Professionalism and the Millbank Tendency: The Political Sociology of New Labour's employees

This article analyses party employees, one of the most under-researched subjects in the study of British political parties. We draw on a blend of quantitative and qualitative data in order to shed light on the social and political profiles of Labour Party staff, and on the question of their professionalisation. The latter theme is developed through a model derived from the sociology of professions. While a relatively limited proportion of party employees conform to the pure ideal-type of professionalism, a considerably greater number manifest enough of the core characteristics of specialisation, commitment, mobility, autonomy and self-regulation to be reasonably described as 'professionals in pursuit of political outcomes'

Guidelines and workbook for of organization and administration of utilities seeking operating license for a nuclear power plant. Workbook for assessment of organization and management. Volume, 2, Revision 1

This report is a partial response to the requirements of Item I.B.1.1 of the ''NRC Action Plan Developed as a Result of the TMI-2 Accident,'' NUREG-0660, and is designed to serve as a basis for replacing the earlier NUREG-0731, ''Guidelines for Utility Management Structure and Technical Resources.'' The Guidelines are intended to provide guidance to the user in preparing a written plan for a proposed nuclear organization and administration. The purpose of the Workbook is to guide the NRC reviewer through a systematic review and assessment of a proposed organization and administration. It is the NRC's intention to incorporate these Guidelines and Workbook into a future revision of the Standard Review Plan (SRP), NUREG-0800. However, at this time the report is being published so that the material may be used on a voluntary basis by industry to systematically prepare or evaluate their organization or administration plans. Use of the report by the NRC would not occur until after it has been incorporated in the SRP

Guidelines and workbook for assessment of organization and administration of utilities seeking operating license for a nuclear power plant. Guidelines for utility organization and administration plan. Volume 1, Revision 1

Volumes 1 and 2 of this report are a partial response to the requirements of Item I.B.1.1 of the ''NRC Action Plan Developed as a Result of the TMI-2 Accident,'' NUREG-0660, and are designed to serve as a basis for replacing the earlier NUREG-0731, ''Guidelines for Utility Management Structure and Technical Resources.'' These Guidelines are intended to provide guidance to the user in preparing a written plan for a proposed nuclear organization and administration. The purpose of the Workbook (Vol. 2) is to guide the NRC reviewer through a systematic review and assessment of a proposed organization and administration. It is the NRC's intention to incorporate these Guidelines and Workbook into a future revision of the Standard Review Plan (SRP), NUREG-0800. However, at this time the report is being published so that the material may be used on a voluntary basis by industry to systematically prepare or evaluate their organization or administration plans. Use of the report by the NRC would not occur until after it has been incorpoarted in the SRP

Approximability of Minimum AND-Circuits

Given a set of monomials, the Minimum AND-Circuit problem asks for a circuit that computes these monomials using AND-gates of fan-in two and being of minimum size. We prove that the problem is not polynomial time approximable within a factor of less than 1.0051 unless P = NP, even if the monomials are restricted to be of degree at most three. For the latter case, we devise several efficient approximation algorithms, yielding an approximation ratio of 1.278. For the general problem, we achieve an approximation ratio of d − 3/2, where d is the degree of the largest monomial. In addition, we prove that the problem is fixed parameter tractable with the number of monomials as parameter. Finally, we reveal connections between the Minimum AND-Circuit problem and several problems from different areas