Public sector reforms, privatisation and regimes of control in a Chinese enterprise

The Chinese economic reform has recently become a major focus of attention around the world. The underlying rationale for the Chinese government's privatisation and public sector reforms is the view that reformed state enterprises and privately managed firms will demonstrate superior management control and better performance, and hence encourage economic growth and employment. There are very few intensive case studies published in English journals studying whether firms privatised in China have reversed previous losses and introduced better management controls, leading to increased investment, productivity, and overall organizational effectiveness and efficiency. The researchers do not seek to deny the control problems of Chinese SOEs, but question the consequences of the new controls installed during the post-privatisation period. The paper also reveals a declining tendency in employment; altered distributions of wealth ? especially to the state ? and labour, and a lack of improvements in the accountability of privatised companies. Overall, the paper argues, the aims of reform policies in China, including better control, increased profitability and an improved working life for Chinese people, have not materialized. The paper calls for more research on the above issues in the Chinese context

Temporal and spatial variability of snow accumulation in central Greenland

Snow accumulation records from central Greenland are explored to improve the understanding of the accumulation signal in Greenland ice core records. Results from a “forest” of 100 bamboo poles and automated accumulation monitors in the vicinity of Summit as well as shallow cores collected in the Summit and Crete areas are presented. Based on these accumulation data, a regression has been calculated to quantify the signal-to-noise variance ratio of ice core accumulation signals on a variety of temporal (1 week to 2 years) and spatial (20 m to 200 km) scales. Results are consistent with data obtained from year-round automated accumulation measurements deployed at Summit which suggest that it is impossible to obtain regional snow accumulation data with seasonal resolution using four accumulation monitors positioned over a length scale of ∼30 km. Given this understanding of the temporal and spatial dependence of noise in the ice core accumulation signal, the accumulation records from 17 shallow cores are revisited. Each core spans the time period from 1964 to 1983. By combining the accumulation records, the regional snow accumulation record has been obtained for this period. The results show that 9 of the 20 years can be identified as having an accumulation different from the 20 year mean with 99% confidence. The signal-to-noise variance ratio for the average accumulation signal sampled at annual intervals is 5.8±0.5. The averaged accumulation time series may be useful to climate modelers attempting to validate their models with accurate regional hydrologic data sets

An examination of the precipitation delivery mechanisms for Dolleman Island, eastern Antarctic Peninsula

Copyright @ 2004 Wiley-BlackwellThe variability of size and source of significant precipitation events were studied at an Antarctic ice core drilling site: Dolleman Island (DI), located on the eastern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Significant precipitation events that occur at DI were temporally located in the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) reanalysis data set, ERA-40. The annual and summer precipitation totals from ERA-40 at DI both show significant increases over the reanalysis period. Three-dimensional backwards air parcel trajectories were then run for 5 d using the ECMWF ERA-15 wind fields. Cluster analyses were performed on two sets of these backwards trajectories: all days in the range 1979–1992 (the climatological time-scale) and a subset of days when a significant precipitation event occurred. The principal air mass sources and delivery mechanisms were found to be the Weddell Sea via lee cyclogenesis, the South Atlantic when there was a weak circumpolar trough (CPT) and the South Pacific when the CPT was deep. The occurrence of precipitation bearing air masses arriving via a strong CPT was found to have a significant correlation with the southern annular mode (SAM); however, the arrival of air masses from the same region over the climatological time-scale showed no such correlation. Despite the dominance in both groups of back trajectories of the westerly circulation around Antarctica, some other key patterns were identified. Most notably there was a higher frequency of lee cyclogenesis events in the significant precipitation trajectories compared to the climatological time-scale. There was also a tendency for precipitation trajectories to come from more northerly latitudes, mostly from 50–70°S. The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) was found to have a strong influence on the mechanism by which the precipitation was delivered; the frequency of occurrence of precipitation from the east (west) of DI increased during El Niño (La Niña) events

Design and operation of a prototype interaction point beam collision feedback system for the International Linear Collider

A high-resolution, intratrain position feedback system has been developed to achieve and maintain collisions at the proposed future electron-positron International Linear Collider (ILC). A prototype has been commissioned and tested with a beam in the extraction line of the Accelerator Test Facility at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Japan. It consists of a stripline beam position monitor (BPM) with analogue signal-processing electronics, a custom digital board to perform the feedback calculation, and a stripline kicker driven by a high-current amplifier. The closed-loop feedback latency is 148 ns. For a three-bunch train with 154 ns bunch spacing, the feedback system has been used to stabilize the third bunch to 450 nm. The kicker response is linear, and the feedback performance is maintained, over a correction range of over $\pm$60 {\mu}m. The propagation of the correction has been confirmed by using an independent stripline BPM located downstream of the feedback system. The system has been demonstrated to meet the BPM resolution, beam kick, and latency requirements for the ILC

The Effect of Atmospheric Forcing Resolution on Delivery of Ocean Heat to the Antarctic Floating Ice Shelves

