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Professional football clubs in England face serious financial and operational difficulties and challenges. Our survey reveals that less than a quarter of football clubs responding had an internal audit committee. Even where clubs had an audit committee, almost one third of those clubs report there being no regular board review of risk assessment reports. The need to undertake risk assessment is now accepted as part of good corporate governance. The collapse of the ITV Digital agreement, which led to Football League clubs losing significant revenue, forcing some into administration, simply illustrates the reasoning behind the practice (following the Turnbull Report). Football clubs (and the companies that own them) need improved corporate governance practice, financial planning and risk assessment procedures; 76 percent of clubs responded that they would benefit from a guide to good corporate governance and 80 percent that they would find advice on Company Law useful.

Positive predictive and negative predictive values (PPV and NPV) are often used to assess the accuracy of binary diagnostic tests. Unlike sensitivity and specificity, PPV and NPV are functions of the accuracy of the test and the overall prevalence of the disease in the population. In many studies of performance of estimators of PPV and NPV the population prevalence is assumed known. We allow for uncertainty in the estimate of the population prevalence and via simulation explore the impact of deviations from the assumed value.

This study asked the question: Are there differences in the characteristics and referral rates of men and women who are referred for cardiac rehabilitation? The sample consisted of 203 men (n = 148) and women (n = 55) who were hospitalized with at least one cardiac diagnosis and were eligible for Phase II cardiac rehabilitation. Hospital records were reviewed to obtain information on gender, age, ethnicity, insurance coverage, marital status, employment status, proximity to rehabilitation services, transportation availability, concurrent disease processes, domestic responsibilities, documentation of referral for cardiac rehabilitation, and the attending physician. A survey sent to the patients approximately 3 weeks after their discharge from the hospital also addressed these variables. Logistic regression analysis indicated only one predictor of referral: the gender of the physician. Male physicians were more likely to refer patients for cardiac rehabilitation. This finding must be viewed with caution because of the small number of female patients and female physicians included in the study. The current literature reflects conflicting findings about the proposed relationships; therefore, they merit further investigation.

Abstract:Semiotics is the theory par excellence of the artificial and therefore should have a substantial role in understanding designed phenomena. By tracing the relation between design and semiotics at the level of the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic (or artificial), this paper argues that semiotics struggles to explain the environmental element of design so central to post-artefactual accounts of design. The analytic method of semiology is suitable for understanding existent semiotic structures but less so at modeling alternate signifying systems-or systems that alter, transform and self-interpret, that is, environments. The paper argues that to understand such milieus a turn to the aesthetic is necessary. By aesthetics it is meant the simultaneous mapping of the environment, the articulation of the environment and the counterfactual element of any design process. More particularly the paper will focus on recent developments within social semiotics to argue that such a framework must move beyond the constraints of analytical spatial and visual grammar to take into account not only multimodal texts but planning, systems and services. It will conclude by arguing that ultimately design and aesthetics are the same phenomenon, not in the sense that design is the study and application of aesthetic principles to useful objects or experiences, but in the sense that it is the organization of the counterfactual elements of artificial-designedenvironments.