Durability challenges for new and existing reinforced concrete structures

November 12, 2015

concete — Laying gray concrete paving slabs in house courtyard driveway patio. Professional workers bricklayers are installing new tiles or slabs for driveway, sidewalk or patio on leveled foundation base made of sand at public or private residence.

Concrete and reinforced/pre-stressed concrete is and will be the main construction material for civil engineering infrastructure. Much more than in the past this construction technology faces challenges that have been discussed at the International RILEM workshop held at ETH Zurich in Switzerland on 17-18 April 2012¹.

For new structures that will be built in industrialised and emerging countries to expand the civil engineering infrastructure, the challenge is to achieve long service life, practical, cost-effective solutions with materials having a reduced environmental footprint. To achieve this, the cement industry made great efforts in substituting clinker (responsible for a large part of the CO2 emissions) with supplementary cementitious materials (SCM). This substitution is reflected in the decreasing amount of Portland cement (CEM I) and the increase of blended cement (CEM II) worldwide. These modern binder systems containing limestone, fly-ash, oil burnt shale etc. in a complex blend are getting included (thus allowed) by more and more standardisation bodies such as the European Cement Standards EN 197-1 and their national companions. The standards include specifications on the proportions in which they are to be combined, as well as the mechanical, physical and chemical requirements for both the products and their constituents.

These blends are suitable for achieving strength similar to Portland cement, thus can be used to build concrete structures. From the point of view of the end user (engineer, owner of the structure, society) that the final product uses concrete made of cement is more important. Performance based concrete standards such as the European concrete standard EN 206-1 have thus emerged that relate concrete durability to different types of exposure. Concrete for a bridge in the Swiss mountains exposed to a severe climate and de-icing salts (exposure condition XD3) must be of much higher quality compared to concrete inside a building (XC1). The term “quality of concrete” includes the care with which it is executed but also its composition – thus water to cement ratio and the cement type.

Whereas long experience is available with concrete structures made with Portland cement (CEM I), new blended cements have a much shorter track record. In addition, due to the reduced clinker content, the pH of the pore solution will be lower and questions arise regarding the corrosion protection of the steel², thus the durability of these new structures both regarding the resistance against carbonation and against chloride-induced corrosion. The civil engineering industry is currently, in many industrialised countries, in a transition phase from building new constructions to maintaining the large stock of valuable assets. This is reflected (as an example valid for other industrialised countries) in the increasing costs for maintenance of the Swiss national highway system compared to the costs for building new structures. These reinforced concrete structures are ageing and very often show premature deterioration due to corrosion of the reinforcement. For existing infrastructure the challenge is thus extending the service life with a minimum of intervention, costs and traffic delay. Bridge management systems based on the results of inspection of the structures are crucial. Today visual inspection is common – once a sign of distress (cracks, rust) is detected maintenance action is decided (reactive strategy). In this way damage, especially chloride induced corrosion of the reinforcement is detected only in a very late stage and maintenance costs are very high. An improved pro-active maintenance strategy requires a step forward, changing from visual inspection towards more refined techniques for inspection and condition assessment, e.g. robotic inspection and corrosion surveys.

This is particularly important for RC structures exposed to chloride ions (sea-water, de-icing salts) as internally ongoing corrosion of the reinforcement will manifest only in a very late stage at the surface.

The topics addressed here will be further focussed on in future issues of AG.

1 U. Angst, R.D. Hooton, J. Marchand, C.L. Page, R.J. Flatt, B. Elsener, C. Gehlen and J. Gulikers, Materials and Corrosion 63 (2012) No. 12

2 L. Bertolini, B. Elsener, E. Redaelli, P. Pedeferri, R. Polder, Corrosion of Steel in Concrete – Prevention, Diagnosis, Repair, WILEY VCH second edition (2013) Author: Prof. Dr. Bernhard Elsener

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Elsener

Head Durability Research Group

Institute for Building Materials, ETH Zurich

Tel: +41 44 633 2791

elsener@ethz.ch

www.ifb.ethz.ch/corrosion

Smart standards for a smart world

November 12, 2015

Henry Lawson, Market Research Consultant at BSRIA examines the possibilities of achieving common standards which are appropriate for the myriad of different “things” that will potentially be part of the Internet of Things

I live about 50 miles to the west of London. When I take the train into central London I often find it ironic that the journey takes about the same time as it did when the first trains trundled out of Reading 175 years ago.

Part of this is due to sheer congestion on the railways, but partly also to the fact that the original railway was created by one of the greatest engineers of all time, Brunel, who set up his own standard – a seven-foot gauge allowing faster, safer transit than Stephenson’s earlier narrower gauge. As we all know, almost two centuries later the UK, including Reading, is still using Stephenson’s narrower, arguably inferior gauge.

This is perhaps the most glaring example of the dichotomy that states that (1) technology needs standards, especially where it connects different systems and (2) the standard that prevails will not necessarily be “the best”, and worst case may actually inhibit innovation.

The railways of course also connected cities, in the process standardising time itself across the UK for the first time. Today, various forecasts are telling us that by 2020, between 20 and 30 billion devices will be connected to the Internet of Things (IoT). This means that, in theory, information and instructions can be shared by everything from the watch on my wrist to the car that I drive (or that drives itself) to the buildings where I live and work, and encompass the functioning of whole regions and countries and their infrastructures.

This then raises huge questions as to how this data can be shared and utilised securely, quickly and efficiently and without creating unintended problems. If we are going to avoid anarchy, there is clearly going to be a need for standards. But how is it technically possible to achieve common standards which are appropriate for the myriad of different “things” that will potentially be part of the “Internet of Things”, let alone to ensure that they are widely adopted – unlike Brunel’s brilliantly simple but now largely forgotten seven-foot gauge?

There is a long tradition of establishing standards in particular countries, in specific industries, which sometimes come to be recognised internationally. But a “standard of everything” to match the “Internet of Things” runs the risk of being too general and high level or too complex and cumbersome, not to mention too prone to being overtaken by events.

Predictably, what we are seeing is that different organisations are tackling the problem at different levels and from different angles. Well-established institutions are offering standards alongside consortia created especially for this purpose. This may seem like a recipe for chaos, if not a contradiction in terms. After all, promoting multiple standards is a bit like saying that if standards are good, then double standards are twice as good.

So what has actually been happening “on the ground”? In our own field of smart buildings, US-based Project Haystack is focussing on “developing semantic modelling solutions for data related to smart devices including building equipment systems, automation and control devices, sensors and sensing devices”. Sponsors include established building automation suppliers like Siemens, and Lynxspring, who are perhaps best known for their initiatives in building cybersecurity.

Looking to the wider field of smart cities, in the UK the HyperCat Consortium has been developing “a hypermedia catalogue format designed for exposing information about IoT assets over the web”. The Board includes representatives from IBM, Cisco, Fujitsu and Accenture. The consortium has also attracted support from some major names in local government and in the academic world.

A slightly different approach is taken by Vorto, an initiative supported by the Eclipse Foundation, which exists mainly to promote open-source software and whose members include IBM, SAP, Oracle, CA Group and Bosch. Bosch, the primary driver behind Vorto, describes the key objective as being to deal with the problem of “industry-specific implementations that provide individual abstraction layers for specific groups of devices.” Vorto can create the code required for different types of devices to communicate efficiently.

At a more granular level, the LoRa initiative provides Low Power Wide Area Networking based on a specification intended for wireless battery operated Things in regional, national or global networks. Key supporters include IBM, Cisco and numerous network providers.

It is clear from this that key industry players are already involved in initiatives at a number of levels. IBM, in particular, is actively engaged in several, which suggests either that the company is “hedging its bets” – which is often a sensible strategy, or that it sees them as compatible or even complementary.

While de facto standards often emerge from commercial success, they are also of course frequently created de jure by national or even supranational authorities – think of the importance of Building Regulations and energy targets to the UK Building Services Industry.

In this area, we are starting to see movement. In 2014 the British Standards Institute (BSI) claimed that the UK was the “first country to develop Smart Cities standards”, when it published a Publically Available Specification: PAS 181 “Smart city framework – Guide to establishing strategies for smart cities and communities”.

Not to be outdone, the same year the International Standards Organisation (ISO) also published ISO 37150 Smart community infrastructures – Review of existing activities relevant to metrics. Even the United Nations has been paying heed to the need for standards for the smart world. The UN’s telecommunications arm, the ITU first set up a Global Standards Initiative on Internet of Things (IoT-GSI) which concluded its activities in July 2015, and which was succeeded by Study Group 20: IoT and its applications including smart cities and communities (SC&C).

There are also numerous other initiatives and projects scattered around the world, sponsored by various bodies and consortia. At this point, you might start to have a nightmare about a multi-faceted Tower of Babel. Who sets the standard for all the standards?

In practice, these initiatives tend to fall into three main broad categories: there are those like Project Haystack which focus on a particular sector: in this instance the built environment. There is always going to be a need for targeted standards of this kind unless that is you create a single gargantuan all-encompassing data model capable of covering all verticals and applications.

The key requirement is that such specialized standards can offer a clear “interface” with others. Other standards initiatives like LoRa concentrate on one of the “building blocks” of the IoT, in this case, the need for wireless wide area networks (WANS). The national and international standards bodies tend to look at more broad functions and relationships and practices, rather than the nuts and bolts.

At present, most of the IoT standards are fairly restricted in their impact, by geography, function or by vertical. But as the IoT expands, and has more impact on day-to-day life and business – which inevitably means more problems and controversies, we can expect the demand for more rigorous standards to intensify. Cybersecurity is one obvious example, given that fridges, cars, planes and buildings are all susceptible to being hacked, so it is no surprise to see companies like Lynxspring taking an active role. As the worlds of big data, buildings and infrastructure converge, we can expect concerns over data privacy and data security to continue to escalate.

Public concern is in turn likely to spur governments into action and possible further regulation and imposed standards. The fact that such government action is sometimes a kneejerk response that may be poorly thought out does not lessen its likely impact.

Other players that can be expected to become more influential include Apple and Google. As the current dominant players in the Smart Devices market, the apps developed on their platforms will be a key component in a fully functioning smart world, and companies developing IoT solutions will at least need to take them into account. Past experience suggests that other new major players are likely to emerge with similar levels of influence.

So what can we do about all this? My advice to anyone who is concerned about the future impact of IoT standards on your business is to find out about the existing standards initiatives in your area of activity and to get involved, ensuring that your voice is heard.

Most of these initiatives are relatively new, and for those who “buy-in” now, there is a real opportunity to help to mould them so that they meet your needs, whether as a supplier or as a user of services.

True, not all of these initiatives will bear fruit. Some will merge, be overtaken or wither on the vine. But in today’s world of revolutionary change, a simple attitude of “wait and see” or “carry on regardless” is simply not going to be sustainable, in any sense of the word.

Henry Lawson

Market Research Consultant

Tel: 01344 465600

bsria@bsria.co.uk

www.bsria.co.uk

www.twitter.com/BSRIALtd

Building renovations – The Nordic way

November 12, 2015

The Nordic Built “Active Roofs and Facades” project has received support from Nordic Innovation, EUDP(DK), Energimyndigheten( SE) and Rannis(IS) allowing strong development of leading Nordic competences in the area of building renovation. This is achieved by creating transnational Public Private

Partnership models to support the development of nearly zero energy building solutions and associated performance documentation – which is required in the EU building directive.

