Identifying customer expectations is key to evidence based service delivery

As librarians and information professionals we share a common rationale: to deliver enhanced services for our customers. The importance of this is self-evident - if we don’t have customers we don't have a job. We therefore put our services at peril if we don’t put the customer at the heart of what we are trying to do. The now-familiar description of evidence based library and information practice reminds us that we need "to integrate user-reported, practitioner-observed and research-derived evidence as an explicit basis for decision-making" (Booth, 2006). This begs several important questions - Who are our users? How can we best capture reports from these users regarding their expected outcomes? How might we as library practitioners observe (and act upon!) what our users require? In attempting to answer such questions we discover potential value in methodologies with a business orientation; utilising tools from the commercial sector such as Customer Value Discovery research (McKnight, 2007a; McKnight & Berrington, 2008)

Canonical Phase Space Formulation of Quasilocal General Relativity

We construct a Hamiltonian formulation of quasilocal general relativity using an extended phase space that includes boundary coordinates as configuration variables. This allows us to use Hamiltonian methods to derive an expression for the energy of a non-isolated region of space-time that interacts with its neighbourhood. This expression is found to be very similar to the Brown-York quasilocal energy that was originally derived by Hamilton-Jacobi methods. We examine the connection between the two formalisms and find that when the boundary conditions for the two are harmonized, the resulting quasilocal energies are identical.Comment: 31 pages, 2 figures, references added, typos corrected, section 3 revised for clarity, to appear in Classical and Quantum Gravit

Free Space Optical Link Utilizing a Modulated Retro-Reflector Intended for Planetary Duplex Communication Links Between an Orbiter and Surface Unit

Presented are simulation and experimental results that provide duplex optical-free space communication links with minimal power and pointing requirements by using a modulated retro-reflector (MRR) for planetary communications. The design is the MRR resides on the surface of a planet or moon, where energy is scarce, while the source of the communication laser resides on an orbiter to achieve satellite-to-ground communications. Also, a simulated scenario using the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is provided for real world potential results. The information sent through this communication path can range from raw scientific data to multimedia files such as videos and pictures. Bidirectional communications is established with the MRR by using a nested pulse position modulation (PPM) structure. This modulation scheme is then evaluated for its validity in a proof-of-concept experiment. Initial results indicate a promising return-link performance of at least 300 kbps in the nested arrangement

Quasilocal energy and naked black holes

We extend the Brown and York notion of quasilocal energy to include coupled electromagnetic and dilaton fields and also allow for spatial boundaries that are not orthogonal to the foliation of the spacetime. We investigate how the quasilocal quantities measured by sets of observers transform with respect to boosts. As a natural application of this work we investigate the naked black holes of Horowitz and Ross calculating the quasilocal energies measured by static versus infalling observers.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure; submitted to the 8th Canadian Conference on General Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics. This paper is a condensed version of gr-qc/990707

The first law for slowly evolving horizons

We study the mechanics of Hayward's trapping horizons, taking isolated horizons as equilibrium states. Zeroth and second laws of dynamic horizon mechanics come from the isolated and trapping horizon formalisms respectively. We derive a dynamical first law by introducing a new perturbative formulation for dynamic horizons in which "slowly evolving" trapping horizons may be viewed as perturbatively non-isolated.Comment: 4 pages, typos fixed, minor changes in wording for clarity, to appear in PR

Design Spaces in Visual Analytics Based on Goals: Analytical Behaviour, Exploratory Investigation, Information Design & Perceptual Tasks

This paper considers a number of perspectives on design spaces in visual analytics and proposes a new set of four design spaces, based on user goals. Three of the user goals are derived from the literature and are categorised under the terms exploratory investigation, perceptual tasks, and information design. The fourth goal is categorised as analytical behaviour; a recently defined term referring to the study of decision-making facilitated by visual analytics. This paper contributes to the literature on decision-making in visual analytics with a survey of real-world applications within the analytical behaviour design space and by providing a new perspective on design spaces. Central to our analysis is the introduction of decision concepts and theories from economics into a visual analytics context. Given the recent interest in decision-making we wanted to understand the emerging topic of analytical behaviour as a design space and found it necessary to look at more than just decision-making to make a valuable contribution. The result is an initial framework suitable for use in the analysis or design of analytical behaviour applications

Control system for hunger and its implications in animals and man

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