Book Publishers and Libraries: Historic Partners Facing a Disruptive Technology

The explosion of digital materials and e-readers has disrupted the historic partnership between book publishers and libraries. Tom Allen explains that the new business models required for more widespread e-lending will necessarily involve compromises. He suggests that e-lending pilot projects between individual publishers and libraries are a promising development

Constitutional Rights in the Irish Home Rule Bill of 1893

In 1893, Prime Minister Gladstone introduced the second Irish home rule bill in parliament. The bill broke with tradition in Britain and the empire, as it included provisions from the bill of rights of the United States. Its significance was clear at the time: it was debated for nine days in the committee stage and, with one minor amendment, it remained part of the bill that passed the Commons. However, the bill was defeated in the Lords and, at least in the United Kingdom, bills of rights were dismissed as unnecessary or detrimental to sound governance until well after the second world war. This article therefore tries to understand how this early bill of rights was regarded at the time. Who suggested, or demanded, its inclusion? How did they expect it to be applied? And how did the debate reflect and influence thinking about constitutional law in Britain and the empire

The Purposes of Land Settlement in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898-1914: Drawing Paths through the Weeds

This article examines the programme of land surveying and registration that was undertaken by the British-led administration of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the period 1898–1914. The Legal Secretary, Edgar Bonham Carter, stated that programme was the most important project of his division in this period. Scholars have shown that the programme, known as land ‘settlement’, was used to build alliances with elites and to clarify title for European investors in the new irrigation scheme at Gezira. This article argues that, as such, the ambitions of land settlement were relatively limited. In many other colonies, and in Britain itself, politicians and administrators across the political spectrum saw the reform of private property in land as the key for addressing structural problems in agricultural labour. One might have thought that, the Sudan, land settlement might have provided a means of addressing the dependence on slave labour in agriculture. The article demonstrates that, except for a small number of administrators (including Bonham Carter), this was not the case. The general indifference to slavery itself carried through to an indifference to the transformative potential of land law. The article examines the proposals of this minority of administrators, and contrasts their views with the majority’s focus on land settlement as demonstration and opportunity to enhance state power

Worldviews in Conflict

This article is an edited version of a lecture given in a lecture series, “Politics Then and Now, in Maine and the Nation,” presented by the Muskie School and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Southern Maine in the fall of 2013. Speakers were asked to address the issue of political polarization and dysfunction, comparing how politics was played in the past with the current situation, and discussing what Maine can offer based on experiences here. Tom Allen analyzes the significance of conflicting worldviews in explaining the modern political climate in the U.S

An Extensible Timing Infrastructure for Adaptive Large-scale Applications

Real-time access to accurate and reliable timing information is necessary to profile scientific applications, and crucial as simulations become increasingly complex, adaptive, and large-scale. The Cactus Framework provides flexible and extensible capabilities for timing information through a well designed infrastructure and timing API. Applications built with Cactus automatically gain access to built-in timers, such as gettimeofday and getrusage, system-specific hardware clocks, and high-level interfaces such as PAPI. We describe the Cactus timer interface, its motivation, and its implementation. We then demonstrate how this timing information can be used by an example scientific application to profile itself, and to dynamically adapt itself to a changing environment at run time

NASTRAN GPWG tables for combined substructures

A method for computing the mass and center of gravity for basic and combined substructures stored in the NASTRAN Substructure Operating File (SOF) is described. The three step method recovers SOF data blocks for the relevant substructure, processes these data blocks using a specially developed FORTRAN routine, and generates the NASTRAN gridpoint weight generator (GPWG) table for the substructure in a PHASE2 SOF execution using a Direct Matrix Abstraction Program (DMAP) sequence. Verification data for the process is also provided

Automatic A-set selection for dynamics analysis

A method for selecting optimum NASTRAN analysis set degrees of freedom for the dynamic eigenvalue problem is described. Theoretical development of the Guyan reduction procedure on which the method is based is first summarized. The algorithm used to select the analysis set degrees of freedom is then developed. Two example problems are provided to demonstrate the accuracy of the algorithm

Analysing the Factors that Influence Social Media Adoption Among SME's in Developing Countries

Social media penetration is on the rise in developing countries and is an important channel of growth for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Many SMEs in developing countries use social media to connect their customers to their products and services. However, the factors that have led the existing SMEs in Africa to adopt or reject Social Media need to be clarified to understand the key contributing factors and influences at play. This paper adopts the learning-by-doing concept from economic theory to explore the factors that influence the adoption of social media. A primary survey follows this to examine the use of social media among firms in the commercial districts of Kenya and Nigeria. The preliminary surveys in both countries were combined into a single dataset to analyse the relationship between social media use and learning-by-doing. The results show that while small SMEs are limited in their social media capacity, medium size firms tend to invest in their social media presence, and larger-size firms still rely on traditional marketing channels

Wind Turbines and Coastal Recreation Demand

We examine the impact of coastal wind turbines on coastal tourism and recreation for residents of the northern CAMA counties in North Carolina. A combination of telephone and web survey data are used to assess the impact of coastal wind farms on trip behavior and site choice. Most of the respondents to our telephone survey claim to support offshore wind energy development, and independent survey data suggest that the observed levels of support may be indicative of the broader population in this region. Overall, we find very little impact of coastal wind turbines on aggregate recreational visitation; loss in consumer surplus associated with wide spread wind development in the coastal zone is insignificant at $17 (or about 1.5$55 per household. On average, we find no evidence of aversion to wind farms 4 miles out in the ocean, or for wind farms located in coastal estuaries. For all wind farm scenarios, we find evidence of preference heterogeneity– some respondents find this appealing while others find it aversive. Key Words: Recreation demand, tourism, renewable energy