6,832 research outputs found
ISP-friendly Peer-assisted On-demand Streaming of Long Duration Content in BBC iPlayer
In search of scalable solutions, CDNs are exploring P2P support. However, the
benefits of peer assistance can be limited by various obstacle factors such as
ISP friendliness - requiring peers to be within the same ISP, bitrate
stratification - the need to match peers with others needing similar bitrate,
and partial participation - some peers choosing not to redistribute content.
This work relates potential gains from peer assistance to the average number
of users in a swarm, its capacity, and empirically studies the effects of these
obstacle factors at scale, using a month-long trace of over 2 million users in
London accessing BBC shows online. Results indicate that even when P2P swarms
are localised within ISPs, up to 88% of traffic can be saved. Surprisingly,
bitrate stratification results in 2 large sub-swarms and does not significantly
affect savings. However, partial participation, and the need for a minimum
swarm size do affect gains. We investigate improvements to gain from increasing
content availability through two well-studied techniques: content bundling -
combining multiple items to increase availability, and historical caching of
previously watched items. Bundling proves ineffective as increased server
traffic from larger bundles outweighs benefits of availability, but simple
caching can considerably boost traffic gains from peer assistance.Comment: In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 201
Operating theatre modelling: integrating social measures
Hospital resource modelling literature is primarily focussed on productivity and efficiency measures. In this paper, our focus is on the alignment of the most valuable revenue factor, the operating room (OR) with the most valuable cost factor, the staff. When aligning these economic and social decisions, respectively, into one sustainable model, simulation results justify the integration of these factors. This research shows that integrating staff decisions and OR decisions results in better solutions for both entities. A discrete event simulation approach is used as a performance test to evaluate an integrated and an iterative model. Experimental analysis show how our integrated approach can benefit the alignment of the planning of the human resources as well as the planning of the capacity of the OR based on both economic related metrics (lead time, overtime, number of patients rejected) and social related metrics (personnel preferences, aversions, roster quality)
Interpreting infrastructure: Defining user value for digital financial intermediaries.
The 3DaRoC project is exploring digital connectivity and peer-to-peer relationships in financial
services. In the light of the near collapse of the UK and world financial sector, understanding and
innovating new and more sustainable approaches to financial services is now a critical topic. At the
same time, the increasing penetration and take-up of robust high-speed networks, dependable peerto-
peer architectures and mobile multimedia technologies offer novel platforms for offering financial
services over the Internet. These new forms of digital connectivity give rise to opportunities in doing
financial transactions in different ways and with radically different business models that offer the
possibility of transforming the marketplace. One area in the digital economy that has had such an
effect is in the ways that users access and use digital banking and payment services.
The impact of the new economic models presented by these digital financial services is yet to be fully
determined, but they have huge potential as disruptive innovations, with a potentially transformative
effect on the way that services are offered to users. Little is understood about how technical
infrastructures impact on the ways that people make sense of the financial services that they use, or
on how these might be designed more effectively. 3DaRoC is exploring this space working with our
partners and end users to prototype and evaluate new online, mobile, ubiquitous and tangible
technologies, exploring how these services might be extended.Executive Summary: Drawing from Studies of Use - the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users. The UK economy has a huge dependence on financial services, and this is increasingly based on digital platforms. Innovating new economic models around consumer financial services through the use of digital technologies is seen as increasingly important in developed economies. There are a number of drivers for this, ranging from national economic factors to the prosaic nature of enabling cheap, speedy and timely interactions for users. The potential for these new digital solutions is that they will allay an over-reliance on the traditional banking sector, which has proved itself to be unstable and risky, and we have seen a number of national policy moves to encourage growth in this sector. Partly as a result of the 2008 banking crisis, there has been an explosion in peer-to-peer financial services for non-professional consumers. These organisations act as intermediaries between users looking to trade goods or credit. However, building self-sustaining or profitable financial services within this novel space is itself fraught with commercial, regulatory, technical and social problems. This document reports on the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users, describing analysis of contextual field studies carried out in two retail digital financial intermediary organisations: Zopa Limited and the Bristol Pound. It forms the second milestone document in the 3DaRoC project, developing patterns of use that have arisen on the back of the technical infrastructures in the two organisations that form cases for examination. Its purpose is to examine how the two different technical infrastructures that underpin the transactions that they support–composed of the back-office hardware and software, data structures, the networking and communications technologies used, supported consumer devices, and the user interfaces and interaction design–have provided opportunities for users to realise their financial and other needs. While we orient towards the issues of service use (and its problems), we also examine the activities and expectations of their various users. Our research has involved teams from Lancaster University examining Zopa and Brunel University focusing on the Bristol Pound over approximately a one-year period from October 2013 to October 2014. Extensive interviews, document analysis, observation of user interactions, and other methods have been employed to develop the process analyses of the firms presented here. This report comprises of three key sections: descriptions of the user demographics for Zopa and the Bristol Pound, a discussion about the user experience and its role in community, and an examination of the role of usage data in the development of these a products. We conclude with final analytical section drawing preliminary conclusions from the research presented.The 3DaRoC project is funded by the RCUK Digital Economy ‘Research in the Wild’ theme (grant no.
