Second Welland Canal - Book 1, Survey Map 6 - Through Grantham and Louth Townships

Survey map of the Second Welland Canal created by the Welland Canal Company showing the area between the Townships of Grantham and Louth. Identified structures associated with the Canal include the floating tow path. The surveyors' measurements and notes can be seen in red and black ink and pencil. Features of the First Welland Canal are noted in red ink and include the old towing path, and the original bed of the Twelve Mile Creek. Local area landmarks are also identified and include streets and roads (ex. New Road, 1st Concession Road, and an unnamed road in the top right corner), an unnamed bridge along New Road, J. Martindale's House, an Old Saw Mill, Richardsons Creek, Georges Point, and an oak tree at Georges Point. Properties and property owners of note are: Concession 2 Lot 23 and Concession 3 Lot 23 in the Grantham Township, Concession 2 Lots 1 and 2, and Concession 3 Lots 1 and 2 in the Louth Township, Peter Weaver, J. Martindale, and John Bonner. A property belonging to the Board of Works is outlined in red at Georges Point.

Second Welland Canal - Book 2, Survey Map 6 - Locks 19, 20, 21 and 22 in Grantham

Survey map of the Second Welland Canal created by the Welland Canal Company showing south Merritton along the boundary between the Grantham and Thorold Townships. Identified structures associated with the Canal include Locks 19, 20, 21, and 22, Lock Tenders House, and the towing path. The surveyors' measurements and notes can be seen in red and black ink and pencil. Local area landmarks are also identified and include streets and roads (ex. Pine Street and Macadamized Road), J. Brown Cement Mill, W. B. Hendershot Saw Mill, W. Parnall Spoke and Sash Factory, W. Beatty Saw Mill, W. Beatty Tannery, a number of structures (possibly houses) belonging to: Mrs. Aikins, J. Battle, and E. Keefer, and a foundry, smithy, and machine shop (all of which possible belonged to J. Dobbie). Properties and property owners of note are: Concession 10 Lots 9 and 10, W. C. Loan Company, P.H. Ball, and J. Keefer. Two small properties belonging to W. B. Hendershot and W. Beatty exist and are outlined in red. A half acre property reserved for a lock lot exists and is outlined in blue. An additional property reserved for a quarry is also identified, but not outlined.

Second Welland Canal - Book 3, Survey Map 5 - Old Canal and New Canal along Chippewa Creek in Port Robinson, Thorold Township

Survey map of the Second Welland Canal created by the Welland Canal Company showing the canal along Chippewa Creek in Thorold Township. Identified structures and features associated with the Canal include the towing path, float bridge, and the waterway itself. The surveyors' measurements and notes can be seen in red and black ink and pencil. Local area landmarks are also identified and include a road allowance between Lot 213 and 214, Chippewa Creek, an unnamed creek, and the Old Canal. Wetlands adjacent to Chippewa Creek are illustrated. Properties and property owners of note are: Lots 213 and 214, Samuel Hill, and Duncan Coleman. The boundary of the land deeded to Coleman is outlined in blue.

The impact of buffer zone size and management on illegal extraction, park protection and enforcement

Many protected areas or parks in developing countries have buffer zones at their boundaries to achieve the dual goals of protecting park resources and providing resource benefits to neighbouring people. Despite the prevalence of these zoning policies, few behavioural models of people’s buffer zone use inform the sizing and management of those zones. This paper uses a spatially explicit resource extraction model to examine the impact of buffer zone size and management on extraction by local people, both legal and illegal, and the impact of that extraction on forest quality in the park’s core and buffer zone. The results demonstrate trade-offs between the level of enforcement, the size of a buffer zone, and the amount of illegal extraction in the park; and describe implications for “enrichment” of buffer zones and evaluating patterns of forest degradation.

A linear optimization approach to the combined production planning model

Two fundamental processes usually arise in the production planning of many industries. The first one consists of deciding how many final products of each type have to be produced in each period of a planning horizon, the well-known lot sizing problem. The other process consists of cutting raw materials in stock in order to produce smaller parts used in the assembly of final products, the well-studied cutting stock problem. In this paper the decision variables of these two problems are dependent of each other in order to obtain a global optimum solution. Setups that are typically present in lot sizing problems are relaxed together with integer frequencies of cutting patterns in the cutting problem. Therefore, a large scale linear optimizations problem arises, which is exactly solved by a column generated technique. It is worth noting that this new combined problem still takes the trade-off between storage costs (for final products and the parts) and trim losses (in the cutting process). We present some sets of computational tests, analyzed over three different scenarios. These results show that, by combining the problems and using an exact method, it is possible to obtain significant gains when compared to the usual industrial practice, which solve them in sequence. (C) 2010 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Novel immunoadjuvants based on cationic lipid: Preparation, characterization and activity in vivo

