Greater return on women's enterprise (GROWE) : final report and recommendations of the women's enterprise task force. SEEDA, women’s enterprise task force.

This Women’s Enterprise Task Force (WETF) report, Greater Return On Women’s Enterprise (GROWE), sets out the economic case for women’s enterprise and advises partners and stakeholders how to achieve a greater economic return from investment in women’s enterprise. The Task Force has framed its recommendations to maximise existing investment and resources. We are mindful of the Government’s Business Support Simplification Programme and the effect the recession will continue to have on public spending, and so suggest that relevant Government departments and private sector organisations work together to streamline support and make best use of existing investment. In providing thought leadership to increase the quantity, scalability and success of women’s enterprise in the UK, the WETF has informed the national agenda on women’s enterprise for the last three years, concentrating its efforts on five specific Pillars: 1. gender-disaggregated business data 2. female-friendly business support 3. access to finance and technology 4. supplier diversity and procurement 5. strategic influencing and awareness raising. WETF highlights of the past three years include paving the way for a Business Link national data disaggregation methodology whilst influencing and shaping the establishment, direction and implementation of Aspire, a £12.5m women’s co-investment fund to support high-growth women-owned businesses. Alongside this, the WETF has played an important role in raising awareness of the economic case for women’s enterprise and the potential of female entrepreneurs in aiding the UK’s economic recovery. Perhaps most importantly, the WETF met with the Prime Minister and saw important policy developments taken forward in the Government’s Enterprise Strategy of March 2008. In 2009 the WETF contributed to the enterprise knowledge bank by producing two research reports into women’s enterprise: Impact of the Recession on Women’s Enterprise and Myths and Realities of Women’s Access to Finance. The Task Force welcomes progress made by the Ethnic Minority Business Task Force (EMBTF) in the advocacy of complementary areas which include the need for access to finance, disaggregated data and supplier diversity. Much of the groundwork for the WETF’s work was laid out in the Government’s 2003 publication, A Strategic Framework for Women’s Enterprise. In 2003, it was estimated that women constituted around 27% of self-employed people in the UK, and that only 12-14% of businesses were majority-owned by women (compared to 28% in the USA). From the Strategic Framework for Women’s Enterprise, to the establishment of the WETF and the Enterprise Strategy, Government has shown the importance that it attaches to women in enterprise and its recognition of the increased economic benefits women can contribute to UK plc. This must be even more important in emerging from recession. Recently, Government has a produced a policy statement, Building Britain’s Future: New Industry, New Jobs (NINJ), which sets out Government’s vision for economic recovery and growth by targeted intervention aimed at hightech, high-growth firms. The WETF has several recommendations for how enterprising women can take advantage of these interventions. Enterprise has a significant role to help women remain economically active and increase the productivity and international competitiveness of the UK. Recent figures from 2009 show that women, who make up 46% of the workforce, now constitute nearly 29% of the self-employed in the UK (up 2 percentage points). 15% of the 4.8 million enterprises in the UK are now majority-led by women. The longer-term quantitative targets outlined in the Framework included women accounting for 40% of customers using Government sponsored business support services; and women-owned businesses accounting for 18-20% of the UK total. Government has gone some way towards achieving these targets. Today, women-owned businesses account for around one third of Business Link customers, a major increase on the 22.3% or nearly 150,000 women customers in Q1 of 2005/6. However, overall progress has been very slow and neither of the Framework targets set for completion by 2006 has yet been met. More work needs to be done to address this and the other issues facing women’s enterprise today. This report examines how to further increase the current £70 billion Gross Value Added (GVA) and £130 billion turnover annual contribution made by women’s enterprise to the UK economy. Recent figures suggest that 900,000 more businesses would be created if the UK achieved the same levels of female entrepreneurship as in the US, resulting in an additional £23 billion GVA to the UK economy, thus largely closing the productivity gap with the US.1 In Britain alone, 150,000 extra businesses would be created per annum if women started businesses at the same rate as men.2 This is especially pertinent in this time of recession. With effective, targeted support, increasing the number of women entrepreneurs will be an important factor in driving economic recovery

Flight Dynamics of the flying wing

Flying wings are one of the most promising concepts for the future of commercial aviation, regarding the market, technology and environmental driving factors. The research reported here is part of a long term project on the 300 seats category flying wings. In several previously published works the feasibility, efficient performance and airport compatibility of the concept have been assessed. The present paper concentrates on the flight dynamic aspects of the aircraft, which have been scarcely analyzed in open literature. The results obtained show that the flying wing configuration can be dynamically stable; however, the longitudinal and lateral directional oscillations decay so slowly that a stability augmentation system would be required to assure an acceptable dynamic response of the aircraft

