A system to support dissemination of knowledge and sharing of experiences in the working environment

In the information era enterprises strive to be productive and efficient. One feature of this goal is to engage their employees in education programmes, help them gain new experiences and knowledge and adapt to an ever-changing working environment. Such programmes require thorough design in order to achieve satisfactory results. Lately, enterprises recognising the role technology can play in the education of their employees, have adopted systems that supplement the traditional educational model with mechanisms that enable the sharing of experiences and knowledge [5]. In this paper we describe an architecture and a system prototype that allows users to search easily for information, interact with colleagues and share experiences, to compose and disseminate best practices and knowledge. The design of this system is based on insights gained from the operation of the Greek Taxation System

Case studies of job access and reverse commute program: 2009-2010

This report presents perceptual, mobility and employment outcomes self-reported by 573 users of 26 transportation services funded by the Job Access and Reverse Commute (JARC) program. The respondents were predominantly low income with 42 percent reporting 2008 personal incomes less than $10,000 and two-thirds of the respondents earning$20,000 or less for the same year. Nearly half the respondents have no household vehicles. Nearly three in five respondents reported that their travel has become reliable and convenient after using the services. Workers using the services have benefitted from overall reductions in the cost of commuting to work. Close to 94 percent rated the service as being important or very important in keeping their jobs. Respondents also self-reported that the services allowed them to access a job with better pay or better working conditions, and to improve their skills. Both median hourly wages and median weekly earnings are reported to have increased since using the service for those workers who use the service to commute to work and were employed in the one-month period prior to starting use of the service. Alternative reasons may exist for these wage changes, including overall changes in the economic conditions of the locations where the services operate, as well as changes in the personal conditions of the workers that are unrelated to the JARC program in the period between starting use of the service and the time of the survey, such as graduation from job-training or school, residential relocation and so on. Because of the lack of a probability sample of services, the results cannot be generalized to the entire JARC program. Detailed case studies of the 26 services yield insights into the types of benefits that are being provided overall in these cases and the planning and programmatic environment within which they operate

Case studies of job access and reverse commute program: 2009-2010

This report presents perceptual, mobility and employment outcomes self-reported by 573 users of 26 transportation services funded by the Job Access and Reverse Commute (JARC) program. The respondents were predominantly low income with 42 percent reporting 2008 personal incomes less than $10,000 and two-thirds of the respondents earning$20,000 or less for the same year. Nearly half the respondents have no household vehicles. Nearly three in five respondents reported that their travel has become reliable and convenient after using the services. Workers using the services have benefitted from overall reductions in the cost of commuting to work. Close to 94 percent rated the service as being important or very important in keeping their jobs. Respondents also self-reported that the services allowed them to access a job with better pay or better working conditions, and to improve their skills. Both median hourly wages and median weekly earnings are reported to have increased since using the service for those workers who use the service to commute to work and were employed in the one-month period prior to starting use of the service. Alternative reasons may exist for these wage changes, including overall changes in the economic conditions of the locations where the services operate, as well as changes in the personal conditions of the workers that are unrelated to the JARC program in the period between starting use of the service and the time of the survey, such as graduation from job-training or school, residential relocation and so on. Because of the lack of a probability sample of services, the results cannot be generalized to the entire JARC program. Detailed case studies of the 26 services yield insights into the types of benefits that are being provided overall in these cases and the planning and programmatic environment within which they operate

Design, development and orchestration of 5G-ready applications over sliced programmable infrastructure

5G networks design and evolution is considered as a key to support the introduction of digital technologies in economic and societal processes. Towards this direction, vertical industries' needs should be considered as drivers of 5G networks design and development with high priority. In the current manuscript, MATILDA is presented, as a holistic 5G end-to-end services operational framework tackling the overall lifecycle of design, development and orchestration of 5G-ready applications and 5G network services over programmable infrastructure, following a unified programmability model and a set of control abstractions

Call Blocking Probabilities of Multirate Elastic and Adaptive Traffic under the Threshold and Bandwidth Reservation Policies, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2016, nr 1

