An investigation into internet use by 45-54 year olds

This research set out to determine how frequently, and for what purpose, members of the 45-54 year old generation used the internet, specifically whether they used it to socialise and for domestic purposes more frequently than they did for educational and work related purposes. This area of research is particularly fascinating because members of that generation grew up in a world with no internet, to one in 2009 where there were an estimated 1.56 billion world-wide internet users. A non-experimental research design was chosen using a questionnaire issued by email. Participants had a choice of completing the questionnaire and posting it back or completing it online. To minimise the risk of unsuitable recruits, and given the specific age related nature of the pre-defined research sample, non-probability purposive sampling techniques were used to arrive at the sampling frame of convenience. The main findings were that respondents stated that they used the internet for socialising and domestic purposes more frequently than they did for work and educational purposes. Therefore the null hypothesis was rejected ( that: "45-54 year olds do not use the internet to socialise and for domestic purposes more frequently than they do for educational and work related activities"). A weak relationship was found between gender and internet usage. Males, on average, used the internet more frequently than females for both social & domestic and work & educational purposes. This finding was similar to that of other recent UK based research. No statistically significant differences in internet use were found between the main roles or professions of respondents. However internet use was found to increase as the level of educational qualification increased broadly in line with the findings of other research. Those with higher educational qualifications in this study used the internet significantly more for work and educational purposes. In addition those who lived in rural areas used the internet significantly more for work & educational purposes, but no statistically significant difference in frequency of internet uses was found for domestic & social purposes. Those from Greater Manchester were the most frequent users of the internet for domestic & social purposes and N. Wales were the lowest. Finally, respondents from married households with children were the most active internet users, but no significant differences were detected when exploring that and other household types. Other studies had found significant differences between household types with internet use increasing as the number of household members increased because their internet use was driven by their need to maintain and coordinate multiple relationships

A renormalisation-group treatment of two-body scattering

Nonrelativistic two-body scattering by a short-ranged potential is studied using the renormalisation group. Two fixed points are identified: a trivial one and one describing systems with a bound state at zero energy. The eigenvalues of the linearised renormalisation group are used to assign a systematic power-counting to terms in the potential near each of these fixed points. The expansion around the nontrivial fixed point is shown to be equivalent to the effective-range expansion.Comment: 6 pages (RevTeX), 1 figure (epsf); picture of RG flow and more discussion of momentum dependence adde

DISTRIBUTION CHOICE UNDER NULL PRIORS AND SMALL SAMPLE SIZE

Defining appropriate probability distributions for the variables in an economic model is an important and often arduous task. This paper evaluates the performance of several common probability distributions under different distributional assumptions when sample sizes are small and there is limited information about the data.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Progress Report to the TNRC for Analysis of the Economics of Atrazine Remediation for Representative Grain Farms in the Aquilla Watershed, Hill County, Texas: Subtasks 4.0-4.4

Four alternative BMPs for atrazine remediation were reported by Harmon and Wang for the study area. The BMPs involved alternative incorporation practices, tillage operations, and sediment ponds. Harmon and Wang reported no statistical difference in corn yields under the alternative BMPs. An economic analysis of four alternative best management practices (BMPs) for atrazine remediation in Hill County, Texas, was performed by the Agricultural and Food Policy Center (AFPC) at Texas A&M University. Using the farm-level economic simulation model FLIPSIM, AFPC scientists analyzed the financial effects of the alternative BMPs on the Texas Blackland Prairie representative farm. This farm consists of 2,000 dryland acres, divided among corn (600 acres), sorghum (750 acres), wheat (250 acres), and native pasture (150 acres). This farm also maintains a small beef cowherd. Regularly updated, the AFPC maintains more than 80 farms across the nation that form the basis for probabilistic-based agricultural policy evaluation.Agricultural and Food Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

STOCHASTIC EFFICIENCY ANALYSIS USING MULTIPLE UTILITY FUNCTIONS

Evaluating the risk of a particular decision depends on the risk aversion of the decision maker related to the underlying utility function. The objective of this paper is to use stochastic efficiency with respect to a function (SERF) to compare the ranking of risky alternatives using alternative utility functional forms.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Stochastic Optimization: An Application to Sub-Arctic Dairy Farming

