A Flexible and Fast Event-Driven Simulator for wireless MAC protocols

Many multiple-access (MAC) protocols have been or are being proposed for wireless networks. As most of these multiple-access protocols are designed for specific applications (such as telephony) and analyzed accordingly, the analysis results can not always be adapted to situations where each user has a different behavior. Wireless MAC protocols for data communication are not straightforward to analyse. To quickly make a reliable judgement of the usability of a MAC protocol for specific situations, we designed a simulator that makes it simple to implement the protocol and test it in different configurations and with differently behaving users. Our simulator generates a large amount of quantitative performance information that can be processed with standard graph drawing tools and an integrated trace analyze

“It’s Kind of Twisted”: Professionalizing Discourse During Youth Documentary Making

This qualitative research article explores how youth create multimodal rhetoric during a service-learning course at a local youth media organization. The study takes a detailed look at how a group of teens wanted to gain access to the Discourse of the documentary making process but struggled with the confines of conventions of film as were represented by the professional documentary maker who was their instructor. The research combines sociocultural and cognitive research traditions while investigating the teens’ and instructor’s relationship and interactions concerning the production of rhetoric

The Organized Bar: A Catalyst for Court Reform

This Article theorizes that state and local bar associations can play a vital role in ridding their courts of excessive costs and delay. Theory can become practice, however, only if state and local bars are reorganized to broaden their oversight and lobbying functions, in order to make them more effective vehicles of reform. This Article, then, discusses the role the organized bar can and should play in achieving procedural reform that will reduce the delay and cost of litigation. Part I describes the various stages of the reform process, using the Kentucky experiment as a model, and outlines the contributions that can be made by bar associations at each stage. Part II sets out a structural model for bar associations that will enable the organized bar to become an effective and efficient court reform agent

The Organized Bar: A Catalyst for Court Reform

This Article theorizes that state and local bar associations can play a vital role in ridding their courts of excessive costs and delay. Theory can become practice, however, only if state and local bars are reorganized to broaden their oversight and lobbying functions, in order to make them more effective vehicles of reform. This Article, then, discusses the role the organized bar can and should play in achieving procedural reform that will reduce the delay and cost of litigation. Part I describes the various stages of the reform process, using the Kentucky experiment as a model, and outlines the contributions that can be made by bar associations at each stage. Part II sets out a structural model for bar associations that will enable the organized bar to become an effective and efficient court reform agent

Software architecture style for interoperable databases

We propose a layered and component based software architecture style which supports interoperability in multiple databases (DB). The architectural style's building blocks and its constraints are described and the deployment of two design patterns outlined. Components placed in our architectural layers exhibit a linear topology and request/reply processing style. The constraints include communications between components which are not in the adjacent architectural layers and extension of the intuitive many : one bindings between components towards many : many. We comment on similarities with mediation architectures and outline some implementation issues

The Prevalence of Behçet’s Disease in a Thrombosis Clinic

Publisher Copyright: © This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International LicenseBackground: the prevalence of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in Behcet’s disease (BD) is around 40%, though recognition of BD in a thrombosis clinic has been poorly addressed. Objective: to evaluate the prevalence of signs and symptoms leading to the diagnosis of BD in a thrombosis clinic compared to patients attending a general haematology clinic and to healthy controls. Design: cross-sectional case-double control anonymous questionnaire survey. Participants: consecutive patients with spontaneous VTE (n=97) attending a thrombosis clinic, consecutive patients from a general haematology (GH) clinic (n=89) and controls (CTR). Results: BD was diagnosed in 1.03% of VTE participants, in 2.2% of GH participants and in 1.2% of healthy CTR. Exhaustion was more common reported in participants from the VTE group (15.6%) than in those from the GH group (10.3%) and from the healthy CTR (3%) (p=0.06); the sum of signs and symptoms of BD clustered in the VTE group (89.5%) compared to the GH (72.4%) and the CTR (59.7%)( p<0.0001).publishersversionpublishe

A survey of acceptance of e-government services in the UK

This paper gives an insight into the readiness of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) for accepting e-government services in he UK. We conducted a survey of 128 SMEs, which revealed that there is a moderate demand for e-government services, but they were not rated as efficient and essential for SMEs' businesses as conventional services. The proliferation of the UK government's Web sites, which requires co-ordination between several organisations/multiple sites, and inadequate awareness of such services, do not comply with the common concepts of e-governance and consequently have an impact on the SMEs acceptance of e-government services in the UK

Ytterbium doped nano-crystalline optical fiber for reduced photodarkening

We report suppression of photodarkening in Yb-doped nano-crystalline fibers in silica host. The photodarkening induced loss reduced by 20 times compared to Yb-doped aluminosilicate fibers. The laser efficiency of the nano-crystalline fiber was 79%

Competing density-wave orders in a one-dimensional hard-boson model

We describe the zero-temperature phase diagram of a model of bosons, occupying sites of a linear chain, which obey a hard-exclusion constraint: any two nearest-neighbor sites may have at most one boson. A special case of our model was recently proposed as a description of a ``tilted'' Mott insulator of atoms trapped in an optical lattice. Our quantum Hamiltonian is shown to generate the transfer matrix of Baxter's hard-square model. Aided by exact solutions of a number of special cases, and by numerical studies, we obtain a phase diagram containing states with long-range density-wave order with period 2 and period 3, and also a floating incommensurate phase. Critical theories for the various quantum phase transitions are presented. As a byproduct, we show how to compute the Luttinger parameter in integrable theories with hard-exclusion constraints.Comment: 16 page

Order Parameters of the Dilute A Models

The free energy and local height probabilities of the dilute A models with broken \Integer_2 symmetry are calculated analytically using inversion and corner transfer matrix methods. These models possess four critical branches. The first two branches provide new realisations of the unitary minimal series and the other two branches give a direct product of this series with an Ising model. We identify the integrable perturbations which move the dilute A models away from the critical limit. Generalised order parameters are defined and their critical exponents extracted. The associated conformal weights are found to occur on the diagonal of the relevant Kac table. In an appropriate regime the dilute A$_3$ model lies in the universality class of the Ising model in a magnetic field. In this case we obtain the magnetic exponent $\delta=15$ directly, without the use of scaling relations.Comment: 53 pages, LaTex, ITFA 93-1