisations
For more information: Time to end the bias towards inclusive education?
2. This release refers to the findings from from ‘Does every child matter, post Blair? The interconnections of disabled childhoods’ funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and carried out by Professor of Psychology and Disability Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. The research examined the effects of the Every Child Matters agenda on disabled children aged 4 to 16 and their families. For more details please visit the project website: post-blair.posterous.com
3. The project involved interviews with disabled children and parents and professionals, along with eighteen months’ observation of families and practitioners as users of health, education and leisure services.
4. The Festival of Social Science is run by the Economic and Social Research Council which runs from 29 October to 5 November 2011. With events from some of the country’s leading social scientists, the Festival celebrates the very best of British social science research and how it influences our social, economic and political lives – both now and in the future. This year’s Festival of Social Science has over 130 creative and exciting events aimed at encouraging businesses, charities, government agencies; and schools or college students to discuss, discover and debate topical social science issues. Press releases detailing some of the varied events are available at the Festival website. You can now follow updates from the Festival on twitter using #esrcfestival
5. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK’s largest organisation for funding research on economic and social issues. It supports independent, high quality research which has an impact on business, the public sector and the third sector. The ESRC’s total budget for 2011/12 is £203 million. At any one time the ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and independent research institutes. More at www.esrc.ac.uk
Contact: Press Office
Pressoffice@esrc.ac.uk
Economic & Social Research Council
The new old age – today’s pensioners are very different to yesterday’s
October 31, 2011
Old people today have more sex, are more likely to be divorced, are cleverer and feel better, reveals a long-term research project comparing what it is like to be old today with 30 years ago. “It’s time to start talking about the ‘new old age’,” says researcher Ingmar Skoog.
The number of elderly is rising worldwide, and it is estimated that average life expectancy in Europe will reach 100 by the end of the century.
At the same time, old age and what we expect from it are changing. An extensive research project at the University of Gothenburg’s Sahlgrenska Academy has spent a number of years comparing the elderly of the 1970s with those of today. The project, known as the H70 study, reveals that old age has changed drastically in a number of ways.
For example, the proportion of elderly with schooling beyond secondary level has risen from 14% to almost 40% for both genders. This is reflected in a better performance in intelligence tests by today’s 70-year-olds than their counterparts back in the 1970s.
The proportion of married people has increased, as has the proportion of divorcees. The elderly are also now more sexually active, and the number with sexual problems such as impotence has fallen.
The results of the long-term study can also be contradictory, not least when it comes to social networking:
“The H70 study shows that the elderly are more outgoing today than they were in the 1970s – they talk more to their neighbours, for example – yet the percentage of elderly who feel lonely has increased significantly,” says professor Ingmar Skoog from the University of Gothenburg’s Sahlgrenska Academy, who leads the study.
Old people’s mental health does not seem to have changed, however. Dementia disorders are no more prevalent today than they were 30 years ago, and while more old people consider themselves to be mildly depressed, more severe forms of depression have not become more common. Meanwhile the elderly are coping better with everyday life: the number needing help with cleaning has fallen from 25% to 12%, and only 4% need help taking a bath, down from 14% in the 1970s.
“Our conclusion is that pensioners are generally healthier and perkier today than they were 30 years ago,” says Skoog. “This may be of interest both in the debate about where to set the retirement age and in terms of the baby boomers now hitting retirement age.”
The H70 study in Gothenburg began back in 1971. More than 1,000 70-year-old men and women born in 1901-02 were examined by doctors and interviewed about their lives to obtain a picture of diseases in elderly populations, risk factors and their functional capacity and social networks. The participants were examined again at the age of 75 and then at regular intervals until the final participant died at the age of 105. The year 2000 brought the start of a new study of 70-year-olds born in 1930, who were examined using the same methods, making it possible to follow a specific generation through life and compare different generations.
