FASTER CLUSTER CONVERGENCE AND LIVELINESS DETECTION THROUGH HIERARCHAL BIDIRECTIONAL FORWARDING DETECTION

Techniques are described herein for hierarchal Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) to scale liveliness detection. Scalability of BFD sessions to Master and Standby nodes is a concern in current implementations. A fast detection mechanism such as BFD is required to support fast detection of liveliness of cluster nodes

Seeking Clarity on Nature-Based Climate Solutions for Adaptation

While there is increasing policy momentum for NbS, criticisms and controversy cloud its application and upscaling. This guidance note clarifies the concepts behind NbS and related terms and shines a light on how to achieve equitable outcomes through a focus on gender responsiveness, social inclusion, and positive outcomes for biodiversity and ecosystems.As the world witnesses and experiences the impacts of climate change, turning to nature could be a pragmatic way to adapt. Governments are being urged to implement ecosystem-based approaches, which include conservation, restoration, and improved land management, in both adaptation and mitigation. Such approaches, framed under the umbrella concept of nature-based solutions (NbS), are expected to be a key component of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework and are already integrated into many countries' National Adaptation Plans (NAPs).However, controversy remains about what constitutes as NbS and how to achieve equitable outcomes while enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem resilience. Compounding this challenge is the unprecedented scale of biodiversity loss as a result of climate change and other interrelated drivers of change.This guidance note aims to clarify the concepts of NbS and nature-based climate solutions (NBCS) with an emphasis on climate adaptation. These adaptation-focused NbS are captured using the widely known term ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA). Beyond awareness and knowledge of these terms, it is vital to unpack the social and biodiversity safeguards necessary for NbS to ensure that solutions are gender responsive, socially inclusive, and deliver biodiversity benefits. This guidance note is a knowledge product of the Nature for Climate Adaptation Initiative (NCAI)

CONSTRAINT-BASED ACTIVE-ACTIVE SERVICE REDUNDANCY IN WIRELESS CLUSTER

Techniques are described herein for using different constraints and electing a leader based on those constraints. This may help to fairly distribute services among different leader-capable nodes. The constraints may include resources such as Central Processing Units (CPUs), memory, bandwidth, network forwarding resources, etc. For example, compute-intensive applications may require more CPU resources, whereas some applications (e.g., logging) may require more memory. The constraint may also be a combination of multiple resources, such as a log collector analysis service

Occupational Stress in the Service Sector: A New Dimension

Previous research on occupational stress is limited in that it has tended to focus on the individual and is frequently located within occupations that are deemed to be stressful, such as nursing and policing. The intention o f this paper is to broaden the scope of analysis by investigating a range of employment factors (i.e. heavy workloads, interpersonal relationships and organisational factors) which can contribute to stress amongst workers and to include more industry sectors. In particular, this paper endeavours to draw attention to occupational stress amongst workers in emotionally demanding, so-called "low risk industries” - namely the call centre and hospitality industries, and to explore their perceptions of stress, their attitudes concerning managing stress and their responses to the inclusion of stress detailed in the Health and Safety in Employment Amendment Act, 2002. Findings, from two studies indicate that working in the hospitality and call centre industries can be stressful and that most workers are vulnerable in terms of their poor working conditions and low wages. Findings also show that, consistent with other studies, there was low trade union presence and a high rate of casualisation and staff turnover in each of the industries. At the same time there was a lack of overt conflict between management and workers, with an apparent close alignment of goals between the two parties and a style of management that could be described as unitarist

Scaling Roll Call Votes with wnominate in R

This paper presents a software package designed to estimate Poole and Rosenthal W-NOMINATE scores in R. The package uses a logistic regression model to analyze political choice data, usually (though not exclusively) from a legislative setting. In contrast to other scaling methods, W-NOMINATE explicitly assumes probabilistic voting based on a spatial utility function, where the parameters of the utility function and the spatial coordinates of the legislators and the votes can all be estimated on the basis of observed voting behavior. Building on software written by Poole in Fortran, the new wnominate package in R facilitates easier data input and manipulation, generates bootstrapped standard errors, and includes a new suite of graphics functions to display the results. We demonstrate the functionality of this package by conducting a natural experiment using roll calls -- an experiment which is greatly simplified by the data manipulation capabilities of the wnominate package in R

Recovering a Basic Space from Issue Scales in<i>R</i>

Basicspace is an R package that conducts Aldrich-McKelvey and Blackbox scaling to recover estimates of the underlying latent dimensions of issue scale data. We illustrate several applications of the package to survey data commonly used in the social sciences. Monte Carlo tests demonstrate that the procedure can recover latent dimensions and reproduce the matrix of responses at moderate levels of error and missing data

Phase I dose-escalation and pharmacokinetic study of dasatinib in patients with advanced solid tumors

