The impact of the law on industrial disputes in the 1980s: report of a survey of public transport employers

This paper reports the results of one part of a research project which investigated the nature and extent of the impact of the labour legislation enacted between 1980 and 1990 on the conduct of the industrial relations and the processes by which this came about. Interviews were carried out with managers in three major public sector transport organisations. All three were subject to radical organisational change during the period under review and had quite extensive experience of dispute in this time. While they had made greater use of the law than employers in other sectors covered by the research project, there were mixed views on the results of this resort to the law. In general the law appeared to be a subsidiary part of, and influence on, the management of the process of change rather than an independent factor influencing management''s relations with trade unions and the workforce

Union Negotiators

It has been widely assumed that the labour legislation of the 1980s has been a major catalyst for change in British industrial relations. The nature and extent of the law's impact have usually been assumed and rarely been clearly articulated. This paper reports the results of part of a research project designed to investigate these issues and the processes by which any legal influences took effect. A survey of negotiations in twenty five trade unions was carried out by questionnaire. The responses showed that the law had become a more important factor in the conduct of disputes. Its influence on union negotiations had not, however, been entirely negative. The law on strike ballots stood out as the most important of the changes in the law made by the 1980s legislation and the use of ballots emerged as a feature of union strategy in negotiations. More often than not this produced positive results from a union perspective. Nevertheless overall a majority of negotiations saw the law as an important factor favouring employers in the bargaining process.

Detection of Mines in Acoustic Images using Higher Order Spectral Features

A new pattern-recognition algorithm detects approximately 90% of the mines hidden in the Coastal Systems Station Sonar0, 1, and 3 databases of cluttered acoustic images, with about 10% false alarms. Similar to other approaches, the algorithm presented here includes processing the images with an adaptive Wiener filter (the degree of smoothing depends on the signal strength in a local neighborhood) to remove noise without destroying the structural information in the mine shapes, followed by a two-dimensional FIR filter designed to suppress noise and clutter, while enhancing the target signature. A double peak pattern is produced as the FIR filter passes over mine highlight and shadow regions. Although the location, size, and orientation of this pattern within a region of the image can vary, features derived from higher order spectra (HOS) are invariant to translation, rotation, and scaling, while capturing the spatial correlations of mine-like objects. Classification accuracy is improved by combining features based on geometrical properties of the filter output with features based on HOS. The highest accuracy is obtained by fusing classification based on bispectral features with classification based on trispectral features

Imprints of deviations from the gravitational inverse-square law on the power spectrum of mass fluctuations

Deviations from the gravitational inverse-square law would imprint scale-dependent features on the power spectrum of mass density fluctuations. We model such deviations as a Yukawa-like contribution to the gravitational potential and discuss the growth function in a mixed dark matter model with adiabatic initial conditions. Evolution of perturbations is considered in general non-flat cosmological models with a cosmological constant, and an analytical approximation for the growth function is provided. The coupling between baryons and cold dark matter across recombination is negligibly affected by modified gravity physics if the proper cutoff length of the long-range Yukawa-like force is > 10 h^{-1} Mpc. Enhancement of gravity affects the subsequent evolution, boosting large-scale power in a way that resembles the effect of a lower matter density. This phenomenon is almost perfectly degenerate in power-spectrum shape with the effect of a background of massive neutrinos. Back-reaction on density growth from a modified cosmic expansion rate should however also affect the normalization of the power spectrum, with a shape distortion similar to the case of a non-modified background.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures; submitted to MNRA

Thos. E. French

About Professor Thomas E. French, head of the Department of Engineering Drawing

Henri Temianka Correspondence; (elgar)

This collection contains material pertaining to the life, career, and activities of Henri Temianka, violin virtuoso, conductor, music teacher, and author. Materials include correspondence, concert programs and flyers, music scores, photographs, and books.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/temianka_correspondence/3721/thumbnail.jp