The ripple effect

The images from The Ripple Effect appear like they are advertising images but have a deeper social message. They are deliberately confronting, humorous, and thought provoking to create debate on true-life experiences of hospital treatments, recovery and support available in our community. The works in this exhibition carry the hopes and aspirations of a community that is bonded together by its collective experiences, and shares a vision of the resources needed for a productive and healthy recovery.

"Ripple Effects" and Forecasting Home Prices in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix

We examine the time-series relationship between housing prices in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix. First, temporal Granger causality tests reveal that Los Angeles housing prices cause housing prices in Las Vegas (directly) and Phoenix (indirectly). In addition, Las Vegas housing prices cause housing prices in Phoenix. Los Angeles housing prices prove exogenous in a temporal sense and Phoenix housing prices do not cause prices in the other two markets. Second, we calculate out-of-sample forecasts in each market, using various vector autoregessive (VAR) and vector error-correction (VEC) models, as well as Bayesian, spatial, and causality versions of these models with various priors. Different specifications provide superior forecasts in the different cities. Finally, we consider the ability of theses time-series models to provide accurate out-of-sample predictions of turning points in housing prices that occurred in 2006:Q4. Recursive forecasts, where the sample is updated each quarter, provide reasonably good forecasts of turning points.

Social network market : storytelling on a Web 2.0 original literature site

This article looks at a Chinese Web 2.0 original literature site, Qidian, in order to show the coevolution of market and non-market initiatives. The analytic framework of social network markets (Potts et al., 2008) is employed to analyse the motivations of publishing original literature works online and to understand the support mechanisms of the site, which encourage readers’ willingness to pay for user-generated content. The co-existence of socio-cultural and commercial economies and their impact on the successful business model of the site are illustrated in this case. This article extends the concept of social network markets by proposing the existence of a ripple effect of social network markets through convergence between PC and mobile internet, traditional and internet publishing, and between publishing and other cultural industries. It also examines the side effects of social network markets, and the role of market and non-market strategies in addressing the issues.

The quality of diabetes care in the community: practice, policy and culture

Aim: Diabetes is an important barometer of health system performance. This chronic condition is a source of significant morbidity, premature mortality and a major contributor to health care costs. There is an increasing focus internationally, and more recently nationally, on system, practice and professional-level initiatives to promote the quality of care. The aim of this thesis was to investigate the ‘quality chasm’ around the organisation and delivery of diabetes care in general practice, to explore GPs’ attitudes to engaging in quality improvement activities and to examine efforts to improve the quality of diabetes care in Ireland from practice to policy. Methods: Quantitative and qualitative methods were used. As part of a mixed methods sequential design, a postal survey of 600 GPs was conducted to assess the organization of care. This was followed by an in-depth qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 31 GPs from urban and rural areas. The qualitative methodology was also used to examine GPs’ attitudes to engaging in quality improvement. Data were analysed using a Framework approach. A 2nd observation study was used to assess the quality of care in 63 practices with a special interest in diabetes. Data on 3010 adults with Type 2 diabetes from 3 primary care initiatives were analysed and the results were benchmarked against national guidelines and standards of care in the UK. The final study was an instrumental case study of policy formulation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 members of the Expert Advisory Group (EAG) for Diabetes. Thematic analysis was applied to the data using 3 theories of the policy process as analytical tools. Results: The survey response rate was 44% (n=262). Results suggested care delivery was largely unstructured; 45% of GPs had a diabetes register (n=157), 53% reported using guidelines (n=140), 30% had formal call recall system (n=78) and 24% had none of these organizational features (n=62). Only 10% of GPs had a formal shared protocol with the local hospital specialist diabetes team (n=26). The lack of coordination between settings was identified as a major barrier to providing optimal care leading to waiting times, overburdened hospitals and avoidable duplication. The lack of remuneration for chronic disease management had a ripple effect also creating costs for patients and apathy among GPs. There was also a sense of inertia around quality improvement activities particularly at a national level. This attitude was strongly influenced by previous experiences of change in the health system. In contrast GP’s spoke positively about change at a local level which was facilitated by a practice ethos, leadership and special interest in diabetes. The 2nd quantitative study found that practices with a special interest in diabetes achieved a standard of care comparable to the UK in terms of the recording of clinical processes of care and the achievement of clinical targets; 35% of patients reached the HbA1c target of <6.5% compared to 26% in England and Wales. With regard to diabetes policy formulation, the evolving process of action and inaction was best described by the Multiple Streams Theory. Within the EAG, the formulation of recommendations was facilitated by overarching agreement on the “obvious” priorities while the details of proposals were influenced by personal preferences and local capacity. In contrast the national decision-making process was protracted and ambiguous. The lack of impetus from senior management coupled with the lack of power conferred on the EAG impeded progress. Conclusions: The findings highlight the inconsistency of diabetes care in Ireland. The main barriers to optimal diabetes management center on the organization and coordination of care at the systems level with consequences for practice, providers and patients. Quality improvement initiatives need to stimulate a sense of ownership and interest among frontline service providers to address the local sense of inertia to national change. To date quality improvement in diabetes care has been largely dependent the “special interest” of professionals. The challenge for the Irish health system is to embed this activity as part of routine practice, professional responsibility and the underlying health care culture.

Regulating the Ocean: Piracy and Protection along the East African Coast

From 2008-2012, a dramatic upsurge in incidents of maritime piracy in the Western Indian Ocean led to renewed global attention to this region: including the deployment of multi national naval patrols, attempts to prosecute suspected pirates, and the development of financial interdiction systems to track and stop the flow of piracy ransoms. Largely seen as the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land, piracy has been slotted into narratives of state failure and problems of governance and criminality in this region.

This view fails to account for a number of factors that were crucial in making possible the unprecedented rise of Somali piracy and its contemporary transformation. Instead of an emphasis on failed states and crises of governance, my dissertation approaches maritime piracy within a historical and regional configuration of actors and relationships that precede this round of piracy and will outlive it. The story I tell in this work begins before the contemporary upsurge of piracy and closes with a foretaste of the itineraries beyond piracy that are being crafted along the East African coast.

Beginning in the world of port cities in the long nineteenth century, my dissertation locates piracy and the relationship between trade, plunder, and state formation within worlds of exchange, including European incursions into this oceanic space. Scholars of long distance trade have emphasized the sociality engendered through commerce and the centrality of idioms of trust and kinship in structuring mercantile relationships across oceanic divides. To complement this scholarship, my work brings into view the idiom of protection: as a claim to surety, a form of tax, and a moral claim to authority in trans-regional commerce.

To build this theory of protection, my work combines archival sources with a sustained ethnographic engagement in coastal East Africa, including the pirate ports of Northern Somalia, and focuses on the interaction between land-based pastoral economies and maritime trade. This connection between land and sea calls attention to two distinct visions of the ocean: one built around trade and mobility and the other built on the ocean as a space of extraction and sovereignty. Moving between historical encounters over trade and piracy and the development of a national maritime economy during the height of the Somali state, I link the contemporary upsurge of maritime piracy to the confluence of these two conceptualizations of the ocean and the ideas of capture, exchange, and redistribution embedded within them.

The second section of my dissertation reframes piracy as an economy of protection and a form of labor implicated within other legal and illegal economies in the Indian Ocean. Based on extensive field research, including interviews with self-identified pirates, I emphasize the forms of labor, value, and risk that characterize piracy as an economy of protection. The final section of my dissertation focuses on the diverse international, regional, and local responses to maritime piracy. This section locates the response to piracy within a post-Cold War and post-9/11 global order and longer attempts to regulate and assuage the risks of maritime trade. Through an ethnographic focus on maritime insurance markets, navies, and private security contractors, I analyze the centrality of protection as a calculation of risk and profit in the contemporary economy of counter-piracy.

