24,376 research outputs found
Surveys on Electronic Money
This paper investigates the views of electronic money operators and innovators on the possibilities and implications of e-money, especially with respect to replacing central bank money as well as technical issues regarding e-money, its implications for the financial industry and central banking. This has been done using surveys of major e-money innovators and operators, based on the assumption that these operators and innovators are likely to shape the future framework for e-money schemes. It seems that innovators and operators are quite confident about the future of e-money â despite problems and obstacles surrounding current testing â and that central banksâ monopoly of the issuance of money as a medium of exchange will no longer be unchallenged.electronic money; financial regulation; central banks; financial innovation
Promising Beginning? Evaluating Museum Mobile Phone Apps
Since 2009 museums have started introducing mobile apps in their range of interpretative media and visitor services.
As mobile technology continues to develop and permeate all aspects of our life, and the capabilities of smart phones
increase while they become more accessible and popular, new possibilities arise for cultural institutions to exploit these
tools for communicating in new ways and promoting their exhibitions and programmes. The use of mobile apps opens
up new channels of communication between the cultural institution and the user, which extent to his or her personal
space and go beyond the boundaries of the museumâs walls. The paper presents a survey carried out of mobile apps
designed by art or cultural historical museums and analyses the wider issues which are raised by the findings. It
discusses, among others, the kind of use these apps were designed to fulfil (e.g. the majority are guided tours to the
permanent collections or to temporary exhibitions), the layering of content,and the type of user interaction and
involvement they support
Service-oriented Context-aware Framework
Location- and context-aware services are emerging technologies in mobile and
desktop environments, however, most of them are difficult to use and do not
seem to be beneficial enough. Our research focuses on designing and creating a
service-oriented framework that helps location- and context-aware,
client-service type application development and use. Location information is
combined with other contexts such as the users' history, preferences and
disabilities. The framework also handles the spatial model of the environment
(e.g. map of a room or a building) as a context. The framework is built on a
semantic backend where the ontologies are represented using the OWL description
language. The use of ontologies enables the framework to run inference tasks
and to easily adapt to new context types. The framework contains a
compatibility layer for positioning devices, which hides the technical
differences of positioning technologies and enables the combination of location
data of various sources
FinBook: literary content as digital commodity
This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can âperformâ. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authorsâ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authorsâ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing âautonomousâ trading bots, we also explore the different ânetworkâ affordances that differ between paper based books thatâs scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items â books â to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be
Envisioning a Compulsory-Licensing System for Digital Samples Through Emergent Technologies
Despite the rapid development of modern creative culture, federal copyright law has remained largely stable, steeped in decades of tradition and history. For the most part, copyright finds strength in its stability, surviving the rise of recorded music, software programs, and, perhaps the most disruptive technology of our generation, the internet.
On the other hand, copyrightâs resistance to change can be detrimental, as with digital sampling. Although sampling can be a highly creative practice, and although copyright purports to promote creativity, current copyright law often interferes with the practice of sampling. The result is a largely broken system: Those who can legally sample are usually able to do so because they are wealthy, influential, or both. Those who cannot legally sample often sample illegally.
Many scholars have suggested statutory solutions to this problem. Arguably, the most workable solutions are rooted in compulsory licenses. Unfortunately, implementing these solutions is practically difficult.
Two recent developments invite us to revisit these proposals. First, with the passage of the Music Modernization Act (âMMAâ), Congress has evinced a willingness to âmodernizeâ parts of copyright law. Second, emergent technologiesâfrom the MMAâs musical-works database to blockchain to smart contractsâcan be leveraged to more easily implement a compulsory-licensing solution. This time around, rather than simply discuss why this solution is favorable, this Note will focus on how it can be implemented
Security Evaluation of Cyber-Physical Systems in Society- Critical Internet of Things
In this paper, we present evaluation of security
awareness of developers and users of cyber-physical systems. Our
study includes interviews, workshops, surveys and one practical
evaluation. We conducted 15 interviews and conducted survey with
55 respondents coming primarily from industry. Furthermore, we
performed practical evaluation of current state of practice for a
society-critical application, a commercial vehicle, and reconfirmed
our findings discussing an attack vector for an off-line societycritical
facility. More work is necessary to increase usage of security
strategies, available methods, processes and standards. The security
information, currently often insufficient, should be provided in the
user manuals of products and services to protect system users. We
confirmed it lately when we conducted an additional survey of
users, with users feeling as left out in their quest for own security
and privacy. Finally, hardware-related security questions begin to
come up on the agenda, with a general increase of interest and
awareness of hardware contribution to the overall cyber-physical
security. At the end of this paper we discuss possible
countermeasures for dealing with threats in infrastructures,
highlighting the role of authorities in this quest
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