Community engagement: leadership tool for catastrophic health events

Disasters and epidemics are immense and shocking disturbances that require the judgments and efforts of large numbers of people, not simply those who serve in an official capacity. This article reviews the Working Group on Community Engagement in Health Emergency Planning's recommendations to government decision makers on why and how to catalyze the civic infrastructure for an extreme health event. Community engagement--defined here as structured dialogue, joint problem solving, and collaborative action among formal authorities, citizens at-large, and local opinion leaders around a pressing public matter--can augment officials' abilities to govern in a crisis, improve application of communally held resources in a disaster or epidemic, and mitigate community wide losses. The case of limited medical options in an influenza pandemic serves to demonstrate the civic infrastructure's preparedness, response, and recovery capabilities and to illustrate how community engagement can improve pandemic contingency planning.     

Time-adjusted global warming potentials for LCA and carbon footprints

Purpose

The common practice of summing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and applying global warming potentials (GWPs) to calculate CO₂ equivalents misrepresents the global warming effects of emissions that occur over a product or system??s life cycle at a particular time in the future. The two primary purposes of this work are to develop an approach to correct for this distortion that can (1) be feasibly implemented by life cycle assessment and carbon footprint practitioners and (2) results in units of CO₂ equivalent. Units of CO₂ equilavent allow for easy integration in current reporting and policy frameworks.

Methods

CO₂ equivalency is typically calculated using GWPs from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. GWPs are calculated by dividing a GHG??s global warming effect, as measured by cumulative radiative forcing, over a prescribed time horizon by the global warming effect of CO₂ over that same time horizon. Current methods distort the actual effect of GHG emissions at a particular time in the future by summing emissions released at different times and applying GWPs; modeling them as if they occur at the beginning of the analytical time horizon. The method proposed here develops time-adjusted warming potentials (TAWPs), which use the reference gas CO₂, and a reference time of zero. Thus, application of TAWPs results in units of CO₂ equivalent today.

Results and discussion

A GWP for a given GHG only requires that a practitioner select an analytical time horizon. The TAWP, however, contains an additional independent variable; the year in which an emission occurs. Thus, for each GHG and each analytical time horizon, TAWPs require a simple software tool (TAWPv1.0) or an equation to estimate their value. Application of 100-year TAWPs to a commercial building??s life cycle emissions showed a 30?% reduction in CO₂ equivalent compared to typical practice using 100-year GWPs. As the analytical time horizon is extended the effect of emissions timing is less pronounced. For example, at a 500-year analytical time horizon the difference is only 5?%.

Conclusions and recommendations

TAWPs are one of many alternatives to traditional accounting methods, and are envisioned to be used as one of multiple characterizations in carbon accounting or life cycle impact assessment methods to assist in interpretation of a study??s outcome.     

PROFILEGRAPH: an interactive graphical tool for protein sequence analysis

The computer program PROFILEGRAPH, a graphical interactive toolfor the analysis of amino acid sequences, is described. Themain task of the program is to integrate a variety of sliding-windowmethods into a single user-friendly shell. The program allowsthe user to combine any amino acid specific parameter with aselection of several possible types of analysis and to plotthe resulting graph in one of several windows on the screen.It is also possible to calculate the moment of the amino acidspecific parameter for a given secondary structure and to displayboth the absolute moment value and the moment angle relativeto a reference residue. Also included are several utilitiesthat facilitate visual analysis of protein primary structureslike, for example, helical-wheel diagrams. It is possible toadapt the majority of published sliding-window analysis proceduresfor use with PROFILEGRAPH.     