Through this focus on longer histories of trade, empire, and regulation my dissertation reframes maritime piracy as an economy of protection straddling boundaries of land and sea, legality and illegality, law and economy, and history and anthropology.

Les impacts des stratégies patronales antisyndicales sur l’organisation des travailleurs

L’utilisation de stratégies antisyndicales est un phénomène de plus en plus préconisé par l’acteur patronal (Bronfenbrenner, 2009b). Une piste d’explication de cette croissance serait liée à l’idéologie de gestion se basant sur une amertume inhérente à l’idée de partager le pouvoir avec une tierce partie représentant des travailleurs (Dundon et al., 2006). Dans le but de faire régner cette idéologie et de conserver un environnement de travail sans présence syndicale, des multinationales se sont même positionnées ouvertement contre la syndicalisation, que l’on pense à Wal-Mart, Mc Donald’s ou Disney (Dundon et al., 2006). Avec cette puissance que les multinationales détiennent actuellement, il ne fait nul doute qu’elles exercent une influence auprès des dirigeants des plus petites entreprises (Dundon et al., 2006), ce qui pourrait expliquer ce recours accru aux stratégies antisyndicales, que ce soit avant ou après l’accréditation syndicale. Mais qu’en est-il de l’antisyndicalisme de l’acteur patronal en sol canadien? Pour certains, les employeurs canadiens pratiqueraient davantage une stratégie d’acceptation du syndicalisme comparativement à nos voisins du sud à cause notamment de la plus forte présence syndicale historique dans le système des relations industrielles canadien, des tactiques syndicales canadiennes différentes (Thomason & Pozzebon, 1998) et des lois encadrant davantage les droits d’association et de négociation collective (Boivin, 2010; Thomason & Pozzebon, 1998). Des travaux montrent cependant une réelle volonté de la part des employeurs canadiens à avoir recours à des stratégies d’opposition à la syndicalisation (Bentham, 2002; Martinello & Yates, 2002; Riddell, 2001). Selon les auteurs Martinello et Yates (2002), six pour cent (6 %) des employeurs ontariens couverts dans le cadre de leur étude n’auraient adopté aucune tactique pour éviter ou éliminer le syndicat : quatre-vingt-quatorze pour cent (94 %) des employeurs couverts ont ainsi utilisé différentes tactiques pour s’opposer au syndicalisme. C’est donc dire que l’opposition patronale face au mouvement syndical révélée par l’utilisation de diverses stratégies antisyndicales est aussi présente chez les employeurs canadiens. Peu d’études canadiennes et québécoises ont pourtant enrichi la littérature au sujet de ce phénomène. De manière générale, les travaux effectués sur la question, anglo-saxons et surtout américains, font principalement état du type de stratégies ainsi que de leur fréquence d’utilisation et proposent souvent une méthodologie basée sur une recension des décisions des tribunaux compétents en la matière ou l’enquête par questionnaire. Face à ces constats, nous avons visé à contribuer à la littérature portant sur les stratégies antisyndicales et nous avons construit un modèle d’analyse nous permettant de mieux cerner leurs effets sur les travailleurs et les syndicats. Notre recherche se démarque également de la littérature de par les démarches méthodologiques qu’elle propose. Nous avons en effet réalisé une recherche de nature qualitative, plus spécifiquement une étude de cas d’une entreprise multiétablissement du secteur du commerce au détail. Notre modèle d’analyse nous permet de dégager des constats quant aux effets de l’utilisation des stratégies patronales antisyndicales auprès des travailleurs visés et du syndicat visé, que ce soit sur les intérêts individuels, les intérêts collectifs ainsi que sur les intérêts du syndicat tels que proposés par Slinn (2008b). Également, nous cherchions à comprendre dans quelle mesure les stratégies antisyndicales contribuent à diminuer (effet paralysant) ou à augmenter (effet rebond) la propension à la syndicalisation des travailleurs visés par les stratégies, tout en tenant compte de la propension des travailleurs d’autres succursales qui n’étaient pas visés directement par cette utilisation (effet d’entraînement). Pour atteindre nos objectifs de recherche, nous avons procédé en trois phases. La phase 1 a permis de faire la recension de la littérature et de formuler des propositions théoriques à vérifier sur le terrain. La phase 2 a permis de procéder à la collecte de données grâce aux entrevues semi-dirigées réalisées à deux niveaux d’analyse : auprès de représentants syndicaux et de travailleurs. Au cours de la phase 3, nous avons procédé à la retranscription des entrevues effectuées et nous avons analysé les principaux résultats obtenus. La méthode de l’appariement logique (Yin, 2009) a été utilisée pour comparer les phénomènes observés (données issues du terrain) aux phénomènes prédits (constats de la littérature et propositions théoriques). À la suite de la réalisation de la phase 3, nous constatons que la campagne de peur a été celle qui a été la plus utilisée en réaction à la menace de présence syndicale avec les tactiques dites coercitives qui la composent : la fermeture de deux succursales, un discours devant un auditoire captif, la diffusion d’une vidéo interne, etc. De ce fait, un sentiment de peur généralisé (86 % des répondants) s’attaquant aux intérêts collectifs a été perçu à la suite de l’utilisation des tactiques antisyndicales. Par conséquent, nous avons pu observer l’effet de ces tactiques sur les travailleurs visés et sur le syndicat : elles auraient en effet gelé la propension de travailleurs d’autres succursales à se syndiquer (64 % des répondants) et donc freiné la campagne syndicale en cours. Nous constatons également que bon nombre de tactiques ont été déployées à la suite de l’accréditation syndicale en s’attaquant aux intérêts individuels. Mentionnons, pour n’en citer que quelques-uns, que les travailleurs feraient face à une plus forte discipline (72 % des répondants), qu’ils seraient victimes d’intimidation ou de menaces (80 % des répondants) et que ces tactiques provoquèrent des démissions à cause de l’ambiance de travail alourdie (50 % des répondants).

