Print Culture and the Rebuilding of London after the Fire: The Presumptuous Proposals of Valentine Knight

Histories of the Great Fire of London regularly mention and reproduce Valentine Knight's scheme for London's reconstruction, published in 1666, and note that he was imprisoned for his pains. His proposal, with new streets laid out on a rough grid and a canal through the heart of the city, has attained a walk-on part in longue durée histories of urban planning. However, Knight has remained a mysterious and little studied figure; the significance of his imprisonment and of the fact that his was the only scheme to be published remain unexplored. By reconstructing his biography and discovering the reason for his incarceration, and by relating his and the other proposals for the rebuilding of the capital after the fire to the history of public opinion, this article uses this episode to explore the tacit rules governing the discussion of public affairs in Restoration England. Further, by examining the publication history of all the immediate post-fire schemes for rebuilding London from 1666 to 1750, it traces how architectural plans gradually became objects for critical discussion in the worlds of print and periodical

Designing high performance teams for projects : a study of 49 project teams in the UK construction industry

Teams have been presented as a panacea to complex and turbulent business environments, but there are few examples of genuinely high-performing teams. This study considers the utility of work design as a means of improving the performance of project teams and thereby resolving this paradox. Grounded in quantitative methodology, and supported by relevant qualitative data, this study has used a single case experiment to examine the effects of multiple work design variables on the climate and performance of 49 construction project management teams. The single case environment provided an opportunity to study a large number of real work groups, executing broadly similar tasks, while controlling for the effects of organisational culture on social and work behaviour. The results indicated that three levels of intervention - transformational leadership, team organisation and team performance orientation - were influential in either (a) directly influencing project team performance or (b) creating a team climate which was itself predictive of desired outcomes, specifically the moderation of project complexity and higher levels of productivity. In particular, the results showed that the `inspiring a shared vision' leader practice was influential in explaining the perceived satisfaction of customers with project team performance. This provides empirical evidence that visionary leadership is an important determinant of high performance in complex, fluid and uncertain work environments, such as construction project management. Although task orientation and shared vision emerged as reasonably strong performance norms in the sample, it is generally difficult isolating the referent group norm(s) which explain(s) the variation in the performance of project teams working in myriad social, temporal and task conditions. Rather than attempting to manage group behaviour in realtime, therefore, the results of this study suggest that a coherent and integrated package of work design interventions can leverage exceptional value from project teams by helping each team to develop unique performance and behavioural strategies

Anti-Takeover Provisions as a Source of Innovation and Value Creation

Managers are risk averse. Excessive risk-aversion can destroy shareholder wealth. A key source of risk is the threat of an opportunistic takeover designed to take advantage of depressed market prices. This is especially the case in innovative or hard-to-value (`HtV') companies whose price may be depressed due to valuation difficulties rather than managerial under-performance. For these HtV firms, the threat of an opportunistic takeover can destroy value by inducing agency con icts of managerial risk aversion. managers and regulators argue that ATPs can ameliorate this problem. This article presents a theoretical model and empirical results that show that for HtV firms, ATPs encourage managers to make value-creating takeovers and increase innovation and do not induce agency con icts of managerial entrenchment. This implies that for innovative or hard-to-value firms, ATPs can ameliorate managerial risk aversion and encourage value-creation.

EVALUATION OF METHANE GAS PRODUCTION IN A SIMULTANEOUS REGRESSION SYSTEM

Methane gas production is a function of volatile solids activity in anaerobic digesters. Increasing the solids retention time of the swine manure digester system without increasing the hydraulic retention time would theoretically increase the methane gas production efficiency. Coagulation treatments were performed on the effluent of the second digester in a system of two digesters in series . The objective of this paper is to describe mathematically the relationship of the Coagulation treatments in the second digester to biogas production and volatile solids retention. An initial, single equation, ordinary least squares regression produced statistically significant parameter estimates, but failed to accurately describe the treatment activity occurring in the second digester. To assess the treatment activity of the second digester and account for the activity of first digester on the second, data was regressed through a simultaneous equation system. Both two-stage and three-stage least squares regression were examined

