The effect of deficits on prices of financial assets : theory and evidence /

"March 1984."

The investigation of present aggregate gradation control practices and the development of short-cut or alternative test methods /

Mode of access: Internet.

Supplemental digest and index of published decisions of the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Labor-Management Relations pursuant to Executive Order 11491, as amended.

Mode of access: Internet.

Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture, 1740-1790 /

Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture, 1740-1790 offers the first study of manuscript-producing coteries as an integral element of eighteenth-century Britain’s literary culture. As a corrective to literary histories assuming that the dominance of print meant the demise of a vital scribal culture, the book profiles four interrelated and influential coteries, focusing on each group’s deployment of traditional scribal practices, on key individuals who served as bridges between networks, and on the aesthetic and cultural work performed by the group. Literary Coteries also explores points of intersection between coteries and the print trade, whether in the form of individuals who straddled the two cultures; publishing events in which the two media regimes collaborated or came into conflict; literary conventions adapted from manuscript practice to serve the ends of print; or simply poetry hand-copied from magazines. Together, these instances demonstrate how scribal modes shaped modern literary production.

Revolving funds and business enterprises of the Government,

On cover: Task force report on revolving funds and business enterprises of the Government, Appendix J. An appendix to a report by the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government with title: Reorganization of Federal business enterprises; a report to the Congress, March 1949.

Principles of Australian public law

In this relatively short book, David Clark sets out to fill what he perceives to be a gap in the presently available writing on Australian public law by achieving two distinct objectives. The first is to remedy 'one of the oddest limitations of current public law writing in Australia' by detailing the history and operation of the state and territory constitutions as well as their philosophical underpinnings. The other is to explore certain areas of federal public law, such as the laws applicable to the constitution and operation of the Commonwealth Parliament and non-judicial bodies such as the Ombudsman, which are often not dealt with in leading constitutional and administrative law texts. It is acknowledged by the author that attempting to cover such a wide range of topics is a 'high-wire act'. Fortunately, apart from one slight stumble, Clark manages to keep his balance and has produced a useful précis of a number of the institutions and concepts that are fundamental to the orderly functioning of Australian society.

Psychotherapy at the point of a pistol

Although specific phobias are among the most prevalent and most treatable of the anxiety disorders, successful treatments for firearm phobias are seldom reported. The assessment and treatment of a phobia specific to firing the 9 mm service pistol is described. The case was identified during a Return to Australia Psychological Screening (RTAPS) evolution, following the operational deployment of a Royal Australian Navy warship. The screening package involved group based psychoeducation and standardised self report scales for detecting trauma experiences and sources of psychological distress. These were followed by semi-structured individual interviews. This process revealed a sailor with a phobia linked to a traumatic experience following an unauthorised discharge of a 9 mm pistol. A behavioural treatment regime was planned and conducted at sea under operational conditions. Live firing constituted the main intervention. The positive results suggest live firing is a safe and effective form of single session exposure, conditional on additional safety precautions to supplement regulated weapons handling procedures. (author abstract)

Experimental expansion tube study of the flow over a toroidal ballute

An experimental investigation of high-enthalpy flow over a toroidal ballute (balloon/parachute) was conducted in an expansion tube facility. The ballute, proposed for use in a number of future aerocapture missions, involves the deployment of a large toroidal-shaped inflatable parachute behind a space vehicle to generate drag on passing through a planetary atmosphere, thus, placing the spacecraft in orbit. A configuration consisting of a spherical spacecraft, followed by a toroid, was tested in a superorbital facility. Measurements at moderate-enthalpy conditions (15-20 MJ/kg) in nitrogen and carbon dioxide showed peak heat transfer rates of around 20 MW/m(2) on the toroid. At higher enthalpies (>50 MJ/kg) in nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and a hydrogen-neon mixture, heat transfer rates above 100 MW/m(2) were observed. Imaging using near-resonant holographic interferometry showed that the flows were steady except when the opening of the toroid was blocked.

Peter Brown's The 'rise of western christendom', second edition: A review essay

Peter Brown, perhaps the world's leading scholar in the field of late antiquity, has produced a substantially revised and expanded edition of one of his major books, drawing on the vast volume of recent work. This essay summarizes its central arguments, especially the significance it attributes to developments away from the Mediterranean and to the seventh century, which together allow the topic to be seen in a compelling new light. It applauds the sustained excellence of Brown's prose, as well as his frame of reference and historical imagination. Some questions are raised concerning his deployment of sources, the importance given to the north, the ability to make decisions that people are credited with, and the coming of Islam. That a scholar of Brown's eminence is able to relish and appropriate effectively work that appeared subsequent to the first edition of this book is a tribute to his stature.

