The combination of decreased income as a result of the RoweCom collapse, cuts in library budgets internationally, and the success of ‘Big Deal’ bundling arrangements has serious repercussions for smaller and society publishers. This paper argues that the scholarly communications environment is going to become increasingly hostile for these publishers and that their best chance of survival may b...

In 2010, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research started a series of citizens' dialogues on future technologies. In the context of the German history of public participation in technology-oriented policy making, these dialogues are unique for at least two reasons: The Federal Ministry retains the responsibility for the entire process and is heavily involved in its planning, organi...

Non-speaking people often rely on AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) devices to assist them to communicate. These AAC devices are slow to operate, however, and as a result conversations can be very difficult and frequently break down. This is especially the case when the conversation partner is unfamiliar with this method of communication, and is a big obstacle to many people when...

We investigate the generation of curvature and isocurvature (dilaton, moduli and axion) perturbations in a general class of axion–dilaton–moduli models, including the pre–big bang scenario. Allowing for an arbitrary coupling constant λ between the dilaton field and the axion field, we exploit the SL(2,R) symmetry of the theory to obtain the spectral indices of the field perturbations in a pre–b...

Jim Kaput lived a full life in mathematics education and we have many reasons to be grateful to him, not only for his vision of the use of technology in mathematics, but also for his fundamental humanity. This paper considers the origins of his ‘big ideas’ as he lived through the most amazing innovations in technology that have changed our lives more in a generation than in many centuries befor...

Despite common acceptance of Big Bang hypothesis among most cosmologists, nonetheless there are criticisms from a small number of theorists partly supported by astronomy observation suggesting that redshift data could not always be attributed to cosmological expansion. In this paper, a new approach to cosmology “fractional calculus” has been developed that we hope will attract attention from as...

Sport has become a highly commercialised business, in recent times sports have utilised considerable corporate sponsorship and advertising opportunities (Slack, 1998), to improve their welfare and popularity. “Today, sport is a big business and big businesses are involved in sport” (Slack, 1998, p1). Major spectator sports produce many marketable opportunities (Slack, 1998), however, the analog...

The military reform in Russia is a big hoax. All military reforms in other countries have amounted to the demobilization of the old army and the creation of a new one, which is based on a different recruitment mode, doctrine, etc. This has not been done in Russia. The old army has not been disbanded, no new one has been built, and meanwhile the military are decaying somewhere in between” (Anony...

Using a farm household data from 3 agroecological zones of Ghana, this paper investigates the causal relationship between the adoption of improved maize variety and technical efficiency or productivity. The empirical results show a positive relationship between the adoption of improved maize variety and technical efficiency or productivity of farmers in the Semi-deciduous forest and Guinea Sava...

This paper aims to revisit the link between corporate governance, value, and firm performance by focusing on convergence, understood as the way that non-US firms are adopting US best practice in terms of corporate governance, and the implications of this adoption. We examine theoretical questions related to conventional models (agency theory, transaction cost economics, new property rights theo...