The proposed cooperation with the building industry on developing models and the demonstration of

“Active House” based sustainable renovation is creating a strong Nordic alliance. The project runs from 2014 to 2017 and involves companies which are represented in the Nordic countries and companies, from the international Active House Alliance. The development will use the best transnational competences and networks, creating greater possibilities to export technology.

The background of building renovation in both Nordic and European projects, where energy use is often 30-40% higher in practice, compared to what was expected from calculations and where innovative solutions are seldom used, is very much connected to the way the building industry is organised. Here consultants will normally only want to operate in a conservative way. This is because, they are not only selling their expertise, but also the insurance that goes with it, and due to consultants fees being considerably reduced, it is common to work with well-known large suppliers, who can contribute to large parts of the design process. This means there is a tendency to not choose the most energy-efficient solutions, but to allow more mediocre and old fashioned solutions, that the suppliers prefer. It is also common knowledge that detailed performance of equipment in practice is never controlled, there is no incentive to perform better, and higher energy use will often be explained by the user behaviour.

A main issue of the proposed Nordic Built project will be to realise the renovation projects in a much better way and secure positive involvement of consultants, so they can be more proactive, e.g. by full-scale testing of innovative solutions before large scale implementation. And, by monitoring key performance indicators as a basis for negotiating guarantees of performance results as part of the overall procurement process, something which also might be used to avoid normal tendering in connection to the development of renovation projects.

An important challenge is to introduce holistically oriented demands in the so-called Nordic Built Charter in practice, in involved demonstration projects.

Further background of the Nordic Built Active Roofs and Facades in Sustainable Renovation project Coordinated by the Danish energy specialist company Cenergia, the project will utilise the results from the recently finalised EU-Concerto project Green Solar Cities ( www.greensolarcities.com ).

These results have been presented in a book by Routledge/Earthscan in 2015, while main results from Copenhagen are illustrated in the two small videos below: http://vimeo.com/98926904 http://vimeo.com/98926905 Important features of the work plan is e.g.: To work alongside Active House

Alliance ( www.activehouse.info ) aiming at involving Nordic best practice producers and using the Active House Specifications in practice. Here the Finnish company ZED Consult will give a special input, whilst at the same time comparing it to existing certification schemes like LEED, Bream and DGNB as well as the Nordic Built Charter in general.

Both innovative and best practice solutions will be full scale tested in cooperation with the housing association, KAB (DK). This will realise the overall winning project of the Nordic Built Challenge architectural competition, Ellebo Garden Room in Ballerup near Copenhagen and the WSP Group working with the housing company Trianon in Malmø, as the basis of later implementation of sustainable renovation in Denmark and Sweden. There will be a special focus on innovative building-integrated PV modules from the Danish company Gaia Solar together with Steni façade and roof plates with long service life.

Besides new decentralised heat recovery ventilation (HRV) solution developed for housing renovation by the Danish companies, Øland and Ecovent will be full scale tested and documented. Innovative features that will be introduced here are window integrated inlet of air, use of a new type of “automatic filter shift box”, which only need to be exchanged every 10 years. And, the use of a new intelligent control device which allows for continuous registration of airflow and electricity use through the internet. At the same time, this secures a reading of the mean seasonal factor of performance (SFP) and general survey of operation.

As an alternative, there will also be a focus on compact window integrated HRV solutions, both for housing and schools. The benefit here will be much lower total costs due to the avoidance of large amounts of ductwork, but the challenges include an optimised operation in correspondence with a minimum air exhaust possibility from wet rooms based on humidity sensors. Besides this, handling of condensate from the used air in a way that does not create problems.

In Norway, the building renovation specialist company, Høyer Finseth, will work with full-scale testing of best practice solutions and will at the same time work with the Norwegian solar thermal panel producer AVENTA.

Peder Vejsig Pedersen

Elsebeth Terkelsen

Head of Office

European Green Cities , EGCN

Tel: +45 27 57 19 55

eterkelsen@eterk

Planning for the future

November 12, 2015

Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP), established in 1987, is an international association of universities teaching and researching in the field of spatial planning.

With over 150 institutional members, AESOP is the only representation of planning schools of Europe. AESOP mobilises its resources, taking a leading role and entering its expertise into ongoing debates and initiatives regarding planning, planning education and qualifications of future professionals.

AESOP offers a platform of exchange of planning knowledge for scholars, practitioners, and urban managers.

AESOP promotes planning as a tool of improving quality of life and builds-up its agenda with professional bodies, politicians and all other key stakeholders in spatial and urban development and management across Europe.

At present, AESOP members cover a significant majority of European scholars in territorial, regional, spatial and urban development and management research. The level of expertise in planning represented by the AESOP community is outstanding. The AESOP Annual Congress, held in July, with more than 1,000 abstracts regularly submitted, has become the biggest planning assembly of scholars, practising planners and urban managers in Europe.

AESOP runs also an annual meeting of the heads of planning schools. The meeting gives the opportunity to the departments, schools and faculties of planning to discuss and compare the challenges they have to face and the programmes they offer to the students. These meetings generated, as a result of discussions, a few interesting outcomes, such as the AESOP Experts Pool, which aims at helping schools to raise the quality of teaching.

For PhD students in planning, AESOP offers a workshop, which is associated with the annual congress. AESOP also supports the Young Academics Network, which is an independent structure of PhD students. Our association publishes also its own journal called Planning Education. All the issues of this publication are available free of charge on the AESOP website.

Our association publishes also its own journal called Planning Education. All the issues of this publication are available free of charge on the AESOP website.

AESOP collaborates with more than 50 planning journals. Special connections link AESOP with disP – The Planning Review, where AESOP holds its own section.

AESOP cooperates with European organisations, both with those with an academic background focusing on territories and planning (in the broad sense of the word) – like for example European Regional Science Association (ERSA), European Urban Research Association (EURA), Regional Studies Association (RSA), International Planning History Society (IPHS) and with those with more focus on practice – like European Council of Spatial Planners – Conseil Européen des Urbanistes (ECTP-CEU), International Federation for Housing and Planning (IFHP), International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP) and UN-Habitat, but above all with the European institutions, agencies and programmes, giving their growing interest in “things territorial”. This cooperation is coordinated by AESOPs representation in Brussels: AESOP Brussels European Liaison Office (BELO) responsible, among others, for representing AESOP in the EU and networking with other organisations.

One of the important activities within BELO activities is the Lecture Series established to attract not only the planning community but also a wider audience of politicians, community leaders and organisations, business and the media to promote it as a discipline that can help to find new tools of governance and function as an effective mediator between many stakeholders.

Among distinguished speakers were already: Klaus R. Kunzmann (in Cappenberg Schloss, Germany), Andreas Faludi (in Paris), Danuta Hübner (in Brussels), Sir Peter Hall (in London), Juval Portugali (in Amsterdam), Cliff Hague (in Riga), Peter Batey (in Warsaw). The 10th Lecture, which will take place on 26th November 2015 in Berlin will focus on the important topic of migrants and the cities.

The other activity is an annual European Urban Summer School (EUSS) for young professionals.

Members of AESOP hosting the event and acting in cooperation with the municipalities and other local actors always offer an interesting case to illustrate the topic discussed during the summer school. Tutors represent both academia and practice. On average some 20-30 young professionals attend the EUSS.

Six editions of the European Urban Summer School (Wrocław, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Tours, Bremen) have shown convincingly that a few days of intensive interaction can produce many useful new ideas documented in the selection of books, which are available free of charge on the AESOP website.

AESOP, via BELO, cooperates with the European Commission, European Parliament, URBACT and ESPON, being invited as an academic partner of the ESPON Scientific Conference.

Responding to the invitation of the European Commission and the Committee of the Regions taking into account its field of expertise, AESOP has become involved in the OPEN DAYS University, and the Master Class for PhD students/early career researchers in the field of regional and urban policy.

Planning schools and research institutions are warmly encouraged to join AESOP. The application form is available at www.aesop-planning.eu. We encourage practitioners and urban managers to link to our activities via AESOP Brussels European Liaison Office (contact our BELO representative by email: belo@aesop-planning.eu or izabela.mironowicz@pwr.edu.pl ).

Izabela Mironowicz

Representative AESOP Brussels

European Liaison Office – AESOP

belo@aesop-planning.eu

izabela.mironowicz@pwr.edu.pl

www.aesop-planning.eu

The urban dimension of Cohesion Policy

November 12, 2015

Corina Crețu, EU Commissioner for Regional Policy outlines how Europe should be exploiting urban areas to their full potential

An important responsibility was bestowed upon me when I came into office as Commissioner for Regional Policy: to lead this policy into the next decade and to exploit its full potential in order to create jobs and sustainable growth. It is a fact: Europe’s cities are the engines of European growth, providing jobs and services, and serving as hubs for creativity and innovation. The urban dimension of our Policy has therefore been significantly reinforced for 2014-2020.

The importance of the thematic was already reflected in the explicit inclusion, in 2012, of urban policy in the responsibilities of the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission. This change was made in recognition of the importance of cities as key actors for the development of regions across Europe.

In the new programming period, over €80bn from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), half of its 2014-2020 envelope, will be spent in urban areas. In each EU member state, according to our new Regulations, a minimum 5% of the ERDF will be invested in integrated sustainable urban development and directly managed by urban authorities, at least for the selection of operations. This will allow cities to build on positive synergies between policy fields. Furthermore, €330m will fund innovative actions in the field of sustainable urban development over this 7 year period.

Overall, Cohesion Policy resources will be strategically targeted at enhancing the integrated approach to urban development, to increase the efficiency of our investments, at strengthening the role of cities in European urban policy, to better deliver on the EU goals of growth and jobs, and at increasing the level of innovation in urban policymaking, to tackle the challenges that will grow in importance in future years. An urban development network set by the Commission will review the on-the-ground deployment of European funds and support the exchange of experience between cities involved in urban innovative actions and in integrated sustainable urban development. I want to stress the paramount importance of an integrated approach to sustainable urban development: urban development is about the social, economic and physical transformation of cities. It means that everything from the advantages of economic activity, innovation, education and culture to the challenges of urban sprawl, poverty, migration, congestion and beyond, are dealt with cohesively.

Integrated problems need integrated solutions. And solutions must be sustainable so that any urban development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Of course for EU investments to have a maximum impact on the ground, cities and regions need to address all issues hampering the good use of the funds, especially in the field of administrative capacity. One of the priorities of my mandate is precisely to help Member States improve the way they manage and invest EU funds, by fostering the exchanges of best practices in the field of administrative capacity building and public procurement and by simplifying the access to the European Structural and Investments Funds.

Now, as you know, the Commission and the 28 Member States have agreed to bring forward an ambitious EU Urban Agenda in the coming years, which will be about enabling cities to fully contribute to our shared priorities and deliver concrete benefits for our citizens. We will pay particular attention to exploiting synergies and complementarities with other EU policies, starting with the other European Structural and Investment Funds, to make the most of the combined effect of all EU funds.

Shaping the EU Urban Agenda will give us the occasion to reflect on the urban dimension of the post-2020 Cohesion Policy, and I am looking forward to the fruitful discussions we will have on the matter with all the national, regional and local stakeholders involved in the shared management of Cohesion Policy funds.

Corina Crețu

Commissioner for Regional Policy

European Commission

http://ec.europa.eu/commission/2014-2019/cretu_en

Philosophy within social/ educational research

November 12, 2015

In the everyday and customary repetitions/reiterations of embodied practices it would be very easy to begin this brief paper concerned with opening space for philosophical discourse in mainstream educational/ social research with expressions of what has been done by a small groups of colleagues in the UK and Australia in setting up an international network concerned with opening further debate about practice-based research ¹. But, in our repetitions/reiterations of practices is it possible to make sense any such practices without the mediation of that ‘Empire of Signs’ ² disseminated from ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ ³ and many other ancient sources around the globe? In raising such a question philosophical discourse opens space for a style of writing and associated thinking that in some ways challenge the very grammars of much existing practice.

Customarily, for example, dominant forms of practice in research ⁴ have always maintained a separation between the virtues of truth and justice; truth claims to the reproduction of knowledge remain the province of institutions of thought, while justice would appear to endure as the first virtue of social institutions. But, in schematic terms, in the context of the institutions of capitalism/technology on one side of research, and political-economic apparatuses of security, including health, welfare and education, on the other, Kevin Flint has begun to open debate on the possibility of aligning such virtues in a reconceived event of research ⁵. In so doing and in drawing from Jacques Derrida’s and Martin Heidegger’s philosophies, Flint’s6 writings open critical reflection on the language of research giving expression to the reproduction of knowledge claims located in the present. Ironically, in accord with a canonical or a communitarian ethic of research the logic of this system currently reduces the body to a standing reserve of energy and possibilities that are available for use within the dominant global system of capitalism7. In being aligned with moves towards justice, however, through deconstruction, the event of research opens space for the possibility of understanding more about the temporal dimensions of existence – the complex interplay of the unknowable future, what has been, and the present. In a nutshell, this reconceived event of research opens space for understanding more about knowledge reproduction and its effects upon us, in our multifarious practices as human beings.

Approached in this way, the practice of research incorporating new philosophical discourse opens space ⁸ for rethinking its complex relationship with education ⁹, citizenship and democratic practice ¹⁰, and so challenging, rather than continually being in danger of reproducing, various forms of oppression within the global capitalist system ¹¹.

At issue is not knowledge reproduction from social/educational research, but the complex inter-relationship of such research with discourses of philosophy and our everyday practices as human beings. Approached in this way, philosophical discourse in the papers that follow over the next 18 months will be employed in opening space for the reproduction and rethinking of a possible new language for human beings, rather than narrowly focused solely upon customary concerns about truth claims to knowledge in research. The approach used is predicated on the assumption that our essential home in this world is language.

The approach to the use of philosophical discourse in research also raises questions about the education cultivated in this process, and just how such education shapes our existence. As the novelist and neo-Marxist critic, Raymond Williams ¹², once observed in walking into a railway station, a shopping arcade and so on, in our everyday practices we become educated in some way by the experience – he called it ‘permanent education’. At issue is not a form of education that is bounded in some way by the current ‘apparatus of education’¹³, but forms of education cultivated from, and variously shaping a multiplicity of institutional practices ¹⁴. Consequently, the complex inter-relationship of research, practice and education will be the subject of the next paper in this series. In the context of the dominant global capitalist system and forms of neoliberal discourse, there also remains the question of its complex inter-relationship with discourses of philosophy, research, education. This will constitute the third paper that will follow in the next few months. At issue here are philosophical questions concerned with the cultivation of democratic practices and citizenship in our ‘late modernn’¹⁵ societies. Until now, it would seem, most commentators have delimited their focus upon questions concerned with the possible organization of democratic practices, whereas this coming paper will move towards the deconstruction of such practices in the light of educational practices in societies around the globe that are variously shaping and delimiting democratic process.

What follows from these early papers are moves towards social justice from the cultivation of authentic education in philosophical readings of the powers of language in practice. Such moves already exist in much social/educational research, but their effects upon the individual/collective body are always in danger of being dissipated and lost ¹⁶.

Until this point, the foregoing discourse has been concerned only with the knowledge economy. But, recent work by Paul Mason ¹⁷, concerned with the ‘information economy’, involving many international social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and so on, also opens other vital spaces for human existence and philosophical concerns regarding moves towards social justice.

In these circumstances ‘the self’ is located in a complex and uncertain world; its very existence on this planet depends upon opening space for an entrepreneurial practice that is no longer confined to outmoded market place economies or, indeed, contemporaneous information economies. At issue remains the contribution of the philosophical discourse on this matter. Forms of writing, literature, narration, poesy and so on, also open more space for moves towards education for social justice in research. But, in the context of the complexity of practice in its structuring the final papers in this series will be concerned with philosophical and deconstructive readings of the process of writing and of ‘complexity’ in social practice ¹⁸.

REFERENCES

The ‘International Association for Practice Doctorates’, IAPD [professionaldoctorates.org] was first set up following a conference in London in 2009.
Barthes, R. [2005] Empire of Signs, Waterlooville, UK: Anchor Books.
Derrida, J. [1981] Dissemination, trans. Johnson, B. London: Athlone Press
Flint, K.J. [2015a] Rethinking Practice, Research and Education: A philosophical inquiry, London and New York: Bloomsbury: 123-204
Flint, K.J. [2015b] ‘Where’s the justice in research’ [2015 c] The ‘Social Justice Turn’ in Qualitative Research: Capitalism, technology and the sublime powers of the ‘is’. [2015d, i]: ‘Education for Social Justice in the knowledge economy: Towards a visualization of the myriad understandings of moves towards social justice in the event of research’, paper in preparation. [2015d, ii]: ‘Education for Social Justice in the Information Economy: Towards a visualization of the myriad understandings of moves towards social justice in the event of information’, paper in preparation.
Flint, K.J. [2015a: 123-268]
Flint, K. J. and Peim, N. [2012] Rethinking the Education Improvement Agenda, London and New York: Continuum.
For Henri Lefebvre space is not an empty vessel, we variously produce it and in turn it shapes our existence in various ways.
Flint, K.J. [in preparation, paper iv] Education for Social Justice: An exploration of moves towards social justice cultivated in the complex inter-relationship of the economies of capitalism, technology and research.
Flint, K.J. [in preparation, paper v]: Opening horizons for social justice: a brief and critical examination of the forces cultivating democracy in the complex inter-relationship of capitalism with technology and research; Giroux, H.A. (2015) Dangerous Thinking in the age of the new authoritarianism, Boulder, CA and London: Paradigm Publishers. (2014a) Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books. (2014b) The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. (2014c) Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. (2008) Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed, Boulder, CA and London: Paradigm Publishers.
Wallerstein, I. [2001] Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth Century Paradigms, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Klein, N. (2000, 2010), London: Fourth Estate. (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London: Penguin. (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. Climate, London: Penguin Mason, P. (2015) Postcapitalism: A guide to the future, UK, USA: Penguin Random House UK
Williams, R. [1966] Communications, [Revised Edition] London: Chatto & Windus.
Foucault, M. [1977] Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, trans. Sheridan, A., London: Penguin Books; Agamben, G. [2009]
Flint, K. J. and Peim, N. [2012]; Flint, K.J. [2015a]
Term borrowed from Anthony Giddens [1991]: Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity
Flint, K.J. [2015a, b, c]
Mason, P. [2015]
Osberg, D. [2015] ‘Learning, Complexity and Emergent [Irreversible] Change’ in, Scott, D. and Hargreaves, [eds.] The Sage Handbook of Learning, London and Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications: 23-40

Dr Kevin J Flint

Reader in Education

Nottingham Trent University

Mobile: 07531 754709

kevin.flint@ntu.ac.uk

www.professionaldoctorates.org

Raising academic standards in UK schools

November 12, 2015

© Artur Szczybylo education — Writing note showingRaise The Bar. Business photo showcasing Set higher standards challenges seeking for excellence Keyboard key Intention to create computer message pressing keypad idea

AG looks at how the Department of Education is improving standards in schools to help pupils leave school with qualifications to find employment

Are UK schools performing as well as they should be? Last month AG reported that only 18% of parents in England thought that the government listened to them about their child’s education. Does this mean that the government are missing a trick in regards to how schools perform?

However, the Department for Education has reported a different story. In figures published in October, they revealed that standards continue to rise under the Academies programme. The provisional GCSE results that were published for the first time showed that converter academies are performing 7.2% points above the national average, with 63.3% of pupils achieving the headline measure of 5+ A* to C GCSEs, including English and Maths.

Converter Academies make up the single biggest type of secondary school, representing 40% of schools. More headteachers are having the freedom to run their school in a way that works for their pupils. The government believes that the results demonstrate that the Academies programme is “continuing to transform the landscape of English education.” Speaking about the results, School Minister Nick Gibb said ¹: “As a one nation government we are committed to delivering educational excellence in every area of the country, and these results demonstrate the progress which is being made in extending opportunity and raising academic standards.

“Converter academies are leading the way in string academic standards and over time we will see the excellence and expertise of strong sponsors spread. As well as raiding standards, our plan for education is ensuring more pupils leave school with qualifications which we know will give them the best possible chance to achieve their full potential.” The government has recently focused their attention on ensuring pupils study core academic subjects. Earlier this year, Secretary of State for Education Nicky Morgan announced that all pupils starting secondary school from September must study the key English Baccalaureate (EBacc) subjects of English, maths, science, history or geography, and a language at GCSE.

The new measures aim to place the UK education systems on par with the best-performing countries. The government wants to ensure that young people are able to compete with peers across the globe in when they go into or apply for full-time employment. The EBacc was introduced back in 2010 to help pupils from particularly disadvantaged backgrounds study the key academic subjects. Figures show that the proportion of pupils entered into the EBacc has almost doubled, rising from 22% in 2010 to 39% in 2014.

Education Secretary Nick Morgan said ²: “As part of this government’s commitment to social justice we want every single person in the country to have access to the best opportunities Britain has to offer – starting with an excellent education.

“This means ensuring children study key subjects that provide them with the knowledge they need to reach their potential – while setting a higher bar at GCSE so young people, their parents and teachers can be sure that the grades they achieve will help them get on in life.

“And it means giving teachers the training they need to tackle low-level bad behaviour which unfairly disrupts pupils’ learning.”

The government seem to be doing all they can to ensure pupils in Britain remain focused on their education and leave school with the ability to gain employment. Behaviour and academic ability go hand in hand in terms of achieving high at school.

In June, Schools Minister, Nick Gibb ³ announced an investigation into the impact of smartphones and tablets on the behaviour of pupils. Although some schools use tablets as a learning tool, teachers are reporting the growing numbers of children bringing personal devices into class. This is leading to disruption in class, which hinders teaching.

In May, the London School of Economics (LSE) found that banning mobile phones from classrooms could benefit students’ learning by as much as an additional week’s worth of schooling over an academic year. The report suggested that banning phones would benefit low-achieving children and those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Nick Gibb said: “Since 2010 we have given teachers more power to ensure good behaviour in the classroom. But we need to make sure the advice we give to schools and the approaches being used across the country are fit for the 21st Century when even primary school pupils may be bringing in phones or tablets.

“Whether it is the use of mobile phones in schools or the attitudes of parents to their child’s behaviour in class, we will now probe deeper into behaviour more generally to ensure that no child has to put up with having their education disrupted by misbehaviour.” The government certainly seems to be committed to ensuring education is one of its key priorities. The government are also inviting your say on failing schools. Launched last month, the consultation is on proposals to speed up the transformation of failing schools and schools that are deemed to be ‘coasting’. “We are committed to delivering on our manifesto to a commitment to transform failing and coasting schools so that every child has the benefits to an excellent education,” said Nicky Morgan ⁴.