Phylomat: an automated protein motif analysis tool for phylogenomics

Recent progress in genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics enables unprecedented opportunities to examine the evolutionary history of molecular, cellular, and developmental pathways through phylogenomics. Accordingly, we have developed a motif analysis tool for phylogenomics (Phylomat, http://alg.ncsa.uiuc.edu/pmat) that scans predicted proteome sets for proteins containing highly conserved amino acid motifs or domains for in silico analysis of the evolutionary history of these motifs/domains. Phylomat enables the user to download results as full protein or extracted motif/domain sequences from each protein. Tables containing the percent distribution of a motif/domain in organisms normalized to proteome size are displayed. Phylomat can also align the set of full protein or extracted motif/domain sequences and predict a neighbor-joining tree from relative sequence similarity. Together, Phylomat serves as a user-friendly data-mining tool for the phylogenomic analysis of conserved sequence motifs/domains in annotated proteomes from the three domains of life.     

Continuing professional development systems for medical physicists: A global survey and analysis

Continuing professional development (CPD) and continuing professional education (CPE) are seen as being necessary for medical physicists to ensure that they are up-to-date with current clinical practice. CPD is more than just continuing professional education, but can include research publication, working group contribution, thesis examination and many other activities. A systematic way of assessing and recording such activities that a medical physicist undertakes is used in a number of countries. This can be used for certification and licensing renewal purposes. Such systems are used in 27 countries, but they should be implemented in all countries where clinical medical physicists are employed.A survey of the CPD systems that are currently operated around the world is presented. In general they are quite similar although there are a few countries that have CPD systems that differ significantly from the others in many respects. Generally they ensure that medical physicists are kept up-to-date, although there are some that clearly will fail to achieve that.An analysis of what is required to construct a useful medical physics CPD system is made. Finally, the need for medical physicist professional organizations to cooperate and share in the production and distribution of CPD and CPE materials is emphasized.     

EMP simulators and public safety: an analysis

Effects produced by electromagnetic fields from exoatmospheric nuclear detonations, known as electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) and devices, which simulate these EMPs are analyzed for their potential danger to human beings in contact with large energy collectors. Comparison is made with ANSI guidelines established for radio-frequency electromagnetic fields.     

Identifying priority areas for conservation: a global assessment for forest-dependent birds

Limited resources are available to address the world's growing environmental problems, requiring conservationists to identify priority sites for action. Using new distribution maps for all of the world's forest-dependent birds (60.6% of all bird species), we quantify the contribution of remaining forest to conserving global avian biodiversity. For each of the world's partly or wholly forested 5-km cells, we estimated an impact score of its contribution to the distribution of all the forest bird species estimated to occur within it, and so is proportional to the impact on the conservation status of the world's forest-dependent birds were the forest it contains lost. The distribution of scores was highly skewed, a very small proportion of cells having scores several orders of magnitude above the global mean. Ecoregions containing the highest values of this score included relatively species-poor islands such as Hawaii and Palau, the relatively species-rich islands of Indonesia and the Philippines, and the megadiverse Atlantic Forests and northern Andes of South America. Ecoregions with high impact scores and high deforestation rates (2000-2005) included montane forests in Cameroon and the Eastern Arc of Tanzania, although deforestation data were not available for all ecoregions. Ecoregions with high impact scores, high rates of recent deforestation and low coverage by the protected area network included Indonesia's Seram rain forests and the moist forests of Trinidad and Tobago. Key sites in these ecoregions represent some of the most urgent priorities for expansion of the global protected areas network to meet Convention on Biological Diversity targets to increase the proportion of land formally protected to 17% by 2020. Areas with high impact scores, rapid deforestation, low protection and high carbon storage values may represent significant opportunities for both biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation, for example through Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiatives.     

VisANT: an online visualization and analysis tool for biological interaction data

Background  

New techniques for determining relationships between biomolecules of all types – genes, proteins, noncoding DNA, metabolites and small molecules – are now making a substantial contribution to the widely discussed explosion of facts about the cell. The data generated by these techniques promote a picture of the cell as an interconnected information network, with molecular components linked with one another in topologies that can encode and represent many features of cellular function. This networked view of biology brings the potential for systematic understanding of living molecular systems.     

