The Charm Renaissance: D-Physics - a Selective Review

For a long time the significance of charm has been overlooked as an important component of the heavy flavour programme. In recent years the balance has been redressed, and charm studies are quite rightly receiving much more attention. This brief review attempts to explain the motives behind this change in perception, focusing on the contribution of charm measurements to precision CKM tests, and the potential that charm has in its own right as a probe of new physics.Comment: Invited conference talk at Physics In Collision, Perugia, Italy, June 200

Godot and the New Physics

A survey is made of selected topics in flavour physics where real progress is expected in the coming half-decade, paying particular attention to those where New Physics signals may appear.Comment: Invited talk at FPCP 2009, Lake Placid, NY, US

Dawn or dusk? Flavour physics in the hadron collider era

A review is made of the status of, and prospects for, flavour physics studies at hadron colliders in the `post e^+e^- era'. It is argued that exciting times lie ahead.Comment: Invited talk at CKM 2010, the 6th International Workshop on the CKM Unitarity Triangle, University of Warwick, UK, 6-10 September 201

Inflation Targeting and the Inflation Process: Lessons from an Open Economy

In an open economy inflation-targeting framework, whether policy makers should target aggregate or non-traded inflation depends on the structural relationships in the economy. This paper shows that in a small empirical model of the Australian economy, it makes little difference which measure is targeted. This conclusion is reinforced by the significant changes to the inflation process that the paper suggests have occurred over the past two decades: the effect of exchange rate changes on inflation appears to have become more muted and the inflation process appears to have become better anchored.

Making real the learning to learn (L2L) rhetoric embedded in an ITE learning and teaching strategy

Building on current research at Chester into the promotion of reflection as a tool for helping students to become more strategically aware of their learning, the project explores the value of introducing college tutors to ideas about learning to learn in its broader sense. Emphasis will be placed upon Claxton's 4Rs: resilience; resourcefulness; reflectiveness and reciprocity as a model of what good learning does look like (Smith, 2004

Player Productivity and Performance: An Econometric Approach to Team Management in Soccer

The motivation for this thesis concerns worker productivity as estimated from production functions. Identifying worker contributions allows for not just an understanding of economic theory but highlights ways in which business management and strategy can be more efficient. The setting for these analyses is professional soccer, where teams are analogous to businesses and workers are multi-million dollar assets in the form of players. Most of a soccer team’s income is tied to its success on the field and so a careful management of staff and players is necessary to their business potential. Sports are the perfect “laboratory” to study economic theory since workers can be observed on a regular basis and there is a large volume of existing data. With almost every game recorded in the modern age this allows for the opportunity to analyse not just worker productivity but also team processes and strategies. This thesis expands the production function literature using a framework from contest theory literature. Most research in soccer focuses on performance at the aggregate level while this thesis primarily considers performance at the player level. It consists of three papers, each providing a different insight into player productivity. Chapter I presents a brief introduction of the relevant literature and contextualizes the research. Chapter II measures the impact of different workers in a production process depending on their expected productivity, finding support for superstar theories over the O-Ring theory in the English Premier League. Chapter III looks at the effects of fatigue in professional soccer finding that under current scheduling in the English Premier League and European competition there are no statistically significant effects of receiving different days of rest on team performance. Chapter IV applies high dimensional techniques to European soccer data to predict match outcomes. The models perform almost as well and betting firms and can be used to estimate individual player contributions in the form of rankings. Chapter V concludes.PHDSport Management PhDUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147502/1/gbwilkin_1.pd

Climate adaptation and resilience in coastal zones : a review of coastal research

The report reviews multiple projects and makes recommendations based on detailed evaluation. Two key thematic clusters were identified in the project sample: the first concentrates on issues related to disaster risk reduction and socioecological resilience; the second focusses on projects related to adaptation related to slow-onset climate change. The coastal focus shows high alignment of projects with indicators of risk reduction, vulnerability assessment, testing adaptation strategies, and strengthening adaptive capacity. Despite their potential significance in coastal areas, alignment with other indicators (for integrated water management and water quality) was low. Eight of the thirteen 13 projects reviewed are still active