Measuring and assessing the effects and extent of international bond market integration

We review briefly the literature on international financial integration, especially as it pertains to bond market integration. This contextualizes the review we than provide of a number of papers contained in a special issue of this Journal. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Triggering trust : to what extent does the question influence the answer when evaluating the perceived importance of trust triggers?

Trust is a critical component of business to consumer (B2C) e-Commerce success. In the absence of typical environmental cues that consumers use to assess vendor trustworthiness in the offline retail context, online consumers often rely on trust triggers embedded within e-Commerce websites to contribute to the establishment of sufficient trust to make an online purchase. This paper presents and discusses the results of a study which took an initial look at the extent to which the context or manner in which trust triggers are evaluated may exert influence on the importance attributed to individual triggers.

The extent and impact of outsourcing:evidence from Germany

The authors use data from several sources, including plant-level data from the manufacturing sector in Germany, to expand the literature on outsourcing. They find that, in Germany, the extent of outsourcing among manufacturing industries is higher than among service industries and that the outsourcing intensity of these industries did not change much between 1995 and 2005. They also find a statistically significantly positive impact of industry-level outsourcing intensity on German plant-level labor productivity for both 2000 and 2005. The estimated economic impact of outsourcing on plant-level productivity is also fairly significant.

Triggering trust:to what extent does the question influence the answer when evaluating the perceived importance of trust triggers?

Trust is a critical component of business to consumer (B2C) e-Commerce success. In the absence of typical environmental cues that consumers use to assess vendor trustworthiness in the offline retail context, online consumers often rely on trust triggers embedded within e-Commerce websites to contribute to the establishment of sufficient trust to make an online purchase. This paper presents and discusses the results of a study which took an initial look at the extent to which the context or manner in which trust triggers are evaluated may exert influence on the importance attributed to individual triggers.

To what extent do currently accepted for-profit new project development success factors apply in the small nonprofit context in the UK?

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Extent and nature of unlicensed and off-label medicine use in hospitalised children in Palestine

Objective of the study To determine the extent and nature of unlicensed/off-label prescribing patterns in hospitalised children in Palestine. Setting Four paediatric wards in two public health system hospitals in Palestine [Caritas children’s hospital (Medical and neonatal intensive care units) and Rafidia general hospital (Medical and surgical units)]. Method A prospective survey of drugs administered to infants and children <18 years old was carried out over a five-week period in the four paediatric wards. Main outcome measure Drug-licensing status of all prescriptions was determined according to the Palestinian Registered Product List and the Physician’s Desk Reference. Results Overall, 917 drug prescriptions were administered to 387children. Of all drug prescriptions, 528 (57.5%) were licensed for use in children; 65 (7.1%) were unlicensed; and 324 (35.3%) were used off-label. Of all children, 49.6% received off-label prescriptions, 10.1% received unlicensed medications and 8.2% received both. Seventy-two percent of off-label drugs and 66% of unlicensed drugs were prescribed for children <2 years. Multivariate analysis showed that patients who were admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit and infants aged 0–1 years were most likely to receive a greater number of off-label or unlicensed medications (OR 1.80; 95% CI 1.03–3.59 and OR 1.99; 95% CI 0.88–3.73, respectively). Conclusion The present findings confirmed the elevated prevalence of unlicensed and off-label paediatric drugs use in Palestine and strongly support the need to perform well designed clinical studies in children.

Measuring the spatial extent of texture pooling using reverse correlation

The local image representation produced by early stages of visual analysis is uninformative regarding spatially extensive textures and surfaces. We know little about the cortical algorithm used to combine local information over space, and still less about the area over which it can operate. But such operations are vital to support perception of real-world objects and scenes. Here, we deploy a novel reverse-correlation technique to measure the extent of spatial pooling for target regions of different areas placed either in the central visual field, or more peripherally. Stimuli were large arrays of micropatterns, with their contrasts perturbed individually on an interval-by-interval basis. By comparing trial-by-trial observer responses with the predictions of computational models, we show that substantial regions (up to 13 carrier cycles) of a stimulus can be monitored in parallel by summing contrast over area. This summing strategy is very different from the more widely assumed signal selection strategy (a MAX operation), and suggests that neural mechanisms representing extensive visual textures can be recruited by attention. We also demonstrate that template resolution is much less precise in the parafovea than in the fovea, consistent with recent accounts of crowding. © 2014 The Authors.

