Sand in the wheels, or oiling the wheels, of international finance? : New Labour's appeal to a 'new Bretton Woods'

Tony Blair’s political instinct typically is to associate himself only with the future. As such, his explicit appeal to ‘the past’ in his references to New Labour’s desire to establish a “new Bretton Woods” is sufficient in itself to arouse some degree of analytical curiosity (see Blair 1998a). The fact that this appeal was made specifically in relation to Bretton Woods is even more interesting. The resonant image of the international economic context established by the original Bretton Woods agreements invokes a style and content of policy-making which Tony Blair typically dismisses as neither economically nor politically consistent with his preferred vision of the future (see Blair 2000c, 2001b)

Investigation of Complex Impedance and Modulus Properties of Nd Doped 0.5BiFeO3-0.5PbTiO3 Multiferroic Composites

0.5BiNdxFe1-xO3-0.5PbTiO3 (x=0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20) composites were successfully synthesized by a solid state reaction technique. At room temperature X-ray diffraction shows tetragonal structure for all concentrations of Nd doped 0.5BiFeO3-0.5PbTiO3 composites. The nature of Nyquist plot confirms the presence of bulk effects only for all compositions of Nd-doped 0.5BiFeO3-0.5PbTiO3 composites. The bulk resistance is found to decreases with the increasing in temperature as well as Nd concentration and exhibits a typical negative temperature coefficient of resistance (NTCR) behavior. Both the complex impedance and modulus studies have suggested the presence of non-Debye type of relaxation in the materials. Conductivity spectra reveal the presence of hopping mechanism in the electrical transport process of the materials. The activation energy of the composite increases with increasing Nd concentration and were found to be 0.28, 0.27, 0.31 and 0.32eV for x=0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20 respectively at 200-275 oC for conduction process.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables, 34 Referenc

Determining p-values for Systems Cointegration Tests With a Prior Adjustment for Deterministic Terms

In this paper I present a procedure to approximate the asymptotic distributions of systems cointegration tests with a prior adjustment for deterministic terms suggested by Lütkepohl, Saikkonen & Trenkler (2004), Saikkonen & Lütkepohl (2000a, 2000b, 2000c), and Saikkonen & Luukkonen (1997). The asymptotic distributions are approximated by the Gamma distribution and the parameters necessary to fit the Gamma distributions are obtained from response surfaces which I describe in this paper. The approximation can be easily used to derive arbitrary p-values or percentiles. --p-values,systems cointegration tests,response surface

Pengaruh Temperatur Hydrothermal terhadap Performa Elektrokimia Lifepo4 sebagai Katoda Baterai Ion Lithium Type Aqueous Elektrolit

Katoda yang biasa digunakan produsen baterai lithium saat ini adalah LiCoO2. Dimana LiCoO2 memilki beberapa kekurangan beracun, tidak stabil, dan harganya mahal. Bahan katoda yang sangat menjanjikan adalah lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) untuk bisa menggantikan LiCoO2 .Dalam proses sintesis katoda LiFePO4 pada penelitian ini menggunakan metode hydrothermal dengan variasi temperatur 1500C,1750C dan 2000C selama 12 jam untuk waktu holdingnya. Dari hasil pengujian XRD menunjukkan terbentuknya fase LiFePO4 pada semua sampel, namun masih ditemukan zat pengotor. Untuk hasil uji SEM, serbuk LiFePO4 memiliki bentuk bulat tidak beraturan dan terjadi aglomerasi. Serbuk LiFePO4 dengan variasi temperatur 2000C memiliki performance yang paling baik dengan nilai kapasitas sebesar 109.32 mA/g hal ini karena dari hasil CV menunjukkan kinetik tranfer ion Lithium yang baik akibat distribusi ukuran partikel yang merata dan juga tingkat kristanilitas yang tinggi

