The cost of systemic corticosteroid-induced morbidity in severe asthma : a health economic analysis

The study data-set was supported by the Respiratory Effectiveness Group through their academic partnership with Optimum Patient Care. Ciaran O'Neill was funded under a HRB Research Leader Award (RL/13/16).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Deviations and Mean Reversion to Purchasing Power in the Asian Currency Crisis of 1997

We analyse the process of mean reversion towards purchasing power parity (PPP) for a sample of Asian countries around the 1997 crisis. It is found that appreciation relative to PPP is evident prior to the 1997 crash period. Correction occurs from 1997 onwards, a period marked by extreme movements in exchange rates with both appreciation and depreciation relative to the PPP rate over relatively short periods. The key result of this paper is that although reversion towards PPP is apparent for mean, though not statistically significant, it is clear that there is a substantial, statistically significant change in variance from 1997 onwards. This result has implications both for economic modelling of crash periods and for appropriate choice of statistical tests

Purchasing Power Parity and Emerging South East Asian Nations

This paper provides a test of purchasing power parity (PPP) as an explanation for longterm foreign exchange rate movements. It essentially extends the analysis of Cheung and Lai (1993) to the South East Asian nations, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand. Consistent with Cheung and Lai, we impose symmetry and proportionality restrictions flowing from the absolute form of purchasing power parity (PPP) as well as applying the less restrictive Johansen test of PPP to data drawn from the period 1972 through 1997. The tests are also run for sub-periods with similar results. Symmetry and proportionality restrictions find little support in the unit root tests though the Johansen tests suggest that the foreign exchange rate and inflation rates are linked in a long run sense. Error correction models are then estimated on the basis of the assumption that the USA inflation rate is exogenous with respect to the selected emerging South East Asian nations. The error correction models vary considerably across the countries though one consistent result is the negative relation between the foreign exchange rate and the error correction parameter and the generally positive relation between the local CPI and the error correction parameter. The impact of the USA CPI on the countries varies considerably, ranging from no impact in the case of Indonesia through to a statistically significant impact on both the foreign exchange rate and local CPI for South Korea

The Shareholder Wealth Effects of Director Departure Announcements

While executive directors are responsible for superior performance, their behaviour may not always be aligned with shareholder interests. Non-executive directors provide one method of monitoring and controlling these and other agency costs. An event study focusing on director departure provides some insight into the economic importance of directors to shareholders. Initial results highlight both the importance of non-executive directors relative to other directors and the possibility of performance and size impacts. Multivariate tests suggest that non-executive director departures, especially when combined with resignation, explain the cross-sectional variation in share returns associated with director departure even after controlling for performance and size

The sound of violets: the ethnographic potency of poetry?

This paper takes the form of a dialogue between the two authors, and is in two halves, the first half discursive and propositional, and the second half exemplifying the rhetorical, epistemological and metaphysical affordances of poetry in critically scrutinising the rhetoric, epistemology and metaphysics of educational management discourse. Phipps and Saunders explore, through ideas and poems, how poetry can interrupt and/or illuminate dominant values in education and in educational research methods, such as: • alternatives to the military metaphors – targets, strategies and the like – that dominate the soundscape of education; • the kinds and qualities of the cognitive and feeling spaces that might be opened up by the shifting of methodological boundaries; • the considerable work done in ethnography on the use of the poetic: anthropologists have long used poetry as a medium for expressing their sense of empathic connection to their field and their subjects, particularly in considering the creativity and meaning-making that characterise all human societies in different ways; • the particular rhetorical affordances of poetry, as a discipline, as a practice, as an art, as patterned breath; its capacity to shift phonemic, and therewith methodological, authority; its offering of redress to linear and reductive attempts at scripting social life, as always already given and without alternative

Equilibrium and Disorder-induced behavior in Quantum Light-Matter Systems

We analyze equilibrium properties of coupled-doped cavities described by the Jaynes-Cummings- Hubbard Hamiltonian. In particular, we characterize the entanglement of the system in relation to the insulating-superfluid phase transition. We point out the existence of a crossover inside the superfluid phase of the system when the excitations change from polaritonic to purely photonic. Using an ensemble statistical approach for small systems and stochastic-mean-field theory for large systems we analyze static disorder of the characteristic parameters of the system and explore the ground state induced statistics. We report on a variety of glassy phases deriving from the hybrid statistics of the system. On-site strong disorder induces insulating behavior through two different mechanisms. For disorder in the light-matter detuning, low energy cavities dominate the statistics allowing the excitations to localize and bunch in such cavities. In the case of disorder in the light- matter coupling, sites with strong coupling between light and matter become very significant, which enhances the Mott-like insulating behavior. Inter-site (hopping) disorder induces fluidity and the dominant sites are strongly coupled to each other.Comment: about 10 pages, 12 figure

Distributed Sensing of a Cantilever Beam and Plate Using a Fiber Optic Sensing System

As the capabilities of Fiber Optic Sensing Systems continue to improve, their application to real-time distributed sensing for structural analysis and control of flexible systems is increasingly feasible. This paper will report experimental results on the use of a Fiber Optic Sensing System for static and dynamic shape estimation of a cantilever beam and plate. Demonstrating the use of this sensor technology in benchtop experiments is the first step in effectively incorporating fiber optic sensors in the Integrated Adaptive Wing Technology Maturation aeroelastic half-span wind tunnel model for real-time shape sensing and feedback for drag optimization, maneuver load alleviation, gust load alleviation, and flutter suppression control laws. The effectiveness of the sensing system will be analyzed and the application of these results to aeroelasticity experimentation will be discussed

Teleportation of a quantum state of a spatial mode with a single massive particle

Mode entanglement exists naturally between regions of space in ultra-cold atomic gases. It has, however, been debated whether this type of entanglement is useful for quantum protocols. This is due to a particle number superselection rule that restricts the operations that can be performed on the modes. In this paper, we show how to exploit the mode entanglement of just a single particle for the teleportation of an unknown quantum state of a spatial mode. We detail how to overcome the superselection rule to create any initial quantum state and how to perform Bell state analysis on two of the modes. We show that two of the four Bell states can always be reliably distinguished, while the other two have to be grouped together due to an unsatisfied phase matching condition. The teleportation of an unknown state of a quantum mode thus only succeeds half of the time.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, this paper was presented at TQC 2010 and extends the work of Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 200502 (2009

Extreme nonlocality with one photon

Quantum nonlocality is typically assigned to systems of two or more well separated particles, but nonlocality can also exist in systems consisting of just a single particle, when one considers the subsystems to be distant spatial field modes. Single particle nonlocality has been confirmed experimentally via a bipartite Bell inequality. In this paper, we introduce an N-party Hardy-like proof of impossibility of local elements of reality and a Bell inequality for local realistic theories for a single particle superposed symmetrical over N spatial field modes (i.e. a N qubit W state). We show that, in the limit of large N, the Hardy-like proof effectively becomes an all-versus nothing (or GHZ-like) proof, and the quantum-classical gap of the Bell inequality tends to be same of the one in a three-particle GHZ experiment. We detail how to test the nonlocality in realistic systems.Comment: 11 single column pages, 2 figures; v3 now includes a Bell inequality in addition to the results in the previous versio