Directing under disqualification:leave to act

Reviews the procedures by which a disqualified director can continue to act. Views this siutation through two recent cases. Highlights that courts should not fetter the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986, s 17 discretion and reject the approach of earlier cases that in order for leave to be granted, a need on the part of the director or company was a prerequisite.

The future of engineering - Do primary school engineering education interventions leave a lasting impression?

This positional paper proposes a conceptual framework and methodological approach for use in a PhD study investigating the longer term educational and social impact of 'active' engineering focused interventions for children age 8-10 in the UK. The study will critically analyse how a child's participation in an engineering education activity contributes to the Engineering Capital that the child possesses; focusing on how the child's awareness and perceptions about engineering are affected. To achieve this aim it is proposed that Grounded Theory methodology be used to enable an in-depth analysis of participation from the perspective of the child participant. The study proposed will be longitudinal, taking place over three formative years for the education and career aspirations of the child, from age 8-10 to 11-13. Although the research is in its infancy, this paper will provide the opportunity to develop theory in an underdeveloped area of engineering education research.

Gimme' A Break: Offering Sabbaticals as an Optional Leave Benefit in the Lodging Industry

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to investigate the extended leave programs offered by lodging companies in the United States and to suggest a model that could be used in the lodging industry. This model mirrors successful sabbatical leave programs offered by leading companies featured in the annual report, 100 Best Companies to Work For (from this point forward, referred to as 100 Best), published on-line by Fortune Magazine, 2013 (CNN, 2013). While extended leave programs are not entirely lacking in the industry, our research discovered that such leave systems are rare. According to the companies investigated that offer a sabbatical leave program, this benefit offers highly sought after time away from work for top performing employees at the management and higher levels. The benefits reported include happier employees who have increased feelings of company loyalty, job satisfaction, and overall better attitudes. The sponsoring companies stated that those who take part in such leave contribute at a higher level upon their return, bringing fresh ideas and a renewed commitment to the company’s success.

Pro-life Dr. Mildred Jefferson asked to leave conference hall [at International Women's Year conference]

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Leave it to the Amateurs: A Career Development Explanation of Political Inexperience among Members of the Canadian Parliament:MA Thesis

In many advanced democracies, political scientists have lamented the rise of professional politicians as a challenge to the effective representation of diverse electorates. In contrast, their relative absence from Canadian federal politics gives rise to concerns over high levels of political amateurism among Canadian MPs. This study, thus, seeks to account for the numerical weakness of individuals with an occupational background in politics in the Canadian Parliament. It utilizes both individual-level quantitative data on MPs serving between the 35th and 41st Parliaments, inclusive, as well as material from qualitative interviews with over seventy former MPs. Conceptualizing the field of politics as a career in itself, and drawing on career development theory, the study finds that at the key stages of establishing, maintaining, and disengaging from a federal political career, there are specific challenges that are not significantly ameliorated by the possession of professional experience in politics itself. Professional politicians, therefore, have no major advantage over those with non-political occupational backgrounds in their career development. Furthermore, by acknowledging the existence of different types of professional politician, it finds that those whose primary occupational background was in politics itself to be in a distinct minority, but the extent of political amateurism is challenged by a much larger minority of MPs whose primary occupation was non-political but who still possess some secondary or electoral experience prior to entering Parliament.

Informal caregiving and mental ill health – differential relationships by workload, gender, age and area-remoteness in a UK region