The paper demonstrates how a deterministic farm linear programming (LP) model can be made stochastic and simulated using Solver and Simetar© in Excel©. The demonstration is conducted with an LP-model for a dairy farm for a sub arctic region of Norway. The income risks arising from variation in milk and crop yields due to winter damage in leys and pastures have been quantified for farms demonstrating low, medium and high forage yield risk. The estimated distribution of farm profit will be skewed to the left, indicating a downside risk. In the presence of risks, farmers maximize income by producing the milk quota with using surplus forage for meat production. The analysis demonstrated here may assist farmers and farm managers in improving sensitivity analysis for risky variables in farm LP models.dairy production, Northern Norway, stochastic optimization, stochastic simulation, yield risks, Livestock Production/Industries,

The politics of prisoner legal rights

The article begins by locating human rights law within the current political context before moving on to critically review judicial reasoning on prisoner legal rights since the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998. The limited influence of proportionality on legal discourses in England and Wales is then explored by contrasting a number of judgments since October 2000 in the domestic courts and European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the restricted interpretation of legal rights for penal reform and proposes an alternative radical rearticulation of the politics of prisoner human rights

Factors affecting progress of the National e-Health Strategy in the NHS in England: A Socio-technical Evaluation.

Background: This is a formative socio-technical study of the “middle out” NHS e-health strategy in England. It began in 2015 with an objective to become “paperless at the point of care by 2020”, focussing nationally on the “electronic glue”, (interoperability), to facilitate the inter-organisational exchange digital communications of patient data and leaving the choice of EHRs to local organisations. No academic research has been published into the strategy and similar studies rarely include sample groups of suppliers or IT consultants. So this study seeks to fill both gaps in knowledge. Such strategies are prevalent across westernised developed countries and can consume large sums of government funding and local resources. In consequence, their failure can be very costly. This study seeks to mitigate that risk whilst recognising that, as they operate in highly complex environments, choosing any particular type of “bottom up”, “middle out” or “top down” strategy construct does not guarantee success. Their outcome is dependent upon the successful navigation through a mix of factors, known and unknown, across technical, human and social, organisational, macro-environmental and wider socio-political dimensions through time. Findings: The “middle out” strategy is broadly more appropriate, rather than “bottom up” or “top down”, but the target, of becoming “paperless by 2020”, is unattainable. Major cultural barriers include resistance by powerful clinicians, who can perceive such strategies as threats to the moral order and their traditional role as gatekeepers of access to patient data. Other barriers include inadequate and delayed national funding; disruption caused by government reorganisations; major premature programme re-structuring and a shift away from the original intent, resulting in the inappropriate selection of single organisation pilot sites rather than multi-organisational community wide ones to promote interoperability. New factors found include: the threats of cyber security incidents and the need for protective measures; the mismatch between strategy timescales and local procurement cycles; the quality of IT suppliers and the competing demands of similar change management programmes for scarce local NHS resources. Proposition: To reflect those findings a new socio-technical model is proposed that incorporates those additional factors as well as two further cross cutting dimensions to reflect “Lifecycle” and “Purpose”, drawing on elements of both Change Management and Technology Lifecycle Theory. “Lifecycle” reflects the “passage of time” as the evidence suggests that factors affecting progress may vary in their presence and impact over time as a strategy moves though its lifecycle. The addition of a “Purpose” dimension supports a reflection on the “why”. Some support is found for the proposal that a “middle out” strategy is more likely to facilitate progress than “bottom up” or “top down” ones. However a shift in approach is advocated. It is proposed that “middle out” e-health strategies are more likely to be successful if their “purpose” shifts away from promoting EHRs, per se, like with single organisation pilot sites, towards inter-organisational clinical and social care workflow improvement across health and social care economies. To achieve that, the focus should shift towards interoperability and cyber security programmes. Those should promote and mandate the use of national interoperability infrastructure, national systems and national standards. They should also provide national funding support to health economy wide clinical and social care workflow improvement pilots and initiatives that span those economies