The possibility of a British earned income tax credit

The possibility of an earned income tax credit, based on the US model, is currently high up the British political agenda. This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of the current British system of in-work benefits, before reviewing the effectiveness of the US Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) scheme. The British and US systems are then directly compared in terms of the net income delivered and the effective tax rate (net benefit deduction rate). Although the evidence in favour of a US-style EITC is weak, two possible variants are considered. The paper concludes that the only future for an EITC is probably as a partial scheme, linked to the amalgamation of in-work and out-of-work benefits, which removes wage subsidisation from the sphere of social security by means of a semi-individualised tax credit. Even so, the same goals could be achieved through the benefit system.

Do CEOs Ever Lose? Fairness Perspective on the Allocation of Residuals Between CEOs and Shareholders

In this study we introduce a justice perspective to examining the result of bargaining between CEOs and boards over the allocation of firm residuals that ultimately determines CEO compensation. Framing CEO pay as the result of bargaining between CEOs and boards focuses attention on the power of CEOs to increase their share of firm residuals in the form of increased compensation, and the diligence of boards of directors to constrain CEO opportunism. Framing this negotiation through a theory of justice offers an alternative perspective to the search for pay-performance sensitivity. We predict and find that as board diligence in controlling opportunism declines and CEO power increases, CEOs are increasingly able to capture a larger portion of firm residuals relative to shareholders. This finding supports critics who charge that CEO pay violates norms of distributive and procedural justice

Garbage collection in distributed systems

PhD ThesisThe provision of system-wide heap storage has a number of advantages. However, when the technique is applied to distributed systems automatically recovering inaccessible variables becomes a serious problem. This thesis presents a survey of such garbage collection techniques but finds that no existing algorithm is entirely suitable. A new, general purpose algorithm is developed and presented which allows individual systems to garbage collect largely independently. The effects of these garbage collections are combined, using recursively structured control mechanisms, to achieve garbage collection of the entire heap with the minimum of overheads. Experimental results show that new algorithm recovers most inaccessible variables more quickly than a straightforward garbage collection, giving an improved memory utilisation

Entanglement under restricted operations: Analogy to mixed-state entanglement

We show that the classification of bi-partite pure entangled states when local quantum operations are restricted yields a structure that is analogous in many respects to that of mixed-state entanglement. Specifically, we develop this analogy by restricting operations through local superselection rules, and show that such exotic phenomena as bound entanglement and activation arise using pure states in this setting. This analogy aids in resolving several conceptual puzzles in the study of entanglement under restricted operations. In particular, we demonstrate that several types of quantum optical states that possess confusing entanglement properties are analogous to bound entangled states. Also, the classification of pure-state entanglement under restricted operations can be much simpler than for mixed-state entanglement. For instance, in the case of local Abelian superselection rules all questions concerning distillability can be resolved.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures; published versio

Pooling quantum states obtained by indirect measurements

We consider the pooling of quantum states when Alice and Bob both have one part of a tripartite system and, on the basis of measurements on their respective parts, each infers a quantum state for the third part S. We denote the conditioned states which Alice and Bob assign to S by alpha and beta respectively, while the unconditioned state of S is rho. The state assigned by an overseer, who has all the data available to Alice and Bob, is omega. The pooler is told only alpha, beta, and rho. We show that for certain classes of tripartite states, this information is enough for her to reconstruct omega by the formula omega \propto alpha rho^{-1} beta. Specifically, we identify two classes of states for which this pooling formula works: (i) all pure states for which the rank of rho is equal to the product of the ranks of the states of Alice's and Bob's subsystems; (ii) all mixtures of tripartite product states that are mutually orthogonal on S.Comment: Corrected a mistake regarding the scope of our original result. This version to be published in Phys. Rev. A. 6 pages, 1 figur

The inverted dead of Britain’s Bronze Age barrows: a perspective from Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Barrows are a prominent feature of Britain’s Bronze Age. While they originated as burial monuments, they also appear to have acquired other roles. However, British prehistorians have been hampered in their interpretations, as they are wary of speculating how Bronze Age people conceptualised their dead. Here were suggest that a recurrent pattern of inversion is significant. We use Conceptual Metaphor Theory to argue that Bronze Age people saw their dead inhabiting an inverted underworld directly beneath the surface of the earth. This would help explain not only burial practices, but also barrows’ other apparent functions.No external funding source

Effects of Timing of Weaning on Performance and Energy Utilization of Primiparous Beef Cows