The interactions between three different protein antigens and dioctadecyldimethylammonium bromide (DODAB) dispersed in aqueous solutions from probe sonication or adsorbed its one bilayer onto particles was comparatively investigated. The three model proteins were bovine serum albumin (BSA), purified 18 kDa/14 kDa antigens from Taenia crassiceps (18/14-Tcra) and a recombinant, heat-shock protein hsp-18 kDa from Mycobacterium leprae. Protein-DODAB complexes in water solution were characterized by dynamic light scattering for sizing and zeta-potential analysis. Cationic complexes (80-100 nm of mean hydrodynamic diameter) displayed sizes similar to those of DODAB bilayer fragments (BF) in aqueous solution and good colloid stability over a range of DODAB and protein concentrations. The amount of cationic lipid required for attaining zero of zeta-potential at a given protein amount depended on protein nature being smaller for 18 kDa/14 kDa antigens than for BSA. Mean diameters for DODAB/protein complexes increased, whereas zeta-potentials decreased with NaCl or protein concentration. In mice, weak IgG production but significant cellular immune responses were induced by the complexes in comparison to antigens alone or carried by aluminum hydroxide as shown from IgG in serum determined by ELISA, delayed type hypersensitivity reaction from footpad swelling tests and cytokines analysis. The novel cationic adjuvant/protein complexes revealed good colloid stability and potential for vaccine design at a reduced DODAB concentration. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

University Scheduling using Genetic Algorithm

The automated timetabling and scheduling is one of the hardest problem areas. This isbecause of constraints and satisfying those constraints to get the feasible and optimizedschedule, and it is already proved as an NP Complete (1) [1]. The basic idea behind this studyis to investigate the performance of Genetic Algorithm on general scheduling problem underpredefined constraints and check the validity of results, and then having comparative analysiswith other available approaches like Tabu search, simulated annealing, direct and indirectheuristics [2] and expert system. It is observed that Genetic Algorithm is good solutiontechnique for solving such problems and later analysis will prove this argument. The programis written in C++ and analysis is done by using variation in various parameters.

Job scheduling policy for high throughput grid computing

The growing computational power requirements of grand challenge applications has promoted the need for merging high throughput computing and grid computing principles to harness computational resources distributed across multiple organisations. This paper identifies the issues in resource management and scheduling in the emerging high throughput grid computing context. We also survey and study the performance of several space-sharing and time-sharing opportunistic scheduling policies that have been developed for high throughput computing.

MRP-production planning in agile manufacturing

Over the years many researchers have been investigating the area of MRP production planning and still is an area of high interest today. This paper look at production planning where there is unpredictable demands due to the type of product and market a company produces for. Production planning becomes difficult when demand fluctuates unpredictably, and hence a historical sales forecast is used as the initial data for production planning. The sales from previous years, especially in a seasonal market, don't necessarily correlate well to the current and future sales for the next year. A planner working in such environment would have himself frustrating to create a feasible production plan that not only needs to meet customer's demands but also to built up the 'correct' amount of stock for that peak sell season. To overcome some of these problems, This work describes a production planning methodology that can be implemented robustly and quickly. This paper has studied two multi-item lot-sizing problems. We detailed the development of the planning problem mathematically and highlight some solutions to initial problems investigated.

Adaptive hierarchical scheduling policy for enterprise grid computing systems

In an enterprise grid computing environments, users have access to multiple resources that may be distributed geographically. Thus, resource allocation and scheduling is a fundamental issue in achieving high performance on enterprise grid computing. Most of current job scheduling systems for enterprise grid computing provide batch queuing support and focused solely on the allocation of processors to jobs. However, since I/O is also a critical resource for many jobs, the allocation of processor and I/O resources must be coordinated to allow the system to operate most effectively. To this end, we present a hierarchical scheduling policy paying special attention to I/O and service-demands of parallel jobs in homogeneous and heterogeneous systems with background workload. The performance of the proposed scheduling policy is studied under various system and workload parameters through simulation. We also compare performance of the proposed policy with a static space–time sharing policy. The results show that the proposed policy performs substantially better than the static space–time sharing policy.

An efficient adaptive scheduling policy for high-performance computing

The advent of commodity-based high-performance clusters has raised parallel and distributed computing to a new level. However, in order to achieve the best possible performance improvements for large-scale computing problems as well as good resource utilization, efficient resource management and scheduling is required. This paper proposes a new two-level adaptive space-sharing scheduling policy for non-dedicated heterogeneous commodity-based high-performance clusters. Using trace-driven simulation, the performance of the proposed scheduling policy is compared with existing adaptive space-sharing policies. Results of the simulation show that the proposed policy performs substantially better than the existing policies.

Personal, social and environmental correlates of resilience to physical inactivity among women from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds

While sex and socio-economic disparities in physical activity have been well documented, not all disadvantaged women are inactive. This study aimed to examine correlates of achieving recommended levels of physical activity among women of low socio-economic position. In 2005, a population-based sample of 291 women with low educational attainment provided survey data on leisure time physical activity (LTPA). Participants reported potential personal (enjoyment and self-efficacy; barriers; intentions; guilt and priorities; routines and scheduling; occupational physical activity; television viewing), social (support from family/friends; social participation; sport/recreation club membership; dog ownership) and environmental (aesthetics; safety; local access; footpaths; interesting walks; busy roads to cross; heavy traffic) correlates of physical activity. Nearly 40% of participants achieved recommended LTPA (150 min week–1). Multivariable analyses revealed that higher levels of self-efficacy for walking [prevalence ratio (PR) 2.05, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.19–3.53], higher enjoyment of walking (PR 1.48, 95% CI 1.04–2.12), greater intentions to be active (PR 1.97, 95% CI 1.12–3.45) and having set routines for physical activity (PR 1.91, 95% CI 1.18–3.09) were significantly associated with achieving recommended LTPA. Personal factors were the characteristics most strongly associated with achieving recommended levels of LTPA among women from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Energy-efficient management of data center resources for cloud computing : a vision, architectural elements, and open challenges

Cloud computing is offering utility-oriented IT services to users worldwide. Based on a pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of pervasive applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, data centers hosting Cloud applications consume huge amounts of energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. Therefore, we need Green Cloud computing solutions that can not only save energy for the environment but also reduce operational costs. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements for energy-efficient management of Cloud computing environments. We focus on the development of dynamic resource provisioning and allocation algorithms that consider the synergy between various data center infrastructures (i.e., the hardware, power units, cooling and software), and holistically work to boost data center energy efficiency and performance. In particular, this paper proposes (a) architectural principles for energy-efficient management of Clouds; (b) energy-efficient resource allocation policies and scheduling algorithms considering quality-of-service expectations, and devices power usage characteristics; and (c) a novel software technology for energy-efficient management of Clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.

Ways in which theory and practice are integrated in the pre-service teacher education practicum

This paper reports on a study into pre-service teachers’ perceptions about their professional development during practicum. The study examined to what extent, and how effectively, one group of pre-service teachers was able to integrate theory and practice during a three-week practicum in the first year of their degree. Data for this mixed methods study were drawn from one cohort of first-year students undertaking the Master of Teaching (MTeach), a graduate-level entry program in the Faculty of Education at an urban Australian university. Although there is a strong field of literature around the practicum in pre-service teacher education, there has been a limited focus on how pre-service teachers themselves perceive their development during this learning period. Further, despite widespread and longstanding acknowledgement of the “gap” between theory and practice in teacher education, there is still more to learn about how well the practicum enables an integration of these two dimensions of teacher preparation. In presenting three major findings of the study, this paper goes some way in addressing these shortcomings in the literature. First, opportunities to integrate theory and practice were varied, with many participants reporting supervision and scheduling issues as impacting on their capacity to effectively enact theory in practice. Second, participants’ privileging of theory over practice, identified previously in the literature as commonly characteristic of the pre-service teacher, was found in this study to be particularly prevalent during practicum. Third, participants overwhelmingly supported the notion of linking university coursework assessment to the practicum as a means of bridging the gap between, on the one hand, the university and the school and, on the other hand, theory and practice. The discussion and consideration of findings such as those reported in this paper are pertinent and timely, given the ratification of both the National Professional Standards for Teachers and the Initial Teacher Education Program Standards by the Australian Federal Government earlier this year. Within a number of the seven Professional Standards, graduate teachers are required to demonstrate knowledge and skills associated with both the theory and practice of teaching and with their effective integration in the classroom. To be nationally accredited, pre-service teacher education programs must provide evidence of enabling pre-service teachers to acquire such knowledge and skills.

Análise do comportamento financeiro de contas médicas em eventos cirúrgicos, comparado a índices inflacionários de preços e mercado de saúde

A prática de saúde no país passa por grandes e difíceis desafios. No que tange a financiamento o setor público ainda carece de um melhor dimensionamento e proposta estratégica. Já o setor privado tem sua crise pela falta de maios análise dos seus custos e suas variações. A regulação do setor suplementar ainda é muito jovem. Os grandes desafios da saúde e a busca de solução são uma constante para melhor dimensionar e gerir o processo. Vários são os fatores pressionam o modelo aumentando seus gastos e ainda em uma situação mais perversa sem nenhuma previsão. Há a necessidade urgente de se entender o modelo de gastos envolvidos e acima de tudo os fatores que mais interferem na variação desses gastos. O trabalho que segue busca entender melhor o problema de variação de custos destes serviços prestados, através da análise de três casos médicos de alta relevância: apendicectomia; histerectomia; e colecistectomia, observando a variação dos preços praticados em uma série histórica de 5 anos, comparando com índices econômicos e inflacionários como IPCA, variação dos preços dos planos de saúde pela ANS e variação dos custos médicos hospitalares. Como resultados observamos que para estes eventos clássicos e isolados eventos não há um padrão nítido de preços atrelados a qualquer destes índices, nem uma variação linear que permita uma maior e melhor análise. Ao mesmo tempo quando se aumenta o volume dos atendimentos, no mix dos três eventos passamos a observar uma relação bem próxima ao IPCA que por sua vez é muito próxima do índice de reajustes autorizado pela ANS no período. Muito há o que ser feito e estudado como forma de melhor entender este modelo de preços e custos, bem como suas variações.