Political market characteristics and the provision of educational infrastructure in North India

In this paper, we are concerned with the provision of schools in rural North India, particularly with whether such provision is determined by the demographic and economic characteristics of the region or whether local democracy also plays a role. We find that the probability that a governing party loses an election has a positive effect on the provision of schooling infrastructure, while the margin of victory of the governing party has a negative effect. Political reservation for members of the Scheduled Castes (SCs) has a positive effect on schooling infrastructure in villages with a large SC population, but a negative effect overall.

The domestic garden: its contribution to urban green infrastructure

Domestic gardens provide a significant component of urban green infrastructure but their relative contribution to eco-system service provision remains largely un-quantified. ‘Green infrastructure’ itself is often ill-defined, posing problems for planners to ascertain what types of green infrastructure provide greatest benefit and under what circumstances. Within this context the relative merits of gardens are unclear; however, at a time of greater urbanization where private gardens are increasingly seen as a ‘luxury’, it is important to define their role precisely. Hence, the nature of this review is to interpret existing information pertaining to gardens /gardening per se, identify where they may have a unique role to play and to highlight where further research is warranted. The review suggests that there are significant differences in both form and management of domestic gardens which radically influence the benefits. Nevertheless, gardens can play a strong role in improving the environmental impact of the domestic curtilage, e.g. by insulating houses against temperature extremes they can reduce domestic energy use. Gardens also improve localized air cooling, help mitigate flooding and provide a haven for wildlife. Less favourable aspects include contributions of gardens and gardening to greenhouse gas emissions, misuse of fertilizers and pesticides, and introduction of alien plant species. Due to the close proximity to the home and hence accessibility for many, possibly the greatest benefit of the domestic garden is on human health and well-being, but further work is required to define this clearly within the wider context of green infrastructure.

Does regional infrastructure investment stimulate extra housing and commercial building supply? Long-run evidence across the English regions

This paper uses long-term regional construction data to investigate whether increases infrastructure investment in the English regions leads to subsequent rises in housebuilding and new commercial property, using time series modeling. Both physical (roads and harbours) and social infrastructure (education and health) impacts are investigated across nine regions in England. Significant effects for physical infrastructure are found across most regions and, also, some evidence of a social infrastructure effect. The results are not consistent across regions, which may be due to geographical differences and to network and diversionary effects. However, the results do suggest that infrastructure does have some impact but follows differential lag structures. These results provide a test of the hypothesis of the economic benefits of infrastructure investment in an approach that has not been used before.

Studying the impact of ubiquitous monitoring technology on office worker behaviours: the value of sharing research data

Pervasive computing is a continually, and rapidly, growing field, although still remains in relative infancy. The possible applications for the technology are numerous, and stand to fundamentally change the way users interact with technology. However, alongside these are equally numerous potential undesirable effects and risks. The lack of empirical naturalistic data in the real world makes studying the true impacts of this technology difficult. This paper describes how two independent research projects shared such valuable empirical data on the relationship between pervasive technologies and users. Each project had different aims and adopted different methods, but successfully used the same data and arrived at the same conclusions. This paper demonstrates the benefit of sharing research data in multidisciplinary pervasive computing research where real world implementations are not widely available.

Establishing a reliable Jini infrastructure for parallel applications

Java is becoming an increasingly popular language for developing distributed and parallel scientific and engineering applications. Jini is a Java-based infrastructure developed by Sun that can allegedly provide all the services necessary to support distributed applications. It is the aim of this paper to explore and investigate the services and properties that Jini actually provides and match these against the needs of high performance distributed and parallel applications written in Java. The motivation for this work is the need to develop a distributed infrastructure to support an MPI-like interface to Java known as MPJ. In the first part of the paper we discuss the needs of MPJ, the parallel environment that we wish to support. In particular we look at aspects such as reliability and ease of use. We then move on to sketch out the Jini architecture and review the components and services that Jini provides. In the third part of the paper we critically explore a Jini infrastructure that could be used to support MPJ. Here we are particularly concerned with Jini's ability to support reliably a cocoon of MPJ processes executing in a heterogeneous envirnoment. In the final part of the paper we summarise our findings and report on future work being undertaken on Jini and MPJ.