General expense and cost summaries: instruction paper

While it is realized that there are differences of opinion among accountants on some of the questions considered in the presentation of this subject, it is the intent of this article to present what is generally conceded by our leading accounting authorities as the best practice in a well-organized, up-to-date, industrial plant, and to so present the subject to the prospective student that he may fully understand and master the why and the how of this important question in factory accounting.That the subject may be carefully considered in all its various phases, it will for convenience be developed under the following general divisions in the order in which they are naturally suggested: (1) Basis of Expense Distribution. (2) Methods of Expense Distribution. (3) Percentage Method Exemplified

A laboratory study on cold-mix, cold-lay emulsion mixtures

This paper describes laboratory experiments and presents results for the performances of cold-mix, cold-lay emulsion mixtures. The main objective of the experiments was to evaluate and improve the properties of the cold mixtures. The mixture properties evaluated were: volumetric properties, indirect tensile stiffness modulus (ITSM), repeated load axial creep and fatigue. These properties were compared with conventional hot asphalt mixtures not containing any waste/recycled materials. To optimise the performances of the mixtures, a target of ITSM value of 2000 MPa was selected. At full curing conditions, the stiffness of the cold mixes was found to be very similar to that of hot mixtures of the same penetration grade base bitumen (100 pen). Test results also show that the addition of 1–2% cement significantly improved the mechanical performance of the mixes and significantly accelerated their strength gain. The fatigue behaviour of the cold mixes that incorporated cement was comparable with that of the hot mixtures

Leadership in the British civil service: an interpretation

This article is essentially a polemic. The argument is that when politicians and officials now talk of ‘leadership’ in the British civil service they do not use that word in the way in which it was previously used. In the past leading civil servants, acting in partnership with ministers and within constitutional constraints, exercised leadership in the sense of setting example, inspiring confidence and encouraging loyalty. The loosening of traditional constitutional patterns, the marginalization of senior officials in the policy process and the emergence of business methods as the preferred model for public ­administration have led to a political and administrative environment in which leadership in the British civil service is now about encouraging patterns of behaviour which fit in with these changes. Leadership skills are now about ‘delivery’; they are not about motivation. It is time for politicians, officials and scholars to be open about this

Ethical issues in autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) in advanced breast cancer: A systematic literature review

BACKGROUND: An effectiveness assessment on ASCT in locally advanced and metastatic breast cancer identified serious ethical issues associated with this intervention. Our objective was to systematically review these aspects by means of a literature analysis. METHODS: We chose the reflexive Socratic approach as the review method using Hofmann's question list, conducted a comprehensive literature search in biomedical, psychological and ethics bibliographic databases and screened the resulting hits in a 2-step selection process. Relevant arguments were assembled from the included articles, and were assessed and assigned to the question list. Hofmann's questions were addressed by synthesizing these arguments. RESULTS: Of the identified 879 documents 102 included arguments related to one or more questions from Hofmann's question list. The most important ethical issues were the implementation of ASCT in clinical practice on the basis of phase-II trials in the 1990s and the publication of falsified data in the first randomized controlled trials (Bezwoda fraud), which caused significant negative effects on recruiting patients for further clinical trials and the doctor-patient relationship. Recent meta-analyses report a marginal effect in prolonging disease-free survival, accompanied by severe harms, including death. ASCT in breast cancer remains a stigmatized technology. Reported health-related-quality-of-life data are often at high risk of bias in favor of the survivors. Furthermore little attention has been paid to those patients who were dying. CONCLUSIONS: The questions were addressed in different degrees of completeness. All arguments were assignable to the questions. The central ethical dimensions of ASCT could be discussed by reviewing the published literature

Duality for The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd ed.

The word ‘duality ’ is often used to invoke a contrast between two related concepts, as when the informal, peasant, or agricultural sector of an economy is labeled as dual to the formal, or profitmaximizing sector. In microeconomic analysis, however, ‘duality ’ refers to connections between quantities and prices which arise as a consequence of the hypotheses of optimization and convexity

Energy monitoring system

Best Practice ProgrammeSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:4201.3508(24) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo