Advertising and product launch strategies in the light of tobacco advertising legislation.

This short paper aims to increase understanding of tobacco companies’ advertising strategies. Time series data and intervention analysis methods are used to investigate whether tougher tobacco advertising legislation, and the threat of such legislation, result in firms significantly changing their advertising activities in the period preceding the enactment of legislation. The paper considers legislation introduced by both the UK Government and the EC in recent years. Results suggest that there is some significant short-term increase in advertising behaviour, coinciding with product launches that firms instigate prior to legislation changes. However, firms do not generally maintain higher advertising expenditures than previously throughout the period between legislation being introduced and coming into force

Symposium on regulation and competition in utility industries: introduction

This collection of papers examines regulation and competition issues in the UK water, gas and electricity industries. These are three vitally important network industries that have undergone significant structural change over the last 15 years and where efforts to extend competition continue in those parts of the industries not deemed to be naturally monopolistic. This is a timely collection, given recent price reviews of the electricity distribution and water companies and the current Transco review. Further, current regulatory issues, such as implementation of the 2000 Utilities Act and the possible structural changes to water companies as some attempt to move away from the equity model, have far-reaching implications. A significant length of time has elapsed since the burst of privatisation activity in the 1980s, and most companies have been subject to two price reviews. As such, it is an appropriate time to reflect on the UK experience from which lessons are being drawn as regulatory regimes are designed and implemented around the world.

Leadership of Integrated Health and Social Care Services

This research explores the lived experience of those individuals charged with leading the integration of health and social care services in Scotland. The research was primarily qualitative in nature – comprising of a qualitative survey of front-line managers of integrated health and social care services from a single partnership area. The survey explored the management and leadership tasks and activities expected of those leading health and social care teams. The research uncovers a sense that these new leadership positions are both overwhelming in the scope of tasks required and lack clarity in how these tasks should be undertaken. This highlights a need for coordinated support and training for staff who are charged with leading integrated health and social care teams. Three key recommendations have been drawn from the findings of this research: more support should be provided to managers working within these complex integrated systems; a joint training programme should be developed for managers across both partnering organisations and finally relevant policies and procedures should be compiled into one reference resource for managers of integrated services

Parallels in Plight: Finding Commonalities in African American and Latino Experiences in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast region on August 29, 2005 and caused extensive damage throughout the affected areas. In New Orleans, flooding due to levee breaches compounded the damage and created a need for a sizable labor force to clean up and rebuild the city. Non-local Latinos overwhelmingly responded to this call and began to arrive in New Orleans in the weeks after the storm. This influx sparked new tensions between New Orleans\u27 traditional low-income African American community and the new group of low-income and often undocumented Latinos. Despite these tensions, both African Americans and Latinos faced considerable and similar injustices in post-Katrina New Orleans. These injustices did not affect Latinos and African Americans in identical ways, but both constitute serious threats to the abilities of the two minority communities to succeed in post-Katrina New Orleans. This work attempts to document three specific scenarios of injustice and disadvantage—labor, housing, and criminal justice that constitute some of the issues most pressing to the Latino and African American communities in post-Katrina New Orleans

Relationships between tributary catchments, valley-bottom width, debris-fan area, and mainstem gradient on the Colorado Plateau: A case study in Desolation and Gray Canyons on the Green River

The alluvial forms of the rivers that drain the Colorado Plateau are a product of the water and sediment load that tributaries deliver to the trunk streams. Where the Green and Colorado Rivers cross structural barriers, narrow canyons have been incised. In the steep terrain adjacent to many of these canyons debris flows occur in the catchment basins of tributaries and deliver coarse sediment to the mainstem river corridor. Over time, debris flow deposits have aggraded in trunk stream valleys and created landforms known as debris fans. The sizes of these debris fans are related to the accommodation space available for fan formation. Lithologic variation in the layer-cake stratigraphy of the Colorado Plateau has led to varying valley widths. Tributary catchment, debris fan, depositional site, and mainstem river characteristics are examined over the 156-kilometer reach of the Green River through Desolation and Gray Canyons. Desolation and Gray Canyons provide some of the widest valley widths and resultant debris fan areas on the Colorado Plateau