“Over the course of the last Parliament, we saw a million more pupils in good or outstanding schools. The measures outlined in this consultation will focus on the next million, extending the opportunity to young people right across the country.”

The consultation which runs until 18 December will seek views on a revised ‘Schools causing concern’ guidance. This sets out how regional schools commissioners will use the new powers to turn around failing schools.

It still remains to be see if the current Education Ministers are doing a better job than the previous Secretary of State, Michael Gove. But with the recent GCSE results, and proposals to transform schools across the UK, they are not off to a bad start.

1 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/academic-standards-continue-to-rise-under-the-academies-programme

2 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-reforms-to-raise-standards-and-improve-behaviour

3 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/impact-of-smartphones-on-behaviour-in-lessons-to-be-reviewed

4 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/have-your-say-on-measures-to-transform-failing-schools

Can validation of non-formal learning increase employability?

November 12, 2015

Pavel Trantina, at the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), argues the case for non-formal learning in order to gain key skills for the working world

At the latest Education, Training and Youth Forum, organised by the European Commission in Brussels in October of this year, one word was on everyone’s lips: “skills”. It was often used in connection with “recognition” or “validation”. It is incredible how views on the recognition of non-formal and informal learning have changed since the concept was first brought into the policy debate in the late 1990s. As the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) stated in its recent opinion on the Validation of skills and qualifications acquired through non-formal and informal learning, “the EU cannot fail to validate the hidden wealth that lies in the experience and skills that people have acquired through non-formal or informal means”.

The Council Recommendation on 20 December 2012 highlighted that “the validation of learning outcomes (knowledge, skills and competences) acquired through non-formal and informal learning can play an important role in enhancing employability and mobility, as well as increasing motivation for lifelong learning, particularly in the case of the socio-economically disadvantaged or the low-qualified.”

This claim is borne out by the research. In 2012, the University of Bath and GHK Consulting drafted a study for the European Youth Forum looking at the impact of non-formal learning in youth organisations, on young people’s employability. Youth organisations are important providers of such learning. This type of education is not primarily aimed at increasing employability, but research has shown that the skills acquired through youth organisations could help achieve this goal. The study confirms the widespread recognition that the skills required by employers clearly correspond to those nurtured by the non-formal learning sector. Five of the 6 most frequently required soft skills are among those further developed by youth organisations – the sole exception being numeracy. The soft skills most sought by employers include communication, organisation and planning, decision-making, teamwork, reliability/independence and numeracy. These soft skills are seen as key competencies for working successfully. Certain character traits are also developed, such as personal motivation, initiative and creativity, which are personal traits related to reliability/independence and entrepreneurship.

Given the high rate of youth unemployment, opportunities for interaction between public and private employment agencies, volunteer organisations (particularly those involving young people) and employers should be supported. This can serve to promote the visibility – and raise awareness of the importance and value – of non-formal education and informal learning in voluntary organisations, and also to strengthen mutual trust.

The EESC strongly believes that emphasis should be placed on identifying, recording, assessing and thus improving the outcomes of non-formal and informal learning and on doing so in a way that is as comparable as possible and comprehensible to all parties involved, particularly employers and educational institutions.

Member States should provide opportunities for people of different ages and qualification levels to have their non-formal and informal learning validated. The EESC recommends that Member States broaden the range of institutions providing the public with guidance and counselling on the benefits of validating competencies and on the options and mechanisms for doing so. Member States should, in particular, enlist employment services, youth information centres, educational institutions, employers, trade unions, career advice centres, youth organisations, women’s organisations, organisations providing support to migrants and disabled people, and public institutions.

The social partners and other civil society organisations should be made more aware of the benefits of validating non-formal and informal learning and should be given an active role in setting national qualification frameworks and determining professional qualifications.

The EESC calls on educational institutions, particularly secondary schools and universities, to promote the validation of skills and knowledge acquired through non-formal means. The EU has many examples of good practice in this field, which should be promoted.

Collective bargaining and social dialogue between unions and employers could play an important role in the process of validating non-formal education and lifelong learning and this should be used as an instrument to work on validating non-formal learning as an important contribution to the debate on employability and the instruments to support it.

The EESC has already supported the creation of the European Skills Passport and, subsequently, the Europass Experience. It is therefore disappointing that the European Commission has suspended the preparatory work on the Europass Experience and calls on it to see this initiative through to completion. Such a tool would increase the transparency of skills acquired outside of school and increase people’s opportunities on the labour market.

The full opinion can be found at: http://www.eesc.europa.eu/?i=portal.en.soc-opinions&itemCode=34487

Pavel Trantina

President of the Employment, Social Affairs and Citizenship (SOC) Section

European Economic and Social Committee (EESC)

www.eesc.europa.eu

The efit21 strategy – transforming education

November 12, 2015

The Federal Ministry for Education and Women’s Affairs (BMBF) details how new digital technologies are transforming classrooms across Austria

Information and communication technologies transform teaching and learning. New teaching and learning methods such as the flipped classroom or Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are opening up the classroom: learning takes place not only during the instruction period but also during the break, in the corridor, on field trips or during leisure time. Technologies support the formation of new learning communities, flexible and class-wide collaborations, individual learning paths, as well as research-based and student-centred learning. The pupils are the focus: they assume an active role in an autonomous learning process.

With the “efit21 – digital literacy” strategy, the Federal Ministry for Education and Women’s Affairs has set focused targets for the sustainable use of digital technologies and media in Austrian educational institutions. “efit21” focuses on international developments and key concepts, bringing together all relevant initiatives and projects of the Ministry under its umbrella and pursues strategic objectives:

Systematically improve the quality of teaching and learning and integrate innovative learning scenarios into the educational process;
Provide digital skills for personal and professional success to youth and adults;
Convey skills relevant to the labour market through professional training and professional eSkills;
Sustainably improve the efficiency of educational administration by the use of IT;
Improve access to digital technologies and media, dismantle barriers to use and support better participation;
Promote digital education institutions.

Attention to gender perspectives, participation in international projects and cooperation with different institutions and disciplines such as science and research and the economy are important principles in the implementation of the strategy.

Digital technologies and media are integrated with binding effect across the board in the curricula of all schools via the “eLearning/application of technology in the classroom” and “Media education” teaching principles, as well as partly via their own subject matter.

No child should leave school without digital skills

Children and young people grow up with technology. The world they live in should also be actively integrated into the school. Studies have shown that as “digital natives”, students can often use only a narrow range of technologies competently. Therefore, it is important to provide them with a reflected approach to digital media and the Internet and lead them to be able to use the technology responsibly on their own.

Under “Digikomp8”, a group of experts has brought the digital skills ¹ together which students should possess by the end of grade 8 (age 14). The rollout is based on digital classroom examples relating to the educational topic. Digital skills were also defined and classroom examples were developed for primary level (age 6 to 10) and secondary level II (age 15 to 18). The saferinternet.at coordination point provides information and services for schools and school partners on various aspects of the safe use of ICT and the Internet.

Educators play a key role in conveying these skills. The “digiCHECK” tool allows teachers to check their digital literacy and skills on the basis of self-assessment questions and receive feedback on recommended measures to be taken to improve qualifications. Training modules and eEducation courses are available to the teachers. Virtual Pedagogical University offers new training models such as collaborative online seminars and introductory units in the form of eLectures.

Taking advantage of technology potential for teaching and learning

The educational potential of ICT for education and training is still not fully being used. One of the core statements of the OECD report on the connections between technology use and student performance is that 21st-century technologies should be linked with modern educational models.²

A large number of Austrian schools have integrated ICT well into their daily routine and the development of the school; they link the technologies with educational concepts and use creative potential for the learning process. eLearning networks have established themselves in innovative schools. Mobile devices are used in notebook and tablet classes as learning tools. Learning platforms and learning-management systems are available as a central service to all schools. The “Mobile Learning” project follows a cross-school peer-learning approach and aims to contribute to further dissemination: An eLearning-savvy school supports 2 newly joined schools on their way to digital teaching and learning with tablets. They network and implement a jointly developed educational concept at their sites. BMBF thereby also pursues a new approach to training educators (learning from colleagues through practice).

Increased use of digital educational media

Well-prepared digital educational content offers the opportunity for effective educational use of technologies. Content portals with digital teaching materials have been established. An important milestone has now been reached in the area of digital textbooks: Through the textbook initiative, beginning in 2016 eBooks will be used for the first time in secondary level II. At another stage of expansion, interactive supplementary materials will also be included. Open Educational Resources are moving into the Austrian classroom too: In a pilot project, teachers developed OER materials, which are currently being tested in e-learning networks and assessed for quality.

Improving access to digital media for schools and learners

Access to digital media will be improved for schools and learners. The challenge for those operating educational institutions is to create the best possible framework conditions in terms of infrastructure, for example, for using ICT in teaching and learning. The expansion of Internet connections and Wi-Fi in schools is an important area for action.

BMBF follows the approach of reducing the administrative burden on federal schools via centrally provided services (e.g. centrally maintained and hosted learning platforms) and standardised applications. More favourable conditions can be achieved by concluding framework agreements (e.g. general licenses for standard software products).

For more information please visit www.efit21.at

1 Skills include not only user knowledge, but also awareness-raising-and action-oriented aspects as well as concepts in information technology.

2 OECD report “Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection”.

Federal Ministry for Education and Women’s Affairs (BMBF)

Austria

www.bmbf.gv.at/enfr

How technology can support teachers best

November 12, 2015

Educational technologies are advancing rapidly; new solutions, apps, and online platforms appear every day. Mobile learning, learning on demand, and media rich curricula are recent buzz words describing the “techno-pedagogical” state of the art. And not least, the research and development community is encircled by the hovering spirit of “big data”, “learning analytics”, and “educational data mining”. In educational practice, moreover, we can observe an increasing change towards a formative-centred evaluation and guidance/support of learners and a strong orientation towards competence development and individualisation. There is little doubt, that the pace and mode of learning must adapt to ever fast changing societal challenges.

Considering Europe’s classroom reality, however, we can find a different situation: The most frequent situation in schools is that they are technology lean; there is little hardware and software, internet access is often not available, too slow, or restricted. Of course, there are few schools where the opposite is the case and technology is seen as an additional basic literacy. In the end, the use of (new) technologies is often dependent on the enthusiasm and skills of individual teachers and, even when teachers are using technologies; it still is difficult to give technology applications a deeper pedagogical value.

In conclusion, in all likelihood, there is no “big data” in schools and sometimes we do not even find “little data” in European school realities. Also, there is a lack of clear psycho-pedagogical ideas of how to use the fantastic new opportunities of technology (ranging from Facebook to Minecraft). On the other hand, we do know that a smart application and analysis of educationally relevant data is the most effective way to improve personalised teaching and learning. Only if a teacher has a detailed and in-depth understanding of each individual learner’s learning trajectory, particular strengths and weaknesses and, perhaps most importantly, the competency gaps, then and only then, teachers can support their learners in an optimal formative manner, highly tailored to the concrete educational needs and goals. Certainly, teachers across

Europe do a fantastic job, however, a large body of research yields that the necessary level of insight can only be reached when teachers are supported by smart technologies tailored to their particular needs and the given context conditions – technologies we can subsume under the term learning analytics.

