105,836 research outputs found
The evolution of anti-circumvention law
Countries around the world have since 1996 updated copyright laws to prohibit the circumvention of "Technological Protection Measures", technologies that restrict the use of copyright works with the aim of reducing infringement and enforcing contractual restrictions. This article traces the legislative and treaty history that lies behind these new legal provisions, and examines their interaction with a wide range of other areas of law: from international exhaustion of rights, through competition law, anti-discrimination measures, regulation of computer security research, constitutional rights to freedom of expression and privacy, and consumer protection measures. The article finds that anti-circumvention law as promoted by US trade policy has interfered with public policy objectives in all of these areas. It picks out key themes from the free trade agreements, legislation and jurisprudence of the World Trade Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization, USA, EU member states, and South American, Asian and Australasian nations. There is now a significant movement in treaty negotiations and in legislatures to reduce the scope of anti-circumvention provisions to ensure their compatibility with other important policy objectives
Maintaining consumer confidence in electronic payment mechanisms
Credit card fraud is already a significant factor inhibiting consumer confidence in e-commerce. As more advanced payment systems become common, what legal and technological mechanisms are required to ensure that fraud does not do long-term damage to consumers' willingness to use electronic payment mechanisms
The effect of WWW document structure on students' information retrieval
This experiment investigated the effect the structure of a WWW document has on the amount of information retained by a reader. Three structures common on the Internet were tested: one long page; a table of contents leading to individual sections; and short sections of text on separate pages with revision questions. Participants read information structured in one of these ways and were then tested on recall of that information. A further experiment investigated the effect that 'browsing' - moving between pages - has on retrieval. There was no difference between the structures for overall amount of information retained. The single page version was best for recall of facts, while the short sections of text with revision questions led to the most accurate inferences from the material. Browsing on its own had no significant impact on information retrieval. Revision questions rather than structure per se were therefore the key factor
Evaluating stories for diverse audiences
The issues are similar in storytelling. These students of different races,
sexes, and ages had very different reactions to the story variants they studied,
reactions that depended on their cultural experiences as well as their
individual viewpoints. So, too, will a storytelling audience bring their own
cultural perspectives to the story they hear. The creators of these variants
were also responding, consciously or unconsciously, to cultural contexts
for The Story of Little Black Sambo; so, too, must storytellers engage with the
cultural contexts of the stories they tell.published or submitted for publicatio
Equivalence of the Beta-function of the Variational Approach to that of QCD
The variational ansatz for the ground state wavefunctional of QCD is found to
capture the anti-screening behaviour that contributes the dominant `-4' to the
beta-function and leads to asymptotic freedom. By considering an SU(N) purely
gauge theory in the Hamiltonian formalism and choosing the Coulomb gauge, the
origins of all screening and anti-screening contributions in gluon processes
are found in terms of the physical degrees of freedom. The overwhelming anti-
screening contribution of `-4' is seen to originate in the renormalisation of a
Coulomb interaction by a transverse gluon. The lesser screening contribution of
`1/3' is seen to originate in processes involving transverse gluon
interactions. It is thus apparent how the variational ansatz must be developed
to capture the full running of the QCD coupling constant.Comment: 35 pages, 11 figures, LaTe
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