Place leadership and regional economic development: a framework for cross-regional analysis

This paper examines the leadership of places – cities, regions, communities – in Australia, Finland, Germany, Italy, the United States and the United Kingdom and explores the capacity of vignettes to generate new, theoretical and empirical insights. It uses vignettes to identify the features of place leadership evident in 12 case studies across six nations. The research finds significant commonalities in place leadership with respect to the importance attached to boundary spanning, the role of government officials in responding to the prospect of regional decline or growth and how the nature of the challenge confronting a locality determines the adequacy of the response

The Evolution of Compact Binary Star Systems

We review the formation and evolution of compact binary stars consisting of white dwarfs (WDs), neutron stars (NSs), and black holes (BHs). Binary NSs and BHs are thought to be the primary astrophysical sources of gravitational waves (GWs) within the frequency band of ground-based detectors, while compact binaries of WDs are important sources of GWs at lower frequencies to be covered by space interferometers (LISA). Major uncertainties in the current understanding of properties of NSs and BHs most relevant to the GW studies are discussed, including the treatment of the natal kicks which compact stellar remnants acquire during the core collapse of massive stars and the common envelope phase of binary evolution. We discuss the coalescence rates of binary NSs and BHs and prospects for their detections, the formation and evolution of binary WDs and their observational manifestations. Special attention is given to AM CVn-stars -- compact binaries in which the Roche lobe is filled by another WD or a low-mass partially degenerate helium-star, as these stars are thought to be the best LISA verification binary GW sources.Comment: 105 pages, 18 figure

Regional Strategies for Renewable Energies: Development Processes in Greater Manchester

Making the transition to renewable, low-carbon forms of energy could be the defining question of our times. Especially for complex problems such as energy supply the regional scale and new forms of control, coordination and cooperation—subsumed under the term regional governance—are widely discussed both in politics (e.g. G8 conferences, Climate Summits, etc.) and academia. The turn from conventional to renewable energies is one major topic of discussion. For this process of change, regional governance can be seen as the best way to initiate it. With the help of a case study conducted in Greater Manchester, UK, this article concentrates on two points: (1) the development of regional governance arrangements in the light of a low-carbon agenda as mixture of path-dependent bottom-up and top-down approaches and (2) the impacts of specific constellations and environments for regional energy development that include institutional rules, strategic behaviour of actors and strategic discourses. This article shows that the integration of a regional governance structure into the strategic development process can achieve a substantial qualitative improvement for the development of a regional energy strategy