New labour and reform of the English NHS: user views and attitudes.

BACKGROUND: The British National Health Service has undergone significant restructuring in recent years. In England this has taken a distinctive direction where the New Labour Government has embraced and intensified the influence of market principles towards its vision of a 'modernized' NHS. This has entailed the introduction of competition and incentives for providers of NHS care and the expansion of choice for patients. OBJECTIVES: To explore how users of the NHS perceive and respond to the market reforms being implemented within the NHS. In addition, to examine the normative values held by NHS users in relation to welfare provision in the UK. DESIGN AND SETTING: Qualitative interviews using a quota sample of 48 recent NHS users in South East England recruited from three local health economies. RESULTS: Some NHS users are exhibiting an ambivalent or anxious response to aspects of market reform such as patient choice, the use of targets and markets and the increasing presence of the private sector within the state healthcare sector. This has resulted in a sense that current reforms, are distracting or preventing NHS staff from delivering quality of care and fail to embody the relationships of care that are felt to sustain the NHS as a progressive public institution. CONCLUSION: The best way of delivering such values for patients is perceived to involve empowering frontline staffs who are deemed to embody the same values as service users, thus problematizing the current assumptions of reform frameworks that market-style incentives will necessarily gain public consent and support

The reformation of Hell? Protestant and Catholic infernalisms in England, c. 1560–1640

Despite a recent expansion of interest in the social history of death, there has been little scholarly examination of the impact of the Protestant Reformation on perceptions of and discourses about hell. Scholars who have addressed the issue tend to conclude that Protestant and Catholic hells differed little from each other in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of printed English-language sources, and finds significant disparities on questions such as the location of hell and the nature of hell-fire. It argues that such divergences were polemically driven, but none the less contributed to the so-called ‘decline of hell’

The Role of Agriculture and Human Capital in Economic Growth: Farmers, Schooling, and Health

This survey reviews the existing literature, identifying the contribution of agriculture, schooling, and nutrition to economic growth and development over time and across countries. Particular attention is paid to the roles of improvements in agricultural technology and of the human capital of farmers and farm people. Macroeconomic and microeconomic evidence related to the interactions between human capital, productivity and real income per capita have occurred over the past 250 years. We show that for most countries, development is a process of conversion from primarily agrarian economies to urban industrial and service economies. The evidence is that positive technology shocks to agriculture have played a key role in igniting a transition from traditional to modern agriculture and to long-term economic growth in almost all countries. Improvements in agricultural technologies improve labor productivity and create surplus agricultural labor that can provide workers for the growing urban areas. In some cases, improved nutrition helps raise labor productivity and allows individuals to work for longer hours, which makes human capital investments more attractive. The induced improvements in the skill level of a population have major implications for raising living standards, improving health standards, and altering time allocation decisions. In most currently poor and middle income countries, improved schooling has been more important than improved nutrition or caloric intake in explaining recent economic growth. Nevertheless, the poorest countries of the world continue to have a large share of their labor force in agriculture, and growth cannot occur until they experience their own agricultural transformation.

The Role of Agriculture and Human Capital in Economic Growth: Farmers, Schooling, and Health

This paper examines the important role played by agriculture and human capital of farmers and farm people in economic growth and development. In particular, we place great emphasis on the importance of positive technology shocks to agriculture for igniting what may become long-term economic growth with increased food production per capita, an improved standard of living, migration of labor from the farm to the nonfarm sector and the rise of cities

Terraforming: Natural or Industrial

Science fiction has proposed many scenarios of humans inhabiting other planets, but those were created for entertainment. As humans continue to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, Earth’s surface temperature rises and the environment changes. The direction of these changes suggest that humans will need to find another place to live in order to survive, but our current solar system doesn’t have any immediate options. This paper discusses two methods of making planetary bodies such as Mars, Venus, Luna, and Ceres inhabitable: terraforming and Shell World construction. The time requirements, ethical considerations, and material requirements for both methods are examined in an attempt to select the best method for future inhabitation of other planets

Financing Georgia's Future

This report explores how Georgia finances its expenditures through various revenue sources and compares Georgia's taxes across states and over time on multiple dimensions

Solving the Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem with Generalized Precedences by Lazy Clause Generation

