Beyond shareholder primacy? Reflections on the trajectory of UK corporate governance.

Core institutions of UK corporate governance, in particular the City Code on Takeovers and Mergers, the Combined Code on Corporate Governance and the law on directors’ duties, are strongly orientated towards the norm of shareholder primacy. Beyond the core, however, stakeholder interests are better represented, in particular at the intersection of insolvency and employment law. This reflects the influence of European Community laws on information and consultation of employees. In addition, there are signs that some institutional shareholders are redirecting their investment strategies, under government encouragement, away from a focus on short-term returns, in such a way as to favour stakeholder-inclusive practices by firms. On this basis we suggest that the UK system is currently in a state of flux and that the debate over shareholder primacy has not been concluded

Routine monitoring and assessment of adults living with HIV: results of the British HIV Association (BHIVA) national audit 2015

BACKGROUND: The clinical care of people living with HIV changed fundamentally as a result of the development of effective antiretroviral therapy (ART). HIV infection is now a long-term treatable condition. We report a national audit to assess adherence to British HIV Association guidelines for the routine investigation and monitoring of adult HIV-1-infected individuals. METHODS: All UK sites known as providers of adult HIV outpatient services were invited to complete a case-note review and a brief survey of local clinic practices. Participating sites were asked to randomly select 50-100 adults, who attended for specialist HIV care during 2014 and/or 2015. Each site collected data electronically using a self-audit spreadsheet tool. This included demographic details (gender, ethnicity, HIV exposure, and age) and whether 22 standardised and pre-defined clinical audited outcomes had been recorded. RESULTS: Data were collected on 8258 adults from 123 sites, representing approximately 10% of people living with HIV reported in public health surveillance as attending UK HIV services. Sexual health screening was provided within 96.4% of HIV services, cervical cytology and influenza vaccination within 71.4% of HIV services. There was wide variation in resistance testing across sites. Only 44.9% of patients on ART had a documented 10-year CVD risk within the past three years and fracture risk had been assessed within the past three years for only 16.7% patients aged over 50 years. CONCLUSIONS: There was high participation in the national audit and good practice was identified in some areas. However improvements can be made in monitoring of cardiovascular risk, bone and sexual health

Routine monitoring and assessment of adults living with HIV: results of the British HIV Association (BHIVA) national audit 2015.

BACKGROUND: The clinical care of people living with HIV changed fundamentally as a result of the development of effective antiretroviral therapy (ART). HIV infection is now a long-term treatable condition. We report a national audit to assess adherence to British HIV Association guidelines for the routine investigation and monitoring of adult HIV-1-infected individuals. METHODS: All UK sites known as providers of adult HIV outpatient services were invited to complete a case-note review and a brief survey of local clinic practices. Participating sites were asked to randomly select 50-100 adults, who attended for specialist HIV care during 2014 and/or 2015. Each site collected data electronically using a self-audit spreadsheet tool. This included demographic details (gender, ethnicity, HIV exposure, and age) and whether 22 standardised and pre-defined clinical audited outcomes had been recorded. RESULTS: Data were collected on 8258 adults from 123 sites, representing approximately 10% of people living with HIV reported in public health surveillance as attending UK HIV services. Sexual health screening was provided within 96.4% of HIV services, cervical cytology and influenza vaccination within 71.4% of HIV services. There was wide variation in resistance testing across sites. Only 44.9% of patients on ART had a documented 10-year CVD risk within the past three years and fracture risk had been assessed within the past three years for only 16.7% patients aged over 50 years. CONCLUSIONS: There was high participation in the national audit and good practice was identified in some areas. However improvements can be made in monitoring of cardiovascular risk, bone and sexual health

Traps of multi-level governance. Lessons from the implementation of the Water Framework Directive in Italy

During recent decades, different patterns of multi-level governance (MLG) have spread across Europe as a consequence of Europeanisation of public policies, which have increasingly adopted decentralized and participatory procedures conceived as a tool of more effective and accountable policy-making. It appears, however, that the implementation of operational designs based on MLG may be rather problematic and it does not necessarily bring to the expected performance improvements. Referring to the case of the EU Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC), which conceives the creation of new multi-level institutional settings as a key tool for enacting a new holistic approach to water management and protection, this article explores the difficulties that the implementation of such settings has brought in Italy, despite some favorable pre-conditions existing in the country. Evidence is provided that along with institutional and agency variables, the implementation effectiveness of MLG arrangements promoted by the EU can be challenged by their inherent characteristics

