An Efficient Mechanism for Differentiated Quality of Internet Service

The Internet industry has realized the importance of provisioning different quality of service to different applications. This paper proposes the integrated differentiated services that achieves the efficient throughput allocation without significant queue management or real-time pricing costs. Competing differentiated services integrates networks into a single network in an economy and allows endusers to submit packets to many networks. In equilibrium, each network posts any price for a submitted packet over time by virtue of the revenue equivalence property.

Credit securitization and credit derivatives : financial instruments and the credit risk management of middle market commercial loan portfolios

Banks increasingly recognize the need to measure and manage the credit risk of their loans on a portfolio basis. We address the subportfolio "middle market". Due to their specific lending policy for this market segment it is an important task for banks to systematically identify regional and industrial credit concentrations and reduce the detected concentrations through diversification. In recent years, the development of markets for credit securitization and credit derivatives has provided new credit risk management tools. However, in the addressed market segment adverse selection and moral hazard problems are quite severe. A potential successful application of credit securitization and credit derivatives for managing credit risk of middle market commercial loan portfolios depends on the development of incentive-compatible structures which solve or at least mitigate the adverse selection and moral hazard problems. In this paper we identify a number of general requirements and describe two possible solution concepts

Do End Users Accept End User Development?

Do end-users accept end-user development by using enterprise mashups? Using the technology acceptance model, this research investigates the acceptance of the FAST platform, which enables endusers to build their own application by simply drag and drop graphical building blocks onto a canvas. An evaluation workshop of 159 individuals in various countries and locations found strong support of the idea. It was revealed that perceived usefulness strongly affected the attitude towards using enterprise mashups for end-user development. In turn, perceived ease of use did not. With respect to the developed mashup platform it was found that the available content within a mashup platform is the main influencing factor on the acceptance of end-user development by using mashups

CAFS in action

For those few readers who do not know, CAFS is a system developed by ICL to search through data at speeds of several million characters per second. Its full name is Content Addressable File Store Information Search Processor, CAFS-ISP or CAFS for short. It is an intelligent hardware-based searching engine, currently available with both ICL's 2966 family of computers and the recently announced Series 39, operating within the VME environment. It uses content addressing techniques to perform fast searches of data or text stored on discs: almost all fields are equally accessible as search keys. Software in the mainframe generates a search task; the CAFS hardware performs the search, and returns the hit records to the mainframe. Because special hardware is used, the searching process is very much more efficient than searching performed by any software method. Various software interfaces are available which allow CAFS to be used in many different situations. CAFS can be used with existing systems without significant change. It can be used to make online enquiries of mainframe files or databases or directly from user written high level language programs. These interfaces are outlined in the body of the report

Application of new technologies in the virtual library: Seminars in Turkey, Portugal, and Spain

This paper focuses on the technologies that are available today to support the concept of a virtual library. The concept of a 'virtual library' or a 'library without walls' is meant to convey the idea that information in any format should be available to the end-user from the desktop as if it were located on the local workstation. Discussed here are the background, trends, technology enablers, end-user requirements, and the NASA Access Mechanism (NAM) system, one example of how it is possible to apply existing technologies to the client server architecture to logically centralize geographically distributed applications and information

Bioplastics tipping point:drop-in or non-drop-in?

The forecasted bioplastic production capacity has signaled a strong growth in the next years, but with higher participation of drop-ins. Drop-in bioplastics are nonbiodegradable materials, identical to their fossil counterparts although obtained from renewable raw materials. The present paper examines why drop-ins have presented growth rates higher than non-drop-ins, analyzing some critical factors of their adoption by end users and whether the bioplastics tipping point has been reached. This comparison between drop-in and non-drop-in bioplastic innovation dynamics, which involves investment and complementary assets, will contribute to a better understanding of the critical factors that lead to bioplastics tipping point