A cost comparison of manual and automated circulation systems in university libraries: The case of the Ibadan University library

This paper presents the results of a comparative cost study of the manual circulation system and experimental automated system in a university library in Nigeria. Two sets of data were collected: one on the existing manual circulation system and the other on the experimental automated system on an Apple II microcomputer. Eight different circulation activities were identified for evaluation for which the direct labor cost of circulating a book on each system was calculated. The experimental automated system was found to be less labor intensive than the manual system, although overall unit cost of book circulation on the automated system was higher than on the manual system ($0.59 and $0.49, respectively). Factors attributed to the higher unit cost on the automated system were the cost of equipment and the low circulation figure. However, the automated system was found to be more effective in providing up-to-date and accurate data required for the monitoring of the library stock.     

Domesticating Computers and the Internet

The people who use computers and the ways they use them have changed substantially over the past 25 years. In the beginning highly educated people, mostly men, in technical professions used computers for work, but over time a much broader range of people are using computers for personal and domestic purposes. This trend is still continuing, and over a shorter time scale has been replicated with the use of the Internet. This paper uses data from four national surveys to document how personal computers and the Internet have become increasingly domesticated since 1995 and to explore the mechanisms for this shift. Now people log on more often from home than from places of employment and do so for pleasure and for personal purposes rather than for their jobs. Analyses comparing veteran Internet users to novices in 1998 and 2000 and analyses comparing the change in use within a single sample between 1995 and 1996 support two complementary explanations for how these technologies have become domesticated. Women, children, and less well-educated individuals are increasingly using computers and the Internet and have a more personal set of motives than well-educated men. In addition, the widespread diffusion of the PC and the Internet and the response of the computing industry to the diversity in consumers has led to a rich set of personal and domestic services.     

Text windows and phrases differing by discipline, location in document, and syntactic structure

Knowledge of window style, content, location, and grammatical structure may be used to classify documents as originating within a particular discipline or may be used to place a document on a theory vs practice spectrum. This distinction is also studied here using the type-token ratio to differentiate between sublanguages. The statistical significance of windows is computed, based on the presence of terms in titles, abstracts, citations, and section headers, as well as binary-independent and inverse-document-frequency weightings. The characteristics of windows are studied by examining their within-window density and the S concentration, the concentration of terms from various document fields (e.g. title, abstract) in the fulltext. The rate of window occurrences from the beginning to the end of document fulltext differs between academic fields. Different syntactic structures in sublanguages are examined, and their use is considered for discriminating between specific academic disciplines and, more generally, between theory vs practice or knowledge vs applications-oriented documents.     

Application of a transversal laguerre network in adaptive equalization

Synchronous data transmission systems that transmit information over dispersive channels often employ adaptive equalization techniques in the processing of the received signals. Most equalizers presently used in communication systems are of the tapped delay line (TDL) type. In this paper, we propose a class of adaptive equalizers of which the TDL equalizer is a member. Another interesting member of this class is the Laguerre adaptive equalizer which is to be introduced in this paper. The configuration of the Laguerre equalizer is developed. It is found, as shown by the examples, that the Laguerre equalizer is more accurate, and is less sensitive to timing error than the conventional TDL equalizer.     

Ultrasonic delay lines

This paper deals with the experimental aspects of ultrasonic delay lines in liquid media and is a sequel to a previous paper treating the general theory of such devices.Delay devices employing ultrasonic propagation through liquids have proved satisfactory for delay times of the order of 3 milliseconds or less. Such devices can be made broadband and give excellent reproduction of pulse shape. The design considerations for such devices are discussed and illustrated by actual examples.     

Transform domain technique for windowing the DCT and DST

In this paper, an algorithm is developed to apply Hann, Hamming, Blackman and related windows directly in the transform domain for the discrete cosine transform and discrete sine transform. These algorithms are useful in applications where windowing is required in order to minimize edge effects caused by implicit symmetries in the transform domain that are not replicated in the real-world data. Examples of such applications include data communication, adaptive system identification and filtering, real-time analysis of financial market data, etc. Software implementations in C language are also given.     

Feedback factorizing control of 3-D transfer functions via a canonical state-space model

The problem factorizing (separating) the transfer function of a given SISO 3-D discrete system, ie of a system depending on three independent variables, is considered. The 3-D system is assumed to be available in its transfer function representation, which is converted to a canonical state-space model by a simple inspection procedure. Then applying state-feedback to this canonical model we choose the feedback matrix gain (under certain conditions) such that the transfer function of the closed-loop system has the desireed factorized form, ie a product of three 1-D transfer functions each one being dependent on a single variable. The method is illustrated by a nontrivial numerical example.     

未来艾滋病的治疗和预防

超过7000万人感染HIV、2000万人死亡,艾滋病是医学史上最严重的流行病之一.     

Chips,tags and scanners: Ethical challenges for radio frequency identification

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems identify and track objects, animals and, in principle, people. The ability to gather information obtained by tracking consumer goods, government documents, monetary transactions and human beings raises a number of interesting and important privacy issues. Moreover, RFID systems pose an ensemble of other ethical challenges related to appropriate uses and users of such systems. This paper reviews a number of RFID applications with the intention of identifying the technology’s benefits and possible misuses. We offer an overview and discussion of the most important ethical issues concerning RFID, and describes and examine some methods of protecting privacy. Norman G. Einspruch serves as a consultant to several high-technology companies, one of which is in the RFID components and systems business.