A contemporary study on the impact of regulations on business performance

This dissertation examines Nobel Prize Laureate Hayek\u27s ominous warning that economic liberty in the U.S. is at risk, due to regulations, of becoming an unplanned administrative state. The research seeks to understand the effects of regulations on business performance and how to right-size them for a healthy business environment. These objectives are accomplished with two papers: (1) a macro cross-discipline literature review and call for research on the impact of regulations on business performance, and (2) a qualitative grounded theory study from interviews from elite business executives on their perspectives on the impact of regulations on business performance. The findings lead to principles of the impact of regulations have on business performance, theoretical implications, and practical implications towards the right-sizing of regulations. The government\u27s role as the umpire is paramount, including acting on appropriate regulations to create a healthy business environment and avoiding regulations that pick winners and losers. Regulations should be vetted against unintended consequences that may create an unhealthy business environment. Future research directions and limitations are discussed

Making Free Online Learning Sustainable Through Reduction of Production Costs

A major reservation about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is that they are extremely expensive to develop and deliver and for most institutions this cannot be justified on a sustainable financial basis. As part of the MOOC technological revolution, costs and funding opportunities have been cited as reasons not to proceed (Gaebel, Kupriyanova, Morais, and Colucci, 2014). Whereas, the findings to date show that this may not be the case for all, educational institutions are often eager to engage technology and embed it into programmes (Hollands, and Devayani, 2014). There are many examples of excellent learning materials being created and distributed on the web using low cost techniques. The Khan Academy has offered free world class education for anyone, anywhere in the world since 2006. Not only are these materials freely available for reuse, but the technologies and techniques used to create them can be easily used to cheaply create new materials. The authors, in a project funded by Intel Ireland, are currently developing and testing workflows and techniques that will facilitate the rapid development of MOOCs at relatively low cost. This project, which will include the delivery of four MOOCs in coding, aimed at young people, endeavouring to measure both the costs involved and the educational impact on the participants through qualitative and quantitative research metrics. The design, methodology and approach to innovative pedagogic practices will be tested, as will the opportunities for peer to peer learning among the students, the use of asynchronous forums, auto/peer grading and collaborative activities among the developers. A prerequisite of the project is the voluntary effort of the developers. However, as production costs are often regarded as the most expensive element of the MOOC, this project will demonstrate that by completing it “in-house” the costs will be negligible. In a recent study 38% of institutions believed that cost is a key concern (Hollands, and Devayani, 2014). The video submissions will be uploaded onto the MOOC platform as both an online repository for the learning material and as a quality checking mechanism and rolled out in a pilot programme from January 2015. The research describes some of the proposed methods that can be used to develop MOOCs at very low cost, but also how, with a competency based approach to accreditation, they may be the catalyst of significant change in higher education. (Lederman, 2013, Mulligan, 2013). In this project open badges will be used as recognition of participation and achievement, with the end goal of international accreditation, as global currency. This is despite the fact that 72% of educators believing that formal accreditation should not be allowed (Petkovska, Delipetrev, and Zdravev, 2014). One of the partners has agreed to trial the MOOC’s with a Zambian student cohort, which will help achieve the globalisation of MOOC’s. The pilot will be available to students within the developers sector and through wider participation with open availability to all by a registration process. As part of the research data on MOOC’s the studies look to determine if the realisation of a digital campus in terms of student satisfaction by completing a MOOC are different from the results for traditional students (Walker, and Brooks, 2013). The final success of the project will be determined by the merit of scalability and by the cost analysis

Call For Research: Towards the Right-Sizing of Regulations for Business Performance

Nobel Prize Laureate Hayek warned the U.S. was susceptible to wrong-sized regulations leading to market failure. We seek to understand where we are relative to Hayek’s portention, the effects of regulations on business performance, and how to right-size regulations to establish a healthy business environment. Previous research contains different underlying evidence and methods because they are from diverse, bias, incomplete, or propagandized angles, making productive discourse difficult and increasing epistemological polarity. Thus, this paper is a call for research to quantify the costs and benefits of regulation on business, with specific requests for action on contemporary regulatory dilemmas. The spectrum of business regulation considerations and a historical perspective of regulatory decisions are examined. A set of models and frameworks based on the literature are developed to propose research questions. The U.S. is at a pivotal moment where it is critical to understand the impacts of regulations on business performance and develop appropriate actions. The aim and underling premises of the study, implications, and desire are based on the genuine concern that we may be reaching a state of overregulation that requires correction, but our stance is not political in nature. Rather, it seeks to provide an economic foundation to investigate whether indeed the U.S. has reached a state of overregulation and if so, how to achieve an optimal level of regulation

