The business-social policy nexus: Corporate power and corporate inputs into social policy

It is increasingly impossible to understand and explain the shape and delivery of contemporary social policy unless we consider the role of business. Several factors have been at work here. First, many of the changes in social policy introduced since the 1970s have been in response either to business demands or more general concerns about national competitiveness and the needs of business. Second, globalisation has increased corporate power within states, leading to transformations in social and fiscal policies. Third, business has been incorporated into the management of many areas of the welfare state by governments keen to control expenditure and introduce private sector values into services. Fourth, welfare services, from hospitals to schools, have been increasingly opened up to private markets. Despite all this, the issues of business influence and involvement in social policy has been neglected in the literature. This article seeks to place corporate power and influence centre-stage by outlining and critically reflecting on the place of business within contemporary welfare states, with a particular focus on the UK. Business, it argues, is increasingly important to welfare outcomes and needs to be taken into account more fully within the social policy literature

Experimental investigations in epitaxial growth of crystalline layers final report

Epitaxial growth of crystalline layer

A Multiple Criteria Decision System to Improve Performance of Federal Conservation Programs

The Environmental Quality Incentives Program and other voluntary Federal conservation programs follow a similar approach for enrollment. Consistent with the legislation, agency personnel identify eligibility criteria, suitable conservation practices, and a process to score, rank, and select applications for funding. Our research outlines a formal multiple criteria decision analysis system that is broadly applicable to current Federal conservation programs to score, rank, and enroll applications, and distribute program funds. Then, we apply the decision system to Indiana’s EQIP program using data from 2005. The incorporation of GLEAMS model improved our estimates of water quality impacts by reintroducing the spatial heterogeneity.Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis, Federal Conservation Programs, Environmental Quality Incentives Program, GLEAMS, Environmental Economics and Policy, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

New Threats for Old Manufacturing Problems: Secure IoT-Enabled Monitoring of Legacy Production Machinery

The digitization of manufacturing through the introduction of Industrie 4.0 technologies creates additional business opportunities and technical challenges. The integration of such technologies on legacy production machinery can upgrade them to become part of the digital and smart manufacturing environment. A typical example is that of industrial monitoring and maintenance, which can benefit from internet of things (IoT) solutions. This paper presents the development of an-IoT-enabled monitoring solution for machine tools as part of a remote maintenance approach. While the technical challenges pertaining to the development and integration of such solutions in a manufacturing environment have been the subject of relevant research in the literature, the corresponding new security challenges arising from the introduction of such technologies have not received equal attention. Failure to adequately handle such issues is a key barrier to the adoption of such solutions by industry. This paper aims to assess and classify the security aspects of integrating IoT technology with monitoring systems in manufacturing environments and propose a systematic view of relevant vulnerabilities and threats by taking an IoT architecture point of view. Our analysis has led to proposing a novel modular approach for secure IoT-enabled monitoring for legacy production machinery. The introduced approach is implemented on a case study of machine tool monitoring, highlighting key findings and issues for further research

Spatial sampling heterogeneity limits the detectability of deep time latitudinal biodiversity gradients

The latitudinal biodiversity gradient (LBG), in which species richness decreases from tropical to polar regions, is a pervasive pattern of the modern biosphere. Although the distribution of fossil occurrences suggests this pattern has varied through deep time, the recognition of palaeobiogeographic patterns is hampered by geological and anthropogenic biases. In particular, spatial sampling heterogeneity has the capacity to impact upon the reconstruction of deep time LBGs. Here we use a simulation framework to test the detectability of three different types of LBG (flat, unimodal and bimodal) over the last 300 Myr. We show that heterogeneity in spatial sampling significantly impacts upon the detectability of genuine LBGs, with known biodiversity patterns regularly obscured after applying the spatial sampling window of fossil collections. Sampling-standardization aids the reconstruction of relative biodiversity gradients, but cannot account for artefactual absences introduced by geological and anthropogenic biases. Therefore, we argue that some previous studies might have failed to recover the ‘true’ LBG type owing to incomplete and heterogeneous sampling, particularly between 200 and 20 Ma. Furthermore, these issues also have the potential to bias global estimates of past biodiversity, as well as inhibit the recognition of extinction and radiation events