Absorptive Capacity and Frontier Technology: Evidence from OECD Manufacturing Industries

This paper investigates whether differences in absorptive capacity help to explain cross-country differences in the level of productivity. We utilise stochastic frontier analysis to investigate two potential sources of this inefficiency: differences in human capital and R&D for nine industries in twelve OECD countries over the period 1973-92. We find that inefficiency in production does indeed exist and it depends upon the level of human capital of the countryÕs workforce.Evidence that the amount of R&D an industry undertakes is also important is less robust. Classification- JEL: O3, O4absorptive capacity, human capital, R&D, SFA

Safer recruitment? protecting children, improving practice in residential child care

In the wake of a number of high-profile cases of the abuse of children and young people in residential child care, there have been repeated calls for the improvement of recruitment and selection of residential child care staff. This paper describes the findings from a survey, undertaken in 2005, of operational and human resource managers who have responsibility for the recruitment and selection of residential child care staff in the voluntary and statutory sectors in Scotland. This research was commissioned by the Scottish Executive to identify which elements of safer recruitment procedures had been implemented following the countrywide launch of a Toolkit for Safer Recruitment Practice in 2001. Research findings show that although local authorities were more likely than voluntary organisations to have gone some way toward implementing safer recruitment procedures, the recruitment process lacked rigour and commitment to safer procedures in some organisations. The article discusses the current barriers to the introduction of safer recruitment methods and proposes some possible solutions for the future

Taxes on bottled water are better at raising money than reducing litter

With environmental concerns on the rise, many US states have introduced policies to reduce waste, including taxes on packaging. In new research using a case study of the introduction of a bottled water tax in Washington State, Andrew Stevens finds that such taxes have far less of an impact than was originally expected. For an average tax increase of 9 percent, consumers only reduced consumption of bottled water by 6 percent. Other policies, such as deposit and refund systems, he writes, are far more effective in reducing plastic bottle waste and litter

Sand and Man

Spinning we fall, clenching, unfurling, always learning more of falling. Always closer, land uncurling, simply heeding matter\u27s calling..

New opportunities in the fight for peace and democracy: Main report delivered at the National Conference of the Communist Party, U.S.A

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/1015/thumbnail.jp

myTea: Connecting the Web to Digital Science on the Desktop

Bioinformaticians regularly access the hundreds of databases and tools that are available to them on the Web. None of these tools communicate with each other, causing the scientist to copy results manually from a Web site into a spreadsheet or word processor. myGrids' Taverna has made it possible to create templates (workflows) that automatically run searches using these databases and tools, cutting down what previously took days of work into hours, and enabling the automated capture of experimental details. What is still missing in the capture process, however, is the details of work done on that material once it moves from the Web to the desktop: if a scientist runs a process on some data, there is nothing to record why that action was taken; it is likewise not easy to publish a record of this process back to the community on the Web. In this paper, we present a novel interaction framework, built on Semantic Web technologies, and grounded in usability design practice, in particular the Making Tea method. Through this work, we introduce a new model of practice designed specifically to (1) support the scientists' interactions with data from the Web to the desktop, (2) provide automatic annotation of process to capture what has previously been lost and (3) associate provenance services automatically with that data in order to enable meaningful interrogation of the process and controlled sharing of the results

Dubuque

A collection of poetry by Andrew Rich Stevens