7,574 research outputs found
The perception and management of risk in UK office property development
Risk is an ever-present aspect of business, and risk taking is necessary for profit and economic progress. Speculative property development is popularly perceived as a 'risky business' yet, like other entrepreneurs, developers have opportunities to manage the risks they face; techniques include phasing and joint ventures. The associated areas of investment portfolio risk, development risk analysis and construction risk management have all been addressed by research. This article presents new knowledge about how developers perceive risks and the means they subsequently adopt to manage them. The developers of office projects across the UK were sent questionnaires by post. Respondents were asked about their perceptions of risks at the first appraisal stage and currently and about the risk management techniques that they had adopted. In-depth interviews with a selection of respondents were then used to discuss and augment the findings. Developers were most concerned about market-based risks at both stages. Concern about production-orientated risks was lower and fell significantly between the two stages. A fixed price contract was the most common risk management technique. Risk management techniques were used more often outside London and the South East. Developer type affects both the perception and management of risk. While developers do manage risk, decisions are made on the basis of professional and business experience. These findings should help development companies manage risk in a more objective and analytical way
Generating socially appropriate tutorial dialog
Analysis of student-tutor coaching dialogs suggest that good human tutors attend to and attempt to influence the motivational state of learners. Moreover, they are sensitive to the social face of the learner, and seek to mitigate the potential face threat of their comments. This paper describes a dialog generator for pedagogical agents that takes motivation and face threat factors into account. This enables the agent to interact with learners in a socially appropriate fashion, and foster intrinsic motivation on the part of the learner, which in turn may lead to more positive learner affective states
The impact of marketisation on postgraduate career preparedness in a high skills economy
This study focuses on the consequences for high skills development of the erosion of the once clear demarcation between higher education and business. It contributes to the broader debate about the relevance of higher education for thewell-being of the society of the future. The research explores the effects of marketisation on the postgraduate curriculum and studentsâ preparedness for careers in public relations and marketing communications. Interviews with lecturers and students in two universities in the UK and Australia indicate that a tension exists between academic rigour and corporate relevancy. The consequences are a diminution of academic attachment to critique and wider social/cultural engagement, with a resulting impoverishment of studentsâ creative abilities and critical consciences. Subsequently, graduates of public relations and marketing communications, and to some extent those from other profession-related disciplines, are insufficiently prepared for careers as knowledge workers in a future high-skills economy
Non-existence of Skyrmion-Skyrmion and Skyrmion-anti-Skyrmion static equilibria
We consider classical static Skyrmion-anti-Skyrmion and Skyrmion-Skyrmion
configurations, symmetric with respect to a reflection plane, or symmetric up
to a -parity transformation respectively. We show that the stress tensor
component completely normal to the reflection plane, and hence its integral
over the plane, is negative definite or positive definite respectively.
Classical Skyrmions always repel classical Skyrmions and classical Skyrmions
always attract classical anti-Skyrmions and thus no static equilibrium, whether
stable or unstable, is possible in either case. No other symmetry assumption is
made and so our results also apply to multi-Skyrmion configurations. Our
results are consistent with existing analyses of Skyrmion forces at large
separation, and with numerical results on Skymion-anti-Skyrmion configurations
in the literature which admit a different reflection symmetry. They also hold
for the massive Skyrme model. We also point out that reflection symmetric
self-gravitating Skyrmions or black holes with Skyrmion hair cannot rest in
symmetric equilibrium with self-gravitating anti-Skyrmions.Comment: v2 Typos corrected, refs added. v3 Journal versio
The Infrared Behavior of Gluon and Ghost Propagators in Landau Gauge QCD
A solvable systematic truncation scheme for the Dyson-Schwinger equations of
Euclidean QCD in Landau gauge is presented. It implements the Slavnov-Taylor
identities for the three-gluon and ghost-gluon vertices, whereas irreducible
four-gluon couplings as well as the gluon-ghost and ghost-ghost scattering
kernels are neglected. The infrared behavior of gluon and ghost propagators is
obtained analytically: The gluon propagator vanishes for small spacelike
momenta whereas the ghost propagator diverges stronger than a massless particle
pole. The numerical solutions are compared with recent lattice data for these
propagators. The running coupling of the renormalization scheme approaches a
fixed point, , in the infrared.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Revtex; revised version accepted for publication
in Physical Review Letter
Tur\'an numbers for -free graphs: topological obstructions and algebraic constructions
We show that every hypersurface in contains a large grid,
i.e., the set of the form , with . We use this to
deduce that the known constructions of extremal -free and
-free graphs cannot be generalized to a similar construction of
-free graphs for any . We also give new constructions of
extremal -free graphs for large .Comment: Fixed a small mistake in the application of Proposition
General Form of the Color Potential Produced by Color Charges of the Quark
Constant electric charge satisfies the continuity equation where is the current density of the electron.
However, the Yang-Mills color current density of the quark
satisfies the equation which is not a continuity
equation () which implies that a color charge
of the quark is not constant but it is time dependent where
are color indices. In this paper we derive general form of color
potential produced by color charges of the quark. We find that the general form
of the color potential produced by the color charges of the quark at rest is
given by \Phi^a(x) =A_0^a(t,{\bf x}) =\frac{q^b(t-\frac{r}{c})}{r}\[\frac{{\rm
exp}[g\int dr \frac{Q(t-\frac{r}{c})}{r}] -1}{g \int dr
\frac{Q(t-\frac{r}{c})}{r}}\]_{ab} where integration is an indefinite
integration, ~~ , ~~, ~~ is the retarded time, ~~ is the speed
of light, ~~ is the position of the quark at the retarded
time and the repeated color indices (=1,2,...8) are summed. For constant
color charge we reproduce the Coulomb-like potential
which is consistent with the Maxwell theory where
constant electric charge produces the Coulomb potential
.Comment: Final version, two more sections added, 45 pages latex, accepted for
publication in JHE
International education: a force for peace and cross-cultural understanding?
This paper discusses the notion that the international sojourn has the potential to transform sojourners into cultural mediators who carry the power to improve global relations. A year-long ethnographic study of the adjustment experiences of international postgraduate students in England revealed a universal early enthusiasm for cross-cultural contact that was matched by a widespread adoption of segregated patterns of interacting. The most common friendship networks were described by bonds with conationals, and yet all students attested to an increase in their cultural learning and mindfulness by the end of the sojourn. Nevertheless, intercultural competence was maximised only in those few students who pursued a multicultural strategy of interaction, leading the researcher to call on Higher Education Institutions to instigate policies to encourage lasting cross-cultural contact
Self-consistent solution of the Schwinger-Dyson equations for the nucleon and meson propagators
The Schwinger-Dyson equations for the nucleon and meson propagators are
solved self-consistently in an approximation that goes beyond the Hartree-Fock
approximation. The traditional approach consists in solving the nucleon
Schwinger-Dyson equation with bare meson propagators and bare meson-nucleon
vertices; the corrections to the meson propagators are calculated using the
bare nucleon propagator and bare nucleon-meson vertices. It is known that such
an approximation scheme produces the appearance of ghost poles in the
propagators. In this paper the coupled system of Schwinger-Dyson equations for
the nucleon and the meson propagators are solved self-consistently including
vertex corrections. The interplay of self-consistency and vertex corrections on
the ghosts problem is investigated. It is found that the self-consistency does
not affect significantly the spectral properties of the propagators. In
particular, it does not affect the appearance of the ghost poles in the
propagators.Comment: REVTEX, 7 figures (available upon request), IFT-P.037/93,
DOE/ER/40427-12-N9
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