EP/K012304/1)
Blockchain Inefficiency in the Bitcoin Peers Network
We investigate Bitcoin network monitoring the dynamics of blocks and
transactions. We unveil that 43\% of the transactions are still not included in
the Blockchain after 1h from the first time they were seen in the network and
20\% of the transactions are still not included in the Blockchain after 30
days, revealing therefore great inefficiency in the Bitcoin system. However, we
observe that most of these `forgotten' transactions have low values and in
terms of transferred value the system is less inefficient with 93\% of the
transactions value being included into the Blockchain within 3h. The fact that
a sizeable fraction of transactions is not processed timely casts serious
doubts on the usability of the Bitcoin Blockchain for reliable time-stamping
purposes and calls for a debate about the right systems of incentives which a
peer-to-peer unintermediated system should introduce to promote efficient
transaction recording.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 3 table
Framing the collaborative economy - Voices of contestation
Within the context of multiple crises and change, a range of practices discussed under the umbrella term of collaborative (or sharing) economy have been gaining considerable attention. Supporters build an idealistic vision of collaborative societies. Critics have been stripping the concept of its visionary potential, questioning its revolutionary nature. In the study, these debates are brought down to the local level in search for common perceptions among the co-creators of the concept in Vienna, Austria. Towards this aim a Q study is conducted, i.e. a mixed method enabling analyses of subjective perceptions on socially contested topics. Four framings are identified: Visionary Supporters, Market Optimists, Visionary Critics, and Skeptics, each bringing their values, visions, and practical goals characteristic of different understanding of the collaborative economy. The study questions the need for building a globally-applicable definition of the concept, calls for more context-sensitivity, exploratory studies, and city-level multi-stakeholder dialogues
The Nab Experiment: A Precision Measurement of Unpolarized Neutron Beta Decay
Neutron beta decay is one of the most fundamental processes in nuclear
physics and provides sensitive means to uncover the details of the weak
interaction. Neutron beta decay can evaluate the ratio of axial-vector to
vector coupling constants in the standard model, , through
multiple decay correlations. The Nab experiment will carry out measurements of
the electron-neutrino correlation parameter with a precision of and the Fierz interference term to
in unpolarized free neutron beta decay. These results, along with a more
precise measurement of the neutron lifetime, aim to deliver an independent
determination of the ratio with a precision of that will allow an evaluation of and sensitively
test CKM unitarity, independent of nuclear models. Nab utilizes a novel, long
asymmetric spectrometer that guides the decay electron and proton to two large
area silicon detectors in order to precisely determine the electron energy and
an estimation of the proton momentum from the proton time of flight. The Nab
spectrometer is being commissioned at the Fundamental Neutron Physics Beamline
at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Lab. We present an
overview of the Nab experiment and recent updates on the spectrometer,
analysis, and systematic effects.Comment: Presented at PPNS201
Self-Healing Protocols for Connectivity Maintenance in Unstructured Overlays
In this paper, we discuss on the use of self-organizing protocols to improve
the reliability of dynamic Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks. Two similar
approaches are studied, which are based on local knowledge of the nodes' 2nd
neighborhood. The first scheme is a simple protocol requiring interactions
among nodes and their direct neighbors. The second scheme adds a check on the
Edge Clustering Coefficient (ECC), a local measure that allows determining
edges connecting different clusters in the network. The performed simulation
assessment evaluates these protocols over uniform networks, clustered networks
and scale-free networks. Different failure modes are considered. Results
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal.Comment: The paper has been accepted to the journal Peer-to-Peer Networking
and Applications. The final publication is available at Springer via
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12083-015-0384-
- …