Competition and cooperation: Libraries and publishers in the transition to electronic scholarly journals

The conversion of scholarly journals to digital format is proceeding rapidly, especially for those from large commercial and learned society publishers. This conversion offers the best hope for survival for such publishers. The infamous "journal crisis" is more of a library cost crisis than a publisher pricing problem, with internal library costs much higher than the amount spent on purchasing books and journals. Therefore publishers may be able to retain or even increase their revenues and profits, while at the same time providing a superior service. To do this, they will have to take over many of the function of libraries, and they can do that only in the digital domain. This paper examines publishers' strategies, how they are likely to evolve, and how they will affect libraries

Too Expensive to Meter: The influence of transaction costs in transportation and communication

Technology appears to be making fine-scale charging (as in tolls on roads that depend on time of day or even on current and anticipated levels of congestion) increasingly feasible. And such charging appears to be increasingly desirable, as traffic on roads continues to grow, and costs and public opposition limit new construction. Similar incentives towards fine-scale charging also appear to be operating in communications and other areas, such as electricity usage. Standard economic theory supports such measures, and technology is being developed and deployed to implement them. But their spread is not very rapid, and prospects for the future are uncertain. This paper presents a collection of sketches, some from ancient history, some from current developments, that illustrate the costs that charging imposes. Some of those costs are explicit (in terms of the monetary costs to users, and the costs of implementing the charging mechanisms). Others are implicit, such as the time or the mental processing costs of users. These argue that the case for fine-scale charging is not unambiguous, and that in many cases may be inappropriate.transportation, communication, transaction costs, collection costs

Numerical study of the derivative of the Riemann zeta function at zeros

The derivative of the Riemann zeta function was computed numerically on several large sets of zeros at large heights. Comparisons to known and conjectured asymptotics are presented.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures; minor typos fixe

What would surprise early Victorian market players if they came alive today?

Perhaps the greatest surprise would be the combination of high equity prices and low long-term interest rates, writes Andrew Odlyzk

The zeta function on the critical line: Numerical evidence for moments and random matrix theory models

Results of extensive computations of moments of the Riemann zeta function on the critical line are presented. Calculated values are compared with predictions motivated by random matrix theory. The results can help in deciding between those and competing predictions. It is shown that for high moments and at large heights, the variability of moment values over adjacent intervals is substantial, even when those intervals are long, as long as a block containing 10^9 zeros near zero number 10^23. More than anything else, the variability illustrates the limits of what one can learn about the zeta function from numerical evidence. It is shown the rate of decline of extreme values of the moments is modelled relatively well by power laws. Also, some long range correlations in the values of the second moment, as well as asymptotic oscillations in the values of the shifted fourth moment, are found. The computations described here relied on several representations of the zeta function. The numerical comparison of their effectiveness that is presented is of independent interest, for future large scale computations.Comment: 31 pages, 10 figures, 19 table

The History of Communications and Its Implications for the Internet

The Internet is the latest in a long succession of communication technologies. The goal of this work is to draw lessons from the evolution of all these services. Little attention is paid to technology as such, since that has changed radically many times. Instead, the stress is on the steady growth in volume of communication, the evolution in the type of traffic sent, the qualitative change this growth produces in how people treat communication, and the evolution of pricing. The focus is on the user, and in particular on how quality and price differentiation have been used by service providers to influence consumer behavior, and how consumers have reacted. There are repeating patterns in the histories of communication technologies, including ordinary mail, the telegraph, the telephone, and the Internet. In particular, the typical story for each service is that quality rises, prices decrease, and usage increases to produce increased total revenues. At the same time, prices become simpler. The historical analogies of this paper suggest that the Internet will evolve in a similar way, towards simplicity. The schemes that aim to provide differentiated service levels and sophisticated pricing schemes are unlikely to be widely adopted. Price and quality differentiation are valuable tools that can provide higher revenues and increase utilization efficiency of a network, and thus in general increase social welfare. Such measures, most noticeable in airline pricing, are spreading to many services and products, especially high-tech ones. However, it appears that as communication services become less expensive and are used more fre-quently, those arguments lose out to customers? desire for simplicity

On the existence of optimum cyclic burst-correcting codes

It is shown that for each integer b >= 1 infinitely many optimum cyclic b-burst-correcting codes exist, i.e., codes whose length n, redundancy r, and burst-correcting capability b, satisfy n = 2^{r-b+1} - 1. Some optimum codes for b = 3, 4, and 5 are also studied in detail

On the Properties of a Tree-Structured Server Process

Let X0 be a nonnegative integer-valued random variable and let an independent copy of X0 be assigned to each leaf of a binary tree of depth k. If X0 and X0′ are adjacent leaves, let X1=(X0−1)++(X0′−1)+ be assigned to the parent node. In general, if Xj and Xj′ are assigned to adjacent nodes at level j = 0,⋯, k − 1, then Xj and Xj′ are, in turn, independent and the value assigned to their parent node is then Xj+1=(Xj−1)++(Xj′−1)+. We ask what is the behavior of Xk as k→∞. We give sufficient conditions for Xk→∞ and for Xk→0 and ask whether these are the only nontrivial possibilities. The problem is of interest because it asks for the asymptotics of a nonlinear transform which has an expansive term (the + in the sense of addition) and a contractive term (the + in the sense of positive part)