A patient with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) presenting as a case of indirect inguinal hernia: A case report

No Abstract. Sudan Journal of Medical Science Vol. 1 (2) December 2006: 153-15

Ethical supply chains: analysis, practices and performance measures

Ethics has been studied in numerous disciplines and its application to various practices has been investigated over the years such as in medicine and law. This has been relatively recently extended into the business arena, and has become a matter of growing interest for many companies. It has led to questions concerning what constitutes ethical behaviour, to what extent ethical practices should be adopted and what benefits a company may derive from its adoption. There are numerous processes involved in the transformation of a product from source to consumer, and these must be managed to produce an optimal balance of business requirements, specifically profitability, and a consideration of the wider impacts they may have or make. The supply chain has become vital to organisational success that companies now compete as supply chains rather than as individual entities. Therefore the ethical conduct of the supply chains has also begun to be scrutinised, both from an internal business performance perspective, and from the increasing concerns held by the numerous stakeholders of the organisation. In light of these developments, this paper explores the notion of ethics as it applies to supply chains. It also examines supply chain ethical practices and demonstrates that there is an empirical relationship between ethical practices and performance. The results show that ethical practices have positive impacts on the performance of the supply chain. Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd

STR-908: EFFECT OF GEOMETRIC IMPERFECTIONS ON THE CAPACITY OF CONICAL STEEL TANKS UNDER HYDRODYNAMIC PRESSURE

Liquid tanks in the form of truncated steel cones are commonly used for liquid storage in North America and in other locations. The main cause of failure, for conical steel tanks in particular, which was identified in most of the failure cases, is the buckling of the tank’s shell at locations of maximum compressive stress. Being constructed of steel, geometric imperfections in the conical tank walls will exist and their amplitude will be dependent on the quality controls applied by the builder. Such geometric imperfections play an important role in defining the buckling capacity of shell structures in general. Some studies found in the literature assessed the effect of geometric imperfections on the buckling capacity of steel tanks. However, most of these studies focused on hydrostatic pressure and not on hydrodynamic pressure that is induced on the tank walls when the tank base is subjected to either horizontal or vertical ground excitations. In this study, an expression for the critical imperfection wave length is obtained and the effect of the geometric imperfections’ amplitude on the buckling capacity of conical steel tanks is assessed numerically under hydrodynamic pressure due to horizontal and vertical ground excitations. The study is conducted numerically through non-linear static pushover analysis using an in-house finite element model that accounts for the geometric and material nonlinear effects

Statistical Analysis of VoDSL Technology for the Efficiency of Listening Quality of 640k/640k

Next-generation Internet technology will offer high performance and high capacity traffic aggregation and scalability. Voice over Digital Subscriber Line (VoDSL) technology allows service providers to offer multiple telephone lines over a single subscriber line in addition to high speed data transmission services. This article provides a baseline test for the Listening Quality (LQ) using VoDSL access technology by using Voice/Listening Quality (V/LQ) transmission with voice compression while countinously downloading files. The result will be to enable the efficiency of the LQ and its statistical analysis based on a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service at level 640K/640K for each American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and Carrier Serving Area (CSA) loops

Анализ современной системы государственных закупок

Рассмотрена современная система осуществления государственного заказа, проанализированы основные достоинства и недостатки данной системы. Произведен обзор Федеральной контрактной системы

NDM-536: EFFECT OF WIND SPEED AND TERRAIN EXPOSURE ON THE WIND PRESSURES FOR ELEVATED STEEL CONICAL TANKS

Steel liquid storage tanks in the form of truncated cones are commonly used as containment vessels for water supply or storing chemicals. A number of failures have been recorded in the past few decades for steel liquid tanks and silos under wind loading. A steel conical tank vessel will have a relatively small thickness making it susceptible to buckling under wind loads especially when they are not fully-filled. In this study, a wind tunnel pressure test is performed on an elevated conical tank in order to estimate the external wind pressures when immersed into a boundary layer. The tested tank configuration represents combined conical tanks where the cone is capped with a cylinder. In addition, the effect of terrain exposure and wind speed on the pressure values and wind forces is assessed. The mean and rms pressure coefficients are presented for different test cases in addition to the mean and rms total drag forces that are obtained by integrating the pressure coefficient over the tank model’s surface. It is found that the total mean and rms drag forces are highly-dependent on Reynolds number which is a function of wind speed and they have a maximum value at mid-height for the lower cylinder, at top for the conical part, and at bottom for the upper cylindrical part

Server-Centric PON Data Center Architecture

Over the last decade, the evolution of data center architecture designs has been mainly driven by the ever increasing bandwidth demands, high power consumption and cost. With all these in mind, a significant potential to improve bandwidth capacity and reduce power consumption and cost can be achieved by introducing PONs in the design of the networking fabric infrastructure in data centers. This work presents a novel server-centric PON design for future cloud data center architecture. We avoided the use of power hungry devices such as switches and tuneable lasers and encouraged the use of low power passive optical backplanes and PONs to facilitate intra and inter rack communication. We also tackle the problem of resource provisioning optimization and present our MILP model results for energy efficient routing and resource provisioning within the PON cell. We optimized the selection of hosting servers, routing paths and relay servers to achieve efficient resource utilization reaching 95% and optimum saving in energy consumption reaching 59%

Energy-Efficient Software-Defined AWGR-Based PON Data Center Network

In this paper, we present our results on tackling the oversubscription issue in the inter-cell communication in the Arrayed Waveguide PON based data center architecture proposed in our recent work. We enhance the bandwidth allocation by introducing 2-tiers of AWGRs to facilitate multipath routing and energy-efficient utilisation of resources. We also employ a centralized Software Defined Network (SDN) control and management system to coordinate and arbitrate the channel access for communication through the OLT links with PONs via wavelength reconfiguration and energy-efficient grooming. A benchmarking study between the proposed SDN architecture against the decentralized conventional design shows that with the SDN enabled architecture, the power consumption can be decreased by up to 90% for typical average data rates while maintaining zero blocking