No abstract

The fair trade movement claims that the products it provides are sourced 'justly' and that purchasing fair trade products brings economic benefits for the poor. Whilst it is clear that fair trade might bring some benefits to particular groups, whether it brings significant net benefits to the poor in general is questionable. Moreover, the claim that fair trade transactions are more 'just' cannot be substantiated. Customers also might be surprised to learn that the majority of the Fairtrade Foundation's net income is spent on promoting its own brand.

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In this paper we discuss methods of developing real estate indices, the availability of real estate data, the problems of using published real estate data and how real estate data can be used for stochastic investment modelling for actuarial purposes. In recent years there have been many developments in the collection, presentation and analysis of real estate data that have not found their way into the actuarial literature. We review those developments and suggest and develop ways in which raw real estate investment data can be used for actuarial purposes. We then review the Wilkie real estate stochastic investment model and use the research of real estate finance academics to inform a critique and development of that model. In developing the models, different data sets are used, including data from valuation-based and de-smoothed indices in order to find appropriate parameter estimates. The significance (or otherwise) of the parameter estimates is tested for each of the fitted models and the differences between the fitted models are examined. By reviewing research in the real estate finance field, making use of the latest research and developing original work, the main aim of this paper is to ensure that actuaries have the means to collect, understand and manipulate real estate data for performance measurement and investment modelling purposes.

Joubert syndrome (JBTS) is an incurable multisystem ciliopathy syndrome. The most commonly mutated gene in JBTS patients with a cerebello-retinal-renal phenotype is CEP290 (alias JBTS5 ). The encoded CEP290 protein localises to the proximal end of the primary cilium, in the transition zone, where it controls ciliary protein composition and signalling. We examined primary cilium structure and composition in fibroblast cells derived from homozygous and compound heterozygous JBTS5 patients with nonsense mutations in CEP290 and show that elongation of cilia, impaired ciliogenesis and ciliary composition defects are typical features in JBTS5 cells. Targeted skipping of the mutated exon c.5668 G > T using antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) therapy leads to restoration of CEP290 protein expression and functions at the transition zone in homozygous and compound heterozygous JBTS5 cells, allowing a rescue of both cilia morphology and ciliary composition. This study, by demonstrating that targeted exon skipping is able to rescue ciliary protein composition defects, provides functional evidence for the efficacy of this approach in the treatment of JBTS.