Post-consumer waste wood in attributive product LCA

Background  

In product life cycle assessment (LCA), the attribution of environmental interventions to a product under study is an ambiguous task. This is due to a) the simplistic modeling characteristics in the life cycle inventory step (LCI) of LCA in view of the complexity of our techno-economic system, and b) to the nontangible theoretical nature of the product system as a representation of the processes ‘causally’ linked to a product. Ambiguous methodological decisions during the setup of an LCI include the modeling of end-of-life scenarios or the choice of an allocation factor for the allocation of joint co-production processes. An important criterion for methodological decisions — besides the conformity with the relevant series of standards ISO 14 040 — is if the improvement options, which can be deduced from the LCI, are perceived by the decision-maker as to redirect the material flows at stake into more sustainable paths.     

Life cycle profit optimization a business opportunity

Life Cycle Profitability combines financial data, and forecasts, with market research to guide pricing decisions and to evaluate the cash flow consequences of goods and services. The ratio of direct and indirect costs, as well as the premium customers are willing to pay for “green” products, provide a quantitative means to identify business and environmental opportunities. Life Cycle Profitability is developed to fit into existing organizational structures permitting firms to protect asset value, reduce legal defense and liability costs, quantify make-or-buy decisions, and aid in ecodesign and new product introduction. It aims at the interface between accounting, legal, marketing, production and EHS divisions. This paper develops “Life Cycle Profitability” as a tool based on measurables which exist within organizations. In this sense, Life Cycle Profitability is an evolutionary means to conduct business practice under scenarios where envirotechnical imperatives compliment short term financial necessities and strategic planning initiatives. The author aims to demonstrate that Life Cycle Profitability is a more meaningful method, and indicator, than non-cost based ecometrics and can compliment the qualitative continuous improvement accounting methods advocated by EMS and ISO 14000 standards, as well as by the Integrated Product Policy initiative     

Social trajectories and the evolution of social behavior

Current research on the evolution of sociality seeks to integrate a wealth of species-specific studies to draw more generalized conclusions. Developing a unified theory of social evolution has been a challenging process, hampered by the inherent complexity of social systems. By viewing a species' social structure as the result of a series, or "trajectory", of decisions individuals make about whether or not to disperse from their natal territory, whether to co-breed or refrain from breeding, and whether or not to provide alloparental care, we can more easily evaluate whether selective factors influencing each social decision are similar across taxa. At the same time, the social trajectory framework highlights the interrelationships among different social decisions, both throughout the life of an individual and over evolutionary time. There are likely to be multiple unifying themes within sociality research; we hope that the simple framework outlined here will promote exchange between researchers across taxonomic disciplines to begin to identify common principles.     

How to make methodological decisions when inferring social networks

Social network analyses allow studying the processes underlying the associations between individuals and the consequences of those associations. Constructing and analyzing social networks can be challenging, especially when designing new studies as researchers are confronted with decisions about how to collect data and construct networks, and the answers are not always straightforward. The current lack of guidance on building a social network for a new study system might lead researchers to try several different methods and risk generating false results arising from multiple hypotheses testing. Here, we suggest an approach for making decisions when starting social network research in a new study system that avoids the pitfall of multiple hypotheses testing. We argue that best edge definition for a network is a decision that can be made using a priori knowledge about the species and that is independent from the hypotheses that the network will ultimately be used to evaluate. We illustrate this approach with a study conducted on a colonial cooperatively breeding bird, the sociable weaver. We first identified two ways of collecting data using different numbers of feeders and three ways to define associations among birds. We then evaluated which combination of data collection and association definition maximized (a) the assortment of individuals into previously known “breeding groups” (birds that contribute toward the same nest and maintain cohesion when foraging) and (b) socially differentiated relationships (more strong and weak relationships than expected by chance). This evaluation of different methods based on a priori knowledge of the study species can be implemented in a diverse array of study systems and makes the case for using existing, biologically meaningful knowledge about a system to help navigate the myriad of methodological decisions about data collection and network inference.     

