Entrepreneurship resources in US public libraries: website analysis

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the entrepreneurship resources patrons can discover and/or access on the web pages of the largest 46 US public libraries to assess the strength of public libraries’ current support to their entrepreneur-patrons, and where, and by what means, public libraries may wish to expand, or further promote, their support. Design/methodology/approach – The author completed a website analysis of the largest 46 US public libraries, as defined by the criteria in the ALA publication The Nation’s Largest Public Libraries. Website analysis was completed via a standardized checklist assessment of each library website. Findings – Public libraries often have print and electronic resources, meeting spaces and programming that could be of use to entrepreneur-patrons, but these resources are sometimes difficult to discover on library websites. Libraries have strong partnering relationships with other government and nonprofit organizations, but they may wish to expand these partnerships further. Practical implications – Public libraries in the US often have multiple support services to offer entrepreneur-patrons. However, if libraries would like to reach entrepreneur-patrons beyond their walls, as well as within them, they may wish to consider further refining the resources both accessible via their website and promoted on it. Originality/value – While there are research articles exploring how both academic and public libraries support entrepreneur-patrons, as yet, there has been no in-depth research into how public libraries support their entrepreneur-patrons through not only their in-library offerings but also the materials highlighted and/ or available via their website. This research addresses this gap in the literature.Publisher does not allow open access until after publicatio

The Untruthful Source: Writings, official and reform documentation 1900 - 1930

Ash’s article, ‘The untruthful source: Prisoner’s writings, official and reform documentation, 1900–1930’, published following her 2009 book on prison dress, questions how myths arose about the history of prisoners’ clothing in Britain in the first half of the 20th century. Ash shows that, although there was little critical writing about prisoners’ clothing in this period, the inmates’ own writing and archival documentation provide us with the means to achieve a new understanding of the political encounters played out in courtrooms. Ash’s research material included interwar Home Office circulars that announced the abolition of ‘broad arrow’ prison uniforms in 1920 and responses of prison governors that reveal their continuance after this date. Other key reform documents consulted by the author included those of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Fenner Brockway’s 1922 Prison System Enquiry Committee Report, later published as English Prisons Under Local Government, which proposed radical prison reforms including the abolition of prison dress as criminal stigmatisation, and inmate testimonials of the continuance of the broad arrow uniform. The article demonstrates the difficulty for design historians investigating prison dress in establishing the truth about specific penal reform dates and practices on the basis of official government documents alone. Ash argues that the publications of penal reformers and the prison writings of inmates at the time also need to be read, in order to establish the clothing prisoners actually wore in confinement. Ash first presented this research as a paper to the 2009 Design History Society annual conference hosted by the theorising Visual Art and Design (tVAD) Research Group, School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire. It was then selected to be peer reviewed and published in the University of Hertfordshire Working Papers on Design web-based journal

Fast and Effective Change Management

{Excerpt} When embarking on a change initiative, one should rapidly implement change that results in the higher levels of performance that were envisioned when the decision to make the changes was made. To make this happen, organizations must first overcome the resistance to change and then secure as much discretionary effort as possible. John Kotter remains one of the most respected experts on the subject of change management. He began writing about change management back in the mid-1990s, when he first declared that only one change initiative in three actually achieved its stated objectives. After more than a decade of research by academics and practitioners, one would think that we are now doing a much better job of managing change. Actually, that does not seem to be the case. In 2008, McKinsey & Company conducted a global survey of change management and found just about the same results as Kotter had 12 years before—only a third of change management attempts are successful. What are we doing wrong

Topological Speedups

Given a dynamical system $(X,T)$ one can define a speedup of $(X,T)$ as another dynamical system conjugate to $S:X\rightarrow X$ where $S(x)=T^{p(x)}(x)$ for some function $p:X\rightarrow\mathbb{Z}^{+}$. In $1985$ Arnoux, Ornstein, and Weiss showed that any aperiodic, not necessarily ergodic, measure preserving system is isomorphic to a speedup of any ergodic measure preserving system. In this paper we study speedups in the topological category. Specifically, we consider minimal homeomorphisms on Cantor spaces. Our main theorem gives conditions on when one such system is a speedup of another. Furthermore, the main theorem serves as a topological analogue of the Arnoux, Ornstein, and Weiss speedup theorem, as well as a 'one-sided" orbit equivalence theorem

Weighted Indices for Evaluating the Quality of Research with Multiple Authorship

Devising an index to measure the quality of research is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a set of indices to evaluate the quality of research produced by an author. Our indices utilize a policy that assigns the weights to multiple authors of a paper. We have considered two weight assignment policies: positionally weighted and equally weighted. We propose two classes of weighted indices: weighted h-indices and weighted citation h-cuts. Further, we compare our weighted h-indices with the original h-index for a selected set of authors. As opposed to h-index, our weighted h-indices take into account the weighted contributions of individual authors in multi-authored papers, and may serve as an improvement over h-index. The other class of weighted indices that we call weighted citation h-cuts take into account the number of citations that are in excess of those required to compute the index, and may serve as a supplement to h-index or its variants.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, 4 table

Agricultural Policies in Selected OECD Countries: Opportunities for Reform

Agricultural and Food Policy,

On the theory of compliant wall drag reduction in turbulent boundary layers

A theoretical model has been developed which can explain how the motion of a compliant wall reduces turbulent skin friction drag. Available experimental evidence at low speeds has been used to infer that a compliant surface selectively removes energy from the upper frequency range of the energy containing eddies and through resulting surface motions can produce locally negative Reynolds stresses at the wall. The theory establishes a preliminary amplitude and frequency criterion as the basis for designing effective drag reducing compliant surfaces