Learning analytics is defined by the Society of Learning Analytics Research ( www.solaresearch.org ) as “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs”. Learning analytics consists in a multistep, cyclical process of data collection and pre-processing, analytics and action, and post-processing. Data collection and pre-processing refers to the gathering of educational data from different learning tools and applications and preparing and translating it into an appropriate format.

The analytics and action phase denotes the actual application of analytic methods, to extract meaningful patterns and information from the data and to make use of the obtained results (e.g., visualisation, feedback, recommendations, adaptation). Post processing includes ideas of continually improving analytics by refining analytics methods or using new methods, including new data sources. Ryan Baker and George Siemens distinguish five classes of key methods currently used in learning analytics: prediction methods, structure discovery, relationship mining, discovery with models, and distillation of data for human judgment. Rebecca Ferguson highlights that the traditional research results must now increasingly find their way into classrooms. Summarising this, the fundamental idea of learning analytics is to bring together all bits and pieces of educational relevant data, no matter from which source.

One of the most successful recent European initiatives to provide teachers with such smart educational and analytical technologies is LEA’s BOX ( www.leas-box.eu ). The name stands for a Learning Analytics Toolbox that aims to provide teachers and learners with a range of tools to collect, aggregate and analyse data. The LEA’s BOX project provides tools that allow teachers to collect data and events (e.g., test results or in-class activities) in a very simple and effective way, independent from devices or particular technological infrastructures. On the basis of data and on the basis of robust psycho-pedagogical theories, the project provides visualisations of learning progress and the structure of competencies in a variety of ways.

A key aspect when using complex intelligent technologies is also to open learner models to the users (teachers and students) to facilitate a reflection about learning and skills. Exactly this active involvement in assessment and the communication of results is the nature of effective learning; it ignites self-reflection and a suitable adaptation of learning as well as teaching strategies. Different visualisations can be useful for supporting different needs for viewing learning data. Learning analytics visualisations tend to be closer to those found in visual analytics more generally, such as pie charts, bubble charts, or line graphs, whereas open learner models have developed visualisations such as skill meters, concept maps or hierarchical tree structures. Bringing together statistical analyses and structural, non-numerical views of competency development, most recent developments focus on structural graphs and lattices to illustrate the details of learning.

In conclusion, it is clear that the best way to support teaching and learning is to have an eye on competency development on a highly detailed and highly individualised level. In addition, we need to consider learning as a structural process that doesn’t occur arbitrarily; we need to link competencies as well as prerequisite structures among them to actual curricula and teaching. The most important step is to translate such considerations into technology that supports teachers and learners in their particular settings and infrastructural context conditions. Most likely, not the most sophisticated technology is the most effective one but that technology that meets teachers and learners where they are – today! Of course, there is no doubt that future teacher education must address appropriate use of technology for educational purposes way more than presently it is the case. Until then, projects like LEA’s BOX envision to fill the gap and make education and training smarter, more effective, and perhaps more enjoyable.

Dr. Michael Kickmeier-Rust

Senior Researcher and Strategic Manager

Graz University of Technology

Tel: +43 664 1359136

michael.kickmeier-rust@tugraz.at

www.kti.tugraz.at/css

Boosting investment in education: Let’s make it happen

November 12, 2015

In a speech at a joint event with The European Investment Bank, Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, outlines the importance of booting investment and tackling the key challenges in Education

When Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker presented the Investment Plan for Europe in Strasbourg almost a year ago, in front of the European Parliament, he found very powerful words to stress why we need fresh investment.

And the very first example he gave was this: “I have a vision of school children in Thessaloniki walking into a brand new classroom, decked out with computers.” I bet that many in the hemicycle and beyond struggled to understand how could this happen. To understand how a new European fund whose raison d’être is to trigger private investment can play in role in education.

Many are still wondering. That is why I decided to organise today’s conference together with the European Investment Bank. I want to make President Juncker’s vision happen. I want to make sure that education benefits from the Investment Plan as much as possible. I know that together, we can reverse the alarming trend of underinvestment and get fresh money flowing into education right across Europe.

The situation is very worrying. Vice-Presidents Katainen and Baranyai have already highlighted how badly Europe is lagging behind, how hard the economic crisis hit the world of education over the past few years. This is especially grave when we look at the broader context: Today, 123 million European are at risk of social exclusion. Youth unemployment is still unacceptably high in the several Member States with 7 million youngsters neither working nor studying. Inequalities continue to grow with the top 20% earning more than 5 times the income of the bottom 20%. Our Union is now less inclusive and equal than before the economic crisis.

Beyond this, we also have to question the efficiency of our education systems. Europe’s workforce is ill-prepared for this more challenging post-crisis world. Even the fundamentals are not secured. How many people know that today, in 2015, one in 5 European adults struggle with reading and writing and lack basic numeracy skills? How many know that one in 4 is unable to use a computer, write a letter or send an email?

Tackling these challenges is crucial. Because education is the best safety net against social exclusion. Today’s early school leavers are tomorrow’s unemployed and impoverished. A solid education that equips young people with the skills and competencies they need for the labour market is the most efficient way to fight employment. And, fighting unemployment is, in turn, the best means of fostering inclusion.

If we are serious about maintaining open, inclusive societies, we need to put people at the heart of our work and show that we are investing in their future. Most importantly, we need to regard putting money into developing people as an investment, not as an expenditure. In times of fiscal consolidation, we all know how difficult it is to keep investment at an adequate level. We are certainly not here to point our fingers at anyone. Quite the contrary. We are here to support the Member States and to offer concrete solutions.

We want to help them make the most of the opportunities that the European Fund for Strategic Investments and the European Investment Bank have to offer. Both have a crucial role in boosting investment in education.

Why? For 3 reasons:

First, because the private sector can play its part in investing in education. The European Fund for Strategic Investments is based on a brand new concept, a new way of working that goes beyond grants and loans. This Fund can offer guarantees to help beneficiaries obtain loans from private banks at more favourable conditions. It can also invest in equity. It can support private-public partnerships that can bring huge benefits to education in many ways: by building and modernising school buildings, by rolling out broadband, by promoting research and projects that bring together universities and companies.

Second, and this is vital, the European Investment Bank already is and will remain a central player in education. How many of you knew that last year, it invested €4.8bn in education and that its projects range from supporting universities in Italy to kindergartens in Belgium and primary schools in France? The European Investment Bank’s on-going activities offer many possibilities as well as technical advice.

Finally, the EU Structural Funds are also part of the equation. They can complement schemes run under the Investment Plan or by the European Investment Bank. This is particularly interesting for projects aimed at boosting investment in people, such as the training of teachers. Thanks to the dedication and hard work of Vice- President Katainen, the European Fund for Strategic Investment is now up and running. This is the moment at which you come in. We need smart projects, and we need them as soon as possible. Your creativity and your ideas will be crucial in creating much needed fresh investment in education. What we want to do today is to explain both the new and the existing instruments, explore possibilities and crosslinks, and examine how projects can be pooled across regions or countries so that they have a real impact. I would like to welcome all those who are presenting their own projects here today. Your examples show just what is possible, and I want to thank you.

Your discussions today are the beginning of a long journey. We, the Commission and the European

Investment Bank will be here to support you and give advice over the coming years. We will do this here in Brussels, but also in each Member State, to ensure that, together, we invest smartly in our more precious asset: our people. In Thessaloniki and all across Europe.

This is speech given by Commissioner Tibor Navracsics at a joint event by the European Commission and the European Investment Bank “Education and the Investment Plan for Europe” http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-15-5764_en.htm

Tibor Navracsics

Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport

European Commission

www.ec.europa.eu/commission/2014-2019/navracsics_en

Nuclear Medicine in Dusseldorf

November 11, 2015

The Clinic of Nuclear Medicine at the University Hospital is located both in Düsseldorf and at the Research Center Jülich, and runs a nuclear medical out-patient department covering the whole spectrum of radioisotope scanning from thyroid and skeleton scintigraphy to examinations of amino acid metabolism for tumor diagnosis. As well as several conventional gamma cameras at both locations, the clinic also runs four SPECT cameras partly equipped with more than one detector head. There is also an out-patient department in Jülich, which specialises in thyroid disorders and excels by combining the diagnostic approaches of internal medicine with nuclear medical ones.

Part of our diagnostic spectrum are cutting-edge nuclear medical examination techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET). This method is used to examine glucose metabolism in patients suffering from cancer or cardiologic, neurological and psychiatric diseases. Apart from the wide range of diagnostic possibilities, the Clinic of Nuclear Medicine is one of the largest nuclear medical therapy centers in Germany, specialising in the treatment of benign and malign thyroid disorders.

Patient care

In Nuclear Medicine, very small amounts of radioactive substances are applied during diagnosis and/or treatment. These are called ‘tracers’, and are used to study metabolic processes or organ function within the human body. The distribution of radioactive tracers is made visible with special radiation detecting cameras. Thus, metabolic irregularities may be diagnosed which are indicative of specific metabolic diseases.

Presently, nuclear medical physicians are able to detect a number of metabolic disorders; diseases may be diagnosed in an early stage, even if organs are not altered in morphological terms. Tumor cells, for example, are characterised by elevated glucose utilisation. Therefore, Nuclear Medicine may detect the tumor earlier by labeling glucose with a radioactive isotope and observing its consumption within the body before changes are detectable by morphological imaging methods (MRI, CT). Nuclear medical examinations may also be successfully employed for the diagnosis of brain diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, or epilepsy. Today, because of Nuclear Medicine, much more is known about their causes. Investigations of the Clinic of Nuclear Medicine showed that psychiatric diseases such as depression may be related to specific biochemical changes of the brain. Radioiodine therapy is vastly applied for the treatment of thyroid diseases. In patients suffering from thyroid cancer, tumor cells may be effectively destroyed using this method. The applied radioactive iodine almost exclusively accumulates within the tumor cells, which are destroyed by the emitted radiation.

Research and teaching

Our research focuses on the assessment of brain functions. Generally, our studies involve measurements of blood flow, glucose utilisation and neuroreceptor/transporter binding. One major field of research is the investigation of brain regions relevant to memory formation. Moreover, we investigate synaptic changes in patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders. A further aspect of our work is the employment of highly resolving small animal cameras for the assessment of pre- and postsynaptic regulation mechanisms.

These studies aim to deepen our understanding of dysfunctions related to diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, epilepsy and depression and contribute to the development of novel therapeutic strategies.

A further key topic of our clinical research is to investigate the effects of myocardial stem cell transplantation after cardiac infarction. Furthermore, we work on several oncological projects; a variety of malign neoplasms including brain tumors, thyroid cancer and prostate cancer are investigated applying PET or SPECT and newly developed radiotracers. Additionally, in a multi-center study, infantile tumors and their response to therapy are also investigated.

A further aspect of our scientific activities is the development and employment of highly-resolving cameras suitable for the investigation of small animals.

