Are Online Business Transactions Executed by Electronic Signatures Legally Binding?

Most of us believe that we make contracts over the Internet all the time. We buy books and computers, arrange for hotels and planes, trade stocks, and apply for mortgages. But as recently as seven months ago that transaction was most likely not legally binding. This uncertainty led many practitioners, businesspeople, and consumers to question the efficacy of contracts executed by electronic signatures. Without a uniform standard, many jurisdictions ruled inconsistently, while other jurisdictions did not consider the issue. This disparate treatment threatened the legitimacy of online agreements and deprived both consumers and businesses of the certainty and predictability expected from well-developed markets. The law\u27s formalities evolved outside of the digital world, and the process of adapting them to it has proven to be more difficult than expected. In June of 2000, Congress attempted to solve this problem with the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-Sign)

Dying to be funny : the sociological significance of (un)successful live performance humour.

Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN052826 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

The Geordie joke: the role of humour in the reaffirmation of regional identity

There are two parallel themes involved in the construction of this thesis. One of these themes is the goal of showing the sociological relevance of the study of humour, and the other is the means to achieve the goal, by showing the role of humour in the reaffirmation of the imagery informing the regional identity of the north-east of England. Consequently the first chapter of the thesis is designed to qualitatively develop the theme of regional imagery. From having decided to use regional imagery to illustrate the significance of humour as a social discourse, the focus on the north-east assumes the characteristic of a case study. This enables the research to expand into detail on the working of humour, by keeping to the scope of the regional frame of reference. Within this regional frame, chapter two shows humour as a social practice on the level of professional performance, rather than on the more private level of conversational expression. This is deemed analytically expedient, insofar as the professional comic text can be assessed in terms of its appeal to the region's public. This is to say, that the appeal of the comic text will depend upon the ability of the comedian to produce humour and laughter. Hence chapters two and three are set to find out what makes a professional comedian successful in the north-east. The findings of chapter two suggest the importance of establishing the complete contextual location of live performance humour in the region. This is to show the influence of audience and setting on the success of humour. Chapter three aims to conclude the thesis, by taking account of the extent to which regional image structures feature in the practice of successful live performance humour in the north-east; and thereby display the communicative value of humour

Linear-time Computation of Minimal Absent Words Using Suffix Array

An absent word of a word y of length n is a word that does not occur in y. It is a minimal absent word if all its proper factors occur in y. Minimal absent words have been computed in genomes of organisms from all domains of life; their computation provides a fast alternative for measuring approximation in sequence comparison. There exists an O(n)-time and O(n)-space algorithm for computing all minimal absent words on a fixed-sized alphabet based on the construction of suffix automata (Crochemore et al., 1998). No implementation of this algorithm is publicly available. There also exists an O(n^2)-time and O(n)-space algorithm for the same problem based on the construction of suffix arrays (Pinho et al., 2009). An implementation of this algorithm was also provided by the authors and is currently the fastest available. In this article, we bridge this unpleasant gap by presenting an O(n)-time and O(n)-space algorithm for computing all minimal absent words based on the construction of suffix arrays. Experimental results using real and synthetic data show that the respective implementation outperforms the one by Pinho et al