Contact: Ingmar Skoog
ingmar.skoog@neuro.gu.se
46-031-343-8640
University of Gothenburg
An important aspect of structural design of super-tall buildings and structures
October 31, 2011
Across-wind loads and effects have become increasingly important factors in the structural design of super-tall buildings and structures with increasing height. Although researchers have investigated the problem for over 30 years now, the research achievements of across-wind loads and effects and the computation methods of equivalent static wind loads are still not satisfactory. Professor GU Ming and his group from the State Key Laboratory of Disaster Reduction in Civil Engineering set out to tackle this problem. After more than 10 years of innovative research, they have obtained many results for across-wind loads on super-tall buildings and structures with various cross-sections and developed new methods for determining across-wind aerodynamic damping and across-wind equivalent static wind loads. These achievements have been adopted in national and local load codes and have been applied to the structural design of a large number of actual super-tall buildings and structures. Their work, entitled “Across-wind loads and effects of super-tall buildings and structures”, was published in Science China Technological Sciences.
Professor GU Ming and his group have performed a series of wind tunnel tests on models of typical tall buildings and structures for across-wind forces employing a wind pressure scanning technique and high-frequency force balance technique. There were a total of 121 general building models and dozens of real tall structure models. Twenty-five building models for wind pressure tests and 96 building models for direct measurements of wind forces were sampled employing the high-frequency force balance technique. The models had different cross-section shapes, namely a square, rectangular, triangle, Y shape, polygon, L shape, corner-modified square, ladder shape, twin-tower shape, and a shape with a continuously contracting cross section.
Formulas for across-wind aerodynamic forces were derived for practical use from many experimental results obtained in wind tunnel tests. As an example, a unified formula for the non-dimensional power spectra density of the across-wind force acting on rectangular buildings and square buildings with corner modifications was derived. The formula has better features than previous formulas.
Aeroelastic models were used to investigate the aerodynamic damping characteristics of buildings. A base for supporting the aeroelastic models of tall buildings was specially designed for the tests. The frequency, mass distribution, and damping of the aeroelastic models could be easily adjusted for parametric study. Three series of buildings, namely rectangular buildings, corner-modified square buildings, and buildings with continuously contracting cross sections, were modeled and tested under four categories of terrain conditions in the TJ-1 Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel at Tongji University. The effects of the cross-section shape and dynamic parameter of buildings as well as the terrain condition on the aerodynamic damping were thoroughly investigated. The time-averaging method of the random-decrease technique and the stochastic sub-space identification method were adopted in the current study to identify the aerodynamic damping ratio. On the basis of testing results and analyses, a formula for the aerodynamic damping ratio of a square building was derived for practical purposes.
A new method of determining the across-wind equivalent static wind load was also developed. The across-wind equivalent static wind load was firstly divided into mean, resonant and background components for separate computation, and these components were combined as the total equivalent static wind load. The resonant component is equal to the inertial force due to vibration of the structure and the background component is essentially the base-moment-based equivalent static wind load.
Since there is no corresponding guidance in the present Chinese code, the across-wind loads and responses have not been considered by structural engineers for many super-tall buildings and structures. As an important application, the above new formulas and methods have been adopted in the national code of China and a local load code and have also been directly applied to the structural design of many super-tall buildings and structures.
The recent trend of constructing higher buildings and structures implies that wind engineering researchers will face new challenges, even problems they are currently unaware of. Therefore, there needs to be more effort to resolve engineering design problems and to further the development of wind engineering.
see the article: GU Ming, Quan Yong. Across-wind loads and effects of super-tall buildings and structures. SCIENCE CHINA Technological Science, 2011, 54(10)
Contact: Gu Ming
minggu@tongji.edu.cn
86-021-659-81210
Science in China Press
Stalemate over organic farming slows progress in effort to combat food insecurity in Central Africa
October 29, 2011
The polarized debate over the use of organic and inorganic practices to boost farm yields is slowing action and widespread farmer adoption of approaches that could radically transform Africa’s food security situation, according to a group of leading international scientists meeting in Kigali this week.
