Capital Structure and Product-Market Rivalry: How Do We Reconcile Theory and Evidence?

This paper presents empirical evidence on the interaction of capital structure decisions and product market behavior. We examine when firms recapitalize and increase the proportion of debt in their capital structure. The evidence in this paper shows that firms with low productivity plants in highly concentrated industries are more likely to recapitalize and increase debt financing. This finding suggests that debt plays a role in highly concentrated industries where agency costs are not significantly reduced by product market competition. Following the empirical evidence we introduce the strategic investment effects of debt and argue that this effect, in conjunction with agency costs, appears to fit the data

Vortex pinning with bounded fields for the Ginzburg-Landau equation

The coefficient, tivity is nonnega applied magnet κ = 1/ε, we sho of local minimi

Our future town: changing hearts and minds policy research

‘Our Future Town’ sets out a fundamentally different approach to community place-making and transport planning. We developed a prototype toolkit that can be used to engage with communities and help them to imagine their town’s future and build consensus for positive change. We developed the prototype with three towns across England (Biggleswade, Haltwhistle and Lyme Regis) with the support of the three professional planning and transport organisations and the involvement of a number of key civil society stakeholders. This report asks professionals and researchers how we should engage with communities, how we might use knowledge around wellbeing and the environment to frame the future, what is the role of disciplines and specialities in the planning process and the importance of vision-making as a platform for development and making change that matters

Engaging rural enterprises in community placemaking and transport planning

Rural entrepreneurs in and around the Tyne Valley share environmental, social and economic concerns and have overlapping visions for a future. These are based on community and kindness, hard work and passion, as well as a value inherent in people’s wellbeing, restoration of nature and protection and development of a local culture and heritage - founded on a natural friendliness that’s part of a Northumbrian way of life. Their vision is centred on helping smaller and independent businesses and town councils to work together to support thriving town centres that are self-sustaining and inclusive, with space and time for everyone. To achieve this they would like to see more community owned buildings and organisations that provide focal points for work, play and learning, connected to green spaces, public transport, walking and micro-mobility networks that reach within and between their towns. They recognise that private vehicles remain important for rural communities but they no longer want them to dominate their towns. Despite these aspirations, entrepreneurs don’t have the knowledge or experience to achieve these goals alone. There's a lack of trust in developers, landowners and larger businesses (often remotely owned) so they’d like communities, local and central government agencies to collaborate rather than compete for limited resources and want other organisations - societies, schools, healthcare and heritage to join in. Not every entrepreneur recognises the urgency for radical change, but they don’t want special interest groups or individuals to dominate decision making about their shared future. The tools that we used in this project served the purpose of collecting perspectives and stimulating discussion. But they do not provide a quantifiable platform that towns can use to justify a future vision and they aren’t yet suitable for large consensus building group activities. To take this work forward, we need to partner with planning organisations, digital platforms and democracy experts so that design skills can complement other quantitative and deliberative engagement techniques that are available today

Making Instructions for Others: Exploring Mental Models Through a Simple Exercise

Investigating how people understand the systems around them—from technology to democracy to our own bodies—is a common research goal across many disciplines. One of the practical aims is uncovering differences between how people think systems work and how they actually work (particularly where differences can cause problems) and then addressing them, either by trying to change people’s understanding or by changing the way people inter- act with systems so that this better matches people’s understanding [1]. Being able to say that you under- stand a system is essentially saying that you have a model of the system [2]. In HCI and other people-centered design fields, attempting to characterize people’s mental models of technology in which their behavior plays a role can be a significant part of user research. Users’ mental models will perhaps only rarely accord exactly with designers’ conceptual models of a system [3], but this is not necessarily a problem in itself: “[A]ll models are wrong, but some are useful” [4]. Mental models should not be assumed to be static constructs covering the whole of a system; multiple models working at different levels of abstraction can be relevant in different circumstances, from complex work domains to simple everyday interactions [5]

Improving household air quality: The neglected cultural dimension

Household air pollution is now recognized as the single largest environmental health risk factor worldwide contributing to the global burden of disease, with the World Health Organization (WHO) estimating that close to 4million people per year die prematurely as a result(1,2).This form of pollution is widespread in resource-poor countries mainly due to the use of biomass fuels, derived from crop residues, animal dung, wood or charcoal, as a source of household energy. It has been linked with an increased frequency of lower respiratory infection, cataract, ischemic stroke, hemorrhagic stroke, hypertension, ischemic heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, as well as tracheal, bronchial and lung cancer (2). Vulnerable groups, such as the rural poor or women and children, appear to be disproportionately affected, the former as they are forced by economic circumstances to use more polluting fuel sources and the latter as a consequence of carrying out common domestic tasks such as cooking. The substantial disease burden and its propensity to affect vulnerable populations have led to its identification as a major target for intervention to improve global health and it is specifically mentioned in the current Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 3 –which recommends implementation of the WHO indoor air quality guidelines on household fuel combustion)

A Coordinated Initialization Process for the Distributed Space Exploration Simulation (DSES)

This document describes the federate initialization process that was developed at the NASA Johnson Space Center with the HIIA Transfer Vehicle Flight Controller Trainer (HTV FCT) simulations and refined in the Distributed Space Exploration Simulation (DSES). These simulations use the High Level Architecture (HLA) IEEE 1516 to provide the communication and coordination between the distributed parts of the simulation. The purpose of the paper is to describe a generic initialization sequence that can be used to create a federate that can: 1. Properly initialize all HLA objects, object instances, interactions, and time management 2. Check for the presence of all federates 3. Coordinate startup with other federates 4. Robustly initialize and share initial object instance data with other federates

Membrane-protein interactions in mechanosensitive channels

In this paper, we examine the mechanical role of the lipid bilayer in ion channel conformation and function with specific reference to the case of the mechanosensitive channel of large conductance (MscL). In a recent paper (Wiggins and Phillips, 2004), we argued that mechanotransduction very naturally arises from lipid-protein interactions by invoking a simple analytic model of the MscL channel and the surrounding lipid bilayer. In this paper, we focus on improving and expanding this analytic framework for studying lipid-protein interactions with special attention to MscL. Our goal is to generate simple scaling relations which can be used to provide qualitative understanding of the role of membrane mechanics in protein function and to quantitatively interpret experimental results. For the MscL channel, we find that the free energies induced by lipid-protein interaction are of the same order as the free energy differences between conductance states measured by Sukharev et al. (1999). We therefore conclude that the mechanics of the bilayer plays an essential role in determining the conformation and function of the channel. Finally, we compare the predictions of our model to experimental results from the recent investigations of the MscL channel by Perozo et al. (2002), Powl et al. (2003), Yoshimura et al. (2004), and others and suggest a suite of new experiments

Analytic models for mechanotransduction: gating a mechanosensitive channel

Analytic estimates for the forces and free energy generated by bilayer deformation reveal a compelling and intuitive model for MscL channel gating analogous to the nucleation of a second phase. We argue that the competition between hydrophobic mismatch and tension results in a surprisingly rich story which can provide both a quantitative comparison to measurements of opening tension for MscL when reconstituted in bilayers of different thickness and qualitative insights into the function of the MscL channel and other transmembrane proteins