New England Genetics Collaborative Results of the Stakeholder Survey for Project Year Four

Stakeholder feedback offers a range of critical and helpful insights into the potential next steps for the collaborative as it carriers on activities for Project Year Five and plans for a new grant application. To facilitate this feedback, the NEGC conducts an annual survey of its stakeholders to identify concerns, document how the project is doing, and solicit suggestions for improvement. One hundred forty-one email invitations were sent out between October and November 2011 to stakeholders of the New England Genetic Collaborative (NEGC). Of these, one opted out and 63 provided responses (45% response rate). Since the 2009 report, there was improvement in two important areas. When asked whether they had a clear understanding of the NEGC\u27s mission, 73% agreed (vs. 60% in 2009). Concerning whether the NEGC had made substantive and clear progress in achieving its mission, 72% agreed (vs. 47% in 2009). Feedback on the project\u27s evaluation reports was generally positive with 67% to 70% of respondents indicating that each of the reports helped them understand the progress and challenges of the initiative (vs. 60% to 75% in 2009). Feedback from the Advisory Council was high this year, with 13 members participating. Most participants (\u3e75%) felt that there was a good spirit of cooperation, that meetings were well run, that the RCC provided excellent support and responded effectively to questions, and that the Advisory Council was achieving its main objectives. Project recommendations highlight the need for continuing to strengthen communication efforts of the NEGC, identifying new collaboration opportunities for members of the Advisory Committee, making effective use of potential stakeholder contributions, improving consumer/family representation in regional change, pursuing sustainable initiatives, addressing multiple barriers to care for families, and improving access to NEGC resources. Results are separated into: context of the report (p.2), survey results (p.3), and recommended areas for followup (p.9)

FIFO anomaly is unbounded

Virtual memory of computers is usually implemented by demand paging. For some page replacement algorithms the number of page faults may increase as the number of page frames increases. Belady, Nelson and Shedler constructed reference strings for which page replacement algorithm FIFO produces near twice more page faults in a larger memory than in a smaller one. They formulated the conjecture that 2 is a general bound. We prove that this ratio can be arbitrarily large

New England Genetics Collaborative Annual Evaluation Report for Project Year Four

This annual report covers the activities of the New England Genetics Collaborative (NEGC) from June 1, 2010 to May 31, 2011. The purpose of this report is to provide the reader with additional documentation on the utilization of grant funds and what has been achieved as a result, to provide an overview of NEGC activities for both old and new partners, and to offer recommendations for the collaborative\u27s improvement and ultimate achievement of its mission and vision

On the Role of External Constraints in a Spatially Extended Evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma Game

We study the emergency of mutual cooperation in evolutionary prisoner's dilemma games when the players are located on a square lattice. The players can choose one of the three strategies: cooperation (C), defection (D) or "tit for tat" (T), and their total payoffs come from games with the nearest neighbors. During the random sequential updates the players adopt one of their neighboring strategies if the chosen neighbor has higher payoff. We compare the effect of two types of external constraints added to the Darwinian evolutionary processes. In both cases the strategy of a randomly chosen player is replaced with probability P by another strategy. In the first case, the strategy is replaced by a randomly chosen one among the two others, while in the second case the new strategy is always C. Using generalized mean-field approximations and Monte Carlo simulations the strategy concentrations are evaluated in the stationary state for different strength of external constraints characterized by the probability P.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure