Spectroscopic studies of field-induced electron emission from isolated microstructures

A detailed investigation has been undertaken into the field induced electron emission (FIEE) mechanism that occurs at microscopically localised `sites' on uncoated and dielectric coated metallic electrodes. These processes have been investigated using two dedicated experimental systems that were developed for this study. The first is a novel combined photo/field emission microscope, which employs a UV source to stimulate photo-electrons from the sample surface in order to generate a topographical image. This system utilises an electrostatic lens column to provide identical optical properties under the different operating conditions required for purely topographical and combined photo/field imaging. The system has been demonstrated to have a resolution approaching 1m. Emission images have been obtained from carbon emission sites using this system to reveal that emission may occur from the edge triple junction or from the bulk of the carbon particle. An existing UHV electron spectrometer has been extensively rebuilt to incorporate a computer control and data acquisition system, improved sample handling and manipulation and a specimen heating stage. Details are given of a comprehensive study into the effects of sample heating on the emission process under conditions of both bulk and transient heating. Similar studies were also performed under conditions of both zero and high applied field. These show that the properties of emission sites are strongly temperature and field dependent thus indicating that the emission process is `non-metallic' in nature. The results have been shown to be consistent with an existing hot electron emission model.

Employment effects of privatisation and foreign acquisition of Chinese state-owned enterprises

This paper investigates the effects of domestic privatisation or foreign acquisition of Chinese State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) on employment growth, using firm level data for China and a combination of propensity score matching and difference-in-differences in order to identify the causal effect. Our results suggest that, controlling for output growth there is some evidence that domestic privatisation leads to contemporaneous reductions in employment growth compared to firms that did not undergo an ownership change. By contrast, there is some evidence that foreign acquisitions show higher employment growth in the post acquisition period than non-acquired SOEs.

TRial of an Educational intervention on patients' knowledge of Atrial fibrillation and anticoagulant therapy, INR control, and outcome of Treatment with warfarin (TREAT)

Background Atrial fibrillation (AF) patients with a high risk of stroke are recommended anticoagulation with warfarin. However, the benefit of warfarin is dependent upon time spent within the target therapeutic range (TTR) of their international normalised ratio (INR) (2.0 to 3.0). AF patients possess limited knowledge of their disease and warfarin treatment and this can impact on INR control. Education can improve patients' understanding of warfarin therapy and factors which affect INR control. Methods/Design Randomised controlled trial of an intensive educational intervention will consist of group sessions (between 2-8 patients) containing standardised information about the risks and benefits associated with OAC therapy, lifestyle interactions and the importance of monitoring and control of their International Normalised Ratio (INR). Information will be presented within an 'expert-patient' focussed DVD, revised educational booklet and patient worksheets. 200 warfarin-naïve patients who are eligible for warfarin will be randomised to either the intervention or usual care groups. All patients must have ECG-documented AF and be eligible for warfarin (according to the NICE AF guidelines). Exclusion criteria include: aged < 18 years old, contraindication(s) to warfarin, history of warfarin USE, valvular heart disease, cognitive impairment, are unable to speak/read English and disease likely to cause death within 12 months. Primary endpoint is time spent in TTR. Secondary endpoints include measures of quality of life (AF-QoL-18), anxiety and depression (HADS), knowledge of AF and anticoagulation, beliefs about medication (BMQ) and illness representations (IPQ-R). Clinical outcomes, including bleeding, stroke and interruption to anticoagulation will be recorded. All outcome measures will be assessed at baseline and 1, 2, 6 and 12 months post-intervention. Discussion More data is needed on the clinical benefit of educational intervention with AF patients receiving warfarin. Trial registration ISRCTN93952605

The human factors aspects of alarms in human supervisory control tasks.

