Weaving the realities and responsibilities: Crossing culture and concepts of healing within co-existing mental health and addictive disorders.

Within ‘Mainstream’ western and Kaupapa Māori services, competing priorities often mean that cultural and clinical services are not implemented in unison. Without this ‘unison’, treatment of Māori with co-existing mental health and addictive disorders may be ineffective. This paper reflects the journey of a small social service agency ‘Pai Ake Solutions Limited’ (PASL) in integrating western clinical approaches within tikanga Māori values. Pai Ake Solutions Limited (PASL) provides a range of group and individual services to whānau who are affected by mental illness and co-existing substance use problems. The initial development of the service was based on the whakaaro of providing ‘pai ake’ (better) services for whānau in the greater Waikato. These services were initially founded on the strong values of founders Mihaka Hohua and the late Ritchie Re Cribb, which were influenced by the practices and experiences of Ngati Kahangungu, Ngati Haua, and Waikato-Maniopoto. From an initial non-clinical service provision contract, PASL began receiving referrals from individuals and whānau whose needs were not being met by mainstream service providers. Encouraging outcomes and an internal agency review of clientele utilising the service, identified that those accessing PASL services were experiencing socially and clinically significant mental and physical health, addiction and psychosocial problems

Presentations of Noneffective Orbifolds

It is well-known that an effective orbifold M (one for which the local stabilizer groups act effectively) can be presented as a quotient of a smooth manifold P by a locally free action of a compact lie group K. We use the language of groupoids to provide a partial answer to the question of whether a noneffective orbifold can be so presented. We also note some connections to stacks and gerbes.Comment: 19 page

NS-branes, source corrected Bianchi identities, and more on backgrounds with non-geometric fluxes

In the first half of the paper, we study in details NS-branes, including the NS5-brane, the Kaluza-Klein monopole and the exotic $5_2^2$- or Q-brane, together with Bianchi identities for NSNS (non)-geometric fluxes. Four-dimensional Bianchi identities are generalized to ten dimensions with non-constant fluxes, and get corrected by a source term in presence of an NS-brane. The latter allows them to reduce to the expected Poisson equation. Without sources, our Bianchi identities are also recovered by squaring a nilpotent $Spin(D,D) \times \mathbb{R}^+$ Dirac operator. Generalized Geometry allows us in addition to express the equations of motion explicitly in terms of fluxes. In the second half, we perform a general analysis of ten-dimensional geometric backgrounds with non-geometric fluxes, in the context of $\beta$-supergravity. We determine a well-defined class of such vacua, that are non-geometric in standard supergravity: they involve $\beta$-transforms, a manifest symmetry of $\beta$-supergravity with isometries. We show as well that these vacua belong to a geometric T-duality orbit.Comment: v2: minor changes and additions, few references added, published versio

Brane-World Inflation and the Transition to Standard Cosmology

In the context of a five-dimensional brane-world model motivated from heterotic M-theory, we develop a framework for potential-driven brane-world inflation. Specifically this involves a classification of the various background solutions of (A)dS_5 type, an analysis of five-dimensional slow-roll conditions and a study of how a transition to the flat vacuum state can be realized. It is shown that solutions with bulk potential and both bane potentials positive exist but are always non-separating and have a non-static orbifold. It turns out that, for this class of backgrounds, a transition to the flat vacuum state during inflation is effectively prevented by the rapidly expanding orbifold. We demonstrate that such a transition can be realized for solutions where one boundary potential is negative. For this case, we present two concrete inflationary models which exhibit the transition explicitly.Comment: 50 pages, 3 figures, minor typos correcte

The classification of substance and behavioural addictions: A preliminary investigation

