Establishing the design knowledge for emerging interaction platforms

While awaiting a variety of innovative interactive products and services to appear in the market in the near future such as interactive tabletops, interactive TVs, public multi-touch walls, and other embedded appliances, this paper calls for preparation for the arrival of such interactive platforms based on their interactivity. We advocate studying, understanding and establishing the foundation for interaction characteristics and affordances and design implications for these platforms which we know will soon emerge and penetrate our everyday lives. We review some of the archetypal interaction platform categories of the future and highlight the current status of the design knowledge-base accumulated to date and the current rate of growth for each of these. We use example designs illustrating design issues and considerations based on the authors’ 12-year experience in pioneering novel applications in various forms and styles

A Simple Approach to Error Reconciliation in Quantum Key Distribution

We discuss the error reconciliation phase in quantum key distribution (QKD) and analyse a simple scheme in which blocks with bad parity (that is, blocks containing an odd number of errors) are discarded. We predict the performance of this scheme and show, using a simulation, that the prediction is accurate.Comment: 19 pages. Presented at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society, Adelaide, Oct 1, 2009. See also http://wwwmaths.anu.edu.au/~brent/pub/pub239.htm

Is small beautiful ? financial structure, size and access to finance

Combining two unique data sets, this paper explores the relationship between the relative importance of different financial institutions and their average size and firms'access to financial services. Specifically, the authors explore the relationship between the share in total financial assets and average asset size of banks, low-end financial institutions, and specialized lenders, on the one hand, and firms'access to and use of deposit and lending services, on the other hand. Two findings stand out. First, the dominance of banks in most developing and emerging markets is associated with lower use of financial services by firms of all sizes. Low-end financial institutions and specialized lenders seem particularly suited to ease access to finance in low-income countries. Second, there is no evidence that smaller institutions are better in providing access to finance. To the contrary, larger specialized lenders and larger banks might actually ease small firms'financing constraints, but only at low levels of gross domestic product per capita.Access to Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Debt Markets,Microfinance,Non Bank Financial Institutions