Young people not in education, employment or training

"This paper highlights policies and provision that exist for young people not in education, employment or training in Wales. Strategies can cut across many different policy areas and are developed at UK, Welsh and local level. The picture of provision is complex. The paper looks at some of the challenges that exist for policy makers and agencies working in this policy field, and examines stakeholder views on what types of support work best for young people not in education, employment or training or at risk of becoming so. It also highlights some of the particular challenges facing these young people" -- front cover

Towards asteroseismology of the non-radial pulsating sdB star PG 1605+072

The recently discovered new class of sdB pulsators (sdBV) offers a powerful possibility for the investigation of their interior and thus their evolutionary history. The first step towards applying asteroseismologic tools is the identification of pulsation modes. We reoport on simultaneous spectroscopic and multi-band photometric time series observations of PG 1605+072 and analyse its radial velocity and light curve.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Proc. XIII Workshop on White Dwarfs, eds. D. de Martino, R. Kalytis, R. Silvotti, J.E. Solheim, Kluwe

Irish Public Service Broadcasting - A Contingent Valuation Analysis

Irish public service broadcasting faces enhanced domestic and international competition and increasingly the Irish public service broadcaster (RTÉ) is being called upon to justify the scale of the television licence fee, its major source of funding. This paper describes the first nationwide valuation of RTÉ’s services. In analysing the determinants of respondents’ willingness to pay for RTÉ’s services, the importance of domestic and international competing services and the relationships between willingness to pay for, usage of, and satisfaction with, RTÉ’s services are analysed. In addition, this paper highlights the importance of distinguishing between household, and individual, willingness to pay.

The Financial Crisis and the Changing Profile of Mortgage Arrears in Ireland. ESRI Research Notes 2014/4/2

Understanding which households go into mortgage arrears during both boom and bust periods in Ireland is of critical importance to ensure suitable policies are deployed to safeguard future financial stability. Many of the difficulties in Ireland arose from the loosening of underwriting standards by financial institutions. This led to excessive household leverage ratios and provided households with limited buffers with which to absorb shocks (McCarthy and McQuinn, 2017; Lydon and McCann, 2017). The joint effects of labour market difficulties and large falls in house prices led to a situation where nearly one-in-five mortgage loans was in arrears at the height of the crisis (McCarthy, 2014)

Assessing price sustainability in the Irish housing market: a county-level analysis. ESRI Research Notes 2019/4/1

In the wake of a number of high profile property crashes, a question that has come to the fore recently is; are housing booms and busts clustered in specific areas within countries or do they tend to be more pan-regional? Within the United States for example, considerable variation in the boom-bust cycle has been experienced with the so-called ‘sand states’ (California, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada) showing much greater fluctuations in prices than other regions following the financial crisis.2 In an Irish context, a significant issue of interest is the apparent divergence between the Dublin property market and other regional markets as well as the difference between urban and rural areas

A county-level perspective on housing affordability in Ireland. ESRI Research Notes 2019/4/2

The issue of housing affordability in Ireland has come to the fore in recent years as house prices have increased significantly following the recovery. In a recent survey, Corrigan et al. (2019a) find that 86.5 per cent of renters expressed a preference for homeownership. However, rising house prices have led to serious concerns about the ability of first time buyers (FTB) to enter the housing market. This group has been cited as one particular pressure point in recent assessments of market affordability (Housing Agency, 2017). Analysis published in the ESRI Quarterly Economic Commentary (McQuinn et al., 2018) finds that house price growth has been uneven across the distribution, with cheaper properties growing at faster rates than more expensive properties. This is likely to further exacerbate the affordability concerns of first time buyers, who typically enter the housing market at lower house price levels than second and subsequent borrowers

Thomas Flanagan on the Stand: Revisiting Métis Land Claims and the Lists of Rights in Manitoba

More than a century after the adoption of section 31 of the Manitoba Act, 1870, which granted 1.4 million acres to the Métis of Manitoba, the descendants were unable to convince a trial judge that the federal and provincial governments improperly implemented this section. In his decision, Judge MacInnes seems to have relied heavily on the historical interpretation of the Crown’s expert witness, political scientist Thomas Flanagan. In this article, the author re-examines the historical evidence concerning the genesis rather than the implementation of s. 31 and finds that, contrary to what Flanagan has asserted, the Métis did indeed make land claims during the Resistance of 1869-70 and mandated their delegate, the abbot Noël-Joseph Ritchot, to negotiate a territorial enclave as consideration for the surrender of their derivative Indian title.Plus d’un siècle après la promulgation de l’art. 31 de la Loi de 1870 sur le Manitoba, qui accordait une concession de 1,4 million d’acres aux Métis du Manitoba, les descendants de ces derniers n’ont pas réussi à convaincre le juge MacInnes de reconnaître l’inconstitutionnalité de la manière que cet acte a été mis en oeuvre. Dans sa décision, le juge MacInnes semble s’être largement appuyé sur l’interprétation historique du témoin expert pour la Couronne, le politologue Thomas Flanagan. Dans cet article, l’auteur réexamine la preuve historique en ce qui concerne la genèse plutôt que la mise en oeuvre de l’art. 31 et démontre que, contrairement à ce qu’a affirmé Flanagan, les Métis ont bel et bien revendiqué des terres pendant la Résistance de 1869-70 et ont mandaté leur représentant, l’abbé Noël-Joseph Ritchot, de négocier une enclave territoriale en guise d’échange de l’extinction de leur titre d’indien dérivé

Exploring Affordability in the Irish Housing Market. ESRI WP593, June 2018

This paper examines housing affordability in Ireland by looking at the distribution of housing costs across households. Using microdata from the SILC survey over the period 2005-2015, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, the paper considers the trends in the cost of housing in Ireland across groups of households split by age, region, household structure, and their position in the income distribution. Second, we apply selected international housing affordability definitions and explore the share, and composition, of households in Ireland that would be captured by these definitions. We do not find evidence of universal affordability difficulties in the Irish market. However, certain groups do face acute affordability challenges. Third, working towards a definition of housing cost affordability for use in Irish policy discussions, we provide some guidance as to what such a definition could look like

The magnetic fields of hot subdwarf stars

Detection of magnetic fields has been reported in several sdO and sdB stars. Recent literature has cast doubts on the reliability of most of these detections. We revisit data previously published in the literature, and we present new observations to clarify the question of how common magnetic fields are in subdwarf stars. We consider a sample of about 40 hot subdwarf stars. About 30 of them have been observed with the FORS1 and FORS2 instruments of the ESO VLT. Here we present new FORS1 field measurements for 17 stars, 14 of which have never been observed for magnetic fields before. We also critically review the measurements already published in the literature, and in particular we try to explain why previous papers based on the same FORS1 data have reported contradictory results. All new and re-reduced measurements obtained with FORS1 are shown to be consistent with non-detection of magnetic fields. We explain previous spurious field detections from data obtained with FORS1 as due to a non-optimal method of wavelength calibration. Field detections in other surveys are found to be uncertain or doubtful, and certainly in need of confirmation. There is presently no strong evidence for the occurrence of a magnetic field in any sdB or sdO star, with typical longitudinal field uncertainties of the order of 2-400 G. It appears that globally simple fields of more than about 1 or 2 kG in strength occur in at most a few percent of hot subdwarfs, and may be completely absent at this strength. Further high-precision surveys, both with high-resolution spectropolarimeters and with instruments similar to FORS1 on large telescopes, would be very valuable

Flash of Zirconia Particle Coated with Nanoscale Alumina

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