Virtually connected, practically mobile

This is the post-print version of the Chapter. The official published version can be accessed from the links below - Copyright @ 2006 SpringerThis chapter addresses a central issue in studies of mobile work and mobile technology – what is the work of mobile workers, and how do they use the resources that they have to undertake this work (i.e. the work they have to do in order to do their work)? In contrast to many of the other papers in this collection, the objective of this chapter is to examine individual mobile work, and not teamwork and co-operation other than where it impacts on the work of individuals. We present data from a study of mobile workers, examining a range of mobile workers to produce a rich picture of their work. Our analysis reveals insights into how mobile workers mix their mobility with their work, home and social lives, their use of mobile technology, the problems – technological and otherwise – inherent in being mobile, and the strategies that they use to manage their work, time, other resources and availability. Our findings demonstrate important issues in understanding mobile work, including the maintenance of communities of practice, the role and management of interpersonal awareness and co-ordination, how environmental resources affect activity, the impact of mobility on family/social relationships and the crossover between the mobile workers’ private and working lives, how preplanning is employed prior to travel, and how mobile workers perform activity multitasking, for example through making use of ‘dead time’. Finally, we turn to the implications of this data for the design and deployment of mobile virtual work (MVW) technologies for individuals and a broader organisational context

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)

Quarkonia in Hamiltonian Light-Front QCD

A constituent parton picture of hadrons with logarithmic confinement naturally arises in weak coupling light-front QCD. Confinement provides a mass gap that allows the constituent picture to emerge. The effective renormalized Hamiltonian is computed to ${\cal O}(g^2)$, and used to study charmonium and bottomonium. Radial and angular excitations can be used to fix the coupling $\alpha$, the quark mass $M$, and the cutoff $\Lambda$. The resultant hyperfine structure is very close to experiment.Comment: 9 pages, 1 latex figure included in the text. Published version (much more reader-friendly); corrected error in self-energ

Note on restoring manifest rotational symmetry in hyperfine and fine structure in light-front QED

We study the part of the renormalized, cutoff QED light-front Hamiltonian that does not change particle number. The Hamiltonian contains interactions that must be treated in second-order bound state perturbation theory to obtain hyperfine structure. We show that a simple unitary transformation leads directly to the familiar Breit-Fermi spin-spin and tensor interactions, which can be treated in degenerate first-order bound-state perturbation theory, thus simplifying analytic light-front QED calculations. To the order in momenta we need to consider, this transformation is equivalent to a Melosh rotation. We also study how the similarity transformation affects spin-orbit interactions.Comment: 17 pages, latex fil

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

#CHIMoney: Financial interactions, digital cash, capital exchange and mobile money

Interactions around money and financial services are a critical part of our lives on and off-line. New technologies and new ways of interacting with these technologies are of huge interest; they enable new business models and ways of making sense of this most important aspect of our everyday lives. At the same time, money is an essential element in HCI research and design. This workshop is intended to bring together researchers and practitioners involved in the design and use of systems that combine digital and new media with monetary and financial interactions to build on an understanding of these technologies and their impacts on users' behaviors. The workshop will focus on social, technical, and economic aspects around everyday user interactions with money and emerging financial technologies and systems

Perturbative Tamm-Dancoff Renormalization

A new two-step renormalization procedure is proposed. In the first step, the effects of high-energy states are considered in the conventional (Feynman) perturbation theory. In the second step, the coupling to many-body states is eliminated by a similarity transformation. The resultant effective Hamiltonian contains only interactions which do not change particle number. It is subject to numerical diagonalization. We apply the general procedure to a simple example for the purpose of illustration.Comment: 20 pages, RevTeX, 10 figure

HOW MUCH DO FARMERS PAY IN TAXES?

A variety of federal, state, and local taxes are levied on farming operations in the United States. To date, there has been no attempt to systematically estimate what the total tax burden is on U.S. farms and how that burden varies from state to state. Based on the results of this analysis, the total farmer tax burden in 1994 was estimated at nearly $17 billion, most of which was in the form of real property tax (44%) and federal personal income tax (26%).farms, income taxes, property taxes, tax burdens, Agricultural Finance, Public Economics,