Seamless mobility with personal servers

We describe the concept and the taxonomy of personal servers, and their implications in seamless mobility. Personal servers could offer electronic services independently of network availability or quality, provide a greater flexibility in the choice of user access device, and support the key concept of continuous user experience. We describe the organization of mobile and remote personal servers, define three relevant communication modes, and discuss means for users to exploit seamless services on the personal server

The BFOQ Defense: Title VII’s Concession to Gender Discrimination

Should the BFOQ exception still exist? Because permitting discrimination under Title VII seems fundamentally contrary to the anti-discrimination purpose of the statute, this article questions whether the BFOQ defense is consistent with the aims of Title VII or whether, in actuality, the defense undermines the Act\u27s effectiveness by providing a loophole for employers to participate in the discriminatory practices Title VII seeks to forbid

Validation of a fault-tolerant multiprocessor: Baseline experiments and workload implementation

In the future, aircraft must employ highly reliable multiprocessors in order to achieve flight safety. Such computers must be experimentally validated before they are deployed. This project outlines a methodology for validating reliable multiprocessors. The methodology begins with baseline experiments, which tests a single phenomenon. As experiments progress, tools for performance testing are developed. The methodology is used, in part, on the Fault Tolerant Multiprocessor (FTMP) at NASA-Langley's AIRLAB facility. Experiments are designed to evaluate the fault-free performance of the system. Presented are the results of interrupt baseline experiments performed on FTMP. Interrupt causing exception conditions were tested, and several were found to have unimplemented interrupt handling software while one had an unimplemented interrupt vector. A synthetic workload model for realtime multiprocessors is then developed as an application level performance analysis tool. Details of the workload implementation and calibration are presented. Both the experimental methodology and the synthetic workload model are general enough to be applicable to reliable multiprocessors beside FTMP

Sidelined: Title IX Retaliation Cases and Women’s Leadership in College Athletics

This paper summarizes some of the initial research findings obtained in the SERMON project, funded by Wireless@KTH. The main focus of this paper is on video streaming transmission and the quantification of how much can be gained, in terms of user satisfaction and network resource utilization, by exploiting this semantic knowledge at network level. For this purpose, different QoE-centric RRM strategies are proposed and their performances evaluated in respect to a “classical” agnostic scheme, in a scenario where users have different QoE requirements for different content types and as a function of the device screen resolution during a live video streaming transmission.QC 20140519</p

A conceptual analytics model for an outcome-driven quality management framework as part of professional healthcare education

BACKGROUND: Preparing the future health care professional workforce in a changing world is a significant undertaking. Educators and other decision makers look to evidence-based knowledge to improve quality of education. Analytics, the use of data to generate insights and support decisions, have been applied successfully across numerous application domains. Health care professional education is one area where great potential is yet to be realized. Previous research of Academic and Learning analytics has mainly focused on technical issues. The focus of this study relates to its practical implementation in the setting of health care education. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to create a conceptual model for a deeper understanding of the synthesizing process, and transforming data into information to support educators’ decision making. METHODS: A deductive case study approach was applied to develop the conceptual model. RESULTS: The analytics loop works both in theory and in practice. The conceptual model encompasses the underlying data, the quality indicators, and decision support for educators. CONCLUSIONS: The model illustrates how a theory can be applied to a traditional data-driven analytics approach, and alongside the context- or need-driven analytics approach

Software-implemented fault insertion: An FTMP example

This report presents a model for fault insertion through software; describes its implementation on a fault-tolerant computer, FTMP; presents a summary of fault detection, identification, and reconfiguration data collected with software-implemented fault insertion; and compares the results to hardware fault insertion data. Experimental results show detection time to be a function of time of insertion and system workload. For the fault detection time, there is no correlation between software-inserted faults and hardware-inserted faults; this is because hardware-inserted faults must manifest as errors before detection, whereas software-inserted faults immediately exercise the error detection mechanisms. In summary, the software-implemented fault insertion is able to be used as an evaluation technique for the fault-handling capabilities of a system in fault detection, identification and recovery. Although the software-inserted faults do not map directly to hardware-inserted faults, experiments show software-implemented fault insertion is capable of emulating hardware fault insertion, with greater ease and automation

