The relative electoral impact of central party co-ordination and size of party membership at constituency level

Over the past decade, clear evidence has been produced showing that effective constituency campaigning in British general elections can lead to better electoral performance. This evidence has challenged the received wisdom that only national campaigning is significant and that efforts at local level are meaningless rituals. Denver et al. have focused on the role of the national parties in strengthening local campaigns in target seats; Seyd and Whiteley, by contrast, have stressed the importance of local party membership. This article attempts to assess the relative electoral impact of national party co-ordination and constituency party membership and suggests that the impact of these two factors varies by party

Merging Electronic Commerce Technologies for Competitive Advantage

Internet commerce has, in recent years, been promoted as the essential way of doing business. The Internet (using www technology) is however primarily a retail medium. Organisations that establish successful Internet selling operations will need effective backroom systems and slick logistics on the supply side of their operations. In many cases these logistics will also be co-ordinated using electronic commerce (EC); not the technologies spawned from the popularisation of the Internet but the rather older technologies of Electronic Markets (EM) and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). It is argued that that the merging of Internet EC with EMs and, in particular, with EDI gives new opportunities for Competitive Advantage

Party membership and campaign activity in Britain: The impact of electoral performance

The article examines the impact of electoral results on party membership and activity. Previous studies have focused on the long-term effects of electoral success or failure, suggesting that they may produce a spiral of demobilization or mobilization. The article shows that the dramatic change of electoral fortunes experienced by British parties at the 1997 general election broke this spiral, with the outcome leading to significant changes in the health and activity of local parties. It is concluded that dramatic election results can have significant implications for party organization

Government Performance and Life Satisfaction in Contemporary Britain

This paper investigates relationships between public policy outcomes and life satisfaction in contemporary Britain. Monthly national surveys gathered between April 2004 and December 2008 are used to analyze the impact of policy delivery both at the micro and macro levels, the former relating to citizens personal experiences, and the latter to cognitive evaluations of and affective reactions to the effectiveness of policies across the country as a whole. The impact of salient political events and changes in economic context involving the onset of a major financial crisis also are considered. Analyses reveal that policy outcomes, especially microlevel ones, significantly influence life satisfaction. The effects of both micro- and macrolevel outcomes involve both affective reactions to policy delivery and cognitive judgments about government performance. Controlling for these and other factors, the broader economic context in which policy judgments are made also influences life satisfaction. © 2010 Southern Political Science Association

Modern Folk Music Composition: A Self-reflexive Exploration

This thesis is comprised of two parts: six recorded original compositions and this paper, which includes an autobiographical survey of my musical influences and an analysis of the compositions. The compositions are all instrumental, written in a modern folk/bluegrass style. This paper discusses my influences and how they affect my writing. In the analysis section, I discuss how each composition has been directly influenced, and how modern recording has become part of the compositional process. The thesis also considers my personal creative experience in writing and recording in a modern studio and live performance context

Non-crossing frameworks with non-crossing reciprocals

We study non-crossing frameworks in the plane for which the classical reciprocal on the dual graph is also non-crossing. We give a complete description of the self-stresses on non-crossing frameworks whose reciprocals are non-crossing, in terms of: the types of faces (only pseudo-triangles and pseudo-quadrangles are allowed); the sign patterns in the self-stress; and a geometric condition on the stress vectors at some of the vertices. As in other recent papers where the interplay of non-crossingness and rigidity of straight-line plane graphs is studied, pseudo-triangulations show up as objects of special interest. For example, it is known that all planar Laman circuits can be embedded as a pseudo-triangulation with one non-pointed vertex. We show that if such an embedding is sufficiently generic, then the reciprocal is non-crossing and again a pseudo-triangulation embedding of a planar Laman circuit. For a singular (i.e., non-generic) pseudo-triangulation embedding of a planar Laman circuit, the reciprocal is still non-crossing and a pseudo-triangulation, but its underlying graph may not be a Laman circuit. Moreover, all the pseudo-triangulations which admit a non-crossing reciprocal arise as the reciprocals of such, possibly singular, stresses on pseudo-triangulation embeddings of Laman circuits. All self-stresses on a planar graph correspond to liftings to piece-wise linear surfaces in 3-space. We prove characteristic geometric properties of the lifts of such non-crossing reciprocal pairs.Comment: 32 pages, 23 figure

Single crystal growth of BaFe2−x_{2-x}Cox_xAs2_2 without fluxing agent

We report a simple, reliable method to grow high quality BaFe$_{2-x}$Co$_x$As$_2$ single crystal samples without using any fluxing agent. The starting materials for the single crystal growth come from well-crystallized polycrystalline samples and the highest growing temperature can be 1493 K. The as-grown crystals have typical dimensions of 4$\times3\times$0.5 mm$^3$ with c-axis perpendicular to the shining surface. We find that the samples have very large current carrying ability, indicating that the samples have good potential technological applications.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, accepted by Journal of Superconductivity and Novel Magnetis