The extent and reasons for compliance failure with oral treatment regimens in haematology outpatients

Focal points: Self-completion questionnaires were used to determine issues with compliance surrounding the use of oral chemotherapy in haematology patients Forty-two patients were identified of which 40 responded over a two-month period Twenty-one respondents (52.5 per cent) indicated that they experienced difficulties in taking their medication Difficulties were not apparently related to the time of dosing; the size of dose units (hydroxyurea) and foil packed agents caused particular difficulties

To which extent can attention and/or modulation explains deficits in dyslexia?

This thesis investigates the visual deficits associated with developmental dyslexia, particularly that of visual attention. Visual attention has previously been investigated in a wide array of behavioural and psychophysical (amongst others) studies but not many have produced consistent findings. Attention processes are believed to play an integral part in depicting the overall "extent" of reading deficits in dyslexia, so it was of paramount importance to aim at such attention mechanisms in this research. The experiments in this thesis focused on signal enhancement and noise (distractor) exclusion. Given the flexibility of the visual search paradigms employed in this research, factors such as visual crowding and attention distribution was also investigated. The experiments systematically manipulated noise (by increasing distractor count, i.e. set-size), crowding (varying the spacing between distractors), attention allocation (use of peripheral cues to direct attention), and attention distribution (influence of one visual field over the other), all of which were tied to a critical factor, the "location/spatial/decisional uncertainty". Adults with dyslexia were: (i) able to modulate attention appropriately using peripheral pre-cues, (ii) severely affected by crowding, and (iii) unable to counteract increased set-sizes when post or un-cued, the latter signifying poor distractor (noise) suppression. By controlling for location uncertainty, the findings confirmed that adults with dyslexia were yet again affected by crowding and set-size, in addition to an asymmetric attention distribution. Confounding effects of ADHD symptoms did not explain a significant independent variance in performance, suggesting that the difficulty shown by adult dyslexics were not accounted for by co-morbid ADHD. Furthermore, the effects of crowding, set-size and asymmetric attention correlated significantly with literacy, but not ADHD measures. It is believed that a more diffuse and an asymmetric attention system (in dyslexia) to be the limiting factor concerning noise exclusion and attention distribution. The findings from this thesis add to the current understanding of the potential role of deficits in visual attention in dyslexia and in the literacy difficulties experienced by this population.

To what extent and in what manner do Chinese and Indian contract research organisation learn and upgrade with the unbundling the global pharmaceutical R&D value chain?

The paper applies the GVC framework to analyse the organisational and geographical reconfiguration of the global R&D function of leading US and European pharmaceutical MNCs. Though pharmaceutical MNCs have been outsourcing clinical trial activities since the mid-1990s, the outsourcing of discovery research tasks is a phenomenon of the 2000s (Ramirez 2013). Moreover, in the context of a crisis of R&D productivity and increasing pressure from shareholders, a number of US and European pharmaceutical MNCs are breaking up their R&D function in an attempt to increase flexibility and reduce risk as well as costs and are thereby restructuring the global architecture of their R&D function. This break-up, or unbundling (Sako 2006), of the R&D function is particularly interesting given the prevalence of market failure in innovation (Howells et al 2008), the non-modular nature of the R&D process in this industry (Pisano 2006) and the strategic important of this activity to the core competence and long-term competitive advantage of firms in this sector. The focus of this paper is on the outsourcing of R&D activities to Chinese and Indian independently-owned contract research organisations (CROs) and the way these firms are becoming integrated as service providers into the global R&D function (or R&D value chain) of pharmaceutical MNCs. Above all the paper is concerned with the development of capabilities of CROs from these two countries and the dynamics of upgrading in GVCs in knowledge-intensive functions. The paper therefore discusses the role of both knowledge flows within global pharmaceutical R&D value chains as well as national innovation systems on the development of capabilities of Chinese and Indian CROs. Our analysis is based on data from semi-structured interviews collected from senior R&D managers from a sample of ten US and European pharmaceutical MNCs and owners and senior R&D managers from five Chinese and five Indian CROs who are providing research services to MNCs in this industry. We discuss the emergence of R&D outsourcing in this industry and the nature and mechanisms of knowledge flows within R&D value chains. The embeddedness of CROS in the national innovation systems of their home countries is also discussed.