Fighting pathophobia: how to construct constructive public engagement with biocontrol for nature without augmenting public fears

Social networks of stakeholders are necessary to foster public support for classical biological control for nature. Drawing from recent scholarship in policy-relevant social science fields, this article describes two key concepts that can improve science communication strategies to support invasive species management and biocontrol: lay public risk perception, and public engagement with science. This article then recommends a fundamental communication strategy: construct public trust in invasive species control efforts using public engagement processes that link trustworthy messengers and appropriate messages with the public. It draws examples from biocontrol projects that used pathogens as the natural enemy of choice, but more broadly seeks to inform efforts to engage the public about the use of classical biocontrol agents in nature conservation efforts.     

Transfected cell microarrays: an efficient tool for high-throughput functional analysis

Transfected cell microarrays are considered to be a breakthrough methodology for high-throughput and high-content functional genomics. Here, recent advances in the cell microarray field are reviewed, along with its potential to increase the speed of determining gene function. These advances, combined with an increasing number and diversity of gene perturbing systems, such as RNAi and ectopic gene expression, provide tools for expanding our understanding of biology at the systems level.     

SNP2CAPS: a SNP and INDEL analysis tool for CAPS marker development

With the influx of various SNP genotyping assays in recent years, there has been a need for an assay that is robust, yet cost effective, and could be performed using standard gel-based procedures. In this context, CAPS markers have been shown to meet these criteria. However, converting SNPs to CAPS markers can be a difficult process if done manually. In order to address this problem, we describe a computer program, SNP2CAPS, that facilitates the computational conversion of SNP markers into CAPS markers. 413 multiple aligned sequences derived from barley ESTs were analysed for the presence of polymorphisms in 235 distinct restriction sites. 282 (90%) of 314 alignments that contain sequence variation due to SNPs and InDels revealed at least one polymorphic restriction site. After reducing the number of restriction enzymes from 235 to 10, 31% of the polymorphic sites could still be detected. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of this tool for marker development, we experimentally validated some of the results predicted by SNP2CAPS.     

In vitro development of maize immature embryos: a tool for embryogenesis analysis

During monocot embryo development, the zygote goes through a proembryo stage characterized by a radial symmetry and later becomes a true embryo with a bilateral symmetry. In order to determine culture conditions for immature embryonic stages, proembryos and embryos were isolated from controlled pollinated maize plants and developed in vitro. Precise culture conditions were determined for each type of explant: a monolayer system for embryos using NBM medium enriched with maltose (0.25 M) but without hormones, and a bilayer system for proembryo stages using N6 medium supplemented with maltose (0.35 M) and zeatin (3 mM). Morphological, cytological, and in situ hybridization analysis have shown that the resulting embryos (stages 1-2), developed in vitro, were similar to those formed in vivo and subsequently gave rise to fertile plants. This work demonstrates that successful embryo differentiation is dependent on specific parameters including the genotype, the nature of the carbon source, the type and concentration of hormones used and orientation of the embryos on the medium. The potential use of these results for embryo rescue and mutant analysis are discussed.     

Free Air Temperature Increase (FATI): a new tool to study global warming effects on plants in the field

A new technique, called Free Air Temperature Increase (FATI), was developed to artificially induce increased canopy temperature in field conditions without the use of enclosures. This acronym was chosen in analogy with FACE (Free Air CO₂ Enrichment), a technique which produces elevated CO₂ concentrations [CO₂] in open field conditions. The FATI system simulates global warming in small ecosystems of limited height, using infrared heaters from which all radiation below 800 nm is removed by selective cut-off filters to avoid undesirable photomorpho-genetic effects. An electronic control circuit tracks the ambient canopy temperature in an unheated reference plot with thermocouples, and modulates the radiant energy from the lamps to produce a 2.5°C increment in the canopy temperature of an associated heated plot (continuously day and night). This pre-set target differential is relatively-constant over time due to the fast response of the lamps and the use of a proportional action controller (the standard deviation of this increment was <1°C in a 3 week field study with 1007 measurements). Furthermore, the increase in leaf temperature does not depend on the vertical position within the canopy or on the height of the stand. Possible applications and alternative designs are discussed.