Growth, profits and technological choice: The case of the Lancashire cotton textile industry

Using Lancashire textile industry company case studies and financial records, mainly from the period just before the First World War, the processes of growth and decline are re-examined. These are considered by reference to the nature of Lancashire entrepreneurship and the impact on technological choice. Capital accumulation, associated wealth distributions and the character of Lancashire business organisation were sybiotically linked to the success of the industry before 1914. However, the legacy of that accumulation in later decades, chronic overcapacity, formed a barrier to reconstruction and enhanced the preciptious decline of a once great industry

Does Community and Environmental Responsibility Affect Firm Risk? Evidence from UK Panel Data 1994-2006

The question of how an individual firm’s environmental performance impacts its firm risk has not been examined in any empirical UK research. Does a company that strives to attain good environmental performance decreases its market risk or is environmental performance just a disadvantageous cost that increases such risk levels for these firms? Answers to this question have important implications for the management of companies and the investment decisions of individuals and institutions. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between corporate environmental performance and firm risk in the British context. Using the largest dataset so far assembled, with Community and Environmental Responsibility (CER) rankings for all rated UK companies between 1994 and 2006, we show that a company’s environmental performance is inversely related to its systematic financial risk. However, an increase of 1.0 in the CER score is associated with only a 0.02 reduction in firm’s risk and cost of capital

Proposal for experimental test of the time-dependent Wigner inequalities for neutral pseudoscalar meson systems

Recently a new class of time-dependent Bell inequalities in Wigner form was introduced. The structure of the inequalities allows experimental studies of quantum and open quantum systems in external fields. In this paper we study the properties of the time dependent Wigner inequalities using the time evolution of neutral pseudoscalar mesons. It is shown that it is always possible to find a range of parameters to test for violation in an experimentally accessible area. The effect of the relaxation of the inequalities for large time scales is demonstrated.Comment: Published in Phys. Rev.

Trending now: feminism, sexism, misogyny and postfeminism in British journalism

In the last few years feminism has gained spectacular visibility across media and popular culture. As Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) observes, “everywhere you turn, there is an expression of feminism – on a T-shirt, in a movie, in the lyrics of a pop song, in an inspirational instagram post, in an acceptance speech”. News media have been pivotal to this, not only reporting on feminist campaigns such as slutwalk or metoo, or on feminist demonstrations like the Women’s marches, but also centering feminism as a topic of discussion – whether substantively in terms of equal pay or sexual violence, or more broadly as something to be routinely asked of politicians, actresses or pop stars. “The new DO: Calling yourself a feminist” announced Glamour magazine in the US, cementing a wider impression that no interview of a high-profile woman is complete without its subject being asked about their views of or identification with feminism

Statistical mechanics of an ideal Bose gas in a confined geometry

We study the behaviour of an ideal non-relativistic Bose gas in a three-dimensional space where one of the dimensions is compactified to form a circle. In this case there is no phase transition like that for the case of an infinite volume, nevertheless Bose-Einstein condensation signified by a sudden buildup of particles in the ground state can occur. We use the grand canonical ensemble to study this problem. In particular, the specific heat is evaluated numerically, as well as analytically in certain limits. We show analytically how the familiar result for the specific heat is recovered as we let the size of the circle become large so that the infinite volume limit is approached. We also examine in detail the behaviour of the chemical potential and establish the precise manner in which it approaches zero as the volume becomes large.Comment: 13 pages, 2 eps figures, revtex

Bose-Einstein condensation as symmetry breaking in compact curved spacetimes

We examine Bose-Einstein condensation as a form of symmetry breaking in the specific model of the Einstein static universe. We show that symmetry breaking never occursin the sense that the chemical potential $\mu$ never reaches its critical value.This leads us to some statements about spaces of finite volume in general. In an appendix we clarify the relationship between the standard statistical mechanical approaches and the field theory method using zeta functions.Comment: Revtex, 25 pages, 3 figures, uses EPSF.sty. To be published in Phys. Rev.

Isolation and characterization of Vibrio parahaemolyticus from seafoods along the southwest coast of India

The work was aimed to study the microbial quality of the seafood sold in the domestic markets and incidence of Vibrio parahaemolyticus. Samples comprising of shellfish, finfish, and cephalopodswere collected fromvarious fish markets in and around Cochin. Presumed V. parahaemolyticus were identified by standard biochemical tests, and further confirmed by polymerase chain reaction targeting species-specific tl gene (450 bp)

Quantum gravitational contributions to quantum electrodynamics

Quantum electrodynamics describes the interactions of electrons and photons. Electric charge (the gauge coupling constant) is energy dependent, and there is a previous claim that charge is affected by gravity (described by general relativity) with the implication that the charge is reduced at high energies. But that claim has been very controversial with the situation inconclusive. Here I report an analysis (free from earlier controversies) demonstrating that that quantum gravity corrections to quantum electrodynamics have a quadratic energy dependence that result in the reduction of the electric charge at high energies, a result known as asymptotic freedom.Comment: To be published in Nature. 19 pages LaTeX, no figure