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This article shows how a large palaeontological database (the Plant Fossil Record version 2.2, available on the Internet) can be used to draw evolutionary and migratory pathways. 2946 published records of the family Aceraceae have been found as leaf, fruit and seed, wood or pollen fossils, and their geographical and stratigraphical distributions are presented here in different graphical forms. Manipulation and analysis of the data have produced palaeo-geographic maps of these distributions, curves of the number of records in five global regions over the last 100 million years, and cladograms of taxa and their geography. The results give objective evidence which shows that early members of the family became well established on upland slopes of the north Pacific rim during the Palaeogene. Some of these early species migrated eastwards across Greenland to Europe before the North Atlantic opened to the Arctic. Later and larger migrations started in the Oligocene, from Asia westwards to central Europe, bringing a diversification in species both there and in the regions of origin.

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If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.Abstract: In order to enhance, consolidate and differentiate online services, developers are increasingly becoming concerned with issues of usability. Lists of design guidelines and evaluations of existing systems are extensive but attempts to place this applied science on a rigorous footing have largely failed. Despite legitimate advances in HCI (Human-computer Interaction), no clear set of principles has emerged that is relevant to practitioners or vendors of online systems. Most previous studies have been concerned with designing the system for a 'standard' user. This paper will present some early findings of our work concerned with discriminating the relative effects of the cultural values of users and their organisational setting in configuring online systems.