Digital curation and the cloud

Digital curation involves a wide range of activities, many of which could benefit from cloud deployment to a greater or lesser extent. These range from infrequent, resource-intensive tasks which benefit from the ability to rapidly provision resources to day-to-day collaborative activities which can be facilitated by networked cloud services. Associated benefits are offset by risks such as loss of data or service level, legal and governance incompatibilities and transfer bottlenecks. There is considerable variability across both risks and benefits according to the service and deployment models being adopted and the context in which activities are performed. Some risks, such as legal liabilities, are mitigated by the use of alternative, e.g., private cloud models, but this is typically at the expense of benefits such as resource elasticity and economies of scale. Infrastructure as a Service model may provide a basis on which more specialised software services may be provided. There is considerable work to be done in helping institutions understand the cloud and its associated costs, risks and benefits, and how these compare to their current working methods, in order that the most beneficial uses of cloud technologies may be identified. Specific proposals, echoing recent work coordinated by EPSRC and JISC are the development of advisory, costing and brokering services to facilitate appropriate cloud deployments, the exploration of opportunities for certifying or accrediting cloud preservation providers, and the targeted publicity of outputs from pilot studies to the full range of stakeholders within the curation lifecycle, including data creators and owners, repositories, institutional IT support professionals and senior manager

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FARMER AND AGENCY ATTITUDES REGARDING POLICIES TO REDUCE PHOSPHORUS POLLUTION IN THE MINNESOTA RIVER BASIN

Environmental Economics and Policy,

ESTIMATING TRANSACTION COSTS OF ALTERNATIVE POLICIES TO REDUCE PHOSPHOROUS POLLUTION IN THE MINNESOTA RIVER

As point sources of pollution reduce their emissions due to water quality control efforts, nonpoint sources have become relatively more important. In the case of agricultural nonpoint source pollution, the policy instruments recommended by economists are not observed in practice. This study was designed to measure the magnitude of transaction costs associated with policies to reduce agricultural nonpoint source pollution and to determine whether transaction costs help explain the prevalence of the policies actually observed. Interviews with staff from governmental agencies were conducted to estimate transaction costs associated with four policies to reduce agricultural phosphorous pollution in the Minnesota River. The tax on phosphate fertilizers had the lowest transaction costs (U.S. $0.94 million), followed by educational programs on best management practices ($3.11 million), the requirement for conservation tillage on all cropped land ($7.85 million), and expansion of a permanent conservation easement program ($9.37 million). Taxes thus may have advantages with respect to transaction costs as well as abatement costs.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Quantum Hall Effect on the Hyperbolic Plane

In this paper, we study both the continuous model and the discrete model of the Quantum Hall Effect (QHE) on the hyperbolic plane. The Hall conductivity is identified as a geometric invariant associated to an imprimitivity algebra of observables. We define a twisted analogue of the Kasparov map, which enables us to use the pairing between $K$-theory and cyclic cohomology theory, to identify this geometric invariant with a topological index, thereby proving the integrality of the Hall conductivity in this case.Comment: AMS-LaTeX, 28 page

History of the Great Northern Paper Company in the 1970s and 1980s

A draft of a book on the history of the Great Northern Paper Company during the 1970s and 1980s written by long-time Public Affairs Manager, Paul K. McCann. This draft is nearly identical to a version later published as Timber! : The Fall of Maine\u27s Paper Giant, printed by the Ellsworth American, c1994. Chapter Table of Contents: i. In the Beginning: Biggest Mill in World; Lonely Farm On Penobscot the “Perfect Site” ii. While GNN Grew and Prospered, Not so GNP; It Was All Down Hill After Years of Stagnation iii. After 70 Years, Modernization Means a Long, Long, Long Learning Curve iv. Diversification with the Pinkham Acquisition; Kraft and Waferboard Mills Proposals fail v. Energy Crisis of 1973; Closing the Mills? Next? Conservation? Coal? Wood? Hydro? vi. Great Northern’s Two Million Acres; Challenge of Protecting the Resource vii. Woodlands: A Company Within a Company; From River Drives to Intensive Management viii. The Spruce Budworm: Out of the Problem Came a New Era of Forest Management ix. GNP Became Center of National Attention; Indians “Frightened” Great Northern Nekoosa x. A Sales Strategy for the Millinocket Mill; Prolonging the Life of the Old Paper Machines xi. “Friendly Strike” Shatters Traditions; Things Were Never the Same Again xii. Of Many Things: Ospreys turn Bombers; The Strike that Wasn’t A Strike xiii. Big A: It Was an Uphill Battle; A Setback Fatal for the Company xiv. Finally, Modernization Wins GNN Funds; Millions for the East Millinocket Mill xv. 1400 Jobs to Go with a Goal of Smaller More Efficient, More Competitive Company xvi. After Years of Studies, Millinocket Project Wins GNN Approval With a German Partner xvii. Final Chapter in the Company History? Georgia Pacific Acquires GN

From clean to diffusive mesoscopic systems: A semiclassical approach to the magnetic susceptibility

We study disorder-induced spectral correlations and their effect on the magnetic susceptibility of mesoscopic quantum systems in the non-diffusive regime. By combining a diagrammatic perturbative approach with semiclassical techniques we perform impurity averaging for non-translational invariant systems. This allows us to study the crossover from clean to diffusive systems. As an application we consider the susceptibility of non-interacting electrons in a ballistic microstructure in the presence of weak disorder. We present numerical results for a square billiard and approximate analytic results for generic chaotic geometries. We show that for the elastic mean free path $\ell$ larger than the system size, there are two distinct regimes of behaviour depending on the relative magnitudes of $\ell$ and an inelastic scattering length.Comment: 7 pages, Latex-type, EuroMacr, 4 Postscript figures, to appear in Europhys. Lett. 199