This research thesis is concerned with the human factors aspects of industrial alarm systems within human supervisory control tasks. Typically such systems are located in central control rooms, and the information may be presented via visual display units. The thesis develops a human, rather than engineering, centred approach to the assessment, measurement and analysis of the situation. A human factors methodology was employed to investigate the human requirements through: interviews, questionnaires, observation and controlled experiments. Based on the analysis of current industrial alarm systems in a variety of domains (power generation, manufacturing and coronary care), it is suggested that often designers do not pay due considerations to the human requirements. It is suggested that most alarm systems have severe shortcomings in human factors terms. The interviews, questionnaire and observations led to the proposal of 'alarm initiated activities' as a framework for the research to proceed. The framework comprises of six main stages: observe, accept, analyse, investigate, correct and monitor. This framework served as a basis for laboratory research into alarm media. Under consideration were speech-based alarm displays and visual alarm displays. Non-speech auditory displays were the subject of a literature review. The findings suggest that care needs to be taken when selecting the alarm media. Ideally it should be chosen to support the task requirements of the operator, rather than being arbitrarily assigned. It was also indicated that there may be some interference between the alarm initiated activities and the alarm media, i.e. information that supports one particular stage of alarm handling may interfere with another.

Fish farm effluent control and the development of an expert system

In recent years, freshwater fish farmers have come under increasing pressure from the Water Authorities to control the quality of their farm effluents. This project aimed to investigate methods of treating aquacultural effluent in an efficient and cost-effective manner, and to incorporate the knowledge gained into an Expert System which could then be used in an advice service to farmers. From the results of this research it was established that sedimentation and the use of low pollution diets are the only cost effective methods of controlling the quality of fish farm effluents. Settlement has been extensively investigated and it was found that the removal of suspended solids in a settlement pond is only likely to be effective if the inlet solids concentration is in excess of 8 mg/litre. The probability of good settlement can be enhanced by keeping the ratio of length/retention time (a form of mean fluid velocity) below 4.0 metres/minute. The removal of BOD requires inlet solids concentrations in excess of 20 mg/litre to be effective, and this is seldom attained on commercial fish farms. Settlement, generally, does not remove appreciable quantities of ammonia from effluents, but algae can absorb ammonia by nutrient uptake under certain conditions. The use of low pollution, high performance diets gives pollutant yields which are low when compared with published figures obtained by many previous workers. Two Expert Systems were constructed, both of which diagnose possible causes of poor effluent quality on fish farms and suggest solutions. The first system uses knowledge gained from a literature review and the second employs the knowledge obtained from this project's experimental work. Consent details for over 100 fish farms were obtained from the public registers kept by the Water Authorities. Large variations in policy from one Authority to the next were found. These data have been compiled in a computer file for ease of comparison.

Privatisation, corporate control and employment growth:evidence from a panel of large Polish firms, 1996-2002

Using data on Polish firms this paper examines the relationship between corporate control structures, sales growth and the determinants of employment change. Privatised and de novo firms are the main drivers of employment growth; in the case of de novo firms, it is foreign ownership which underpins the result. Being privatised has a positive impact on employment but this is concentrated within a range of 3–6 years after privatisation. There are no systematic differences in employment response to negative sales growth across the ownership categories. Employment in state firms is less responsive to positive sales growth. From these results we infer that the behaviour of state firms is affected by both insider rent sharing and binding budget constraints.

Privatisation, corporate control and employment growth:evidence from a panel of large Polish firms, 1996-2002

Using panel data on large Polish firms this paper examines the relationship between corporate control structures, sales growth and the determinants of employment change during the period 1996-2002. We find that privatised and de novo firms are the main drivers of employment growth and that, in the case of de novo firms, it is foreign ownership which underpins the result. Interestingly, we find that being privatised has a positive impact on employment growth but that this impact is concentrated within a range of three to six years after privatisation. In contrast with the findings of earlier literature, we find evidence that there are no systematic differences in employment response to negative sales growth across the ownership categories. On the other hand, employment in state firms is less responsive to positive sales growth. From these combined results we infer that the behaviour of state firms is constrained by both insider rent sharing and binding budget constraints. Consistent with this, we find that privatised companies, three to six years post-privatisation, are the firms for whom employment is most responsive to positive sales growth and as such, offer the best hope for rapid labour market expansion.