“The ideological divide over approaches to farm production are a distraction from the actions needed to address food security now and ensure it in the future,” said Nteranya Sanginga, director general designate of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). “Persistently high food prices and low farm yields are weakening Central Africa’s food security and putting the region’s fragile stability and economic growth at risk.”
“Climate change, rapid population growth, and intense land pressure are major challenges for the region. It’s time to focus on practical, evidence-based solutions that will forever end the cycle of hunger, poverty and civil conflict,” he added.
Over 200 leading African and international scientists met at the first conference of the Consortium for Improving Agriculture Based Livelihoods in Central Africa (CIALCA) in Kigali, Rwanda, this week. Participants identified several practical solutions that would help move the region towards a food security. These include scaling up farmer adoption of new technologies that improve degraded soils through more efficient use of inorganic fertilizers, new higher-yielding varieties of staple crops that improve nutrition, and mixed farming and intercropping approaches for crops like banana, coffee, and grain legumes.
“For many, fertilizer is a dirty word,” said Bernard Vanlauwe, acting director of the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility research area at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). “We have to focus on approaches that improve livelihoods.”
“It does not have to be a choice between organic or inorganic; both approaches can work well together at different stages in agricultural development,” said Vanlauwe.
Participants at the CIALCA conference reached consensus that agricultural research and development efforts should focus on the middle ground, increasingly referred to as sustainable intensification, which combines the most effective and sustainable approaches to improving farm yields.
“Sustainable Intensification is the best way to tackle rural poverty and hunger in regions with huge land and population pressures,” said Vanlauwe.
Fertilizer use in Africa is by far the lowest in the world. On average, African farmers apply about 9 kg per hectare of fertilizer compared to 86 kg per hectare in Latin America and 142 kg per hectare in Southeast Asia.
“African agriculture is already organic. It’s not working,” said Sanginga. “We need to focus on practical things that help, not ideology.”
Agricultural researchers have found ways to dramatically reduce fertilizer use – while boosting crop yields. These include site-specific recommendations, partly based on detailed satellite images of African soils, and a technique known as micro-dosing, which involves the application of small, affordable quantities of fertilizer during a crop’s growing period.
New research by CIALCA scientists has shown that intercropping banana and coffee can benefit both the environment and farmers’ incomes compared to growing each crop separately. Banana — a food staple for millions across the region — provides a shaded canopy for coffee plants, which results in higher yields, less soil erosion, and more money for the farmers. Scientists also noted that this approach is ‘climate smart’ because the shade could buffer heat-sensitive coffee crops against the predicted impacts of climate change.
Improved climbing bean varieties being grown by thousands of farmers in the region have been particularly well-received, producing three times the yield of ordinary bush beans. On tightly-packed, small farms, the new bean varieties make valuable use of limited space by growing upwards instead of sprawling outwards. They also improve soil fertility through nitrogen fixation, and when grown in rotation with maize – another crucial African staple – maize yields have increased substantially, and the need for fertilizer reduced.
At the close of the CIALCA conference today, participants will recommend the priority actions for agricultural research and development efforts in Central Africa. For outcomes and updates, please visit http://CIALCAconference.org.
Since 2006, CIALCA, which is led by International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Bioversity International, and Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (TSBF-CIAT), has been working with public and private sector partners to make improvements to farm production, market access, and child nutrition in Central Africa’s Great Lakes region.
For stories, interviews and updates on discussions at the conference, please visit: http://www.cialcaconference.org and join the conversation on Twitter using #CIALCA. More information can be found at http://www.cialca.org.
Jeff Haskins
254-729-871-422
jhaskins@burnesscommunications.com
Michelle Geis
mgeis@burnesscommunications.com
254-706-348-938
Burness Communications
New hybrid technology could bring ‘quantum information systems
October 29, 2011
The merging of two technologies under development – plasmonics and nanophotonics – is promising the emergence of new “quantum information systems” far more powerful than today’s computers.
The technology hinges on using single photons the tiny particles that make up light for switching and routing in future computers that might harness the exotic principles of quantum mechanics.
The quantum information processing technology would use structures called “metamaterials,” artificial nanostructured media with exotic properties.
The metamaterials, when combined with tiny “optical emitters,” could make possible a new hybrid technology that uses “quantum light” in future computers, said Vladimir Shalaev, scientific director of nanophotonics at Purdue University’s Birck Nanotechnology Center and a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering.
The concept is described in an article to be published Friday (Oct. 28) in the journal Science. The article will appear in the magazine’s Perspectives section and was written by Shalaev and Zubin Jacob, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Alberta, Canada.
“A seamless interface between plasmonics and nanophotonics could guarantee the use of light to overcome limitations in the operational speed of conventional integrated circuits,” Shalaev said.
Researchers are proposing the use of “plasmon-mediated interactions,” or devices that manipulate individual photons and quasiparticles called plasmons that combine electrons and photons.
One of the approaches, pioneered at Harvard University, is a tiny nanowire that couples individual photons and plasmons. Another approach is to use hyperbolic metamaterials, suggested by Jacob; Igor Smolyaninov, a visiting research scientist at the University of Maryland; and Evgenii Narimanov, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue. Quantum-device applications using building blocks for such hyperbolic metamaterials have been demonstrated in Shalaev’s group.
“We would like to record and read information with single photons, but we need a very efficient source of single photons,” Shalaev said. “The challenge here is to increase the efficiency of generation of single photons in a broad spectrum, and that is where plasmonics and metamaterials come in.”
Today’s computers work by representing information as a series of ones and zeros, or binary digits called “bits.”
Computers based on quantum physics would have quantum bits, or “qubits,” that exist in both the on and off states simultaneously, dramatically increasing the computer’s power and memory. Quantum computers would take advantage of a strange phenomenon described by quantum theory called “entanglement.” Instead of only the states of one and zero, there are many possible “entangled quantum states” in between one and zero.
An obstacle in developing quantum information systems is finding a way to preserve the quantum information long enough to read and record it. One possible solution might be to use diamond with “nitrogen vacancies,” defects that often occur naturally in the crystal lattice of diamonds but can also be produced by exposure to high-energy particles and heat.
“The nitrogen vacancy in diamond operates in a very broad spectral range and at room temperature, which is very important,” Shalaev said.
The work is part of a new research field, called diamond photonics. Hyperbolic metamaterials integrated with nitrogen vacancies in diamond are expected to work as efficient “guns” of single photons generated in a broad spectral range, which could bring quantum information systems, he said.
Writer: Emil Venere, 765-494-4709, venere@purdue.edu
Sources: Vladimir Shalaev, 765-494-9855, shalaev@ecn.purdue.edu Zubin Jacob, zjacob@ualberta.ca
Related websites: Vladimir Shalaev: http://www.ece.purdue.edu/~shalaev Zubin Jacob: http://www.ece.ualberta.ca/~zjacob
IMAGE CAPTION
Structures called “metamaterials” and the merging of two technologies under development are promising the emergence of new “quantum information systems” far more powerful than today’s computers. The concept hinges on using single photons the tiny particles that make up light for switching and routing in future computers that might harness the exotic principles of quantum mechanics. The image at left depicts a “spherical dispersion” of light in a conventional material, and the image at right shows the design of a metamaterial that has a “hyperbolic dispersion” not found in any conventional material, potentially producing quantum-optical applications. (Zubin Jacob)
Contact: Emil Venere
venere@purdue.edu
765-494-4709
Purdue University
Planets smashed into dust near supermassive black holes
October 29, 2011
Fat doughnut-shaped dust shrouds that obscure about half of supermassive black holes could be the result of high speed crashes between planets and asteroids, according to a new theory from an international team of astronomers. The scientists, led by Dr. Sergei Nayakshin of the University of Leicester, publish their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Supermassive black holes reside in the central parts of most galaxies. Observations indicate that about 50% of them are hidden from view by mysterious clouds of dust, the origin of which is not completely understood. The new theory is inspired by our own Solar System, where the so-called zodiacal dust is known to originate from collisions between solid bodies such as asteroids and comets. The scientists propose that the central regions of galaxies contain not only black holes and stars but also planets and asteroids.
