Advantages of JAESE’s Open-Access Strategy

There has been considerable debate in recent years—some well informed and others not so well informed—about the advantages and disadvantages of publishing in online, open-access journals as compared to traditional, subscription-based, print journals.  For many professional societies, traditional, subscription-based, page-charge funded, print journals have served as an important service that societies can enthusiastically provide to their members, as well as provide societies with a healthy stream of financial revenue.  At the same time as providing revenue to run a society, society members have been able to provide important service to the broader professional community by publishing their own scholarship and conducting peer reviews of others’ research.  By far, the majority of a journal’s cost has been born by libraries paying hefty subscription fees

Tracking the Web Visibility of North Country Communities

In an age of increasing reliance on the World Wide Web for researching destination information, geographic communities that once relied on conventional mass media for self promotion now find themselves obligated to maintain a virtual presence. Our North Country-Adirondack communities have the tools to make their defining regional features known to Web navigators around the world. But are community stakeholders indeed working toward a virtual identity that is commensurate with the region\u27s physical reality, ensuring they are sufficiently present, visible, and presented online? This article reports the outcomes of Phase I of a long-term Community Web Visibility project, focusing on one fundamental component of community virtual identity - Visibility. Visibility is an important indication of the comparative virtual area that any community inhabits on the Web. The discussion of results reveals a connection between Web visibility, online identity, and a community\u27s potential for self promotion and economic development

Getting to know you: Engagement and relationship building: First interim national positive futures case study research report

This report represents the culmination of the first phase of the Positive Futures (PF) Case Studies Research Project rather than a definitive set of findings as such. Rather like the PF programme itself it is very much a work in progress which is evolving all the time in the context of the action research approach we have adopted. This approach involves a cycle of action and reflection, with both the projects and research adapting in relation to the themes that emerge from the study as it progresses. Nevertheless whilst this element of the research has been concerned as much with the establishment of relations with projects and participants as investigating the relationships between them, we have begun to identify a number of tentative themes and findings. These themes are presented in a fashion which is intended to guide the future direction of projects every bit as much as to gain abstract theoretical insight. Yet this recognition of the importance of practicality and direction should not distract from the importance of gaining a wider contextual feel for the programme. For whilst this summary is intended to highlight the key themes emerging from the research and the policy and practice issues associated with them, it is in the detail of the main report that a full appreciation of the PF approach emerges. It is from the more narrative accounts in these subsequent parts that we have drawn the conclusions and recommendations presented here and which will provide the baselines against which we assess future progress. Indeed these accounts are themselves drawn from three regional reports focused on the seven case studies that constitute the overall national research project

Using marine planning to balance competing demands on the marine environment: international comparisons

[Extract from Executive Summary] Scottish and UK context. The Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 established an integrated planning system for the UK’s marine environment. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have developed separate marine planning processes with the 2009 Act remaining the overarching legislation. This has resulted in a variety of institutional and governance arrangements across the UK.Publisher PD

Acting rehearsal in collaborative multimodal mixed reality environments

This paper presents the use of our multimodal mixed reality telecommunication system to support remote acting rehearsal. The rehearsals involved two actors, located in London and Barcelona, and a director in another location in London. This triadic audiovisual telecommunication was performed in a spatial and multimodal collaborative mixed reality environment based on the 'destination-visitor' paradigm, which we define and put into use. We detail our heterogeneous system architecture, which spans the three distributed and technologically asymmetric sites, and features a range of capture, display, and transmission technologies. The actors' and director's experience of rehearsing a scene via the system are then discussed, exploring successes and failures of this heterogeneous form of telecollaboration. Overall, the common spatial frame of reference presented by the system to all parties was highly conducive to theatrical acting and directing, allowing blocking, gross gesture, and unambiguous instruction to be issued. The relative inexpressivity of the actors' embodiments was identified as the central limitation of the telecommunication, meaning that moments relying on performing and reacting to consequential facial expression and subtle gesture were less successful

A quantum Monte Carlo study of the one-dimensional ionic Hubbard model

Quantum Monte Carlo methods are used to study a quantum phase transition in a 1D Hubbard model with a staggered ionic potential (D). Using recently formulated methods, the electronic polarization and localization are determined directly from the correlated ground state wavefunction and compared to results of previous work using exact diagonalization and Hartree-Fock. We find that the model undergoes a thermodynamic transition from a band insulator (BI) to a broken-symmetry bond ordered (BO) phase as the ratio of U/D is increased. Since it is known that at D = 0 the usual Hubbard model is a Mott insulator (MI) with no long-range order, we have searched for a second transition to this state by (i) increasing U at fixed ionic potential (D) and (ii) decreasing D at fixed U. We find no transition from the BO to MI state, and we propose that the MI state in 1D is unstable to bond ordering under the addition of any finite ionic potential. In real 1D systems the symmetric MI phase is never stable and the transition is from a symmetric BI phase to a dimerized BO phase, with a metallic point at the transition