Dr Hans-Wilhelm Müller BA (open)

Clinic Director

Tel: +49 (0)211 811 85 40

Tel: +49 (0)211 811 70 41

nuk(@)uni-duesseldorf.de

www.uniklinik-duesseldorf.de/en/unternehmen/kliniken/department-ofnuclear-medicine/

It’s the ‘content’ of cells that matters in biomedical research

November 11, 2015

One of the most remarkable things about life on earth, in all its forms, is how cells often only tens of microns in diameter have evolved to carry out the variety of tasks that they do. In multicellular organisms, the situation is even more complicated, as different cell types need to work together in an orchestrated manner in functional units such as tissues and organs to maintain the health of the organism. Ultimately, therefore, it is the function of individual cells in our body that determines our health, and our susceptibility to disease and infection. The discipline of cell biology serves to understand how cells work, and importantly what goes wrong in cells to cause disease. It is a discipline, with associated technologies, positioned at the centre of all fundamental biomedical research.

Since the mid-seventeenth century microscopy has been the primary tool for scientists to reveal the structure and organisation of cells, both in isolation and in their ‘social’ context. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries however, the widespread application and integration of fluorescence technologies with microscopy have provided new opportunities to reveal the innermost workings of cells. Fluorescence microscopy allows researchers to potentially view not only the cellular organelles but also the billions of molecules – in particular, proteins – that work together to provide the cell with its functionality. Therefore, in this post-genome sequencing age, how can we assign a discrete function to each of the 22,000 human genes and the proteins that they encode?

Furthermore, how can we identify those proteins that can cause a particular disease and those proteins that can have protective properties? Carrying out such experiments in intact and preferably living cells has obvious benefits, but clearly, the scale of such experiments is challenging. Simply visualising each protein in turn (and molecular techniques in principle make this possible) requires 22,000 individual microscopy images, and so without considering any further complexity of the experiment or replicates we would need to image almost every well from 230 96-well plates in a consistent manner. Even if this is achievable, the next problem becomes one of how to interpret the images, and in such a way that we can objectively compare them. The issues are experimental scale and complexity of information.

In the last ten years, this experimental approach has become a reality, and these barriers are being overcome, encompassed in a technology termed ‘high content screening and analysis’ – HCS / HCA. This is a fusion technology, combining lab automation, particularly in terms of the microscopy, with sophisticated software routines capable of analysing images of millions of individual cells (‘high throughput’) and extracting user-defined quantitative information (‘content’) for each cell. Since its development, labs around the world have embraced its power to address both fundamental cell biology questions and applications relevant to human health and disease. HCS can and has been used to rapidly screen massive libraries of chemical compounds to identify leads with desired cellular phenotypes, to identify host factors associated with virus infection, and reveal new triggers for cancer cell development. For cell biologists, it has proved to be a particularly powerful technique when combined with RNA interference (RNAi), a molecular technique that allows researchers to inactivate genes and the proteins that they encode in a systematic manner. Carrying out RNAi experiments in an HCS format effectively allows us to dissect the function of each gene/protein in turn with respect to a particular biological question, with the output being images of cells revealing the phenotype, and also their quantitative analysis.

In the Cell Screening Lab at UCD ( www.ucd.ie/hcs ) we have been developing and applying HCS strategies for a number of years to address questions related to how cells transport material (cargo) between their various internal organelles. Understanding how these membrane transport processes work is of vital importance, as all cargo inside cells will only facilitate cell function if it is located in the correct place. For example, signalling receptors at the cell surface are actually synthesised and assembled in internal membranes of the endoplasmic reticulum, requiring transport through intermediate organelles for further processing prior to delivery to the cell surface. Many human diseases are associated with mistargeting of such receptors – cystic fibrosis is a well-known example. Our ongoing mission is to use RNAi at a whole genome scale to systematically dissect how such transport pathways are regulated, and ultimately to use this information to gain insight into how they can be manipulated.

Improving drug delivery efficacy into cells is one good example of how this approach can be utilised. Ultimately, therefore, we believe that our HCS approaches provide critical information about cell organisation that can be exploited by many branches of biomedical research. There are of course both technological and political challenges to overcome if HCS is to continue providing valuable data to the scientific community. From a technological perspective there is a move towards the use of more complex 3-dimensional multi-cell type models, which although may better represent the in vivo situation, they are more difficult to image and precisely quantify, requiring confocal HCS technology. Politically, HCS is a relatively expensive technique, both in terms of its hardware and the reagents needed to carry out large-scale screens. In the current challenging environment of research grant availability, funding bodies often prioritise more advanced or applied projects that might return again in the short term. Ignoring HCS projects would be foolish, as they show real promise to deliver advanced cell biology knowledge that will inform and drive the direction of future biomedical research.

Prof. Jeremy C. Simpson

Cell Screening Laboratory

University College Dublin (UCD)

jeremy.simpson@ucd.ie

Exon skipping: making sense out of nonsense

November 11, 2015

RNA — 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

Associate Professor Michela Alessandra Denti, Principal Investigator of the Laboratory of RNA Biology and Biotechnology at the Centre for Integrative Biology of the University of Trento, discusses how modulation of RNA splicing can represent a cure for inherited diseases

RNA impacts nearly every aspect of gene expression and it is now clear that a large portion of human genetic diseases is caused by mistakes in RNA metabolism. It has become progressively evident that RNA is not just a carrier of genetic information, but also a catalyst and a guide for sequence-specific recognition and processing of other RNA molecules.

The growing body of knowledge concerning RNAs is opening up exciting and unprecedented avenues for research: RNA molecules are today, at the same time, targets of therapeutic intervention and novel therapeutic molecules to treat human diseases.

RNA splicing

‘RNA splicing’ is a process that all messenger RNAs (mRNAs) undergo in the cell. Once transcription of a gene begins in the nucleus, the transcript undergoes a complex series of processes all devoted to the production of a mature mRNA, collectively dubbed ‘‘mRNA processing’’. One of these events, called RNA splicing, consists in the removal of intervening sequences (‘‘introns’’) and the joining of the coding portions of the transcript (‘‘exons’’).

RNA splicing is a major way by which the cell can induce transcriptional diversity, mainly through alternative splicing, and apply a fine control on this diversity. The proper recognition of introns and exons is mediated by cis-acting sequences on the pre-mRNA and trans-acting protein factors, constituting the splicing machinery.

Gene mutations can alter RNA splicing

Several gene mutations, which cause different rare inherited diseases, affect the splicing of specific mRNAs. Generally, mutations residing in introns are categorised as splicing mutations because the amino acid sequence of the protein is not altered, thus the problem most likely concerns proper splicing. However, splicing mutations can also be found in the exons, altering or not the coding sequence. In this case, their identification as a splicing mutation is much more difficult, as it requires analysis of the splicing pattern. Today it is believed that more than 50% of mutations act by altering the splicing pattern. Their effect can be retention of a part of an intron or the use of alternative splice sites, ultimately causing the insertion of a stop (“nonsense”) codon. This, in turn, would cause the messenger RNA to produce a truncated, hence not functional, protein. Correct identification of these mutations is of pivotal importance for the development of therapeutic approaches.

Modulating RNA splicing as a cure for inherited diseases

At variance with mainstream gene therapy approaches, which aim at replacing the mutated gene with a functional DNA copy of the gene itself, the therapeutic approach called “exon-skipping” aims at correcting the mRNA transcribed from the mutated gene. By introducing small RNA molecules, scientists mask the mRNA to the attack of the splicing machinery, inducing it to jump certain portions of the mRNA, thus restoring the correct message. Exon-skipping holds a great deal of promise as a potential cure for genetic diseases, and several clinical trials in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy have supported the notion that the technique could one day become commonplace for many other inherited diseases.

Aside from splicing mutations, antisense-mediated splicing-correction approaches can potentially be utilised for the correction of missense and nonsense mutations, as well as for small insertions and deletions. In all cases where a mutation causes the introduction of a stop codon or frameshift leading to premature termination of the transcript, the possibility to interfere with the proper recognition, by the splicing machinery, of the exon carrying the mutation (therapeutic exon skipping) can be the right strategy to follow. The result of this approach is a shorter mature mRNA, missing the portion encoded by the skipped exon, but resulting in a restored protein. Such an approach has been proven successful to restore dystrophin in the muscles of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy patients.

The most widely studied approach for the correction of aberrant splicing is the use of antisense oligonucleotides, short synthetic molecules that target the pre-mRNA and that can be delivered to the affected tissue by local injection or through intravenous injection and delivery via the circulation. As the effect of antisense oligonucleotides is time-limited, to have a durable effect repeated administration is required. In this view, scientists are also studying the possibility of using engineered small antisense RNA molecules, produced by endogenous transcription of DNA vectors provided to the affected organ using viral or non-viral delivery systems.

RNA splicing is an extremely complex and fundamental cellular process that has been so fare barely considered as a therapeutic target, even if it can be seen as a highly appealing one for its importance in the cell context. The ability to modulate splicing can in fact offer several advantages over other conventional gene replacement approaches.

By definition, antisense-based therapeutic approaches act following base-pairing with their mRNA target, thus giving the possibility of obtaining a great specificity of action. Since they act at the mRNA level, the endogenous transcriptional regulation of the target gene is always maintained. This means that the therapeutic effect is obtained only where and when the target pre-mRNA is present. Splicing-correction approaches also allow a fine-tuning over the relative abundance of splicing isoforms because, by acting at a pre-mRNA level, it is relatively easy to modulate their ratio. The availability of several different molecular tools that can be used to manipulate splicing renders these approaches a versatile and promising strategy for the multitude of genetic diseases known today.

To overcome the challenges of the exon-skipping strategy, at the end on 2012 several key stakeholders (scientists, clinicians, regulators, industry and patients) came together in COST (European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) Action BM1207 ( www.exonskipping.eu ). This COST Action aims to advance the development of antisense mediated exon skipping for rare diseases, using Duchenne muscular dystrophy, for which this approach is currently tested in phase 3 clinical trials, like a showcase. Through networking, participants belonging to 18 different countries, intend to allow the clinical implementation of antisense-mediated exon skipping for as many rare disease patients as possible.

Prof. Michela Alessandra Denti

Principal Investigator

Laboratory of RNA Biology and Biotechnology,

Centre for Integrative Biology, University of Trento, Italy

michela.denti@unitn.it

http://www.unitn.it/en/cibio/11886/laboratory-rna-biology-and-biotechnology

Addressing the world’s water shortage

November 11, 2015

Acute shortage of drinking water reserves across the globe is one of the biggest problems these days. According to the study conducted by NASA in cooperation with the University of California on the underground natural reservoirs of water for the period of 2003-2013, the water supplies in underground aquifers are rapidly shrinking. Just over 30 percent (13 out of 37) of the largest underground water reservoirs are drying up at the moment. The fact that 35 percent of the world’s drinking water comes from these underground sources means the situation could be described as critical.

According to the Agency for Regulation of Natural Monopolies, the groundwater reserves of Kazakhstan are estimated at 19 billion cubic meters, with an annual intake of water around 1.4 billion cubic meters. Providing the population of all regions with high-quality drinking water is one of the most urgent and difficult problems for the ecological security of Kazakhstan. According to the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the current state of sewerage systems resulted in a lack of sanitary and epidemiological welfare of the country’s population. Thus, the quality of water from the 1 category open reservoirs used for centralised water supply in Kazakhstan declined on chemical indicators compared to 2009. Out of 1,989 water samples, 151 (7.6%) did not meet the standards of microbiological indicators – 4.5%.

The problem with drinking water purification is that it requires the joint efforts of industry, scientists and government together. There are a number of government programs aimed at addressing the problem.

