Attaining social value from electronic government

We define and elaborate a Social Value framework supporting evaluation and attainment of the broader socio-political and socio-economic goals that characterise many electronic government initiatives. The key elements of the framework are the willingness of citizens to (positively) recommend an e-government service to others, based upon personal trust in the service provider, and personal experience of the service, based upon experience of service provision and outcomes. The validity of the framework is explored through an empirical quantitative study of citizens' experiences of a newly introduced e-government system to allocate public social housing. The results of this study include evidence of generic antecedents of trust and willingness to recommend, pointing the way to more general applicability of the framework for designers and managers of electronic government systems

Virtual Property: Protecting Bits In Context

A virtual environment is a presentation of a virtual world to a real person, as if the person were virtual and in that world. The most ubiquitous examples today of virtual environments are multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft and Project Entropia. These games provide thousands of users from all over the real world with persistent virtual worlds and consistent personal representation in the virtual world in the form of characters. The characters interact with each other within the virtual world. In fact, players spend ten hours per week building up the strength and abilities of their characters. This process is called “leveling up.

Portable dynamic fundus instrument

A portable diagnostic image analysis instrument is disclosed for retinal funduscopy in which an eye fundus image is optically processed by a lens system to a charge coupled device (CCD) which produces recordable and viewable output data and is simultaneously viewable on an electronic view finder. The fundus image is processed to develop a representation of the vessel or vessels from the output data

Dark matter relic density in Gauss-Bonnet braneworld cosmology

The relic density of symmetric and asymmetric dark matter in a Gauss-Bonnet (GB) modified Randall-Sundrum (RS) type II braneworld cosmology is investigated. The existing study of symmetric dark matter in a GB braneworld (Okada and Okada, 2009) found that the expansion rate was reduced compared to that in standard General Relativity (GR), thereby delaying particle freeze-out and resulting in relic abundances which are suppressed by up to O(10^−2). This is in direct contrast to the behaviour observed in RS braneworlds where the expansion rate is enhanced and the final relic abundance boosted. However, this finding that relic abundances are suppressed in a GB braneworld is based upon a highly contrived situation in which the GB era evolves directly into a standard GR era, rather than passing through a RS era as is the general situation. This collapse of the RS era requires equating the mass scale m(α) of the GB modification and the mass scale m(σ) of the brane tension. However, if the GB contribution is to be considered as the lowest order correction from string theory to the RS action, we would expect m(α) > m(σ). We investigate the effect upon the relic abundance of choosing more realistic values for the ratio Rm ≡ mα/mσ and find that the relic abundance can be either enhanced or suppressed by more than two orders of magnitude. However, suppression only occurs for a small range of parameter choices and, overwhelmingly, the predominant situation is that of enhancement as we recover the usual Randall-Sundrum type behaviour in the limit Rm >> 1. We use the latest observational bound Ω(DM)h^2 = 0.1187 ± 0.0017 to constrain the various model parameters and briefly discuss the implications for direct/indirect dark matter detection experiments as well as dark matter particle models