Defining the ‘online gambler’: the British perspective

The UK 2010 Gambling Prevalence Study (GPS), published on 15 February, has shown that there are many different types of attitudes and behaviours towards gambling. What an ‘online gambler’ is in reality is difficult to ascertain as many factors need to be taken into account. Heather Wardle, Researcher at the National Centre for Social Research, and Mark Griffiths, Professor at Nottingham Trent University - who both coauthored the 2010 GPS - analyse the different types of behaviour in the sphere of ‘online gambling’

Supplier search in industrial clusters: Sheffield metal working in the 1990s

Industrial clusters can be characterised by high levels of personal interaction between the owners/managers of firms. It has been argued that within industrial clusters community and firm tend to merge. One result of the notion of a cluster as a community is that it might be expected that personal interaction between members of the community will have an important influence on intra-cluster trading patterns. Whereas there appears to be a number of anecdotal stories of the impact of the 'personal' upon the 'economic' within clusters we do not know whether such relationships are uniquely part of cluster behaviour or whether they are found more widely within the industrial system. The paper reports the result of a new interview survey of seventy small metal working firms in the Sheffield metal working cluster in the UK. Although dealing with a traditional industrial sector the analysis is focused upon contemporary business patterns. It explores the ways in which owner/managers of small metal working firms search for new suppliers. In the empirical analysis the search process is conceptualised as being characterised by two stages: the identification of potential new suppliers and the selection of a specific new supplier. The research is in undertaken in two parts. It first measures the role of the personal networks of the owner/managers of small firms in the identification and selection of suppliers. Second, the research examines whether personal factors are more important in the identification and selection of within cluster suppliers than in the identification and selection of suppliers based outside the cluster. It is shown that, overall, personal networks are of major significance in the identification of suppliers and that information received from third parties are more important than direct contacts between the owner/manager and the potential supplier. However, in the selection decision, price and availability are dominant considerations and personal factors such as trust and reputation of only minor significance. It was not possible to identify a cluster effect in disaggregation of the data to separate out the relationships with cluster suppliers and relationships with suppliers based outside the cluster. There was no evidence that personal factors play a more important role in the establishment of within cluster links. In sum, personal networks are important in the identification of within cluster links but they are equally important in the establishment of links outside the cluster. This suggests that the importance of personal interaction within clusters has been overplayed.

Deriving AGN properties from radio CP and LP

We report multi-frequency circular polarization measurements for the radio source 0056-00 taken at the Effelsberg 100-m radiotelescope. The data reduction is based on a new calibration procedure that allows the contemporary measurement of the four Stokes parameters with single-dish radiotelescopesComment: 2 pages, Proceeding of "IAU Symposium No.259. Cosmic Magnetic Fields from planets, to stars and galaxies

The Strategic Use of Mexico to Restrict South American Access to the Diversity Visa Lottery

In 1990, Congress enacted the Family Unity and Employment Opportunity Act (the 1990 Act ), which created a visa lottery to enhance the diversity of the immigrant stream and to ensure that areas of the world sending relatively few immigrants to the United States could still have access to the immigrant stream. In order to achieve these goals, Congress created a complex formula by which 55,000 diversity visas would be distributed annually among six geographically defined regions based on the total number of immigrant admissions from each region. Under this formula, regions with relatively low admission rates are granted more visas than regions with relatively high admission rates. As the bulk of immigrants to the United States come from Asia and North America (primarily Mexico), it is not surprising that fewer diversity visas are granted to North American and Asian immigrants than to immigrants from Europe and Africa. What is startling is how few diversity visas are allotted to immigrants from South America, even though every year there are fewer non-diversity immigrants from South America than from Europe. For example, in 2004, South America accounted for approximately 8% of all non-diversity immigrant admissions, significantly less than the 12% that came from Europe. In that same year, almost 38% of all diversity visa immigrants came from Europe, but only 3% of all diversity immigrants came from continental South America. This Note will shed light on the legislative slight of hand responsible for this discrepancy, which has been largely overlooked in the debate surrounding the diversity visa lottery: the strategic definition of the South America region. By defining the South America region to include, for diversity lottery purposes, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and the South American continent, the drafters of the diversity lottery were able to limit a cultural group\u27s access to the lottery while simultaneously ensuring that a maximum number of lottery visas would be available for European and African immigrants