Mark Deakin

Pancreatic cancer hENT1 expression and survival from gemcitabine in patients from the ESPAC-3 trial

BACKGROUND Human equilibrative nucleoside transporter 1 (hENT1) levels in pancreatic adenocarcinoma may predict survival in patients who receive adjuvant gemcitabine after resection. METHODS Microarrays from 434 patients randomized to chemotherapy in the ESPAC-3 trial (plus controls from ESPAC-1/3) were stained with the 10D7G2 anti-hENT1 antibody. Patients were classified as having high hENT1 expression if the mean H score for their cores was above the overall median H score (48). High and low hENT1-expressing groups were compared using Kaplan-Meier curves, log-rank tests, and Cox proportional hazards models. All statistical tests were two-sided. RESULTS Three hundred eighty patients (87.6%) and 1808 cores were suitable and included in the final analysis. Median overall survival for gemcitabine-treated patients (n = 176) was 23.4 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 18.3 to 26.0) months vs 23.5 (95% CI = 19.8 to 27.3) months for 176 patients treated with 5-fluorouracil/folinic acid (χ(2) 1=0.24; P = .62). Median survival for patients treated with gemcitabine was 17.1 (95% CI = 14.3 to 23.8) months for those with low hENT1 expression vs 26.2 (95% CI = 21.2 to 31.4) months for those with high hENT1 expression (χ(2)₁= 9.87; P = .002). For the 5-fluorouracil group, median survival was 25.6 (95% CI = 20.1 to 27.9) and 21.9 (95% CI = 16.0 to 28.3) months for those with low and high hENT1 expression, respectively (χ(2)₁ = 0.83; P = .36). hENT1 levels were not predictive of survival for the 28 patients of the observation group (χ(2)₁ = 0.37; P = .54). Multivariable analysis confirmed hENT1 expression as a predictive marker in gemcitabine-treated (Wald χ(2) = 9.16; P = .003) but not 5-fluorouracil-treated (Wald χ(2) = 1.22; P = .27) patients. CONCLUSIONS Subject to prospective validation, gemcitabine should not be used for patients with low tumor hENT1 expression.

The triple-helix model of smart cities: a neo-evolutionary perspective

This paper sets out to demonstrate how the triple-helix model enables us to study the knowledge base of an urban economy in terms of its civil societys support for the evolution of the city as a key component of an innovation system. It argues that cities can be considered as densities in networks among three relevant dynamics: the intellectual capital of universities, the wealth creation of industries, and the democratic government of civil society. It goes on to suggest that these interactions generate dynamic spaces within cities where knowledge can be exploited to bootstrap the technology of regional innovation systems. These dynamic spaces can best be understood as spaces of ubiquitous information and communication technologies (ICT) where knowledge is key to regional innovation systems, creating the notion of “smart cities.”

Urban Regeneration and Sustainable Communities: The Role of Networks, Innovation, and Creativity in Building Successful Partnerships

The following examination goes against the current trend in policy on urban regeneration partnerships by relaxing the assumption that they represent virtuous circles of mutually reinforcing actions that are good in their own right. It does this by offering a critique of the market-led urban regeneration initiatives and suggesting that they be replaced by a plan-led alternative. This would entail strategic actions being based on a sufficiently “place-based” knowledge of what communities need to be sustainable. Urban regeneration now uses partnerships, with cities, regional development agencies, and businesses seeking to leverage resources from the private sector and channel money, capital, and professional expertise into the development of villages and neighborhoods as part of the search for sustainable communities. By focusing on the social capital of collaborative platforms and consensus building, it has become possible to recognize the critical role networks, innovation, and creative partnerships play in representing places that are not only sites of ecological integrity, equity, and democratic renewal, but that are also locations where socially inclusive decision making can institutionalize the civic values required for the regeneration of urban villages and neighborhoods as self-sustaining communities.

Citizens' expectations of information cities: implications for urban planning and design.

The European Union has made the development of a vibrant knowledge-based economy a key policy objective, and increasingly national and local governments worldwide are seeking to harness information and communication technologies to provide government services more effectively and for the benefit of their citizenry. The paper reports on the first phase of the ongoing European Union IntelCities integrated project that seeks to integrate electronic governance of cities and urban planning. The background to the project in terms of the e-Europe Action Plan is explored and the outcome of surveys of user needs and requirements carried out in the cities of Marseilles (France), Siena and Rome (Italy), Helsinki (Finland), Leicester and Manchester (UK), and Dresden and Berlin (Germany) are explained. The outcomes identify a range of implications for digital or electronic planning in terms of increasing the efficiency in e-urban planning and the need to develop digital methodologies for widening public participation. Thus, the importance of e-skills development in new forms of e-planning for planners, developers and citizens is highlighted and shown to be important for achieving a wider e-enabled sustainable knowledge society.

