10,951 research outputs found
The influence of 'soft' fair work regulation on union recovery: a case of re-recognition in the Scottish voluntary social care sector
This longitudinal case study contributes to debates concerning how ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ forms of regulation can interact to contribute to the advancement of worker rights. More specifically, the article explores the contribution of Scotland’s ‘soft’ fair work (FW) programme and the UK’s ‘hard’ statutory recognition procedure to union re-recognition in a voluntary sector social care provider. In combination, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ regulation are found to have added breadth to the pressures for re-recognition exerted by the union, bringing reputational and financial costs associated with derecognition to the employer. Concerns nevertheless arose regarding the depth of impact from this interaction due to union compromises on key issues in the final recognition agreement. Due to the specific public service context of the study, doubts are also expressed regarding the potential for unions in other hard to organise sectors to achieve similar outcomes
Supply chain regulation in Scottish social care: facilitators and barriers
Drawing on a study of a Scottish government initiative to ensure the provision of a living wage to social care workers, the paper sheds new light on the value of regulating domestic supply chains to enhance labour standards in supplier organisations, and the factors that facilitate and hinder such regulation. The study confirms that supply chains driven by monopsonistic purchasers tend to drive down employment conditions, while indicating that the studied initiative met with a good deal of success due to a combination of the government generated ‘soft’ regulation and support from care providers that reflected both value and pragmatic considerations. It also highlights the contradictory tensions that can arise between policy aspirations and business objectives and suggests that to be effective, initiatives to enhance labour standards in supply chains need to address adverse market dynamics
Head-on collisions of black holes: the particle limit
We compute gravitational radiation waveforms, spectra and energies for a
point particle of mass falling from rest at radius into a
Schwarzschild hole of mass . This radiation is found to lowest order in
with the use of a Laplace transform. In contrast with numerical
relativity results for head-on collisions of equal-mass holes, the radiated
energy is found not to be a monotonically increasing function of initial
separation; there is a local radiated-energy maximum at . The
present results, along with results for infall from infinity, provide a
complete catalog of waveforms and spectra for particle infall. We give a
representative sample from that catalog and an interesting observation: Unlike
the simple spectra for other head-on collisions (either of particle and hole,
or of equal mass holes) the spectra for show a series of
evenly spaced bumps. A simple explanation is given for this. Lastly, our energy
vs. results are compared with approximation methods used elsewhere, for
small and for large initial separation.Comment: 15 pages, REVTeX, 25 figure
Non-adiabaticity and single-electron transport driven by surface acoustic waves
Single-electron transport driven by surface acoustic waves (SAW) through a
narrow constriction, formed in two-dimensional electron gas, is studied
theoretically. Due to long-range Coulomb interaction, the tunneling coupling
between the electron gas and the moving minimum of the SAW-induced potential
rapidly decays with time. As a result, nonadiabaticiy sets a limit for the
accuracy of the quantization of acoustoelectric current
Smart Focal Plane Technologies for VLT Instruments
As we move towards the era of ELTs, it is timely to think about the future
role of the 8-m class telescopes. Under the OPTICON programme, novel
technologies have been developed that are intended for use in multi-object and
integral-field spectrographs. To date, these have been targeted at instrument
concepts for the European ELT, but there are also significant possibilities for
their inclusion in new VLT instruments, ensuring the continued success and
productivity of these unique telescopes.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the ESO Workshop "Science
with the VLT in the ELT era
Conformal compactification and cycle-preserving symmetries of spacetimes
The cycle-preserving symmetries for the nine two-dimensional real spaces of
constant curvature are collectively obtained within a Cayley-Klein framework.
This approach affords a unified and global study of the conformal structure of
the three classical Riemannian spaces as well as of the six relativistic and
non-relativistic spacetimes (Minkowskian, de Sitter, anti-de Sitter, both
Newton-Hooke and Galilean), and gives rise to general expressions holding
simultaneously for all of them. Their metric structure and cycles (lines with
constant geodesic curvature that include geodesics and circles) are explicitly
characterized. The corresponding cyclic (Mobius-like) Lie groups together with
the differential realizations of their algebras are then deduced; this
derivation is new and much simpler than the usual ones and applies to any
homogeneous space in the Cayley-Klein family, whether flat or curved and with
any signature. Laplace and wave-type differential equations with conformal
algebra symmetry are constructed. Furthermore, the conformal groups are
realized as matrix groups acting as globally defined linear transformations in
a four-dimensional "conformal ambient space", which in turn leads to an
explicit description of the "conformal completion" or compactification of the
nine spaces.Comment: 43 pages, LaTe
X-ray iron line variability for the model of an orbiting flare above a black hole accretion disc
The broad X-ray iron line, detected in many active galactic nuclei, is likely
to be produced by fluorescence from the X-ray illuminated central parts of an
accretion disc close to a supermassive black hole. The time-averaged shape of
the line can be explained most naturally by a combination of special and
general relativistic effects. Such line profiles contain information about the
black hole spin and the accretion disc as well as the geometry of the emitting
region and may help to test general relativity in the strong gravity regime. In
this paper we embark on the computation of the temporal response of the line to
the illuminating flux. Previous studies concentrated on the calculation of
reverberation signatures from static sources illuminating the disc. In this
paper we focus on the more physically justified case of flares located above
the accretion disc and corotating with it. We compute the time dependent iron
line taking into account all general relativistic effects and show that its
shape is of very complex nature, and also present light curves accompanying the
iron line variability. We suggest that future X-ray satellites like XMM or
Constellation-X may be capable of detecting features present in the computed
reverberation maps.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 11 pages, 12 figure
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