Public leisure management : a strategic analysis of effectiveness and performance outcomes

Local government in England have reformed the management of their public services over many years. The increase in collaboration across the public sector between the public, private and voluntary sectors has been promoted under New Labour in public leisure provision, either through contracts or partnership arrangements. The transfer to collaboration has created significantly new modes of service delivery, including in-house, leisure trust, and private leisure management contractor arrangements. There is a need to examine and test in a more focused way the practices of those engaged in collaborative structures and reflect upon the implications these models present from a strategic management perspective. To this end, the thesis adopts a resource-based view of the firm and seeks to examine how the three approaches to public leisure provision develop strategies and effectively utilise and deploy resources through their strategic actions, with the overarching aim to achieve strategic outcomes. The main findings of the empirical analyses are two-fold. Firstly, of the three approaches examined, in-house provision has the most to gain from being more strategically aware. The case is made for significant strengthening oflocal government in-house managed facilities, which has often been viewed as the poor relation in public leisure provision and stands to lose the most in funding cuts and the subsidies provided to leisure trust rivals. Secondly, leisure trusts receive significant government funds and subsidies through tax breaks that are not forthcoming to rivals, which raises questions as to whether leisure trusts deserve such aid for delivering upon the social inclusion agenda of the government. Given that inclusion is not heavily emphasised or significantly achieved to any greater degree than rivals, it can be argued that this approach to provision does not justify the financial perks oftrust status provided to it. This thesis calls for a fundamental rethink of public policy and for the current public leisure management playing field to be levelled in a rebalance of opportunity and investment through the removal of anti-competitive measures in service delivery.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Public leisure management : a strategic analysis of effectiveness and performance outcomes

Local government in England have reformed the management of their public services over many years. The increase in collaboration across the public sector between the public, private and voluntary sectors has been promoted under New Labour in public leisure provision, either through contracts or partnership arrangements. The transfer to collaboration has created significantly new modes of service delivery, including in-house, leisure trust, and private leisure management contractor arrangements. There is a need to examine and test in a more focused way the practices of those engaged in collaborative structures and reflect upon the implications these models present from a strategic management perspective. To this end, the thesis adopts a resource-based view of the firm and seeks to examine how the three approaches to public leisure provision develop strategies and effectively utilise and deploy resources through their strategic actions, with the overarching aim to achieve strategic outcomes. The main findings of the empirical analyses are two-fold. Firstly, of the three approaches examined, in-house provision has the most to gain from being more strategically aware. The case is made for significant strengthening oflocal government in-house managed facilities, which has often been viewed as the poor relation in public leisure provision and stands to lose the most in funding cuts and the subsidies provided to leisure trust rivals. Secondly, leisure trusts receive significant government funds and subsidies through tax breaks that are not forthcoming to rivals, which raises questions as to whether leisure trusts deserve such aid for delivering upon the social inclusion agenda of the government. Given that inclusion is not heavily emphasised or significantly achieved to any greater degree than rivals, it can be argued that this approach to provision does not justify the financial perks oftrust status provided to it. This thesis calls for a fundamental rethink of public policy and for the current public leisure management playing field to be levelled in a rebalance of opportunity and investment through the removal of anti-competitive measures in service delivery.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Absorptive capacity and market orientation in public service provision

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Journal of Strategic Marketing on 05.04.2012, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0965254X.2011.643915The application of market orientation to public organisations does not adequately account for the unique features of this context. Drawing on absorptive capacity literature, this is the first study to examine the role of the organisation's learning environment on the market orientation-performance interface for two opposing public management contexts. The research involved a national survey questionnaire to 1060 internal and external public leisure service providers in England. Empirical testing through structural equation modelling revealed that not all dimensions of market orientation are universally positive and marketing scholars should seek to examine and understand market orientation in the context of the organisation and its learning mechanisms, as absorptive capacity has clear and different moderation effects under different management contexts. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

A large-scale genome-wide association study meta-analysis of cannabis use disorder