What checkers actually check:an eye tracking study of inhibitory control and working memory

Background - Not only is compulsive checking the most common symptom in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) with an estimated prevalence of 50–80% in patients, but approximately ~15% of the general population reveal subclinical checking tendencies that impact negatively on their performance in daily activities. Therefore, it is critical to understand how checking affects attention and memory in clinical as well as subclinical checkers. Eye fixations are commonly used as indicators for the distribution of attention but research in OCD has revealed mixed results at best. Methodology/Principal Finding - Here we report atypical eye movement patterns in subclinical checkers during an ecologically valid working memory (WM) manipulation. Our key manipulation was to present an intermediate probe during the delay period of the memory task, explicitly asking for the location of a letter, which, however, had not been part of the encoding set (i.e., misleading participants). Using eye movement measures we now provide evidence that high checkers’ inhibitory impairments for misleading information results in them checking the contents of WM in an atypical manner. Checkers fixate more often and for longer when misleading information is presented than non-checkers. Specifically, checkers spend more time checking stimulus locations as well as locations that had actually been empty during encoding. Conclusions/Significance - We conclude that these atypical eye movement patterns directly reflect internal checking of memory contents and we discuss the implications of our findings for the interpretation of behavioural and neuropsychological data. In addition our results highlight the importance of ecologically valid methodology for revealing the impact of detrimental attention and memory checking on eye movement patterns.

A Bayesian formulation of search, control and the exploration/exploitation trade-off

A new approach to optimisation is introduced based on a precise probabilistic statement of what is ideally required of an optimisation method. It is convenient to express the formalism in terms of the control of a stationary environment. This leads to an objective function for the controller which unifies the objectives of exploration and exploitation, thereby providing a quantitative principle for managing this trade-off. This is demonstrated using a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem. This approach opens new possibilities for optimisation algorithms, particularly by using neural network or other adaptive methods for the adaptive controller. It also opens possibilities for deepening understanding of existing methods. The realisation of these possibilities requires research into practical approximations of the exact formalism.

Social control and knowledge in democratic societies

In this article we introduce the notions of knowledge policy and the politics of knowledge. These have to be distinguished from the older, well-known terms of research policy, or science and technology policy. While the latter aim to foster the development of innovations in knowledge and its applications, the former is aware of side effects of new knowledge and tries to address them. While research policy takes the aims of innovations as largely unproblematic (insofar as they help improving national competitiveness), knowledge policy tries to govern (regulate, control, restrict, or even forbid) the production of knowledge.

"Well did you feel jealous?" Control and ideology in police interviews with rape complainants

The methods used by the UK Police to investigate complaints of rape have unsurprisingly come under much scrutiny in recent times, with a 2007 joint report on behalf of HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate and HM Inspectorate of Constabulary concluding that there were many areas where improvements should be made. The research reported here forms part of a larger project which draws on various discourse analytical tools to identify the processes at work during police interviews with women reporting rape. Drawing on a corpus of video recorded police interviews with women reporting rape, this study applies a two pronged analysis to reveal the presence of these ideologies. Firstly, an analysis of the discourse markers ‘well’ and ‘so’ demonstrates the control exerted on the interaction by interviewing officers, as they attach importance to certain facts while omitting much of the information provided by the victim. Secondly, the interpretative repertoires relied upon by officers to ‘make sense’ of victim’s accounts are subject to scrutiny. As well as providing micro-level analyses which demonstrate processes of interactional control at the local level, the findings of these analyses can be shown to relate to a wider context – specifically prevailing ideologies about sexual violence in society as a whole.

Quantifying the pathology of neurodegenerative disorders:Quantitative measurements, sampling strategies and data analysis

The use of quantitative methods has become increasingly important in the study of neurodegenerative disease. Disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) are characterized by the formation of discrete, microscopic, pathological lesions which play an important role in pathological diagnosis. This article reviews the advantages and limitations of the different methods of quantifying the abundance of pathological lesions in histological sections, including estimates of density, frequency, coverage, and the use of semiquantitative scores. The major sampling methods by which these quantitative measures can be obtained from histological sections, including plot or quadrat sampling, transect sampling, and point-quarter sampling, are also described. In addition, the data analysis methods commonly used to analyse quantitative data in neuropathology, including analyses of variance (ANOVA) and principal components analysis (PCA), are discussed. These methods are illustrated with reference to particular problems in the pathological diagnosis of AD and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB).

The role of leader-member exchanges in mediating the relationship between locus of control and work reactions

The relationship between locus of control, the quality of exchanges between subordinates and leaders (LMX), and a variety of work-related reactions (intrinsic/extrinsic job satisfaction, work-related well-being, and organizational commitment) are examined. It was predicted that people with an internal locus of control develop better quality relations with their manager and this, in turn, results in more favourable work-related reactions. Results from two different samples (N=404, and N=51) supported this prediction, and also showed that LMX either fully, or partially, mediated the relationship between locus of control and all the work-related reactions.