Specification and validation of process constraints for flexible workflows

Workflow systems have traditionally focused on the so-called production processes which are characterized by pre-definition, high volume, and repetitiveness. Recently, the deployment of workflow systems in non-traditional domains such as collaborative applications, e-learning and cross-organizational process integration, have put forth new requirements for flexible and dynamic specification. However, this flexibility cannot be offered at the expense of control, a critical requirement of business processes. In this paper, we will present a foundation set of constraints for flexible workflow specification. These constraints are intended to provide an appropriate balance between flexibility and control. The constraint specification framework is based on the concept of pockets of flexibility which allows ad hoc changes and/or building of workflows for highly flexible processes. Basically, our approach is to provide the ability to execute on the basis of a partially specified model, where the full specification of the model is made at runtime, and may be unique to each instance. The verification of dynamically built models is essential. Where as ensuring that the model conforms to specified constraints does not pose great difficulty, ensuring that the constraint set itself does not carry conflicts and redundancy is an interesting and challenging problem. In this paper, we will provide a discussion on both the static and dynamic verification aspects. We will also briefly present Chameleon, a prototype workflow engine that implements these concepts. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Health system reform in Mexico 5: Assessing the effect of the 2001-06 Mexican health reform: an interim report card

Since 2001, Mexico has been designing, legislating, and implementing a major health-system reform. A key component was the creation of Seguro Popular, which is intended to expand insurance coverage over 7 years to uninsured people, nearly half the total population at the start of 2001. The reform included five actions: legislation of entitlement per family affiliated which, with full implementation, will increase public spending on health by 0.8-1.0% of gross domestic product; creation of explicit benefits packages; allocation of monies to decentralised state ministries of health in proportion to number of families affiliated; division of federal resources flowing to states into separate funds for personal and non-personal health services; and creation of a fund to protect families against catastrophic health expenditures. Using the WHO health-systems framework, we used a wide range of datasets to assess the effect of this reform on different dimensions of the health system. Key findings include: affiliation is preferentially reaching the poor and the marginalised communities; federal non-social security expenditure in real per-head terms increased by 38% from 2000 to 2005; equity of public-health expenditure across states improved; Seguro Popular affiliates used more inpatient and outpatient services than uninsured people; effective coverage of 11 interventions has improved between 2000 and 2005-06; inequalities in effective coverage across states and wealth deciles has decreased over this period; catastrophic expenditures for Seguro Popular affiliates are lower than for uninsured people even though use of services has increased. We present some lessons for Mexico based on this interim evaluation and explore implications for other countries considering health reforms.

A participatory design agenda for ubiquitous computing and multimodal interaction: A case study of dental practice

This paper reflects upon our attempts to bring a participatory design approach to design research into interfaces that better support dental practice. The project brought together design researchers, general and specialist dental practitioners, the CEO of a dental software company and, to a limited extent, dental patients. We explored the potential for deployment of speech and gesture technologies in the challenging and authentic context of dental practices. The paper describes the various motivations behind the project, the negotiation of access and the development of the participant relationships as seen from the researchers' perspectives. Conducting participatory design sessions with busy professionals demands preparation, improvisation, and clarity of purpose. The paper describes how we identified what went well and when to shift tactics. The contribution of the paper is in its description of what we learned in bringing participatory design principles to a project that spanned technical research interests, commercial objectives and placing demands upon the time of skilled professionals. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc

Sharpening the edge of market driven intangibles and innovations

A review of the extant literature concludes that market-driven intangibles and innovations are increasingly considered to be the most critical firm-specific resources, but also finds a lack of elaboration of which types of these resources are most important. In this paper, we incorporate these observations into a conceptual model and link it to highly developed institutional settings for the model evaluation. From the point of view of firm revenue management, we can anticipate that performance advantages created through deployment of intellectual and relational capital in marketing and innovation are more likely to be superior. In essence, they constitute the integration of organisational intangibles both in cognitive and behavioural level to create an idiosyncratic combination for each firm. Our research findings show feasible paths for sharpening the edge of market-driven intangibles and innovations. We discuss the key results for research and practice.

The 'voice' approach of trade associations:support for SMEs accessing a research institute

Access to external sources of technical knowledge is one of the keys to staying innovative for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The literature suggests that SMEs with a weak internal R&D capacity do not make much use of institutional sources like research institutes and universities. In this paper I investigate how trade associations can induce member SMEs to use a research institute. The case of a public research institute and SMEs in the textile industry in Kyoto, Japan is examined. Evidence from the case suggests that trade associations facilitate the use of the institute by expressing a collective `voice' to the management of the institute. The effect is evident among active members in the use of services involving a large information gap as to their benefits. I also consider a shortcoming of the collective approach and suggest some measures to be taken on the part of research institutes.

The role of prior exposure on the capture of attention by items in working memory

The Biased Competition Model (BCM) suggests both top-down and bottom-up biases operate on selective attention (e.g., Desimone & Duncan, 1995). It has been suggested that top-down control signals may arise from working memory. In support, Downing (2000) found faster responses to probes presented in the location of stimuli held vs. not held in working memory. Soto, Heinke, Humphreys, and Blanco (2005) showed the involuntary nature of this effect and that shared features between stimuli were sufficient to attract attention. Here we show that stimuli held in working memory had an influence on the deployment of attentional resources even when: (1) It was detrimental to the task, (2) there was equal prior exposure, and (3) there was no bottom-up priming. These results provide further support for involuntary top-down guidance of attention from working memory and the basic tenets of the BCM, but further discredit the notion that bottom-up priming is necessary for the effect to occur.