Entry and productivity growth: evidence from microlevel panel data

How does entry affect productivity growth of incumbents? In this paper we exploit policy reforms in the United Kingdom that changed entry conditions by opening up the U.K. economy during the 1980s and panel data on British establishments to shed light on this question. We show that more entry, measured by a higher share of industry employment in foreign firms, has led to faster total factor productivity growth of domestic incumbent firms and thus to faster aggregate productivity growth

Can virtual seminars be used cost‐effectively to enhance student learning?

This paper describes a virtual seminar initiative designed to investigate the extent to which computer‐mediated communication (CMC) can cost‐effectively strengthen staff‐student interaction and enhance student group discussion, and thereby improve collaborative learning. After setting the scene by means of a brief review of the discursive potential of CMC, the establishment of an asynchronous bulletin board system on three modules in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester using industry standard software is described. Detailed time diaries kept by all staff involved revealed that organizing and running the virtual seminars were very much less time‐consuming than running face‐to‐face seminars. However, analysis of the students’ access to and mage of the virtual seminars indicates that some of them were disadvantaged by CMC and that they favoured face‐to‐face contact with lecturers over virtual seminars. The latter should therefore be part of a portfolio of teaching techniques rather than the sole form of collaborative learning. The conclusion is that a significant obstacle to benefiting from CMC is the further demand on staff time that results from adding virtual seminars as a supplement to existing teaching practices. Even though these extra demands may be modest, effectively deploying the discursive potential of CMC to enhance student learning increases staff effort rather than reducing it, as many have hoped or promised it would

Seeking the Goal in the Process, the Process for the Goal: Organizational Learning in a Public Sector Change Project

This paper describes how a combination of process modelling and goal modelling techniques has been used to facilitate organizational learning. The case study comes from the public sector in the UK. The modelling techniques have helped users to rationalise about the existing processes and then to design how they would like the process to work. The paper describes how the users have been able to confront the complex issues involved. The experience suggests that the combination of the modelling techniques is important to the learning experience of the users involved

Development of Kinect based teleoperation of Nao robot

In this paper, an online tracking system has been developed to control the arm and head of a Nao robot using Kinect sensor. The main goal of this work is to achieve that the robot is able to follow the motion of a human user in real time to track. This objective has been achieved using a RGB-D camera (Kinect v2) and a Nao robot, which is a humanoid robot with 5 degree of freedom (DOF) for each arm. The joint motions of the operatoŗs head and arm in the real world captured by a Kinect camera can be transferred into the workspace mathematically via forward and inverse kinematics, realitically through data based UDP connection between the robot and Kinect sensor. The satisfactory performance of the proposed approaches have been achieved, which is shown in experimental results