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Building an alternative social currency: Dematerialising and rematerialising digital money across media
This paper reports on the user experience and design of physical and digital forms of a mixed-media local currency. We reconceive digitally mediated transactions as social interactions and report on the development of conceptual designs informed by user research and interactive workshops. Our findings show that use is strongly tied to conceptions of locality and community, markers of identity, information exchange and the digital and physical forms as tools for shaping interactions. The form of the currency can make the invisible visible, exposing our identities and values, business models, and the details of the transactions themselves. Our analysis stresses the need to provide opportunities for extending social interaction, making more local connections and deriving the best value from those connections, without insulating individuals from each other, or from the wider geographical context. Themes that emerged from the user research were visualized as conceptual designs for digitally augmented media, allowing us to explore the monetary transaction at three levels: the material, as interaction between two parties, and the context of the transaction.The RCUK Digital Economy theme (EP/K012304/1)
Fundamental Oscillation Periods of the Interlayer Exchange Coupling beyond the RKKY Approximation
A general method for obtaining the oscillation periods of the interlayer
exchange coupling is presented. It is shown that it is possible for the
coupling to oscillate with additional periods beyond the ones predicted by the
RKKY theory. The relation between the oscillation periods and the spacer Fermi
surface is clarified, showing that non-RKKY periods do not bear a direct
correspondence with the Fermi surface. The interesting case of a FCC(110)
structure is investigated, unmistakably proving the existence and relevance of
non-RKKY oscillations. The general conditions for the occurrence of non-RKKY
oscillations are also presented.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figures ; to appear in J. Phys.: Condens. Mat
Putting the ‘digital’ in Digital Intermediaries: the role of technical infrastructure in building business models
Digital Technology Innovation and Financial Business Practices The UK economy has a huge dependence on financial services, and this is increasingly based on digital platforms. Innovating new economic models around consumer financial services through the use of digital technologies is seen as increasingly important in developed economies. There are a number of drivers for this, ranging from national economic factors to the prosaic nature of enabling cheap, speedy and timely interactions for users. The potential for these new digital solutions is that they will allay an over-reliance on the traditional banking sector, which has proved itself to be unstable and risky, and we have seen a number of national policy moves to encourage growth in this sector. Partly as a result of the 2008 banking crisis, there has been an explosion in peer-to-peer financial services for non-professional consumers. These organisations act as intermediaries between users looking to trade goods or credit. However, building self-sustaining or profitable financial services within this novel space is itself fraught with commercial, regulatory, technical and social problems. This report addresses the mutual shaping of business models and innovations in digital technical infrastructure – both client-facing and administrative back-end – in two retail financial products currently in use in the United Kingdom: peer-to-peer consumer lending and a local digital/paper hybrid currency system. The two products and their issuing firms, Zopa Limited (Zopa) and The Bristol Pound Community Interest Company (the Bristol Pound), respectively, are established leaders in their respective product areas: Zopa was established in 2005 and the Bristol Pound in 2010. Each of these firms seeks to disrupt an established financial market through the application of digital technologies and processes: consumer lending for Zopa and retail payment for the Bristol Pound. Our research has involved teams from Lancaster University examining Zopa and Brunel University focusing on the Bristol Pound over approximately a one-year period from October 2013 to October 2014. Extensive interviews, document analysis, observation of user interactions, and other methods have been employed to develop the process analyses of the firms presented here. This report is comprised of three primary sections: descriptions of the business and technological processes of each of Zopa and the Bristol Pound, and a final analytical section drawing preliminary conclusions from the research presented.3DaRoC is funded by the UK’s Digital Economy ‘Research in the Wild’ initiative. It has a substantial research budget of over £320K, with £35K of additional industrial support
Exchange coupling between magnetic layers across non-magnetic superlattices
The oscillation periods of the interlayer exchange coupling are investigated
when two magnetic layers are separated by a metallic superlattice of two
distinct non-magnetic materials. In spite of the conventional behaviour of the
coupling as a function of the spacer thickness, new periods arise when the
coupling is looked upon as a function of the number of cells of the
superlattice. The new periodicity results from the deformation of the
corresponding Fermi surface, which is explicitly related to a few controllable
parameters, allowing the oscillation periods to be tuned.Comment: 13 pages; 5 figures; To appear in J. Phys.: Cond. Matte
Exponential behavior of the interlayer exchange coupling across non-magnetic metallic superlattices
It is shown that the coupling between magnetic layers separated by
non-magnetic metallic superlattices can decay exponentially as a function of
the spacer thickness , as opposed to the usual decay. This effect
is due to the lack of constructive contributions to the coupling from extended
states across the spacer. The exponential behavior is obtained by properly
choosing the distinct metals and the superlattice unit cell composition.Comment: To appear in Phys. Rev.
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