The botnet: webs of hegemony/zombies who publish

The scholarly communication structure at present bears a strong resemblance to a malware system called a botnet. This piece explores this metaphor and proposes ways in which the library can become a bi-directional information hub called the Research Output Team as a potential antidote

Longer-term agreements for health care services: what will they achieve?

Government policy announced in the White Paper is to require purchasers and providers in the NHS to move from annual contracting cycles to longer-term contracts (agreements). It would appear the original arguments for this change came from the economics literature, suggesting longer-term contracts would help deal with problems of asset specificity, promotion of new entry and transactions cost. The Labour government emphasises longer-term contracting as a means of shifting the focus of purchaser provider relations from price and activity to quality of service and strategic planning. This Discussion Paper reports the results of research into the extent and nature of long-term contracting in the NHS. It is based on examination of contracts from a sample of six health authorities and their GP Fundholders, supplemented by interviews with individuals from these Health Authorities and Trusts who were involved in the contracting process. The paper considers the extent to which the problems identified in the theoretical literature on duration of contract are likely to be observed in the NHS and the extent to which it is likely a movement to longer-term contracting will achieve the benefits expected.NHS contracts

Reference face graph for face recognition

Face recognition has been studied extensively; however, real-world face recognition still remains a challenging task. The demand for unconstrained practical face recognition is rising with the explosion of online multimedia such as social networks, and video surveillance footage where face analysis is of significant importance. In this paper, we approach face recognition in the context of graph theory. We recognize an unknown face using an external reference face graph (RFG). An RFG is generated and recognition of a given face is achieved by comparing it to the faces in the constructed RFG. Centrality measures are utilized to identify distinctive faces in the reference face graph. The proposed RFG-based face recognition algorithm is robust to the changes in pose and it is also alignment free. The RFG recognition is used in conjunction with DCT locality sensitive hashing for efficient retrieval to ensure scalability. Experiments are conducted on several publicly available databases and the results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods without any preprocessing necessities such as face alignment. Due to the richness in the reference set construction, the proposed method can also handle illumination and expression variation

Review of periodical articles

One of the attractions of medieval urban history is the fact that major conceptual problems in the field continue to be debated. In a stimulating review article by J.H. Mundy, ’Philip Jones and the medieval Italian city-state‘, J. of European Economic History, 28 (1999), 185–200, one distinguished scholar is taxed for holding views now dismissed by some, but of which he is by no means a unique surviving representative. One of these views assumes a clear distinction between the antique city, supposedly a bureaucratic centre with limited economic functions, and the medieval city, as the home of industrious artisans and nascent capitalism. The image of the non-profit-making ancient town may be overly indebted to the nature of the literary sources and to the prevalent interests of classicists; but, although many would now agree that both the elements in the above equation need qualifying, a more focused comparison is presently lacking, and a fine book is still waiting to be written on the transition from the ancient world to the middle ages in urban history

The regulations of honour: an attempt at a Weberian and anthropological enquiry through the prism of a Spanish trading group

Abstract: This paper is concerned with a rather neglected issue in sociological analysis: honour as a value and regulating principle of social life. The attempt is made to study honour from a perspective which pays attention to both the carriers of honour and the social order itself, its maintenance and reproduction. It focuses on a group of Spanish traders who were fervent Catholics who claimed and were reputed to be men of honour. The article shows that honour was incarnated in two external domains: the family house and lineage, providing status-honour, and the trading routes, which brought our group fame as courageous and trustworthy men. Engaging with contemporary debates, it is contended that neither trust nor ethics need be brought to the exchanges from the outside, as is the case with modern capitalist forms, for they are a function of personalised social bonding and embedded in honour itself. Abstract: Cet article traite d'un sujet plutôt négligé par l'analyse sociologique: l'honneur comme valeur et principe régulateur de la vie sociale. La perspective retenue considére les groupes porteurs de l'honneur et l'ordre social lui-même, son maintien et sa reproduction. L'article se centre sur un groupe de commerçants espagnols, catholiques fervents, qui se proclamaient et sont reconnus hommes d'honneur. L'article montre que l'honneur s'incarne dans deux domaines: la maison et le lignage familiaux, sources d'honneur comme statut, et les routes commerciales, qui conféraient au groupe une réputation d'hommes courageux et dignes de confiance. En lien avec les débats contemporains, nous soutenons qu'il n'y a ici nul besoin d'introduire dans ces échanges confiance et éthique, comme il le faut dans les formes capitalistes modernes. Ici, ils s'ancrent dans l'honneur même. Abstract: Diese Besprechung untersucht ein von der soziologischen Analyse vernachlässigtes Thema: die Ehre als Wert und Regelungselement des sozialen Lebens. Untersuchungsgegenstand: eine Gruppe spanischer Kaufleute, überzeugte Katholiken, die sich als Ehrenmänner bezeichneten und auch als solche betrachtet wurden. Die Ehre gründet sich auf zwei Bereiche: den Familienstamm, Ausgangspunkt für den Ehrenstatus, und die Handelsstraßen, die der Gruppe den Ruf von mutigen Männern und Vertrauensleuten einbrachten. Im Zusammenhang mit der gegenwärtigen Auseinandersetzung behaupten wir, dass im Austausch weder Vertrauen noch Ethik eingeführt werden müssen, wie es bei modernen Formen des Kapitalismus notwendig ist. Sie sind mit der Ehre verwurzelt

E-finance-lab at the House of Finance : about us

The financial services industry is believed to be on the verge of a dramatic [r]evolution. A substantial redesign of its value chains aimed at reducing costs, providing more efficient and flexible services and enabling new products and revenue streams is imminent. But there seems to be no clear migration path nor goal which can cast light on the question where the finance industry and its various players will be and should be in a decade from now. The mission of the E-Finance Lab is the development and application of research methodologies in the financial industry that promote and assess how business strategies and structures are shared and supported by strategies and structures of information systems. Important challenges include the design of smart production infrastructures, the development and evaluation of advantageous sourcing strategies and smart selling concepts to enable new revenue streams for financial service providers in the future. Overall, our goal is to contribute methods and views to the realignment of the E-Finance value chain. ..

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

Socially Necessary Impact/Time: Notes on the Acceleration of Academic Labor, Metrics and the Transnational Association of Capitals

This article constitutes a contribution to the critique of the political economy of contemporary higher education. Its notes form, intended to open "windows" on the thorny issue of metrics permeating academia on both the local/national and global levels, facilitates a conceptualization of the academic law of value as a mechanism responsible for regulating the tempo and speed of academic labor in a higher education system subsumed under capital. First, it begins with a presentation of the Marxist approach to acceleration and measure. Second, it presents the academic law of value as a socially necessary impact/time. Third, it conceptualizes a figure of capital that operates in the contemporary global higher education system. Fourth, it describes the conditions of operation of merchant capital within higher education and explores the close links of global university rankings, metadata providers, and the academic publishing industry. As a fifth and final point, the analysis turns to Central Eastern Europe and the case study of Poland to demonstrate that, to function properly, the academic law of value needs to be imposed by political means, that is, through policy reforms that establish and legitimize the sets of parameters and criteria for the evaluation of academic labor. In conclusion, the argument suggests that the domination of merchant capital over academic labor, resulting in the latter's ongoing and uncontrolled acceleration, cannot be overcome without addressing not so much the issue of private property but, first and foremost, the politically and socially defined metrics