On the average-case complexity of pattern matching with wildcards

Pattern matching with wildcards is a string matching problem with the goal of finding all factors of a text $t$ of length $n$ that match a pattern $x$ of length $m$, where wildcards (characters that match everything) may be present. In this paper we present a number of complexity results and fast average-case algorithms for pattern matching where wildcards are allowed in the pattern, however, the results are easily adapted to the case where wildcards are allowed in the text as well. We analyse the \textit{average-case} complexity of these algorithms and derive non-trivial time bounds. These are the first results on the average-case complexity of pattern matching with wildcards which provide a provable separation in time complexity between exact pattern matching and pattern matching with wildcards. We introduce the \textit{wc-period} of a string which is the period of the binary mask $x_b$ where $x_b[i]=a$ \textit{iff} $x[i]\neq \phi$ and $b$ otherwise. We denote the length of the wc-period of a string $x$ by \textsc{wcp}(x). We show the following results for constant $0< \epsilon < 1$ and a pattern $x$ of length $m$ and $g$ wildcards with \textsc{wcp}(x)=p the prefix of length $p$ contains $g_p$ wildcards: \begin{itemize} \item If $\displaystyle\lim_{m \rightarrow \infty} \frac{g_p}{p}=0$ there is an optimal algorithm running in \cO(\frac{n \log_\sigma m}{m})-time on average. \item If $\displaystyle\lim_{m \rightarrow \infty} \frac{g_p}{p}=1-\epsilon$ there is an algorithm running in \cO(\frac{n \log_\sigma m\log_2 p}{m})-time on average. \item If $\displaystyle\lim_{m \rightarrow \infty} \frac{g}{m} = \displaystyle\lim_{m \rightarrow \infty} 1-f(m)=1$ any algorithm takes at least $\Omega(\frac{n \log_\sigma m}{f(m)})$-time on average. \end{itemize

Supporting newly qualified nurses in the UK: a systematic literature review

Aim: This is a systematic literature review of the existing published research related to the development of preceptorship to support newly qualified nurses in the United Kingdom (UK). Background: It has been known for some time that newly qualified nurses experience a period of unsettling transition at the point of registration. In the UK, preceptorship has been the professional body’s recommended solution to this for over 20 years. Data Sources: Searches were made of the CINAHL Plus and MEDLINE databases. Review Methods: A systematic review was carried out in August 2011. Twelve separate searches were conducted generating 167 articles, of which 24 were finally reviewed. Papers were critically reviewed and relevant data were extracted and synthesised using an approach based on Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis ( PRISMA). Results and Discussion: A results table is presented of the twenty-four sources generated by the systematic search. Three themes were identified from the empirical evidence base: ‘Managerial Support Framework’; ‘Recruitment and Retention’; and ‘Reflection and Critical Thinking in Action’;. Conclusion: There is strong evidence that the newly qualified nurse benefits from a period of supported and structured preceptorship, which translates to improved recruitment and retention for the employing organisations. Recommendations for Further Research and Practice: The existing literature provides an evidence base upon which to construct a preceptorship programme and a means by which to measure its efficacy and monitor its future development. Case study research projects should be considered for future preceptorship programmes in order to find the most effective methods of delivery.Research funded by Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Trus

Indexing weighted sequences: Neat and efficient

In a weighted sequence, for every position of the sequence and every letter of the alphabet a probability of occurrence of this letter at this position is specified. Weighted sequences are commonly used to represent imprecise or uncertain data, for example in molecular biology, where they are known under the name of Position Weight Matrices. Given a probability threshold 1/z , we say that a string P of length m occurs in a weighted sequence X at position i if the product of probabilities of the letters of P at positions i, . . . , i+m−1 in X is at least 1/z . In this article, we consider an indexing variant of the problem, in which we are to pre-process a weighted sequence to answer multiple pattern matching queries. We present an O(nz)-time construction of an O(nz)-sized index for a weighted sequence of length n that answers pattern matching queries in the optimal O(m+Occ) time, where Occ is the number of occurrences reported. The cornerstone of our data structure is a novel construction of a family of [z] strings that carries the information about all the strings that occur in the weighted sequence with a sufficient probability. We thus improve the most efficient previously known index by Amir et al. (Theor. Comput. Sci., 2008) with size and construction time O(nz2 log z), preserving optimal query time. On the way we develop a new, more straightforward index for the so-called property matching problem. We provide an open-source implementation of our data structure and present experimental results using both synthetic and real data. Our construction allows us also to obtain a significant improvement over the complexities of the approximate variant of the weighted index presented by Biswas et al. at EDBT 2016 and an improvement of the space complexity of their general index. We also present applications of our index