Philadelphia's Crowded, Costly Jails: The Search for Safe Solutions

Analyzes trends in Philadelphia's jail population, spending on jails, and steps to enable effective management of the population while ensuring public safety, including reducing pretrial detentions. Explores policy options from other jurisdictions

Just Queuing: Policy-Based Scheduling Mechanism for Packet Switching Networks

The pervasiveness of the Internet and its applications lead to the potential increment of the users’ demands for more services with economical prices. The diversity of Internet traffic requires some classification and prioritisation since some traffic deserve much attention with less delay and loss compared to others. Current scheduling mechanisms are exposed to the trade-off between three major properties namely fairness, complexity and protection. Therefore, the question remains about how to improve the fairness and protection with less complex implementation. This research is designed to enhance scheduling mechanism by providing sustainability to the fairness and protection properties with simplicity in implementation; and hence higher service quality particularly for real-time applications. Extra elements are applied to the main fairness equation to improve the fairness property. This research adopts the restricted charge policy which imposes the protection of normal user. In terms of the complexity property, genetic algorithm has an advantage in holding the fitness score of the queue in separate storage space which potentially minimises the complexity of the algorithm. The integrity between conceptual, analytical and experimental approach verifies the efficiency of the proposed mechanism. The proposed mechanism is validated by using the emulation and the validation experiments involve real router flow data. The results of the evaluation showed fair bandwidth distribution similar to the popular Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) mechanism. Furthermore, better protection was exhibited in the results compared with the WFQ and two other scheduling mechanisms. The complexity of the proposed mechanism reached O(log(n)) which is considered as potentially low. Furthermore, this mechanism is limited to the wired networks and hence future works could improve the mechanism to be adopted in mobile ad-hoc networks or any other wireless networks. Moreover, more improvements could be applied to the proposed mechanism to enhance its deployment in the virtual circuits switching network such as the asynchronous transfer mode networks

Communication Platform Payload Definition (CPPD) study. Volume 2: Technical report

This is Volume 2 (Technical Report) of the Ford Aerospace & Communications Corporation Final Report for the Communication Platform Payload Definition (CPPD) Study program conducted for NASA Lewis Research Center under contract No. NAS3-24235. This report presents the results of the study effort leading to five potential platform payloads to service CONUS and WARC Region 2 traffic demand as projected to the year 2008. The report addresses establishing the data bases, developing service aggregation scenarios, selecting and developing 5 payload concepts, performing detailed definition of the 5 payloads, costing them, identifying critical technology, and finally comparing the payloads with each other and also with non-aggregated equivalent services

Low Cost Video For Distance Education

A distance education system has been designed for Nova Southeastern University (NSU) . The design was based on emerging low cost video technology. The report presented the design and summarizes existing distance education efforts and technologies. The design supported multimedia electronic classrooms, and enabled students to participate in multimedia classes using standard telephone networks. Results were presented in three areas: management, courseware, and, systems. In the area of management, the report recommended that the University separately establish, fund, and staff the distance education project. Supporting rationale was included. In the area of courseware, the importance of quality courseware was highlighted. It was found that the development of distance education courseware was difficult; nevertheless, quality courseware was the key to a successful distance education program. In the area of systems, component level designs were presented for a student system, a university host, and a support system. Networks connecting the systems were addressed. The student system was based on widely available multimedia systems. The host system supported up to sixteen participants in a single class. The support system was designed for the development of courseware and the support of future projects in distance education. The report included supporting Proof of Principle demonstrations. These demonstrations showed that low cost video systems had utility at speeds as low as 7. 2 kbps. They also showed that high quality student images were not crucial to the system. The report included three alternate implementation strategies. The initial capability could be operational in 1997. A multi-session, 2000 user system was projected for early in the next century

Telemedicine

Telemedicine is a rapidly evolving field as new technologies are implemented for example for the development of wireless sensors, quality data transmission. Using the Internet applications such as counseling, clinical consultation support and home care monitoring and management are more and more realized, which improves access to high level medical care in underserved areas. The 23 chapters of this book present manifold examples of telemedicine treating both theoretical and practical foundations and application scenarios

A Decade of Neural Networks: Practical Applications and Prospects

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory Neural Network Workshop, sponsored by NASA and DOD, brings together sponsoring agencies, active researchers, and the user community to formulate a vision for the next decade of neural network research and application prospects. While the speed and computing power of microprocessors continue to grow at an ever-increasing pace, the demand to intelligently and adaptively deal with the complex, fuzzy, and often ill-defined world around us remains to a large extent unaddressed. Powerful, highly parallel computing paradigms such as neural networks promise to have a major impact in addressing these needs. Papers in the workshop proceedings highlight benefits of neural networks in real-world applications compared to conventional computing techniques. Topics include fault diagnosis, pattern recognition, and multiparameter optimization

Impact of product configurations on lead time and profits

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1997, and Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 71).by Narayan Hegde.M.B.A.M.S

MedLAN: Compact mobile computing system for wireless information access in emergency hospital wards

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.As the need for faster, safer and more efficient healthcare delivery increases, medical consultants seek new ways of implementing a high quality telemedical system, using innovative technology. Until today, teleconsultation (the most common application of Telemedicine) was performed by transferring the patient from the Accidents and Emergency ward, to a specially equipped room, or by moving large and heavy machinery to the place where the patient resided. Both these solutions were unpractical, uneconomical and potentially dangerous. At the same time wireless networks became increasingly useful in point-of-care areas such as hospitals, because of their ease of use, low cost of installation and increased flexibility. This thesis presents an integrated system called MedLAN dedicated for use inside the A&E hospital wards. Its purpose is to wirelessly support high-quality live video, audio, high-resolution still images and networks support from anywhere there is WLAN coverage. It is capable of transmitting all of the above to a consultant residing either inside or outside the hospital, or even to an external place, thorough the use of the Internet. To implement that, it makes use of the existing IEEE 802.11b wireless technology. Initially, this thesis demonstrates that for specific scenarios (such as when using WLANs), DICOM specifications should be adjusted to accommodate for the reduced WLAN bandwidth. Near lossless compression has been used to send still images through the WLANs and the results have been evaluated by a number of consultants to decide whether they retain their diagnostic value. The thesis further suggests improvements on the existing 802.11b protocol. In particular, as the typical hospital environment suffers from heavy RF reflections, it suggests that an alternative method of modulation (OFDM) can be embedded in the 802.11b hardware to reduce the multipath effect, increase the throughput and thus the video quality sent by the MedLAN system. Finally, realising that the trust between a patient and a doctor is fundamental this thesis proposes a series of simple actions aiming at securing the MedLAN system. Additionally, a concrete security system is suggested, that encapsulates the existing WEP security protocol, over IPSec