Photometric Confirmation of MACHO Large Magellanic Cloud Microlensing Events

We present previously unpublished photometry of three Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) microlensing events and show that the new photometry confirms the microlensing interpretation of these events. These events were discovered by the MACHO Project alert system and were also recovered by the analysis of the 5.7 year MACHO data set. This new photometry provides a substantial increase in the signal-to-noise ratio over the previously published photometry and in all three cases, the gravitational microlensing interpretation of these events is strengthened. The new data consist of MACHO-Global Microlensing Alert Network (GMAN) follow-up images from the CTIO 0.9 telescope plus difference imaging photometry of the original MACHO data from the 1.3m "Great Melbourne" telescope at Mt. Stromlo. We also combine microlensing light curve fitting with photometry from high resolution HST images of the source stars to provide further confirmation of these events and to show that the microlensing interpretation of event MACHO-LMC-23 is questionable. Finally, we compare our results with the analysis of Belokurov, Evans & Le Du who have attempted to classify candidate microlensing events with a neural network method, and we find that their results are contradicted by the new data and more powerful light curve fitting analysis for each of the four events considered in this paper. The failure of the Belokurov, Evans & Le Du method is likely to be due to their use of a set of insensitive statistics to feed their neural networks.Comment: 29 pages with 8 included postscript figures, accepted by the Astrophysical Journa

There is no such thing as an audit society

[First Paragraph] Any discussion of Power’s Audit Society paper of 1994 has to start by acknowledging that it has enjoyed an extraordinary degree of success for an academic paper, let alone for an academic paper about audit. His terms audit society and audit explosion have gained very wide currency within the social sciences and on the wider stages of quality journalism and serious-minded websites. Some of this is, admittedly, due to Power’s own copious output on the topic (Power, 1994a,1994b, 1997, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2000d, 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2005a, 2005b), some to exegeses of it (see for instance Bowerman et al 2000, Humphrey and Owen 2000 and Courville, Parker, and Watchirs 2003)) but a great deal to admirers from all sorts of disciplines

Friend or Foe: Towards a Critical Assessment of Direct Payments

Direct payments enable individuals to purchase their own care rather than have directly provided services. This article unpacks the complexities involved in the implementation of direct payments by addressing the need to reconcile the strong evidence of their benefits with emerging concerns about the wider consequences of their implementation. One practice that highlights the conflicts at the heart of direct payments is the employment of personal assistants. While directly employing personal assistants offers maximum benefit for recipients, it also produces the strongest concerns. Therefore, an understanding of the context of direct payments, specifically the practice of employing personal assistants, is used to explore these complexities in greater depth. The discussion concludes by arguing for a more critical awareness of the wider context in which direct payments are being developed in order to understand how this context can open up or limit opportunities for greater self-determination. It suggests a number of factors that need to be addressed to ensure that direct payments continue to be a progressive strategy. These include reconciling conflicting ideologies such as those advocating individual choice and/or collective provision; the need for political action to secure adequate resources; and the development of alternative strategies such as cooperatives to address the collective needs of direct payment recipients and workers

Optical afterglows of gamma-ray bursts: a bimodal distribution?"

The luminosities of the optical afterglows of Gamma Ray Bursts, 12 hours (rest frame time) after the trigger, show a surprising clustering, with a minority of events being at a significant smaller luminosity. If real, this dichotomy would be a crucial clue to understand the nature of optically dark afterglows, i.e. bursts that are detected in the X-ray band, but not in the optical. We investigate this issue by studying bursts of the pre-Swift era, both detected and undetected in the optical. The limiting magnitudes of the undetected ones are used to construct the probability that a generic bursts is observed down to a given magnitude limit. Then, by simulating a large number of bursts with pre-assigned characteristics, we can compare the properties of the observed optical luminosity distribution with the simulated one. Our results suggest that the hints of bimodality present in the observed distribution reflects a real bimodality: either the optical luminosity distributions of bursts is intrinsically bimodal, or there exists a population of bursts with a quite significant grey absorption, i.e. wavelength independent extinction. This population of intrinsically weak or grey-absorbed events can be associated to dark bursts.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA