Senior executive service : opinions about the federal work environment : report to the Chairman, Subcommittee on Civil Service, Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, House of Representatives /

"B-243518"--P. 1.

Two watershed projects of the Soil Conservation Service : hearing before the Subcommittee on Water Resources of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, United States Senate, Ninety-eighth Congress, second session, on Turkey Creek Watershed, Oklahoma and Indian Creek-Van Buren Watershed, Iowa, September 25, 1984.

Mode of access: Internet.

Enhancing employment services for people with severe mental illness: the challenge of the Australian service environment

Objectives: Comparatively few people with severe mental illness are employed despite evidence that many people within this group wish to obtain, can obtain and sustain employment, and that employment can contribute to recovery. This investigation aimed to: (i) describe the current policy and service environment within which people with severe mental illness receive employment services; (ii) identify evidence-based practices that improve employment outcomes for people with severe mental illness; (iii) determine the extent to which the current Australian policy environment is consistent with the implementation of evidence-based employment services for people with severe mental illness; and (iv) identify methods and priorities for enhancing employment services for Australians with severe mental illness through implementation of evidence-based practices. Method: Current Australian practices were identified, having reference to policy and legal documents, funding body requirements and anecdotal reports. Evidence-based employment services for people with severe mental illness were identified through examination of published reviews and the results of recent controlled trials. Results: Current policy settings support the provision of employment services for people with severe mental illness separate from clinical services. Recent studies have identified integration of clinical and employment services as a major factor in the effectiveness of employment services. This is usually achieved through co-location of employment and mental health services. Conclusions: Optimal evidence-based employment services are needed by Australians with severe mental illness. Providing optimal services is a challenge in the current policy environment. Service integration may be achieved through enhanced intersectoral links between employment and mental health service providers as well as by co-locating employment specialists within a mental health care setting.

Web services based state of the environment reporting

The Environmental Sciences Division within Queensland Environmental Protection Agency works to monitor, assess and model the condition of the environment. The Division has as a legislative responsibility to produce a whole-of-government report every four years dealing environmental conditions and trends in a ”State of the Environment report” (SoE)[1][2][3]. State of Environment Web Service Reporting System is a supplementary web service based SoE reporting tool, which aims to deliver accurate, timely and accessible information on the condition of the environment through web services via Internet [4][5]. This prototype provides a scientific assessment of environmental conditions for a set of environmental indicators. It contains text descriptions and tables, charts and maps with spatiotemporal dimensions to show the impact of certain environmental indicators on our environment. This prototype is a template based indicator system, to which the administrator may add new sql queries for new indicator services without changing the architecture and codes of this template. The benefits are brought through a service-oriented architecture which provides an online query service with seamless integration. In addition, since it uses web service architecture, each individual component within the application can be implemented by using different programming languages and in different operating systems. Although the services showed in this demo are built upon two datasets of regional ecosystem and protection area of Queensland, it will be possible to report on the condition of water, air, land, coastal zones, energy resources, biodiversity, human settlements and natural culture heritage on the fly as well. Figure 1 shows the architecture of the prototype. In the next section, I will discuss the research tasks in the prototype.

Moomba - A collaborative environment for supporting distributed extreme programming in global software development

Global Software Development (GSD) is an emerging distributive software engineering practice, in which a higher communication overhead due to temporal and geographical separation among developers is traded with gains in reduced development cost, improved flexibility and mobility for developers, increased access to skilled resource-pools and convenience of customer involvements. However, due to its distributive nature, GSD faces many fresh challenges in aspects relating to project coordination, awareness, collaborative coding and effective communication. New software engineering methodologies and processes are required to address these issues. Research has shown that, with adequate support tools, Distributed Extreme Programming (DXP) – a distributive variant of an agile methodology – Extreme Programming (XP) can be both efficient and beneficial to GDS projects. In this paper, we present the design and realization of a collaborative environment, called Moomba, which assists a distributed team in both instantiation and execution of a DXP process in GSD projects.

Superstring: A scalable service discovery protocol for the wide-area pervasive environment

Arguably, the world has become one large pervasive computing environment. Our planet is growing a digital skin of a wide array of sensors, hand-held computers, mobile phones, laptops, web services and publicly accessible web-cams. Often, these devices and services are deployed in groups, forming small communities of interacting devices. Service discovery protocols allow processes executing on each device to discover services offered by other devices within the community. These communities can be linked together to form a wide-area pervasive environment, allowing processes in one p u p tu interact with services in another. However, the costs of communication and the protocols by which this communication is mediated in the wide-area differ from those of intra-group, or local-area, communication. Communication is an expensive operation for small, battery powered devices, but it is less expensive for servem and workstations, which have a constant power supply and 81'e connected to high bandwidth networks. This paper introduces Superstring, a peer to-peer service discovery protocol optimised fur use in the wide-area. Its goals are to minimise computation and memory overhead in the face of large numbers of resources. It achieves this memory and computation scalability by distributing the storage cost of service descriptions and the computation cost of queries over multiple resolvers.

A fuzzy AHP based integer linear programming model for the multi-criteria transshipment problem

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to develop a holistic approach to maximize the customer service level while minimizing the logistics cost by using an integrated multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) method for the contemporary transshipment problem. Unlike the prevalent optimization techniques, this paper proposes an integrated approach which considers both quantitative and qualitative factors in order to maximize the benefits of service deliverers and customers under uncertain environments. Design/methodology/approach – This paper proposes a fuzzy-based integer linear programming model, based on the existing literature and validated with an example case. The model integrates the developed fuzzy modification of the analytic hierarchy process (FAHP), and solves the multi-criteria transshipment problem. Findings – This paper provides several novel insights about how to transform a company from a cost-based model to a service-dominated model by using an integrated MCDM method. It suggests that the contemporary customer-driven supply chain remains and increases its competitiveness from two aspects: optimizing the cost and providing the best service simultaneously. Research limitations/implications – This research used one illustrative industry case to exemplify the developed method. Considering the generalization of the research findings and the complexity of the transshipment service network, more cases across multiple industries are necessary to further enhance the validity of the research output. Practical implications – The paper includes implications for the evaluation and selection of transshipment service suppliers, the construction of optimal transshipment network as well as managing the network. Originality/value – The major advantages of this generic approach are that both quantitative and qualitative factors under fuzzy environment are considered simultaneously and also the viewpoints of service deliverers and customers are focused. Therefore, it is believed that it is useful and applicable for the transshipment service network design.

Alternative service organizations: Funding environment, strategies, and patterns of adaptation

This study explored the strategies that community-based, consumer-focused advocacy, alternative service organizations (ASOs), implemented to adapt to the changes in the nonprofit funding environment (Oliver & McShane, 1979; Perlmutter, 1988a, 1994). It is not clear as to the extent to which current funding trends have influenced ASOs as little empirical research has been conducted in this area (Magnus, 2001; Marquez, 2003; Powell, 1986). ^ This study used a qualitative research design to investigate strategies implemented by these organizations to adapt to changes such as decreasing government, foundation, and corporate funding and an increasing number of nonprofit organizations. More than 20 community informants helped to identify, locate, and provide information about ASOs. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 30 ASO executive directors from diverse organizations in Miami-bade and Broward Counties, in South Florida. ^ Data analysis was facilitated by the use of ATLAS.ti, version 5, a qualitative data analysis computer software program designed for grounded theory research. This process generated five major themes: Funding Environment; Internal Structure; Strategies for Survival; Sustainability; and Committing to the Cause, Mission, and Vision. ^ The results indicate that ASOs are struggling to survive financially by cutting programs, decreasing staff, and limiting service to consumers. They are also exploring ways to develop fundraising strategies; for example, increasing the number of proposals written for grants, focusing on fund development, and establishing for-profit ventures. Even organizations that state that they are currently financially stable are concerned about their financial vulnerability. There is little flexibility or cushioning to adjust to "funding jolts." The fear of losing current funding levels and being placed in a tenuous financial situation is a constant concern for these ASOs. ^ Further data collected from the self-administered Funding Checklist and demographic forms were coded and analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Descriptive information and frequencies generated findings regarding the revenue, staff compliment, use of volunteers and fundraising consultants, and fundraising practices. The study proposes a model of funding relationships and presents implications for social work practice, and policy, along with recommendations for future research. ^

Enabling adaptability in service aggregates using transparent shaping techniques

Distributed applications are exposed as reusable components that are dynamically discovered and integrated to create new applications. These new applications, in the form of aggregate services, are vulnerable to failure due to the autonomous and distributed nature of their integrated components. This vulnerability creates the need for adaptability in aggregate services. The need for adaptation is accentuated for complex long-running applications as is found in scientific Grid computing, where distributed computing nodes may participate to solve computation and data-intensive problems. Such applications integrate services for coordinated problem solving in areas such as Bioinformatics. For such applications, when a constituent service fails, the application fails, even though there are other nodes that can substitute for the failed service. This concern is not addressed in the specification of high-level composition languages such as that of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). We propose an approach to transparently autonomizing existing BPEL processes in order to make them modifiable at runtime and more resilient to the failures in their execution environment. By transparent introduction of adaptive behavior, adaptation preserves the original business logic of the aggregate service and does not tangle the code for adaptive behavior with that of the aggregate service. The major contributions of this dissertation are: first, we assessed the effectiveness of BPEL language support in developing adaptive mechanisms. As a result, we identified the strengths and limitations of BPEL and came up with strategies to address those limitations. Second, we developed a technique to enhance existing BPEL processes transparently in order to support dynamic adaptation. We proposed a framework which uses transparent shaping and generative programming to make BPEL processes adaptive. Third, we developed a technique to dynamically discover and bind to substitute services. Our technique was evaluated and the result showed that dynamic utilization of components improves the flexibility of adaptive BPEL processes. Fourth, we developed an extensible policy-based technique to specify how to handle exceptional behavior. We developed a generic component that introduces adaptive behavior for multiple BPEL processes. Fifth, we identify ways to apply our work to facilitate adaptability in composite Grid services.

