Anniversary seminar on Foucault and Derrida : theory and practice : review

In December 2014, the Departments of Educational Studies, English, and Philosophy at the University of Malta met at the KSU Common Room for a one-day conference to mark the thirtieth and tenth anniversaries of the deaths of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, respectively.peer-reviewe

Encountering Malta II : British writers and the Mediterranean 1760 - 1840 : literature, landscapes, politics : conference review

In January 2014, the Department of English at the University of Malta held the second in a series of conferences, entitled ‘Encountering Malta II – British Writers and the Mediterranean 1760-1840: Literature, Landscapes, Politics’. The first, held in 2011 in conjunction with the School of English at the University of St Andrew’s, Scotland, grounded itself within the same eighty year span, and had featured keynote speakers Professor Peter Vassallo and Professor Michael O’Neill. This series was inspired, in part, by the book Encounters with Malta—a work that details the interaction of various artistic figures with the Maltese archipelago over the centuries, as Dr Petra Caruana Dingli, one of the co-editors of the work, pointed out in the roundtable discussion on the first day of the event. This second two-day conference took place at the Old University Building in Valletta, Malta. It was a moderately paced event with a comfortable schedule that allowed for two keynote speakers and an intriguing variety of papers which attested to the tumultuous richness of the late 18th and early 19th century period in question.peer-reviewe

A versatile and accurate approximation for LRU cache performance

In a 2002 paper, Che and co-authors proposed a simple approach for estimating the hit rates of a cache operating the least recently used (LRU) replacement policy. The approximation proves remarkably accurate and is applicable to quite general distributions of object popularity. This paper provides a mathematical explanation for the success of the approximation, notably in configurations where the intuitive arguments of Che, et al clearly do not apply. The approximation is particularly useful in evaluating the performance of current proposals for an information centric network where other approaches fail due to the very large populations of cacheable objects to be taken into account and to their complex popularity law, resulting from the mix of different content types and the filtering effect induced by the lower layers in a cache hierarchy

Impact of traffic mix on caching performance in a content-centric network

For a realistic traffic mix, we evaluate the hit rates attained in a two-layer cache hierarchy designed to reduce Internet bandwidth requirements. The model identifies four main types of content, web, file sharing, user generated content and video on demand, distinguished in terms of their traffic shares, their population and object sizes and their popularity distributions. Results demonstrate that caching VoD in access routers offers a highly favorable bandwidth memory tradeoff but that the other types of content would likely be more efficiently handled in very large capacity storage devices in the core. Evaluations are based on a simple approximation for LRU cache performance that proves highly accurate in relevant configurations

Upstream traffic capacity of a WDM EPON under online GATE-driven scheduling

Passive optical networks are increasingly used for access to the Internet and it is important to understand the performance of future long-reach, multi-channel variants. In this paper we discuss requirements on the dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) algorithm used to manage the upstream resource in a WDM EPON and propose a simple novel DBA algorithm that is considerably more efficient than classical approaches. We demonstrate that the algorithm emulates a multi-server polling system and derive capacity formulas that are valid for general traffic processes. We evaluate delay performance by simulation demonstrating the superiority of the proposed scheduler. The proposed scheduler offers considerable flexibility and is particularly efficient in long-reach access networks where propagation times are high

Developing Integrated Waste Management Systems: Information Needs and the Role of Locally Based Data

No abstract available