High Tech and High Touch: Headhunting, Technology, and Economic Transformation

[Excerpt] In High Tech and High Touch, James E. Coverdill and William Finlay invite readers into the dynamic world of headhunters, personnel professionals who acquire talent for businesses and other organizations on a contingent-fee basis. In a high-tech world where social media platforms have simplified direct contact between employers and job seekers, Coverdill and Finlay acknowledge, it is relatively easy to find large numbers of apparently qualified candidates. However, the authors demonstrate that headhunters serve a valuable purpose in bringing high-touch search into the labor market: they help parties on both sides of the transaction to define their needs and articulate what they have to offer. As well as providing valuable information for sociologists and economists, High Tech and High Touch demonstrates how headhunters approach practical issues such as identifying and attracting candidates; how they solicit, secure, and evaluate search assignments from client companies; and how they strive to broker interactions between candidates and clients to maximize the likelihood that the right people land in the right jobs

Financing, fire sales, and the stockholder wealth effects of asset divestiture announcements

We thank Dimitris Andriosopoulos, Leonidas Barbopoulos, Robert Faff, Russell Gregory-Allan, Krishna Paudyal, Amandeep Sahota, Jianren Xu, participants at the 2015 European Accounting Association Annual Congress (Glasgow), 2015 Financial Management Association European Conference (Venice), 2015 Financial Management Association Annual Meeting (Orlando), and seminar participants at the University of Strathclyde for helpful comments on earlier versions of this work. We also thank Martin Kemmitt for helpful research assistance. All errors remain our own.Peer reviewedPostprin

The depth of all Boolean functions

It is shown that every Boolean function of n arguments has a circuit of depth n+1 over the basis {f|f:{0,1}^2 -> {0,1}}

Some results on circuit depth

An important problem in theoretical computer science is to develop methods for estimating the complexity of finite functions. For many familiar functions there remain important gaps between the best known lower and upper bound we investigate the inherent complexity of Boolean functional taking circuits as our model of computation and depth (or delay)to be the measure of complexity. The relevance of circuits as a model of computation for Boolean functions stems from the fact that Turing machine computations may be efficiently simulated by circuits. Important relations among various measures of circuit complexity are btained as well as bounds on the maximum depth of any function and of any monotone function. We then give a detailed account of the complexity of NAND circuits for several important functions and pursue an analysis of the important set of symmetric functions. A number of gap theorems for symmetric functions are exhibited and these are contrasted with uniform hierarchies for several large sets of functions. Finally, we describe several short formulae for threshold functions

Forecasting geomagnetic time series for global field modelling

The secular variation (SV) of the geomagnetic field is difficult to accurately predict with our current incomplete knowledge of its governing physics. Many academic and applied studies rely on the extrapolation of global field models beyond their most reliable, data constrained, period. Often, predictions of the field are made based on simple extrapolations of the modelled approximation to the observations. Where these models are parameterised by temporal B-splines, a linear extrapolation of the field is often heavily dependent on the damping chosen for the model, specifically at the model ends. Here we investigate using time series forecasting methods to pre-process predictions of observations, with a view to including these predictions within the constraints of a field model inversion. In doing so, we can use the most recent data to govern our predictions, without the impact of temporal damping effects from the field modelling process. We can also choose to apply any spatial and physical constraints of our model to these predictions as part of the model inversion. We look at the application of forecasting to ground observatories and satellite “virtual observatories” from the CHAMP and Swarm missions

Sustainable forestry : incorporating ecology and economics through independent certification

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/96898/1/MBA_Finlay_Jennifer_Winter_1997Final.pd

Making space: the counterpublics of post-apartheid independent literary publishing activities (1994-2000)

