Transition Dynamics in Vintage Capital Models: Explaining the Postwar Catch-Up of Germany and Japan

We consider a neoclassical interpretation of Germany and Japan's rapid postwar growth that relies on a catch-up mechanism through capital accumulation where technology is embodied in new capital goods. Using a putty-clay model of production and investment, we are able to capture many of the key empirical properties of Germany and Japan's postwar transitions, including persistently high but declining rates of labor and total-factor productivity growth, a U-shaped response of the capital-output ratio, rising rates of investment and employment, and moderate rates of return to capital.

Is resilience a normative concept?

In this paper, we engage with the question of the normative content of the resilience concept. The issues are approached in two consecutive steps. First, we proceed from a narrow construal of the resilience concept – as the ability of a system to absorb a disturbance – and show that under an analysis of normative concepts as evaluative concepts resilience comes out as descriptive. In the second part of the paper, we argue that (1) for systems of interest (primarily social systems or system with a social component) we seem to have options with respect to how they are described and (2) that this matters for what is to be taken as a sign of resilience as opposed to a sign of the lack of resilience for such systems. We discuss the implications of this for how the concept should be applied in practice and suggest that users of the resilience concept face a choice between versions of the concept that are either ontologically or normatively charged

All-Wales licensed premises intervention (AWLPI): a randomised controlled trial to reduce alcohol-related violence

Background: Alcohol-related violence in and in the vicinity of licensed premises continues to place a considerable burden on the United Kingdom’s (UK) health services. Robust interventions targeted at licensed premises are therefore required to reduce the costs of alcohol-related harm. Previous evaluations of interventions in licensed premises have a number of methodological limitations and none have been conducted in the UK. The aim of the trial was to determine the effectiveness of the Safety Management in Licensed Environments intervention designed to reduce alcohol-related violence in licensed premises, delivered by Environmental Health Officers, under their statutory authority to intervene in cases of violence in the workplace.<p></p> Methods/Design: A national randomised controlled trial, with licensed premises as the unit of allocation. Premises were identified from all 22 Local Authorities in Wales. Eligible premises were those with identifiable violent incidents on premises, using police recorded violence data. Premises were allocated to intervention or control by optimally balancing by Environmental Health Officer capacity in each Local Authority, number of violent incidents in the 12 months leading up to the start of the project and opening hours. The primary outcome measure is the difference in frequency of violence between intervention and control premises over a 12 month follow-up period, based on a recurrent event model. The trial incorporates an embedded process evaluation to assess intervention implementation, fidelity, reach and reception, and to interpret outcome effects, as well as investigate its economic impact.<p></p> Discussion: The results of the trial will be applicable to all statutory authorities directly involved with managing violence in the night time economy and will provide the first formal test of Health and Safety policy in this environment. If successful, opportunities for replication and generalisation will be considered.<p></p&gt

Second-Order Nonlinear Mixing of Two Modes in a Planar Photonic Crystal Microcavity

Polarization-resolved second-harmonic spectra are obtained from the resonant modes of a two-dimensional planar photonic crystal microcavity patterned in a free-standing InP slab. The photonic crystal microcavity is comprised of a single missing-hole defect in a hexagonal photonic crystal host formed with elliptically-shaped holes. The cavity supports two orthogonally-polarized resonant modes split by 60 wavenumbers. Sum-frequency data are reported from the nonlinear interaction of the two coherently excited modes, and the polarization dependence is explained in terms of the nonlinear susceptibility tensor of the host InP.Comment: 7 pages, 8 Postscript figures, to be presented at Photonics West Jan. 2

Spectral Analysis and the Dynamic Response of Complex Networks

The eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the connectivity matrix of complex networks contain information about its topology and its collective behavior. In particular, the spectral density $\rho(\lambda)$ of this matrix reveals important network characteristics: random networks follow Wigner's semicircular law whereas scale-free networks exhibit a triangular distribution. In this paper we show that the spectral density of hierarchical networks follow a very different pattern, which can be used as a fingerprint of modularity. Of particular importance is the value $\rho(0)$, related to the homeostatic response of the network: it is maximum for random and scale free networks but very small for hierarchical modular networks. It is also large for an actual biological protein-protein interaction network, demonstrating that the current leading model for such networks is not adequate.Comment: 4 pages 14 figure

The AHK-Wales Report Card 2018: Policy Measures - is it possible to ‘score’ qualitative data?

Comprehensive and meaningful policy analysis in the field of physical activity is difficult, not least because of the variable influence of other policy domains. However, in 2011 a Policy Assessment Tool (PAT) was developed by members of the WHO European Network for the Promotion of Health-Enhancing Physical Activity (HEPA Europe) and tested in several different countries. In 2014, Wales joined a global initiative, active healthy kids (AHK) Global Alliance, that supported the development of country level ‘Report Cards’ scoring a range of indicators that influence physical activity amongst children and young people, one of which was labelled ‘Government Strategies and Investments’. For the first two Report Cards this indicator and its associated ‘score’ was informed subjectively by expert consensus. In 2018, it was decided to utilize the Policy Audit Tool Version 2 (PAT v2) developed by HEPA Europe to aid analysis and to develop and test a scoring rubric aligned to the tool. The subsequent process indicated that the tool could be applied and translated into a ‘grade’ that could be used in conjunction with the other indicators of the AHK Report Card to generate overall Report Card grades. The use of both the HEPA PAT v2 and the scoring rubric offers an opportunity to provide greater consistency and potential for developing both comparative and trend data when assessing policy impact on physical activity in children and young people. These tools should be utilized by the AHK Global Alliance in future Report Cards

The role of trapped bubbles in kidney stone detection with the color Doppler ultrasound twinkling artifact

The color Doppler ultrasound twinkling artifact, which highlights kidney stones with rapidly changing color, has the potential to improve stone detection; however, its inconsistent appearance has limited its clinical utility. Recently, it was proposed stable crevice bubbles on the kidney stone surface cause twinkling; however, the hypothesis is not fully accepted because the bubbles have not been directly observed. In this paper, the micron or submicron-sized bubbles predicted by the crevice bubble hypothesis are enlarged in kidney stones of five primary compositions by exposure to acoustic rarefaction pulses or hypobaric static pressures in order to simultaneously capture their appearance by high-speed photography and ultrasound imaging. On filming stones that twinkle, consecutive rarefaction pulses from a lithotripter caused some bubbles to reproducibly grow from specific locations on the stone surface, suggesting the presence of pre-existing crevice bubbles. Hyperbaric and hypobaric static pressures were found to modify the twinkling artifact; however, the simple expectation that hyperbaric exposures reduce and hypobaric pressures increase twinkling by shrinking and enlarging bubbles, respectively, largely held for rough-surfaced stones but was inadequate for smoother stones. Twinkling was found to increase or decrease in response to elevated static pressure on smooth stones, perhaps because of the compression of internal voids. These results support the crevice bubble hypothesis of twinkling and suggest the kidney stone crevices that give rise to the twinkling phenomenon may be internal as well as external