PURPOSE: To determine the maximum tolerated dose, dose-limiting toxicity (DLT), and recommended phase II dose of dasatinib in metastatic solid tumors refractory to standard therapies or for which no effective standard therapy exists. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/br&gt; EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: In this phase I, open-label, dose-escalation study, patients received 35 to 160 mg of dasatinib twice daily in 28-day cycles either every 12 hours for 5 consecutive days followed by 2 nontreatment days every week (5D2) or as continuous, twice-daily (CDD) dosing. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/br&gt; RESULTS: Sixty-seven patients were treated (5D2, n = 33; CDD, n = 34). The maximum tolerated doses were 120 mg twice daily 5D2 and 70 mg twice daily CDD. DLTs with 160 mg 5D2 were recurrent grade 2 rash, grade 3 lethargy, and one patient with both grade 3 prolonged bleeding time and grade 3 hypocalcemia; DLTs with 120 mg twice daily CDD were grade 3 nausea, grade 3 fatigue, and one patient with both grade 3 rash and grade 2 proteinuria. The most frequent treatment-related toxicities across all doses were nausea, fatigue, lethargy, anorexia, proteinuria, and diarrhea, with infrequent hematologic toxicities. Pharmacokinetic data indicated rapid absorption, dose proportionality, and lack of drug accumulation. Although no objective tumor responses were seen, durable stable disease was observed in 16% of patients.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/br&gt; CONCLUSION: Dasatinib was well tolerated in this population, with a safety profile similar to that observed previously in leukemia patients, although with much less hematologic toxicity. Limited, although encouraging, preliminary evidence of clinical activity was observed. Doses of 120 mg twice daily (5D2) or 70 mg twice daily (CDD) are recommended for further studies in patients with solid tumors.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/br&gt

Matching dependence-related queries in the system dependence graph.

In software maintenance and evolution, it is common that develop-ers want to apply a change to a number of similar places. Due to the size and complexity of the code base, it is challenging for develop-ers to locate all the places that need the change. A main challenge in locating the places that need the change is that, these places share certain common dependence conditions but existing code searching techniques can hardly handle dependence relations satisfactorily. In this paper, we propose a technique that enables developers to make queries involving dependence conditions and textual condi-tions on the system dependence graph of the program. We carried out an empirical evaluation on four searching tasks taken from the development history of two real-world projects. The results of our evaluation indicate that, compared with code-clone detection, our technique is able to locate many required code elements that code-clone detection cannot locate, and compared with text search, our technique is able to effectively reduce false positives without losing any required code elements

Academic influencers: Teaching faculty as potential departmental change agents for inclusive pedagogy

There is a disproportionate loss of minoritized undergraduate students from STEM majors. Faculty change efforts to confront this diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) challenge, such as the adoption of evidenced-based instructional approaches, has been slow. Research on affecting change in STEM departments suggests that initiatives are more successful when they are sustained and target departments rather than individuals. One potential change strategy to promote DEI-related change within a department is to embed tenure-track education-focused faculty within STEM departments. The specialist faculty have been demonstrated to pedagogically innovate within their department and consistently interact with their colleagues regarding teaching. Therefore, we sought to assess whether tenure-track education-focused faculty can influence their colleagues on instructional topics, including those related to DEI. We surveyed five STEM departments at large research-intensive campuses. The surveys had faculty select colleagues who were influential upon various aspects of instruction, including methodology, course materials, and aspects of DEI. We constructed social networks of influence across these aspects of instruction. Our analyses reveal heterogeneity across these networks. Some, like the teaching strategies network, are highly connected and involve the majority of the department, while others, like the DEI influence network, comprise a significantly smaller population of faculty. We find that tenure-track education-focused faculty are influential across all aspects of instruction and are disproportionately so in the sparsely populated DEI influence networks. This suggests that embedding these specialist faculty within departments may lead to effective sustained change efforts in the DEI values held by STEM academic departments. This research was approved by the institutional review board at the University of California, Irvine

Spin-dependent scattering in a silicon transistor

The scattering of conduction electrons off neutral donors depends sensitively on the relative orientation of their spin states. We present a theory of spin-dependent scattering in the two dimensional electron gas (2DEG) of field effect transistors. Our theory shows that the scattering mechanism is dominated by virtual transitions to negatively ionized donor levels. This effect translates into a source-drain current that always gets reduced when donor spins are at resonance with a strong microwave field. We propose a model for donor impurities interacting with conduction electrons in a silicon transistor, and compare our explicit numerical calculations to electrically detected magnetic resonance (EDMR) experiments. Remarkably, we show that EDMR is optimal for donors placed into a sweet spot located at a narrow depth window quite far from the 2DEG interface. This allows significant optimization of spin signal intensity for the minimal number of donors placed into the sweet spot, enabling the development of single spin readout devices. Our theory reveals an interesting dependence on conduction electron spin polarization p_c. As p_c increases upon spin injection, the EDMR amplitude first increases as p_{c}^{2}, and then saturates when a polarization threshold p_T is reached. These results show that it is possible to use EDMR as an in-situ probe of carrier spin polarization in silicon and other materials with weak spin-orbit coupling