Thus, in the years 2002-2010 the “Drinking Water” industry program was launched by the government to provide settlements with reserves of drinking water. In 2011, the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade has planned an industry program called “Ak Bulak” to ensure settlements with drinking water for the years 2011-2020. The state programs developers indicate that one of the most affordable and effective ways to improve the quality of water is the use of individual purifications, mobile and stationary water purification filters. Thus, the Interdisciplinary Research Complex was established in 2006 at the University, and since 2010 has been working with the Intergovernmental Organization “Joint Institute for Nuclear Research” (JINR) on the development of filters based on track membranes.

Analysis of the literature and patent documentation in the field of water treatment with the use of track membranes has indicated significant potential and limitless possibilities of this technology. At the heart of track membrane a polyethylene terephthalate film is irradiated with a heavy ion accelerator DC-60. After irradiation, the film is subjected to chemical etching, in which the latent tracks are converted into pores of the necessary diameter.

Filters based on track membranes are considered as a logical solution to the problems arising in the processing of drinking, technical and ultrapure water. This is due to a number of advantages of membrane technology as compared to conventional water treatment systems, such as the stability of the purification quality – even with substantial fluctuations in the composition of the source water, the compactness of the equipment, high level of automation, and low operating costs. Membrane technology produces drinking water not only safe in chemical and microbiological terms, but also physiologically full in terms of macro- and microelement composition. As a result of this project, “Bulak-M”, a line for the production of individual filters was launched and entered the retail market and was later exported to African countries.

It is notable that at this point in Kazakhstan no enterprise except L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University is carrying out a complete production cycle of track membranes. Thus, in the high technology sector, there is no alternative import substitution, and demands of the consumer market are replenished by the products of foreign companies.

Engineering profile laboratory for the development of membrane technology- based accelerator DC-60 has become a starting point for the development of innovative technologies focused on the result of high demand. The accelerator DC-60 is the first major research nuclear physics facility complex established in the CIS. In the process of its design the most advanced physics ideas and technical solutions were used to create one of the world’s best-in-class accelerators.

The research group consists of scientists, graduate and undergraduate students, and PhD students of the L.N.Gumilyov Eurasian National University.

Today, it is evident that the research activity of the complex is proof of the successful integration of education and science in solving the urgent problems of mankind. Due to the persistently increasing of the world’s population, this problem of drinking water has reached a global scale. Therefore, it is hard to deny that an interdisciplinary approach in this area is one of the most effective. Basically, this is exactly what the creation of the research complex was supposed to bring in the ecology studies and life science.

Jamilya Nurmanbetova

L.N.Gumilyov Eurasian

National University

Tel: +77172 709500 (31-309)

enu@enu.kz

www.enu.kz

A number one funding source for Russian basic science

November 11, 2015

Alexander Khlunov, Director of the Russian Science Foundation (RSF) gives an overview of how the Foundation supports research throughout the country

The Russian Science Foundation (RSF) was launched in November 2013; its operation is governed by a special federal law. Incorporated as a foundation, RSF proves a more flexible and effective funding tool in comparison with other institutions that finance science in Russia.

RSF’s mission is to identify the most promising scientific projects and highly efficient and result driven scientists, as well as to actively engage the country’s young researchers in science.

Its support of research relies on the principle of competition and RSF organises a variety of funding competitions to appeal to the following research areas:

Basic and applied research projects initiated by scientific departments, organisations and universities. Here, the Foundation reviews projects carried out by small teams set up for that purpose.
Support to research institutions and universities. In this area of operation, RSF seeks out programmes led by research institutions and geared towards ground-breaking research. Each programme must include a number of large-scale projects with a significant scientific, economic and social impact.
Establishment of up-to-date laboratories and departments in research institutions and universities. To make this happen, the Foundation reviews projects submitted by long-established or newly-created labs.
Promotion of international scientific and technological collaboration. RSF invites projects carried out by international teams working together to solve a particular problem.

RSF provides funding opportunities to projects across 9 branches of knowledge: mathematics, computer and systems sciences; physics and space science; chemistry and materials science; biology and life sciences; basic medical research; agricultural sciences; Earth sciences; humanities and social sciences; engineering sciences. In 2014, over a third of all projects supported by RSF involved basic and applied research in the socially relevant field of life sciences.

RSF is Russia’s largest foundation engaged in funding of basic and applied research. Its annual budget dynamics is shown in the chart below.

The Foundation is supervised by the supervisory board, chaired by the Assistant to the President of the Russian Federation Andrei Fursenko. The Board has 15 members, counting among themselves high-ranking scientists, members of the Academy of Science and officials, including the Minister of Science and Education and the Parliament Members.

Over 3000 Russian and 1000 foreign scientists sit on the Foundation’s various review boards.

The project evaluation process is shown in figure 2 and spans several review stages, including individual evaluations and discussions at sectional review boards. RSF keenly assesses the professional expertise of the project leaders. In order to submit a funding proposal, the team leader should provide a list of publications by the team members over a 5-year period preceding the application, and be able to confirm his or her relevant experience in research project execution and educational activities.

Following just 1 year of operation the Foundation’s achievements are already impressive:

RSF processed 110,000 funding applications from researchers in Russia and abroad.
1120 projects and programmes, 383 research institutions and universities from 51 regions in Russia were awarded funds by RSF
161 established labs engaged in the world-class research were supported by RSF.
38 new labs tackling the highly relevant problems with a societal and economic impact were established with RSF’s financial support.
16 development programmes of research institutions and universities received funds from RSF in order to boost their research staff’s career potential and conduct research and development according to the internationally recognised standards
16 000 scientists from Russia and abroad are engaged in the RSF-funded projects, most of whom are aged 39 or younger.

RSF is open to collaborations and works to extend its international cooperation. The Foundation engages over 200 foreign scientists, with more than 1000 experts from 46 counties participating in proposal reviews. In June, 2015 the Foundation oversaw the launch of the first joint competition together with DFG, the German Research Foundation.

Alexander Khlunov

Director

Russian Science Foundation

www.rscf.ru

The climate’s beating heart: Myths and maths

November 11, 2015

It stores heat, greenhouse gases and gives back at a measured rate. It is the World’s Ocean. As a player in our understanding and predicting the climate on Earth, it has had a supporting role to the atmosphere. But things have changed and it is moving to center-stage.

To a great extent, our understanding of the climate comes from massive mathematical models. There are only a few around the world that make the cut in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s list (see www.ipcc.ch ).

The idea of a full climate model, now often known as an Earth system model, is to create a mathematical replica of the Earth. We have only one Earth and so experimentation in the normal sense is impossible on the full climate system. But the computational output of a climate model can tell what is likely to happen under a particular scenario, for instance from a certain pattern of greenhouse gas emissions in the future.

The primary concern in climate change is the heating of the air that sustains life on Earth. We know the ocean is involved as heating leads to ice melting and that will lead to sea level rise. A myth is that the Ocean is a passive partner in this process. Its role in regulating the climate and moderating its change is enormous. But, in the twentieth century, climate models treated the ocean as a slab. If it is so important, how did they get away with such a crude representation? The answer lies in what the models were then used for: to test the prediction that our climate would be warming over the long term, upwards of fifty years. On such time scales, the variability of the ocean is not that important.

The climate community accepts that the case for climate change, as well as its causes in anthropogenic emissions, is now closed. The focus has shifted to prediction on shorter time-scales, driven by an interest in what will happen in five, ten, or twenty years. The thinking is that we are committed to considerable climate change already and we need to know how it will impact us in specific ways. On this time scale, the ocean will play a critical and active role.

It is a myth is that we know everything about the ocean from taking measurements. Of course, we know a lot more than we did in the past. This has been made possible through international efforts, such as the ARGO project ( www.argo.net ), and the availability of new autonomous vehicles taking measurements. These so-called gliders can be viewed as waterborne drones. But the ocean is vast and deep and what we observe is only a small fraction of the whole. So, how do we fill in all the missing information? The answer is again to use a mathematical model. We know how the ocean must work from its underlying physics. It all comes from classical mechanics and the mathematical equations were formulated over 200 years ago. Although new simplifications are coming along all the time, the basic set of equations used in the models have remained the same.

How does this help us fill in all the missing information? The picture to have here is of a massive three dimensional grid filling the ocean, both in breadth and depth. A full description of the ocean would consist of an assignment of physical variable values at each node of this grid. The physical variables will include: flow velocity, temperature, pressure, and density among others. The observations, coming from all these measuring instruments, will tell us the values of these quantities at some of the nodes. It is a myth that the remaining values can be found just by interpolation; there are simply too few nodes reporting and too many possibilities for how the interpolation might work. This is where the mathematical equations come in as they can tell us, through computation of the model, what constrains the physical variables across the entire grid. This process of merging data and model is known as data assimilation (DA).

It is hard to underestimate the importance of DA. While much work is devoted to big data, it is often not recognised that data comes from different sources and that fact influences how we can effectively tease out the most accurate information. DA works as follows: the model gives an estimate of the system state, which is in our case an assignment of physical variable values at each grid node, and is evolving in time in a way that is provided by solving the equations on a large computer. At observation times, two things should happen: first, the estimate of the system state needs to be adjusted in light of the observational data. Inevitably, the inaccuracies in the model will have driven the estimate off track and there would be little hope of a match with observations. Secondly, certain parameters set in the model will need adjustment in the light of observations coming from the real world. This is a way in which the model can learn from observations.

This all sounds simple enough: somebody just goes in and switches out a few values in the model. But to ensure physical consistency, we cannot perform this task arbitrarily and the whole process ends up being as complex as the underlying model itself. The issues are further exacerbated by the fact that the observations are often not of the physical variables of the model, but something related to them by a further model!

There are a plethora of mathematical challenges in data assimilation, particularly for the ocean. The hardest, and arguably most important, is simultaneously dealing with the inherent nonlinearity in the system and its high dimension. The high dimension comes from the fact that we have a number of physical variables at each grid node and the dimension is the product of the number of grid nodes, of which there will usually be a million or more, and the number of variables. We have good DA methods for nonlinear systems in low dimensions as well as methods that work in high dimensions, but these involve linear approximations that may be broken by an underlying nonlinear system. This issue of dealing with nonlinearity versus dimension is, in my mind, one of the greatest mathematical challenges of our day. We will not get the ocean correct until we perform data assimilation much better, and we cannot predict the climate on decadal time-scales until we get the ocean right.

Christopher Jones

Guthridge Distinguished Professor

RENCI and Department of Mathematics

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Director

Mathematics and Climate Research Network

Department of Mathematics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Tel: +1 919 923 3569

ckrtj@amath.unc.edu

www.mathclimate.org

The power of basic research

November 11, 2015

Rebecca Keiser, Head of the National Science Foundation’s Office of International Science & Engineering sheds light on why basic research is integral to the progress of science

The touchscreen on your cell phone. The bar code scanner in a grocery store check-out line. Doppler radar for weather prediction and GPS – these are all part of everyday life. None would be possible without basic scientific research.

And, they would not be possible without the National Science Foundation (NSF), the only U.S. government agency charged with supporting fundamental research in all fields of science and engineering. For more than 70 years, NSF has invested in pioneers. Our mission is to promote the progress of science; advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; and secure the national defense. Each year, we make about 11,000 awards, chosen after a rigorous review process from more than 50,000 proposals. NSF funding provides resources to individual scientists and engineers, students, teachers, institutions and centers, in all 50 states and U.S. territories.