Spatial housing economics: a survey

This introduction to the Virtual Special Issue surveys the development of spatial housing economics from its roots in neo-classical theory, through more recent developments in social interactions modelling, and touching on the role of institutions, path dependence and economic history. The survey also points to some of the more promising future directions for the subject that are beginning to appear in the literature. The survey covers elements hedonic models, spatial econometrics, neighbourhood models, housing market areas, housing supply, models of segregation, migration, housing tenure, sub-national house price modelling including the so-called ripple effect, and agent-based models. Possible future directions are set in the context of a selection of recent papers that have appeared in Urban Studies. Nevertheless, there are still important gaps in the literature that merit further attention, arising at least partly from emerging policy problems. These include more research on housing and biodiversity, the relationship between housing and civil unrest, the effects of changing age distributions - notably housing for the elderly - and the impact of different international institutional structures. Methodologically, developments in Big Data provide an exciting framework for future work.

A simple method for the fabrication of intrinsically apodized chirped fibre Bragg gratings

A new and simple fabrication technique is reported for the UV inscription of intrinsically apodized chirped fibre gratings at an arbitrary Bragg wavelength employing a single chirped phase-mask in a scanning Talbot interferometer set-up. Chirped gratings have been successfully produced over a large wavelength range and with bandwidths up to 5 nm. These gratings exhibit the time-delay response of a small ripple effect. In the present paper a comparison with previously reported fabrication methods is given, showing the advantages and disadvantages of the different methods.

