Public Jobs and Public Agendas: The Public Sector in an Era of Economic Stress

[Excerpt] The issues described in this volume\u27s chapters remained in flux as this book was being completed. The U.S. economy was in a recovery phase, albeit a recovery at a rather lackluster pace. Because of the lags in adjustment in state and local governments, the public sector was coping with prior circumstances even as the private sector resumed an economic expansion. At the international level, some European elections in the aftermath of the Great Recession have suggested that there is public frustration with austerity policies. The Great Recession occurred in an era of political polarization, which the sharp downturn exacerbated. As a result, resolving the issues related to public sector employment was complicated by an infusion of ideology. Working out the problems that remain unresolved is likely to be marked by continued partisan struggles in state and local affairs, and in similar conflicts around the world

Review of Victorian Britain- An Encyclopedia

There is an old adage that if you have a large problem, the best way to tackle it is to break it down into small parts and deal with each in turn. The trouble with this theory is that if your problem is as large as the Victorian era the resultant number of parts is so huge that they resemble the unconnected pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, each individual piece having some value in its own right, but not giving an idea of the complete picture. The reign of Queen Victoria, the longest in British history, witnessed an unprecedented explosion of progress in all facets of human activity. This enormous fecundity, the number of personalities involved, the ideas expounded and the frontiers pushed back make the task of recording it all such a daunting one that one feels the compilers of this encyclopedia were very brave to contemplate it. Within the limits suggested above, I think they have succeeded

The impact of maintenance practices on operational and business performance

Maintenance and plant engineering are considered to be important parts of the strategy underlying successful manufacturing. The aim of this paper is to investigate the deployment level of good practice in these areas compared to other manufacturing processes and what impact they have on an organisation’s performance. It draws empirical results out of the data provided from a large-scale benchmarking study carried out in a specific region of the UK and tests part of these with case research. The findings are discussed, highlighting any variations between company size, sector and world-class status and the significance of any correlation found between practice and performanc

What Are We Goin\u27 To Do? : When There\u27s Nothing To Do On Sunday

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/5602/thumbnail.jp

EIC Crab Cavity Multipole Analysis

Crab cavities are specialized RF devices designed for colliders targeting high luminosities. It is a straightforward solution to retrieve head-on collision with crossing angle existing to fast separate both beams after collision. The Electron Ion Collider (EIC) has a crossing angle of 25 mrad, and will use local crabbing to minimize the dynamic aperture requirement throughout the rings. The current crab cavity design for the EIC lacks axial symmetry. Therefore, their higher order components of the fundamental deflecting mode have a potential of affecting the long-term beam stability. We present here the multipole analysis and preliminary particle tracking results from the current crab cavity design

Pacific Equatorial Age Transect : expeditions 320 and 321 of the riserless drilling platform from and to Honolulu, Hawaii (USA), Sites U1331–U1336, 5 March–4 May 2009 and Honolulu, Hawaii (USA), to San Diego, California (USA), Sites U1337–U1338, 4 May–22 June 2009

Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 320/321, "Pacific Equatorial Age Transect" (Sites U1331–U1338), was designed to recover a continuous Cenozoic record of the equatorial Pacific by coring above the paleoposition of the Equator at successive crustal ages on the Pacific plate. These sediments record the evolution of the equatorial climate system throughout the Cenozoic. As we gained more information about the past movement of plates and when in Earth's history "critical" climate events took place, it became possible to drill an age transect ("flow-line") along the position of the paleoequator in the Pacific, targeting important time slices where the sedimentary archive allows us to reconstruct past climatic and tectonic conditions. The Pacific Equatorial Age Transect (PEAT) program cored eight sites from the sediment surface to basement, with basalt aged between 53 and 18 Ma, covering the time period following maximum Cenozoic warmth, through initial major glaciations, to today. The PEAT program allows the reconstruction of extreme changes of the calcium carbonate compensation depth (CCD) across major geological boundaries during the last 53 m.y. A very shallow CCD during most of the Paleogene makes it difficult to obtain well-preserved carbonate sediments during these stratigraphic intervals, but Expedition 320 recovered a unique sedimentary biogenic sediment archive for time periods just after the Paleocene/Eocene boundary event, the Eocene cooling, the Eocene–Oligocene transition, the "one cold pole" Oligocene, the Oligocene–Miocene transition, and the middle Miocene cooling. Expedition 321, the second part of the PEAT program, recovered sediments from the time period roughly from 25 Ma forward, including sediments crossing the Oligocene/Miocene boundary and two major Neogene equatorial Pacific sediment sections. Together with older Deep Sea Drilling Project and Ocean Drilling Program drilling in the equatorial Pacific, we can delineate the position of the paleoequator and variations in sediment thickness from ~150°W to 110°W longitude

The role of primary care in cancer diagnosis via emergency presentation: qualitative synthesis of significant event reports

Background: Patients diagnosed with cancer in the context of an emergency presentation (EP) have poorer outcomes. It is often assumed that such patients present to the emergency department without consulting their general practitioner (GP). Little work has been done to identify primary care involvement before hospital attendance. Methods: Participating primary care practices completed a significant event audit (SEA) report for the last patient diagnosed with cancer as a result of an EP. Accounts were synthesised and a qualitative approach to analysis undertaken. Results: SEAs for 222 patients were analysed. A range of cancers were included, the most common being lung (32.4%) and upper gastrointestinal (19.8%). In most cases, patients had contact with their practice before diagnosis, primarily in the period immediately before admission. In only eight cases had there been no input from primary care. Accounts of protracted primary care contact generally demonstrated complexity, often related to comorbidity, patient-mediated factors or reassurance provided by negative investigations. Learning points identified by practices centred on the themes of presentation and diagnosis, consultation and safety-netting, communication and system issues, patient factors and referral guidelines. Conclusions: There is extensive primary care input into patients whose diagnosis results from EP, and for the most part potential ‘delay’ in referral can be reasonably explained by the complexity of the presentation or by coexisting patient factors

LHC Crab Cavity Coupler Test Boxes

The LHC double quarter wave (DQW) crab cavities have two different types of Higher Order Mode (HOM) couplers in addition to a fundamental power coupler (FPC). The FPC requires conditioning, so to achieve this we have designed a radio-frequency (RF) quarter wave resonator to provide high transmission between two opposing FPCs. For the HOM couplers we must ensure that the stop-band filter is positioned at the cavity frequency and that peak transmission occurs at the same frequencies as the strongest HOMs. We have designed two test boxes which preserve the cavity spectral response in order to test the couplers