Collisions between these rocky objects would occur at colossal speeds as large as 1000 km per second, continuously shattering and fragmenting the objects, until eventually they end up as microscopic dust. Dr. Nayakshin points out that this harsh environment – radiation and frequent collisions – would make the planets orbiting supermassive black holes sterile, even before they are destroyed. “Too bad for life on these planets”, he says, “but on the other hand the dust created in this way blocks much of the harmful radiation from reaching the rest of the host galaxy. This in turn may make it easier for life to prosper elsewhere in the rest of the central region of the galaxy.”
He also believes that understanding the origin of the dust near black holes is important in our models of how these monsters grow and how exactly they affect their host galaxies. “We suspect that the supermassive black hole in our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, expelled most of the gas that would otherwise turn into more stars and planets”, he continues, “Understanding the origin of the dust in the inner regions of galaxies would take us one step closer to solving the mystery of the supermassive black holes”.
CONTACTS
Dr Sergei Nayakshin
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Leicester
Leicester LE1 7RH
United Kingdom
Tel: 44-116-252-2454
Email: sn85@leicester.ac.uk
Peter Thorley
Press Office
University of Leicester
Tel: 44-116-252-2415
Email: pt91@leicester.ac.uk
IMAGE AND CAPTION
A related image is available from
http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic0617/
Caption: “”Light echo” of dust illuminated by a nearby star V838 Monocerotis as it became 600,000 times more luminous than our Sun in January 2002. The flash is believed to have been caused by a giant collision of some kind, e.g., between two stars or a star and a planet. Credit: NASA/ESA. Collsions of smaller objects, such as asteroids or minor planets near a supermassive black hole could also be dramatic due to the huge collision velocities and would release a lot of dust.”
FURTHER INFORMATION
The new work is published in “Are SMBHs shrouded by “Super-Oort” clouds of comets and asteroids?”, Nayakshin S., Sazonov S., Sunayev R., Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in press. A preprint can be seen at http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.1217
Contact: Dr Sergei Nayakshin
sn85@leicester.ac.uk
44-011-625-22454
University of Leicester
Physicists manipulate single molecules to unravel secrets of protein folding
October 27, 2011
Physicists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) are opening a new window into the life of biological cells, using a technique that lets them grab the ends of a single protein molecule and pull, making continuous, direct measurements as it unfolds and refolds. Their latest results, reported in the journal Science, reveal a complex network of intermediate structural and kinetic states along the way to functionally correct folded forms, including both express routes and dead ends. Better understanding of protein folding is essential because incorrectly folded proteins cause diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The experiments focused on the protein calmodulin, which is not implicated in these diseases but plays a role in many processes vital to cellular functions, and thus to human health.
The functions (and malfunctions) of proteins are largely determined by their structures, so researchers are exploring many avenues toward understanding precisely how they fold (or misfold). Where X-ray structural analyses offer “snapshots” of protein folding, single-molecule force spectroscopy — the approach pioneered by Prof. Matthias Rief and colleagues in the TUM Department of Physics — produces views that are, by comparison, more like movies. Even though these movies are very “blurred,” since they only capture the length of the molecule, they allow the researchers to study the dynamics of the folding process.