This paper proposes multirate teletraffic loss models of a link that accommodates different service-classes of elastic and adaptive calls. Calls follow a Poisson process, can tolerate bandwidth compression and have an exponentially distributed service time. When bandwidth compression occurs, the service time of new and in-service elastic calls increases. Adaptive calls do not alter their service time. All calls compete for the available link bandwidth under the combination of the Threshold (TH) and the Bandwidth Reservation (BR) policies. The TH policy can provide different QoS among service-classes by limiting the number of calls of a service-class up to a predefined threshold, which can be different for each service-class. The BR policy reserves part of the available link bandwidth to benefit calls of high bandwidth requirements. The analysis of the proposed models is based on approximate but recursive formulas, whereby authors determine call blocking probabilities and link utilization. The accuracy of the proposed formulas is verified through simulation and found to be very satisfactory

Perception of isolated chords: Examining frequency of occurrence, instrumental timbre, acoustic descriptors and musical training

This study investigated the perception of isolated chords using a combination of experimental manipulation and exploratory analysis. Twelve types of chord (five triads and seven tetrads) were presented in two instrumental timbres (piano and organ) to listeners who rated the chords for consonance, pleasantness, stability and relaxation. Listener ratings varied by chord, by timbre, and according to musical expertise, and revealed that musicians distinguished consonance from the other variables in a way that other listeners did not. To further explain the data, a principal component analysis and linear regression examined three potential predictors of the listener ratings. First, each chord’s frequency of occurrence was obtained by counting its appearances in selected works of music. Second, listeners rated their familiarity with the instrumental timbre in which the chord was played. Third, chords were described using a set of acoustic features derived using the Timbre Toolbox and MIR Toolbox. Results of the study indicated that listeners’ ratings of both consonance and stability were influenced by the degree of musical training and knowledge of tonal hierarchy. Listeners’ ratings of pleasantness and relaxation, on the other hand, depended more on the instrumental timbre and other acoustic descriptions of the chord

Lensing in the Blue II: Estimating the Sensitivity of Stratospheric Balloons to Weak Gravitational Lensing

The Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) is a diffraction-limited, wide-field, 0.5 m, near-infrared to near-ultraviolet observatory designed to exploit the stratosphere's space-like conditions. SuperBIT's 2023 science flight will deliver deep, blue imaging of galaxy clusters for gravitational lensing analysis. In preparation, we have developed a weak lensing measurement pipeline with modern algorithms for PSF characterization, shape measurement, and shear calibration. We validate our pipeline and forecast SuperBIT survey properties with simulated galaxy cluster observations in SuperBIT's near-UV and blue bandpasses. We predict imaging depth, galaxy number (source) density, and redshift distribution for observations in SuperBIT's three bluest filters; the effect of lensing sample selections is also considered. We find that in three hours of on-sky integration, SuperBIT can attain a depth of b = 26 mag and a total source density exceeding 40 galaxies per square arcminute. Even with the application of lensing-analysis catalog selections, we find b-band source densities between 25 and 30 galaxies per square arcminute with a median redshift of z = 1.1. Our analysis confirms SuperBIT's capability for weak gravitational lensing measurements in the blue.Comment: Submitted to Astronomical Journa

The Timbre Perception Test (TPT): A new interactive musical assessment tool to measure timbre perception ability

To date, tests that measure individual differences in the ability to perceive musical timbre are scarce in the published literature.The lack of such tool limits research on how timbre, a primary attribute of sound, is perceived and processed among individuals.The current paper describes the development of the Timbre Perception Test (TPT), in which participants use a slider to reproduce heard auditory stimuli that vary along three important dimensions of timbre: envelope, spectral flux, and spectral centroid. With a sample of 95 participants, the TPT was calibrated and validated against measures of related abilities and examined for its reliability. The results indicate that a short-version (8 minutes) of the TPT has good explanatory support from a factor analysis model, acceptable internal reliability (α=.69,ωt = .70), good test–retest reliability (r= .79) and substantial correlations with self-reported general musical sophistication (ρ= .63) and pitch discrimination (ρ= .56), as well as somewhat lower correlations with duration discrimination (ρ= .27), and musical instrument discrimination abilities (ρ= .33). Overall, the TPT represents a robust tool to measure an individual’s timbre perception ability. Furthermore, the use of sliders to perform a reproductive task has shown to be an effective approach in threshold testing. The current version of the TPT is openly available for research purposes