Emacs Lisp in Edwin SScheme

The MIT-Scheme program development environment includes a general-purpose text editor, Edwin, that has an extension language, Edwin Scheme. Edwin is very similar to another general-purpose text editor, GNU Emacs, which also has an extension language, Emacs Lisp. The popularity of GNU Emacs has lead to a large library of tools written in Emacs Lisp. The goal of this thesis is to implement a useful subset of Emacs Lisp in Edwin Scheme. This subset was chosen to be sufficient for simple operation of the GNUS news reading program.

Going global in small steps: e-internships in SMEs.

Technological developments over the last thirty years increasingly shaped the means by which we recruit, select and appraise employees. Today, technology supports more flexible and geographically dispersed working modes: From teleworkers, to virtual workers, to e-interns (also known as virtual interns). The current article describes how developments in e-HRM and changes in employment forms contribute to the development and increasing popularity of e-internships (better known as virtual internships) amongst small and medium-sized enterprises. In this paper, we reflect on the rise of e-internships across different countries and relate this to e-HRM and technological advances. We explore the opportunities and challenges. These include developing effective global talent and knowledge management practices, managing diversity as well as intellectual and social capital. We furthermore link the employment of e-internship practices to strategic organizational goals and learning. In the final section, we also critically reflect on the high investment required for e-internships to succeed. The discussion on e-internships is set in the literature on e-HRM, virtual teams and knowledge management, which is furthermore supported by interviews conducted with e-interns or internship managers. Keywords: e-internships, virtual internships, computer-mediated communication

Uptake and use of electronic information services: trends in UK higher education from the JUSTEIS project

Urquhart, C., Lonsdale, R.,Thomas, R., Spink, S., Yeoman, A., Armstrong, C. & Fenton, R. (2003). Uptake and use of electronic information services: trends in UK higher education from the JUSTEIS project. Program, 37(3), 167-180. Sponsorship: JISC

JUSTEIS: JISC Usage Surveys: Trends in Electronic Information Services Final report 2003/2004 Cycle Five

Urquhart, C., Spink, S., Thomas, R., Yeoman, A., Durbin, J., Turner, J., Fenton, R. & Armstrong, C. (2004). JUSTEIS: JISC Usage Surveys: Trends in Electronic Information Services Final report 2003/2004 Cycle Five. Aberystwyth: Department of Information Studies, University of Wales Aberystwyth. Sponsorship: JISC

Watching the Lord of the Rings

Barker, Martin, Mathijs, Ernest, Watching the Lord of the Rings (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2008), pp.xiv+297 RAE2008

Writing Home : Martin Walser's Ein fliehendes Pferd as Anti-Tourist Literature

Wilkinson, Jane, 'Writing Home: Martin Walser's Ein fliehendes Pferd as Anti-Tourist Literature', Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change (2006) 4(3) pp.001-017 RAE2008

Herbal supplements: Recent findings in exercise, health and weight loss

Natural herbs have been in use for weight loss purposes since history began. However, the current global obesity epidemic and the rise in obesity-related chronic diseases, including type-II diabetes and cancer, have highlighted the need for novel and effective approaches for herbal remedies. Whilst the popularity of several prescribed and non-prescribed slimming aids and herbal plant supplements have been marketed for their weight loss efficacy, single and multi-ingredient herbal supplements are still being investigated for their single or combined weight loss benefits. Limited research have highlighted an interesting efficacy for several popular herbal plant supplements including caffeine and capsaicin, Ayurvedic preparations and herbal teas, resulting in various degrees of effectiveness including thermogenic, appetite control and psychological benefits such as mood state. Recent research has suggested acute augmented weight-loss effects of combining herbal ingestion with exercise. For example, ingesting green tea, yerba mate and/or caffeine have been shown to increase metabolic rate, and augmented fatty acid metabolism and to increase energy expenditure from fatty acid sources during exercise with various intensities, particularly at low and moderate intensities. Other promising weight-loss effects have also been also reported for combining exercise with multi-ingredient herbal supplements, particularly those that are rich in phytochemicals and caffeoyl derivatives. Combining herbal ingestions with exercise still require further research in order to establish the supplementation most effective protocols in terms of dosage and timing, and to determine the long-term benefits, particularly those related to exercise protocols, and the long term adherence to sustain the weight loss outcomes.

Religijne motywy w tworczości syberyjskiego pisarza Wiktora Astafjewa

Wydział Neofilologii: Instytut Filologii Rosyjskiej

O antropomorfizowaniu i potrzebie przedstawień figuralnych w sztuce greckiej

Estetyka w archeologii. Antropomorfizacje w pradziejach i starożytności, eds. E. Bugaj, A. P. Kowalski, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie.

