3,602 research outputs found
Citizen Participation in the Digital Age: An Evaluation of the Potential of a Website to Encourage Community Involvement in School Board Issues
This paper examines the potential for school board websites to engage the public by promoting a greater understanding of school board issues and accepting feedback and recommendations from the local community. An analysis of school board websites in Ontario was conducted to measure the effectiveness of existing websites as a method for communication. The findings reveal that until school boards provide an incentive for citizens to visit their websites on a regular basis, they will not become a strong way to connect to the community
Monitoring Networked Applications With Incremental Quantile Estimation
Networked applications have software components that reside on different
computers. Email, for example, has database, processing, and user interface
components that can be distributed across a network and shared by users in
different locations or work groups. End-to-end performance and reliability
metrics describe the software quality experienced by these groups of users,
taking into account all the software components in the pipeline. Each user
produces only some of the data needed to understand the quality of the
application for the group, so group performance metrics are obtained by
combining summary statistics that each end computer periodically (and
automatically) sends to a central server. The group quality metrics usually
focus on medians and tail quantiles rather than on averages. Distributed
quantile estimation is challenging, though, especially when passing large
amounts of data around the network solely to compute quality metrics is
undesirable. This paper describes an Incremental Quantile (IQ) estimation
method that is designed for performance monitoring at arbitrary levels of
network aggregation and time resolution when only a limited amount of data can
be transferred. Applications to both real and simulated data are provided.Comment: This paper commented in: [arXiv:0708.0317], [arXiv:0708.0336],
[arXiv:0708.0338]. Rejoinder in [arXiv:0708.0339]. Published at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000583 in the Statistical Science
(http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
(http://www.imstat.org
Optimal Moments for the Analysis of Peculiar Velocity Surveys II: Testing
Analyses of peculiar velocity surveys face several challenges, including low
signal--to--noise in individual velocity measurements and the presence of
small--scale, nonlinear flows. This is the second in a series of papers in
which we describe a new method of overcoming these problems by using data
compression as a filter with which to separate large--scale, linear flows from
small--scale noise that can bias results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of
our method using realistic catalogs of galaxy velocities drawn from N--body
simulations. Our tests show that a likelihood analysis of simulated catalogs
that uses all of the information contained in the peculiar velocities results
in a bias in the estimation of the power spectrum shape parameter and
amplitude , and that our method of analysis effectively removes this
bias. We expect that this new method will cause peculiar velocity surveys to
re--emerge as a useful tool to determine cosmological parameters.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figure
Rejoinder: Monitoring Networked Applications With Incremental Quantile Estimation
Rejoinder: Monitoring Networked Applications With Incremental Quantile
Estimation [arXiv:0708.0302]Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000592 in the
Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
On The Effect of Giant Planets on the Scattering of Parent Bodies of Iron Meteorite from the Terrestrial Planet Region into the Asteroid Belt: A Concept Study
In their model for the origin of the parent bodies of iron meteorites, Bottke
et al proposed differentiated planetesimals that were formed in the region of
1-2 AU during the first 1.5 Myr, as the parent bodies, and suggested that these
objects and their fragments were scattered into the asteroid belt as a result
of interactions with planetary embryos. Although viable, this model does not
include the effect of a giant planet that might have existed or been growing in
the outer regions. We present the results of a concept study where we have
examined the effect of a planetary body in the orbit of Jupiter on the early
scattering of planetesimals from terrestrial region into the asteroid belt. We
integrated the orbits of a large battery of planetesimals in a disk of
planetary embryos, and studied their evolutions for different values of the
mass of the planet. Results indicate that when the mass of the planet is
smaller than 10 Earth-masses, its effects on the interactions among
planetesimals and planetary embryos is negligible. However, when the planet
mass is between 10 and 50 Earth-masses, simulations point to a transitional
regime with ~50 Earth-mass being the value for which the perturbing effect of
the planet can no longer be ignored. Simulations also show that further
increase of the mass of the planet strongly reduces the efficiency of the
scattering of planetesimals from the terrestrial planet region into the
asteroid belt. We present the results of our simulations and discuss their
possible implications for the time of giant planet formation.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Ap
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