Abstract This thesis explores how independent literary publishing activities during the period 1994-2004 sought to engage in public debate and deliberation, and thereby moved beyond purely literary concerns. It explores how the publishers understood their publishing activities as acts of public engagement and contestation, and argues that they can usefully be considered counterpublics, a characteristic which feels unique to the post-apartheid period. The mid-1990s saw a surge in literary publishing activity in South Africa that included journals and magazines, books, pamphlets, websites, readings and performances, and recordings. These publishing activities can be considered independent in that they occurred outside the support structures of institutions such as the commercial book publishing industry or universities, and were typically initiated by writers, who relied on their own time, energy and skills to publish. While independent literary publishing was not a new thing in South Africa, the post-apartheid period showed some striking features, including a heightened concern with the act of publishing itself, the emergence of several black-owned publishers, and a new relationship to the state in terms of access to funding. This thesis focuses on the publishing activities of five publishers: Dye Hard Press, Botsotso, Timbila, Kotaz and Chimurenga. It discusses the often complex contribution the publishing activities make to what we consider a post-apartheid public sphere that is central to democracy, and to public deliberation broadly conceptualized. It argues that public sphere theory offers a way of talking about the divergent characteristics of the publishing activities, which can be considered acts of poetic world making that position themselves in contestation with the post-apartheid mainstream. They are counterpublic in that their world making tends to contest the exclusions of the mainstream in publishing and editorial practice. However, it suggests that their relationship to the mainstream is at times ambivalent, and their independence not always assured. This is particularly felt in the reliance of some of the publishers on state and state-aligned arts bodies for funding for their survival, but also in other areas such as their difficult relationship with commercial book dealers, and the mainstream media. This thesis suggests that it is here where the very nature of both their dependence on and independence from the dominant public as publishing activities is in itself a shifting site of contestation. Their proximity to the mainstream 3 in terms of state funding also suggests the need for a theorization of what we might call “embedded counterpublics” in highly stratified societies such as South Africa

Geomagnetic Virtual Observatories: Global monitoring of geomagnetic secular variation with Swarm data

The ESA Swarm DISC Geomagnetic Virtual Observatories (GVO) project aims to apply the virtual observatory concept to Swarm magnetic field measurements. The Virtual Observatory concept is a data processing method which mimics the behavior of magnetic monthly-mean time-series measured at ground observatories but at fixed locations on a uniform global grid at satellite altitude instead. Here we present several new GVO data products consisting of the average time-series of vector magnetic field values, regularly distributed in space and time which are suitable for monitoring the geomagnetic field. The GVO products consist of an equal-area grid with separation spacing of 300 km and cadence of either 1 month or 4 months. Various levels of processing are applied to remove the effects of altitude change and satellite local-time differences to produce a consistent time series. It is known that monthly time-series can have strong local-time artifacts which are removed with four-monthly averages, though with a loss of temporal resolution. The GVO products are designed to make Swarm magnetic data more accessible to researchers studying the physics of the core dynamo process, and related phenomenon such are secular variation, geomagnetic jerks and rapid core dynamics. In addition, the GVO data products also provide valuable information for investigating magnetospheric and ionospheric magnetic signals on timescales of months and longer

Denoising Swarm Geomagnetic Virtual Observatories using principal component analysis

Geomagnetic Virtual Observatories (GVOs) use satellite measurements to provide estimates of the mean internally-generated magnetic field (MF) over a specified period (usually one or four months) at a fixed location in space, mimicking the mean values obtained at ground-based observatories (GOs). These permit secular variation (SV) estimates anywhere on the globe, thereby mitigating the effects of uneven GO coverage. Current GVO estimates suffer from two key contamination sources: first, local time sampling biases due to satellite orbital dynamics, and second, MFs generated in regions external to the Earth such as the magnetosphere and ionosphere. Current methods to alleviate this contamination have drawbacks:Averaging over four months removes the local time sampling bias at the cost of reduced temporal resolution Stringent data selection criteria such as night-time, quiet-time only data greatly reduce, but do not entirely remove, external MF contamination and result in a small subset (<5%) of the available data being used Removing model predictions for external MFs from the measurements also reduces noise, however such parameterisations cannot fully describe these physical systems and some of their signal remains in the data. Here we present an alternative approach to denoising GVOs that uses principal component analysis (PCA). This method retains monthly resolution, uses all available vector satellite data and removes contamination from orbital effects and external MFs. We present an application of PCA, implemented in an open-source Python package called MagPySV, to new GVOs calculated as part of a Swarm DISC project. The denoised data will be incorporated into a new GVO data set that will be available to the geomagnetism community as an official Swarm product