Informal caregiving can be a demanding role which has been shown to impact on physical, psychological and social wellbeing. Methodological weaknesses including small sample sizes and subjective measures of mental health have led to inconclusive evidence about the relationship between informal caregiving and mental health. This paper reports on a study carried out in a UK region which investigated the relationship between informal caregiving and mental ill health. The analysis was conducted by linking three datasets, the Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study, the Northern Ireland Enhanced Prescribing Database and the Proximity to Service Index from the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. Our analysis used both a subjective measure of mental ill health, i.e. a question asked in the 2011 Census, and an objective measure, whether the respondents had been prescribed antidepressants by a General Practitioner between 2010 and 2012. We applied binary logistic multilevel modelling to these two responses to test whether, and for what sub-groups of the population, informal caregiving was related to mental ill health. The results showed that informal caregiving per se was not related to mental ill health although there was a strong relationship between the intensity of the caregiving role and mental ill health. Females under 50, who provided over 19 hours of care, were not employed or worked part-time and who provided care in both 2001 and 2011 were at a statistically significantly elevated risk of mental ill health. Caregivers in remote areas with limited access to shops and services were also at a significantly increased risk as evidenced by prescription rates for antidepressants. With community care policies aimed at supporting people to remain at home, the paper highlights the need for further research in order to target resources appropriately.

The EU Referendum and the UK Environment: An Expert Review:How has EU membership affected the UK and what might change in the event of a vote to Remain or Leave

This expert review provides a detailed review of the academic evidence on how EU membership has influenced UK policies, systems of decision making and environmental quality. Containing 14 chapters and over 60,000 words, it documents how the EU has affected UK environmental policy and how, in turn, the UK has worked through the EU to shape wider, international thinking. It has been authored by 14 international experts, who have drawn on the findings of over 700 publications to offer an impartial and authoritative assessment of the evidence.

Leave a light on – Terracotta lamps from Agia Paraskevi of Arachamitai, from the Classical period until Roman times

This thesis deals with terracotta lamps found at the archaeological site of Agia Paraskevi of Arachamitai during the years 2010–2014. The research questions are: What kind of lamps were used on the site and when? For what purposes were the lamps used? Where were they manufactured? In order to address these questions, a total of fifty lamps have been chosen to form the body of research material. To answer the first research question, a typology for these lamps has been created with twenty-one types and one variant, after examining various lamp typologies and previous publications. The find contexts and distribution of the lamps are both examined to test the dates for the different lamp types gathered from other publications, and to answer the question on what purposes the lamps were used on the site. Visual observation of the clay of the lamps and information on clay materials from other sites are both examined to determine the lamps' origins. The lamps in this study date from the 5th century BC to the 2nd century AD. The find contexts allow the dating of the lamps according to the other publications, but suggestions of more site-specific dates are given to some lamps. The distribution of the lamps indicates that while most were used for everyday lighting at the sanctuary, some may have had ritual connections. Most of the lamps were manufactured locally or at a nearby Arcadian site. Few lamps can be regarded as imports.

Dynamic Workload Parallelization and System Calibration on Single-Chip Cloud Computer

Many-core systems are emerging from the need of more computational power and power efficiency. However there are many issues which still revolve around the many-core systems. These systems need specialized software before they can be fully utilized and the hardware itself may differ from the conventional computational systems. To gain efficiency from many-core system, programs need to be parallelized. In many-core systems the cores are small and less powerful than cores used in traditional computing, so running a conventional program is not an efficient option. Also in Network-on-Chip based processors the network might get congested and the cores might work at different speeds. In this thesis is, a dynamic load balancing method is proposed and tested on Intel 48-core Single-Chip Cloud Computer by parallelizing a fault simulator. The maximum speedup is difficult to obtain due to severe bottlenecks in the system. In order to exploit all the available parallelism of the Single-Chip Cloud Computer, a runtime approach capable of dynamically balancing the load during the fault simulation process is used. The proposed dynamic fault simulation approach on the Single-Chip Cloud Computer shows up to 45X speedup compared to a serial fault simulation approach. Many-core systems can draw enormous amounts of power, and if this power is not controlled properly, the system might get damaged. One way to manage power is to set power budget for the system. But if this power is drawn by just few cores of the many, these few cores get extremely hot and might get damaged. Due to increase in power density multiple thermal sensors are deployed on the chip area to provide realtime temperature feedback for thermal management techniques. Thermal sensor accuracy is extremely prone to intra-die process variation and aging phenomena. These factors lead to a situation where thermal sensor values drift from the nominal values. This necessitates efficient calibration techniques to be applied before the sensor values are used. In addition, in modern many-core systems cores have support for dynamic voltage and frequency scaling. Thermal sensors located on cores are sensitive to the core's current voltage level, meaning that dedicated calibration is needed for each voltage level. In this thesis a general-purpose software-based auto-calibration approach is also proposed for thermal sensors to calibrate thermal sensors on different range of voltages.

