Evolving IT management frameworks towards a sustainable future

Information Technology (IT) Management Frameworks are a fundamental tool used by IT professionals to efficiently manage IT resources and are globally applied to IT service delivery and management. Sustainability is a recent notion that describes the need for economic, environmental and social development with- out compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs; this applies to businesses as well as society in general. Unfortunately, IT Management Frameworks do not take sustainability into account. To the practitioner this paper demonstrates sustainability integration thereby allowing CIOs and IT managers to improve the sustainability of their organisation. To the researcher this paper argues that sustainability concerns need to be provided to IT Management through its integration into the mainstream of IT Management Frameworks. This is demonstrated through the high-level integration of sustainability in Six Sigma, C OBI T, ITIL and PRINCE2

Epidemiological, clinical and laboratory characteristics of 19 serologically confirmed rickettsial disease in Singapore.

AIM: To identify epidemiological, clinical and laboratory features of serologically-proven typhus in the local setting. METHOD & RESULTS: Retrospective study looking at rickettsial serologies done over a six-month period and collection of the epidemological, clinical, laboratory and treatment response data from the case notes of the patients with an ordered rickettsial serology. Twenty of the 35 cases had a positive serology. Of these 20 patients, 18 were already clinically diagnosed as having murine typhus. All except one were males and all were migrant workers. Majority of the patients were construction workers staying in containers where rats abound. The most consistent clinical features were high fever (100%) for a median period of seven days, headache (94%) and cough (47%). The white cell count was usually normal (74%) but thrombocytopenia was common (68%). Transaminitis was also common (90%) with the AST component higher than the ALT in half of the cases. Response to doxycycline therapy was rapid and most (88%) were afebrile by 72 hours. CONCLUSION: Typhus (notably murine type) can be confidently diagnosed from consistent clinical features supported by epidemiological and laboratory clues. Early recognition with the prompt treatment response will result in shorter hospital stay with decreased cost. Serological testing may only prove useful in difficult situations when the clinical diagnosis is less clear

Effect of Soft and Softer Handoffs on CDMA System Capacity

Abstract? The effect of soft and softer handoffs on code-division multiple-access (CDMA) system capacity is evaluated for unsectorized and sectorized hexagonal cells according to an average bit energy-to-interference power spectral density, which corresponds to a bit-error rate (BER) of 10-3. The effect of imperfect sectorization on sectorization efficiency is also considered. On the reverse link, there is no capacity loss as no extra channels are needed to perform soft handoff, while the macrodiversity provided by soft handoff can improve the reverse-link quality and extend the cell coverage. On the forward link, when soft handoff is employed in unsectorized cells, the capacity loss due to two traffic channels assigned to a user in the handoff zone is 0.2% or 1.1% for a voice activity factor of 3/8 or 1/2, respectively. As the forward-link capacity is higher than that of the reverse link, this small capacity loss does not affect the system capacity. For sectorized cells having three sectors per cell, there are overlapping coverage areas between sectors, where mobiles in these areas are subjected to an increase in cochannel iterference. For an overlapping angle of 5°, the sectorization efficiency is 0.96 and 0.7 for the reverse-link and forward-link systems, respectively. When soft and softer handoffs are employed, the forward-link sectorization efficiency is improved to 0.97. We find the application of soft and softer handoff improves not only the forward-link capacity, but also the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) for mobiles near the cell and sector boundaries. Index Terms?CDMA, macrodiversity, sectorization efficiency, soft handoff, softer handoff

Some scheduling problems with deteriorating jobs and learning effects

Author name used in this publication: T. C. E. Cheng2007-2008 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalAccepted ManuscriptPublishe

Candida parapsilosis associated with cervical necrotizing fasciitis and descending mediastinitis

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Controllability and controller-observer design for a class of linear time-varying systems

“The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10852-012-9212-6"In this paper a class of linear time-varying control systems is considered. The time variation consists of a scalar time-varying coefficient multiplying the state matrix of an otherwise time-invariant system. Under very weak assumptions of this coefficient, we show that the controllability can be assessed by an algebraic rank condition, Kalman canonical decomposition is possible, and we give a method for designing a linear state-feedback controller and Luenberger observer

Unfolding the Spatial and Temporal Neural Processing of Making Dishonest Choices

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Real-Time Estimation of Lane-to-Lane Turning Flows at Isolated Signalized Junctions

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Cumulative disease damage in southern Chinese patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE)

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