The Politics of Service Delivery Reform

This article identifies the leaders, the supporters and the resisters of public service reform. It adopts a principal–agent framework, comparing reality with an ‘ideal’ situation in which citizens are the principals over political policy-makers as their agents, and policy-makers are the principals over public service officials as their agents. Reform in most developing countries is complicated by an additional set of external actors — international financial institutions and donors. In practice, international agencies and core government officials usually act as the ‘principals’ in the determination of reforms. The analysis identifies the interests involved in reform, indicating how the balance between them is affected by institutional and sectoral factors. Organizational reforms, particularly in the social sectors, present greater difficulties than first generation economic policy reforms

Search for lepton flavor violating decays of a heavy neutral particle in p-pbar collisions at root(s)=1.8 TeV

We report on a search for a high mass, narrow width particle that decays directly to e+mu, e+tau, or mu+tau. We use approximately 110 pb^-1 of data collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab from 1992 to 1995. No evidence of lepton flavor violating decays is found. Limits are set on the production and decay of sneutrinos with R-parity violating interactions.Comment: Figure 2 fixed. Reference 4 fixed. Minor changes to tex

An availability study for a SME

A case study of an availability analysis for a small commercial company is presented. The analysis was carried out to meet a customer requirement for the availability of an electronic ground-based system in a benign environment. Availability calculations were based on failure data provided and an explanation of the methodology and problems encountered and dealt with are discussed. The methodology includes failure classification according to MIL-HDBK-781A and how it may be used to promote and develop internal processes. A commentary on the background to reliability/availability specification is provided and a number of recommendations for monitoring reliability and availability are given

Real-world word learning: exploring children's developing semantic representations of a science term

Assessments of lexical acquisition are often limited to pre-school children on forced choice comprehension measures. This study assessed the understandings 30 school-age children (mean age = 6;7) acquired about the science term, eclipse following a naturalistic exposure to a solar eclipse. The knowledge children acquired about eclipses and a control term, comet was assessed at three points in time (baseline-test, two-week post-test and five-month post-test) using a range of assessment tasks (multiple-choice comprehension, picture-naming, drawing and a model of a solar system task). Children's knowledge was compared to 15 adult controls during the baseline-test and two-week post-test. Children acquired extensive knowledge about eclipses, but not comets; at the two-week post-test and five-month post-test, the majority of children named and drew eclipses and „made? an eclipse using models of the sun, moon and earth. Also, children's eclipse knowledge more closely approximated adult-level understandings at the two-week post-test than at the baseline-test. Implications for the study of lexical acquisition in later development are discussed

Turning the tables : regions shaping university performance

[EN] This paper straddles the systems of innovation and the economic geography theories that conceptualize universities as engines of regional development and drivers of growth. However, these approaches overlook the heterogeneity of universities in the process of engagement, assuming their equal capacity to contribute to their region. In the view proposed here, not only does the university influence the surrounding region, but also regional characteristics shape university performance. The paper puts into perspective differences between university profiles in Spain based on their strategies and performance, and the scale and scope of the capabilities to contribute to their regionsThis research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education through the Formación de Profesorado Universitario (FPU) programme.Sánchez-Barrioluengo, M. (2014). Turning the tables : regions shaping university performance. Regional Studies Regional Science. 1(1):276-285. doi:10.1080/21681376.2014.964299S2762851

Employer Health Insurance Mandates and the Risk of Unemployment

Employer health insurance mandates form the basis of many health care reform proposals. Proponents make the case that they will increase insurance, while opponents raise the concern that low-wage workers will see offsetting reductions in their wages and that in the presence of minimum wage laws some of the lowest wage workers will become unemployed. We construct an estimate of the number of workers whose wages are so close to the minimum wage that they cannot be lowered to absorb the cost of health insurance, using detailed data on wages, health insurance, and demographics from the Current Population Survey (CPS). We find that 33 percent of uninsured workers earn within $3 of the minimum wage, putting them at risk of unemployment if their employers were required to offer insurance. Assuming an elasticity of employment with respect to minimum wage increase of -0.10, we estimate that 0.2 percent of all full-time workers and 1.4 percent of uninsured full-time workers would lose their jobs because of a health insurance mandate. Workers who would lose their jobs are disproportionately likely to be high school dropouts, minority, and female. This risk of unemployment should be a crucial component in the evaluation of both the effectiveness and distributional implications of these policies relative to alternatives such as tax credits, Medicaid expansions, and individual mandates, and their broader effects on the well-being of low-wage workers.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73099/1/j.1540-6296.2008.00133.x.pd

Helicity Modulus and Fluctuating Type II Superconductors: Elastic Approximation and Numerical Simulations

We develop the helicity modulus as a criterion for superconducting order in the mixed phase of a fluctuating type II superconductor. We show that there is a duality relation between this helicity modulus and the superfluid density of a system of analog 2D bosons. We show that the vortex line lattice exhibits a perfect Meissner effect with respect to a shearing perturbation of the applied magnetic field, and this becomes our creterion for "longitudinal superconductivity" parallel to the applied field. We present arguments based on the 2D boson analogy, as well as the results of numerical simulations, that suggest that longitudinal superconductivity can persist into the vortex line liquid state for systems of finite thickness, comparable to those commonly found in experiments.Comment: 63 pages, 22 postscript figure

Modeling the initiation of others into injection drug use, using data from 2,500 injectors surveyed in Scotland during 2008-2009

The prevalence of injection drug use has been of especial interest for assessment of the impact of blood-borne viruses. However, the incidence of injection drug use has been underresearched. Our 2-fold aim in this study was to estimate 1) how many other persons, per annum, an injection drug user (IDU) has the equivalent of full responsibility (EFR) for initiating into injection drug use and 2) the consequences for IDUs' replacement rate. EFR initiation rates are strongly associated with incarceration history, so that our analysis of IDUs' replacement rate must incorporate when, in their injecting career, IDUs were first incarcerated. To do so, we have first to estimate piecewise constant incarceration rates in conjunction with EFR initiation rates, which are then combined with rates of cessation from injecting to model IDUs' replacement rate over their injecting career, analogous to the reproduction number of an epidemic model. We apply our approach to Scotland's IDUs, using over 2,500 anonymous injector participants who were interviewed in Scotland's Needle Exchange Surveillance Initiative during 2008-2009. Our approach was made possible by the inclusion of key questions about initiations. Finally, we extend our model to include an immediate quit rate, as a reasoned compensation for higher-than-expected replacement rates, and we estimate how high initiates' quit rate should be for IDUs' replacement rate to be 1

Virus shapes and buckling transitions in spherical shells

We show that the icosahedral packings of protein capsomeres proposed by Caspar and Klug for spherical viruses become unstable to faceting for sufficiently large virus size, in analogy with the buckling instability of disclinations in two-dimensional crystals. Our model, based on the nonlinear physics of thin elastic shells, produces excellent one parameter fits in real space to the full three-dimensional shape of large spherical viruses. The faceted shape depends only on the dimensionless Foppl-von Karman number \gamma=YR^2/\kappa, where Y is the two-dimensional Young's modulus of the protein shell, \kappa is its bending rigidity and R is the mean virus radius. The shape can be parameterized more quantitatively in terms of a spherical harmonic expansion. We also investigate elastic shell theory for extremely large \gamma, 10^3 < \gamma < 10^8, and find results applicable to icosahedral shapes of large vesicles studied with freeze fracture and electron microscopy.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figure

Energy transitions and uncertainty: creating low carbon investment opportunities in the UK electricity sector

This paper examines how actors in the UK electricity sector are attempting to deliver investment in low carbon generation. Low carbon technologies, because of their relative immaturity, capital intensity and low operational costs, do not readily fit with existing electricity markets and investment templates which were designed for fossil fuel based energy. We analyse key electricity market and infrastructure policies in the UK and highlight how these are aimed at making low carbon technologies ‘investable’ by reducing uncertainty, managing investment risks and repositioning actors within the electricity socio-technical ‘regime’. We argue that our study can inform contemporary debates on the politics and governance of sustainability transitions by empirically investigating the agency of incumbent regime actors in the face of uncertainty and by offering critical insights on the role of markets and finance in shaping socio-technical change