Enabling cloud computing in emergency management systems

Emergencies, including both natural and man - made disasters, increasingly pose an immediate threat to life, health, property, and environment. For example, Hurricane Katrina, the deadliest and most destructive Atlantic tropical cyclone of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, led to at least 1,883 people's death and an estimated loss of - 108 billion property. To reduce the damage by emergencies, a wide range of cutting-edge technologies on medicine and information are used in all phases of emergency management. This article proposes a cloud-based emergency management system for environmental and structural monitoring that utilizes the powerful computing and storage capability of datacenters to analyze the mass data collected by the wireless intelligent sensor network deployed in civil environment. The system also benefits from smartphone and social network platform to setup the spatial and population models, which enables faster evacuation and better resource allocation.

Mutational interference mapping experiment (MIME) for studying RNA structure and function

RNA regulates many biological processes; however, identifying functional RNA sequences and structures is complex and time-consuming. We introduce a method, mutational interference mapping experiment (MIME), to identify, at single-nucleotide resolution, the primary sequence and secondary structures of an RNA molecule that are crucial for its function. MIME is based on random mutagenesis of the RNA target followed by functional selection and next-generation sequencing. Our analytical approach allows the recovery of quantitative binding parameters and permits the identification of base-pairing partners directly from the sequencing data. We used this method to map the binding site of the human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1) Pr55(Gag) protein on the viral genomic RNA in vitro, and showed that, by analyzing permitted base-pairing patterns, we could model RNA structure motifs that are crucial for protein binding.

An era of governance through performance management - New Labour's National Health Service from 1999 to 2010

In 1997, the New Labour government inherited a ‘crisis’ in the UK National Health Service from the outgoing Conservative government. To address this perceived crisis, New Labour offered investment and, contrary to expectations, further neo-liberal health service reforms. In particular, the government extended the scope of performance management beyond financial numbers to encompass all aspects of managerial and organisational performance. Drawing on an analytics of government framework, this paper demonstrates how reforms were framed and given meaning through a framework of hierarchical accountability and centralised control. These panoptical arrangements relied on performance-management technologies of targets and ratings, which were linked to patient choice and a prospective funding system called ‘Payment by Results’. In turn, these top-down technologies disciplined knowledge, identity, and visibility and control of practice.

ANGEL: agent-based scheduling for real-time tasks in virtualized clouds

The success of cloud computing makes an increasing number of real-time applications such as signal processing and weather forecasting run in the cloud. Meanwhile, scheduling for real-time tasks is playing an essential role for a cloud provider to maintain its quality of service and enhance the system's performance. In this paper, we devise a novel agent-based scheduling mechanism in cloud computing environment to allocate real-time tasks and dynamically provision resources. In contrast to traditional contract net protocols, we employ a bidirectional announcement-bidding mechanism and the collaborative process consists of three phases, i.e., basic matching phase, forward announcement-bidding phase and backward announcement-bidding phase. Moreover, the elasticity is sufficiently considered while scheduling by dynamically adding virtual machines to improve schedulability. Furthermore, we design calculation rules of the bidding values in both forward and backward announcement-bidding phases and two heuristics for selecting contractors. On the basis of the bidirectional announcement-bidding mechanism, we propose an agent-based dynamic scheduling algorithm named ANGEL for real-time, independent and aperiodic tasks in clouds. Extensive experiments are conducted on CloudSim platform by injecting random synthetic workloads and the workloads from the last version of the Google cloud tracelogs to evaluate the performance of our ANGEL. The experimental results indicate that ANGEL can efficiently solve the real-time task scheduling problem in virtualized clouds.