The Origin of Homo sapiens in the Light of Different Research Methods

The origins of Homo sapiens is a central issue of modern paleoanthropology. The available fossil material serves as a basis for postulating different hypotheses and models, but as is widely appreciated, anthropologists have yet to reach a consensus about human origins. It seems possible that the main reasons behind such an irreducible divergence of opinions are different methodological approaches rather than the analyses of fossil material. Some scientists would say that it is the fragmentary nature of fossil material which accounts for the debates about the origins of H. sapiens. Had the debate been only a matter of the empirical considerations many disagreements concerning H. sapiens would have probably disappeared long ago. But since the controversies are imbued in methodological reality the closure of the debate is not to be expected soon. There are three research methods: morphological, archaeological and genetic. Each approach has a specific definition of H. sapiens at its disposal, which largely accounts for the different scenarios for the origin of our species. Any debate concerning this problem must therefore begin with a discussion about the research methods. The controversy about our origins thus appears to be of secondary importance. The present paper aims at presenting the methodological controversy in relation to the origins of H. sapiens. The discussion about the genealogy of H. sapiens certainly is in urgent need of a new, more integrated way of approaching the past.     

Managing Nordic boreal forest landscapes for biodiversity: ecological and economic perspectives

More conservation-oriented forest management practices have been implemented recently in the Nordic countries. The goal of this ecological forest landscape management is to reconcile the commercial harvesting of boreal forests with biodiversity conservation. Management aims at maintaining viable populations of the full array of naturally occurring species in an area while still keeping the timber flow as maximal as possible. Basic ecological tools of managing landscape for biodiversity are (1) to mimic natural disturbance regimes, (2) to set aside areas in permanent or temporary nature reserves, and (3) to enhance dispersal of organisms by creating habitat corridors and stepping stones. The ecological basis of this management system is not well founded, and much more empirical and theoretical research is needed to justify and further develop forest landscape management. It has also proved difficult to assess the economic consequences of more conservation-oriented forest management because the market economy largely fails to give value to forest products other than fibre. Considerable methodological development in the valuation of non-timber goods has occurred in recent years, but there is still much controversy over the justification of the valuation procedure in principle. It seems that both economic and moral approaches to the issue of valuation are inseparable from the choices and decisions we have to make about ecological systems. Perhaps the most fruitful outcome can be achieved by using moral and economic arguments in parallel.     

Methodological standards for nature conservation: casestudy landscape planning

One of the main reasons for the insufficient realisation of nature conservation objectives, especially in competition with land use and development, is the lack of methodological standards. Existing standards are not widely accepted by the users, who often apply very different schemes and techniques for evaluation and monitoring, to work on the same kind of problems. In the complex social context of modern communities, that increasingly rely on standardised regulations, a loss of reliability and public acceptance of results can consequently occur.The demand for methodological standards in nature conservation increased rapidly during the past years, due to a more comprehensive overall concept including used or anthropogeneous ecosystems and landscapes and general globalisation trends, including nature conservation strategies and laws. In Europe the recent development within the European Union, especially the conservation concept of Natura 2000, requires harmonisation of planning, management and monitoring methods.Regardless of this, methodological standardisation is not yet a major topic in nature conservation sciences. Many disadvantages and obstacles of such standards are discussed, such as the fact that the complexity and individuality of nature forbids standardisation in general. However such arguments merge methodological and thematic standardisation. In a 3-year developmental study, the challenges and limits of standardisation in nature conservation were analysed, thematically focusing on conservation-related items of landscape planning in Germany. A board of experts, comprising outstanding conservationists from universities, research institutions and private enterprises produced draft papers for standardisation (called yellow prints). Further representative scientists and conservationists were involved in the stepwise definition of standards. Such drafts are now available for 5 methodological fields of landscape planning (fauna, vegetation, biotopes, evaluation schemes, landscape visions). They represent best practice in German landscape planning in these methodological fields.The developed procedures of standard-setting are applicable to other fields of nature conservation on regional and international levels as well.     