Value Creation in Venture Capital and Private Equity

This thesis examines the drivers of value-creation and value-destruction in venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) funds. VC/PE funds have become an increasingly important financial intermediary. They are a key source of capital for young companies who might otherwise have difficulty raising funds from stock-markets or from lenders. VC/PE funds can also help larger companies to restructure and re-direct operations. However, not all VC/PE funds earn super-normal returns or succeed in fostering innovation and value-creation. Subsequently, this thesis examines the drivers of value-creation in VC/PE funds. This thesis highlights the skewness that is present in VC/PE funds returns. The thesis then examines the role of fund-level characteristics in determining VC/PE performance. The thesis focuses on the role of a fund s size and diversification. The thesis also examines typical incentive contracts between VC/PE funds and their investors, and shows that the traditional incentive schemes can lead to sub-optimal performance. The thesis then uses this background to examine the structure of Australia s Innovation Investment Fund scheme, which is designed to support VC funds in their investments in start-up companies. The main contributions of this thesis are to highlight the drivers of VC/PE fund performance and to propose ways to incentivize and select value-creating funds

Cheap print, crime and information in early modern London: The Life and Death of Griffin Flood

This article centres on the pamphlet The Life and Death of Griffin Flood informer (1623), which tells the career and execution through pressing of an informer and murderer working in early modern London. It outlines what archival research reveals about this figure, and thereby re-examines how far crime pamphlets were rooted in social actuality. Secondly, it shows that The Life and Death does not follow what historians have identified as the conventions of rogue literature and murder pamphlets, and that scholars’ treatment of cheap print has often overlooked its generic instability and inconsistency of tone. Finally, it highlights how the representation of Flood’s career as an informer casts new light on attitudes towards non-citizens within early modern London. The article concludes by arguing that The Life and Death (and many similar pamphlets) invoked communitarian understandings of justice, and emphasized neighbourliness, social peace, and charity, rather than the themes of redemption and divine retribution

Geodynamic implications for zonal and meridional isotopic patterns across the northern Lau and North Fiji Basins

We present new Sr-Nd-Pb-Hf-He isotopic data for sixty-five volcanic samples from the northern Lau and North Fiji Basin. This includes forty-seven lavas obtained from forty dredge sites spanning an east-west transect across the Lau and North Fiji basins, ten ocean island basalt (OIB)-type lavas collected from seven Fijian islands, and eight OIB lavas sampled on Rotuma. For the first time we are able to map clear north-south and east-west geochemical gradients in 87Sr/86Sr across the northern Lau and North Fiji Basins: lavas with the most geochemically enriched radiogenic isotopic signatures are located in the northeast Lau Basin, while signatures of geochemical enrichment are diminished to the south and west away from the Samoan hotspot. Based on these geochemical patterns and plate reconstructions of the region, these observations are best explained by the addition of Samoa, Rurutu, and Rarotonga hotspot material over the past 4 Ma. We suggest that underplated Samoan material has been advected into the Lau Basin over the past ∼4 Ma. As the slab migrated west (and toward the Samoan plume) via rollback over time, younger and hotter (and therefore less viscous) underplated Samoan plume material was entrained. Thus, entrainment efficiency of underplated plume material was enhanced, and Samoan plume signatures in the Lau Basin became stronger as the trench approached the Samoan hotspot. The addition of subducted volcanoes to the Cook-Austral Volcanic Lineament material, first from the Rarotonga hotspot, then followed by the Rurutu hotspot, contributes to the extreme geochemical signatures observed in the northeast Lau Basin

Managing land application rates of to optimize economic value and water quality

Annual broiler processing capacity in southwestern Missouri is expected to increase from 127 million birds in 1989 to 245 million birds in 1995, or 93 percent. Much of this growth is expected to occur in Barry county where an additional 42,400 acres, almost double current land requirements, will be needed for land disposal of broiler litter. Rapid expansion in broiler production in southwestern Missouri can increase the risk of surface and ground water contamination from land application of broiler litter because the area has karst topography and large openings in the aquifer. Contamination of water in this region could have adverse economic and health impacts because water-based recreation is a significant sector of the regional economy and groundwater is the major source of drinking water. This study: determines the amount and composition of litter removed from seven broiler houses; develops a geographic information system for determining how spatial variability in land use, soil types and hydrogeologic features, and limits on the locations and application of broiler litter to protect water quality affect the amount of litter applied and the number of broilers grown in the watershed; and develops an economic optimization model that determines the locations and rates of litter application on areas of the watershed that maximize the economic value of applied litter while protecting water quality. The study area is the Shoal Creek watershed located in Barry County.Project # G-1572-04 Agreement # 14-08-0001-G-157