How can SMEs benefit from big data? Challenges and a path forward

Big data is big news, and large companies in all sectors are making significant advances in their customer relations, product selection and development and consequent profitability through using this valuable commodity. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have proved themselves to be slow adopters of the new technology of big data analytics and are in danger of being left behind. In Europe, SMEs are a vital part of the economy, and the challenges they encounter need to be addressed as a matter of urgency. This paper identifies barriers to SME uptake of big data analytics and recognises their complex challenge to all stakeholders, including national and international policy makers, IT, business management and data science communities. The paper proposes a big data maturity model for SMEs as a first step towards an SME roadmap to data analytics. It considers the ‘state-of-the-art’ of IT with respect to usability and usefulness for SMEs and discusses how SMEs can overcome the barriers preventing them from adopting existing solutions. The paper then considers management perspectives and the role of maturity models in enhancing and structuring the adoption of data analytics in an organisation. The history of total quality management is reviewed to inform the core aspects of implanting a new paradigm. The paper concludes with recommendations to help SMEs develop their big data capability and enable them to continue as the engines of European industrial and business success. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A trigger-based middleware cache for ORMs

ACM/IFIP/USENIX 12th International Middleware Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, December 12-16, 2011. ProceedingsCaching is an important technique in scaling storage for high-traffic web applications. Usually, building caching mechanisms involves significant effort from the application developer to maintain and invalidate data in the cache. In this work we present CacheGenie, a caching middleware which makes it easy for web application developers to use caching mechanisms in their applications. CacheGenie provides high-level caching abstractions for common query patterns in web applications based on Object-RelationalMapping (ORM) frameworks. Using these abstractions, the developer does not have to worry about managing the cache (e.g., insertion and deletion) or maintaining consistency (e.g., invalidation or updates) when writing application code. We design and implement CacheGenie in the popular Django web application framework, with PostgreSQL as the database backend and memcached as the caching layer. To automatically invalidate or update cached data, we use triggers inside the database. CacheGenie requires no modifications to PostgreSQL or memcached. To evaluate our prototype, we port several Pinax web applications to use our caching abstractions. Our results show that it takes little effort for application developers to use CacheGenie, and that CacheGenie improves throughput by 2-2.5× for read-mostly workloads in Pinax.Quanta Computer (Firm

Anticancer efficacy of the hypoxia-activated prodrug evofosfamide is enhanced in combination with proapoptotic receptor agonists against osteosarcoma

Tumor hypoxia is a major cause of treatment failure for a variety of malignancies. However, hypoxia also leads to treatment opportunities as demonstrated by the development of compounds that target regions of hypoxia within tumors. Evofosfamide is a hypoxia-activated prodrug that is created by linking the hypoxia-seeking 2-nitroimidazole moiety to the cytotoxic bromo-isophosphoramide mustard (Br-IPM). When evofosfamide is delivered to hypoxic regions of tumors, the DNA cross-linking toxin, Br-IPM, is released leading to cell death. This study assessed the anticancer efficacy of evofosfamide in combination with the Proapoptotic Receptor Agonists (PARAs) dulanermin and drozitumab against human osteosarcoma in vitro and in an intratibial murine model of osteosarcoma. Under hypoxic conditions in vitro, evofosfamide cooperated with dulanermin and drozitumab, resulting in the potentiation of cytotoxicity to osteosarcoma cells. In contrast, under the same conditions, primary human osteoblasts were resistant to treatment. Animals transplanted with osteosarcoma cells directly into their tibiae developed mixed osteosclerotic/osteolytic bone lesions and consequently developed lung metastases 3 weeks post cancer cell transplantation. Tumor burden in the bone was reduced by evofosfamide treatment alone and in combination with drozitumab and prevented osteosarcoma-induced bone destruction while also reducing the growth of pulmonary metastases. These results suggest that evofosfamide may be an attractive therapeutic agent, with strong anticancer activity alone or in combination with either drozitumab or dulanermin against osteosarcoma.Vasilios Liapis, Aneta Zysk, Mark DeNichilo, Irene Zinonos, Shelley Hay, Vasilios Panagopoulos, Alexandra Shoubridge, Christopher Difelice, Vladimir Ponomarev, Wendy Ingman, Gerald J. Atkins, David M. Findlay, Andrew C. W. Zannettino and Andreas Evdokio