Examining the Impact of Service Times on Overall Guest Satisfaction Perception in the Casual Dining Environment

A mystery shopper study was used to examine the influence of service times on customer satisfaction. The impact of management emphasis on service quality was also examined. In the restaurants studied, service time influenced customer satisfaction. Management attention to service time improved performance in direct relationship to the level of emphasis.

Common Environment for Undergraduate Computer Programming

We present an Integrated Environment suitable for learning and teaching computer programming which is designed for both students of specialised Computer Science courses, and also non-specialist students such as those following Liberal Arts. The environment is rich enough to allow exploration of concepts from robotics, artificial intelligence, social science, and philosophy as well as the specialist areas of operating systems and the various computer programming paradigms.

Online MBPeT dashboard : enabling performance testing as a service in the cloud

In this thesis, tool support is addressed for the combined disciplines of Model-based testing and performance testing. Model-based testing (MBT) utilizes abstract behavioral models to automate test generation, thus decreasing time and cost of test creation. MBT is a functional testing technique, thereby focusing on output, behavior, and functionality. Performance testing, however, is non-functional and is concerned with responsiveness and stability under various load conditions. MBPeT (Model-Based Performance evaluation Tool) is one such tool which utilizes probabilistic models, representing dynamic real-world user behavior patterns, to generate synthetic workload against a System Under Test and in turn carry out performance analysis based on key performance indicators (KPI). Developed at Åbo Akademi University, the MBPeT tool is currently comprised of a downloadable command-line based tool as well as a graphical user interface. The goal of this thesis project is two-fold: 1) to extend the existing MBPeT tool by deploying it as a web-based application, thereby removing the requirement of local installation, and 2) to design a user interface for this web application which will add new user interaction paradigms to the existing feature set of the tool. All phases of the MBPeT process will be realized via this single web deployment location including probabilistic model creation, test configurations, test session execution against a SUT with real-time monitoring of user configurable metric, and final test report generation and display. This web application (MBPeT Dashboard) is implemented with the Java programming language on top of the Vaadin framework for rich internet application development. The Vaadin framework handles the complicated web communications processes and front-end technologies, freeing developers to implement the business logic as well as the user interface in pure Java. A number of experiments are run in a case study environment to validate the functionality of the newly developed Dashboard application as well as the scalability of the solution implemented in handling multiple concurrent users. The results support a successful solution with regards to the functional and performance criteria defined, while improvements and optimizations are suggested to increase both of these factors.

Interoperability Challenges in Internet of Things Systems: a Service-Oriented Computing Approach

Internet of Things systems are pervasive systems evolved from cyber-physical to large-scale systems. Due to the number of technologies involved, software development involves several integration challenges. Among them, the ones preventing proper integration are those related to the system heterogeneity, and thus addressing interoperability issues. From a software engineering perspective, developers mostly experience the lack of interoperability in the two phases of software development: programming and deployment. On the one hand, modern software tends to be distributed in several components, each adopting its most-appropriate technology stack, pushing programmers to code in a protocol- and data-agnostic way. On the other hand, each software component should run in the most appropriate execution environment and, as a result, system architects strive to automate the deployment in distributed infrastructures. This dissertation aims to improve the development process by introducing proper tools to handle certain aspects of the system heterogeneity. Our effort focuses on three of these aspects and, for each one of those, we propose a tool addressing the underlying challenge. The first tool aims to handle heterogeneity at the transport and application protocol level, the second to manage different data formats, while the third to obtain optimal deployment. To realize the tools, we adopted a linguistic approach, i.e.\ we provided specific linguistic abstractions that help developers to increase the expressive power of the programming language they use, writing better solutions in more straightforward ways. To validate the approach, we implemented use cases to show that the tools can be used in practice and that they help to achieve the expected level of interoperability. In conclusion, to move a step towards the realization of an integrated Internet of Things ecosystem, we target programmers and architects and propose them to use the presented tools to ease the software development process.