Two Unordered Queues

A special customer must complete service from two servers in series, in either order, each with an M/M/1 queueing system. It is assumed that the two queueing system lengths are independent with initial numbers of customers a and b at the instant when the special customer arrives. We find the expected total time (ETT) for the special customer to complete service. We show that even if the interarrival and service time parameters of two queues are identical, there exist examples (specific values of the parameters and initial lengths) for which the special customer surprisingly has a lower expected total time to completion by joining the longer queue first rather than the shorter one.Comment: Presented at AMMCS 2011 Conference, July 25, 201

Review of \u3ci\u3eTrailblazers: The Lives and Times of Michael Ewanchuk and Muriel (Smith) Ewanchuk.\u3c/i\u3e By John Lehr and David McDowell.

Belonging to the genre of local history, Trailblazers explores the lives of two Canadians in the province of Manitoba spanning the 20th century. They were, as the introduction states, ordinary people, just like us. There is much here to interest the casual reader and the serious historian alike. Readers of Great Plains Research may need to be reminded that while the geographic designation Great Plains extends into the western Canadian provinces, the term is purely American. Canadians use the generic term prairie. Michael Ewanchuk was a teacher, a principal, and finally a school inspector for 23 years; Muriel was a teacher whose professional career effectively ended in 1941 when she married, since married female teachers were not hireable in that era. In their introduction and conclusion, John Lehr and David McDowll effectively place the story of Michael and Muriel within the cultural and social milieu of their times. Issues of environment, colonialism, racism, and feminism are integrated into the narrative without ever being heavy-handed or overly academic

Review of \u3ci\u3eTrailblazers: The Lives and Times of Michael Ewanchuk and Muriel (Smith) Ewanchuk.\u3c/i\u3e By John Lehr and David McDowell.

Belonging to the genre of local history, Trailblazers explores the lives of two Canadians in the province of Manitoba spanning the 20th century. They were, as the introduction states, ordinary people, just like us. There is much here to interest the casual reader and the serious historian alike. Readers of Great Plains Research may need to be reminded that while the geographic designation Great Plains extends into the western Canadian provinces, the term is purely American. Canadians use the generic term prairie. Michael Ewanchuk was a teacher, a principal, and finally a school inspector for 23 years; Muriel was a teacher whose professional career effectively ended in 1941 when she married, since married female teachers were not hireable in that era. In their introduction and conclusion, John Lehr and David McDowll effectively place the story of Michael and Muriel within the cultural and social milieu of their times. Issues of environment, colonialism, racism, and feminism are integrated into the narrative without ever being heavy-handed or overly academic

A queueing model with servers disguised as customers

We propose a new queueing model, motivated by the phenomenon of pseudoprogression in cancer, in which the length of a queue appears to increase initially, before reducing to a steady state. We assume that servers arrive to the queue alongside the customers, i.e. `disguised' as customers. We derive the general equations for this model using matrix analytic methods, and demonstrate its behaviour with numerical simulations.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure

Reversibility Checking for Markov Chains

In this paper, we present reversibility preserving operations on Markov chain transition matrices. Simple row and column operations allow us to create new reversible transition matrices and yield an easy method for checking a Markov chain for reversibility

Using Heritage in Multi-Population Evolutionary Algorithms

Multi-Population Cultural Algorithms (MPCA) define a set of individuals that can be categorized as belonging to one of a set of populations. Not only reserved for Cultural Algorithms, the concept of Multi-Populations has been used in evolutionary algorithms to explore different search spaces or search for different goals simultaneously, with the capability of sharing knowledge with each other. The populations themselves can define specific goals or knowledge to use in the context of the problem. One limitation of MPCA is that an individual can only belong to one population at a time, which can restrict the potential and realism of the algorithm. This thesis proposes a novel approach to represent population usage called “Heritage,” which allows individuals to belong to multiple populations with weighted influence. Heritage-Dynamic Cultural Algorithm (HDCA) is used to test against different domains to examine the advantages and disadvantages of this approach