Reading with hotspots: How young children respond to touchscreen stories

Worldwide estimates indicate that toddlers and preschoolers are introduced to mobile technology at an early age, with many now using touchscreens on a daily basis. One of the appeals of touchscreen technology is that it seems to be intuitive to very young children and, at least from anecdotal evidence, they seem to enjoy it. Even the simplest forms of children's touchscreen media often contain hotspots, which are interactive elements of a screen that allow children to touch a picture and obtain an immediate visual and/or auditory response. Despite the fact that children seem to engage haptically with these technological features, little is known about how they use them and how these features may influence their attention to and comprehension of the media content. A detailed understanding of children's verbal and haptic responses, as well as their visual attention and comprehension, is key to gaining a more complete understanding of children's use of this medium. Using an experimental design, in this pilot study, we examine Dutch preschoolers' (age 2–5, n = 78) haptic use (how much and when they use hotspots), verbal responding (i.e., narrative relevant and irrelevant comments), attention, and story comprehension when hotspots are either activated or turned off. Implications for the use of touchscreen media in early childhood, as well as the design of such media, are offered

Minority enterprise in the clothing industry: an analysis of Asian jeans manufacturers in Birmingham

This thesis discusses and assesses the resources available to Asian entrepreneurs in the West Midlands' clothing industry and how they are used by these small businessmen in order to address opportunities in the market economy within the constraints imposed. The fashion industry is volatile and is dependent upon flexible firms which can respond quickly to shortrun production schedules. Small firms are best able to respond to this market environment. Production of jeans presents an interesting departure from the mainstream fashion industry. It is traditionally gared towards longrun production schedules where multinational enterprises have artificially diversified the market, promoting the 'right' brand name and have established control of the upper end of the market, whilst imports from Newly Developing Countries have catered for cheap copies at the lower end of the market. In recent years, a fashion element to jeans has emerged, thus opening a market gap for U.K. manufacturers to respond in the same way as for other fashion articles. A large immigrant population, previously serving the now declining factories and foundries of the West Midlands but, through redundancy, no longer a part of this employment sector, has ~5ponded to economic constraints and market opportunities by drawing on ethnic network resources for competitive access to labour, finance and contacts, to attack the emergent market gap. Two models of these Asian entrepreneurs are developed. One being somecne who has professionally and actively tackled the market gap and become established. These entrepreneurs are usually educated and have personal experience in business and were amongst the first to perceive opportunities to enter the industry, actively utilising their ethnicity as a resource upon which to draw for favorable access to cheap, flexible labour and capital. The second model is composed of later entrants to jeans manufacturing. They have less formal education and experience and have been pushed into self-employment by constraints of unemployment. Their ethnicity is passively used as a resource. They are more likely confined to the marginal activity of 'cut make and trim' and have little opportunity to increase profit margins, become estalished or expand

CERN Axion Solar Telescope as a probe of large extra dimensions

We explore the potential of the CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) for testing the presence of large extra dimensions. The CAST experiment has originally been proposed to search for solar axions with a sensitivity supposed to provide a limit on the axion-photon coupling g_{a\gamma\gamma}<5x10^{-11} GeV^{-1} or even lower. The expected bound on the coupling constant is by a factor of ten more stringent than the current experimental results. This bound extends for the first time beyond the limit dictated by astrophysical considerations. As a tuning experiment planning to explore the axion mass region up to about 1 eV, CAST would also be sensitive to the existence of Kaluza-Klein massive states. Therefore, the detection of X-rays at least at two pressures may be the signature of large extra dimensions. From this requirement we find that CAST may test (two) large extra dimensions with a (common) compactification radius R down to around 250 nm if m_{PQ}<1/(2R), and down to around 370 nm if 1/(2R)<m_{PQ}, where m_{PQ} is the Peccei-Quinn mass.Comment: Version to appear in Phys. Rev. D. Changes to the total rate formula in Sec. III. Conclusions remain essentially unchanged; 5 pages, 2 figures, revtex

Search for solar hadronic axions produced by a bremsstrahlung-like process

We have searched for hadronic axions which may be produced in the Sun by a bremsstrahlung-like process, and observed in the HPGe detector by an axioelectric effect. A conservative upper limit on the hadronic axion mass m_a < 334 eV at 95% C.L. is obtained. Our experimental approach is based on the axion-electron coupling and it does not include the axion-nucleon coupling, which suffers from the large uncertainties related to the estimation of the flavor-singlet axial-vector matrix element.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures; version to appear in PL

