H2O: An Autonomic, Resource-Aware Distributed Database System

This paper presents the design of an autonomic, resource-aware distributed database which enables data to be backed up and shared without complex manual administration. The database, H2O, is designed to make use of unused resources on workstation machines. Creating and maintaining highly-available, replicated database systems can be difficult for untrained users, and costly for IT departments. H2O reduces the need for manual administration by autonomically replicating data and load-balancing across machines in an enterprise. Provisioning hardware to run a database system can be unnecessarily costly as most organizations already possess large quantities of idle resources in workstation machines. H2O is designed to utilize this unused capacity by using resource availability information to place data and plan queries over workstation machines that are already being used for other tasks. This paper discusses the requirements for such a system and presents the design and implementation of H2O.Comment: Presented at SICSA PhD Conference 2010 (http://www.sicsaconf.org/

The place names of the county of West Lothian

One of the first remarks made by the editors, of the Report on West Lothian of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (Introduction xvii) concerns the sparseness of prehistoric monuments in the Lothians. This fact may partly be due to the heavily wooded and marshy state of the land, which compelled settlers to live either on the seashore or in forest clearances; and it is possible on this hypothesis that more intensive cultivation of the country has swept away such prehistoric remains as existed; it is possible also that the small number of monuments is due to the correspondingly small number of the inhabitants.Whatever is the reason - and both suggestions may be true in part - the scarcity of monuments is evident. There are a handful of flint implements, and a number of large constructions. There are three Cairns (Cairnpapple Hill, Earl Calrnie, and Laughing Hill) and one group of standing stones (Gala Braes, Bathgate); an early Iron Age grave has been discovered at Blackness, and there are several fortified sites, at Craigie Hill, Peace Knowe, Bowden Hill, and Cockleroy; one crannog has been listed, at Loch-cote, though it is probable that there was one also at Linlithgow; and two rocks with cup-markings, at Craigie Hill and at Dalmeny, are cited in the Introductio

Letter

"Angus MacDonald was Chief Trader at Fort Colville (originally spelled Colvile) and this letter was to his son-in-law, James McKenzie, a former Hudson's Bay Company clerk at the same fort.

Aspects of colonic motility in idiopathic slow transit constipation

This thesis sets out to examine the hypothesis that some patients with idiopathic constipation, notably those who develop their symptoms following childbirth or hysterectomy, have regional as opposed to total colonic dysmotility. Such a group may be amenable to segmental rather than total colonic resection. Several clinical studies are presented which establish postchildbirth/hysterectomy constipation as a distinct subgroup of idiopathic constipation. Studies of gastric emptying demonstrate that patients with postchildbirth/hysterectomy constipation have normal motility in the proximal gastrointestinal tract. In contrast, patients with idiopathic constipation have prolonged gastric emptying indicating that proximal GI dysmotility may form a significant component of the presenting symptoms. Having identified that the proximal GI tract appears normal in patients with postchildbirth/hysterectomy constipation the next task was to identify in which region of the colon the dysmotility was most severe. Segmental colonic transit studies, using radio-opaque markers, identify delayed transit in the left colon, while dynamic radio-isotope studies localise the area of abnormality to the sigmoid colon. Colonic manometry studies, using a water-perfusion catheter point to a region of hindgut dysmotility which manifests as an excess of low pressure waves at rest and a specific failure to generate high pressure propagative waves. The usefulness of prostigmine provocation testing is examined critically in this group of patients and the pitfalls of this technique are presented

The Architecture of an Autonomic, Resource-Aware, Workstation-Based Distributed Database System

Distributed software systems that are designed to run over workstation machines within organisations are termed workstation-based. Workstation-based systems are characterised by dynamically changing sets of machines that are used primarily for other, user-centric tasks. They must be able to adapt to and utilize spare capacity when and where it is available, and ensure that the non-availability of an individual machine does not affect the availability of the system. This thesis focuses on the requirements and design of a workstation-based database system, which is motivated by an analysis of existing database architectures that are typically run over static, specially provisioned sets of machines. A typical clustered database system -- one that is run over a number of specially provisioned machines -- executes queries interactively, returning a synchronous response to applications, with its data made durable and resilient to the failure of machines. There are no existing workstation-based databases. Furthermore, other workstation-based systems do not attempt to achieve the requirements of interactivity and durability, because they are typically used to execute asynchronous batch processing jobs that tolerate data loss -- results can be re-computed. These systems use external servers to store the final results of computations rather than workstation machines. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a workstation-based database system and investigates its viability by evaluating its performance against existing clustered database systems and testing its availability during machine failures.Comment: Ph.D. Thesi

An Approach to Ad hoc Cloud Computing

We consider how underused computing resources within an enterprise may be harnessed to improve utilization and create an elastic computing infrastructure. Most current cloud provision involves a data center model, in which clusters of machines are dedicated to running cloud infrastructure software. We propose an additional model, the ad hoc cloud, in which infrastructure software is distributed over resources harvested from machines already in existence within an enterprise. In contrast to the data center cloud model, resource levels are not established a priori, nor are resources dedicated exclusively to the cloud while in use. A participating machine is not dedicated to the cloud, but has some other primary purpose such as running interactive processes for a particular user. We outline the major implementation challenges and one approach to tackling them

Study in epidemiology: illustrated by a diphtheria epidemic

The consideration of Epidemic disease here set out, while illustrated by the study of a Diphtheria Epidemic, represents rather the conclusions arrived at after some twenty years experience of disease in general gained in the practice of Medicine and Surgery, amplified by two years recently devoted to the study of Preventive Medicine and Bacteriology in particular. Little of originality is claimed ; but the exceptional advantage of being able to discuss an epidemic from personal investigation thereof, from the clinical and epidemiological at the same time as from the Bacteriological standpoint is undoubted. Personal experience would stand for little, unless it had been aided by the study of the recent and current literature on the subject of Diphtheria and Epidemics in general. Contributions to the various Medical Journals, `Public Health,' Journal of Hygiene, and different publications and text books have all been taken advantage of ; and amongst others contributing to these may be mentioned the names of Loeffler, Newsholme, Newman, Theobald Smith, Cobbett, Graham Smith, Delépine, Woodhead. I may add that I owe much to Professor Delépine of Manchester, under whom I spent various periods of study from 1908 to 1910 ; for no one can come in contact with him without being infected with his enthusiasm in the cause of Preventive Medicine and trying to emulate in some degree his extraordinary precision and thoroughness and attempting to adopt his breadth of outlook. The personal friendship as well as continuous help and suggestion of Dr. Buckley, Medical Officer of Health for Crewe, greatly assisted my work at Crewe

Towards Adaptable and Adaptive Policy-Free Middleware

We believe that to fully support adaptive distributed applications, middleware must itself be adaptable, adaptive and policy-free. In this paper we present a new language-independent adaptable and adaptive policy framework suitable for integration in a wide variety of middleware systems. This framework facilitates the construction of adaptive distributed applications. The framework addresses adaptability through its ability to represent a wide range of specific middleware policies. Adaptiveness is supported by a rich contextual model, through which an application programmer may control precisely how policies should be selected for any particular interaction with the middleware. A contextual pattern mechanism facilitates the succinct expression of both coarse- and fine-grain policy contexts. Policies may be specified and altered dynamically, and may themselves take account of dynamic conditions. The framework contains no hard-wired policies; instead, all policies can be configured.Comment: Submitted to Dependable and Adaptive Distributed Systems Track, ACM SAC 200