Effects of the environment and disease on drug metabolism in man

Imperial Users onl

Entrepreneurial borrowing : do entrepreneurs seek and receive enough credit?

This work reviews the literature on entrepreneurial borrowing. The dynamic concept of the “entrepreneurial credit journey” is developed to frame the discussion of supply and demand side issues affecting entrepreneurial borrowing. The entrepreneurial credit journey follows the entrepreneur from the development of credit needs, through application and lending decisions and, beyond, to the consequences of these earlier decisions for firm performance. The literature has traditionally focussed on the lending decision stage, including: problems of credit rationing which may arise due to asymmetric information; and lending technologies to reduce information issues. However, on the demand side, discouraged borrowers, who decide not to apply for fear of rejection, have received increasing attention. There is also greater attention to issues of entrepreneurial cognition (e.g., over-optimism, illusion of control) which may adversely affect borrowing decisions. In terms of the firm performance effects of credit access, the review highlights the widely used internal finance approach to testing financial constraints is unidentified because it is unable to disentangle financial from cognitive constraints. An alternative, more direct, external funding gaps test of underinvestment is therefore proposed. The policy literature is also reviewed which suggests that assistance in the form of loan guarantees has been both finance and economic additional (i.e., providing entrepreneurs with credit they cannot get elsewhere and helping to create jobs that would not otherwise have been created) especially following the Great Financial Crisis. A discussion of the literature relating to underrepresented groups in the entrepreneurial credit market highlights that female and ethnic minority entrepreneurs may receive less credit, and/or pay a higher rate on the credit they receive, than their male or white counterparts. This speaks to ongoing issues of gender stereotypes and ethnic discrimination in the credit market. The increasing role of peer-to-peer lending following the Great Financial Crisis, and its potential for ‘democratizing entrepreneurial finance’, is discussed. This literature highlights that, while peer-to-peer lending is helping to fill credit gaps following the Great Financial Crisis, there are issues relating to the performance of small business peer-to-peer loans and possible issues of ethnic discrimination. The review concludes with proposals for future research on entrepreneurial borrowing, including: collecting more data relating to entrepreneurial credit journeys; developing tests for the presence of information asymmetries and the nature of selection in entrepreneurial credit markets; testing relationships between stages of the entrepreneurial credit journey (e.g., to shed light on the causes of discouragement); developing tests which disentangle financial from cognitive constraints; and researching entrepreneurial and bank learning over recurrent entrepreneurial credit journeys

Treatment of bacterial infections by intradermal medication

A General Practitioner is not capable of scientific observation. He is easily prejudiced in favour of any new treatment, and has not the means at hand to test out results, using controls &c. But his greatest interest is in treatment. if any method: of treatment will relieve his patients of their suffering, either mental or physical, he is justified in adopting it.The following suggestions regarding treatment of infections is made with the full knowledge of the fact that they may not stand scientific observation. The number of cases is necessarily limited

Exiled from glory: Anglo-Indian settlement in nineteenth-century Britain, with special reference to Cheltenham

The thesis is a study of the Anglo-Indians, many of whom settled in Cheltenham during the major part of the nineteenth century. It includes datasets of Anglo-Indians connected with Cheltenham compiled from a wide variety of sources. A number of conclusions are made about the role of the Anglo-Indians and their position in the middle class. These include estimates of the number of Anglo-Indians in Cheltenham and their contribution to the development of the town. Studies of a number of individuals has provided evidence for an analysis of Anglo-Indian attitudes and values, especially in relation to such issues as identity, status, beliefs and education. Separate chapters deal with the middle-class life-style of the Anglo-Indians as it developed in Cheltenham and elsewhere. The importance of the family and friendship links is examined and compared to the experience of other middle-class people in the Victorian period. The strength of religion and its contribution to Anglo-Indian values is investigated, especially the influence of the evangelical movement. The crucial role of education is highlighted especially with the growth of the public schools. The role of the middle class, and especially the Anglo-Indians, in the rise of voluntary societies and other public work is examined. It is also demonstrated how the Anglo-Indians represented a wide range of incomes, despite the sharing of particular values and beliefs. A study of Anglo-Indian women further develops an understanding of the position of the family and how it differed from the normal middle-class expectations. The study concludes with an appreciation of the circumstances which led many Anglo-Indians to feel alienated to some degree from their fellow countrymen, while at the same time recognising that many of their attitudes and values were very similar to the section of the middle class referred to as the pseudo-gentry

A study of the effects of changing raw material prices and varying interest rates on the stockholding decisions of a small manufacturing company

