The Role of Responsive Pricing in the Internet

The Internet continues to evolve as it reaches out to a wider user population. The recent introduction of user-friendly navigation and retrieval tools for the World Wide Web has triggered an unprecedented level of interest in the Internet among the media and the general public, as well as in the technical community. It seems inevitable that some changes or additions are needed in the control mechanisms used to allocate usage of Internet resources. In this paper, we argue that a feedback signal in the form of a variable price for network service is a workable tool to aid network operators in controlling Internet traffic. We suggest that these prices should vary dynamically based on the current utilization of network resources. We show how this responsive pricing puts control of network service back where it belongs: with the users.Internet, pricing, feedback, networks

Cost-based burst dropping strategy in optical burst switching networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) is a new paradigm for future all-optical networks. Intentional burst dropping is one of techniques used to achieve desired quality of service. In this paper we note that some bursts are more likely to cause contention. We propose a cost function that can be used to predict the likelihood that a given burst will interfere with other traffic, then we explain how, by using this information a new burst dropping strategy can be designed. We compare our method with a random burst dropping technique and show that the cost-based approach offers a significant performance improvement

Cultivating Resilience in Part-Time Doctoral Students

In an increasingly competitive world, master’s degrees are becoming the new common educational currency, leading to a markable increase in the number of students pursuing Professional Doctorates to stand out, boost their professional standing, and increase their income. The rise of Professional Doctorates is eclipsing the growth of traditional PhDs, and the academic intakes of the future look to be built of part-time professionals, who must also balance additional stressors such as family and personal life and their day-to-day careers. As such, this author recommends academic institutes promote the skills of resilience to help part-time students manage day-to-day stressors and embark on a more successful doctoral journey. This is an opinion-based paper that utilises lessons learned from the author’s own academic journey and the classic underpinning literature on resilience to recommend three sets of skills and mindsets that could help boost part-time doctoral students’ resilience

What’s the Deference? Interpreting the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines After Kisor

For more than three decades, the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines have constrained the punishment doled out by federal judges, limiting discretion that was once nearly unlimited and bringing standardization to the penological decisionmaking process. For twice as long, the Supreme Court has constrained judges in a different way—by requiring that administrative agencies receive deference when they interpret the meaning of their own regulations. At the convergence of these two domains sits “commentary,” or interpretive notes the U.S. Sentencing Commission appends to the otherwise congressionally approved Guidelines. In Stinson v. United States, the Court made clear that commentary should be reviewed and deferred to as an agency’s view of its own regulations. This classification has since rendered numerous examples of commentary, including those that enhance punishment, the last word on what the Guidelines mean and how they should be applied. Recently, however, in Kisor v. Wilkie, the Supreme Court clarified its regulatory deference doctrine, narrowing the circumstances in which it should be applied. This Note examines the historical interplay between federal sentencing and regulatory deference and considers whether, in light of Kisor, deference to commentary is appropriate. Specifically, by analyzing one example of commentary already dividing the circuit courts, this Note contends that Kisor and the rationales underlying the Guidelines and regulatory deference caution against their commingling—particularly where, as here, commentary only adds punishment

Designing a Supply Chain Visibility Information System for the Manufacturing Industry

This paper evaluates the design and success of an Information System developed in a just-in-time UK manufacturer to combat the lack of visibility and financial impact caused by supply chain disruptions related to extreme weather and traffic events. An information system design is first presented through the use of leading academic models, with a subsequent evaluation of perceived success via 4 employee interviews within the UK manufacturer. The DeLone and McLean model Multi-Perspective Evaluation model is then used to present the interviewees responses. This paper finds the newly introduced IS to be a partial success in meeting project objectives via the reduction of incident response time by 30 minutes per incident, and the centralization of key data points. This paper contributes to literature through the provision of framework and learnings for other organizations to build and act upon, in the aims of reducing their own supply chain disruption due to extreme weather and traffic events

Synthetic Data Generation using Benerator Tool

Datasets of different characteristics are needed by the research community for experimental purposes. However, real data may be difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns. Moreover, real data may not meet specific characteristics which are needed to verify new approaches under certain conditions. Given these limitations, the use of synthetic data is a viable alternative to complement the real data. In this report, we describe the process followed to generate synthetic data using Benerator, a publicly available tool. The results show that the synthetic data preserves a high level of accuracy compared to the original data. The generated datasets correspond to microdata containing records with social, economic and demographic data which mimics the distribution of aggregated statistics from the 2011 Irish Census data.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 10 reference

Ontology-Based Quality Evaluation of Value Generalization Hierarchies for Data Anonymization

In privacy-preserving data publishing, approaches using Value Generalization Hierarchies (VGHs) form an important class of anonymization algorithms. VGHs play a key role in the utility of published datasets as they dictate how the anonymization of the data occurs. For categorical attributes, it is imperative to preserve the semantics of the original data in order to achieve a higher utility. Despite this, semantics have not being formally considered in the specification of VGHs. Moreover, there are no methods that allow the users to assess the quality of their VGH. In this paper, we propose a measurement scheme, based on ontologies, to quantitatively evaluate the quality of VGHs, in terms of semantic consistency and taxonomic organization, with the aim of producing higher-quality anonymizations. We demonstrate, through a case study, how our evaluation scheme can be used to compare the quality of multiple VGHs and can help to identify faulty VGHs.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, presented in the Privacy in Statistical Databases Conference 2014 (Ibiza, Spain

A survey of fertilizer use from 2001-2003 for grassland and arable crops

End of project reportFarm management data for the years 2001-2003 from the Teagasc National Farm Survey (NFS) were used as the basis for this fertilizer use survey. The farms which took part in the survey were randomly selected to represent the major farm systems and sizes using information from the CSO Census of Agriculture 2000. Farms were classified into 6 main farm systems namely: dairying, dairying with other enterprises, cattle rearing, cattle with other systems, mainly sheep and tillage systems. These systems refer to the dominant enterprise in each group