Introduction to Big Data in Education and Its Contribution to the Quality Improvement Processes

In this chapter, we introduce the readers to the field of big educational data and how big educational data can be analysed to provide insights into different stakeholders and thereby foster data driven actions concerning quality improvement in education. For the analysis and exploitation of big educational data, we present different techniques and popular applied scientific methods for data analysis and manipulation such as analytics and different analytical approaches such as learning, academic and visual analytics, providing examples of how these techniques and methods could be used. The concept of quality improvement in education is presented in relation to two factors: (a) to improvement science and its impact on different processes in education such as the learning, educational and academic processes and (b) as a result of the practical application and realization of the presented analytical concepts. The context of health professions education is used to exemplify the different concepts

The impact of regulation on money market funds

This dissertation comprises three empirical studies that aim to investigate the role of financial regulation in curtailing the systemic risk posed by shadow banks. The focus of this work is on money market funds (MMFs), a type of shadow bank. In the first empirical study, we examine prime MMFs after the introduction of the minimum liquidity requirements mandated in the 2010 Amendments to rule 2a-7 of the US Investment Company Act of 1940. We show that liquidity requirements have considerably increased the resilience of prime funds. We also show that funds increase their liquidity to meet expected redemptions. But liquidity does not shelter risky funds from lower inflows in a crisis. In the second empirical study, we assess the response of MMFs and their investors to the 2016 Amendments to rule 2a-7. We show that following the segregation of retail and institutional prime MMFs required by the new rules, these funds have become different in their liquidity positions, maturity structure, competitiveness and risk management. Institutional prime MMFs maintain higher liquidity and tend to increase their liquidity actively as they increase the credit risk of their portfolios. On the contrary, retail prime MMFs have become more relaxed in their liquidity management, possibly because of lower market discipline that was previously enforced by the presence of institutional investors in their shareholder mix. In the third study, we look at the changes in MMFs after the introduction of floating net asset value (NAV) requirements as mandated by the 2016 Amendments. We show that the floating NAV is seen by institutional investors as a new indicator of performance that they utilize to make investment decisions. Institutional investors prefer funds that maintain higher NAV in order to benefit from capital gains. Furthermore, we observe that to increase NAV, funds tend to keep liquidity low, invest in longer maturity, higher risk securities. So, to boost NAV a fund must take on more risk, which could lead to amplification of risk during crisis periods

Beyond xMOOCs in healthcare education : study of the feasibility in integrating virtual patient systems and MOOC platforms

Background. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are an emerging trend in online learning. However, their technology is not yet completely adjusted to the needs of healthcare education. Integration of Virtual Patients within MOOCs to increase interactivity and foster clinical reasoning skills training, has been discussed in the past, but not verified by a practical implementation.Objective. To investigate the technical feasibility of integrating MOOCs with Virtual Patients for the purpose of enabling further research into the potential pedagogical benefits of this approach.Methods. We selected OpenEdx and Open Labyrinth as representative constituents of a MOOC platform and Virtual Patient system integration. Based upon our prior experience we selected the most fundamental technical requirement to address. Grounded in the available literature we identified an e-learning standard to guide the integration. We attempted to demonstrate the feasibility of the integration by designing a “proof-of-concept” prototype. The resulting pilot implementation was subject of verification by two test cases.Results. A Single Sign-On mechanism connecting Open Labyrinth with OpenEdx and based on the IMS LTI standard was successfully implemented and verified.Conclusion. We investigated the technical perspective of integrating Virtual Patients with MOOCs. By addressing this crucial technical requirement we set a base for future research on the educational benefits of using virtual patients in MOOCs. This provides new opportunities for integrating specialized software in healthcare education at massive scale