Migrant workers in Rochdale and Oldham

This research focuses on the needs and experiences of Central and Eastern European migrants living and working in Rochdale and Oldham. It was commissioned by Oldham Housing Investment Partnership, Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council, Oldham Rochdale Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder and Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council in January 2008 and was conducted by a team of researchers from the Salford Housing & Urban Studies Unit (SHUSU) at the University of Salford

Continuing professional development of early years managers and practitioners working with children under 3 years of age: technical report

This research into CPD provision for those working with children under 3 years of age was undertaken in the context of the National Review of the Early Years and Childcare Workforce (Scottish Executive, 2006) and the Scottish Parliamentary response (2006) which emphasised that: 'the area which requires most urgent investment is improving the skills level of the workforce, and that although further investment is required in the 3-5 sector, the under 3 sector is the most immediate priority' (SPEC, 2006, para 16). The findings of the research are interpreted in the light of the Standard for Childcare Practice (QAA, 2007) and the more recently published Early Years Framework (Scottish Government, 2008). The Early Years Framework defines early years as pre-birth to 8 years, though it highlights the need for 'a renewed focus on 0-3' (p5)

Start-Up Costs in American Research Universities

Our report briefly summarizes findings from the 2002 Cornell Higher Education Research Institute survey of start-up costs at the over 220 universities classified as Research and Doctoral universities by the Carnegie Foundation in 1994. It reports the mean start-up cost packages across institutions for new assistant professors and senior faculty, broken down by institutional type (public/private), Carnegie classification and field (biology, chemistry, engineering, physics and astronomy) and also discuses the sources of funding for start-up costs

Development of a best practice statement on the use of ankle-foot orthoses following stroke in Scotland

A National Health Service Quality Improvement Scotland (NHS QIS) scoping exercise in 2007 identified the use of ankle-foot orthoses (AFOs) following stroke as a clinical improvement priority, leading to the development of a best practice statement (BPS) on AFO use after stroke. This paper outlines the development process of the BPS which is available from NHS QIS. The authors were involved in the development of the BPS as part of a working group that included practitioners from the fields of orthotics, physiotherapy, stroke nursing and bioengineering, and staff of NHS QIS and a patient representative. In consultation with an NHS QIS health services researcher, the authors undertook a systematic literature review to evidence where possible the recommendations made in the BPS. Where evidence was unavailable, consensus was reached by the expert working group. As the BPS was designed for the non-specialist and non-orthotic practitioner the authors also developed educational resources which were included within the BPS to aid the understanding of the principles underpinning orthotic design and prescription. The BPS has been widely distributed throughout the health service in Scotland and is available electronically at no cost via the NHS QIS website. At part of an ongoing evaluation of the impact of the BPS on the quality of orthotic provision, NHS QIS has invited feedback regarding successes and challenges to implementation

Pregelix: Big(ger) Graph Analytics on A Dataflow Engine

There is a growing need for distributed graph processing systems that are capable of gracefully scaling to very large graph datasets. Unfortunately, this challenge has not been easily met due to the intense memory pressure imposed by process-centric, message passing designs that many graph processing systems follow. Pregelix is a new open source distributed graph processing system that is based on an iterative dataflow design that is better tuned to handle both in-memory and out-of-core workloads. As such, Pregelix offers improved performance characteristics and scaling properties over current open source systems (e.g., we have seen up to 15x speedup compared to Apache Giraph and up to 35x speedup compared to distributed GraphLab), and makes more effective use of available machine resources to support Big(ger) Graph Analytics

Continuing professional development of early years managers and practitioners working with children under 3 years of age: executive summary

The Faculty of Education at the University of Strathclyde was commissioned by Learning and Teaching Scotland to undertake research into the continuing professional development provision (CPD) for early years practitioners and managers across Scotland, specifically focusing on provision for thoseworking with children under 3 years of age. The aim of the research was to identify ways in which those working in early years centres might be better supported through effective CPD opportunities, designed to meet the needs ofchildren and their families. The research was carried out between April and September 2008

Information Inertia

We show that aversion to risk and ambiguity leads to information inertia when investors process public news about future asset values. Optimal portfolios do not always depend on news that is worse than expected; hence, the equilibrium stock price does not reflect this news. This informational inefficiency is more severe when there is more risk and ambiguity, but disappears when investors are risk neutral or the news is about idiosyncratic risk. Information inertia leads to time-series momentum and is consistent with low trading activity of households. An ex-ante ambiguity premium helps explain the macro and earnings announcement premium

Information Inertia

We study how information about an asset affects optimal portfolios and equilibrium asset prices when investors are not sure about the model that predicts future asset values and thus treat the information as ambiguous. We show that this ambiguity leads to optimal portfolios that are insensitive to news even though there are no information processing costs or other market frictions. In equilibrium, we show that stock prices may not react to public information that is worse than expected and this mispricing of bad news leads to profitable trading strategies based on public information