The Hutton review is unlikely to solve the “wicked” problem of executive pay in the public sector

In a time of fiscal austerity in government, the pay levels for senior civil servants have come under increasing scrutiny. Sandy Pepper finds that despite the public’s seeming opposition to high pay in the public sector, there are no easy fixes, and that some of the recommendations in Will Hutton’s review may actually have the opposite outcome to what is intended

Written evidence given by Professor Alexander Pepper of the London School of Economics and Political Science to the UK Parliamentary Commission on banking standards

My contention is that many of the current problems with 'Bankers’ Pay' have their origins in the dismantling of the formal and informal institutions which regulated the labour markets in the financial centres in London and New York prior to 1986-1987

Drug Usage Among Women Attending Stephen F. Austin State University

The purpose of this study is to determine illegal drug usage among women attending Stephen F. Austin State University

Narrow-row soybeans : what to consider / 1161

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Degree Sequence Index Strategy

We introduce a procedure, called the Degree Sequence Index Strategy (DSI), by which to bound graph invariants by certain indices in the ordered degree sequence. As an illustration of the DSI strategy, we show how it can be used to give new upper and lower bounds on the $k$-independence and the $k$-domination numbers. These include, among other things, a double generalization of the annihilation number, a recently introduced upper bound on the independence number. Next, we use the DSI strategy in conjunction with planarity, to generalize some results of Caro and Roddity about independence number in planar graphs. Lastly, for claw-free and $K_{1,r}$-free graphs, we use DSI to generalize some results of Faudree, Gould, Jacobson, Lesniak and Lindquester

Robust Inferences from Random Clustered Samples: Applications Using Data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics

Many large data sets are created using clustered, rather than random sampling schemes. Clustered data arise when multiple observations exist on the same respondent, as in panel data, and when respondents share a common factor, such as a neighborhood or family. In the presence of clustered data, methods that rely on random sampling to measure the precision of an estimator may be incorrect. Many researchers, however, continue to treat respondents from the same sampling cluster as independent observations and thus implicitly ignore the potential intracluster correlation. In this paper, I use a robust method for drawing inferences and data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, to examine the implications of clustered samples on inference. Consistent with the previous survey sampling literature, important differences are revealed in comparisons between the estimated asymptotic variances derived assuming random and clustered sampling, even when there are only a few observations per cluster. The estimates derived under random sampling are generally biased downward.Clustered Samples; Design Effects; PSID

Application of Meshless Methods for Thermal Analysis

Many numerical and analytical schemes exist for solving heat transfer problems. The meshless method is a particularly attractive method that is receiving attention in the engineering and scientific modeling communities. The meshless method is simple, accurate, and requires no polygonalisation. In this study, we focus on the application of meshless methods using radial basis functions (RBFs) — which are simple to implement — for thermal problems. Radial basis functions are the natural generalization of univariate polynomial splines to a multivariate setting that work for arbitrary geometry with high dimensions. RBF functions depend only on the distance from some center point. Using distance functions, RBFs can be easily implemented to model heat transfer in arbitrary dimension or symmetry