Oceanic melting at the base of the floating Antarctic ice shelves is now thought to be a more significant cause of mass loss for the Antarctic ice sheet than iceberg calving. In this study, a 10-km horizontal-resolution circum-Antarctic ocean–sea ice–ice shelf model [based on the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS)] is used to study the delivery of ocean heat to the base of the ice shelves. The atmospheric forcing comes from the ERA-Interim reanalysis (;80-km resolution) and from simulations using the polar-optimized Weather Re- search and Forecasting Model (30-km resolution), where the upper atmosphere was relaxed to the ERA- Interim reanalysis. The modeled total basal ice shelf melt is low compared to observational estimates but increases by 14% with the higher-resolution winds and just 3% with both the higher-resolution winds and atmospheric surface temperatures. The higher-resolution winds lead to more heat being delivered to the ice shelf cavities from the adjacent ocean and an increase in the efficiency of heat transfer between the water and the ice. The higher-resolution winds also lead to changes in the heat delivered from the open ocean to the continental shelves as well as changes in the heat lost to the atmosphere over the shelves, and the sign of these changes varies regionally. Addition of the higher-resolution temperatures to the winds results in lowering, primarily during summer, the wind-driven increase in heat advected into the ice shelf cavities due to colder summer air temperatures near the coast

The Arctic summer atmosphere: an evaluation of reanalyses using ASCOS data

The Arctic has experienced large climate changes over recent decades, the largest for any region on Earth. To understand the underlying reasons for this climate sensitivity, reanalysis is an invaluable tool. The Arctic System Reanalysis (ASR) is a regional reanalysis, forced by ERA-Interim at the lateral boundaries and incorporating model physics adapted to Arctic conditions, developed to serve as a state-of-the-art, high-resolution synthesis tool for assessing Arctic climate variability and monitoring Arctic climate change. <br><br> We use data from Arctic Summer Cloud-Ocean Study (ASCOS) to evaluate the performance of ASR and ERA-Interim for the Arctic Ocean. The ASCOS field experiment was deployed on the Swedish icebreaker <i>Oden</i> north of 87° N in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic during August and early September 2008. Data were collected during the transits from and to Longyearbyen and the 3-week ice drift with <i>Oden</i> moored to a drifting multiyear ice floe. These data are independent and detailed enough to evaluate process descriptions. <br><br> The reanalyses captures basic meteorological variations coupled to the synoptic-scale systems, but have difficulties in estimating clouds and atmospheric moisture. While ERA-Interim has a systematic warm bias in the lowest troposphere, ASR has a cold bias of about the same magnitude on average. The results also indicate that more sophisticated descriptions of cloud microphysics in ASR did not significantly improve the modeling of cloud properties compared to ERA-Interim. This has consequences for the radiation balance, and hence the surface temperature, and illustrate how a modeling problem in one aspect of the atmosphere, here the clouds, feeds back to other parameters, especially near the surface and in the boundary layer

Adventures of the Coupled Yang-Mills Oscillators: I. Semiclassical Expansion

We study the quantum mechanical motion in the $x^2y^2$ potentials with $n=2,3$, which arise in the spatially homogeneous limit of the Yang-Mills (YM) equations. These systems show strong stochasticity in the classical limit ($\hbar = 0$) and exhibit a quantum mechanical confinement feature. We calculate the partition function $Z(t)$ going beyond the Thomas-Fermi (TF) approximation by means of the semiclassical expansion using the Wigner-Kirkwood (WK) method. We derive a novel compact form of the differential equation for the WK function. After separating the motion in the channels of the equipotential surface from the motion in the central region, we show that the leading higher-order corrections to the TF term vanish up to eighth order in $\hbar$, if we treat the quantum motion in the hyperbolic channels correctly by adiabatic separation of the degrees of freedom. Finally, we obtain an asymptotic expansion of the partition function in terms of the parameter $g^2\hbar^4t^3$

Oxford Brookes faculty take on Turkish Paramedic Rally and International Congress 2015

Conference Repor

Data-Driven Audiogram Classification for Mobile Audiometry

Recent mobile and automated audiometry technologies have allowed for the democratization of hearing healthcare and enables non-experts to deliver hearing tests. The problem remains that a large number of such users are not trained to interpret audiograms. In this work, we outline the development of a data-driven audiogram classification system designed specifically for the purpose of concisely describing audiograms. More specifically, we present how a training dataset was assembled and the development of the classification system leveraging supervised learning techniques. We show that three practicing audiologists had high intra- and inter-rater agreement over audiogram classification tasks pertaining to audiogram configuration, symmetry and severity. The system proposed here achieves a performance comparable to the state of the art, but is signific

A new multivariable 6-psi-6 summation formula

By multidimensional matrix inversion, combined with an A_r extension of Jackson's 8-phi-7 summation formula by Milne, a new multivariable 8-phi-7 summation is derived. By a polynomial argument this 8-phi-7 summation is transformed to another multivariable 8-phi-7 summation which, by taking a suitable limit, is reduced to a new multivariable extension of the nonterminating 6-phi-5 summation. The latter is then extended, by analytic continuation, to a new multivariable extension of Bailey's very-well-poised 6-psi-6 summation formula.Comment: 16 page