A survey of unresolved problems in life cycle assessment

Background, aims, and scope  Life cycle assessment (LCA) stands as the pre-eminent tool for estimating environmental effects caused by products and processes from ‘cradle to grave’ or ‘cradle to cradle.’ It exists in multiple forms, claims a growing list of practitioners, and remains a focus of continuing research. Despite its popularity and codification by organizations such as the International Organization for Standards and the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, life cycle assessment is a tool in need of improvement. Multiple authors have written about its individual problems, but a unified treatment of the subject is lacking. The following literature survey gathers and explains issues, problems and problematic decisions currently limiting LCA’s goal and scope definition and life cycle inventory phases. Main features  The review identifies 15 major problem areas and organizes them by the LCA phases in which each appears. This part of the review focuses on the first 7 of these problems occurring during the goal and scope definition and life cycle inventory phases. It is meant as a concise summary for practitioners interested in methodological limitations which might degrade the accuracy of their assessments. For new researchers, it provides an overview of pertinent problem areas toward which they might wish to direct their research efforts. Results and discussion  Multiple problems occur in each of LCA’s four phases and reduce the accuracy of this tool. Considering problem severity and the adequacy of current solutions, six of the 15 discussed problems are of paramount importance. In LCA’s first two phases, functional unit definition, boundary selection, and allocation are critical problems requiring particular attention. Conclusions and recommendations  Problems encountered during goal and scope definition arise from decisions about inclusion and exclusion while those in inventory analysis involve flows and transformations. Foundational decisions about the basis of comparison (functional unit), bounds of the study, and physical relationships between included processes largely dictate the representativeness and, therefore, the value of an LCA. It is for this reason that problems in functional unit definition, boundary selection, and allocation are the most critical examined in the first part of this review.

Rodent Gymnastics: Neurobehavioral Assays in Ischemic Stroke

Despite years of research, most preclinical trials on ischemic stroke have remained unsuccessful owing to poor methodological and statistical standards leading to “translational roadblocks.” Various behavioral tests have been established to evaluate traits such as sensorimotor function, cognitive and social interactions, and anxiety-like and depression-like behavior. A test’s validity is of cardinal importance as it influences the chance of a successful translation of preclinical results to clinical settings. The mission of choosing a behavioral test for a particular project is, therefore, imperative and the present review aims to provide a structured way to evaluate rodent behavioral tests with implications in ischemic stroke.     

Speed, Sex, Gay Men, and HIV: Ecological and Community Perspectives

Fifteen years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a great deal is now known about the different populations impacted by the disease, including those affected directly or indirectly by drug use. Anthropology has played a critical role in assisting with this task by identifying hidden populations, developing new methodological approaches, and targeting outreach efforts. In spite of this considerable body of ethnographic knowledge, men who have sex with other men (i.e., MSM, or gay and bisexual men) who use drugs have not received the same research attention as other drug users, despite the fact that they represent nearly one-fifth of AIDS cases in the U.S. with injection drug histories. In response to the alarming increase in HIV seroprevalence among this population, this ethnographic project provides preliminary data about those who are at dual risk for HIV through both homosexual behavior and injection drug use.     

How rhesus monkey mothers and infants keep in touch when infants are at risk from social companions

Ten-to 17-week-old rhesus monkey infants that received hits from companions other than their mother at high rates (relative to their rates of involvement in playful social encounters with those companions) tended to be members of mother-infant dyads that were vigilant. Criteria of vigilance were frequent contacts between mother and infant during the first 5 sec of the infants’ social encounters and/or a bias of mother-infant contacts toward that time. Infants that received few hits per encounter came from both vigilant and nonvigilant dyads. When analyzed alone, mothers’ rates showed the same trends. High levels of vigilance tended to reduce infants’rates of making social contacts. Maternal social rank and other measures of the infants’ social involvement were not correlated with vigilance. There is no evidence that mothers and infants were in conflict with each other about interrupting the infants’ encounters. Understanding vigilance becomes important whenever vigilant activity conflicts with other activities. Special problems arise because decisions about vigilance levels require judgments of risk based on the kinds of events that occur only rarely if vigilance is effective. A model providing a framework for studies of vigilance against the risks of infants’ social activities was developed. It recognizes that (1) risk-reducing vigilant behavior can conflict with acquiring information about risk; (2) in social situations where reliable estimates of risk are impossible, individuals might follow rules of thumb (e.g., be restrictive) rather than modify behavior moment by moment according to the current situation;and (3) at the dyad’s optimum balance between vigilance for the current infant and investment in subsequent off-spring, the infant will not be totally protected, so that while dyads at higher risks are more vigilant, the risks are also realized to a greater extent (e.g., itin terms of the number of hits received per encounter).     