We funded the early innovators of the Internet and supported robotics and synthetic biology when they were nascent fields. Through our science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education programs, we’ve also supported the next generation of scientists and engineers, students who have gone on to make astounding discoveries, win Nobel Prizes and even start a company called Google.

The beauty of basic research, the kind NSF funds, is that it can take us anywhere. Discoveries lead to new questions and new discoveries – and then usually more questions – and down the line society has an innovation like 3D printing (3 of the patented technologies used in this process were developed with NSF support). Even slightly odd research questions – like how are human populations distributed with respect to altitude? – can lead to insights used today by the food, semiconductor and biomedical industries.

Broadly speaking, investing in basic research expands knowledge. It teaches us more about the molecules that make up our bodies, the bodies that make up our universe, and everything in between. Yet basic research is also a major economic driver.

The spectrum auction policy used by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, for example, came out of NSF-funded economic research. This method for apportioning airwaves has brought in millions of dollars in government revenue. Early NSF investment in digital wireless technology laid the groundwork for the creation of Qualcomm, now a global company worth more than $100bn.

Today’s discoveries are often made in a global setting. More than ever before, research involves collaborators from around the world. Over the past 20 years, the percent of all scientific papers that are internationally co-authored has more than doubled, according to a July Plos One article. In fact, the more elite a scientist is, the more likely it is that they collaborate internationally.

NSF places a high value on the importance of international cooperation; it, too, has tangible benefits to both the U.S. and our international partners.

Our work with Japan and Chile, for example, has helped scientists comprehend earthquake causes and effects, ultimately helping countries better understand and plan for these hazards. A partnership between NSF and the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council collected a diverse group of researchers to tackle the issue of nitrogen fertiliser pollution. The ensuing research projects, still ongoing, could help develop crops of the future.

Working together ensures we leverage both scientific resources and scientific funding. With our international awards, NSF funds the U.S. researchers, while our partner agencies abroad fund their portion. This enables engineers from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, for example, to collaborate with leading roboticists in Korea on artificial muscle technology.

It gives a graduate student studying marine microbes the chance to spend a summer working in a Japanese lab specialising in that research. Our world is facing major challenges – a changing climate, growing pressures on resources like energy and water, emerging infectious diseases. Science and engineering will play a major role in tackling these challenges. Continued support of basic research – and continued collaborations between NSF and countries around the world – will ensure the health and prosperity of citizens around the world.

Rebecca Keiser

Head of the Office of International

Science & Engineering

U.S. National Science Foundation

info@nsf.gov

www.nsf.gov

The challenge of recruiting more women

November 11, 2015

Recently-installed IET President Naomi Climer has made it her mission to improve recruitment of women into engineering and technology roles, with oil and gas just one area under the spotlight

Name a famous engineer or technologist and most people would undoubtedly mention Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Isambard Kingdom Brunel or George Stephenson. Being optimistic, perhaps Ada Lovelace or Martha Lane Fox might spring to mind.

But most people would, I think, struggle to name many women who have influenced the history of engineering or technology – which makes it unsurprising that young girls are not drawn to an engineering and technology career.

Why does this matter? It matters because the world needs more engineers and technologists if our economies are to continue to grow, and also because diverse teams are more innovative. The truth is that a more representative workforce would be a good outcome for everyone – not just for women. A lack of diversity means we are missing out on ideas and innovation that come from different perspectives.

To achieve a more diverse workforce, we need more role models at every level to inspire young women by showing them what engineering and technology could look like for them. The world has changed a lot for women over the past 100 years. We earned the right to vote and have broken down boundaries in many professions – for example, 50 per cent of GPs are now women, so why are we not seeing more modern-day female champions emerging in engineering and technology?

Less than one in 10 engineers in the UK today are women. This is a result of a number of factors – from the careers, advice girls are given in schools, to schools not instilling girls with the confidence to opt for science and maths at A-level. But, it is also due to some employers needing to make their approach to recruitment and retention more female-friendly.

More female-friendly retention and recruitment practices are a vital part of solving the challenge. There are skilled women qualified to take up existing roles, but many are leaving the profession as soon as they graduate and I believe there are things that companies can do to attract and retain these qualified women. The whole of the engineering profession – including men – needs to pull together to help win this battle. There is no quick or simple fix. Instead, we need many small and subtle changes over time.

Promoting female role models

Our recent Skills Survey found that 57 per cent of engineering businesses don’t have gender diversity initiatives in place. This could be as simple as things like routinely reviewing recruitment language or marketing images for engineering jobs. There are great examples of companies who have consistently worked on their diversity and it does make a difference.

I would like to see companies over a certain size measure and publish their diversity figures including recruitment, retention, promotion and pay. This would help them to focus on the issue and also benchmark themselves against what other companies are achieving.

I would like to think that in 10 years’ time, many more people would be able to name a minimum of five women in engineering and technology. But this can only be achieved if we do more to create and promote these female role models and ambassadors. We need consistent efforts from parents, schools, and universities to encourage more girls to study Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects and aspire to a career in engineering. From industry, we need a concerted effort to attract and retain female engineers and technologists who can help address the UK’s shortage of engineers – and bring a new perspective and skill set to the world’s big engineering and technology challenges.

Naomi Climer

President

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

www.theiet.org

The Impact of engineering in biology and medicine: the biomedical engineer (BME)

November 11, 2015

In 2014, WHO stated: “trained and qualified biomedical engineering professionals are required to design, evaluate, regulate, maintain and manage medical devices, and train on their safe use in health systems around the world”¹.

In response, the European Economic and Social Committee stated: “Biomedical Engineering is not simply a subset of modern medicine. Modern medicine predominantly secures important advances through the use of the products of biomedical engineering”².

With this document as a start, two Euro-Parliamentarian Members, Dr Lara Comi and Dr Nicola Caputo, tabled two parliamentary questions asking why, different to the USA, the Horizon 2020 vision does not have a dedicated space for BME and why BME is not listed among the professions that the European Commission officially recognises. The European Commission answered that biomedical engineering is crucial in addressing many of the challenges found in the programme. So, what is happening? Why all this interest around the field of BME over the last few months? The answer is not easy to arrive at, but we can attempt it. BME represents one of those cases in which Academic research is perfectly aligned to manufacturing visions and missions, and both are supporting healthcare innovations that are directly impacting the wellbeing of European Citizens and increasing National healthcare systems and services cost-effectiveness. This chain is working so well that WHO is also benefiting from this. For instance, the initiatives that have seen the International Federation of Medical and BME, IFMBE, which is the world’s most important scientific society for BME and also an ONG officially recognised by the UN, supporting WHO on specific projects aiming to build capacities in low-income countries or to promote innovation making more affordable medical devices, are countless.

However, let us take a step back in order to understand better the context. BME is a key sector for European competitiveness. It presents a €100 billion-market size. In Europe, 20,000 companies work in this sector. This equates to 575,000 jobs and in terms of innovation, this is the first sector in patent applications – 10,412 – in 2012. Those numbers are growing very fast and the BME sector is becoming of strategic interest to Europe and other developed countries. For instance, the CNN reported in 2014 that BME was the first job in the USA for impact, growth and future prospects3. On the other hand, 90% of companies producing medical devices are SMEs and the product lifecycle is very short (18 months circa) making the time from research to the assessment to the adoption very short in comparison to other healthcare technologies (i.e. drugs). This is creating new challenges for the European Union that require a strong synergy between all the stakeholders and a proactive reaction from each actor.

What are the challenges for BME? The fact that the lifecycle of its main products, medical devices, is so short is one of the most significant challenges. Apart from inventing the future, BMEs are also called to invent how to sell it, proposing new business models that make sustainable the cycle of innovation and marketing, especially in the field of ICT for healthcare. Another huge challenge, very specific to BME, is that we do design technologies that are required, assessed, acquired and utilised by people other than engineers. If you design aircraft, you will most probably follow the specifications given by an engineer and your innovations will be assessed, acquired and even piloted by someone with the same background as yours. This means that they have been educated using the same language as the one you have been educated to, and most probably they will use this language to give you their specifications. If you work in medicine or biology, you will face that even the specification and the commissioning of new system requisites may require outstanding empathy, apart from a solid scientific basis and experience. Additionally, if you are a BME, you will mainly work in multi-disciplinary teams. You may work one day with a cardiologist and the day after with a neurologist, and you will need to understand as much as them about a cardiac cycle, Krebs cycle and mirror neurons, in order to understand deeply where your innovation can maximise your impact.

However, it does not matter how many years you have spent alternating books of physiology with those of electronics and computer science, at this moment the only opportunity you have, if you are trying to apply for a grant, is to select “other engineering” when you have to describe your field. From the Academic perspective, a BME’s community is continuously monitoring the evolutions of the relevant markets. For instance, two European Projects in the past years contributed to the harmonization of BME curricula in Europe: Biomedea and INTERREG CRH-BME.

In answer to these challenges, and considering the results of those projects, the Warwick Engineering in Biomedicine (WEB) group at the School of Engineering, the University of Warwick, have launched a new MSc programme in Biomedical Engineering. This one year programme takes into account the interdisciplinarity of the field and provides students with targeted modules addressing the needs of industry, healthcare providers and Academia. It covers classic topics of BME (i.e. biomedical signal processing, imaging, biological system dynamic modelling, biomechanics, tissue engineering, clinical engineering and health technologies design, system medicine) but also topics that are not traditionally delivered as part of BME degrees such as health technology assessment, procurement and management. This is important as BMEs graduating at Warwick have a concrete feeling of the complexity of the BME field and are never naïve to the challenges that an innovation has to face to move from the lab to the market. The design of this innovative Masters degree has been possible as WEB brings together the research expertise of more than 20 biomedical engineering academics and researchers working in very different areas of BME and coming from very different professional experiences, not to mention Nations and continents. In fact, walking in the corridors of the School of Engineering, and particularly in the new building dedicated to WEB, students can engage with key figures within the main scientific international organisations on BME in UK, Europe and Worldwide, which practice an open door policy. This includes the IEEE EMBS; the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE); and the European Alliance for Medical and Biological Engineering and Sciences (EAMBES).

Prof Christopher James, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, IEEE EMBS ADCOM (Europe Representative), IEEE EMBS UKRI Chair, IEEE Spokesperson in Europe for Healthcare Technology, Director of Warwick Engineering in Biomedicine. Dr Leandro Pecchia, Assistant Prof of Biomedical Engineering, Chairman of the Health Technology Assessment Division of the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE), Chairman of the Public Affairs Working Group of the European Alliance for Medical and Biological Engineering and Sciences (EAMBES).

1 WHO web site, last access 26th of October 2015,http://www.who.int/medical_devices/support/en/

2 EUR-LEX, 2015/C 291/07: EUR-LEX, 2015/C 291/07, “Opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee on Promoting the European single market combining biomedical engineering with the medical and care services industry”, Rapporteur: Edgardo Maria IOZIA, Co-rapporteur: Dirk JARRÉ

3 CNN Money, last access 27th of October 2015, http://money.cnn.com/pf/best-jobs/2013/snapshots/1.html

Christopher James

Director, WEB

Leandro Pecchia

Lead, Applied Biomedical Signal Processing and Intelligent eHealth Lab

Warwick Engineering in Biomedicine (WEB)

School of Engineering, University of Warwick

Tel: +44 (0)24 7652 8193

c.james@warwick.ac.uk

l.pecchia@warwick.ac.uk

www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/eng/research/biomedical

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