Is the Internet a Viable Threat to Representative Democracy?

The Internet, despite its relatively recent advent, is critical to millions of Americans’ way of life. Although the Internet arguably opens new opportunities for citizens to become more directly involved in their government, some scholars fear this direct involvement poses a risk to one of the Constitution’s most precious ideals: representative democracy. This iBrief explores whether the constitutional notion of representation is vulnerable to the Internet’s capacity to open new vistas for a more direct democracy by analyzing statistics and theories about why voters in the United States do or do not vote and by examining the inherent qualities of the Internet itself. This iBrief concludes that the Constitution will adapt to the Internet and the Internet to the Constitution, such that even if there are advances in direct democracy, representative democracy will not be unduly threatened

Space Detectors for Gamma Rays (100 MeV - 100 GeV): from EGRET to Fermi LAT

The design of spaceborne high-energy (E>100 MeV) gamma-ray detectors depends on two principal factors: (1) the basic physics of detecting and measuring the properties of the gamma rays; and (2) the constraints of operating such a detector in space for an extended period. Improvements in technology have enabled major advances in detector performance, as illustrated by two successful instruments, EGRET on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and LAT on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Comptes Rendus Physiqu

Introductory Problem Solving in Computer Science

This paper describes our experiences in devising a lightweight, informal methodology for problem solving in introductory, university level, computer science. We first describe the original context of the experiment and the background to the methodology. We then give the details of the steps of the Problem Solving Cycle - Understanding, Designing, Writing and Reviewing - and the lessons we learned about our teaching from devising the material. We also present practical examples of how it has been applied in a variety of units in our programme

Assembling and enriching digital library collections

People who create digital libraries need to gather together the raw material, add metadata as necessary, and design and build new collections. This paper sets out the requirements for these tasks and describes a new tool that supports them interactively, making it easy for users to create their own collections from electronic files of all types. The process involves selecting documents for inclusion, coming up with a suitable metadata set, assigning metadata to each document or group of documents, designing the form of the collection in terms of document formats, searchable indexes, and browsing facilities, building the necessary indexes and data structures, and putting the collection in place for others to use. Moreover, different situations require different workflows, and the system must be flexible enough to cope with these demands. Although the tool is specific to the Greenstone digital library software, the underlying ideas should prove useful in more general contexts

Enzymatic transhalogenation of dendritic RGD peptide constructs with the fluorinase

We thank EPSRC and the Scottish Imaging Network (SINAPSE) for grants. DO’H thanks the Royal Society for a Wolfson Research Merit Award and ST is grateful to the John and Kathleen Watson Scholarship for financial support. We are grateful to Dr Catherine Botting and Dr Sally Shirran of the St Andrews Mass Spectrometry Service for MALDI-MS acquisitions. We also thank Dr Sally Pimlott of the University of Glasgow for the use of radiochemistry facilities. Open access via RSC Gold for Gold.Peer reviewedPublisher PD