Asymptotic Spectrum of Kerr Black Holes in the Small Angular Momentum Limit

We study analytically the highly damped quasinormal modes of Kerr black holes in the small angular momentum limit. To check the previous analytic calculations in the literature, which use a combination of radial and tortoise coordinates, we reproduce all the results using the radial coordinate only. According to the earlier calculations, the real part of the highly damped quasinormal mode frequency of Kerr black holes approaches zero in the limit where the angular momentum goes to zero. This result is not consistent with the Schwarzschild limit where the real part of the highly damped quasinormal mode frequency is equal to c^3 ln(3)/(8 pi G M). In this paper, our calculations suggest that the highly damped quasinormal modes of Kerr black holes in the zero angular momentum limit make a continuous transition from the Kerr value to the Schwarzschild value. We explore the nature of this transition using a combination of analytical and numerical techniques. Finally, we calculate the highly damped quasinormal modes of the extremal case in which the topology of Stokes/anti-Stokes lines takes a different form.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Number learning in the primary years

This chapter provides an overview of recent Australasian research on number learning in the primary years - that is, research pertaining to the number learning of 5- to 12-year old children. The research has been categorised using the headings of (a) developmental frameworks in number, (b) counting, (c) place value and the number system, (d) addition and subtraction, (e) multiplication and division, (f) mental computation, (g) number sense, and (h) fractions and decimals

The Impact of Flexible Working Arrangements on Work-Life Conflict and Work Pressure in Ireland. ESRI WP192. April 2007

The impetus for this study arose from the need to upgrade the case mix measure of choice in use at the national level in Ireland. Since 1993, various versions of the DRG grouper supported by the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) had been in use in Ireland. With improvements in available data, together with developments in the range and quality of alternative groupers available, it was considered timely to test performance of the alternative options on discharge abstract data for Irish hospitals. The groupers selected for testing included four versions of the Australian Refined (AR) DRGs, the AP DRGs (V18.0), CMS DRGs (V20) and IR DRGs (V1.2). Results for the HCFA DRGS (V16.0) were also included for purposes of compariso

Founding-Era Translations of the U.S. Constitution. Appendix

Table of original text of the United States Constitution and parallel translations into Dutch and German, with commentary on the translations. Appendix to the article, Founding-era translations of the U.S. Constitution. Both article and appendix appear in Volume 31, Number 1

High-Velocity Features of Calcium and Silicon in the Spectra of Type Ia Supernovae

"High-velocity features" (HVFs) are spectral features in Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) that have minima indicating significantly higher (by greater than about 6000 km/s) velocities than typical "photospheric-velocity features" (PVFs). The PVFs are absorption features with minima indicating typical photospheric (i.e., bulk ejecta) velocities (usually ~9000-15,000 km/s near B-band maximum brightness). In this work we undertake the most in-depth study of HVFs ever performed. The dataset used herein consists of 445 low-resolution optical and near-infrared (NIR) spectra (at epochs up to 5 d past maximum brightness) of 210 low-redshift SNe Ia that follow the "Phillips relation." A series of Gaussian functions is fit to the data in order to characterise possible HVFs of Ca II H&K, Si II {\lambda}6355, and the Ca II NIR triplet. The temporal evolution of the velocities and strengths of the PVFs and HVFs of these three spectral features is investigated, as are possible correlations with other SN Ia observables. We find that while HVFs of Ca II are regularly observed (except in underluminous SNe Ia, where they are never found), HVFs of Si II {\lambda}6355 are significantly rarer, and they tend to exist at the earliest epochs and mostly in objects with large photospheric velocities. It is also shown that stronger HVFs of Si II {\lambda}6355 are found in objects that lack C II absorption at early times and that have red ultraviolet/optical colours near maximum brightness. These results lead to a self-consistent connection between the presence and strength of HVFs of Si II {\lambda}6355 and many other mutually correlated SN~Ia observables, including photospheric velocity.Comment: 48 pages (22 of which are tables), 15 figures, 5 tables, re-submitted to MNRAS (after first referee report