The business-social policy nexus: Corporate power and corporate inputs into social policy

It is increasingly impossible to understand and explain the shape and delivery of contemporary social policy unless we consider the role of business. Several factors have been at work here. First, many of the changes in social policy introduced since the 1970s have been in response either to business demands or more general concerns about national competitiveness and the needs of business. Second, globalisation has increased corporate power within states, leading to transformations in social and fiscal policies. Third, business has been incorporated into the management of many areas of the welfare state by governments keen to control expenditure and introduce private sector values into services. Fourth, welfare services, from hospitals to schools, have been increasingly opened up to private markets. Despite all this, the issues of business influence and involvement in social policy has been neglected in the literature. This article seeks to place corporate power and influence centre-stage by outlining and critically reflecting on the place of business within contemporary welfare states, with a particular focus on the UK. Business, it argues, is increasingly important to welfare outcomes and needs to be taken into account more fully within the social policy literature

Portfolio Performance and Agency

The evaluation and compensation of portfolio managers is an important problem for practitioners. Optimal compensation will induce managers to expend effort to generate information and to use it appropriately in an informed portfolio choice. Our general model points the way towards analysis of optimal performance evaluation and contracting in a rich model. Optimal contracting in the model includes an important role for portfolio restrictions that are more complex than the sharing rule. The agent's compensation gives the agent approximately to benchmark return plus an incentive fee equal to a portfolio measure that is approximately the excess of return above the benchmark. This measure is often used by practitioners but is simpler than the Jensen measure and other measures commonly recommended in the academic literature. In addition to the excess return above the fixed benchmark, the manager is given some additional incentive to take a position that deviates from the benchmark to remove an incentive to tend towards being a "closet indexer." Efficient contracting involves restrictions on what portfolio strategies can be pursued, and prior communication of the information gathered

Forest Grouse in the Fall

This bulletin describes the two types of forest grouse that inhabit mountain forests and rangelands in Utah, the ruffed grouse and the dusky grouse. It tells the species differences such as breeding, survival and reproduction, and broods. It includes tips for forest grouse hunters

The Research Excellence Framework (REF): Assessing the impact of social work research on society

This paper reviews one aspect, impact, of the forthcoming assessment of research in UK universities, the Research Excellence Framework (REF), and examines its meaning and potential for enhanced partnerships between social work practice and academia in the context of the current economic crisis. Examples of case studies being developed to show how research has societal impact are described and some of the complexities of what, on the surface appears to echo social work 19s desire to make a positive difference to the lives of people in society, are drawn out. The importance of the REF for the integration of social work practice and academia have been rehearsed many times. This paper argues that making an impact is everybody 19s concern and practitioners and those who use social work services and their carers have a role to play in its creation and identification

Data-constrained assessment of ocean circulation changes since the middle Miocene in an Earth system model

Since the middle Miocene (15 Ma, million years ago), the Earth's climate has undergone a long-term cooling trend, characterised by a reduction in ocean temperatures of up to 7–8 ∘C. The causes of this cooling are primarily thought to be due to tectonic plate movements driving changes in large-scale ocean circulation patterns, and hence heat redistribution, in conjunction with a drop in atmospheric greenhouse gas forcing (and attendant ice-sheet growth and feedback). In this study, we assess the potential to constrain the evolving patterns of global ocean circulation and cooling over the last 15 Ma by assimilating a variety of marine sediment proxy data in an Earth system model. We do this by first compiling surface and benthic ocean temperature and benthic carbon-13 (δ13C) data in a series of seven time slices spaced at approximately 2.5 Myr intervals. We then pair this with a corresponding series of tectonic and climate boundary condition reconstructions in the cGENIE (“muffin” release) Earth system model, including alternative possibilities for an open vs. closed Central American Seaway (CAS) from 10 Ma onwards. In the cGENIE model, we explore uncertainty in greenhouse gas forcing and the magnitude of North Pacific to North Atlantic salinity flux adjustment required in the model to create an Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) of a specific strength, via a series of 12 (one for each tectonic reconstruction) 2D parameter ensembles. Each ensemble member is then tested against the observed global temperature and benthic δ13C patterns. We identify that a relatively high CO2 equivalent forcing of 1120 ppm is required at 15 Ma in cGENIE to reproduce proxy temperature estimates in the model, noting that this CO2 forcing is dependent on the cGENIE model's climate sensitivity and that it incorporates the effects of all greenhouse gases. We find that reproducing the observed long-term cooling trend requires a progressively declining greenhouse gas forcing in the model. In parallel to this, the strength of the AMOC increases with time despite a reduction in the salinity of the surface North Atlantic over the cooling period, attributable to falling intensity of the hydrological cycle and to lowering polar temperatures, both caused by CO2-driven global cooling. We also find that a closed CAS from 10 Ma to present shows better agreement between benthic δ13C patterns and our particular series of model configurations and data. A final outcome of our analysis is a pronounced ca. 1.5 ‰ decline occurring in atmospheric (and ca. 1 ‰ ocean surface) δ13C that could be used to inform future δ13C-based proxy reconstructions.</p

Practical Considerations in Cloud Utilization for the Science Gateway nanoHUB.org

nanoHUB.org is arguably the largest online nanotechnology user facility in the world. Just between July 2010 and June 2011 it served 177,823 users. 10,477 users ran 393,648 simulation jobs on a variety of computational resources ranging from HUBzero-based virtual execution hosts for rapid, interactive runs as well as grid-based resources for computationally-intense runs. We believe that as such our users experience a fully operational scientific “cloud”-based infrastructure even though it is not using “standard” computational cloud infrastructures such as EC2. In this paper we explore the use of standard computational cloud-based resources to determine whether they can deliver satisfactory outcomes for our users without requiring high personnel costs for configuration. In a science gateway environment, the assignment of jobs to the appropriate computational resource is not trivial. Resource availability, wait time, time to completion, and likelihood of job success must all be considered in order to transparently deliver an acceptable level of service to our users. In this paper, we present preliminary results examining the benefits and drawbacks of utilizing standard computational cloud resources as one potential venue for nanoHUB computational runs. In summary we find that cloud resources performed competitively with other grid resources in terms of wait time, CPU usage, and success in a multiple job submission strategy

最近の經濟學界

Size spectrum models have emerged from 40 years of basic research on how body size determines individual physiology and structures marine communities. They are based on commonly accepted assumptions and have a low parameter set, which make them easy to deploy for strategic ecosystem oriented impact assessment of fisheries. We describe the fundamental concepts in size-based models about food encounter and the bioenergetics budget of individuals. Within the general framework three model types have emerged that differs in their degree of complexity: the food-web, the trait-based and the community model. We demonstrate the differences between the models through examples of their response to fishing and their dynamic behavior. We review implementations of size spectrum models and describe important variations concerning the functional response, whether growth is food-dependent or fixed, and the density-dependence imposed on the system. Finally we discuss challenges and promising directions.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author