Search results

Since the advent of agriculture, man has suffered losses of his crops to various pests. In 1859, in the introduction to his book Farm Insects, John Curtis wrote ‘… little attention has, comparatively, been paid to those animals which annually consume an amount of produce that sets calculation at defiance, and indeed if an approximation could be made to the quantity thus destroyed, the world would remain sceptical of the result obtained, considering it too marvellous to be received as truth’.

THE manufacturing methods and processes being used by Percival Aircraft Ltd., at Luton, in the production of the Prentice are of more than usual interest because this is the first metal aeroplane to be made by a firm well known for its wooden aircraft. Not only has the company built many hundreds of Gulls, Proctors and other wooden aeroplanes of its own design, but during the war the factory was largely occupied making Oxfords and Mosquitos. It is only in the post‐war period that Percival's have turned to metal, with the Prentice for the R.A.F. and the Merganser and Prince for the civil market. It was decided to design and build much of the works equipment. Examples of this are to be found in the two stretching presses, the strip rolls and the strip slitter.

THE increasing speed of modern aircraft has brought to the forefront the necessity for making a careful drag analysis of all aircraft in order to separate out the essential drag, that is to say the drag that is unavoidable, from the non‐essential drag. Most designers, we believe, now do this in order to see what progress is being made in the streamlining of their products. By this means we are enabled to see the relative importance of the drag terms and to arrive at a figure of merit. The ideally‐streamline aeroplane, though not at present a precise proposition, is like other ideals unattainable. It is the standard to which designers may aspire, but which they cannot achieve.

EACH September the eyes of the aeronautical World turn towards the S.B.A.C. Air Display and Exhibition with interest unequalled by any other event. It is fitting that the Display is now held each year at the airfield of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, one of the world's most prominent aeronautical research centres. This interest becomes increasingly keen too, as the preview day comes closer, because new prototypes of unorthodox designs often appear a short time before the Show to illustrate the results of years of careful planning, development and research of the particular company. These designs often mould the path of progress for smaller countries without the economic resources to forge the way ahead alone. Most British citizens are very proud of their country's place in aviation today, both in the military and civil fields. This is understood by most foreigners because it is clear that Britain has won a place in aeronautical development second to none.

The initial shock of devaluing the currency, after so many promises that it would not take place, has passed; only the uncertainty and apprehension remain. It seems an idle exercise to compare the present state of the country's economy with other periods in recent history, such as when in the first Labour Government, we went off the gold standard; at that time, shock was indeed profound and again, the French were cock‐a‐hoop, but the position was complicated by the huge inter‐indebtedness of the Allies in the First War. Or the first devaluation after the Second World War, but both periods were also characterized by public waste and profligate spending. Now, we have to obtain foreign loans and financial backing to keep going, and it is this aspect of the present devaluation which will probably far outweigh any positive advantages. The country's massive external debts were increased by approximately one‐seventh overnight, probably wiping out completely all the repayments made at such great effort since the War. Devaluation of the currency cannot be seen as anything but a grievous blow to the country, presaging hard times ahead for everyone. When promises were being made that devaluation would not take place, there can be little doubt that these were honestly made and, at the time, believed in, for no Government of a country with imports always exceeding exports, would impose such a burden on its people willingly. It must then have been forced upon them.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a biographical sketch of Pauline Arnold focusing on her pioneering contributions to the field of market research.

Archival source material included the Pauline Arnold Collection at the University of Minnesota and the Lucy Sallick Papers including correspondence, unpublished documents, and the transcript of a 1995 oral history interview with Matilda White Riley, who was Pauline Arnold's stepdaughter. Primary historical source material includes the scholarship, both published and unpublished, of the subject. An important primary, published source for this study is the periodical, Market Research, to which Arnold contributed under the auspices of the Market Research Corporation of America from 1934 through to 1938.

Pauline Arnold's contributions to the field of market research are documented.

Pauline Arnold has been cited as having made important but neglected contributions to market research, including her advocating an understanding of customers' motives, needs, and wants. However, there is no published account of Arnold's life and work.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the possible portfolio diversification opportunities between Asian Islamic market and other regions’ Islamic markets; namely USA, Europe, and BRIC. This study makes the initial attempt to fill in the gaps of previous studies by focusing on the proxies of global Islamic markets to identify the correlations among those selected markets by employing the recent econometric methodologies such as multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic–dynamic conditional correlations (MGARCH–DCC), maximum overlap discrete wavelet transform (MODWT), and the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). By utilizing the MGARCH-DCC, this chapter tries to identify the strength of the time-varying correlation among the markets. However, to see the time-scale-dependent nature of these mentioned correlations, the authors utilized CWT. For robustness, the authors have applied MODWT methodology as well. The findings tend to indicate that the Asian investors have better portfolio diversification opportunities with the US markets, followed by the European markets. BRIC markets do not offer any portfolio diversification benefits, which may be explained partly by the fact that the Asian markets cover partially the same countries of BRIC markets, namely India and China. Considering the time horizon dimension, the results narrow down the portfolio diversification opportunities only to the short-term investment horizons. The very short-run investors (up to eight days only) can benefit through portfolio diversification, especially in the US and European markets. The above-mentioned results have policy implications for the Asian Islamic investors (e.g., Portfolio Management and Strategic Investment Management).

The original legislation which introduced the redundancy payments scheme was the Redundancy Payments Act 1965. This was the first of the substantive statutory individual employment rights given to an employee; other individual employment rights, as for example, the right not to be unfairly dismissed, followed some years later. The Redundancy Payments Act 1965 has been repealed and the provisions on redundancy are now to be found in the Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act 1978.

Market links (and price discovery) between financial assets and lead–lag relationships are topics of interest for financial economists, financial managers and analysts. The lead–lag relationship analysis should consider both short and long-term investors. From a portfolio diversification perspective, the first type of investor is generally more interested in determining the co-movement of financial assets at higher frequencies, which are short-run fluctuations, while the latter concentrates on the relationship at lower frequencies, or long-run fluctuations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

For this study, a technique was employed known as the wavelet approach, which has recently been imported to finance from engineering sciences to study the co-movement dynamics between global sukuk and bond markets. Data cover the period from January 2010 to December 2015.

The results indicate that: there is no unidirectional causality from developed market bond indices to Malaysia and Dow Jones indices, which is promising for fixed-income investors of a developed market; and in relation to emerging markets, the Malaysian sukuk market has a bidirectional causality with Indonesia, Malaysia, India and South Korea bond indices but not China bond indices, while in terms of the Dow Jones sukuk index, there is no unidirectional causality between the listed emerging markets and the sukuk index except Indonesia’s market during the sample period.

This analysis provides evidence regarding the timely and appropriate measure of correlation changes and the behaviour of sukuk and bond indices globally, which is beneficial to the management of sukuk and bond portfolios.

The evidence hitherto unexplored, which was produced by the application of a wavelet cross-correlation amongst the selected sukuk and bond indices, provides robust and useful information for international financial analysts as well as long and short-term investors.