The Effect of Website Age on Reported Cash Flows

Websites are one of the most debated technologies in business. After the dotcom bust, many argue that websites lack value in commercial environments. Cash flow, essential to a business' health, is often a reliable indicator of income opportunities. Yet the link between cash flows and website ownership has never been satisfactorily made. This paper explores the relationship between cash flows, website use and maturity by examining factors such as website age, number of IT employees, total assets and market capitalisation. The study finds that website ownership and maturity do not explain cash flows, except for companies in IT industries

Students and knowledge exchange in university business services

Enterprise is becoming a more important part of UK Higher Education Institution (HEI) activity as a source of revenue, added value to students, and broader demonstration of the contribution of HEIs to the economy. Despite this there is little information on the overall provision of business services by HEIs in the UK and even less on that which involves students engaging with consultancy. In this paper, our focus is on the latter: the role of students in university business consultancy within the disciplines of marketing, media and creative industries. In this report we present: - An overview of how involved students are engaging in knowledge exchange through consultancy via a comprehensive audit of all 164 UK HEI’s. Here, we identify different models of student consultancy in terms of their links to research and education, and offer some more broader reflections on the way that UK universities are engaging with business. - Through four case studies (with a total of 32 interviews and 3 focus groups), an analysis of the key tensions, barriers and motivations (both internal and external) in integrating students in consultancy in ways what benefit them, academic staff, HEIs and external organisations. - The implications for the management of such projects, and a series of recommendations for those who wish to involve students in university consultancy services. The report should be essential reading for academic leaders and staff involved in delivering education for employability

Television news and the symbolic criminalisation of young people

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Studies, 9(1), 75 - 90, 2008, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14616700701768105.This essay combines quantitative and qualitative analysis of six UK television news programmes. It seeks to analyse the representation of young people within broadcast news provision at a time when media representations, political discourse and policy making generally appear to be invoking young people as something of a folk devil or a locus for moral panics. The quantitative analysis examines the frequency with which young people appear as main actors across a range of different subjects and analyses the role of young people as news sources. It finds a strong correlation between young people and violent crime. A qualitative analysis of four “special reports” or backgrounders on channel Five's Five News explores the representation of young people in more detail, paying attention to contradictions and tensions in the reports, the role of statistics in crime reporting, the role of victims of crime and the tensions between conflicting news frames.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

The Unusual Suspects: An Educated, Legitimately Employed Drug Dealing Network

This article challenges the mainstream discourse that is often used to conceptualize illegal drug supply. In particular, it questions the assumption that drug dealers and the markets they inhabit are a social aberration, restricted primarily to social outsiders operating in socially and economically marginalized communities. Drawing on 6 years of ethnographic fieldwork with 25 “conventional” working-class “lads,” the article makes two overarching arguments. First, that the illegal drug trade is by no means confined to a subset of violent or marginalized drug distributors. Second, that the organization and structure of drug distribution networks can often be entwined into the fabric of conventional routines. The article concludes that criminological research must move toward better conceptualizing the so-called silent majority of drug dealers if we are to accurately reframe the current reductionist drugs discourse

Pursuit-Evasion with Acoustic Sensing using One Step Nash Equilibria

Abstract-In this paper, we derive a non-zero-sum multiplayer game that models pursuit-evasion tactics in an acoustic field. Specifically, the Pursuer uses acoustic sensing to determine the location of the Evader. However, this sensing ability is corrupted by noise generated from the motion of both the Pursuer and Evader. It is argued that the dominant mechanism of sensory degrading noise from the Pursuer is a function of speed, while the noise from the Evader is a function of acceleration and speed. Depending on the set of parameters characterizing the game, the control evolution exhibits various striking and diverse qualitative features. In some cases, the strategy of choosing actions associated with one step Nash equilibria yields a limit cycle response. This confirms observations by other researchers that the temporal evolution of games need not converge to a single Nash equilibrium and opens opportunities for future analysis on making the correct choice of cost functions by determining the effects this has on the agent's ability to obtain a desired goal

Local-area sustainability assessment system: a theoretical and operational overview

The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conferences have been held biennially since 2003 to support interdisciplinary policy-related urban research. This paper was presented at SOAC 4 held in Perth from 24 to 27 November 2009. SOAC 4 was hosted by the University of Western Australia, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University and Murdoch University and held at The University of Western of Australia’s Crawley campus.SOAC 4 was a collaborative venture between colleagues from the planning, geography and related disciplines across the four public universities. The meta-theme of this conference - city growth, sustainability, vitality and vulnerability – sought to capture the dynamic and complex nature and contexts in which Australian cities find themselves in the early 21st century. The last decade or so has seen Australian cities and many of their residents benefit from significant economic prosperity. With this economic prosperity, largely on the back of a resources boom, Australian cities and resources and mineral-rich regions, particularly in Queensland and in WA, have been subjected to profound demographic, social, economic, environmental and political changes. In the wake of the so-called ‘global financial crisis’ we have witnessed the rise of what might be called ‘neo-Keynesianism’ as various liberal democratic nations have pumped billions of dollars into their national economies via ‘bail outs’ or a stimulus package’ in an effort to stave off economic recession. The economic prosperity and more recent uncertainty that has been experienced in the last decade provides a fascinating and dare we say it a timely backdrop to critically reflect on the condition of urban Australia. All published papers have been subject to a peer reviewing process