Commitment to an Emerging Organizational Field, Institutional Entrepreneurship, and the Perception of Opportunity: An Enactment Theory

Given an indifferent institutional environment, ongoing commitment to an emerging organizational field is critical. We build and test an enactment theory of commitment that holds that commitment is driven by institutional entrepreneurship, specifically actions to educate stakeholders, but that this factor is mediated by perception of an opportunity that rests on beliefs in industry attractiveness, superior products and services, and the likelihood of disruptive exogenous change. We illustrate this theory with findings from surveys of energy efficiency and renewable energy businesses. The results highlight the central role of actions to educate stakeholders. When an institutional domain is not yet fully established, the effect of entrepreneurs' actions to educate stakeholders is not just external, but has an important inward function of bolstering the entrepreneurs' ongoing commitment to the emerging field

The crime drop and the security hypothesis

Major crime drops were experienced in the United States and most other industrialised countries for a decade from the early to mid-1990s. Yet there is little agreement over explanation or lessons for policy. Here it is proposed that change in the quantity and quality of security was a key driver of the crime drop. From evidence relating to vehicle theft in two countries it is concluded that electronic immobilisers and central locking were particularly effective. It is suggested that reduced car theft may have induced drops in other crime including violence. From this platform a broader security hypothesis, linked to routine activity and opportunity theory, is outlined

Analytic Representation of The Dirac Equation

In this paper we construct an analytical separation (diagonalization) of the full (minimal coupling) Dirac equation into particle and antiparticle components. The diagonalization is analytic in that it is achieved without transforming the wave functions, as is done by the Foldy-Wouthuysen method, and reveals the nonlocal time behavior of the particle-antiparticle relationship. We interpret the zitterbewegung and the result that a velocity measurement (of a Dirac particle) at any instant in time is, as reflections of the fact that the Dirac equation makes a spatially extended particle appear as a point in the present by forcing it to oscillate between the past and future at speed c. From this we infer that, although the form of the Dirac equation serves to make space and time appear on an equal footing mathematically, it is clear that they are still not on an equal footing from a physical point of view. On the other hand, the Foldy-Wouthuysen transformation, which connects the Dirac and square root operator, is unitary. Reflection on these results suggests that a more refined notion (than that of unitary equivalence) may be required for physical systems

Itinerant Electron Ferromagnetism in the Quantum Hall Regime

We report on a study of the temperature and Zeeman-coupling-strength dependence of the one-particle Green's function of a two-dimensional (2D) electron gas at Landau level filling factor $\nu =1$ where the ground state is a strong ferromagnet. Our work places emphasis on the role played by the itinerancy of the electrons, which carry the spin magnetization and on analogies between this system and conventional itinerant electron ferromagnets. We discuss the application to this system of the self-consistent Hartree-Fock approximation, which is analogous to the band theory description of metallic ferromagnetism and fails badly at finite temperatures because it does not account for spin-wave excitations. We go beyond this level by evaluating the one-particle Green's function using a self-energy, which accounts for quasiparticle spin-wave interactions. We report results for the temperature dependence of the spin magnetization, the nuclear spin relaxation rate, and 2D-2D tunneling conductances. Our calculations predict a sharp peak in the tunneling conductance at large bias voltages with strength proportional to temperature. We compare with experiment, where available, and with predictions based on numerical exact diagonalization and other theoretical approaches.Comment: 29 pages, 20 figure

Wafer-scale Epitaxial Graphene Growth on the Si-face of Hexagonal SiC (0001) for High Frequency Transistors

Up to two layers of epitaxial graphene have been grown on the Si-face of two-inch SiC wafers exhibiting room-temperature Hall mobilities up to 1800 cm^2/Vs, measured from ungated, large, 160 micron x 200 micron Hall bars, and up to 4000 cm^2/Vs, from top-gated, small, 1 micron x 1.5 micron Hall bars. The growth process involved a combination of a cleaning step of the SiC in a Si-containing gas, followed by an annealing step in Argon for epitaxial graphene formation. The structure and morphology of this graphene has been characterized using AFM, HRTEM, and Raman spectroscopy. Furthermore, top-gated radio frequency field effect transistors (RF-FETs) with a peak cutoff frequency fT of 100 GHz for a gate length of 240 nm were fabricated using epitaxial graphene grown on the Si face of SiC that exhibited Hall mobilities up to 1450 cm^2/Vs from ungated Hall bars and 1575 cm^2/Vs from top-gated ones. This is by far the highest cut-off frequency measured from any kind of graphene.Comment: 30 pages (double line spacing). Submitte

The LIVESTRONG Survivorship Center of Excellence Network

The LIVESTRONG™ Survivorship Center of Excellence Network consists of eight National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers funded by the LAF between 2004 and 2008. The Network was created to accelerate the pace of progress in addressing the needs of the growing survivor community

The Politics of Environmental Dispute Resolution

Also PCMA Working Paper #17.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51148/1/380.pd

Protein-coding variants implicate novel genes related to lipid homeostasis contributing to body-fat distribution.

Body-fat distribution is a risk factor for adverse cardiovascular health consequences. We analyzed the association of body-fat distribution, assessed by waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index, with 228,985 predicted coding and splice site variants available on exome arrays in up to 344,369 individuals from five major ancestries (discovery) and 132,177 European-ancestry individuals (validation). We identified 15 common (minor allele frequency, MAF ≥5%) and nine low-frequency or rare (MAF <5%) coding novel variants. Pathway/gene set enrichment analyses identified lipid particle, adiponectin, abnormal white adipose tissue physiology and bone development and morphology as important contributors to fat distribution, while cross-trait associations highlight cardiometabolic traits. In functional follow-up analyses, specifically in Drosophila RNAi-knockdowns, we observed a significant increase in the total body triglyceride levels for two genes (DNAH10 and PLXND1). We implicate novel genes in fat distribution, stressing the importance of interrogating low-frequency and protein-coding variants

How confident are young adult cancer survivors in managing their survivorship care? A report from the LIVESTRONG™ Survivorship Center of Excellence Network

This study examined the association between sociodemographic, cancer treatment, and care delivery factors on young adult cancer survivors’ confidence in managing their survivorship care