The technical report presents a generic exact solution approach for minimizing the project duration of the resource-constrained project scheduling problem with generalized precedences (Rcpsp/max). The approach uses lazy clause generation, i.e., a hybrid of finite domain and Boolean satisfiability solving, in order to apply nogood learning and conflict-driven search on the solution generation. Our experiments show the benefit of lazy clause generation for finding an optimal solutions and proving its optimality in comparison to other state-of-the-art exact and non-exact methods. The method is highly robust: it matched or bettered the best known results on all of the 2340 instances we examined except 3, according to the currently available data on the PSPLib. Of the 631 open instances in this set it closed 573 and improved the bounds of 51 of the remaining 58 instances.Comment: 37 pages, 3 figures, 16 table

Deuteron Photodisintegration at Intermediate Energies

This thesis describes an experiment whose aim was to measure the angular differential cross-section d2s/dpdEt for the two-body photodisintegration of the deuteron D(t,p)n at photon energies in the region of 140 MeV. The experiment was performed using the Glasgow tagged photon spectrometer which was installed at the Mainz Institut fur Kernphysik to take advantage of the high quality d. c. electron beam provided by the racetrack microtron MAMI-A. The experimental work and subsequent data analysis took place in the period from March 1986 to December 1988. The motivation for the project was provided by the recent renewal of theoretical interest in the deuteron photodisintegration reaction which has lead to a call for new and more reliable data on the process. The significance of the reaction lies in its use as a test case for the application of modern models of the N --- N interaction. Such models seek to describe the nuclear force in terms of the underlying hadronic dynamics of the nucleon-meson system as opposed to the essentially phenomenological parameterisations which have been used previously. Photons, both real and virtual, provide the ideal tool for such studies since the electromagnetic interaction is the best understood of all the elementary processes. The experiment was performed with a 0.45 g cm-2 liquid deuterium target cell placed in a tagged photon beam with a total intensity of 10e7 s-1 in the range Et=133 --- 158MeV. Protons were detected in a large solid angle (0. 9 steradian) position sensitive plastic scintillator telescope which had an energy resolution of 5% and an angular resolution of 3. Measurement of the proton energy and angle together with knowledge of photon energy overdefined the reaction kinematics thus facilitating a very clean rejection of background events. Reliable normalisation was assisted by the tagging technique which determined the photon flux to +/-1%. A complete Monte Carlo simulation of the experiment was developed in order to evaluate the systematic corrections to the data. Included in the simulation are effects due to the beam-target geometry, energy losses of the protons in the target, energy deposition in the detector, light production non-linearities and nuclear interactions of the protons in the CH scintillator medium, and also variations in the light collection efficiency throughout the scintillator blocks. The monte carlo simulation produces an efficiency correction factor specific to each data point, as well as providing global normalisation factors to account for the tagging efficiency and the combination of beam and target geometries. The data is presented in the form of two angular distributions corresponding to mean photon energies of 140 and 150 MeV. The total systematic error is estimated to be not greater than 6 %. The results are found to be in good general agreement with other recent experiments but it is observed that none of the available theoretical calculations can give a fully satisfactory account of the data

SMT goes ABMS: Developing Strategic Management Theory using Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation.

For the emerging complexity theory of strategy (CTS), organizations are complex adaptive systems able to co-evolve with their dynamic environments through interaction and response, rather than purely analysis and planning. A promising approach within the CTS context, is to focus on a strategic logic of opportunity pursuit, one in which the distributed decision-makers behave audaciously despite unpredictable, unstable environments. Although there is only emergent support for it, intriguingly organizations can perform better when these decision-makers ‘throw caution to the wind’ even at their own possible expense. Since traditional research methods have had difficulty showing how this can work over time, this research adopts a complementary method, agent-based modelling and simulation (ABMS), to examine this phenomenon. The simulation model developed here, CTS-SIM, is based on quite simple constructs, but it introduces a rich and novel externally driven environment and represents individual decision-makers as having autonomous perceptions but constrainable decision-making freedom. Its primary contribution is the illumination of core dynamics and causal mechanisms in the opportunity-transitioning process. During model construction the apparently simple concept of opportunity-transitioning turns out to be complex, and the apparently complex integration of exogenous and endogenous environments with all three views of opportunity pursuit in the entrepreneurship literature, turns out to be relatively simple. Simulation outcomes using NetLogo contribute to CTS by confirming the positive effects on agent performance of opportunistic transitioning among opportunities in highly dynamic environments. The simulations also reveal tensions among some of the chosen variables and tipping points in emergent behaviours, point to areas where theoretical clarity is currently lacking, provoke some interesting questions and open up useful avenues for future research and data collection using other methods and models. Guidance through numerous stylized facts, flexible methods, careful documentation and description are all intended to inspire interest and facilitate critical discussion and ongoing scientific work