Abordagem da piezocirurgia na Medicina Dentária

Projeto de Pós-Graduação/Dissertação apresentado à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Medicina Dentária

Demand-based Document Dissemination for the World-Wide Web

We analyzed the logs of our departmental HTTP server http://cs-www.bu.edu as well as the logs of the more popular Rolling Stones HTTP server http://www.stones.com. These servers have very different purposes; the former caters primarily to local clients, whereas the latter caters exclusively to remote clients all over the world. In both cases, our analysis showed that remote HTTP accesses were confined to a very small subset of documents. Using a validated analytical model of server popularity and file access profiles, we show that by disseminating the most popular documents on servers (proxies) closer to the clients, network traffic could be reduced considerably, while server loads are balanced. We argue that this process could be generalized so as to provide for an automated demand-based duplication of documents. We believe that such server-based information dissemination protocols will be more effective at reducing both network bandwidth and document retrieval times than client-based caching protocols [2].

Characteristics of WWW Client-based Traces

The explosion of WWW traffic necessitates an accurate picture of WWW use, and in particular requires a good understanding of client requests for WWW documents. To address this need, we have collected traces of actual executions of NCSA Mosaic, reflecting over half a million user requests for WWW documents. In this paper we describe the methods we used to collect our traces, and the formats of the collected data. Next, we present a descriptive statistical summary of the traces we collected, which identifies a number of trends and reference patterns in WWW use. In particular, we show that many characteristics of WWW use can be modelled using power-law distributions, including the distribution of document sizes, the popularity of documents as a function of size, the distribution of user requests for documents, and the number of references to documents as a function of their overall rank in popularity (Zipf's law). Finally, we show how the power-law distributions derived from our traces can be used to guide system designers interested in caching WWW documents.

Characterizing Reference Locality in the WWW

As the World Wide Web (Web) is increasingly adopted as the infrastructure for large-scale distributed information systems, issues of performance modeling become ever more critical. In particular, locality of reference is an important property in the performance modeling of distributed information systems. In the case of the Web, understanding the nature of reference locality will help improve the design of middleware, such as caching, prefetching, and document dissemination systems. For example, good measurements of reference locality would allow us to generate synthetic reference streams with accurate performance characteristics, would allow us to compare empirically measured streams to explain differences, and would allow us to predict expected performance for system design and capacity planning. In this paper we propose models for both temporal and spatial locality of reference in streams of requests arriving at Web servers. We show that simple models based only on document popularity (likelihood of reference) are insufficient for capturing either temporal or spatial locality. Instead, we rely on an equivalent, but numerical, representation of a reference stream: a stack distance trace. We show that temporal locality can be characterized by the marginal distribution of the stack distance trace, and we propose models for typical distributions and compare their cache performance to our traces. We also show that spatial locality in a reference stream can be characterized using the notion of self-similarity. Self-similarity describes long-range correlations in the dataset, which is a property that previous researchers have found hard to incorporate into synthetic reference strings. We show that stack distance strings appear to be strongly self-similar, and we provide measurements of the degree of self-similarity in our traces. Finally, we discuss methods for generating synthetic Web traces that exhibit the properties of temporal and spatial locality that we measured in our data.

TCP Boston: A Fragmentation-tolerant TCP Protocol for ATM Networks

The popularity of TCP/IP coupled with the premise of high speed communication using Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology have prompted the network research community to propose a number of techniques to adapt TCP/IP to ATM network environments. ATM offers Available Bit Rate (ABR) and Unspecified Bit Rate (UBR) services for best-effort traffic, such as conventional file transfer. However, recent studies have shown that TCP/IP, when implemented using ABR or UBR, leads to serious performance degradations, especially when the utilization of network resources (such as switch buffers) is high. Proposed techniques-switch-level enhancements, for example-that attempt to patch up TCP/IP over ATMs have had limited success in alleviating this problem. The major reason for TCP/IP's poor performance over ATMs has been consistently attributed to packet fragmentation, which is the result of ATM's 53-byte cell-oriented switching architecture. In this paper, we present a new transport protocol, TCP Boston, that turns ATM's 53-byte cell-oriented switching architecture into an advantage for TCP/IP. At the core of TCP Boston is the Adaptive Information Dispersal Algorithm (AIDA), an efficient encoding technique that allows for dynamic redundancy control. AIDA makes TCP/IP's performance less sensitive to cell losses, thus ensuring a graceful degradation of TCP/IP's performance when faced with congested resources. In this paper, we introduce AIDA and overview the main features of TCP Boston. We present detailed simulation results that show the superiority of our protocol when compared to other adaptations of TCP/IP over ATMs. In particular, we show that TCP Boston improves TCP/IP's performance over ATMs for both network-centric metrics (e.g., effective throughput) and application-centric metrics (e.g., response time).

Performance Analysis of a WWW Server

This paper addresses the problem of analyzing performance of WWW servers. The web has experienced a phenomenal growth and has become the most popular Internet application. As a consequence of its large popularity, the Internet has suffered from various performance problems, such as network congestion and overloaded servers. These days, it is not uncommon to find servers refusing connections because they are overloaded. Performance has always been a key issue in the design and operation of on-line systems. With regard to Internet, performance is also critical, because users want fast and easy access to all objects (i.e., documents, pictures, audio, and video) available on the net. Thus, it is important to understand WWW performance issues. This paper focuses on the performance analysis of a Web server. Using a synthetic benchmark (WebStone), we analyze three different Web server software running on top of a Windows NT platform and performing some typical WWW tasks.