The effect of the group delay ripple of chirped fiber grating on composite second-order in optical fiber CATV system

The effect of group delay ripple of chirped fiber gratings on composite second-order (CSO) performance in optical fiber CATV system is investigated. We analyze the system CSO performances for different ripple amplitudes, periods and residual dispersion amounts in detail. It is found that the large ripple amplitude and small ripple period will deteriorate the system CSO performance seriously. Additionally, the residual dispersion amount has considerable effect on CSO performance in the case of small ripple amplitude and large ripple period. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Negative differential resistance and effect of defects and deformations in MoS2 armchair nanoribbon metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistor

In this work, we present a study on the negative differential resistance (NDR) behavior and the impact of various deformations (like ripple, twist, wrap) and defects like vacancies and edge roughness on the electronic properties of short-channel MoS2 armchair nanoribbon MOSFETs. The effect of deformation (3 degrees-7 degrees twist or wrap and 0.3-0.7 angstrom ripple amplitude) and defects on a 10 nm MoS2 ANR FET is evaluated by the density functional tight binding theory and the non-equilibrium Green's function approach. We study the channel density of states, transmission spectra, and the I-D-V-D characteristics of such devices under the varying conditions, with focus on the NDR behavior. Our results show significant change in the NDR peak to valley ratio and the NDR window with such minor intrinsic deformations, especially with the ripple. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.

Force ripple compensation in a tubular linear generator for marine renewable generation

Tubular permanent magnet linear generators are a promising generator technology for use in marine renewables. One aspect of their design relates to the conditions necessary for achieving a smooth thrust response from the generator, free from cogging and periodic variations due to spatial harmonics of the flux cutting the generator coils. This paper presents an experimental and finite element study of the sources of thrust ripple in a prototype linear generator for marine generation. A simple self-commutated control scheme is shown, which uses linear Hall-effect sensors and look-up-table based feed-forward compensation to derive the excitation currents required to drive the machine with constant force. Details of the controller's FPGA based implementation are given, including its strategy for detecting sensor failure. © 2011 IEEE.

The Effect of Transmission Design on Force-Controlled Manipulator Performance

Previous research in force control has focused on the choice of appropriate servo implementation without corresponding regard to the choice of mechanical hardware. This report analyzes the effect of mechanical properties such as contact compliance, actuator-to-joint compliance, torque ripple, and highly nonlinear dry friction in the transmission mechanisms of a manipulator. A set of requisites for high performance then guides the development of mechanical-design and servo strategies for improved performance. A single-degree-of-freedom transmission testbed was constructed that confirms the predicted effect of Coulomb friction on robustness; design and construction of a cable-driven, four-degree-of- freedom, "whole-arm" manipulator illustrates the recommended design strategies.

The Effect of Package Geometry on Moisture Driven Degradation of Polymer Aluminum Capacitors

Polymer aluminum electrolytic capacitors were introduced to provide an alternative to liquid electrolytic capacitors. Polymer electrolytic capacitor electric parameters of capacitance and ESR are less temperature dependent than those of liquid aluminum electrolytic capacitors. Furthermore, the electrical conductivity of the polymer used in these capacitors (poly-3,4ethylenedioxithiophene) is orders of magnitude higher than the electrolytes used in liquid aluminum electrolytic capacitors, resulting in capacitors with much lower equivalent series resistance which are suitable for use in high ripple-current applications. The presence of the moisture-sensitive polymer PEDOT introduces concerns on the reliability of polymer aluminum capacitors in high humidity conditions. Highly accelerated stress testing (or HAST) (110ºC, 85% relative humidity) of polymer aluminum capacitors in which the parts were subjected to unbiased HAST conditions for 700 hours was done to understand the design factors that contribute to the susceptibility to degradation of a polymer aluminum electrolytic capacitor exposed to HAST conditions. A large scale study involving capacitors of different electrical ratings (2.5V – 16V, 100µF – 470 µF), mounting types (surface-mount and through-hole) and manufacturers (6 different manufacturers) was done to determine a relationship between package geometry and reliability in high temperature-humidity conditions. A Geometry-Based HAST test in which the part selection limited variations between capacitor samples to geometric differences only was done to analyze the effect of package geometry on humidity-driven degradation more closely. Raman spectroscopy, x-ray imaging, environmental scanning electron microscopy, and destructive analysis of the capacitors after HAST exposure was done to determine the failure mechanisms of polymer aluminum capacitors under high temperature-humidity conditions.