Race to idle or not: balancing the memory sleep time with DVS for energy minimization

Reducing energy consumption is a critical problem in most of the computing systems today. Among all the computing system components, processor and memory are two significant energy consumers. Dynamic voltage scaling is typically applied to reduce processor energy while sleep mode is usually injected to trim memory’s leakage energy. However, in the memory architecture with multiple cores sharing memory, in order to optimize the system-wide energy, these two classic techniques are difficult to be directly combined due to the complicated interactions. In this work, we explore the coordination of the multiple cores and the memory, and present systematic analysis for minimizing the system-wide energy based on different system models and task models. For tasks with common release time, optimal schemes are presented for the systems both with and without considering the static power of the cores. For agreeable deadline tasks, different dynamic programming-based optimal solutions are proposed for negligible and non-negligible static power of cores. For the general task model, this paper proposes a heuristic online algorithm. Furthermore, the scheme is extended to handle the problem when the transition overhead between the active and sleep modes is considered. The optimality of the proposed schemes for common release time and agreeable deadline tasks are proved. The validity of the proposed heuristic scheme is evaluated through experiments. Experimental results confirm the superiority of the heuristic scheme in terms of the energy saving improvement compared to the most related existing work.     

Planning for urbanization in religious tourism destinations: insights from Shirdi,India

This paper examines the urbanization process in religious tourism destinations using the example of Shirdi in India. Shirdi, a town dedicated to worship of a twentieth-century Saint Sai Baba, attracts more than eight million visitors every year. The paper explains how religious tourism economy drives rapid urbanization including demographic change and land-use conversion owing to the infrastructure needs of visitors. It is found that planning mechanisms including the conventional master plan approach have been ineffective in adequately responding to issues such as the proliferation of unauthorized commercial establishments, hotels, lodging and boarding houses; strained infrastructure; and environmental pollution that characterize urbanization in religious tourism destinations.     

Layouts for ocean wave energy farms: Models,properties, and optimization

Renewable energy, such as wave energy, plays a significant role in sustainable energy development. Wave energy represents a large untapped source of energy worldwide and potentially offers a vast source of sustainable energy. We present models and a heuristic algorithm for choosing optimal locations of wave energy conversion (WEC) devices within an array, or wave farm. The location problem can have a significant impact on the total power of the farm due to the interactions among the incident ocean waves and the scattered and radiated waves produced by the WECs. Depending on the nature of the interference (constructive or destructive) among these waves, the wave energy entering multiple devices, and thus the power output of the farm, may be significantly larger or smaller than the energy that would be seen if the devices were operating in isolation. Our algorithm chooses WEC locations to maximize the performance of a wave farm as measured by a well known performance measure called the q-factor, which is the ratio of the power from an array of N WECs to the power from N WECs operating independently, under the point absorber approximation. We prove an analytical optimal solution for the 2-WEC problem and, based on the properties of the 2-WEC solution, we propose an iterative heuristic optimization algorithm for the general problem.     

Strategic and operational considerations for the Extended Enterprise: insights from the aerospace industry

The extended enterprise (EE) paradigm has been adopted in the civil aerospace industry to enhance collaboration and product innovation among supply chain partners. Nevertheless, key aspects of this collaborative form remain poorly understood. In particular, the interrelation of strategic and operational considerations has received little attention in the literature. Our study aimed to investigate this area, using two dyads as case studies, where three companies were involved in an EE form of collaboration. The primary case company was a leading manufacturer in the civil aerospace industry that employs EE principles on both upstream and downstream sides of its supply chain. The other two case companies were key suppliers embedded in the EE. This paper aimed to develop a more complete understanding of how sharing risks and rewards results in effective collaboration among EE partners with key strategic and operational results.     

Learning,signaling, and convincing: The role of experimentation in the business modeling process

This study examines experimentation in the business modeling process, unpacking three different roles of experimentation: learning, signaling, and convincing. Learning is an inherent role of experimentation, as managers typically experiment to engage with the environment and to obtain knowledge. This study uncovers another set of roles, which have a symbolic nature. These roles show that experimentation is not just a learning process, but also a strategic legitimation process, aimed at enacting the environment. Experimentation serves the purpose of signaling to potential customers and other stakeholders, and of convincing them to embrace the business model. Furthermore, this study shows that experimentation takes two forms—purposeful interactions and experimental projects—and that these forms can support the different roles of experimentation.     