A study is made of the inventory control procedures in a manufacturing company with an annual turnover of around £5M. The study is made at a time of fluctuating prices and varying interest rates in order to determine both their effect on, and ways of improving, the control procedures. The study concentrates on one of the many stock items carried, peppermint oil, it being fairly typical. The study lists the main costs of establishing and growing peppermint in Washington State. The study reveals the importance of price forecasting in the determination of timing and quantity of purchases. Various price forecasting methods including that due to Box and Jenkins are tested and found wanting for one reason or another. The ordinary economic order quantity formula is modified to take account of fluctuating prices and varying interest rates. It is then tested with an assumption of perfect price forecasts against the performance of the firm’s buyer over the years 1971-1978. The results indicate that the buyer possesses faculties which cannot yet, if ever, be emulated by machine based formulas. Normally economic models are devised with the assumption that the purchaser is at least risk-neutral if not risk-averse. This study reveals a pronounced bias in the opposite direction, namely risk-preference, in the case of essential oil traders. The study, in examining the market structure, also shows that there are peppermint farmers in the western United States who are both willing and able to make direct contracts with importers in the United Kingdom in order to eliminate the risks associated with dealing through second and third parties. The absence of a formal controlled market for the particular oil studied is noted together with the buyer’s inability uO ’hedge’ except with purchases of other equally risky oils. It is recommended that the possibility of such a market being organised be further investigated

A new perspective on the Sullivan dictionary via Assouad type dimensions and spectra

Funding: JMF was financially supported by an EPSRC Standard Grant (EP/R015104/1) and a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (RPG-2019-034). LS was financially supported by the University of St Andrews.The Sullivan dictionary provides a beautiful correspondence between Kleinian groups acting on hyperbolic space and rational maps of the extended complex plane. We focus on the setting of geometrically finite Kleinian groups with parabolic elements and parabolic rational maps. In this context an especially direct correspondence exists concerning the dimension theory of the associated limit sets and Julia sets. In recent work we established formulae for the Assouad type dimensions and spectra for these fractal sets and certain conformal measures they support. This allows a rather more nuanced comparison of the two families in the context of dimension. In this expository article we discuss how these results provide new entries in the Sullivan dictionary, as well as revealing striking differences between the two families.PostprintPeer reviewe

The Assouad spectrum of Kleinian limit sets and Patterson-Sullivan measure

Funding information: JMF was financially supported by an EPSRC Standard Grant (EP/R015104/1) and a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (RPG-2019-034). LS was financially supported by the University of St Andrews.The Assouad dimension of the limit set of a geometrically finite Kleinian group with parabolics may exceed the Hausdorff and box dimensions. The Assouad spectrum is a continuously parametrised family of dimensions which ‘interpolates’ between the box and Assouad dimensions of a fractal set. It is designed to reveal more subtle geometric information than the box and Assouad dimensions considered in isolation. We conduct a detailed analysis of the Assouad spectrum of limit sets of geometrically finite Kleinian groups and the associated Patterson-Sullivan measure. Our analysis reveals several novel features, such as interplay between horoballs of different rank not seen the box or Assouad dimensions.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

A new perspective on the Sullivan dictionary via Assouad type dimensions and spectra

We conduct a detailed analysis of the Assouad type dimensions and spectra in the context of limit sets of geometrically finite Kleinian groups and Julia sets of parabolic rational maps. Our analysis includes the Patterson-Sullivan measure in the Kleinian case and the analogous conformal measure in the Julia set case. Our results constitute a new perspective on the Sullivan dictionary between Kleinian groups and rational maps. We show that there exist both strong correspondences and strong differences between the two settings. The differences we observe are particularly interesting since they come from dimension theory, a subject where the correspondence described by the Sullivan dictionary is especially strong.Comment: 66 pages. 17 figure

The dimensions of inhomogeneous self-affine sets

Funding: SAB thanks the Carnegie Trust for financially supporting this work. JMF was financially supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (RF-2016-500) and an EPSRC Standard Grant (EP/R015104/1).We prove that the upper box dimension of an inhomogeneous self-affine set is bounded above by the maximum of the affinity dimension and the dimension of the condensation set. In addition, we determine sufficient conditions for this upper bound to be attained, which, in part, constitutes an exploration of the capacity for the condensation set to mitigate dimension drop between the affinity dimension and the corresponding homogeneous attractor. Our work improves and unifies previous results on general inhomogeneous attractors, low-dimensional affine systems, and inhomogeneous self-affine carpets, while providing inhomogeneous analogues of Falconer’s seminal results on homogeneous self-affine sets.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Predicting success in graduate entry medical students undertaking a graduate entry medical program (GEM)

Background: Success in undergraduate medical courses in the UK can be predicted by school exit examination (A level) grades. There are no documented predictors of success in UK graduate entry medicine (GEM) courses. This study looks at the examination performance of GEM students to identify factors which may predict success; of particular interest was A level score. Methods: Data was collected for students graduating in 2004, 2005 and 2006, including demographic details (age and gender), details of previous academic achievement (A level total score and prior degree) and examination results at several points during the degree course. Results: Study group comprised 285 students. Statistical analyses identified no significant variables when looking at clinical examinations. Analysis of pass/fail data for written examinations showed no relationship with A level score. However, both percentage data for the final written examination and the analysis of the award of honours showed A level scores of AAB or higher were associated with better performance (p < 0.001). Discussion: A prime objective of introducing GEM programs was to diversify admissions to medical school. In trying to achieve this, medical schools have changed selection criteria. The findings in this study justify this by proving that A level score was not associated with success in either clinical examinations or passing written examinations. Despite this, very high achievements at A level do predict high achievement during medical school. Conclusions: This study shows that selecting graduate medical students with the basic requirement of an upper-second class honours degree is justifiable and does not disadvantage students who may not have achieved high scores in school leaver examinations