Early weaning is used to minimize cow nutrient requirements in situations where feed inputs are scarce or expensive. For many years, maintenance energy requirements have been assumed to be 20% greater in lactating compared to non-lactating beef cows. Consequently, early weaning primiparous cow/calf pairs should improve overall efficiency, particularly in situations where mid- to late-lactation forage or feed nutritive value is low. The objective of this study was to determine the biological efficiency of early weaning and maintenance energy requirements of lactating versus non-lactating primiparous dams. Experiments were conducted in two consecutive years using 90 primiparous heifers and their calves (48 in yr 1, 42 in yr 2). Pairs were randomly assigned to one of 6 pens (8 pairs/pen yr 1, 7 pairs/pen yr 2) and pens were randomly assigned to each treatment; early weaning (EW, 130 d ± 15.4) and traditional weaning (TW, 226 d ± 13.1). Late-lactation cow and calf performance and feed consumption was measured for 92 d (yr 1) and 100 d (yr 2). Cows were limit-fed to meet maintenance requirements, while calves were offered ad libitum access to the same diet in a creep feeding area. Calves were not allowed access to the cows' feed. Cow feed intake, body condition score, body weight, milk yield and composition, and calf body weight gain and creep feed intake were recorded. After accounting for lactation and retained energy, there was a trend for higher maintenance energy requirements of lactating primiparous beef cows (P=0.07). From early weaning to traditional weaning, calf ADG (P0.40). During finishing, BW was higher (P=0.02) and G:F tended (P=0.06) to be higher for TW calves. The increased TW calf performance offset the additional maintenance costs of their lactating dams, allowing the TW system to be more efficient at converting total feed energy to kg of calf body weight gain.Animal Scienc

The development of ideas about communication in European thought from Ancient Greece to the early Modern Age

The field of communication is highly fragmented. There are half-a-dozen major competing schools; dozens of incompatible theories; no agreed research methods; and poor connection between research, practice and policy. Although theorists recognise fragmentation is a problem and agree that it must be resolved, they do not agree on its causes—ontological, methodological, or institutional—nor how the problem might be overcome. This thesis argues that sources of our present confusion have been misdiagnosed. The problems are not, in the first place, conceptual. Disagreement in the scope and practice of communication are symptoms of the problem; not its causes. This thesis argues that the main source of incoherence lies in the unregarded development of ideas about communication over the last 2,500 years. Far from being a single idea of communication in Western thought, there are three very different traditions that have existed and competed throughout Western history. Each tradition exists for different reasons, has an entirely different scope and purpose, and is made up of ideas from different categories (factual claims, value claims, and plans of action). In their development however, all three interacted and concepts were transferred between them, giving the appearance of a single unbroken tradition. My thesis describes the core concepts of each tradition, the sources and development of these concepts, the reasons for their evolution, the interactions and borrowings between the three traditions, and what these concepts have committed the field to—particularly in its attachments to other fields such as psychology, linguistics, law and politics. The first tradition is the idea of communication as transference, which seeks to explain what happens when people speak and listen to one another. The main sources of this tradition have been everyday explanation of human physiology, although in the last four hundred years, these have been supplemented with scientific theories concerning physical nature. Everyday metaphors used in ancient Greece and Rome show a fully formed but implicit model which treated communication as breathing words out of one person and into another. This model became more complex with the appearance of ideas concerning the mind, soul and language. This model in turn provided the basis for many key Western beliefs about thought and consciousness, which were later incorporated into medieval theories of speech. This model persisted until the seventeenth century, when physiology was displaced by mechanics, and the tradition was split into physical and symbolic transference. In contemporary theory, this tradition dominates the other two traditions, and is the development of ideas about communication in european thought is represented in mass communication studies, ‘message-driven’ and transmission models, behavioural and cognitive psychology, cybernetics, and information processing. The second tradition is organised around the idea of communication as making order. In particular, it treats communicating as the way in which communities are formed, regulated and advanced. This tradition has been heavily influenced by political theory and jurisprudence throughout its history, also becoming intertwined with theories of creation in Platonism and medieval Christian theology. This view of communication began to decline in the early Modern Age with the Protestant Reformation and the rise of liberal democracies and the physical sciences. These undermined belief in an intrinsic social order by emphasising human beings as individuals rather than social creatures. Today this tradition is most apparent in structuralism, French semiotics, aspects of descriptive grammar, social psychology, cultural theory, and some critical theory. The third tradition sees communication as a matter of applying techniques. From the earliest times, these techniques were divided into a prominent collection concerned with speaking and arguing (rhetoric and dialectic) and a diffuse and specialised group concerned with reading (grammar and legal interpretation—extended to biblical exegesis in the third century ad). The latter interpretative tradition evolved concepts of meaning and symbols, although they were later grafted onto communication-as-transmission. Both branches of the tradition were dormant throughout the early Middle Ages, but were revived by the Humanists in the Renaissance. During the dispute between philosophers and rhetoricians in the sixteenth century, communication-as-technique was stripped of anything to do with the material presented and was left only with style and presentation—the origins of the contemporary division of substance and style, thought and word. This division ultimately denied communication any claims to essence, substance, or ontology. The rise of Protestantism and the natural sciences contributed to the decline in rhetoric, and the transformation of dialectic from a spoken art into formal, mental reasoning divorced from communication. Today, the main representatives of this tradition are journalism, design, and the plain language movement—although rhetoric, hermeneutics and critical theory still find a place in Western universities. The thesis concludes by exposing contradictions between the three traditions, attachments and accretions they have acquired in their development, and how these are manifested in the current fragmentation of the field. Finally, I consider what might be salvaged from the history of ideas about communication, upon which a new unified tradition might be built