FESTAL: fault-tolerant elastic scheduling algorithm for real-time tasks in virtualized clouds

As clouds have been deployed widely in various fields, the reliability and availability of clouds become the major concern of cloud service providers and users. Thereby, fault tolerance in clouds receives a great deal of attention in both industry and academia, especially for real-time applications due to their safety critical nature. Large amounts of researches have been conducted to realize fault tolerance in distributed systems, among which fault-tolerant scheduling plays a significant role. However, few researches on the fault-tolerant scheduling study the virtualization and the elasticity, two key features of clouds, sufficiently. To address this issue, this paper presents a fault-tolerant mechanism which extends the primary-backup model to incorporate the features of clouds. Meanwhile, for the first time, we propose an elastic resource provisioning mechanism in the fault-tolerant context to improve the resource utilization. On the basis of the fault-tolerant mechanism and the elastic resource provisioning mechanism, we design novel fault-tolerant elastic scheduling algorithms for real-time tasks in clouds named FESTAL, aiming at achieving both fault tolerance and high resource utilization in clouds. Extensive experiments injecting with random synthetic workloads as well as the workload from the latest version of the Google cloud tracelogs are conducted by CloudSim to compare FESTAL with three baseline algorithms, i.e., Non-M igration-FESTAL (NMFESTAL), Non-Overlapping-FESTAL (NOFESTAL), and Elastic First Fit (EFF). The experimental results demonstrate that FESTAL is able to effectively enhance the performance of virtualized clouds.

Anonymous credential-based access control scheme for clouds

In the cloud, data is usually stored in ciphertext for security. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a popular solution for allowing legal data users to access encrypted data, but it has high overhead and is vulnerable to data leakage. The authors propose an anonymous authorization credential and Lagrange interpolation polynomial-based access control scheme in which an access privilege and one secret share are applied for reconstructing the user's decryption key. Because the credential is anonymously bounded with its owner, only the legal authorized user can access and decrypt the encrypted data without leaking any private information.

O Uso da Análise de Conteúdo em Jornalismo: pesquisas feitas com o método na Intercom de 1996 a 2012

Este artigo investiga o uso do método da análise de conteúdo em Jornalismo no contexto da Intercom (Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos Interdisciplinares da Comunicação). O objeto de estudo compõe-se de 20 artigos sobre o campo jornalístico apresentados nos eventos da entidade no período de 1996 a 2012 que registram o método nas palavras-chave. Como resultados, estudo bibliométrico destaca a obra da socióloga francesa Laurence Bardin como a principal referência para discorrer sobre o conceito, a história e a prática do método. Dentre as categorias analisadas, os estudos são nacionais, com exceção de um português, predominantemente da região Sudeste e de autoria de mulheres (68%), com amplo espectro de objetos de estudo. Os estudos mais recentes, de 2012, são os primeiros com resultados tabulados com softwares específicos para esta finalidade.

Levantamento de demandas ergonômicas em dez plantas petroquímicas brasileiras

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O cuidado à criança hospitalizada com câncer : concepções dos cuidadores

Trata-se de uma pesquisa qualitativa que teve como objetivos: investigar a concepção de cuidado para o cuidador membro da equipe multiprofissional de saúde que atua junto a crianças hospitalizadas com câncer; e conhecer como ele vivencia esse cuidado. Os participantes foram 15 cuidadores pediátricos que atuam junto a crianças hospitalizadas com câncer no Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre. As informações foram coletadas por meio de uma entrevista semi-estruturada e, após, submetidas à técnica de análise de conteúdo de Laurence Bardin. As categorias temáticas encontradas foram “Concepção de cuidado” e “Vivências do cuidador”. Ao final do estudo constatou-se que os cuidadores percebem o cuidado como Ação, Vínculo, Presença, Sentimentos e Promoção do desenvolvimento pessoal e espiritual. Constatou-se também que, ao compartilhar as experiências com o outro, lhes possibilita vivenciar as mais variadas situações permeadas de tensões, conflitos, envolvimentos, além de um reconhecimento de identificação com a área da criança, com fases do crescimento e desenvolvimento, com as necessidades das famílias e com o ser frente à morte.

Marketing interativo : a gestão do relacionamento com clientes como um fator competitivo

Uma análise dos ganhos obtidos por empresas que adotam estratégias voltadas à aquisição, retenção e maximização do valor de tempo de vida dos clientes. A partir de uma análise de valor estratégico, identificam-se novas oportunidades na cadeia de fornecedores da indústria do marketing interativo. Inclui um estudo teórico de caso de um Agente que provê planejamento e execução de estratégia focadas no relacionamento de clientes.