International reserves in the era of quasi-world money

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on the modern monetary arrangements from a Marxist perspectives, following the recent developments of the Marxist theory of world money. The paper treats the US Dollar as a primus inter pares quasi-world money and challenges the argument of the US hegemony by exploring the behavior of major capitalist states and selected developing countries as far as their official international reserves are concerned. The findings reveal a clear pattern in the behavior of major capitalist states in terms of size and forms, although the degree varies implying a hierarchical structure of the corresponding quasi-world moneys. Although part of a vast literature on international reserves, the analysis focuses on developed countries and treats them individually. The merit of this approach is that it reveals the above mentioned pattern which is blurred when Japan is included. The results imply that current international monetary arrangements promote multipolarity and competition in the geopolitical scene, the evolution of which is historical

The roots of the Euro

Indisputably, the euro has played a pivotal role in the development of Europe. Yet, the euro has also been very controversial, raising many discussions related to the nature, role and form of the “common currency”. This paper aims at contributing to this ongoing debate from a Marxist perspective, presenting the theoretical framework of quasi-world money and examining the evolution of the euro as such, from the 1950s when the idea appeared for the first time. In particular, the paper focuses on the processes that led to the emergence of the euro as quasi-world money. These processes comprised a series of political solutions to the contradiction between the necessity of all major European countries to impose their money on the European market on the one hand, and their incompetence in doing so, on the other. The analysis focuses on the post-war European monetary system up until the launch of the European Monetary Union. Its object is a historical monetary compromise that passed through many phases and managed to survive until the present day. The paper analyses the particular mechanisms through which the euro became a reality and points to the class interests that were satisfied in each phase. This discussion offers useful insights for the current debate that unfolds amidst a deep capitalist crisis internationally and a particular monetary crisis in the European Union

The forms of world money

Distinguishing between the money that functions in the world market and the money that functions internally in an economy has troubled many theorists. This paper is informed by the Marxist approach to money in general and world money in particular and argues that the theoretical difficulty derives from a fundamental misconception with regard to the forms of money. Consequently, the paper offers an analysis of the forms of money and shows that a new form emerged as early as 1914 associated with the world market, which might be called quasi-world-money, such as the US dollar. The analysis provides a framework within which to comprehend the residual but essential role of gold in parallel to quasi-world-money. The framework also allows for money convertibility to be redefined appropriately

International reserves in the era of quasi-world money

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on the modern monetary arrangements from a Marxist perspectives, following the recent developments of the Marxist theory of world money. The paper treats the US Dollar as a primus inter pares quasi-world money and challenges the argument of the US hegemony by exploring the behavior of major capitalist states and selected developing countries as far as their official international reserves are concerned. The findings reveal a clear pattern in the behavior of major capitalist states in terms of size and forms, although the degree varies implying a hierarchical structure of the corresponding quasi-world moneys. Although part of a vast literature on international reserves, the analysis focuses on developed countries and treats them individually. The merit of this approach is that it reveals the above mentioned pattern which is blurred when Japan is included. The results imply that current international monetary arrangements promote multipolarity and competition in the geopolitical scene, the evolution of which is historical

Online View Selection for the Web

View materialization has been shown to ameliorate the scalability problem of data-intensive web servers. However, unlike data warehouses which are off-line during updates, most web servers maintain their back-end databases online and perform updates concurrently with user accesses. In such environments, the selection of views to materialize must be performed online; both performance and data freshness should be considered. In this paper, we discuss the Online View Selection problem: select which views to materialize in order to maximize performance while maintaining freshness at acceptable levels. We define Quality of Service and Quality of Data metrics and present OVIS(theta), an adaptive algorithm for the Online View Selection problem. OVIS(theta) evolves the materialization decisions to match the constantly changing access/update patterns on the Web. The algorithm is also able to identify infeasible freshness levels, effectively avoiding saturation at the server. We performed extensive experiments under various workloads, which showed that our online algorithm comes close to the optimal off-line selection algorithm. Also UMIACS-TR-2002-2