Machbarkeitsstudie: Geschäftsmodelle in der digitalen Wirtschaft

Selten zuvor haben Konzepte und Technologien überall auf der Welt so schnell und weitreichend Anwendung gefunden wie digitale Geschäftsmodelle und Smartphones in den letzten Jahren. Die digitale Transformation stellt die Politik vor große Herausforderungen. Für eine fundierte Entscheidungsfindung fehlen derzeit aber noch belastbare Studien. Diese Machbarkeitsstudie benennt und erläutert Datensätze und Forschungsmethoden zur Beantwortung der gestellten Forschungsfragen. Dabei wird auch auf Risiken und Kosten der vorgeschlagenen Forschungsmethoden eingegangen. Die Verfasser der Machbarkeitsstudie schlagen einen Methodenmix vor, der sowohl quantitative und qualitative Befragungen, als auch die Auswertung umfassender Datenbanken beinhaltet. Es wird vorgeschlagen die Erforschung des Status quo und insbesondere der Entstehungsdynamik digitaler Geschäftsmodelle anhand einer Kombination aus Handelsregisterdaten, d.h. alle Kapitalgesellschaften als Grundgesamtheit, und Datensätzen zu Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), Initial Public Offerings (IPO) und Venture-Capital (VC) Finanzierungsrunden durchzuführen. Für börsennotierte Firmen soll der Erfolg digitaler Geschäftsmodelle mit Hilfe von Daten großer Finanzdatenanbietern wie Thomson Reuters oder Bloomberg gemessen werden. Die Bedeutung des Endnutzerzugangs soll mit Hilfe der Firmenbewertungen von Unternehmen mit Services, die eine hohe Nutzerzahl aufweisen, quantifiziert werden. Zukunftsszenarien sollen basierend auf aktuellen Firmengründungen, VC-Finanzierungsrunden, Akquisitionen, Patentanmeldungen sowie Experteninterviews bzw. einer Delphi Studie entwickelt werden. Fallstudieninterviews in allen relevanten Basissektoren sollen Veränderungen in den Wertschöpfungsnetzwerken der Unternehmen aufzeigen. Eine Umfrage unter Führungskräften mit IT-Verantwortung soll die Nutzung aktueller Technologien wie Big Data und Cloud Computing aufzeigen und die Erfolgswirkung der digitalen Transformation untersuchen. Die Machbarkeitsstudie ist wie folgt organisiert: Kapitel 1 erläutert die Relevanz der Arbeit, Kapitel 2 und 3 enthalten wichtige Begriffsdefinitionen und geben einen umfassenden Überblick über die relevante Literatur, um aufzuzeigen, welche Forschungsfragen sich bereits mit Hilfe der bestehenden Literatur beantworten lassen. Kapitel 4 erklärt das Forschungsdesign, das zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfragen entwickelt wurde. Dabei zeigt Tabelle 8 relevante Sekundärdatensätze. Abschnitt 4.5 beschreibt in kompakter Form (Tabelle 12 - Tabelle 14) welche Forschungsfragen mit welchem Forschungsdesign beantwortet werden sollen und welches Risiko mit den jeweiligen Ansätzen verbunden ist. Kapitel 5 enthält die Kostenschätzung für die Durchführung der einzelnen Arbeitspakete

The large system asymptotics of persistent currents in mesoscopic quantum rings

We consider a one-dimensional mesoscopic quantum ring filled with spinless electrons and threaded by a magnetic flux, which carries a persistent current at zero temperature. The interplay of Coulomb interactions and a single on-site impurity yields a non-trivial dependence of the persistent current on the size of the ring. We determine numerically the asymptotic power law for systems up to 32000 sites for various impurity strengths and compare with predictions from Bethe Ansatz solutions combined with Bosonization. The numerical results are obtained using an improved functional renormalization group (fRG) method. We apply the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and exact diagonalization methods to benchmark the fRG calculations. We use DMRG to study the persistent current at low electron concentrations in order to extend the validity of our results to quasi-continuous systems. We briefly comment on the quality of calculated fRG ground state energies by comparison with exact DMRG data.Comment: REVTex, 12 pages, 12 figs, accepted in Phys. Rev.

The Future of Outsourcing in the Asia-Pacific Region: Implications for Research and Practice—Panel Report from PACIS 2014

This paper summarizes a panel discussion held at the 18th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) in Chengdu, China, 2014, with the same title. The panel discussed the future of outsourcing in the Asia-Pacific region (specifically the importance of outsourcing, new trends, and issues in outsourcing). This paper provides directions for future research that surpasses regional specificity (i.e., the Asia-Pacific region), and contributes to research interests on outsourcing in general

Irreducible Representations of Diperiodic Groups

The irreducible representations of all of the 80 diperiodic groups, being the symmetries of the systems translationally periodical in two directions, are calculated. To this end, each of these groups is factorized as the product of a generalized translational group and an axial point group. The results are presented in the form of the tables, containing the matrices of the irreducible representations of the generators of the groups. General properties and some physical applications (degeneracy and topology of the energy bands, selection rules, etc.) are discussed.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures, 28 tables, 18 refs, LaTex2.0