Between mediatisation and politicisation: The changing role and position of Whitehall press officers in the age of political spin

Despite widespread critiques of ‘political spin’, the way governments engage with the mass media has attracted relatively little empirical attention. There is a small but growing body of research into bureaucracies’ responses to mediatisation from within which have identified tensions between bureaucratic and party political values, but this has not included the United Kingdom. There are concerns that the traditional dividing line between government information and political propaganda has come under increasing pressure as a higher premium is placed on persuasion by both journalists and politicians battling for public attention in an increasingly competitive market. Within Whitehall, the arrival of Labour in 1997 after 18 years in opposition was a watershed for UK government communications, allowing the government to reconfigure its official information service in line with the party political imperative to deploy strategic communications as a defence against increasingly invasive media scrutiny. Public relations, in government as elsewhere, has grown in scale, scope and status, becoming institutionalised and normalised within state bureaucracies, but how has this affected the role, status and influence of the civil servants who conduct media management? Within the system of executive self-regulation of government publicity that is characteristic of Whitehall, government press officers must negotiate a difficult path between the need to inform citizens about the government’s programme, and demands by ministers to deploy privileged information to secure and maintain personal and party advantage in the struggle for power. Taking 1997 as a turning point, and through the voices of the actors who negotiate government news – mainly press officers, but also journalists and special advisers – this article examines the changing role and position of Whitehall press officers in what has become known as the age of political spin, finding that profound and lasting change in the rules of engagement has taken place and is continuing

Charitable funding and fundraising in schools

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:q94/12159 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Metabolism of levormeloxifene, a selective oestrogen receptor modulator, in the Sprague-Dawley rat, Cynomolgus monkey and postmenopausal woman

1. The metabolic fate of levormeloxifene in the Sprague-Dawley rat, Cynomolgus monkey and postmenopausal volunteer has been investigated. 2. Two doses of [14C]levormeloxifene, 0.7 and 50 mg/kg, were given to the male and female rat and monkey, and a single 20-mg dose to the postmenopausal volunteer. 3. The primary route of excretion in all three species was the faeces. Metabolism was similar in all three species, with demethylation forming the major metabolite in the rat and postmenopausal volunteer. One of the major metabolites in the monkey involved an oxidative ring opening of a pyrrole ring. 4. The main site of metabolism of levormeloxifene is the liver and the majority of the drug and its metabolites is excreted via the faecal route. Metabolic pathways appear to be similar in the three species studied

Study of Timing Yield Optimization and Rectilinear Polygon Generation Algorithm

With the decreasing of integrate circuit’s feature size, the process parameters of chips have serious variations. The process variations have severe influence on the timing analysis of integrate circuit. The precise modeling of process variations is the prerequisite of statistical timing analysis. Intra-die variation is one part of the process variation. It is one of the dominant factors affecting chip’s performance and behaves spatial correlation. With the decreasing of feature size, the spatial correlation of intra-die variation becomes more and more complicated. The traditional parametric approach fails to describe the corresponding correlation function correctly. Recent study found out that the spatial correlation of intra-die variation is different in different directions, which is called anisotropic. To improve the accuracy of the spatial correlation modeling of intra-die variation, this thesis presents a non-parametric approach for estimation, using B-spline function as the basis function of the correlation function. The result accords with the statistical characteristics of the samples. Clock skew scheduling is a method utilizing the clock skew to optimize the circuit’s performance. The clock period minimization and timing failure probability minimization are two conflicting targets in clock skew scheduling. Considering the influence of process variations, traditional yield driven clock skew scheduling can be described as a series of minimum ratio cycle problems. However, the description assumed that the critical path delay is Gaussian distribution which is no longer suitable for the nanometer process of next generation. Latest study has presented a method considering non Gaussian distribution. This method solved the optimization problem by generalized Lawler’s algorithm. To accelerate the solving of the optimization problem, this thesis further presents several improved algorithm. The experimental result shows that the improved algorithm is faster than the former algorithm. The test of EDA algorithm needs rectilinear polygons in different layouts which come from real cases and randomly generated cases. Sometimes, the real cases cannotcover all the cases in complex algorithm. In this thesis, a practical algorithm that generates random rectilinear polygon is proposed, which can flexibly generate layout cases of different distributions and sizes. We prove that the new algorithm is guaranteed to terminate within finite steps

What Do the Decisions of the European Court of Human Rights Tell About Property Rights Across Europe?

Despite the important role that institutions play in explaining economic growth, there exist few objective quantitative measures of institutional quality. We propose a new quantitative index that allows comparing the strength of property rights across the member states of the Council of Europe. To construct the index, we analyzed all judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) related to property rights for all member states and identified whether the ECtHR had found a violation of property rights in the domestic courts’ decisions. The resulting data were used to calculate the likelihood of finding violation in the judgments of national courts. Assuming that the ECtHR is impartial and unbiased, higher probability of overruling the judgments of local courts from a given country implies that the level of property rights protection is low. Our constructed measure is highly correlated with a number of indices of property rights protection used in the literature and serves as a strong objective foundation for these indices. Furthermore, we found that the ECtHR had received more applications from countries with higher likelihood of national court judgments violating property rights