Using OPAL Citizen Science Resources to explore science outside the classroom

Explore the free OPAL resources including surveys from air quality, water quality, tree health, biodiversity of hedgerows, soil and earthwork survey and bug count survey

Genomic Resources Notes Accepted 1 June 2015 - 31 July 2015

This article documents the public availability of (i) microbiomes in diet and gut of larvae from the dipteran Dilophus febrilis using massive parallel sequencing, (ii) SNP and SSR discovery and characterization in the transcriptome of the Atlantic mackerel (Scomber scombrus, L) and (iii) assembled transcriptome for an endangered, endemic Iberian cyprinid fish (Squalius pyrenaicus).

Assessing the Potential for Saving Energy by Impersonating Idle Networked Devices

The idea of proxying network connectivity has been proposed as an efficient mechanism to maintain network presence on behalf of idle devices, so that they can “sleep”. The concept has been around for many years; alternative architectural solutions have been proposed to implement it, which lead to different considerations about capability, effectiveness and energy efficiency. However, there is neither a clear understanding of the potential for energy saving nor a detailed performance comparison among the different proxy architectures. In this paper, we estimate the potential energy saving achievable by different architectural solutions for proxying network connectivity. Our work considers the trade-off between the saving achievable by putting idle devices to sleep and the additional power consumption to run the proxy. Our analysis encompasses a broad range of alternatives, taking into consideration both implementations already available in the market and prototypes built for research purposes. We remark that the main value of our work is the estimation under realistic conditions, taking into consideration power measurements, usage profiles and proxying capabilities.

A new Nawaz–Enscore–Ham-based heuristic for permutation flow-shop problem with bicriteria of makespan and machine idle-time

A new heuristic based on Nawaz–Enscore–Ham (NEH) algorithm is proposed for solving permutation flowshop scheduling problem in this paper. A new priority rule is proposed by accounting for the average, mean absolute deviation, skewness and kurtosis, in order to fully describe the distribution style of processing times. A new tie-breaking rule is also introduced for achieving effective job insertion for the objective of minimizing both makespan and machine idle-time. Statistical tests illustrate better solution quality of the proposed algorithm, comparing to existing benchmark heuristics.