In the study reported in Science, Rief’s co-authors were TUM doctoral candidates Johannes Stigler, Fabian Ziegler, Anja Gieseke, and Christof Gebhardt (now a postdoc at Harvard University). A grant from the TUM Institute for Advanced Study helped the laboratory acquire the instrumentation that made these single-molecule experiments possible — ultra-stable, high-resolution “optical tweezers,” a tool that traps miniscule objects between opposing laser beams as surely as if they were being held between thumb and forefinger.
To get a grip on a calmodulin molecule, the researchers first would insert it between two molecules of a mechanically tougher protein called ubiquitin. Residues of the amino acid cysteine at the outer ends of this assembly allowed “handles” made of DNA to be attached, and these were fixed to glass beads one micrometer in diameter. The beads, and thus the calmodulin molecule between them, could then be manipulated with the optical tweezers. The essence of the experiments, repeated many times over in a variety of ways, was to pull the ends of a single, folded calmodulin molecule until it straightened out and then to reduce the tension so it could fold again, constantly measuring protein length, mechanical forces and time with extreme precision. Throughout, the calmodulin molecule was kept in conditions not too different from its working environment inside a cell, an aqueous solution with a concentration of calcium ions known to favor stable folding. Statistical analysis helped to reveal what the measurements recorded.
The results indicate that distinct subdomains of the calmodulin molecule fold independently yet interact with others, sometimes cooperating and sometimes interfering. “Far from being a simple two-state process,” Rief explains, “the folding of a calmodulin molecule takes place via a complex network of pathways in what we call its ‘energy landscape.’ We found that this map of kinetic states and paths between different folded forms includes dead ends — intermediate structures that need to be undone, like unwanted knots in a rope, before the protein can assume a shape that enables it to function properly.” The researchers also discovered express routes, pathways that let some domains reach their final state much more rapidly than the molecule as a whole.
“The calmodulin molecule,” Rief says, “even though considered small compared to most proteins in our body, already exhibits unexpected complexity in its folding. Nature manages to fold much more complex proteins without major misfoldings. Understanding this still remains a challenge for the future, and single-molecule experiments will help to resolve it.”
Original publication:
The Complex Folding Network of Single Calmodulin Molecules
Johannes Stigler, Fabian Ziegler, J. Christof M. Gebhardt, Matthias Rief
Science, Oct. 28, 2011, pp. 512-516
DOI: 10.1126/science.1207598
Contact:
Prof. Matthias Rief
Department of Physics E22
Technische Universitaet Muenchen
James-Franck-Strasse
85748 Garching, Germany
Tel: +49 89 289 12471
E-mail: mrief@ph.tum.de
Home page: http://bio.ph.tum.de/home/e22-prof-dr-rief/rief-home.html
Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) is one of Europe’s leading universities. It has roughly 460 professors, 9000 academic and non-academic staff, and 31,000 students. It focuses on the engineering sciences, natural sciences, life sciences, medicine, and economic sciences. After winning numerous awards, it was selected as an “Elite University” in 2006 by the Science Council (Wissenschaftsrat) and the German Research Foundation (DFG). The university’s global network includes an outpost with a research campus in Singapore. TUM is dedicated to the ideal of a top-level research-based entrepreneurial university. http://www.tum.de
Contact: Patrick Regan
regan@zv.tum.de
49-892-891-0515
Technische Universitaet Muenchen
Governments must plan for migration in response to climate change, researchers say
October 27, 2011
Governments around the world must be prepared for mass migrations caused by rising global temperatures or face the possibility of calamitous results, say University of Florida scientists on a research team reporting in the Oct. 28 edition of Science.
If global temperatures increase by only a few of degrees by 2100, as predicted by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, people around the world will be forced to migrate. But transplanting populations from one location to another is a complicated proposition that has left millions of people impoverished in recent years. The researchers say that a word of caution is in order and that governments should take care to understand the ramifications of forced migration.
A consortium of 12 scientists from around the world, including two UF researchers, gathered last year at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center to review 50 years of research related to population resettlement following natural disasters or the installation of infrastructure development projects such as dams and pipelines. The group determined that resettlement efforts in the past have left communities in ruin, and that policy makers need to use lessons from the past to protect people who are forced to relocate because of climate change.
