The question of access to the Japanese market

This survey focuses on the question of how market structure and different corporate organisational forms might affect access to the Japanese market for industrial goods. The question is how and whether keiretsu corporate structures in Japan constitute an important unofficial barrier in access to the Japanese market for manufactured goods

Access to the market - a question of collaboration?

When contemplating entering an alliance the rationale behind the decision should differ depending on the size of the companies involved as well as on other important factors. The important factors influencing the decision are related to the resource pooling potential of the alliance, the power structure along with the business network the companies are a part of. The analysis has shown proof of a need for cooperation if one wish to succeed in the telecommunication industry and it has also determined which resources that are deemed to be most important to get in touch with, for our study object, to facilitate its access to the market. Those resources are defined as a direct channel to the customer, funds/capital and the access to relevant business networks. To get in touch with these lacking resources, three alternative approaches has been proposed; all of them involving a strategic alliance decision. Furthermore a strategy on how to survive, once the company has reached the market, is also analysed

Open access publishing: What is world’s best practice?

Open access publishing delivers on the dream of centuries - the free and unfettered access to the written word. However there are shades of openness and the question raised is 'what is world's best practice for open access publishing?' Four criteria are proposed to generate a star rating for an open access journal - for ‘openness’ - with a star available for meeting each criterion, to a maximum of four. The open access criteria for scoring star ratings are: (1) There is no barrier to access for the reader; (2) It is free to the author/s; (3) Copyright is retained by the author/s; and (4) The paper can be freely distributed under licence. The Journal of Organic Systems 'ticks all the boxes' to rate as a four-star open access journal

Network-Coded Multiple Access

This paper proposes and experimentally demonstrates a first wireless local area network (WLAN) system that jointly exploits physical-layer network coding (PNC) and multiuser decoding (MUD) to boost system throughput. We refer to this multiple access mode as Network-Coded Multiple Access (NCMA). Prior studies on PNC mostly focused on relay networks. NCMA is the first realized multiple access scheme that establishes the usefulness of PNC in a non-relay setting. NCMA allows multiple nodes to transmit simultaneously to the access point (AP) to boost throughput. In the non-relay setting, when two nodes A and B transmit to the AP simultaneously, the AP aims to obtain both packet A and packet B rather than their network-coded packet. An interesting question is whether network coding, specifically PNC which extracts packet (A XOR B), can still be useful in such a setting. We provide an affirmative answer to this question with a novel two-layer decoding approach amenable to real-time implementation. Our USRP prototype indicates that NCMA can boost throughput by 100% in the medium-high SNR regime (>=10dB). We believe further throughput enhancement is possible by allowing more than two users to transmit together

Transmitting, Editing, and Communicating: Determining What “The Freedom of Speech” Encompasses

How much can one say with confidence about what constitutes the freedom of speech that Congress shall not abridge? In this Article, I address that question in the context of the transmission of speech specifically, the regulation of Internet access known as net neutrality. This question has implications both for the future of economic regulation, as more and more activity involves the transmission of bits, and for First Amendment interpretation. As for the latter, the question is what a lawyer or judge can conclude without having to choose among competing conceptions of speech. How far can a basic legal toolkit go? Using that toolkit, I find that bare transmission is not speech under the First Amendment, and that most forms of manipulation of bits also would not qualify as speech. Adopting any of the leading conceptions of the First Amendment would narrow the range of activities covered by the First Amendment. But even without choosing among those conceptions we can reach some meaningful conclusions about the limited application of the First Amendment to Internet access providers

SoundBar: exploiting multiple views in multimodal graph browsing

In this paper we discuss why access to mathematical graphs is problematic for visually impaired people. By a review of graph understanding theory and interviews with visually impaired users, we explain why current non-visual representations are unlikely to provide effective access to graphs. We propose the use of multiple views of the graph, each providing quick access to specific information as a way to improve graph usability. We then introduce a specific multiple view system to improve access to bar graphs called SoundBar which provides an additional quick audio overview of the graph. An evaluation of SoundBar revealed that additional views significantly increased accuracy and reduced time taken in a question answering task

Consciousness, introspection, and subjective measures

This chapter discusses the main types of so-called ’subjective measures of consciousness’ used in current-day science of consciousness. After explaining the key worry about such measures, namely the problem of an ever-present response bias, I discuss the question of whether subjective measures of consciousness are introspective. I show that there is no clear answer to this question, as proponents of subjective measures do not employ a worked-out notion of subjective access. In turn, this makes the problem of response bias less tractable than it might otherwise be

Location, location, location

How important is access to markets as a driver of economic prosperity? In new research, Stephen Redding and Daniel Sturm address this question by analysing the post-war division of Germany and its impact on the border cities in the West suddenly cut off from their nearby trading partners