Publishing solutions for contemporary scholars: The library as innovator and partner

Purpose: To review the trend in academic libraries toward including scholarly communication, and by extension, electronic publishing, as part of their core mission, using the Cornell University Library as an example. Design/methodology/approach: The paper describes several manifestations of publishing activity organized under the Library’s Center for Innovative Publishing, including the arXiv (http://arxiv.org/), Project Euclid (http://projecteuclid.org), and DPubS (http://DPubS.org). Findings: Libraries bring many competencies to the scholarly communications process, including expertise in digital initiatives, close connections with authors and readers, and a commitment to preservation. To add publishing to their responsibilities, they need to develop expertise in content acquisition, editorial management, contract negotiation, marketing, and subscription management. Originality/value: Academic libraries are making formal and informal publishing a part of their core activity. A variety of models exist. The Cornell University Library has created a framework for supporting publishing called the Center for Innovative Publishing, and through it supports a successful open access repository (arXiv), a sustainable webhosting service for journals in math and statistics (Project Euclid) and a content management tool (DPubS) to enable other institutions (libraries,scholarly societies, presses) to engage in similar ventures to increase the dissemination of scholarship and to lower the barriers to its access

Publishing solutions for contemporary scholars: The library as innovator and partner

Purpose: To review the trend in academic libraries toward including scholarly communication, and by extension, electronic publishing, as part of their core mission, using the Cornell University Library as an example. Design/methodology/approach: The paper describes several manifestations of publishing activity organized under the Library’s Center for Innovative Publishing, including the arXiv (http://arxiv.org/), Project Euclid (http://projecteuclid.org), and DPubS (http://DPubS.org). Findings: Libraries bring many competencies to the scholarly communications process, including expertise in digital initiatives, close connections with authors and readers, and a commitment to preservation. To add publishing to their responsibilities, they need to develop expertise in content acquisition, editorial management, contract negotiation, marketing, and subscription management. Originality/value: Academic libraries are making formal and informal publishing a part of their core activity. A variety of models exist. The Cornell University Library has created a framework for supporting publishing called the Center for Innovative Publishing, and through it supports a successful open access repository (arXiv), a sustainable webhosting service for journals in math and statistics (Project Euclid) and a content management tool (DPubS) to enable other institutions (libraries,scholarly societies, presses) to engage in similar ventures to increase the dissemination of scholarship and to lower the barriers to its access

Electronic Democracy and Environmental Governance: A Survey of the States

Just as information technology is rapidly changing how we work, shop, and play, it is changing how we practice democracy. This paper focuses on one area where the Internet is broadening public participation in governance: the administration of environmental laws and regulations. It describes a survey of how each of the 50 states is using the Internet to provide citizens with environmental information, gather public input on agency decisions, and foster networks of interested citizens. As "laboratories for democracy," the states may be the source of ideas and experience that anticipate how environmental governance at all levels of government will change over the next decade. The survey results suggest that electronic democracy in state-level environmental decisionmaking is in an early and experimental phase. All state environmental agencies have Web sites and most provide substantial amounts of information on-line. However, opportunities for active on-line interaction between citizens and government, as well as among citizens themselves, are quite limited. Relatively few states, for example, allow citizens to comment on proposed rules electronically. Overall, the survey suggests that it is a good time for states to learn from each other as more innovative states push the envelope of what technology allows and more cautious states continue to adopt basic features as decision-makers become convinced of their efficacy.

Symmetric colorings of polypolyhedra

Polypolyhedra (after R. Lang) are compounds of edge-transitive 1-skeleta. There are 54 topologically different polypolyhedra, and each has icosidodecahedral, cuboctahedral, or tetrahedral symmetry, all are realizable as modular origami models with one module per skeleton edge. Consider a coloring in which each edge of a given component receives a different color, and where the coloring (up to global color permutation) is invariant under the polypolyhedron's symmetry group. On the Five Intersecting Tetrahedra, the edges of each color form visual bands on the model, and correspond to matchings on the dodecahedron graph. We count the number of such colorings and give three proofs. For each of the non-polygon-component polypolyhedra, there is a corresponding matching coloring, and we count the number of these matching colorings. For some of the non-polygon-component polypolyhedra, there is a corresponding visual-band coloring, and we count the number of these band colorings

Longer-Baseline Telescopes Using Quantum Repeaters

We present an approach to building interferometric telescopes using ideas of quantum information. Current optical interferometers have limited baseline lengths, and thus limited resolution, because of noise and loss of signal due to the transmission of photons between the telescopes. The technology of quantum repeaters has the potential to eliminate this limit, allowing in principle interferometers with arbitrarily long baselines.Comment: 10 pages, v2 improved clarit

