Growing without Pains? Explaining Liberal Democrat MPs' Behaviour

Author(s):  
Matt Cole

Recent academic studies and wider commentary on the behaviour of Liberal Democrat MPs have recognised their relatively high level of cohesiveness on whipped votes when compared to that of Labour and the Conservatives, and to the Liberal Democrats' own reputation; but while this trend continues, few studies have focused upon its causes. This article uses the MPs' voting records, personal papers, interviews and wider contextual data to chart the extent of that unity over time, and to explore its origins, including group composition, structure, patronage, relations with the extra-parliamentary party and other parties as well as national party image. It finds the key to this unity in a combination of medium and long-term features of the Liberal and Liberal Democrat group of MPs, rather than a short-term singular determinant.

Author(s):  
Halil Kaya ◽  
Gaurango Banerjee

The paper examines the Sarbanes-Oxley (2002) Acts immediate impact on board composition and characteristics as well as possible reversals in its impact over time. Effects on directors age and tenure are analyzed over the 2001-06 sample period. Female participation in corporate boards is also studied in the pre-SOX and post-SOX periods. The dual roles of directors in being a member of the board as well as serving as either CEO, CFO, Chairman, Co-Chair, Founder, or Lead Director of their respective companies is also examined. We observe a short-term impact of SOX on board compositions due to changes seen in board characteristics between 2001 (pre-SOX), and 2003-05 short-term period (post-SOX). Also, we observe a reversal of board characteristics in 2006 to pre-SOX levels implying that the effects of SOX on board composition were short-lived, and needs to be monitored over time to ensure adherence to corporate accountability guidelines over the long-term.


2021 ◽  
pp. 089020702110173
Author(s):  
Nadin Beckmann ◽  
Damian P Birney ◽  
Amirali Minbashian ◽  
Jens F Beckmann

The study aimed to investigate the status of within-person state variability in neuroticism and conscientiousness as individual differences constructs by exploring their (a) temporal stability, (b) cross-context consistency, (c) empirical links to selected antecedents, and (d) empirical links to longer term trait variability. Employing a sample of professionals ( N = 346) from Australian organisations, personality state data together with situation appraisals were collected using experience sampling methodology in field and repeatedly in lab-like settings. Data on personality traits, cognitive ability, and motivational mindsets were collected at baseline and after two years. Contingent (situation contingencies) and non-contingent (relative SD) state variability indices were relatively stable over time and across contexts. Only a small number of predictive effects of state variability were observed, and these differed across contexts. Cognitive ability appeared to be associated with state variability under lab-like conditions. There was limited evidence of links between short-term state and long-term trait variability, except for a small effect for neuroticism. Some evidence of positive manifold was found for non-contingent variability. Systematic efforts are required to further elucidate the complex pattern of results regarding the antecedents, correlates and outcomes of individual differences in state variability.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaap Spreeuw ◽  
Iqbal Owadally

AbstractWe analyze the mortality of couples by fitting a multiple state model to a large insurance data set. We find evidence that mortality rates increase after the death of a partner and, in addition, that this phenomenon diminishes over time. This is popularly known as a “broken-heart” effect and we find that it affects widowers more than widows. Remaining lifetimes of joint lives therefore exhibit short-term dependence. We carry out numerical work involving the pricing and valuation of typical contingent assurance contracts and of a joint life and survivor annuity. If insurers ignore dependence, or mis-specify it as long-term dependence, then significant mis-pricing and inappropriate provisioning can result. Detailed numerical results are presented.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Fulvio Corno ◽  
Luigi De Russis ◽  
Alberto Monge Roffarello

In the Internet of Things era, users are willing to personalize the joint behavior of their connected entities, i.e., smart devices and online service, by means of trigger-action rules such as “IF the entrance Nest security camera detects a movement, THEN blink the Philips Hue lamp in the kitchen.” Unfortunately, the spread of new supported technologies makes the number of possible combinations between triggers and actions continuously growing, thus motivating the need of assisting users in discovering new rules and functionality, e.g., through recommendation techniques. To this end, we present , a semantic Conversational Search and Recommendation (CSR) system able to suggest pertinent IF-THEN rules that can be easily deployed in different contexts starting from an abstract user’s need. By exploiting a conversational agent, the user can communicate her current personalization intention by specifying a set of functionality at a high level, e.g., to decrease the temperature of a room when she left it. Stemming from this input, implements a semantic recommendation process that takes into account ( a ) the current user’s intention , ( b ) the connected entities owned by the user, and ( c ) the user’s long-term preferences revealed by her profile. If not satisfied with the suggestions, then the user can converse with the system to provide further feedback, i.e., a short-term preference , thus allowing to provide refined recommendations that better align with the original intention. We evaluate by running different offline experiments with simulated users and real-world data. First, we test the recommendation process in different configurations, and we show that recommendation accuracy and similarity with target items increase as the interaction between the algorithm and the user proceeds. Then, we compare with other similar baseline recommender systems. Results are promising and demonstrate the effectiveness of in recommending IF-THEN rules that satisfy the current personalization intention of the user.


