THE IMPACT OF SELECTED HEDGING STRATEGIES ON THE CASH FLOW POSITION OF CATTLE FEEDERS

Agricultural Finance,

National Evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme in English Local Government: Annex 3. Direct Support in Poor and Weak Local Authorities: Emerging findings

This report summarises emerging findings from initial scoping analysis and case study fieldwork with authorities that have received Direct Support from the Capacity Building Programme (CBP) for local government. The report is one of a series of outputs from the national evaluation of the CBP, being undertaken by a team of researchers at the Policy Research Institute (PRI) at Leeds Metropolitan University and the Cities Research Unit at the University of West of England

Maser Source Finding Methods in HOPS

The {\bf H}$_2${\bf O} Southern Galactic {\bf P}lane {\bf S}urvey (HOPS) has observed 100 square degrees of the Galactic plane, using the Mopra radio telescope to search for emission from multiple spectral lines in the 12\,mm band (19.5\,--\,27.5\,GHz). Perhaps the most important of these spectral lines is the 22.2\,GHz water maser transition. We describe the methods used to identify water maser candidates and subsequent confirmation of the sources. Our methods involve a simple determination of likely candidates by searching peak emission maps, utilising the intrinsic nature of water maser emission - spatially unresolved and spectrally narrow-lined. We estimate completeness limits and compare our method with results from the {\sc Duchamp} source finder. We find that the two methods perform similarly. We conclude that the similarity in performance is due to the intrinsic limitation of the noise characteristics of the data. The advantages of our method are that it is slightly more efficient in eliminating spurious detections and is simple to implement. The disadvantage is that it is a manual method of finding sources and so is not practical on datasets much larger than HOPS, or for datasets with extended emission that needs to be characterised. We outline a two-stage method for the most efficient means of finding masers, using {\sc Duchamp}.Comment: 8 pages, 1 table, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in PASA special issue on Source Finding & Visualisatio

National Evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme in English Local Government: Annex 4: Follow On Study of Progress in Seven Case Study Improvement Partnerships

This report is one of a series of outputs from the national evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme for local government in England (CBP), being undertaken by a team of researchers at the Policy Research Institute (PRI) at Leeds Metropolitan University and the Cities Research Unit at the University of West of England. This report summarises the findings from the second phase of fieldwork with regional and sub-regional Improvement Partnerships, established to facilitate capacity building and improvement activity in local authorities. The research underpinning this report was undertaken in seven case study Improvement Partnerships (see Section 2) in October and November 2006 and follows a similar – baseline – exercise undertaken during the same period during 2005. It thus both draws on the earlier research (see Section 3) and identifies evidence of progress and impact (see Section 10) since the baseline phase

National Evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme in English Local Government: Overall Final Report

This report is one of a series of outputs from the National Evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme for local government in England (CBP), undertaken by a team of researchers at the Policy Research Institute (PRI) at Leeds Metropolitan University and the Cities Research Unit at the University of West of England. This report summarises the findings from all four key strands of the evaluation. Because of the difficulties associated with quantifying the capacity of local authorities, much less the sector, in relation to the dynamic roles and objectives that they pursue, the report focuses on what has worked, why and in what circumstances, rather than providing a definitive assessment of the extent of change of capacity building enabled by the CBP. The CBP was launched in 2003 as a joint Department for Communities and Local Government/Local Government Association (LGA) initiative to support capacity building and improvement activities within local authorities in England. The CBP has supported four main streams of improvement and capacity building activity in local authorities (see Section 1.2; p13)

National Evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme in English Local Government: Annex 1. Seven Case Studies: The Pilot Programme

This report presents the findings of the evaluation of the Capacity Building pilots. The evaluation of the pilots is part of the on-going evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme and has been undertaken in the early scoping phase of the main evaluation in order to capture key learning points and insights into the programme. It is intended that the ongoing evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme will be formative and assist in the development of the programme over time. In what follows the background to the pilots programme is discussed, highlighting the kinds of capacity building activities the pilots are engaged with and the link between the Capacity Building Programme and the CPA. The report outlines the structure and purpose of the pilots programme and the nature and characteristics of the different pilots that were undertaken. The seven case studies are then discussed in more detail in the main body of 1 Introduction | 5 the report. These are drawn together in key themes and findings which can be used to strengthen future project development

Evaluation of the table Mountain Ronchi telescope for angular tracking

The performance of the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) Table Mountain telescope was evaluated to determine the potential of such an instrument for optical angular tracking. This telescope uses a Ronchi ruling to measure differential positions of stars at the meridian. The Ronchi technique is summarized and the operational features of the Table Mountain instrument are described. Results from an analytic model, simulations, and actual data are presented that characterize the telescope's current performance. For a star pair of visual magnitude 7, the differential uncertainty of a 5-min observation is about 50 nrad (10 marcsec), and tropospheric fluctuations are the dominant error source. At magnitude 11, the current differential uncertainty is approximately 800 nrad (approximately 170 marcsec). This magnitude is equivalent to that of a 2-W laser with a 0.4-m aperture transmitting to Earth from a spacecraft at Saturn. Photoelectron noise is the dominant error source for stars of visual magnitude 8.5 and fainter. If the photoelectron noise is reduced, ultimately tropospheric fluctuations will be the limiting source of error at an average level of 35 nrad (7 marcsec) for stars approximately 0.25 deg apart. Three near-term strategies are proposed for improving the performance of the telescope to the 10-nrad level: improving the efficiency of the optics, masking background starlight, and averaging tropospheric fluctuations over multiple observations

Capitalism and Risk: Concepts, Consequences, and Ideologies

Politically charged claims about both capitalism and risk became increasingly insistent in the late twentieth century. The end of the post-World War II boom in the 1970s and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union inspired fervent new commitments to capitalist ideas and institutions. At the same time structural changes in the American economy and expanded industrial development across the globe generated sharpening anxieties about the risks that those changes entailed. One result was an outpouring of roseate claims about capitalism and its ability to control those risks, including the use of new techniques of risk management to tame financial uncertainties and guarantee stability and prosperity. Despite assurances, however, recent decades have shown many of those claims to be overblown, if not misleading or entirely ill-founded. Thus, the time seems ripe to review some of our most basic economic ideas and, in doing so, reflect on what we might learn from past centuries about the nature of both capitalism and risk, the relationship between the two, and their interactions and consequences in contemporary America