Time and dose dependency of bone-sarcomas in patients injected with radium-224

The time course and dose dependency of the incidence of bone-sarcomas among 900 German patients treated with high doses of radium-224 is analysed in terms of a proportional hazards model with a log-normal dependency of time to tumor and a linear-quadratic dose relation. The deduced dose dependency agrees well with a previous analysis in terms of a non-parametric proportional hazards model, and confirms the temporal distribution which has been used in the Radioepidemiological Tables of NIH. However, the linear-quadratic dose-response model gives a risk estimate for low doses which is somewhat less than half that obtained under the assumption of linearity. Dedicated to Prof. W. Jacobi on the occasion of his 60th birthday Work performed under Euratom contracts BI6-D-083-D, BI6-F-111-D, U.S. Department of Energy contract DE-AC 02-76 EV-00119, the U.S. National Cancer Institut

Development of an Interpretive Simulation Tool for the Proton Radiography Technique

Proton radiography is a useful diagnostic of high energy density (HED) plasmas under active theoretical and experimental development. In this paper we describe a new simulation tool that interacts realistic laser-driven point-like proton sources with three dimensional electromagnetic fields of arbitrary strength and structure and synthesizes the associated high resolution proton radiograph. The present tool's numerical approach captures all relevant physics effects, including effects related to the formation of caustics. Electromagnetic fields can be imported from PIC or hydrodynamic codes in a streamlined fashion, and a library of electromagnetic field `primitives' is also provided. This latter capability allows users to add a primitive, modify the field strength, rotate a primitive, and so on, while quickly generating a high resolution radiograph at each step. In this way, our tool enables the user to deconstruct features in a radiograph and interpret them in connection to specific underlying electromagnetic field elements. We show an example application of the tool in connection to experimental observations of the Weibel instability in counterstreaming plasmas, using $\sim 10^8$ particles generated from a realistic laser-driven point-like proton source, imaging fields which cover volumes of $\sim10$ mm$^3$. Insights derived from this application show that the tool can support understanding of HED plasmas.Comment: Figures and tables related to the Appendix are included in the published journal articl

Theory and practice in Finnish teacher education : a rhetorical analysis of changing values from the 1960s to the present day

Our aim in this article is to examine the relationship between theory and practice in Finnish teacher education from the 1960s to the present. We identify four different periods to represent this relationship based on our analysis of national committee and evaluation reports. Theory and practice gradually converged, culminating in a research-based agenda that reflects the current situation. This relationship between theory and practice also reflects the ideal teacher of different times and what a teacher's working orientation should be. We use rhetorical analysis and the concept of a 'philosophical pair' introduced by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca to interpret this development.Peer reviewe

USCID fourth international conference

Presented at the Role of irrigation and drainage in a sustainable future: USCID fourth international conference on irrigation and drainage on October 3-6, 2007 in Sacramento, California.Includes bibliographical references.Backpropagation Neural Network is applied to establish the relationship between meteorological factors and evapotranspiration, which is then used to predict the evapotranspiration in ChiaNan irrigated area, Taiwan. It takes the weather data from Irrigation Experiment Station of ChiaNan Irrigation Association as the input layer, which include the following weather factors: (1) the highest temperature; (2) the lowest temperature; (3) average temperature; (4) relative humidity; (5) wind speed; (6) sunlight hours; (7) solar radiation amount; (8) dew point; (9) forenoon ground temperature; (10) afternoon ground temperature. From the result it can be known that the correlation coefficient reaches 0.993 between the evapotranspiration in 2004 calculated by FAO56 Penman-Monteith method and the one predicted by the neural network model with a hidden layer of 10 nodes. The actual evapotranspiration is 911.6cm and the prediction by the neural network is 864.4, between which the error ratio is 1.67%. The correlation coefficient is 0.708 between the actual evaporation in 2004 and the prediction by the neural network with a hidden layer of 10 nodes and an output layer with the pan evaporation as its target output. The pan evaporation is 1674.1cm, while the prediction by the neural network is 1451.7cm, between which the error ratio is 13.23%