An Experiment on Bare-Metal BigData Provisioning

Many BigData customers use on-demand platforms in the cloud, where they can get a dedicated virtual cluster in a couple of minutes and pay only for the time they use. Increasingly, there is a demand for bare-metal bigdata solutions for applications that cannot tolerate the unpredictability and performance degradation of virtualized systems. Existing bare-metal solutions can introduce delays of 10s of minutes to provision a cluster by installing operating systems and applications on the local disks of servers. This has motivated recent research developing sophisticated mechanisms to optimize this installation. These approaches assume that using network mounted boot disks incur unacceptable run-time overhead. Our analysis suggest that while this assumption is true for application data, it is incorrect for operating systems and applications, and network mounting the boot disk and applications result in negligible run-time impact while leading to faster provisioning time.This research was supported in part by the MassTech Collaborative Research Matching Grant Program, NSF awards 1347525 and 1414119 and several commercial partners of the Massachusetts Open Cloud who may be found at http://www.massopencloud.or

Controlling Patent Prosecution History

[Excerpt] “One of the most salient effects of patent prosecution history arises in the context of the doctrine of equivalents. Under that doctrine, although patent claims may be found to be broader than their literal scope, territory surrendered during prosecution cannot be encompassed as equivalent. Nor can territory forfeited by initial failure to claim be captured under the doctrine of equivalents. Most attorneys who prosecute applications are apt to be aware of such problems and to take measures to avoid them.

Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! Moving from European discourses on the precarious and art to the realities of contemporary dance

In this article, we encapsulate several key debates in sociology, cultural and arts politics and the media industry on precarious work since its emergence at the turn of the twenty-first century. After setting out the fundamental discourses on precarity, we concentrate on contemporary dance artists as precarious workers and investigate the extent to which different levels of precarity affect them, distinguishing relevant aspects related to socio-economic, mental and physical precarity. We propose that the nature of their work is integrally connected with the 'precarious'. To close, we conclude that protest against precarity itself is of a precarious nature

'Requisite irony' and the knowledge based economy: a critical discourse analysis of the drafting of education policy in the european union

This chapter makes a case for combining the critical analysis of discourse with an embrace of ‘self-reflexive irony’ (Jessop, 2002, 2004a) in the investigation of the articulations between the Knowledge Based Economy (KBE) and education policy in the European Union (EU). Irony is embraced as a topic within the study of EU governance of education policy in so far as it contributes to an analysis of the activities of supranational and national actors within complex multi-scalar political structures. In addition, the implications of self-reflexive irony are considered so as to suggest a series of clarifications for the process of analysing policy texts within a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework (Fairclough,1989,1996,1999). In essence, the chapter does two things. It interrogates the contradictory strategies and sources of conflict in the production of EU scale education policy texts and questions both the significance and the stability of the articulation of education reform with KBE discourses. At the same time, the chapter argues that the production of such texts contingently but incrementally contributes to the production of a relatively stable governance framework for EU scale education policy and that it is to the significance of this that a critical discourse analysis leads

Restore the Floor: It’s Time to Raise the Minimum Wage

[Excerpt] In 1994 there were 4.1 million hourly workers who were paid the minimum wage or less which represents 6.2 percent of all workers paid on an hourly basis. These estimates are conservative as this total does not include all the salaried workers with trumped up titles such as “assistant manager” or “management trainee” who, because of long hours, are often paid at the minimum wage rate or less. Individuals who are employed at the minimum wage can be characterized by their strong work ethic as they work even though their low wage jobs do not provide enough earnings or income for a decent standard of living. Adopting a higher minimum wage is the most straight forward “program” to help the “working poor.” An increase in the minimum wage is good policy, is beneficial to the economy and it is supported by the vast majority of Americans

Reconsidering Ford’s Highland Park assembly line: new data vs. old ideas

Ford’s Assembly Line at Highland Park is one of the most influential production system conceptualizations. Anecdotal commentary and a limited set of annual data have provided the foundation for popular opinion about Ford and past research on his factory and its management. New data is used to explore Ford’s development of the assembly line. This confirms and strengthens research on line’s effect on labor productivity, but raises several significant incongruities vis-à-vis its modern stereotype. These are important for they show Ford’s assembly line was used differently than modern ones and their production systems were more flexible than previously recognized

Rhetorical Resolutions to the Tension Between Issue Ownership and Agency OR What do you do with an old social movement?

This paper will apply Gusfield’s theory of issue ownership to one specific social issue: domestic violence. It will briefly trace the evolution of the issue as a social problem, looking at the battered women’s movement. It will present a case study of a specific, localized issue owner – Boulder County Safehouse, now SPAN (Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence) as it attempts to reframe the problem and expand its control of the issue. Finally, the case study and paper will serve as an exemplar for how other issue owners might meet the challenge of expanding the power of ownership to reframe an issue -- to keep it current and viable