“The effects of climate change are likely to be experienced by as many people as disasters,” UF anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith said. “More people than ever may be moving in response to intense storms, increased flooding and drought that makes living untenable in their current location.”
“Sometimes the problem is simply a lack of regard for the people ostensibly in the way of progress,” said Oliver-Smith, an emeritus professor who has researched issues surrounding forced migration for more than 30 years. But resettlements frequently fail because the complexity of the task is underestimated. “Transplanting a population and its culture from one location to another is a complex process — as complicated as brain surgery,” he said.
“It’s going to be a matter of planning ahead now,” said Burt Singer, a courtesy faculty member at the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute who worked with the research group. He too has studied issues related to population resettlement for decades.
Singer said that regulatory efforts promoted by the International Finance Corporation, the corporate lending arm of the World Bank, are helping to ensure the well-being of resettled communities in some cases. But as more people are relocated — especially very poor people with no resources — financing resettlement operations in the wake of a changing climate could become a real challenge.
Planning and paying for resettlement is only part of the challenge, Oliver-Smith said. “You need informed, capable decision makers to carry out these plans,” he said. A lack of training and information can derail the best-laid plans. He said the World Bank increasingly turns to anthropologists to help them evaluate projects and outcomes of resettlement.
“It is a moral imperative,” Oliver-Smith said. Also, a simple cost-benefit analysis shows that doing resettlement poorly adds to costs in the future. Wasted resources and the costs of malnutrition, declining health, infant and elder mortality, and the destruction of families and social networks should be included in the total cost of a failed resettlement, he said.
Oliver-Smith said the cautionary tales of past failures yield valuable lessons for future policy makers, namely because they point out many of the potential pitfalls than can beset resettlement projects. But they also underscore the fact that there is a heavy price paid by resettled people, even in the best-case scenarios.
In the coming years, he said, many projects such as hydroelectric dams and biofuel plantations will be proposed in the name of climate change, but moving people to accommodate these projects may not be the simple solution that policy makers sometimes assume.
A clear-eyed review of the true costs of forced migration could alert governments to the complexities and risks of resettlement.
“If brain surgeons had the sort of success rate that we have had with resettling populations, very few people would opt for brain surgery,” he said.
Contact: Anthony Oliver-Smith
aros@ufl.edu
352-377-8359
University of Florida
Policymakers should prepare for major uncertainties with Medicaid expansion
October 26, 2011
The number of low-income, uninsured Americans enrolling in Medicaid under the expanded coverage made possible by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 could vary considerably from the levels currently projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), according to a new study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers. They report that it’s probably more realistic to say somewhere between 8 million and 22 million may enroll in Medicaid by 2014 instead of the 16 million predicted by the CBO.
Medicaid, which is jointly funded by the federal and state governments, covers the health care costs of eligible low-income individuals and families. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 expands Medicaid to cover additional low-income adults in all states by 2014.
“The lower estimate of Medicaid enrollees suggests that the ACA will not be as successful as envisioned in insuring low-income Americans; the high-end estimate implies that the federal cost of expanding Medicaid eligibility will be a good deal higher than expected and accounted for,” said Arnold Epstein, John H. Foster Professor of Health Policy and Management and chair, Department of Health Policy and Management at HSPH and the study’s senior author.
The study was published online October 26, 2011, and will appear in the November print edition of Health Affairs.
The HSPH researchers, including lead author Benjamin Sommers, assistant professor of health policy and economics, and Katherine Swartz, professor of health economics and policy, created a simulation model to determine the range of reasonable projections, estimating eligibility, participation, and population growth using prior research and other data.