一场特殊的"车改研讨会"

省里来了一个调研组,组里还有兄弟地市的部门领导参加,由于工作关系,我参加了接待。     

Discounting Across Generations: Necessary, not Suspect

Periodically, ethical objections are raised against the practice of discounting for future effects. Concerns about the potential effects on future generations from long-term nuclear waste disposal and global climate change have caused these ethical objections to recur. This article rebuts the various ethical objections to future discounting on practical, ethical, and analytic grounds. Discounting for future effects is a ubiquitous practice that cannot be practically prevented. In the event that public policy would dictate against future discounting in public decisions, such a constraint could never be successfully imposed on markets. Market values will always reflect the full, discounted streams of future effects even if governments prohibited the practice among individuals. Ethically, there is no basis for choosing an upper-bound time horizon beyond which discounting should be rejected. Any proposed horizon is arbitrary and has no obvious foundation. All decisions are fundamentally irreversible, so opponents of future discounting also must define a degree of irreversibility beyond which normal discounting should not apply, and defend on ethical grounds the basis for this demarcation. This task is further complicated by the likelihood that choices are rarely, if ever, as irreversible as opponents suggest. Typical examples given to prove future discounting is inappropriate overstate the degree of irreversibility actually present and understate subsequent opportunities for modifications. Finally, opposition to distant-future discounting on the ground that burdens are shifted to future generations must face the fact that such shifts are characteristic of intergenerational transfers now practiced widely and with great public support.     

Period batch control: Classic,not outdated

Period Batch Control was developed and first applied during the Second World War. The historic roots are discussed and the principles of this classic production planning approach explained, PBC compared to other production control concepts, and it is demonstrated that it may still be fruitfully applied, especially in combination with cellular manufacturing. It is therefore considered as a classic, but not outdated production planning concept.     

Improved upper bound for the degenerate and star chromatic numbers of graphs

Let \(G=G(V,E)\) be a graph. A proper coloring of G is a function \(f:V\rightarrow N\) such that \(f(x)\ne f(y)\) for every edge \(xy\in E\). A proper coloring of a graph G such that for every \(k\ge 1\), the union of any k color classes induces a \((k-1)\)-degenerate subgraph is called a degenerate coloring; a proper coloring of a graph with no two-colored \(P_{4}\) is called a star coloring. If a coloring is both degenerate and star, then we call it a degenerate star coloring of graph. The corresponding chromatic number is denoted as \(\chi _{sd}(G)\). In this paper, we employ entropy compression method to obtain a new upper bound \(\chi _{sd}(G)\le \lceil \frac{19}{6}\Delta ^{\frac{3}{2}}+5\Delta \rceil \) for general graph G.     

Continuity of care: some experiences and thoughts

Continuity of health care is a goal to be achieved. Most are for it. Many claim to provide it. But how do we know we have it? What are the key features of continuity? While dictionaries do not define the phrase "continuity of health care," we do find definitions of "continuity." The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, includes in its definitions: "the state or quality of being uninterrupted in sequence or succession, or in essence or idea; connectedness, coherence, unbroken..." Stedman's Medical Dictionary includes: "absence of interruption, a succession of parts intimately united..." These definitions stress an uninterrupted succession and include the concept that there needs to be a connection to the parts. Without that connection, continuity, in health care delivery or elsewhere, does not exist.     

Reconstructing nurse schedules: Computational insights in the problem size parameters

Managing nursing personnel properly is of critical importance as these resources comprise a vast share of the hospital's operational costs. The organisational support and the managerial policy decisions on the scheduling level are important determinants for the nurses' working conditions and the related quality of care. In this paper, we gain insights and understanding in the consequences and outcomes of various personnel re-rostering characteristics and strategies. We explore the boundaries of the time horizon and the nurse staffing size to consider for the nurse re-rostering problem based on computational experiments in a real-life problem environment.     

Direction,not destination: Institutional work practices in the face of field-level uncertainty

Though field-level uncertainty represents a common challenge, research seldom addresses how institutional work that aims to influence institutional change occurs in the face of uncertainty. We study institutional work practices in a field beset with high uncertainty. Focusing on a field-configuring event in the semiconductor industry, we show how institutional work is possible through practices of dealing with uncertainty that do not eliminate the basic uncertainty but nevertheless configure the field and institutionalize a common direction without specifying a final destination. We find evidence of the open-endedness and collectiveness of institutional work and we contribute to the microfoundations of institutional theory conceptualizing a set of four practices of dealing with field-level uncertainty purposively but not purposefully, i.e., bootstrapping, roadmapping, leader-picking, and issue-bracketing. We highlight the reciprocal relationship between practices and uncertainty, focus on the coordination of institutionalization, and distinguish between events in fields marked by high versus low uncertainty.     

