Explaining the Circumstances

Christopher North with his wife Marisa run the Almassera Vella Arts Centre  in a mountain village near Alicante, Spain (www,oldolivepress.com).He facilitates poetry readings , writing workshops and  7 day residential courses in the Spring and Autumn. His pamphlet collection 'A Mesh of Wires '(Smith Doorstop 1999) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, he had a third place in the National (1995) and recently won the Silver Wyvern at the ‘Poetry on the Lake' Festival in Italy. His first full collection ‘Explaining the Circumstances’ was published by Oversteps Books in February 2010 (www.overstepsbooks.com). The poem he has gracefully allowed us to include in this issue, is the title poem in this collection. A planned bi-lingual joint collection with the poet Terry Gifford ‘The Other Side of Aguilar’  is due for publication later this year

Space for Two to Think: Large, High-Resolution Displays for Co-located Collaborative Sensemaking

Large, high-resolution displays carry the potential to enhance single display groupware collaborative sensemaking for intelligence analysis tasks by providing space for common ground to develop, but it is up to the visual analytics tools to utilize this space effectively. In an exploratory study, we compared two tools (Jigsaw and a document viewer), which were adapted to support multiple input devices, to observe how the large display space was used in establishing and maintaining common ground during an intelligence analysis scenario using 50 textual documents. We discuss the spatial strategies employed by the pairs of participants, which were largely dependent on tool type (data-centric or function-centric), as well as how different visual analytics tools used collaboratively on large, high-resolution displays impact common ground in both process and solution. Using these findings, we suggest design considerations to enable future co-located collaborative sensemaking tools to take advantage of the benefits of collaborating on large, high-resolution displays

Large High Resolution Displays for Co-Located Collaborative Intelligence Analysis

Large, high-resolution vertical displays carry the potential to increase the accuracy of collaborative sensemaking, given correctly designed visual analytics tools. From an exploratory user study using a fictional intelligence analysis task, we investigated how users interact with the display to construct spatial schemas and externalize information, as well as how they establish shared and private territories. We investigated the spatial strategies of users partitioned by tool type used (document- or entity-centric). We classified the types of territorial behavior exhibited in terms of how the users interacted with the display (integrated or independent workspaces). Next, we examined how territorial behavior impacted the common ground between the pairs of users. Finally, we recommend design guidelines for building co-located collaborative visual analytics tools specifically for use on large, high-resolution vertical displays

Educational research : An unorthodox introduction

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Studies in the morphogenesis of cabbage with special reference to the phenomenon of heading

Abstract Not Provide

Determinants of property rights in Poland and Ukraine: the polity or politicians?

North (1994) famously remarked that ‘it is the polity that defines and enforces property rights’. This paper traces the development of property rights in Poland and Ukraine and explores their divergence over the past three centuries using North's framework of economic calculation. In each country, the distribution of political power and political institutions had a profound impact on property rights. Indeed, while it was the Polish polity that defined the evolution of property rights from 1386 to 1795 and then from 1989 onward, due to diffusion of power, it was Ukrainian politicians that controlled the destiny of property rights for most of Ukraine's history. This situation has not changed despite the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, and recent moves in Poland show how tenuous property rights are in the face of political opposition