Structural Recursion as a Query Language

We propose a programming paradigm that tries to get close to both the semantic simplicity of relational algebra, and the expressive power of unrestricted programming languages. Its main computational engine is structural recursion on sets. All programming is done within a nicely typed lambda calculus, as in Machiavelli [OBB89]. A guiding principle is that how queries are implemented is as important as whether they can be implemented. As in relational algebra, the meaning of any relation transformer is guaranteed to be a total map taking finite relations to finite relations. A naturally restricted class of programs written with structural recursion has precisely the expressive power of the relational algebra. The same programming paradigm scales up, yielding query languages for the complex-object model [AB89]. Beyond that, there are, for example, efficient programs for transitive closure and we are also able to write programs that move out of sets, and then perhaps back to sets, as long as we stay within a (quite flexible) type system. The uniform paradigm of the language suggests positive expectations for the optimization problem. In fact, structural recursion yields finer grain programming. Therefore we expect that lower-level and therefore better optimizations will be feasible

Quantum effects on Higgs-strahlung events at Linear Colliders within the general 2HDM

The associated production of neutral Higgs bosons with the Z gauge boson is investigated in the context of the future linear colliders, such as the ILC and CLIC, within the general two-Higgs-doublet model (2HDM). We compute the corresponding production cross-sections at one-loop, in full consistency with the available theoretical and phenomenological constraints. We find that the wave-function renormalization corrections to the external Higgs fields are the dominant source of the quantum effects, which turn out to be large and negative, and located predominantly in the region around \tan\beta=1 and moderate values of the parameter \lambda_5 (being \lambda_5 < 0). This behavior can be ultimately traced back to the enhancement potential of the triple Higgs boson self-couplings, a trademark feature of the 2HDM with no counterpart in the Higgs sector of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. The predicted Higgs-strahlung rates comfortably reach a few tens of femtobarn, which means barely 10^3 - 10^4 events per 500 inverse femtobarn of integrated luminosity. Due to their great complementarity, we argue that the combined analysis of the Higgs-strahlung events and the previously computed one-loop Higgs-pair production processes could be instrumental to probe the structure of the Higgs sector at future linac facilities.Comment: LaTeX, 16 pages, 9 Figures, 2 Tables. Extended discussion, references added, matches published version in Phys. Rev.

Compilability of Abduction

Abduction is one of the most important forms of reasoning; it has been successfully applied to several practical problems such as diagnosis. In this paper we investigate whether the computational complexity of abduction can be reduced by an appropriate use of preprocessing. This is motivated by the fact that part of the data of the problem (namely, the set of all possible assumptions and the theory relating assumptions and manifestations) are often known before the rest of the problem. In this paper, we show some complexity results about abduction when compilation is allowed

Rushing to Overpay: The REIT Premium Revisited

We explore the questions of whether and why Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) pay more for real estate than non-REIT buyers, consequently breaking the law of one price. We develop a model where REITs optimally pay more for property because (1) they are able, due to capital access advantages and, (2) are occasionally compelled, due to regulatory time constraints on the deployment of capital. We show that the typically large (20 to 60 percent) and statistically significant (p-values less than 0.01) REIT-buyer premiums found in standard empirical hedonic pricing models are biased due to unobserved explanatory variables. Using a repeat-transaction methodology that controls for unobserved independent variables, we find the REIT-buyer premium to be about 5 percent. Furthermore, we show that REITs¿ ability (as measured by access to capital markets) and regulator compulsion (as measured by capital deployment deadlines) are related to the price premium.Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), commercial properties, hedonic price analysis, repeat transactions, market efficiency, law of one price, price premium

Feed-forward segmentation of figure-ground and assignment of border-ownership

Figure-ground is the segmentation of visual information into objects and their surrounding backgrounds. Two main processes herein are boundary assignment and surface segregation, which rely on the integration of global scene information. Recurrent processing either by intrinsic horizontal connections that connect surrounding neurons or by feedback projections from higher visual areas provide such information, and are considered to be the neural substrate for figure-ground segmentation. On the contrary, a role of feedforward projections in figure-ground segmentation is unknown. To have a better understanding of a role of feedforward connections in figure-ground organization, we constructed a feedforward spiking model using a biologically plausible neuron model. By means of surround inhibition our simple 3-layered model performs figure-ground segmentation and one-sided border-ownership coding. We propose that the visual system uses feed forward suppression for figure-ground segmentation and border-ownership assignment

The Effect of Increasing Age on the Concentric and Eccentric Contractile Properties of Isolated Mouse Soleus and Extensor Digitorum Longus Muscles

There is currently a limited amount of literature investigating the age-related changes in eccentric muscle function in vitro. The present study uniquely uses the work loop technique, to better replicate in vivo muscle function, in the assessment of the age and muscle-specific changes in acute and sustained concentric and eccentric power and recovery. Whole soleus or EDL muscles were isolated from 10-week and 78-week old mice, and acute and sustained concentric and eccentric work loop power assessed. Despite an age-related increase in body and muscle mass, peak absolute power for both muscles was unaffected by age. Peak concentric power normalised to muscle mass declined significantly for each muscle, whilst peak normalised eccentric power declined only for soleus. Fatigue resistance and recovery for the soleus did not differ between age or contraction type. Older EDL was less resistant to concentric fatigue, but was better able to withstand sustained eccentric activity than young EDL. We have shown that age-related changes in muscle quality are more limited for eccentric function than concentric function. A greater bodily inertia is likely to further reduce in vivo locomotor performance in older animals.</p