Environment

"environment" is now the usual name for the main editorial category dealing with news and opinion concerned with humans’ impact on the world around them. The word is also prominent in the names, ambitions, proposed policies and standards of bodies engaged with such issues. Despite the word’s prominence, however, use of "environment" (and derivatives including "environmental" and "environmentalism") is imprecise; and the word is positioned awkwardly among related terms including "surroundings", "ecology" and "natural world". Drawing on the detailed entry for "environment" in the Oxford English Dictionary, this article examines the history, multiple meanings and uncertainty of meaning of the word, and examines the complex roles it plays in modern debates about environmental protection and policy

Bank seasoned equity offers: do voluntary and involuntary offers differ?

Recent research has shown that for industrial and utilities’ seasoned equity offers (SEOs) the offer price discount is informative and has significant price effects. We examine whether the offer price discount for SEOs made by undercapitalized banks is different from those made by banks that were already overcapitalized prior to issue announcement. The former are labeled "involuntary" issues, and the latter "voluntary." Voluntary issues are likely made by opportunistic managers at times when their stock is overvalued. Prior research has argued and provided evidence suggesting that for involuntary issues, such timing discretion may be limited. However, we find no significant differences in the issue-date discount, and in issue-date abnormal returns between the two types of issues. We find that trading volume increases dramatically at the offer date, stays at abnormally high levels over a 60-day post–issue period, and is accompanied by a positive abnormal return in the post-offer period for both types of issues.Bank stocks

Offer-price discount of bank seasoned equity offers: do voluntary and involuntary offers convey different information?

Seasoned equity offers made by undercapitalized banks (labeled involuntary offers) could be different from other seasoned equity offers because the issuer is presumably under regulatory duress to make up the shortfall in required capital. For this reason, involuntary offers may exhibit limited managerial opportunism. When a firm issues seasoned equity, investment bankers gather information about the issuer in the period between the registration of the offer and its issue date. The information gathered during the book-building process gets reflected in the offer price discount on the issue date. We find that the offer price discount appears to convey more information to investors on the issue date for the voluntary issuers. However, we find that both types of issues show signs of market timing, and that investors react negatively to both types of issuance announcements. Our results are robust to several checks.Bank stocks

Design aspects of explosive mixtures in a vehcile interstage final report

Prevention and control of explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen within vehicle interstag

Anisotropic Energy Gaps of Iron-based Superconductivity from Intra-band Quasiparticle Interference in LiFeAs

If strong electron-electron interactions between neighboring Fe atoms mediate the Cooper pairing in iron-pnictide superconductors, then specific and distinct anisotropic superconducting energy gaps \Delta_i(k) should appear on the different electronic bands i. Here we introduce intra-band Bogoliubov quasiparticle scattering interference (QPI) techniques for determination of \Delta_i(k) in such materials, focusing on LiFeAs. We identify the three hole-like bands assigned previously as \gamma, \alpha_2 and \alpha_1, and we determine the anisotropy, magnitude and relative orientations of their \Delta_i(k). These measurements will advance quantitative theoretical analysis of the mechanism of Cooper pairing in iron-based superconductivity

Pairwise entanglement in the XX model with a magnetic impurity

For a 3-qubit Heisenberg model in a uniform magnetic field, the pairwise thermal entanglement of any two sites is identical due to the exchange symmetry of sites. In this paper we consider the effect of a non-uniform magnetic field on the Heisenberg model, modeling a magnetic impurity on one site. Since pairwise entanglement is calculated by tracing out one of the three sites, the entanglement clearly depends on which site the impurity is located. When the impurity is located on the site which is traced out, that is, when it acts as an external field of the pair, the entanglement can be enhanced to the maximal value 1; while when the field acts on a site of the pair the corresponding concurrence can only be increased from 1/3 to 2/3.Comment: 9 Pages, 4 EPS figures, LaTeX 2

Supporting staff to respond effectively to informal complaints: findings from an action research study

Aim: to understand how nurses and midwives manage informal complaints at ward level. Background: the provision of high quality, compassionate clinical nursing and midwifery is a global priority. Complaints management systems have been established within the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom (UK) to improve patient experience yet little is known about effective responses to informal complaints in clinical practice by nurses and midwives. Design: collaborative action research. Methods: four phases of data collection and analysis relating to primarily one NHS trust during 2011-2014 including: scoping of complaints data, interviews with five service users and six key stakeholders and eight reflective discussion groups with six midwives over a period of nine months, two sessions of communications training with separate groups of midwives and one focus group with four nurses in the collaborating trust. Results: three key themes emerged from these data: multiple and domino complaints; ward staff need support; and unclear complaints systems. Conclusions: current research does not capture the complexities of complaints and the nursing and midwifery response to informal complaints. Relevance to clinical practice: robust systems are required to support clinical staff to improve their response to informal complaints and thereby improve the patient experience

From transformative learning to social change? Using action research to explore and improve informal complaints management in an NHS trust

Background: The number of complaints concerning aspects of care from patients and/or carers have increased over time. Yet, in spite of a growing body of national and international literature on health care complaints there is a lack of knowledge around how nurses and midwives manage informal complaints at ward level, or staff needs in relation to this. Aim: Using an Action research (AR) approach with mixed methods, four phases and four cycles, the aim was to explore informal complaints management by nurses and midwives at ward level. We discuss the AR process primarily in connection with learning and service change, drawing from the qualitative data in this paper. Findings: The analysis of the collected qualitative data resulted in three main themes related to the complexities of complaints and complaints management, staff support needs and the existing ambiguous complaints systems which are hard for both staff and servicer users to negotiate. The AR approach facilitated learning and change in participants in relation to views on complaints management, and the main issues around complaints management in the collaborating trust. Conclusions: The extant body of research on complaints does not sufficiently recognise the complexity of complaints and informal complaints management or the complaints systems in place. Needs based staff training can help support staff to manage informal complaints more effectively

Gatekeeping access to the midwifery unit: managing complaints by bending the rules

While poor communication between service users and front line staff causes many service user complaints in the British National Health Service (NHS), staff rarely reflect on the causes of these complaints. We discuss findings from an action research project with midwives which suggest that the midwives struggled to fully understand complaints from women, their partners and families particularly about restricted visiting and the locked door to the midwifery unit. They responded to individual requests to visit out of hours while maintaining the general policy of restricted visiting. In this way the door was a gatekeeping device which allowed access to the unit within certain rules. The locked door remained a barrier to women and their families and as a result was a common source of informal complaints. We argue that the locked door and restricted visiting to the midwifery unit were forms of gate-keeping and boundary making by midwives which reveals a tension between their espoused woman-centred care and contemporary midwifery practice which is increasingly constrained by institutional values