Aging and semantic integration in sentence processing: Testing the cognitive workload of wrap-up

The current study investigated the cognitive workload of sentence and clause wrap-up in younger and older readers. A large number of studies have demonstrated the presence of wrap-up effects, peaks in processing time at clause and sentence boundaries that some argue reflect attention to organizational and integrative semantic processes. However, the exact nature of these wrap-up effects is still not entirely clear, with some arguing that wrap-up is not related to processing difficulty, but rather is triggered by a low-level oculomotor response or the implicit monitoring of intonational contour. The notion that wrap-up effects are resource-demanding was directly tested by examining the degree to which sentence and clause wrap-up affects the parafoveal preview benefit. Older and younger adults read passages in which a target word N occurred in a sentence-internal, clause-final, or sentence-final position. A gaze-contingent boundary change paradigm was used in which, on some trials, a non-word preview of word N+1 was replaced by a target word once the eyes crossed an invisible boundary located between words N and N+1. All measures of reading time on word N were longer at clause and sentence boundaries than in the sentence-internal position. In the earliest measures of reading time, sentence and clause wrap-up showed evidence of reducing the magnitude of the preview benefit similarly for younger and older adults. However, this effect was moderated by age in gaze duration, such that older adults showed a complete reduction in the preview benefit in the sentence-final condition. Additionally, sentence and clause wrap-up were negatively associated with the preview benefit. Collectively, the findings from the current study suggest that wrap-up is cognitively demanding and may be less efficient with age, thus, resulting in a reduction of the parafoveal preview during normal reading.

Too Busy to Be Fair? The Effect of Managers’ Perceived Workload on Their Core Technical Performance and Justice Rule Adherence

Despite the organizational benefits of treating employees fairly, both anecdotal and empirical evidence suggest that managers do not behave fairly towards their employees in a consistent manner. As treating employees fairly takes up personal resources such as time, effort, and attention, I argue that when managers face high workloads (i.e., high amounts of work and time pressure), they are unable to devote such personal resources to effectively meet both core technical task requirements and treat employees fairly. I propose that in general, managers tend to view their core technical task performance as more important than being fair in their dealings with employees; as a result, when faced with high workloads, they tend to prioritize the former at the expense of the latter. I also propose that managerial fairness will suffer more as a result of heightened workloads than will core technical task performance, unless managers perceive their organization to explicitly reward fair treatment of employees. I find support for my hypotheses across three studies: two experimental studies (with online participants and students respectively) and one field study of managers from a variety of organizations. I discuss the implications of studying fairness in the wider context of managers’ complex role in organizations to the fairness and managerial work demands literatures.

How to Efficiently Control the Title and Registration Mail-in Workload Backlog Processing

The Titles and Registration Mail-In Unit of the Department of Motor Vehicles only processes title and registration work that has been mailed in. During the time periods of May through June and November through January, the mail workload backlog becomes overbearing. This research will attempt to find out the cause of this increase backlog during those periods, determine what procedures or steps are currently in place and unnecessarily creating needless work that has a direct correlation with the backlog and deploy a recommendation that will totally eliminate peak time backlog work loads.

Look, learn, leave

When you see a wild animal or an animal you don’t know look at them from a safe distance. Don’t get too close. Learn about them. Leave them alone. Remind your mom or dad to take your pets to the vet to get their rabies shots.