The term addiction has been used to refer to impaired control over substance use for several centuries however recently there has been a shift toward using this term in the context of non-substance use disorders, such as pathological gambling. A preliminary investigation was conducted in an attempt to clarify the most appropriate classification of 'behavioural addictions'. Participants with alcohol dependence (AD, n = 24), pathological gambling (PG, n = 20) and compulsive buying disorder (CBD, n = 14) completed an Addictive Disorder Questionnaire (ADQ); the Symptom Checklist 90 Revised (SCL-90R); Barratt Impulsivity Scale II; and substance specific adaptations of the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS). Although the AD group reported more severe addiction symptoms and had higher levels of depression and anxiety, there were broad similarities across the three disorders in relation to cravings, dyscontrol, impulsivity and obsessions. Despite the small sample size and the different recruitment strategies used across the groups, the findings from this preliminary study provide support for broadening addiction diagnostic definitions to include non-substance related disorders which in turn may contribute to the development of more efficacious treatments

Institutions and Economic Growth: The Successful Experience of Switzerland (1870-1950)

economic growth, institutions, Switzerland, small countries

Entrepreneurial growth in British regions 1980-1998

This paper examines the relationship between new firm startups and employment growth in Great Britain. We construct a new data set for 60 British regions, covering the whole of Great Britain, between 1980 and 1998. The central theme of the paper is that, with the exception of a recent paper by Audretsch and Fritsch (2002) for Germany, no data set has been available to examine long-run, as well as short-run relationships. The current paper uses a long-run data set and obtains results for Great Britain which are in some respects similar to those for Germany. There are a number of theoretical reasons to expect a positive relationship between the extent to which a geographical area is 'entrepreneurial' and the extent to which it is 'economically successful' (measured as, for instance, the number of jobs created). The first is that if 'entrepreneurial' is reflected in 'new firm formation' then these new firms create jobs directly and so add to the stock of jobs. The second is that the new firms constitute a (real or imagined) competitive threat to existing firms, encouraging the latter to perform better. Finally, new firms provide a vehicle for the introduction of new ideas and innovation to an economy, which has been shown to be a key source of long-term economic growth [Romer 1986]. However, there are also reasons for not expecting firm formation rates to be related to job creation. We mention two of them. The first is that new firms directly contribute only a small proportion of the stock of jobs in the economy [Storey 1994]. Secondly, most new firms are merely displacing existing firms without any observable gain either to the customer or to the economy [Storey and Strange 1991]. To establish the relation empirically, we estimate a model where employment growth is explained by startup activity and some controls, using our long-run data set. Within the period 1980-1998 we analyze different subperiods to examine whether the impact of new firm startups on growth has changed during the last two decades of the 20th century. We explicitly take account of numerous empirical pitfalls. We find evidence for positive employment effects of startup activity for British regions. Two important conclusions can be drawn from our regression exercises. First, the positive impact of new firm startups on employment growth is stronger for the 1990s than for the 1980s. This finding is consistent with Audretsch and Fritsch (2002), who find an increased impact of new firm startups on employment growth for German regions over the last two decades of the 20th century. Second, lag structures are important, and longer lagged startups are found to have a bigger impact on employment growth than shorter lagged startups. This finding is consistent with Audretsch, Carree and Thurik (2001). They investigate the relation between entrepreneurship and unemployment for 23 OECD countries and find empirical evidence for their claim that "the employment impact of entrepreneurship is not instantaneous but rather requires a number of years for the firm to grow". Selected references: Audretsch, D.B., M.A. Carree and A.R. Thurik (2001), "Does entrepreneurship reduce unemployment?", Discussion paper TI01-074/3, Tinbergen Institute, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Audretsch, D.B., and M. Fritsch (2002), "Growth regimes over Time and Space", Regional Studies (forth-coming). Romer, P.M. (1986), "Increasing returns and Long Run Growth", Journal of Political Economy 94, 1002-1037. Storey, D.J. and A. Strange, (1992), "Entrepreneurship in Cleveland 1979-1989: A Study of the Effects of the Enterprise Culture", Employment Department, Research Series No. 3. Storey, D.J. (1994), "Understanding the Small Business Sector", Routledge, London.