Devolving skills: the case of the Apprenticeship Grant for Employers

One rationale for devolution is that local decision makers may be well placed to adapt national policies to the local context. We test whether such adaptation helps meet programme objectives in the case of the Apprenticeship Grant for Employers. Originally a national programme, aimed at incentivising employers to take on apprentices, reforms a few years into operation gave some Local Authorities negotiated flexibilities in how the scheme operated. We consider the impact of the national scheme and then use a difference‐in‐differences approach to test whether flexibility led to an increase in the number of apprenticeship starts in devolved areas relative to control groups. We find that flexibility had zero effect. There is suggestive evidence that this is because flexibilities were negotiated on the wrong margins

Il rilievo-progetto di Franco Rosso

La continuità dell’attività della mano, uno strumento delicato e sensibile che si relaziona con la vista e con il sapere vedere e, per documentare, passa dalla scrittura al disegno, per tornare alla scrittura: il lavoro di Rosso trasmette questa continuità, e insieme l’esperienza del mestiere, in un rilievo che ha l’obiettivo di comprendere l’architettura, le motivazioni del progetto, le condizioni al contorno di un determinato periodo, le tensioni culturali, e non può prescindere da un inquadramento storico

Minisuperspace Models in M-theory

We derive the full canonical formulation of the bosonic sector of 11-dimensional supergravity, and explicitly present the constraint algebra. We then compactify M-theory on a warped product of homogeneous spaces of constant curvature, and construct a minisuperspace of scale factors. First classical behaviour of the minisuperspace system is analysed, and then a quantum theory is constructed. It turns out that there similarities with the "pre-Big Bang" scenario in String Theory.Comment: 35 pages, 2 figures, added additional discussion of gauge fixing and self-adjointness of the Hamiltonian, added reference

Collider Production of TeV Scale Black Holes and Higher-Curvature Gravity

We examine how the production of TeV scale black holes at colliders is influenced by the presence of Lovelock higher-curvature terms in the action of models with large extra dimensions. Such terms are expected to arise on rather general grounds, e.g., from string theory and are often used in the literature to model modifications to the Einstein-Hilbert action arising from quantum and/or stringy corrections. While adding the invariant which is quadratic in the curvature leads to quantitative modifications in black hole properties, cubic and higher invariants are found to produce significant qualitative changes, e.g., classically stable black holes. We use these higher-order curvature terms to construct a toy model of the black hole production cross section threshold. For reasonable parameter values we demonstrate that detailed measurements of the properties of black holes at future colliders will be highly sensitive to the presence of the Lovelock higher-order curvature terms.Comment: 37 pages, 11 figures, references adde

TeV-Scale Black Hole Lifetimes in Extra-Dimensional Lovelock Gravity

We examine the mass loss rates and lifetimes of TeV-scale extra dimensional black holes (BH) in ADD-like models with Lovelock higher-curvature terms present in the action. In particular we focus on the predicted differences between the canonical and microcanonical ensemble statistical mechanics descriptions of the Hawking radiation that results in the decay of these BH. In even numbers of extra dimensions the employment of the microcanonical approach is shown to generally lead to a significant increase in the BH lifetime as in case of the Einstein-Hilbert action. For odd numbers of extra dimensions, stable BH remnants occur when employing either description provided the highest order allowed Lovelock invariant is present. However, in this case, the time dependence of the mass loss rates obtained employing the two approaches will be different. These effects are in principle measurable at future colliders.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figs; Refs. and discussion adde

Multimessenger Search for Sources of Gravitational Waves and High-Energy Neutrinos: Initial Results for LIGO-Virgo and IceCube

We report the results of a multimessenger search for coincident signals from the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave observatories and the partially completed IceCube high-energy neutrino detector, including periods of joint operation between 2007-2010. These include parts of the 2005-2007 run and the 2009-2010 run for LIGO-Virgo, and IceCube\u27s observation periods with 22, 59 and 79 strings. We find no significant coincident events, and use the search results to derive upper limits on the rate of joint sources for a range of source emission parameters. For the optimistic assumption of gravitational-wave emission energy of 10-2M⊙c2 at ∼150Hz with ∼60ms duration, and high-energy neutrino emission of 1051 erg comparable to the isotropic gamma-ray energy of gamma-ray bursts, we limit the source rate below 1.6x10-2Mpc-3yr-1. We also examine how combining information from gravitational waves and neutrinos will aid discovery in the advanced gravitational-wave detector era

Generalized 2d dilaton gravity with matter fields

We extend the classical integrability of the CGHS model of 2d dilaton gravity [1] to a larger class of models, allowing the gravitational part of the action to depend more generally on the dilaton field and, simultaneously, adding fermion- and U(1)-gauge-fields to the scalar matter. On the other hand we provide the complete solution of the most general dilaton-dependent 2d gravity action coupled to chiral fermions. The latter analysis is generalized to a chiral fermion multiplet with a non-abelian gauge symmetry as well as to the (anti-)self-dual sector df = *df (df = -*df) of a scalar field f.Comment: 37 pages, Latex; typos and Eqs. (44,45) corrected; paragraph on p. 26, referring to a work of S. Solodukhin, reformulated; references adde

Homothetic Self-Similar Solutions of the Three-Dimensional Brans-Dicke Gravity

All homothetic self-similar solutions of the Brans-Dicke scalar field in three-dimensional spacetime with circular symmetry are found in closed form.Comment: latex, five pages, without figur