Using patient and physician perspectives to develop a shared decision-making framework for colorectal cancer

The Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI) program and implementation research have both come of age in the 10 years since QUERI was established. Looking forward, if QUERI and the field of implementation science are to mature successfully, we will need to address a series of challenges. First, we need to more clearly demonstrate how applying principles of implementation science leads to more effective implementation and communicate those lessons to our partners and funders. Second, we will need to engage in the ongoing debate over methodological standards in quality improvement and implementation research. Third, a program like QUERI needs to become more relevant to the daily decisions of key stakeholders. Fourth, if we hope to sustain interest in implementation science, we will need to demonstrate the business case for more effective implementation. Fifth, we need to think creatively about how to nurture the next generations of implementation researchers and front-line "connectors," who are critical for accelerating implementation. Finally, we need to strengthen the connections between implementation research and the other operational and research activities that influence change in healthcare systems. The excitement of entering adulthood is tempered by the challenge of new responsibilities and expectations. What is essential is that we continue to learn and move forward. For implementation science and for QUERI, the next decade looks to be one filled with exciting possibilities, new partnerships, increasing relevance, and real accomplishment.     

The Futility of Futility: Death Causation is the ��Elephant in the Room�� in Discussions about Limitation of Medical Treatment

The term “futility” has been widely used in medical ethics and clinical medicine for more than twenty years now. At first glance it appears to offer a clear-cut categorical characterisation of medical treatments at the end of life, and an apparently objective way of making decisions that are seen to be emotionally painful for those close to the patient, and ethically, and also potentially legally hazardous for clinicians. It also appears to deal with causation, because omission of a futile treatment cannot surely be a cause of death. The problem is that futility can be argued to be a “false friend”, in that it gives an appearance of representing a reliable conceptual basis, in ethics, for limitation of medical treatment—usually in the context of dying—without actually doing so. In fact, the concept of futility is a conflation of clinical judgement about outcomes of treatment and the quality or even value of life, and has really failed to contribute much to the advancement of decision-making and hence care at the end-of-life. It also has the capacity to medicalise the personal space. Deliberations about the likely outcomes of medical treatment are necessary, and medical expertise is pivotal. However, futility is argued to have a better future in partnership with a broad social action agenda about the process of dying, such as that articulated in health promoting palliative care, as a basis for better “death-ways” in the 21st century (Kellehear 2005). Medicine needs to more honest and upfront about its limits, as death is, after all, the elephant in everybody's room.     

Metaphors we think with: the role of metaphor in reasoning

The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments, we explore how these metaphors influence the way that we reason about complex issues and forage for further information about them. We find that even the subtlest instantiation of a metaphor (via a single word) can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve social problems like crime and how they gather information to make "well-informed" decisions. Interestingly, we find that the influence of the metaphorical framing effect is covert: people do not recognize metaphors as influential in their decisions; instead they point to more "substantive" (often numerical) information as the motivation for their problem-solving decision. Metaphors in language appear to instantiate frame-consistent knowledge structures and invite structurally consistent inferences. Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualize and act with respect to important societal issues. We find that exposure to even a single metaphor can induce substantial differences in opinion about how to solve social problems: differences that are larger, for example, than pre-existing differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans.     