Summary Background Variation in liability to cannabis use disorder has a strong genetic component (estimated twin and family heritability about 50–70%) and is associated with negative outcomes, including increased risk of psychopathology. The aim of the study was to conduct a large genome-wide association study (GWAS) to identify novel genetic variants associated with cannabis use disorder. Methods To conduct this GWAS meta-analysis of cannabis use disorder and identify associations with genetic loci, we used samples from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Substance Use Disorders working group, iPSYCH, and deCODE (20 916 case samples, 363 116 control samples in total), contrasting cannabis use disorder cases with controls. To examine the genetic overlap between cannabis use disorder and 22 traits of interest (chosen because of previously published phenotypic correlations [eg, psychiatric disorders] or hypothesised associations [eg, chronotype] with cannabis use disorder), we used linkage disequilibrium score regression to calculate genetic correlations. Findings We identified two genome-wide significant loci: a novel chromosome 7 locus (FOXP2, lead single-nucleotide polymorphism [SNP] rs7783012; odds ratio [OR] 1·11, 95% CI 1·07–1·15, p=1·84 × 10−9) and the previously identified chromosome 8 locus (near CHRNA2 and EPHX2, lead SNP rs4732724; OR 0·89, 95% CI 0·86–0·93, p=6·46 × 10−9). Cannabis use disorder and cannabis use were genetically correlated (rg 0·50, p=1·50 × 10−21), but they showed significantly different genetic correlations with 12 of the 22 traits we tested, suggesting at least partially different genetic underpinnings of cannabis use and cannabis use disorder. Cannabis use disorder was positively genetically correlated with other psychopathology, including ADHD, major depression, and schizophrenia. Interpretation These findings support the theory that cannabis use disorder has shared genetic liability with other psychopathology, and there is a distinction between genetic liability to cannabis use and cannabis use disorder. Funding National Institute of Mental Health; National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; National Institute on Drug Abuse; Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine and the Centre for Integrative Sequencing; The European Commission, Horizon 2020; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; Health Research Council of New Zealand; National Institute on Aging; Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium; UK Research and Innovation Medical Research Council (UKRI MRC); The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation; National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA); National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering; National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Australia; Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program of the University of California; Families for Borderline Personality Disorder Research (Beth and Rob Elliott) 2018 NARSAD Young Investigator Grant; The National Child Health Research Foundation (Cure Kids); The Canterbury Medical Research Foundation; The New Zealand Lottery Grants Board; The University of Otago; The Carney Centre for Pharmacogenomics; The James Hume Bequest Fund; National Institutes of Health: Genes, Environment and Health Initiative; National Institutes of Health; National Cancer Institute; The William T Grant Foundation; Australian Research Council; The Virginia Tobacco Settlement Foundation; The VISN 1 and VISN 4 Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Centers of the US Department of Veterans Affairs; The 5th Framework Programme (FP-5) GenomEUtwin Project; The Lundbeck Foundation; NIH-funded Shared Instrumentation Grant S10RR025141; Clinical Translational Sciences Award grants; National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; National Institute of General Medical Sciences.Peer reviewe

A Roadmap for HEP Software and Computing R&D for the 2020s

Particle physics has an ambitious and broad experimental programme for the coming decades. This programme requires large investments in detector hardware, either to build new facilities and experiments, or to upgrade existing ones. Similarly, it requires commensurate investment in the R&D of software to acquire, manage, process, and analyse the shear amounts of data to be recorded. In planning for the HL-LHC in particular, it is critical that all of the collaborating stakeholders agree on the software goals and priorities, and that the efforts complement each other. In this spirit, this white paper describes the R&D activities required to prepare for this software upgrade.Peer reviewe

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

Antibodies against endogenous retroviruses promote lung cancer immunotherapy

B cells are frequently found in the margins of solid tumours as organized follicles in ectopic lymphoid organs called tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS). Although TLS have been found to correlate with improved patient survival and response to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB), the underlying mechanisms of this association remain elusive. Here we investigate lung-resident B cell responses in patients from the TRACERx 421 (Tracking Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer Evolution Through Therapy) and other lung cancer cohorts, and in a recently established immunogenic mouse model for lung adenocarcinoma. We find that both human and mouse lung adenocarcinomas elicit local germinal centre responses and tumour-binding antibodies, and further identify endogenous retrovirus (ERV) envelope glycoproteins as a dominant anti-tumour antibody target. ERV-targeting B cell responses are amplified by ICB in both humans and mice, and by targeted inhibition of KRAS(G12C) in the mouse model. ERV-reactive antibodies exert anti-tumour activity that extends survival in the mouse model, and ERV expression predicts the outcome of ICB in human lung adenocarcinoma. Finally, we find that effective immunotherapy in the mouse model requires CXCL13-dependent TLS formation. Conversely, therapeutic CXCL13 treatment potentiates anti-tumour immunity and synergizes with ICB. Our findings provide a possible mechanistic basis for the association of TLS with immunotherapy response