When the Fed aims for higher inflation, middle-aged, middle-class households, who tend to have big mortgages, benefit at the expense of wealthy retirees, who have a lot of their savings in bank accounts and bonds. Poor and young households are less affected because they are less likely to own homes and their debt burdens are low. In this model, monetary policy not only creates winners and loser...

Data warehouse projects can be characterized as very complex, cross-functional and long lasting. Slogans like ‘think big start small’ or ‘act local think global’ can be found in literature. But most methodologies for data warehousing only focus on technical aspects or short-term project management and do not provide applicable recommendations for coping with the evolution of data warehouse syst...

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...

Zero-index materials exhibit exotic optical properties that can be utilized for integrated-optics applications. However, practical implementation requires compatibility with complementary metallic-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies. We demonstrate a CMOS-compatible zero-index metamaterial consisting of a square array of air holes in a 220-nm-thick silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. This des...

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...