Infrastructure investment - the emergent PPP equity market

Increasingly governments are looking to private sector actors to invest in infrastructure projects. An emergent mechanism for such investment is the market in PPP equity. This is an aspect of PPPs that has to date had little empirical attention. This paper reports on the size and scope of the market in PPP equity sales within the UK. In the process, the nature of PPP projects and the existing rationales for the policy are critiqued. The paper concludes by laying out a number of potential research agendas focused on PPP equity sales including a call for reassessing theoretical perspectives

Living with ‘Aliens’: Contrasting Public Perceptions and Experiences of Immigration at a ‘National’ and ‘Local’ Level

According to a recent article entitled Immigration is British society's biggest problem (Boffey, 2013) nearly a third of the British public who took part in a survey perceive immigration to be one of the greatest causes of social division. Segregation and the ‘parallel lives’ that diverse cultures lead have been high on the political agenda ever since the 2001 northern riots in the towns of Oldham, Bradford and Burnley. Government policies have attempted to promote community cohesion and integration in diverse neighbourhoods. The topic of immigration and its imagined ‘threat’ to ‘British’ values and to ‘British’ communities has arisen again recently with both the Romanian and Bulgarian migration flows, and the killing of British soldier Lee Rigby; both of which have sparked a hostile response in negative media portrayals of immigrants or in protests against immigration involving the far right

A comprehensive survey on the quickest path problem

Abstract This work is a survey on a special minsum-maxmin bicriteria problem, known as the quickest path problem, that can model the transmission of data between two nodes of a network. Moreover, the authors review the problems of ranking the K quickest paths, and the K quickest loopless paths, and compare them in terms of the worst-case complexity order. The classification presented led to the proposal of a new variant of a known K quickest loopless paths algorithm. Finally, applications of quickest path algorithms are mentioned, as well as some comparative empirical results

An Experimental Investigation Into the Rubber-Stabilization of an Externally-Pressurized Air-Lubricated Thrust Bearing

Stability maps are presented for a circular thrust bearing which has a central feed hole and pocket and is flexibly supported on various rubber O-rings. Results obtained show that a substantial improvement in stability can be achieved compared with the normal fixed-pad arrangement. An earlier stability theory has been programmed with measured O-ring support data but qualitative agreement with experiment is attained only after modification of theory.</jats:p