A Note on Return on Foreign Assets and Foreign Presence for UK Multinationals

Within the context of the international business literature on multinationality and performance we develop new data on the foreign presence and performance of large UK multinational enterprises (MNEs). There are 32 UK MNEs for which we can obtain data on both their degree of multinationality (measured by the ratio of foreign-to-total sales, F/T) and on their performance. Here, in addition to the traditional overall performance of the firm, shown as return on total assets (ROTA), we use new data on the return on foreign assets (ROFA). We conduct analytical work to show the positioning of the UK MNEs in the ROFA and F/T space and provide regression results showing a linear relationship between multinationality and performance, using the new ROFA metric.UK multinationals, return on foreign assets, foreign-to-total sales, performance, multinational strategy

An optimal fixed-priority assignment algorithm for supporting fault-tolerant hard real-time systems

The main contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present an appropriate schedulability analysis, based on response time analysis, for supporting fault-tolerant hard real-time systems. We consider systems that make use of error-recovery techniques to carry out fault tolerance. Second, we propose a new priority assignment algorithm which can be used, together with the schedulability analysis, to improve system fault resilience. These achievements come from the observation that traditional priority assignment policies may no longer be appropriate when faults are being considered. The proposed schedulability analysis takes into account the fact that the recoveries of tasks may be executed at higher priority levels. This characteristic is very important since, after an error, a task certainly has a shorter period of time to meet its deadline. The proposed priority assignment algorithm, which uses some properties of the analysis, is very efficient. We show that the method used to find out an appropriate priority assignment reduces the search space from O(n!) to O(n/sup 2/), where n is the number of task recovery procedures. Also, we show that the priority assignment algorithm is optimal in the sense that the fault resilience of task sets is maximized as for the proposed analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated by simulation

International Success of British Companies

This paper examines the international success of British companies in a matrix combining global market share and international revenues. We identify those industry segments in which British companies are most successful internationally, and also investigate whether these are attractive industries in terms of profitability and growth. We find that the industries with the largest global market shares for British companies are Mining, Casinos (and Gaming), Oil Companies (Major), Distillers & Brewers, and Water Utilities. Four of the top ten might be considered to be “sin” industries. The industries with the highest international revenues are Precious Metals, Pharmaceuticals, Industrial (Diversified), Oil Companies (Secondary), and Mining. We also find that virtually all of the largest British firms average over a 10% global market share, in the “British Winners” segment of our matrix. However, we find the second measure, the extent of internationalization, to be ambiguous. The manufacturing (product-based) firms tried to be highly internationalized, as they compete globally, but the largest British services firms (financials, retailers) tend to have low internationalization, and therefore appear to benefit from a still somewhat regulated home market. In addition, British companies have done a good job of building up global market shares in higher growth industries. We provide recommendations for managers as to how British companies with different combinations of global market share and extent of internationalisation can improve their positions. Our methodology can also be applied to analyzing companies from other nations.

Creating a web-scale video collection for research

This paper begins by considering a number of important design questions for a web-scale, widely available, multimedia test collection intended to support long-term scientific evaluation and comparison of content-based video analysis and exploitation systems. Such exploitation systems would include the kinds of functionality already explored within the annual TRECVid benchmarking activity such as search, semantic concept detection, and automatic summarisation. We then report on our progress in creating such a multimedia collection which we believe to be web scale and which will support a next generation of benchmarking activities for content-based video operations, and we report on our plans for how we intend to put this collection, the IACC.1 collection, to use

TRECVID 2008 - goals, tasks, data, evaluation mechanisms and metrics

The TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID) 2008 is a TREC-style video analysis and retrieval evaluation, the goal of which remains to promote progress in content-based exploitation of digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. Over the last 7 years this effort has yielded a better understanding of how systems can effectively accomplish such processing and how one can reliably benchmark their performance. In 2008, 77 teams (see Table 1) from various research organizations --- 24 from Asia, 39 from Europe, 13 from North America, and 1 from Australia --- participated in one or more of five tasks: high-level feature extraction, search (fully automatic, manually assisted, or interactive), pre-production video (rushes) summarization, copy detection, or surveillance event detection. The copy detection and surveillance event detection tasks are being run for the first time in TRECVID. This paper presents an overview of TRECVid in 2008

Methods for producing soluble, biologically-active disulfide-bond containing eukaryotic proteins in bacterial cells

Disclosed are methods of producing eukaryotic disulfide bond-containing polypeptides in bacterial hosts, and compositions resulting therefrom. Co-expression of a eukaryotic foldase and a disulfide bond-containing polypeptide in a bacterial host cell is demonstrated. In particular embodiments, the methods have been used to produce mammalian pancreatic trypsin inhibitor and tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) in soluble, biologically-active forms, which are isolatable from the bacterial periplasm. Also disclosed are expression systems, recombinant vectors, and transformed host cells.Board of Regents, University of Texas Syste

The effects of a home-based physical activity intervention on cardiorespiratory fitness in breast cancer survivors; a randomised controlled trial

The aim of this current randomised controlled trial was to evaluate the effects of a home-based physical activity (PA) intervention on cardiorespiratory fitness in breast cancer survivors. Thirty-two post-adjuvant therapy breast cancer survivors (age = 52 ± 10 years; BMI = 27.2 ± 4.4 kg∙m2) were randomised to a six-month home-based PA intervention with face-to-face and telephone PA counselling or usual care. Cardiorespiratory fitness and self-reported PA were assessed at baseline and at six-months. Participants had a mean relative V̇O2max of 25.3 ± 4.7 ml∙kg−1∙min−1, which is categorised as “poor” according to age and gender matched normative values. Magnitude-based inference analyses revealed likely at least small beneficial effects (effect sizes ≥.20) on absolute and relative V̇O2 max (d = .44 and .40, respectively), and total and moderate PA (d = .73 and .59, respectively) in the intervention compared to the usual care group. We found no likely beneficial improvements in any other outcome. Our home-based PA intervention led to likely beneficial, albeit modest, increases in cardiorespiratory fitness and self-reported PA in breast cancer survivors. This intervention has the potential for widespread implementation and adoption, which could considerably impact on post-treatment recovery in this population