Intelligent cities as smart providers: CoPs as organizations for developing integrated models of eGovernment Services

This paper develops the notion of the intelligent city as the smart provider of electronically enhanced services. It identifies how this growing interest in intelligent cities has led universities to exploe the opportunities “communities of practice” (CoPs) offer industry to become smart providers of online services. With this aim, it reports on the efforts a number of leading European cities have recently made to be intelligent in exploiting the opportunities CoPs offer industry to become smart providers. That is, smart in developing online presence via integrated models of eGovernment services, which are in turn capable of meeting the learning needs, knowledge requirements and capacity-building commitments of the socially inclusive and participatory urban regeneration programs they promote.

Bequest: The framework and directory of assessment methods

This paper has outlined the areas of the Environment and Climate Programme (Economic and Social Aspects of Human Settlement) the BEQUEST project addresses. It has also examined the framework for analysis the project sets out for a common understanding of SUD and the assessment methods currently made use of by planners, architects, engineers and surveyors to build environmental capacity. The paper has done this by:•fore-grounding the question of urban development and representing the process of urbanisation as a life cycle of inter-related activities;•agreeing the sustainable development issues underlying the urban process;•identifying the environmental, economic and social structure, spatial level and time scales of sustainable urban development.

The First Two Decades of Smart-City Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

ABSTRACT This paper reports on the first two decades of research on smart cities by conducting a bibliometric analysis of the literature published between 1992 and 2012. The analysis shows that smart-city research is fragmented and lacks cohesion, and its growth follows two main development paths. The first one is based on the peer-reviewed publications produced by European universities, which support a holistic perspective on smart cities. The second path, instead, stands on the gray literature produced by the American business community and relates to a techno-centric understanding of the subject. Divided along such paths, the future development of this new and promising field of research risks being undermined. For while the bibliometric analysis indicates that smart cities are emerging as a fast-growing topic of scientific enquiry, much of the knowledge that is generated about them is singularly technological in nature. In that sense, lacking the social intelligence, cultural artifacts, and environmental attributes, which are needed for the ICT-related urban innovation that such research champions.

A Community-Based Approach to Sustainable Urban Regeneration

THIS paper outlines the research that has been carried out to understand Large Urban Distressed Areas (LUDAs) and the community-based approach to sustainable urban regeneration that cities are developing to meet the challenges LUDAs pose.1 After exposing the limits of current government policy towards LUDAs and offering a critique of the property-market based approaches underlying them, the paper goes on to highlight the key roles community participation and futures workshops2 can play in sustaining their regeneration and bringing about improvements in the quality of life.

The embedded intelligence of smart cities

This article offers an extensive review of Mitchells thesis on the transition from the city of bits to e-topia and finds it wanting. It suggests that the problems encountered with the thesis lie with the lack of substantive insight it offers into the embedded intelligence of smart cities. Although problematic in itself, the article also suggests that if the difficulties experienced were only methodological they might perhaps be manageable, but the problem is that they run deeper than this and relate to more substantive issues that surround the trajectory of the thesis. This is a critical insight of some significance because if the trajectory of e-topia is not in the direction of either the embedded intelligence of smart cities, or the information and communication technologies of digitally inclusive regeneration platforms, then the question arises as to whether the thesis can be a progressive force for change, or merely a way of reproducing the status quo.

Valuation, appraisal, discounting, obsolescence and depreciation

Previous editions of this Journal have drawn attention to the critical role valuation plays in life cycle analysis and environmental impact assessment (see for exampleVolkwkin andKlöpffer |1|). In particular, the critical role of valuation has heen highlighed in a number of discussions on ‘valuation step’ within life cycle costing, ‘hedonic and contingency’ assessments of environmental impact and both the utility and welfare of ‘pathway’ analysis/assessment (Krkwitt, Mayerhofer, Trukenmüller andFriedrich, 1998;Powell, Pearce andCraighill, 1997;Volkwein, On in andKlöpffer, 1996 |2-4|). Focusing on the utility of market valuation, this paper examines the critique of discounting environmentalists have made in relation to property valuation, investment appraisal and the application of the principle in the income based net annual return model of land use time-horizons and the spatial configuration of building programmes-a criticism implict in ‘valuation step’, ‘hedonic, contingency’ and ‘pathway’ analysis/assessments. It examines the argument put forward regarding the link between the selection of a discount rate, the valuation of property, appraisal of investment and inter-generational downloading of costs associated with the use of land, repair, maintenance and refurbishment of buildings: the downloading of costs, seen by some, to have an adverse impact and work against the introduction of experimental designs aimed at energy saving, clean air environments.