Metallurgy of armour exhibited at the Palace Armoury, Valletta, Malta

The metallurgy of ten armour pieces from the Palace Armoury Collection in Malta was examined. Results showed that out of ten artefacts examined, six were produced in low carbon steel, one from a high carbon steel and three were made from wrought iron. One of the wrought iron armour pieces was fabricated from a phosphoric iron, an unusual material for these artefacts. All the steel artefacts exhibited a ferrite-pearlite microstructure. In their manufacture, no attempts had been made at producing martensite by full or slack quenching. All metal fragments contained slag inclusions. The elongated nature of the latter suggested that these artefacts were forged into shape.peer-reviewe

Skills are not enough : the globalisation of knowledge and the future Uk economy

The UK’s policy response to globalisation centres on building a highly skilled population and competing in higher value market places: this is not enough. The UK needs to move beyond a ‘national-centric view of the world’ and to place a greater emphasis on active demand side policy that engages with employers and focuses on job creation, job quality and labour supply

Researcher-led teaching:embodiment of academic practice

This paper explores the embodied practices of leading researchers(and/or leading scholars/practitioners), suggesting that distinctive‘researcher-led teaching’ depends on educators who are willing and able to be their research in the teaching setting. We advocate an approach to the development of higher education pedagogy which makes lead-researchers the objects of inquiry and we summarise case study analyses (in neuroscience and humanities) where the knowledge-making‘signatures’ of academic leaders are used to exhibit the otherwise hidden identities of research. We distinguish between learning readymade knowledge and the process of knowledge in the making and point towards the importance of inquiry in the flesh. We develop a view of higher education teaching that depends upon academic status a priori, but we argue that this stance is inclusive because it has the propensity to locate students as participants in academic culture

Toward closer credit-sales cooperation in mercantile credit management

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston Universit

Economics in International Relations

The general topic for this morning is Economics in International Relations. This is another one of those impossible academic titles which includes a body of material deserving at least a lifetime of study

The construction and use of mathematical programming models for the analysis of the integrated investment and financing decision within a firm

This thesis examines the contribution that mathematical programming-models can make to the solution of the joint problem of investment and financing within a firm. In particular it contrasts the performance of rules for investment appraisal which are based on discounting methodologies with the solutions which are obtainable from linear programming models. Using a method of analysis which exploits the relationship between the primal and dual solutions in such models, it argues that there are strong theoretical reasons why linear programming models will not generate solutions which are radically different from those which can be arrived at by simple discounting procedures. It concludes that linear programming models in their current form add little to the practice of investment appraisal. It shows however, that such models provide a powerful framework for the development of normative decision rules for project appraisal within the broader context of the firm's operating environment. The impact of alternative measures of debt capacity and the effect of finite and irregular cash flow patterns on the investment decision are all considered using this framework. These ideas are then applied to the specific problem of the valuation of a financial lease contract. The final Chapter returns to the problem of using linear programming models for investment appraisal and explores one way in which they might be restructured to be of practical assistance to corporate financial planners

Conservatism in residual income models: theory and supporting evidence

PublishedArticle"This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Accounting and Business Research on 29 May 2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00014788.2015.1009869."In this paper, we develop a framework for evaluating the impact of conservative accounting on the structure of residual income models of equity valuation. We explore specific examples of both unconditional and conditional conservatism and observe a common mathematical structure. We proceed to generalise our model and identify the joint dependency of conservatism and the persistence of abnormal earnings on the weights attached to book values, earnings and dividends. We are able to show theoretically the likely numerical impact of conservatism on price-earnings ratios and under valuations produced by residual income models. We investigate empirically the interaction between conservatism and persistence and find they accord well with the theory developed. We briefly discuss the implications for testing of the effect of conservatism on valuation and linear information dynamics