On a Catalogue of Metrics for Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services

Given the continually increasing amount of commercial Cloud services in the market, evaluation of different services plays a significant role in cost-benefit analysis or decision making for choosing Cloud Computing. In particular, employing suitable metrics is essential in evaluation implementations. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any systematic discussion about metrics for evaluating Cloud services. By using the method of Systematic Literature Review (SLR), we have collected the de facto metrics adopted in the existing Cloud services evaluation work. The collected metrics were arranged following different Cloud service features to be evaluated, which essentially constructed an evaluation metrics catalogue, as shown in this paper. This metrics catalogue can be used to facilitate the future practice and research in the area of Cloud services evaluation. Moreover, considering metrics selection is a prerequisite of benchmark selection in evaluation implementations, this work also supplements the existing research in benchmarking the commercial Cloud services.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Grid Computing (Grid 2012), pp. 164-173, Beijing, China, September 20-23, 201

Hospital information systems : a nursing viewpoint : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Nursing Studies at Massey University

This thesis is concerned with hospital information systems. The literature relating to management information systems is examined in conjunction with the literature which specifically focuses upon hospital and nursing information systems. A field study, using a case study approach, is designed and implemented, its purpose being to analyse five sub-systems of a current hospital information system in use in one Hospital Board. This field study utilises a basic systems analysis methodology focusing upon the problem identification and performance identifications of the analysis cycle. In the problem identification phase forty-two subjects are interviewed, (83.3% of the sample being nurses in management positions). Check lists designed to test the sub-systems abilities to generate, store, retrieve and utilise data, and test the subjects knowledge of the sub-systems are devised and applied. The data obtained from the application of check lists is analysed and data flow charts and in-depth interview schedules developed for use in phase two or the performance identification phase of the field study. In phase two (performance identification) eleven subjects in administrative positions within the Hospital Board are interviewed using the data flow charts and the in-depth interview schedules as tools for eliciting data. Contrary to the author's expectations the field study results reveal a considerable diversity. In phase one the respondents possessed a sound knowledge of the admission/discharge, patient care and nursing management sub-systems. 85,7% of the nurse respondents have knowledge of the patient care sub-system and a further 79.2% have some knowledge of its ability to generate, store, retrieve and utilise information. In common with the administrators the high level of knowledge of retrieval and utlisation (89.2%) would indicate frequent use of the system. By contrast only 5.4% of the respondents in phase one had knowledge of retrieval and utilisation of the staffing information sub-system as compared with 100% in the administrators group. This same pattern emerges for the financial sub-system with 13.5% of the respondents having knowledge of retrieval and 18.9% of utilisation of the sub-system compared with 81.8% of administrators. These results indicate to the author that information systems development tends to be associated with each health discipline rather than with the macro development of a relevant, comprehensive hospital information system. To this end a series of questions are raised and possible answers provided. Finally a model which could become a prescription for future development is presented

Comparing the Overhead of Topological and Concatenated Quantum Error Correction

This work compares the overhead of quantum error correction with concatenated and topological quantum error-correcting codes. To perform a numerical analysis, we use the Quantum Resource Estimator Toolbox (QuRE) that we recently developed. We use QuRE to estimate the number of qubits, quantum gates, and amount of time needed to factor a 1024-bit number on several candidate quantum technologies that differ in their clock speed and reliability. We make several interesting observations. First, topological quantum error correction requires fewer resources when physical gate error rates are high, white concatenated codes have smaller overhead for physical gate error rates below approximately 10E-7. Consequently, we show that different error-correcting codes should be chosen for two of the studied physical quantum technologies - ion traps and superconducting qubits. Second, we observe that the composition of the elementary gate types occurring in a typical logical circuit, a fault-tolerant circuit protected by the surface code, and a fault-tolerant circuit protected by a concatenated code all differ. This also suggests that choosing the most appropriate error correction technique depends on the ability of the future technology to perform specific gates efficiently

The Structured Process Modeling Theory (SPMT): a cognitive view on why and how modelers benefit from structuring the process of process modeling

After observing various inexperienced modelers constructing a business process model based on the same textual case description, it was noted that great differences existed in the quality of the produced models. The impression arose that certain quality issues originated from cognitive failures during the modeling process. Therefore, we developed an explanatory theory that describes the cognitive mechanisms that affect effectiveness and efficiency of process model construction: the Structured Process Modeling Theory (SPMT). This theory states that modeling accuracy and speed are higher when the modeler adopts an (i) individually fitting (ii) structured (iii) serialized process modeling approach. The SPMT is evaluated against six theory quality criteria

An overview of decision table literature 1982-1995.

This report gives an overview of the literature on decision tables over the past 15 years. As much as possible, for each reference, an author supplied abstract, a number of keywords and a classification are provided. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. The literature is classified according to application area, theoretical versus practical character, year of publication, country or origin (not necessarily country of publication) and the language of the document. After a description of the scope of the interview, classification results and the classification by topic are presented. The main body of the paper is the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.