Empirical examinations of the "social amplification of risk" framework are rare, partly because of the difficulties in predicting when conditions likely to result in amplification effects will occur. This means that it is difficult to examine changes in risk perception that are contemporaneous with increases and/or decreases in social or media discussion of the risks associated with a particular risk event. However, the collection of attitude data before, during, and after the increased reporting of the risks of genetically modified food in the United Kingdom (spring 1999) has demonstrated that people's risk perceptions do increase and decrease in line with what might be expected upon examination of the amplification and attenuation mechanisms integral to the framework. Perceptions of benefit, however, appeared to be permanently depressed by negative reporting about genetically modified food. Trust in regulatory institutions with responsibility for protecting the public was not affected. It was concluded that the social amplification of risk framework is a useful framework for beginning to explain the potential impact on risk perceptions of a risk event, particularly if that risk event is presented to the public as a new hazard occurring in a crisis context.

Payment for performance is driving major changes in the roles and organization of English primary health care teams. Non-incentivized activities and patients' concerns may receive less clinical attention. Practitioners would benefit from improved dissemination of the evidence justifying the inclusion of new performance indicators in the QOF.

The concept of “public participation” is currently one of great interest to researchers and policy makers. In response to a perceived need for greater public involvement in decision making and policy formation processes on the part of both policymakers and the general public, a variety of novel mechanisms have been developed, such as the consensus conference and citizens jury, to complement traditional mechanisms, such as the public meeting. However, the relative effectiveness of the various mechanisms is unclear, as efforts at evaluation have been sparse. In this article, the authors describe an evaluation of a two-day “deliberative conference” on the topic of radiation dose assessment. The authors detail the evaluation framework that they adopt and describe the instruments that they have developed to determine the attainment (or otherwise) of the evaluationcriteria stipulated in that framework. They then describe the participation exercise that they have evaluated. Finally, they apply the instruments to assess the effectiveness of the exercise, and discuss the results and their implications for the conduct of evaluations and the use of this particular participation mechanism.

The Antarctic Peninsula region has exprienced a long-term warming trend over the twentieth century, with the 1971-90 mean at Faraday being 1.9°C warmer than the mean over 1903-41 based on expedition reports. For the period prior to 1900, there is conflicting evidence from different data sources. An initial interpretation of isotopic data from ice cores suggests that the nineteenth century was warmer than the twentieth century. In contrast, snow accumulation rate data for the nineteenth century from the same ice cores suggest lower temperatures. Here we investigate these facts by studying the links between atmospheric temperature over the Antarctic Peninsula, circulation parameters and isotopic data over the period of instrumental records. We show that the relationships between these variables are complex and highly spatially variable. In particular, the correlations between temperature and d 18O and dD are generally of the order r = 0.5 or less on timescales of one to five years. Conflicts between evidence from accumulation rate and isotopic data appear to reflect the influence of source-region effects on the isotope records. To unravel the complex isotopic records available for the Peninsula region better; additional cores must be analysed for both d 18O and 8D at the same site