Book review: The great Indian phone book: how the cheap cell phone changes business, politics, and daily life

"The Great Indian Phone Book: How The Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life." Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron. Hurst & Company, London. February 2013. --- The cheap mobile phone is arguably the most significant personal communications device in history. In India, where caste hierarchy has reinforced power for generations, the disruptive potential of the mobile phone is even more striking than elsewhere. The book probes the whole universe of the mobile phone from the contests of great capitalists and governments to control radio frequency spectrum to the ways ordinary people build the troublesome, addictive device into their daily lives. Matt Birkinshaw hopes the broad scope and rich empirical detail found in this book will prompt a range of further, narrower, investigations in its wake

United Kingdom judges and European integration

The British, specifically the English, are widely regarded as awkward partners in the European project. Much of the criticism has come from anti-European integration politicians. Now that the outcome of the 2015 general election for the United Kingdom Parliament is known the United Kingdom will face a referendum by 2017 on exit (Brexit) from the European Union. The Conservative Party is also anxious to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. Criticism of European influence on our law has also surfaced among senior judges but in a far more principled way than among politicians. In this article the author analyses the attitude of senior judges towards European law and integration. The judicial desire to establish UK constitutional space in the relationship with EU law has accompanied the emergence of a constitutional jurisprudence shaping the UK’s modern unwritten constitution. Our constitution has become far more judicialised. Despite the criticism witnessed in recent case law, the UK judges are constructive and cooperative in our legal relationship with Europe

Government and information - the limits of law's empire

Article by Patrick Birkinshaw (Professor of Law, Hull University, Barrister) looking at the difficult areas where law - meaning judicial and constitutional control via the courts - has little role to play in government's use of information. Published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London

Hot Electrons and Cold Photons: Galaxy Clusters and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect

The hot gas in clusters of galaxies emits thermal bremsstrahlung emission that can be probed directly through measurements in the X-ray band with satellites like ROSAT and ASCA. Another probe of this gas comes from its effect on the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR): the hot cluster electrons inverse Compton scatter the CMBR photons and thereby distort the background radiation from its blackbody spectral form. In the last few years, the development of sensitive new instruments for measuring this distortion, called the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect, has sparked a revolution in the field. Current radio interferometric arrays can now detect and map the SZ effect in even distant (z ~ 1) clusters. It is well known that one of the purposes of conducting such measurements is to determine the Hubble constant. In this review I report on the progress that has been made in this area, quote the current best estimate of Ho from the SZ effect of 8 galaxy clusters (44 - 64 km/s/Mpc +/- 17%), discuss important systematic uncertainties, and highlight what else has been learned about galaxy clusters from these investigations.Comment: 4 pages, including 2 postscript figs, LaTeX. To appear in the proceedings of IAU Symposium 188 "The Hot Universe" (held August 26-30, 1997, Kyoto, Japan

Observational issues in radiometric and interferometric detection and analysis of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects

This review discusses the techniques used in single-dish and interferometric radiometric observations of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects, the pitfalls that arise, the systematic and other sources of error in the data, and the uncertainties in the interpretation of the results.Comment: 46 pages, 23 figures. To appear in Background Microwave Radiation and Intracluster Cosmology, Proceedings of the International School of Physics "Enrico Fermi", Eds. Melchiorri, F. & Rephaeli, Y., 200

Beyond the Thin Lens Approximation

We obtain analytic formulae for the null geodesics of Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre-Robertson-Walker spacetimes with scalar perturbations in the longitudinal gauge. From these we provide a rigorous derivation of the cosmological lens equation, and obtain an expression for the magnification of a bundle of light rays without restriction to static or thin lens scenarios. We show how the usual magnification matrix naturally emerges in the appropriate limits.Comment: 37 pages plus 3 appended figures, plain TeX. Submitted to Ap

Sliding not sloshing in Abell 3744: the influence of radio galaxies NGC 7018 and 7016 on cluster gas

We present new X-ray (Chandra) and radio (JVLA) observations of the nearby cluster Abell 3744. It hosts two prominent radio galaxies with powers in the range critical for radio-mode feedback. The radio emission from these galaxies terminates in buoyant tendrils reaching the cluster's outer edge, and the radio-emitting plasma clearly influences the cluster's X-ray-emitting atmosphere. The cluster's average gas temperature, of kT=3.5 keV, is high for its bolometric luminosity of 3.2 \times 10^{43} ergs s^{-1}, but the 100 kpc-scale cavity carved out by radio-emitting plasma shows evidence of less than 2 per cent of the excess enthalpy. We suggest instead that a high-velocity encounter with a galaxy group is responsible for dispersing and increasing the entropy of the gas in this non-cool-core cluster. We see no evidence for shocks, or established isobaric gas motions (sloshing), but there is much sub-structure associated with a dynamically active central region that encompasses the brightest radio emission. Gas heating is evident in directions perpendicular to the inferred line of encounter between the infalling group and cluster. The radio-emitting tendrils run along boundaries between gas of different temperature, apparently lubricating the gas flows and inhibiting heat transfer. The first stages of the encounter may have helped trigger the radio galaxies into their current phase of activity, where we see X-rays from the nuclei, jets, and hotspots.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ (13 pages, 17 figures

How management innovation happens

Management innovation — that is, the implementation of new management practices, processes and structures that represent a significant departure from current norms — has over time dramatically transformed the way many functions and activities work in organizations. Many of the practices, processes and structures that we see in modern business organizations were developed during the last 150 years by the creative efforts of management innovators. Those innovators have included well-known names like Alfred P. Sloan and Frederick Taylor, as well as numerous other unheralded individuals and small groups of people who all sought to improve the internal workings of organizations by trying something new

A missing operationalization: entrepreneurial competencies in multinational enterprise subsidiaries

We seek to provide a comprehensive operationalization of firm-specific variables that constitute multinational enterprise subsidiary entrepreneurial competencies. Towards this objective, we bring together notions from the fields of entrepreneurship and international business. Drawing on an empirical study of 260 subsidiaries located in the UK, we propose a comprehensive set of scales encompassing innovativeness, risk-taking, proactiveness, learning, intra-multinational networking, extra-multinational networking and autonomy; which capture distinct subsidiary entrepreneurial competencies at the subsidiary level. Research and managerial implications are discussed