A Framework for Integrating Transportation Into Smart Cities

In recent years, economic, environmental, and political forces have quickly given rise to “Smart Cities” -- an array of strategies that can transform transportation in cities. Using a multi-method approach to research and develop a framework for smart cities, this study provides a framework that can be employed to: Understand what a smart city is and how to replicate smart city successes; The role of pilot projects, metrics, and evaluations to test, implement, and replicate strategies; and Understand the role of shared micromobility, big data, and other key issues impacting communities. This research provides recommendations for policy and professional practice as it relates to integrating transportation into smart cities

Gradualism and Uncertainty in International Union Formation

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework of international unions qua coalitions of countries adopting a common policy and common supranational institutions. We introduce a general class of non-cooperative spatial bargaining games of coalition formation among three countries in order to examine the endogenous strategic considerations in the creation and enlargement of international unions. Why would we observe a gradualist approach in the formation of the grand coalition even if the latter is assumed to be weakly efficient? We propose uncertainty about the benefits of integration as a mechanism that can generate gradual union formation in equilibrium. As it turns out, it may well be in the ‘core’ countries’ interest to delay the accession of a third, peripheral country in order to i) stack the institutional make-up of the initial union in their favor and ii) signal their high resolve to wait out the expansion of their bilateral subunion. A related case from the European Union provides an interesting illustration.

Performance Management in Public Organizations: A Complexity Perspective

During this uncertain and turbulent knowledge-oriented era, simple linear organizations are no longer able to face the current openness, conflicts, chaos, randomness and uncertainty. Therefore, amoeba or multi-faceted organizational structures are on the rise and performance management of organizations should change their present course. This research employs complexity theory to review the innovation of performance management in public organizations. It further emphasizes the unpredictability and nonlinear- development and focuses more on how modern organizations can create dynamical performance management with paradox management, co-evolution and selforganization management methods to examine performance management of public organizations

Service Oriented Grid Computing Model as a means of Cost Sharing in the Institutions of Higher Learning in Kenya

The use of distributed systems by enterprises and academic institutions has increased exponentially in recent years, enabled by factors such as ready access to the Internet and the World-Wide Web, the maturity and ubiquity of the HTTP protocol, and the improvement in secure communication technology. In the early days, distributed applications communicated using proprietary protocols, and system administrators used adhoc (improvised) methods to manage systems that might be across town, on another continent, or anywhere in between. Numerous standards have been developed over the years to ease the costs of deployment and maintenance, with varying degrees of success. Today, the key technologies in distributed systems are service-oriented architecture (SOA), Web services, and grid computing, all of which are seeing significant investment in standardization and increasingly rapid adoption by organizations of all types and sizes. Academic organizations in Kenya have seen increase in the number of students admitted as well reduction in central government funding to these institutions to purchase more computer systems and procure management information systems .In this paper we offer a highlevel description of each of the technologies, and how they can be used to develop a cost effective co-funded dynamic system that can be used by the institutions

Locating Cache Performance Bottlenecks Using Data Profiling

Effective use of CPU data caches is critical to good performance, but poor cache use patterns are often hard to spot using existing execution profiling tools. Typical profilers attribute costs to specific code locations. The costs due to frequent cache misses on a given piece of data, however, may be spread over instructions throughout the application. The resulting individually small costs at a large number of instructions can easily appear insignificant in a code profiler's output. DProf helps programmers understand cache miss costs by attributing misses to data types instead of code. Associating cache misses with data helps programmers locate data structures that experience misses in many places in the application's code. DProf introduces a number of new views of cache miss data, including a data profile, which reports the data types with the most cache misses, and a data flow graph, which summarizes how objects of a given type are accessed throughout their lifetime, and which accesses incur expensive cross-CPU cache loads. We present two case studies of using DProf to find and fix cache performance bottlenecks in Linux. The improvements provide a 16-57% throughput improvement on a range of memcached and Apache workloads.MathWorks, Inc. FellowshipNational Science Foundation (U.S.). (Grant number CNS-0834415

Service Oriented Grid Computing Model as a means of Cost Sharing in the Institutions of Higher Learning in Kenya

