Too far ahead of its time: Barclays, Burroughs and real-time banking

The historiography of computing has until now considered real-time computing in banking as predicated on the possibilities of networked ATMs in the 1970s. This article reveals a different story. It exposes the failed bid by Barclays and Burroughs to make real time a reality for British banking in the 1960s

Structuring information work: Ferranti and Martins Bank, 1952-1968

The adoption of large-scale computers by the British retail banks in the 1960s required a first-time dislocation of customer accounting from its confines in the branches, where it had been dealt with by paper-based and mechanized information systems, to a new collective space: the bank computer center. While historians have rightly stressed the continuities between centralized office work, punched-card tabulation and computerization, the shift from decentralized to centralized information work by means of a computer has received little attention. In this article, I examine the case of Ferranti and Martins Bank and employ elements of Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory to highlight the difficulties of transposing old information practices directly onto new computerized information work

Improved Bounds for rr-Identifying Codes of the Hex Grid

For any positive integer $r$, an $r$-identifying code on a graph $G$ is a set $C\subset V(G)$ such that for every vertex in $V(G)$, the intersection of the radius-$r$ closed neighborhood with $C$ is nonempty and pairwise distinct. For a finite graph, the density of a code is $|C|/|V(G)|$, which naturally extends to a definition of density in certain infinite graphs which are locally finite. We find a code of density less than $5/(6r)$, which is sparser than the prior best construction which has density approximately $8/(9r)$.Comment: 12p

Influence of the atomic-scale inhomogeneity of the pair interaction on extracted from the STM spectra characteristics of high-TcT_c superconductors

The influence of the atomic-scale inhomogeneities of the pairing interaction strength on the superconducting order parameter and the conductance spectra measurable by STM is studied in the framework of weak-coupling BCS-like theory for two-dimensional lattice model. First of all, it is found that the inhomogeneity having the form of atomic-scale regions of enhanced pair interaction increases the ratio of the local low-temperature gap in differential conductance spectra to the local temperature of vanishing the gap $2\Delta_g/T_p$. Even in the framework of mean-field treatment this ratio is shown to be larger than the one corresponding to the homogeneous case. It is shown that the effect of thermal phase fluctuations of the superconducting order parameter can further increase this ratio. Taking them into account in the framework of a toy model we obtained the ratio $2\Delta_g/T_p$ to be $\sim 7-8$. It is found that the additional atomic-scale hopping element disorder and weak potential scatterers, which can also take place in cuprate materials, have no considerable effect on the statistical properties of the system, including the distribution of the gaps, $T_p$ and the ratio $2\Delta_g/T_p$. The second consequence of the atomic-scale order parameter inhomogeneity is the anticorrelation between the low-temperature gap and the high-temperature zero-bias conductance. The obtained results could bear a relation to recent STM measurements.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure