Editorial: Welcome to a new era of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship

With this new stage of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship we are starting a new adventure towards a fully-open access, fully-sustainable open peer-reviewed publishing platform for the 21st-century. We hope many of you will be willing to share the journey with us

Access to financial services: the case of the ‘Mzansi’ account in South Africa

The presence of rationing of financial services in the developing countries is a major obstacle to achieving sustainable growth. In recent years there have been co-ordinated efforts to increase the level of financial inclusion, i.e. to reduce the supply-side constraints restricting access to finance. This paper aims to understand household’s latent behaviour decision making in accessing financial services, by analysing an entry level Mzansi account in South Africa. The willingness to access financial services is not taken as given, but it is instead defined by perceptions and attitudes. The Mzansi intervention is appealing to individuals with basic but insufficient financial education. Aspirations seem to be very influential in revealing the choice of financial services and to this end, Mzansi is perceived as a pre-entry account not meeting the aspirations of individuals aiming to climb up the financial services ladder

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Mobile Computing in Physics Analysis - An Indicator for eScience

This paper presents the design and implementation of a Grid-enabled physics analysis environment for handheld and other resource-limited computing devices as one example of the use of mobile devices in eScience. Handheld devices offer great potential because they provide ubiquitous access to data and round-the-clock connectivity over wireless links. Our solution aims to provide users of handheld devices the capability to launch heavy computational tasks on computational and data Grids, monitor the jobs status during execution, and retrieve results after job completion. Users carry their jobs on their handheld devices in the form of executables (and associated libraries). Users can transparently view the status of their jobs and get back their outputs without having to know where they are being executed. In this way, our system is able to act as a high-throughput computing environment where devices ranging from powerful desktop machines to small handhelds can employ the power of the Grid. The results shown in this paper are readily applicable to the wider eScience community.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures. Presented at the 3rd Int Conf on Mobile Computing & Ubiquitous Networking (ICMU06. London October 200

Are Peer Effects Present in Residential Solar Installations? Evidence from Minnesota and Wisconsin

There are geographic differences in the rate of adoption of residential photovoltaic (PV) solar. Are adoption rates in small scale localities (counties and zip codes) influenced by previous, nearby adoptions? This paper adds to the literature on Peer Effects with an analysis of Minnesota and Wisconsin zip codes. I use residential adoption data from the OpenPV Project in an empirical analysis of social interactions. My findings indicate that there is a small but significant effect of nearby adoptions at the zip code level. These peer effects are shown to be nuanced by policy incentives such as the XCEL Solar Rewards Program. I additionally engage in a case study analysis of the relationship of some localities