The use of distributed systems by enterprises and academic institutions has increased exponentially in recent years, enabled by factors such as ready access to the Internet and the World-Wide Web, the maturity and ubiquity of the HTTP protocol, and the improvement in secure communication technology. In the early days, distributed applications communicated using proprietary protocols, and system administrators used adhoc (improvised) methods to manage systems that might be across town, on another continent, or anywhere in between. Numerous standards have been developed over the years to ease the costs of deployment and maintenance, with varying degrees of success. Today, the key technologies in distributed systems are service-oriented architecture (SOA), Web services, and grid computing, all of which are seeing significant investment in standardization and increasingly rapid adoption by organizations of all types and sizes. Academic organizations in Kenya have seen increase in the number of students admitted as well reduction in central government funding to these institutions to purchase more computer systems and procure management information systems .In this paper we offer a high-level description of each of the technologies, and how they can be used to develop a cost effective co-funded dynamic system that can be used by the institutions. Keywords:service-oriented architecture, Web services, grid computing

EU enlargement and consequences for FDI assisted industrial development

Many of the new member states as well as candidate and accession countries of the EU are confident that membership will result in substantially increased inward foreign direct investment (FDI) in manufacturing. This paper discusses the policy issues and challenges that cohesion and accession countries face, applying lessons that by now have become mainstream in the parallel discussion of FDI-assisted development in the developing economies. We argue that globalisation has attenuated the benefits that accrue from EU membership for latecomers, and they must now compete for FDI not just with other European countries but also with non-EU emerging economies. We posit that they should not base their industrial development strategy on mere passive reliance of FDI flows without considering how to concatenate their industrial development and the nature of the MNE activities they attract.FDI, European Union, MNEs, multinationals, absorptive capacity, globalization, industrial development, EU enlargement, foreign investment, direct investment

The Industrial Symbiosis Research Symposium at Yale: Advancing the Study of Industry and Environment

Industrial symbiosis (IS), a sub-field of industrial ecology, is principally concerned with the cooperative management of resource flows through networks of businesses as a means of approaching ecologically sustainable industrial activity. Isolated researchers in a broad range of disciplines have investigated industrial symbiosis from a variety of starting points without a common agenda. The Industrial Symbiosis Research Symposium was held in January 2004 at Yale University, bringing together more than 30 experts from 15 countries to discuss critical questions and issues in this emerging area.The purpose of the Symposium was to give researchers an opportunity to share their knowledge and experience on the state of research, to determine areas of possible cross-fertilization among disciplines, and to establish research priorities. The Industrial Symbiosis Research Symposium at Yale: Advancing the Study of Industry and Environment is a report on the first global research conference in this area

Framework for Real-time collaboration on extensive Data Types using Strong Eventual Consistency

La collaboration en temps réel est un cas spécial de collaboration où les utilisateurs travaillent sur le même élément simultanément et sont au courant des modifications des autres utilisateurs en temps réel. Les données distribuées doivent rester disponibles et consistant tout en étant répartis sur plusieurs systèmes physiques. "Strong Consistency" est une approche qui crée un ordre total des opérations en utilisant des mécanismes tel que le "locking". Cependant, cela introduit un "bottleneck". Ces dix dernières années, les algorithmes de concurrence ont été étudiés dans le but de garder la convergence de tous les replicas sans utiliser de "locking" ni de synchronisation. "Operational Trans- formation" et "Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDT)" sont utilisés dans ce but. Cependant, la complexité de ces stratégies les rend compliquées à intégrer dans des logicielles conséquents, comme les éditeurs de modèles, spécialement pour des data structures complexes comme les graphes. Les implémentations actuelles intègrent seulement des data linéaires tel que le texte. Dans ce mémoire, nous présentons CollabServer, un framework pour construire des environnements de collaboration. Il a une implémentation de CRDTs pour des data structures complexes tel que les graphes et donne la possibilité de construire ses propres data structures.Real-time collaboration is a special case of collaboration where users work on the same artefact simultaneously and are aware of each other’s changes in real-time. Shared data should remain available and consistent while dealing with its physically distributed aspect. Strong Consistency is one approach that enforces a total order of operations using mechanisms, such as locking. This however introduces a bottleneck. In the last decade, algorithms for concurrency control have been studied to keep convergence of all replicas without locking or synchronization. Operational Transformation and Conflict free Replicated Data Types (CRDT) are widely used to achieve this purpose. However, the complexity of these strategies makes it hard to integrate in large software, such as modeling editors, especially for complex data types like graphs. Current implementations only integrate linear data, such as text. In this thesis, we present CollabServer, a framework to build collaborative environments. It features a CRDTs implementation for complex data types such as graphs and gives possibility to build other data structures