The researchers’ model predicts that the number of people enrolling in Medicaid under health reform may vary by more than 10 million, with a “best-guess” estimate of 13.4 million, and a possible range of 8.5 million to 22.4 million. Their model estimates that annual federal spending for new Medicaid enrollees will range from $34 billion to $98 billion in 2019, and that 4,500 to 12,100 new physicians will be needed to care for new enrollees.
Prior research shows that a decreasing number of doctors are willing to treat new Medicaid patients, due to low reimbursement rates. This suggests that policymakers will need to take additional steps to ensure that there are enough providers to care for new Medicaid enrollees.
Last year, Medicaid covered nearly 69 million Americans, at an annual cost of over $400 billion. This means that even with the highest-cost estimate of $98 billion, Sommers and colleagues project that the Medicaid expansion under the ACA will represent less than one-quarter of total spending in the program.
“In the end, Medicaid enrollment will be determined largely by the extent to which federal and state efforts encourage or discourage eligible people from enrolling,” Swartz said. “The budget scoring rules require CBO to produce one cost number but that number is an estimate. Policymakers are better served if they have the range of cost estimates so possible higher costs are anticipated.”
Support for the study was provided in part by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
“Policy Makers Should Prepare for Major Uncertainties in Medicaid Enrollment, Costs, and Needs for Physicians Under Health Reform,” Benjamin Sommers, Katherine Swartz, and Arnold Epstein, Health Affairs, November, 2011.
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Cornell researchers discover only recorded flight of lost imperial woodpecker
October 26, 2011
It was once the undisputed king of its clan, but most believe the imperial woodpecker faded unseen into the pages of history sometime in the late 20th century in the high mountains of Mexico.
But now, thanks to some keen detective work, the largest woodpecker that ever lived can be seen by the world once more – and this 85-second flight through time offers us a lesson about its behavior, and ours.
“It is stunning to look back through time with this film and see the magnificent imperial woodpecker moving through its old-growth forest environment, said research associate Martjan Lammertink, lead author of the paper along with four Cornell Lab of Ornithology staff members and two Mexican biologists. “And it is heartbreaking to know that both the bird and the forest are gone.”
The imperial woodpecker was thought to have gone extinct without anyone ever capturing photos or film of the 2-foot-tall, flamboyantly crested bird. That was until a biologist from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology tracked down a 16-mm film shot in 1956 by a dentist from Pennsylvania. The footage, which captures the last confirmed sighting of an imperial woodpecker in the wild, is available for viewing at http://www.birds.cornell.edu/imperialfilm.
In the color film, a female imperial woodpecker hitches up and forages on the trunks of large Durango pines and then launches into flight.
The film was shot by William Rhein with a hand-held camera from the back of a mule while camping in a remote location in the Sierra Madre Occidental in Durango state. In March 2010, Lammertink and Tim Gallagher of the Cornell Lab launched an expedition with members of the conservation group Pronatura Noroeste to identify and survey the film site. The expedition turned up no evidence that imperial woodpeckers are still alive.
The entire range of the imperial woodpecker lay in the high country of the Sierra Madre Occidental – a rugged mountain range stretching some 900 miles south from the U.S.-Mexico border – and the Transvolcanic mountains of central Mexico. The species largely vanished in the late 1940s and 1950s as logging destroyed their old-growth pine forest habitat. Imperial woodpeckers were also frequently shot for food, to use in folk remedies or out of curiosity.
The imperial woodpecker was the closest relative of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which suffered a similar decline from habitat loss in the southeastern United States and Cuba. A 2005 study by the Cornell Lab reported the rediscovery of an ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas, but subsequent region-wide surveys did not find evidence of a surviving population.
The research appears in the October 2011 issue of The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union. In addition to Lammertink and Gallagher, authors of the article include Kenneth V. Rosenberg, John Fitzpatrick and Eric Liner of the Cornell Lab, and Jorge Rojas-Tomé of Organización Vida Silvestre and Patricia Escalante of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Contact: John Carberry
johncarberry@cornell.edu
607-255-5353
Cornell University