Street Children’s Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child: A study of acceptance and observance in Mexico and Ecuador

This paper offers a first template for assessing performance by national governments in guaranteeing disadvantaged groups of youngsters access to their rights, as enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Street children, who are among the most severely disadvantaged children of any society, are the particular focus of this paper. The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) constitutes a bold new approach to children’s rights, requiring governments to assume new commitments to helping street children. Latin America has a particularly strong history of work with street children, spanning at least 30 years, but governments have not managed to guarantee access by street children to their basic human rights. This paper explores CRC adherence with respect to street children in two Latin American countries – Mexico, a fairly affluent country and Ecuador, a relatively poor one. I divide my exploration of each country’s observance of the CRC into the broad fields of legislation, implementation and enforcement, and assess governmental progress in the decade since their ratification of the Convention. Findings are disappointing for both countries: they suggest that domestic legislation is still inadequate, and that neither government has implemented the policies or allocated the budgetary resources necessary to ensure that street children gain access to their rights. Regrettably, data collection, monitoring of implementation and measurement of outcomes, are all gravely inadequate for enforcement of CRC provisions in Mexico and Ecuador. The findings suggest that strong monitoring and enforcement mechanisms are required to counter existing disincentives for governments to invest in street children. Substantial improvements are needed, particularly in the field of enforcement, before street children in Mexico and Ecuador can gain consistent access to their basic human rights. The prospects for Ecuador’s street children are particularly bleak: the government will need considerable international support to be able to deliver on its commitments to street children under the CRC. Mexico has a more developed political economy and has made more progress than Ecuador; the Mexican government is in a position to make substantial advances toward guaranteeing street children their rights as provided by the CRC.

Shock wave propagation in porous ice

We present data on shock wave propagation in porous ice under conditions applicable to the outer solar system. The equation of state of porous ice under low temperature and low pressure conditions agrees well with measurements under terrestrial conditions implying that data on terrestrial snow may be applicable to the outer solar system. We also observe rarefaction waves from small regions of increased porosity and calculate release wave velocities

APEX/SABOCA observations of small-scale structure of infrared-dark clouds I. Early evolutionary stages of star-forming cores

Infrared-dark clouds (IRDCs) harbor the early phases of cluster and high-mass star formation and are comprised of cold (~20 K), dense (n > 10$^4$ cm$^{-3}$) gas. The spectral energy distribution (SED) of IRDCs is dominated by the far-infrared and millimeter wavelength regime, and our initial Herschel study examined IRDCs at the peak of the SED with high angular resolution. Here we present a follow-up study using the SABOCA instrument on APEX which delivers 7.8" angular resolution at 350 micron, matching the resolution we achieved with Herschel/PACS, and allowing us to characterize substructure on ~0.1pc scales. Our sample of 11 nearby IRDCs are a mix of filamentary and clumpy morphologies, and the filamentary clouds show significant hierarchical structure, while the clumpy IRDCs exhibit little hierarchical structure. All IRDCs, regardless of morphology, have about 14% of their total mass in small scale core-like structures which roughly follow a trend of constant volume density over all size scales. Out of the 89 protostellar cores we identified in this sample with Herschel, we recover 40 of the brightest and re-fit their SEDs and find their properties agree fairly well with our previous estimates ( ~ 19K). We detect a new population of "cold cores" which have no 70 micron counterpart, but are 100 and 160 micron-bright, with colder temperatures ( ~ 16K). This latter population, along with SABOCA-only detections, are predominantly low-mass objects, but their evolutionary diagnostics are consistent with the earliest starless or prestellar phase of cores in IRDCs.Comment: accepted to A&A. 28 pages, 27 figures. For full-resolution image gallery, see http://www.mpia.de/~ragan/saboca.html (v2 includes only minor typographical corrections, changed to agree with published version

Vibrational Branching Ratios From The Dissociation Of The NeIBr Van Der Waals Molecule

The degree of vibrational excitation in the IBr fragment from the vibrational predissociation of NeIBr (A (3)PI(1)) has been measured using two-color pump-probe laser-induced fluorescence spectroscopy. We find that for the lowest initial vibrational states examined, DELTA-upsilon = -1 dissociation pathways dominate the dynamics, while this channel is closed for upsilon greater-than-or-equal-to 17. From this result, the A state binding energy (D0) of the complex is determined to be 67 +/- 4 cm-1, while that in the X electronic state is found to be 73 +/- 4 cm-1. The X state binding energy is identical to that for NeI2 and NeBr2, suggesting that the potential energy surface for NeIBr can be constructed from a summation of atom-atom pair potentials; we present such a model potential energy surface. The variations in the vibrational branching ratios, when combined with the trends in the predissociation rates, point to the importance of fragment rotational excitation in the dynamics of the dissociation