Evidence for social role in a dolphin social network

Social animals have to take into consideration the behaviour of conspecifics when making decisions to go by their daily lives. These decisions affect their fitness and there is therefore an evolutionary pressure to try making the right choices. In many instances individuals will make their own choices and the behaviour of the group will be a democratic integration of everyone’s decision. However, in some instances it can be advantageous to follow the choice of a few individuals in the group if they have more information regarding the situation that has arisen. Here I provide early evidence that decisions about shifts in activity states in a population of bottlenose dolphin follow such a decision-making process. This unshared consensus is mediated by a non-vocal signal, which can be communicated globally within the dolphin school. These signals are emitted by individuals that tend to have more information about the behaviour of potential competitors because of their position in the social network. I hypothesise that this decision-making process emerged from the social structure of the population and the need to maintain mixed-sex schools.     

Best of both worlds: Combining ecological and social research to inform conservation decisions in a Neotropical biodiversity hotspot

Conservation decision is a challenging and risky task when it aims at prioritizing species or protected areas (PAs) to prevent extinction while ensuring fair treatment of all stakeholders. Better conservation decisions are those made upon a broader evidence base that includes both ecological and social considerations. However, in some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth — tropical forests, for instance — multicriteria decision-making has been constrained by the following (i) ecological and social datasets available have been obtained in an independent, non-integrated manner, with social data typically more scarce than ecological ones, and (ii) capacity in social and/or interdisciplinary data analysis among decision-maker is limited. We describe a conservation prioritization exercise that combined findings from independent ecological and social research conducted in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, and propose methods to integrate, analyze and visualize data. We found that the outcomes based on combined ecological and social research findings were, in some cases, different from those based on any of these lines of evidence alone. Indeed, the input from relatively basic social research significantly changed the outcomes of decision-making based on the results of ecological research. Results corroborate the importance and cost-effectiveness of broadening the interdisciplinary evidence base for conservation decision-making, even when social data is scarce and analytical capacity is limited.     

Realizing the promise of population biobanks: a new model for translation

The promise of science lies in expectations of its benefits to societies and is matched by expectations of the realisation of the significant public investment in that science. In this paper, we undertake a methodological analysis of the science of biobanking and a sociological analysis of translational research in relation to biobanking. Part of global and local endeavours to translate raw biomedical evidence into practice, biobanks aim to provide a platform for generating new scientific knowledge to inform development of new policies, systems and interventions to enhance the public’s health. Effectively translating scientific knowledge into routine practice, however, involves more than good science. Although biobanks undoubtedly provide a fundamental resource for both clinical and public health practice, their potentiating ontology—that their outputs are perpetually a promise of scientific knowledge generation—renders translation rather less straightforward than drug discovery and treatment implementation. Biobanking science, therefore, provides a perfect counterpoint against which to test the bounds of translational research. We argue that translational research is a contextual and cumulative process: one that is necessarily dynamic and interactive and involves multiple actors. We propose a new multidimensional model of translational research which enables us to imagine a new paradigm: one that takes us from bench to bedside to backyard and beyond, that is, attentive to the social and political context of translational science, and is cognisant of all the players in that process be they researchers, health professionals, policy makers, industry representatives, members of the public or research participants, amongst others.     

Advanced methods for the study of the chemistry and the metabolism of lichens

Lichens are compound entities of a fungal partner (“mycobiont”) and one or more photosynthetically active algae or cyanobacteria (“photobionts”). The organisms live in an intimate, symbiotic association which has been classified as a mutualistic or controlled parasitic relationship. Several metabolites from lichens display unique structures with unknown functions, and only a few model species have been analysed comprehensively. The complex metabolic interplay between the organisms in lichens is also incompletely understood. Earlier experiments with ¹⁴C-labelled precursors indicated that the photobionts produce from CO₂ glucose or sugar alcohols (e.g. ribitol and arabitol) which are then transferred to the mycobionts. In the fungi, these compounds are believed to be converted into mannitol serving as the carbon and energy source in the downstream metabolic processes. Recent methodological developments in spectroscopy and “systems biology” now enable a concise analysis of the metabolite profiles, networks and fluxes by non-targeted quantitative approaches. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge about lichen metabolism and report on the potential of the advanced methods to reinvestigate lichen chemistry and metabolism on a quantitative basis.