This article considers UK prime ministers as leaders of their political parties. It evaluates the extent to which three trends identified by Uchiyama in this issue, relation Japanese ministers, are replicated case ministers. First, what is trend towards increasing party centralisation within Labour and Conservative parties? Second, reduced factional influence lower rebellion rates Finally, asso...

The extraordinary context of the COVID-19 crisis gave governments around world a freer hand to reshape their socio-economic orders. Political economists studying East Central Europe have started debate in how far democratic backsliding region has ushered more authoritarian form capitalism. Our paper examines responses four anti-liberal region: Hungary, Poland, Serbia, and Slovenia. Incorporatin...

Globally, women and girls make up the majority of recorded estimated victims modern slavery human trafficking. In Brazil, however, females represent only 5% more than 35,000 people rescued from forced slave labour 2003 to 2018. This paper interrogates data on antislavery efforts in identify explain gender dynamics rescues. It evaluates legal, policy, contextual factors that may help discrepanci...

Due to the automation and centralisation of railway operation the demand for train monitoring systems arises to guarantee operational safety in times of liberalisation of the railway market. The motivation for wayside train monitoring has it’s origin in national considerations and regulations. Accordingly monitoring systems are designed for national use, but the market of railway undertakings i...

This study revisits the face-to-tongue articulatory inversion problem in speech. We compare the Multi Linear Regression method (MLR) with two more sophisticated methods based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), using the same French corpus of articulatory data acquired by ElectroMagnetoGraphy. GMMs give overall results better than HMMs, but MLR does poorly. GMMs a...

Lines of Action (LOA) is a two-person zero-sum chess-like connection game. Building an evaluation function for LOA is a difficult task because not much knowledge about the game is available. In this paper the evaluation function of the tournament program MIA is explained. This evaluator consists of the following nine features: concentration, centralisation, centre-of-mass position, quads, mobil...

The aim of this project was to produce guidance for a rationalised virological electron microscopy specimen testing policy for PHLS North West, to facilitate centralisation of a groupwide diagnostic electron microscopy service on a single site. Careful specimen selection to limit numbers and the groupwide use of commercially available enzyme immunoassays has allowed PHLS North West to reduce th...

Based on an empirical investigation, this study explores the influence of institutionalised social structures in governance models of virtual communities. Drawing upon institutional theory, the research shows that virtual communities are subject to the influence of their institutional environment, and that conflictive institutions dispute online spaces similarly to the phenomenon observed in of...

Hospital and clinical environments are moving towards computerisation, digitisation and centralisation, resulting in prohibitive amounts of digital medical image data. Compression techniques are, therefore, essential in archival and communication of medical image. Although lossy compression yields much higher compression rates, the medical community has relied on lossless compression for legal ...

In recent years the interest organisation of the European consumer electronics industry has experienced a dramatic centralisation and concentration. The overall consequence of this development is an integrative tendency encompassing up to now fragmented sub-sectors. These findings are in sharp contrast with the widespread assumption of an ever growing fragmentation of the associational landscap...