Utopian community football? Sport,hope and belongingness in the lives of refugees and asylum seekers

Refugees and asylum seekers have become increasingly demonised as part of anti-migrant sentiment leading to social exclusion. Sport has been utilised as a tool for social cohesion though evidence as to its efficacy in such a task is limited. Based on a three-year research programme exploring the role of football in the lives of refugees and asylum seekers in the U.K., this paper examines the concept of belonging, provides evidence for the role of community-based sport in social development and concludes with a call for practitioners to maximise their belief in concrete utopian ideals without losing the inherent critical approach needed to positively develop the industry in which they work.     

Time-varying forecasts by variational approximation of sequential Bayesian inference

Methods developed for making time-varying forecasts in economic and financial analysis include (a) equal-weighted moving-window (or rolling) regression, (b) time-weighted (e.g. exponentially weighted) regression, (c) the Kalman filter (KF) and (d) adaptive Kalman filters. This paper developed a new method based on variational approximation of sequential Bayesian inference (VASB). Concepts and notions of the sequential Bayesian analysis and the variational approximation of an intractable posterior are simple and straightforward. Our VASB algorithm is not complicated and is easy to code. For a regression on multiple time-series, the regression coefficients, standard errors, prediction and residual error are time-varying and are estimated jointly at every time step. For a single time-series (e.g. price returns of an asset), its mean and variance are time-varying and are predicted jointly at every time step. The VASB algorithm performs better than the rolling and time-weighted statistics or regressions and the KF in terms of higher predictive power and stronger robustness. Derivations of the VASB algorithm are presented in the appendices.     

The impact of drought in early fourteenth‐century England

Climatic change is currently viewed as one of the main causes of the so‐called crisis of the early fourteenth century. It is well established that England saw increased storminess and heavy rainfall in this period, but this article suggests that the impact of drought—which became a common feature of the English climate during the 1320s and early 1330s—has been overlooked. Based primarily on a detailed analysis of account rolls for over 60 of the best‐documented manors in this period, the article establishes that drought brought devastating harvest failure and caused severe outbreaks of a number of diseases, plausibly including enteric infections, malaria, and winter and spring fevers. As a result, mortality surged and population levels fell in communities in affected regions, which were mainly confined to the southern and eastern counties of England. The article concludes that such regional variation significantly affects our understanding of demographic, agricultural, and even fiscal trends in this period. Although we should not disregard the human factors influencing the impact of environmental shocks, England was plainly struck with indubitable force by extreme weather in this pivotal phase of the medieval economy.     

米兰

用手思考的城市罗马,Caput Mundi,所谓世界之都、永恒之城、所有道路殊途同归的地方。城市的记忆是罗马人的生活原点。上千年的古迹,日日鲜活地存在于罗马人的起居生活中,于是,罗马的设计从手中的一根针线,到整个城市格局,始终都不能摆脱对这个城市的历史记忆。不受机械化生产的影响,回归创造物件最原始的功能需求、取材实验、质地纹理认识、工具、工法,一连串用手思考的过程,让我们在罗马,找到了手工的尊严:在整个社会每日千万只手的日常操作中,无论制作者或使用者,无论是衣服、珠宝、游艇还是已经渐渐远去的胶片电影,我们都能在其中看到对生活之美的精神追求。     

The Good,the Poor and the Wealthy: who Responds Most to College Financial Aid?

Financial aid programmes for students in the United States focus increasingly on academic merit, rather than financial need. There is little empirical evidence, however, on the distributional effects of merit–based aid – who benefits or responds most. We develop a bivariate probit model of the enrolment process estimated using data for a large public university over several years. Results show that merit–based aid increases enrolment for all students, but that financially–able students respond disproportionately, even with academic merit held constant. Thus, increased emphasis on merit in financial aid may exacerbate the trend toward greater income inequality in the US, even among students of equal academic merit.     

Attitude and risk: Exploring the relationship

The attitude and risk constructs each enjoy prominence in marketing research. Attitude is conceptualized and widely accepted as a construct predicated on beliefs. Risk shares the same conceptual underpinning, for risk is predicated on expectations, itself a beliefbased concept. The idea of two constructs predicated on beliefs presents a possible conceptual overlap between the two constructs depending upon the nature of these beliefs. No research, however, has investigated the two constructs in such a beliefs similarity context. Thus, this research explored the proposition that in situation-specific instances risk may share a number of beliefs in common with attitude and, as such, is not to be viewed as a construct separate from attitude, but as an integral, inherent component of attitude formation. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Business to business: Lessons on segmentation and other issues from financial services markets

The aim of this paper is to provide business-to-customer financial services companies with an insight into the relevance of business-to-business segmentation for their companies. The whole area of understanding customers is being turned upside down by rapidly developing new patterns of intermediation, so almost paradoxically there is a much stronger focus today on ‘doing what works’ and ‘doing what is profitable’, rather than trying to optimise. Customers, whether final or intermediary, are simply changing too rapidly to permit the old stable analyses.