2002 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amado Peirό

AbstractThis paper studies the existence of a world business cycle by examining quarterly and annual comovements in production, prices and interest rates in the three main world economies: Germany, Japan and the US. In accordance with earlier studies, contemporaneous relationships clearly dominate short-term dynamics. The evidence indicates the existence of strong comovements in prices and long-term interest rates, and, to a lesser degree, in GDP and short-term interest rates. They are, however, rather unstable over time.


10.29007/cfr2 ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zunoon Parambath ◽  
Nilupa Udawatta

Recession is considered as a major threat to the economy as it slows down economic activities. The property development sector is extremely responsive to these economic conditions. Thus, it is crucial to understand causes, effects and strategies for property developers to survive in a recession without any ill effects. Thus, this research aimed to develop a framework for property developers to identify appropriate survival strategies in recession. A comprehensive literature review was conducted in this research to achieve the above mentioned aim. The results of this study indicated that recession prompts negative impacts on property development sector resulting in unemployment, lower demand, production and revenue, decline in resources and high level of competition. According to the results, the survival strategies were classified into short-term and long-term strategies. The short term strategies include: implementing management tactics, cut down of operating costs, keeping financing lines set up, timely repayment of debts, setting vital new objectives for the future, undertaking shorter time span developments, specialisation in favoured market, renegotiating deals and contracts. The long-term strategies include retrenchment, restructuring, investment and ambidextrous strategies. Similarly, attention should be paid to predict any changes in the economic environment that can influence property development activities and it is necessary to carefully evaluate investment activities to increase sales, profits and market shares of property developers. Preparing for a crisis is doubtlessly the ideal approach as it can facilitate both survival and growth. Thus, the property developers can implement these suggested strategies in their businesses to enhance their practices.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Godsoe ◽  
Peter J Bellingham ◽  
Elena Moltchanova

Beta diversity describes the differences in species composition among communities. Changes in beta diversity over time are thought to be due to selection based on species' niche characteristics. For example, theory predicts that selection that favours habitat specialists will increase beta diversity. In practice, ecologists struggle to predict how beta diversity changes. To remedy this problem, we propose a novel solution that formally measures selection's effects on beta diversity. Using the Price equation, we show how change in beta diversity over time can be partitioned into fundamental mechanisms including selection among species, variable selection among communities, drift, and immigration. A key finding of our approach is that a species' short-term impact on beta diversity cannot be predicted using information on its long-term environmental requirements (i.e. its niche). We illustrate how our approach can be used to partition causes of diversity change in a montane tropical forest before and after an intense hurricane. Previous work in this system highlighted the resistance of habitat specialists and the recruitment of light-demanding species but was unable to quantify the importance of these effects on beta diversity. Using our approach, we show that changes in beta diversity were consistent with ecological drift. We use these results to highlight the opportunities presented by a synthesis of beta diversity and formal models of selection.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 9571-9578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Yue Ying ◽  
Pan Lu ◽  
Hongyuan Zha

Personalized image caption, a natural extension of the standard image caption task, requires to generate brief image descriptions tailored for users' writing style and traits, and is more practical to meet users' real demands. Only a few recent studies shed light on this crucial task and learn static user representations to capture their long-term literal-preference. However, it is insufficient to achieve satisfactory performance due to the intrinsic existence of not only long-term user literal-preference, but also short-term literal-preference which is associated with users' recent states. To bridge this gap, we develop a novel multimodal hierarchical transformer network (MHTN) for personalized image caption in this paper. It learns short-term user literal-preference based on users' recent captions through a short-term user encoder at the low level. And at the high level, the multimodal encoder integrates target image representations with short-term literal-preference, as well as long-term literal-preference learned from user IDs. These two encoders enjoy the advantages of the powerful transformer networks. Extensive experiments on two real datasets show the effectiveness of considering two types of user literal-preference simultaneously and better performance over the state-of-the-art models.


Author(s):  
Ed Hessler

My focus is both narrow and incomplete, for it is limited to a single area of learning: science, and it is in the form of a working list, a beginning of things one might write down, not in any particular order—so that they might be remembered and edited over time, with colleagues. Improving schools, teacher preparation, and professional development are important national priorities as we enter a new millennium. Past emphasis on targeted innovations in the short term are now conceptualized into the idea of continuous improvements that are connected in the long term. Today, the idea of improvement itself is being challenged. “Improvement,” the term of the technocrat, is being recast in the context of student learning—that is, how can we educate our young or learners of any age?


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (04) ◽  
pp. 2050032
Author(s):  
Shadi Shakeri

In this paper, we investigate communication among Twitter users in the context of the 2016 Zika crisis, to understand how influencers and audiences contribute to agenda setting in health crisis communication. We analyse the content of 146,953 Zika-related tweets posted between April and September 2016 and examine how discussion topics vary by network community and user involvement over time. We argue that audiences adopt a broad view of health crisis-related issues and advocate for long-term solutions drawn from theories of active audiences and agenda-setting. Based on our observations on the Zika crisis case, we propose a framework for the dynamics in health crisis communication, which suggests a shift of discourse from a short-term perspective on specific issues to a long-term perspective on broader issues. The research contributes to the KM literature by suggesting a new method for converting individual tacit knowledge to collective explicit knowledge. Applying the framework to the coronavirus pandemic conversations can offer significant insights into the crisis.


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