Individual Investment Behaviour: A Brief Review Of Research

This brief review of research was carried out to inform whether the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority (PADA) should be making decisions for its members with regard to pension fund choices. The findings are based on a review of around 80 items, mostly involving research carried out in the US and UK. The body of evidence mainly comes from the discipline of economics and the field of behavioural economics in particular. Survey data was the most common type of evidence, but the review included qualitative research as well

Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction by Dawne McCance

Review of Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction by Dawne McCance

Using the carbon management index to indicate ecosystem function in brigalow (Acacia harpophylla) agro-ecosystems of South East Queensland, Australia

Soil organic matter is an effective indicator of soil resource condition that reflects functional traits such as aggregation, infiltration and microbial activity and plays a critical role in sustaining production and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. Agricultural practices typically reduce soil carbon levels through the action of soil disturbance and consequent mineralisation. In the Brigalow (Acacia harpophylla) landscape we studied, soil carbon levels in pellic vertisols were significantly lower in the agricultural matrix of cropping and grasslands than in remnant Brigalow vegetation. There was no detectable gradient of soil carbon across Brigalow/matrix boundaries. Uncultivated grasslands showed signaificantly higher carbon levels than currently and previously cultivated grasslands, with regenerating grasslands showing no significant recovery of soil carbon over 15 years. The carbon management index (CMI) was used to combine the active and passive components of soil carbon to provide a sensitive indicator of the rate of change of carbon dynamics in response to changes in land management at local-scales. A landscape CMI (CMIL) was developed, by aggregating soil carbon data using GIS-derived spatial data. the landscape CMI is proposed as a potentially useful tool for modelling soil carbon dynamics and ecosystem function in agro-ecosystems at a range of spatial scales

Money Guidance Pathfinder - A Report to the FSA

In April 2009 the Government and the Financial Services Authority launched the £12m Money Guidance Pathfinder service in the North-West and North-East of England. The service, known as Moneymadeclear, provides impartial information and guidance on a wide range of personal finance issues tailored to the individual's needs and circumstances. It is available through the web, over the phone or face-to-face across the North-West and North-East. An evaluation of the Money Guidance Pathfinder was undertaken by PFRC to provide an evidence base for decisions on the roll out of a national Money Guidance service

Online Personal Finance Learning

True Potential PUFin’s trilogy of free, online personal finance modules is designed to give adults the knowledge and tools they need to make better financial decisions, in bite-size chunks of learning. Between May 2014 and May 2016, a total of 53,770 people registered for Managing My Money, the first course in the trilogy, which gives people the foundations for good personal finance management. This paper looks in detail at Managing My Money: what the course covers, who has taken the course, and what impact the course has had

Saving Us From Ourselves – How Can We Make The UK More Financially Resilient?

Untold time and resource has been devoted to quantifying and analysing the UK’s low level of personal saving – and recommending ways to change it for the better. Yet despite the concerted efforts of academics, policymakers, industry and others, the number of people in the UK with few or no savings remains stubbornly high. When we do decide to save, we are prone to making poor decisions about where to put our money

How to use a nanocorpus. Enriching corpora of interpreting

Corpus-based research into interpreting is still in its infancy. The late Miriam Shlesinger warned the scholarly community of interpreting studies that, even though corpus-based research was much needed in their field to attain the necessary degree of generalization and empirical validity, it would nevertheless be quite a challenge to collect the amount of data such studies required (Shlesinger 1998). She proved right: efforts were undertaken in various places to collect corpora of interpreting, notably interpreting carried out at the European Parliament (Bologna, Poznan, Ghent inter alia), but the amounts of data are still very modest (typically around 250,000 tokens, including source and target texts). This seriously limits the kind of questions researchers can answer with regard to this special kind of language usage. Results of coarse-grained analyses focusing on highly frequent lexical items, e.g. type-token ratios, head lists, etc. are fairly reliable (Bernardini et al. 2015, Kajzer-Wietrzny 2015, Defrancq et al. 2015), but it is currently impossible to conduct analyses on the same scale as what is common practice in translation studies. On the other hand, as the research interests in the field are also quite particular, e.g. a strong focus on cognitive aspects of interpreting, enriching the corpus with specific metadata (speech rate, disfluencies, gender, time tags…) allows us to answer new questions in the field of cognitive science. In our presentation will show what the metadata can tell us about the Ear-Voice-Span of interpreters and introduce the use of the transcription and alignment tool EXMARaLDA Partitur-Editor

Parallel Ada benchmarks for the SVMS

The use of parallel processing paradigm to design and develop faster and more reliable computers appear to clearly mark the future of information processing. NASA started the development of such an architecture: the Spaceborne VHSIC Multi-processor System (SVMS). Ada will be one of the languages used to program the SVMS. One of the unique characteristics of Ada is that it supports parallel processing at the language level through the tasking constructs. It is important for the SVMS project team to assess how efficiently the SVMS architecture will be implemented, as well as how efficiently Ada environment will be ported to the SVMS. AUTOCLASS II, a Bayesian classifier written in Common Lisp, was selected as one of the benchmarks for SVMS configurations. The purpose of the R and D effort was to provide the SVMS project team with the version of AUTOCLASS II, written in Ada, that would make use of Ada tasking constructs as much as possible so as to constitute a suitable benchmark. Additionally, a set of programs was developed that would measure Ada tasking efficiency on parallel architectures as well as determine the critical parameters influencing tasking efficiency. All this was designed to provide the SVMS project team with a set of suitable tools in the development of the SVMS architecture