Evaluating the transition of e-Government: A review of local authorities in England

The goal of e-Government is seen as a panacea for governmental authorities. The emerging needs of citizens, their inclusion and engagement in policy development, political and participatory processes have meant new perspectives on e-Government are required. This paper seeks to identify and evaluate the preparedness of 10 UK-based local authorities to transition from basic e-Government to a more sophisticated and integrated e-Government. A categorical assessment of e-Government characteristics is made and these authorities are ranked accordingly. Our findings reveal the majority of local authorities sampled had reached a high percentage of informational and transactional e-Government but few had reached the interactional level and none had achieved assimilation. This suggests that local authorities seem to have focused on basic e-Government services. There is a need now to forge ahead to integration and assimilation of e-Government in order to address the critical objectives of citizen inclusion and engagement, and alignment of institutional processes to provide an infrastructure for the transition to e-governance and e-knowledge

Crystallization and preliminary X-ray analysis of the sporulation factor SpoIIAA in its native and phosphorylated forms

Sporulation in Bacillus begins with an asymmetric cell division producing two progeny with identical chromosomes but different developmental fates. As such, it is a simple example of cellular differentiation. The establishment of cell type is controlled by a series of alternate RNA polymerase sigma subunits. The first compartment-specific sigma factor is sigma (F), whose activity is controlled by SpoIIAB, an anti-sigma factor, and SpoIIAA, an anti-sigma factor antagonist which is phosphorylated by the kinase activity of SpoIIAB. Here, the preliminary crystallographic analysis of SpoIIAA and phosphorylated SpoIIAA from B. sphaericus in forms suitable for high-resolution structure determination are reported

Modelling the Galactic Magnetic Field on the Plane in 2D

We present a method for parametric modelling of the physical components of the Galaxy's magnetised interstellar medium, simulating the observables, and mapping out the likelihood space using a Markov Chain Monte-Carlo analysis. We then demonstrate it using total and polarised synchrotron emission data as well as rotation measures of extragalactic sources. With these three datasets, we define and study three components of the magnetic field: the large-scale coherent field, the small-scale isotropic random field, and the ordered field. In this first paper, we use only data along the Galactic plane and test a simple 2D logarithmic spiral model for the magnetic field that includes a compression and a shearing of the random component giving rise to an ordered component. We demonstrate with simulations that the method can indeed constrain multiple parameters yielding measures of, for example, the ratios of the magnetic field components. Though subject to uncertainties in thermal and cosmic ray electron densities and depending on our particular model parametrisation, our preliminary analysis shows that the coherent component is a small fraction of the total magnetic field and that an ordered component comparable in strength to the isotropic random component is required to explain the polarisation fraction of synchrotron emission. We outline further work to extend this type of analysis to study the magnetic spiral arm structure, the details of the turbulence as well as the 3D structure of the magnetic field.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures, updated to published MNRAS versio

NICMOS and VLBA observations of the gravitational lens system B1933+503

NICMOS observations of the complex gravitational lens system B1933+503 reveal infrared counterparts to two of the inverted spectrum radio images. The infrared images have arc-like structures. The corresponding radio images are also detected in a VLBA map made at 1.7 GHz with a resolution of 6 mas. We fail to detect two of the four inverted radio spectrum components with the VLBA even though they are clearly visible in a MERLIN map at the same frequency at a different epoch. The absence of these two components could be due to rapid variability on a time-scale less than the time delay, or to broadening of the images during propagation of the radio waves through the ISM of the lensing galaxy to an extent that they fall below the surface brightness detectability threshold of the VLBA observations. The failure to detect the same two images with NICMOS is probably due to extinction in the ISM of the lensing galaxy.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitted to MNRA

Quantum response of weakly chaotic systems

Chaotic systems, that have a small Lyapunov exponent, do not obey the common random matrix theory predictions within a wide "weak quantum chaos" regime. This leads to a novel prediction for the rate of heating for cold atoms in optical billiards with vibrating walls. The Hamiltonian matrix of the driven system does not look like one from a Gaussian ensemble, but rather it is very sparse. This sparsity can be characterized by parameters $s$ and $g$ that reflect the percentage of large elements, and their connectivity respectively. For $g$ we use a resistor network calculation that has direct relation to the semi-linear response characteristics of the system.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, expanded improved versio

Electrohydrodynamic migration of charged droplets in an insulating fluid

The motion of charged, conducting droplets present in an insulating fluid medium is analyzed under the action of an electric field, in microgravity. Previous analyses of this problem have considered the Maxwell stresses as the only driving force. In the present study, arguments from macroscopic thermodynamics and the molecular theory of surface tension are used to show that the surface tension gradients can be induced due to the variation of the electric potential on the interface. In the limit of Reynolds numbers small compared to unity, the terminal velocity of migration of the droplet is calculated under the combined action of the Maxwell stresses and the surface tension gradients. The results show that there are no surface tension gradients (i.e., no electric potential variation at the interface) in a case that is due to the convection of the surface charges, surface tension gradients do exist and tend to reduce the terminal velocity of the droplet. The shape of the droplet altered by the motion was also calculated, when the deformations from the spherical shape are small

A quantum Peierls-Nabarro barrier

Kink dynamics in spatially discrete nonlinear Klein-Gordon systems is considered. For special choices of the substrate potential, such systems support continuous translation orbits of static kinks with no (classical) Peierls-Nabarro barrier. It is shown that these kinks experience, nevertheless, a lattice-periodic confining potential, due to purely quantum effects anaolgous to the Casimir effect of quantum field theory. The resulting ``quantum Peierls-Nabarro potential'' may be calculated in the weak coupling approximation by a simple and computationally cheap numerical algorithm, which is applied, for purposes of illustration, to a certain two-parameter family of substrates.Comment: 13 pages LaTeX, 7 figure