The future of energy and the environment: Policy implications for electric power

Balancing environmental responsibility while promoting efficient restructing of the electric power sector is a primary challenge facing energy companies such as American Electric Power (AEP). These are issues that transcend the confines of business operations or regulatory procedures, belonging instead at the forefront of national (and global) policy on energy and the environment. Aligning effective corporate environmental strategy with good business sense relies upon a sound policymaking framework, and toward this end, a recent AEP analysis revealed several unrealistic assumptions and undesirable economic impacts of the emerging direction of environmental policy in the power sector. This study also identified numerous policy options that could lead to more feasible and sustainable alternatives for an environmentally concious, prosperous future.     

跨组织工作流建模及分析研究述评

从组织间工作流的层面对跨组织工作流建模的已有研究进行分类、总结和评价.然后,从定性分析和定量分析2个角度综述了工作流分析的相关研究.最后,总结了该领域研究的管理实践意义,并针对现有研究存在的不足,探讨了未来的研究趋势和发展方向.     

Lower bounds for independence numbers of some locally sparse graphs

An \(m\) -distinct-coloring is a proper vertex-coloring \(c\) of a graph \(G\) if for each vertex \(v\in V\) , any color appears in at most one of \(N_0(v)\) , \(N_1(v)\) , \(\ldots \) , and \(N_m(v)\) , where \(N_i(v)\) is the set of vertices at distance \(i\) from \(v\) . In this note, we show that if \(G\) is \(C_{2m+1}\) -free which is assigned an \((m+1)\) -distinct-coloring \(c\) , then \(\alpha (G)c(G)^{1/m}\ge \Omega \Big (\sum _{v} c(v)^{1/m}\Big )\) , where \(c(G)\) is the number of colors used in \(c\) and \(c(v)\) is the number of different colors appearing in \(N_1(v)\) . Moreover, we obtain that if \(G\) has \(N\) vertices and it contains neither \(C_{2m+1}\) nor \(C_{2m}\) , then \(\alpha (G)\ge \Omega \big ((N\log N)^{m/(m+1)}\big )\) . The algorithm in the proof for the first result is random, and that for the second is constructive.     

Transfer of training: A review and new insights

Even successful training programs cannot guarantee that newly learned knowledge and skills will be transferred to the workplace. This has led to researchers’ interests in understanding the transfer process. Notwithstanding that transfer issues have been studied for several decades, the recent emphasis on ‘workplace learning’, especially the so‐called ‘situated learning’ approach, suggests that conventional training transfer research may be inadequate to understand the dynamics of performance improvement through training. Against this, the authors point to the increased policy emphasis on the development of transferable generic skills, which underscores the ongoing importance of training transfer. This review paper suggests that the role of trainees themselves has not been dealt with sufficiently in research, which leads to a new direction for studying the transfer of training.     

Risk Assessment for Aflatoxin: III. Modeling the Relative Risk of Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Estimates have been made of the cancer potency of aflatoxin exposure among the U.S. population. Risk modeling is used to assess the dose-response relationship between aflatoxin exposure and primary liver cancer, controlling for hepatitis B virus (HBV), based on data provided by the Yeh et al. study in China. A relative risk model is proposed as a more appropriate alternative to the additive ("absolute" risk) model for transportation of risk coefficients between populations with different baseline rates. Several general relative risk models were examined; the exponential model provided the best fit. The Poisson regression method was used to fit the relative risk model to the grouped data. The effects of exposure to aflatoxin (AFB1) and hepatitis B infection were both found to be statistically significant. The risk of death from liver cancer for those exposed to AFB1 relative to the unexposed population, increases by 0.05% per ng/kg/day exposure of AFB1 (p less than 0.001). The results also indicated a 25-fold increase in the risk of death from liver cancer among those infected with hepatitis B virus, relative to noncarriers (p less than 0.0001). With a hepatitis prevalence rate of 1%, the aflatoxin intake level associated with liver cancer lifetime excess risk of 1 x 10(-5) for the U.S. population was estimated as 253 ng/day, based on a liver cancer baseline rate of 3.4/100,000/yr.