Howzat? The Financial Health of English Cricket: Not Out, Yet

In 1997 a review of the financial health of English county cricket highlighted strategic weaknesses within the professional game, principally an over-reliance by clubs on the annual grants provided to them by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB). Without such grants the teams, in general terms, would be insolvent. Using the financial statements of the First Class Cricket Counties, this paper explores how the financial position and performance of the county game has changed, 20 years on from the seminal study. A series of structural changes to the game had been made, yet financial problems are still evident. Counties are as reliant on central grant income as they were in 1997, although there are cases where clubs have made strategic enhancements and are becoming self-sustainable as going concerns. Rather than the ECB directly funding county revenue it should be working in collaboration with individual clubs to achieve developments in the game from the grassroots upwards, in order to help clubs grow their own revenue streams.</jats:p

Regulation of vascular endothelial growth factor bioactivity in patients with acute lung injury

Background: Reduced bioactive vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) has been demonstrated in several inflammatory lung conditions including the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). sVEGFR-1, a soluble form of VEGF-1 receptor, is a potent natural inhibitor of VEGF. We hypothesised that sVEGFR-1 plays an important role in the regulation of the bioactivity of VEGF within the lung in patients with ARDS. Methods: Forty one patients with ARDS, 12 at risk of developing ARDS, and 16 normal controls were studied. Bioactive VEGF, total VEGF, and sVEGFR-1 were measured by ELISA in plasma and bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid. Reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction for sVEGFR-1 was performed on BAL cells. Results: sVEGFR-1 was detectable in the BAL fluid of 48% (20/41) of patients with early ARDS (1.4– 54.8 ng/ml epithelial lining fluid (ELF)) compared with 8% (1/12) at risk patients (p = 0.017) and none of the normal controls (p = 0.002). By day 4 sVEGFR-1 was detectable in only 2/18 ARDS patients (p = 0.008). Patients with detectable sVEGFR-1 had lower ELF median (IQR) levels of bioactive VEGF than those without detectable sVEGFR-1 (1415.2 (474.9–3192) pg/ml v 4761 (1349–7596.6) pg/ml, median difference 3346 pg/ml (95% CI 305.1 to 14711.9), p = 0.016), but there was no difference in total VEGF levels. BAL cells expressed mRNA for sVEGFR-1 and produced sVEGFR-1 protein which increased following incubation with tumour necrosis factor a. Conclusion: This study shows for the first time the presence of sVEGFR-1 in the BAL fluid of patients with ARDS. This may explain the presence of reduced bioactive VEGF in patients early in the course of ARDS

The Ethical Dilemma of Information Asymmetry in Innovation: Reputation, Investors and Noise in the Innovation Channel.

A sufficient and steady stream of innovations is widely seen as a basis for healthy modern economies. Governments divert substantial resources from other purposes in society to increase innovation. Yet the failure rate among innovative SMEs is high, suggesting that resources are wasted. Avoiding such waste is a challenge for both governments and investors, but also raises a question for the innovative company, namely how to build and fund the\ud enterprise on an ethical basis. The dilemma of giving in to temptations to ‘cut corners’ clearly exists, for example to exploit the inevitable asymmetry of information arising in innovation and potentially deploy this in support of misleading claims about specific capabilities and/or the unjustified creation and exploitation of reputation. This is consistent with Olaf Fisscher’s finding that entrepreneurs starting new ventures tend to exhibit an inherent bias towards compromising their own values in order to succeed at any cost. When the innoSME’s aspirations are unrealistic or the proposed innovations are of marginal value, the ethical issues are broader and extend also to those who are potential financiers. Noting this as a gap in the ethics literature, we argue that the current situation fails to match economic and ethical ideals and that work is needed to develop tools which allow those who provide finance and support for innovation to target it more effectively at those who have a prospect of successfully launching genuine innovations and thus reduce the ‘noise’ in the innovation field

Activation workers’ perceptions of their long-term unemployed clients’ attitudes towards employment

The Work Programme’s use of severe social security benefit sanctions reflects British coalition ministers’ belief that many people on out-of-work benefits do not want a job. While a substantial empirical literature has repeatedly demonstrated that in fact unemployed benefit claimants possess the same work values as the employed and that the vast majority want paid work, it has ignored some conservative authors’ pleas to consider the views and experiences of people who work with the unemployed. Forty employees of agencies contracted to help unemployed people into employment were interviewed in summer 2011. Respondents had spent an estimated combined total of 147,000 hours in the presence of people who have claimed Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) for over six months. Most said that between a quarter and half of their present clients did not want employment. This finding does not contradict existing research, given that most JSA claimants re-enter employment within six months. However, all forty agreed that many others remained unemployed because they were choosy in the jobs they were willing to undertake, and,most strikingly, respondents overwhelmingly endorsed the view that a ‘dependency culture’ exists in households and neighbourhoods that have experienced joblessness for several generations

Exploring calibration algorithms to maximize the null depth in KPIC's vortex fiber nulling mode

Vortex fiber nulling (VFN) is a new interferometric technique with the potential to unlock the ability to detect and spectroscopically characterize exoplanets at angular separations smaller than the conventional diffraction limit of $\lambda$/D. In early 2022, a VFN mode was added to the Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC) instrument suite on Keck II. VFN operates by adding an azimuthal phase ramp to the incident wavefront so that light from the star at the center of the field is prevented from coupling into a single-mode fiber. One of the key performance goals of VFN is to minimize the ratio of on-axis starlight coupling to off-axis planet coupling, which requires minimizing the wavefront aberrations of light being injected into the fiber. Non-common path aberrations can be calibrated during the daytime and compensated for with the KPIC deformable mirror during nighttime observing. By applying different amplitudes of low-order Zernike modes, we determine which combinations maximize the system performance. Here we present our work developing and testing different procedures to estimate the incident aberrations, both in simulation and on the Keck bench. The current iteration of this calibration algorithm has been used successfully for VFN observing, and there are several avenues for improvement.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, to be published in SPIE Proceedings associated with the 2023 SPIE Optics and Photonics Conferenc

Effect of mycorrhizal colonization and light limitation on growth and reproduction of lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus L.)

Plants can respond with sink stimulation of photosynthesis when colonized with fungal or bacterial root symbionts, compensating costs of carbohydrate allocation to the microbes. However, constraints may arise under light limitation when plants cannot extensively increase photosynthesis. We hypothesize that under such conditions the costs for maintaining the symbiosis outweigh the benefits, ultimately turning the mutualist microbes into parasites, resulting in reduced plant growth and reproduction. Using lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus) as experimental plant, we applied two levels of light (full light, 75% shading) and microbial inoculation (sterile soil, mycorrhizal fungi) and quantified both vegetative and generative plant traits. As expected, shaded plants produced less vegetative biomass and seeds than non-shaded plants. However, individual seeds were significantly heavier in shaded plants and required less time for germination. While under both light conditions mycorrhizal plants showed a significantly reduced belowground biomass, mycorrhizal fungi neither enhanced overall plants performance in terms of total biomass and seed production nor resulted in measurable costs in either light condition. Our study suggest that mycorrhizal colonization neither provided benefits to lima bean plants grown under full light, nor created costs when photosynthesis was limited