207 research outputs found
Downeast Recording Library for the Blind Inc.: Why It Is, What It Is, Where It Came From, Where It\u27s Going
An informational pamphlet explaining programs and services available through the Downeast Recording Library for the Blind, Inc., on Campbell Street in Portland, Maine, circa 1964. Includes a list of the program\u27s Officers and features a photograph and statement about the program from Senator Margaret Chase Smith
Narrating Devolution: Politics and/as Scottish Fiction
This article explores the tensions between the competing cultural andpolitical narratives of devolution, anchored around James Robertson’s state- of-the-nation novelAnd the Land Lay Still(2010). The article emergesfrom the two-year research project ‘Narrating Scottish Devolution’, and includes excerpts from workshops held on this topic at the Stirling Centre for Scottish Studies, alongside archival work on the internal debates of the Royal Commission on the Constitution (1969–73). The article unpicks competing teleologies of government de-centralisation and the recovery of Scottish cultural agency, ending with a call to begin the thorny task ofnarrativising devolution in political and historical terms. Access the podcast at: http://hdl.handle.net/11667/77The article reports the findings of a research project ('Narrating Scottish Devolution: Literature, Politics and the Culturalist Paradigmâ) supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (ref SG132334)
Public Forum: The War Against Substance Abuse - Utilization of the Celebrity Positive Role Model Theory as a Preventative Measure
Public Forum: The War Against Substance Abuse - Utilization of the Celebrity Positive Role Model Theory as a Preventative Measure
A document management system for the conservation of cultural heritage buildings
A document management system (DcMS) for the efficient organization and visualization of the data related to conservation projects in cultural heritage buildings applied to a case study is presented. The objective of the system is to allow for the interchange of information between different specialists, to prevent the loss of data through time and to promote technical awareness of general public. For this purpose, a database for the management of the information involved in the works carried out in the Monastery of Santa Maria de Salzedas (Portugal) was created. The newly developed system collects the information about the Monastery produced in a period of five years by different specialists (architects, engineers, geologists, physicists and material scientists). The system is fully web based and includes a Back-End for easy uploading of information and a Front-End for automatic visualization and downloading of the information. Both Back- and Front-End are accessible via an Internet connection.The DcMS presented here is part of the project POCTI-HEC-60431-2004, Integrated approach for conservation and valuation of monuments, funded by FCT (Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation). F. Pena acknowledges funding from the FCT grant contract SFRH/BPD/17449/2004. The system was programmed by Engineers Ana Lima and Daniel Oliveira of the Centre of Computer Graphics (CCG)
Can filesharers be triggered by economic incentives? Results of an experiment
Illegal filesharing on the internet leads to considerable financial losses for artists and copyright owners as well as producers and sellers of music. Thus far, measures to contain this phenomenon have been rather restrictive. However, there are still a considerable number of illegal systems, and users are able to decide quite freely between legal and illegal downloads because the latter are still difficult to sanction. Recent economic approaches account for the improved bargaining position of users. They are based on the idea of revenue-splitting between professional sellers and peers. In order to test such an innovative business model, the study reported in this article carried out an experiment with 100 undergraduate students, forming five small peer-to-peer networks.The networks were confronted with different economic conditions.The results indicate that even experienced filesharers hold favourable attitudes towards revenue-splitting.They seem to be willing to adjust their behaviour to different economic conditions
Ethnicity and consumption: South Asian food shopping patterns in Britain 1947-75
Authors' draft version also available on University of Surrey e-print repository. Final version published by Sage and available at http://joc.sagepub.com/This article reviews the literature that explores the relationship between ethnic
identities and food consumption, with particular reference to business management
studies. It focuses on the food shopping practices of south Asians in Britain in the
period 1947 to 1975, to illustrate the need for more historically contextualized studies
that can provide a more nuanced exploration of any interconnections between ethnic
identity and shopping behaviour. The article draws on a reasonably long-standing
interest in ethnicity and consumption in marketing studies, and explores the
conceptual use of acculturation within this literature. The arguments put forward are
framed by recent interdisciplinary studies of the broader relationship between
consumption and identity, which stress the importance of contextualizing any
influence of ethnic identifications through a wider consideration of other factors
including societal status, gender and age, rather than giving it singular treatment. The
article uses a body of empirical research drawn from recent oral histories, to explore
how these factors informed everyday shopping practices among south Asians in Britain. It examines some of the shopping and wider food provisioning strategies
adopted by early immigrants on arrival in Britain. It considers the interaction between
the south Asian population and the changing retail structure, in the context of the
development of self-service and the supermarket. Finally, it demonstrates how age,
gender and socioeconomic status interacted with ethnic identities to produce
variations in shopping patterns
The Bits of Silence : Redundant Traffic in VoIP
Human conversation is characterized by brief pauses and so-called turn-taking behavior between the speakers. In the context of VoIP, this means that there are frequent periods where the microphone captures only background noise â or even silence whenever the microphone is muted. The bits transmitted from such silence periods introduce overhead in terms of data usage, energy consumption, and network infrastructure costs. In this paper, we contribute by shedding light on these costs for VoIP applications. We systematically measure the performance of six popular mobile VoIP applications with controlled human conversation and acoustic setup. Our analysis demonstrates that significant savings can indeed be achievable - with the best performing silence suppression technique being effective on 75% of silent pauses in the conversation in a quiet place. This results in 2-5 times data savings, and 50-90% lower energy consumption compared to the next better alternative. Even then, the effectiveness of silence suppression can be sensitive to the amount of background noise, underlying speech codec, and the device being used. The codec characteristics and performance do not depend on the network type. However, silence suppression makes VoIP traffic network friendly as much as VoLTE traffic. Our results provide new insights into VoIP performance and offer a motivation for further enhancements, such as performance-aware codec selection, that can significantly benefit a wide variety of voice assisted applications, as such intelligent home assistants and other speech codec enabled IoT devices.Peer reviewe
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