Analysing Pedestrian Traffic Around Public Displays

This paper presents a powerful approach to evaluating public technologies by capturing and analysing pedestrian traffic using computer vision. This approach is highly flexible and scales better than traditional ethnographic techniques often used to evaluate technology in public spaces. This technique can be used to evaluate a wide variety of public installations and the data collected complements existing approaches. Our technique allows behavioural analysis of both interacting users and non-interacting passers-by. This gives us the tools to understand how technology changes public spaces, how passers-by approach or avoid public technologies, and how different interaction styles work in public spaces. In the paper, we apply this technique to two large public displays and a street performance. The results demonstrate how metrics such as walking speed and proximity can be used for analysis, and how this can be used to capture disruption to pedestrian traffic and passer-by approach patterns

Understanding Public Evaluation: Quantifying Experimenter Intervention

Public evaluations are popular because some research questions can only be answered by turning “to the wild.” Different approaches place experimenters in different roles during deployment, which has implications for the kinds of data that can be collected and the potential bias introduced by the experimenter. This paper expands our understanding of how experimenter roles impact public evaluations and provides an empirical basis to consider different evaluation approaches. We completed an evaluation of a playful gesture-controlled display – not to understand interaction at the display but to compare different evaluation approaches. The conditions placed the experimenter in three roles, steward observer, overt observer, and covert observer, to measure the effect of experimenter presence and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of each approach

Largest Mergers and Acquisitions by Corporations, 2006

[Excerpt] Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity has continued to increase, especially in each of the past three years. This report provides a listing of the largest M&A transactions worldwide (value equivalent to $2 billion or more) that were proposed during 2006. The report includes the dates on which transactions were completed and shows M&A deals that were still pending as of December 31, 2006, or that were not successful. These data have been drawn from publicly available sources and have not been otherwise verified by the Congressional Research Service. This report will not be updated

Largest Mergers and Acquisitions by Corporations in 2005

[Excerpt] Mergers and acquisitions activity increased in 2004 over 2003 and 2005 looks to be an even bigger year for m&a. This report provides a listing of the largest mergers (announced value of at least two billion U.S. Dollars) or acquisitions during 2005 through November 18, 2005. Completion dates for the mergers or acquisitions are included and merger or acquisition failures noted. These data have been drawn from publicly available sources and have not been otherwise verified by CRS. This report will be updated monthly

Fingers of a Hand Oscillate Together: Phase Syncronisation of Tremor in Hover Touch Sensing

When using non-contact finger tracking, fingers can be classified as to which hand they belong to by analysing the phase relation of physiological tremor. In this paper, we show how 3D capacitive sensors can pick up muscle tremor in fingers above a device. We develop a signal processing pipeline based on nonlinear phase synchronisation that can reliably group fingers to hands and experimentally validate our technique. This allows significant new gestural capabilities for 3D finger sensing without additional hardware

Understanding Special Drawing Rights (SDRs)

Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), the reserve asset issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have lately reappeared in the news. The G-20 leaders, at their recent meeting in London, endorsed a proposal to issue $250 billion in SDRs to counteract the financial crisis, while the governor of the People's Bank of China has called for SDRs to gradually replace the dollar at the center of the international monetary system, a plan that would be facilitated by allowing countries to convert their dollar reserve holdings into SDRs. John Williamson reviews the history of the IMF's SDRs and provides an overview of these and other proposals that would increase this synthetic currency's role in the international monetary system. The SDR was originally created to resolve a recognized flaw in the structure of the postwar Bretton Woods monetary system, but the eventual breakdown of Bretton Woods and the subsequent evolution of the current dollar-centered system have relegated the SDR mostly to the minor role of serving as a unit of account for the IMF's transactions. Recent proposals would return the SDR to greater prominence and could help to create a financial system that is free from the imbalances that have plagued the world of late.

Curbing the Boom-Bust Cycle: Stabilizing Capital Flows to Emerging Markets

International investors poured vast sums of money into East Asian and Latin American countries during the mid-1990s, when the emerging market boom was at its peak. Then Thailand stumbled and panic seized the markets, and boom gave way to bust. Investors suffered large financial losses, while Asian countries suddenly experienced large capital outflows and the macroeconomic pressures these wrought plunged countries that had been growing rapidly ("miraculously") into crisis. Much the same had happened in Latin America when the debt crisis broke in 1982. This book investigates what can be done to make the international capital market a constructive force in promoting development in emerging markets. The author concludes that the problem of cyclicality that has undermined the value of international borrowing cannot be tackled just, or even mainly, from the supply side, but will require actions on the part of both creditors and debtors.

Why SDRs Could Rival the Dollar

The special drawing rights (SDRs)--the International Monetary Fund's unit of account--could emerge as a rival to the US dollar as an international reserve currency. Williamson questions the assertion of Cato Institute's Swaminathan Aiyar that the SDR is not a currency and can never be one and the relevance of the fact that the IMF has no GDP and no taxing capacity and so lacks the fundamental requirements for creating a currency. It is true that only central banks accept SDRs in settlement of debts. But to the extent that they are so accepted, Williamson argues, they are money and could play a far more central role in the international monetary system than they have so far. Large SDR allocations could be a mechanism to ensure consistency in balance of payments objectives sought by countries around the world, one that ensures a much fairer distribution of gains from seigniorage--profit that accrues to whoever issues money. In the case of the SDRs, the IMF would be the issuer, and the seigniorage gains would be distributed in proportion to IMF quotas, which determine the proportion of allocations. For most countries, there is a clear advantage in boosting the role of the SDR and achieving a portion of the seigniorage gains. The interests of major reserve-currency countries, like the United States and potentially China, in displacing the dollar's reserve role can be disputed, but these countries too would benefit from an enhanced role of the SDR, depending on the evaluation of advantages and disadvantages.

Choosing Monetary Arrangements for the 21st Century: Problems of a Small Economy

The traditional monetary arrangement, in which a country uses and manages a distinct money, has several strong advantages, but countries have increasingly been adopting other arrangements: currency unions, use of another country's currency, and currency boards. Countries entering into a monetary union agree to share monetary sovereignty. But abandonment of monetary sovereignty (full or near-dollarization) implies a permanent and irrevocable outsourcing of monetary policy. A currency board also implies outsourcing of monetary policy but without the presumption that it is permanent or irrevocable. When deciding whether to share (or abandon) monetary sovereignty, a country must ask whether the political symbolism of a common money, reduced transactions costs (and increased trade), and probably better monetary management outweigh the increased cost of having to adjust without the freedom to vary the exchange rate.