A study of the oppinions of Brasov county SME employees regarding the use of business games

A scientific research was carried out using a 17 - question form, which was filled out by 335 businesses from Brasov County, through which we wanted to determine the awareness degree in regard to some information system notions. To analyse the data the SPSS software was used. The research reached the conclusion that the employees of businesses from Brasov County know very little about information systems

Study of the combined effects of oxidation and adsorption process in removing MTBE from wastewater

Treatment of Methyl Tert-Butyl Ether (MTBE) from wastewater supplies presents specific challenges due to the physicochemical properties of MTBE which depend strongly on its hydrophilic nature, and translate into a high solubility in water. MTBE has very low Henry‘s constant and very low affinity for common adsorbents. An investigation was carried out for the treatability of metyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) in synthetic wastewater. In this research, experimental rig and bench-scale studies using granular activated carbon (GAC) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) were conducted to observe the treatability of MTBE in synthetic wastewater. An experimental rig was built up that consist of three conjugated system. Subsequently, MTBE was amended to the H2O2 and air flow, followed by adsorption treatment with GAC. Generally, the major finding suggests that the longer cycle pulsation time (3 minutes open valve + 5 seconds closed valve) with air flow rate at 6 L/min over the synthetic wastewater caused a greater removal of MTBE. The result of this study can help to provide specific guidance into process parameter selection for treating MTBE in wastewaters. The optimum operating conditions are very important for treating the wastewater effectively in a larger scale

Optimizing Streaming Applications with Self-Interested Users using M-DPOP

In this paper we deal with the problem of optimally placing a set of query operators in an overlay network. Each user is interested in performing a query on streaming data and each query has an associated set of in-network operators that filter, aggregate and process the data in various ways. Each user has private information about the operators associated with a query and about the utility from different combinations of operator placements. Each server in the overlay network is able to perform some set of operators, and servers differ in their network and computational characteristics. We model this problem as a Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem (DCOP). On this DCOP model, we apply the MDPOP algorithm from Petcu et al. that is executed by clients associated with users and situated at nodes on the overlay network. MDPOP makes truth-telling an \textit{ex-post Nash equilibrium}, and determines the social-welfare maximizing placement of operators to servers. No client can benefit by deviating from the MDPOP algorithm. Nodes need only communicate with other nodes that have an interest in placing an operator on the same server. Structure can be exploited, where it exists, to provide a scalable algorithm. The only central authority required is a bank that can extract payments from users. In addition, it is possible to develop a faithful method to redistribute some of the VCG payments back to users when desired.Engineering and Applied Science

Critical analysis of vendor lock-in and its impact on cloud computing migration: a business perspective

Vendor lock-in is a major barrier to the adoption of cloud computing, due to the lack of standardization. Current solutions and efforts tackling the vendor lock-in problem are predominantly technology-oriented. Limited studies exist to analyse and highlight the complexity of vendor lock-in problem in the cloud environment. Consequently, most customers are unaware of proprietary standards which inhibit interoperability and portability of applications when taking services from vendors. This paper provides a critical analysis of the vendor lock-in problem, from a business perspective. A survey based on qualitative and quantitative approaches conducted in this study has identified the main risk factors that give rise to lock-in situations. The analysis of our survey of 114 participants shows that, as computing resources migrate from on-premise to the cloud, the vendor lock-in problem is exacerbated. Furthermore, the findings exemplify the importance of interoperability, portability and standards in cloud computing. A number of strategies are proposed on how to avoid and mitigate lock-in risks when migrating to cloud computing. The strategies relate to contracts, selection of vendors that support standardised formats and protocols regarding standard data structures and APIs, developing awareness of commonalities and dependencies among cloud-based solutions. We strongly believe that the implementation of these strategies has a great potential to reduce the risks of vendor lock-in

Orthogonal variability modeling to support multi-cloud application configuration

Cloud service providers benefit from a vast majority of customers due to variability and making profit from commonalities between the cloud services that they provide. Recently, application configuration dimensions has been increased dramatically due to multi-tenant, multi-device and multi-cloud paradigm. This challenges the configuration and customization of cloud-based software that are typically offered as a service due to the intrinsic variability. In this paper, we present a model-driven approach based on variability models originating from the software product line community to handle such multi-dimensional variability in the cloud. We exploit orthogonal variability models to systematically manage and create tenant-specific configuration and customizations. We also demonstrate how such variability models can be utilized to take into account the already deployed application parts to enable harmonized deployments for new tenants in a multi-cloud setting. The approach considers application functional and non-functional requirements to provide a set of valid multi-cloud configurations. We illustrate our approach through a case study

Recent Advances Concerning Certain Class of Geophysical Flows

This paper is devoted to reviewing several recent developments concerning certain class of geophysical models, including the primitive equations (PEs) of atmospheric and oceanic dynamics and a tropical atmosphere model. The PEs for large-scale oceanic and atmospheric dynamics are derived from the Navier-Stokes equations coupled to the heat convection by adopting the Boussinesq and hydrostatic approximations, while the tropical atmosphere model considered here is a nonlinear interaction system between the barotropic mode and the first baroclinic mode of the tropical atmosphere with moisture. We are mainly concerned with the global well-posedness of strong solutions to these systems, with full or partial viscosity, as well as certain singular perturbation small parameter limits related to these systems, including the small aspect ratio limit from the Navier-Stokes equations to the PEs, and a small relaxation-parameter in the tropical atmosphere model. These limits provide a rigorous justification to the hydrostatic balance in the PEs, and to the relaxation limit of the tropical atmosphere model, respectively. Some conditional uniqueness of weak solutions, and the global well-posedness of weak solutions with certain class of discontinuous initial data, to the PEs are also presented.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1507.0523

KCDC - The KASCADE Cosmic-ray Data Centre

KCDC, the KASCADE Cosmic-ray Data Centre, is a web portal, where data of astroparticle physics experiments will be made available for the interested public. The KASCADE experiment, financed by public money, was a large-area detector for the measurement of high-energy cosmic rays via the detection of air showers. KASCADE and its extension KASCADE-Grande stopped finally the active data acquisition of all its components including the radio EAS experiment LOPES end of 2012 after more than 20 years of data taking. In a first release, with KCDC we provide to the public the measured and reconstructed parameters of more than 160 million air showers. In addition, KCDC provides the conceptional design, how the data can be treated and processed so that they are also usable outside the community of experts in the research field. Detailed educational examples make a use also possible for high-school students and early stage researchers.Comment: 8 pages, accepted proceeding of the ECRS-symposium, Kiel, 201