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The vendor lock-in is a prominent issue in cloud computing. It is caused by cloud providers who offer proprietary services, which hinders the cloud interoperability. Client-centric interoperability enables the migration of the dat...
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The vendor lock-in is a prominent issue in cloud computing. It is caused by cloud providers who offer proprietary services, which hinders the cloud interoperability. Client-centric interoperability enables the migration of the data and applications across clouds; it gives the clients control over their workloads and a wider range of service choices. Whereas, provider-centric interoperability allows the providers to collaborate. Thus, providers, who have spare resources, can lend them to other providers who lack computational or storage capabilities to overcome the limitations of their local resources. In this article, we conduct a survey to differentiate between client- and provider-centric interoperability solutions. We aim to provide an up-to-date analysis of the current tendencies and the neglected areas of the cloud interoperability field. Thus, we study the cloud service interoperability evolution through the years. Furthermore, we propose definitions for the intra-cloud and inter-cloud interoperability. Moreover, we propose a taxonomy to classify the cloud interoperability approaches into client-centric and provider-centric categories. Then, for each category, we classify the approaches based on their interoperability environment into single cloud or interconnected clouds. Finally, we analyze and compare the approaches based on multiple criteria. The study reveals the focus on the client-centric solutions and the interoperability in interconnected clouds. We notice more interest in the data and application levels interoperability, mainly, in infrastructure as a service model. We also find that client-centric solutions are, mostly, semantic technologies and brokers. However, provider-centric solutions are middleware, protocols, and standards. We conclude that a generic cloud service interoperability model is needed.
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To better understand how clients' and therapists' views of the therapeutic alliance differ and overlap, this study investigated, first, the components of the alliance that are relevant to the therapy participants; second, their re...
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To better understand how clients' and therapists' views of the therapeutic alliance differ and overlap, this study investigated, first, the components of the alliance that are relevant to the therapy participants; second, their relationship to post-therapy outcome; and third, the relationships between participants' alliance constructs. To identify participants' views, exploratory factor analyses were performed on clients' (n=176) and therapists' (n=133 observations) ratings of the Working Alliance Inventory (short form), the Helping Alliance Questionnaire and the California Psychotherapy Alliance Scales and conducted both on each measure separately and on the three measures combined. The results of the separate analyses indicated in general poor correspondence between the participant-derived components and each measure's a priori constructs. Results of the joint analyses suggested that clients view the alliance in terms of six basic components (Collaborative Work Relationship, Productive Work, Active Commitment, Bond, Non-disagreement on Goals/Tasks and Confident Progress), five of which were found to predict client-rated and/or therapist-rated post-therapy outcome. Results for therapists suggested four basic components (Collaborative Work Relationship, Therapist Confidence & Dedication, Client Commitment & Confidence, Client Working Ability), of which three predicted post-therapy outcome. Findings of significant, but modest to low moderate, correlations between several client and therapist joint factors suggested that despite similarities, the therapy partners' views of the alliance differ in important ways. Compared with therapists, clients appear to place greater emphasis on helpfulness, joint participation in the work of therapy and negative signs of the alliance. Implications of these findings are discussed.
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Although there is a growing body of research in both cross-cultural issues in psychotherapy and in the client's perspective, little is known about differences or similarities in the way clients from different cultures, particularl...
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Although there is a growing body of research in both cross-cultural issues in psychotherapy and in the client's perspective, little is known about differences or similarities in the way clients from different cultures, particularly those from different nations, subjectively experience therapy. The present study addressed this gap through a qualitative analysis of interviews with former therapy clients in Argentina and the United States. The researchers used a consensual qualitative research (CQR; C. E. Hill, B. J. Thompson, & E. N. Williams, 1997, A guide to conducting consensual qualitative research, The Counseling Psychologist, Vol. 25, pp. 517-572; C. E. Hill, S. Knox, B. J. Thompson, E. N. Williams, S. A. Hess, & N. Ladany, 2005, Consensual qualitative research: An update, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Vol. 52, pp. 196-205) methodology and provide illustrative examples from the raw transcripts. Among other differences, Argentine and U.S. participants differed in their experience of the therapy setting, the interventions their therapists used, and in the types of change they reported to result from therapy. Also notable, Argentine participants spoke a great deal more about change than U.S. participants. Results are preliminary, but provide implications for the adaptation of treatments to different cultures and for the cross-cultural validity of researchers' and policymakers' current definitions of treatment efficacy.
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As the Internet becomes a more popular distribution channel for multimedia, one inevitably encounters the problem of the amount of bandwidth required for quality multimedia presentations. Bandwidth may be controlled through variou...
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As the Internet becomes a more popular distribution channel for multimedia, one inevitably encounters the problem of the amount of bandwidth required for quality multimedia presentations. Bandwidth may be controlled through various techniques such as compression, caching, or layered encoding of data. These techniques, however, may be unsuitable for applications with stringent quality of service requirements, as it may lead to severe degradations of the quality of the content being distributed. This article proposes a new version of a media content delivery algorithm, based on the "chaining" strategy, that supports "VCR operations." The proposed algorithm explicitly balances the client-side requirements to support the VCR functionalities while preserving the advantages of using the client playback device as a proxy video server, as specified in the original chaining algorithm. The article also investigates the effect of supporting VCR operations on the performance of the proposed scheme and the impact these operations have on chaining.
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Client-centricity deals with addressing the needs of clients as they change. It requires contact-personnel who are empowered to not only identify client needs, but address them speedily. This study investigated the perceptions of ...
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Client-centricity deals with addressing the needs of clients as they change. It requires contact-personnel who are empowered to not only identify client needs, but address them speedily. This study investigated the perceptions of client-centricity for 559 contact-personnel at three major South African retail banks in central South Africa. The results indicate that in general the contact personnel regard their respective banks as enforcing a client-centric strategy. They do however feel that the support from administrative personnel and the processes that support the sales environment are not always conducive to client-centric principles. This is a particular problem as contact-personnel are attuned to addressing the sales-related product and service offerings of clients as opposed to the process-related administrative burdens attached to the delivery of such products and services. The study also found that the job function of contact-personnel is the most important factor to consider when developing a client-centric strategy. Further to this, contact-personnel with the longest number of years of experience in a specific function are the best to use for management when determining whether or not specific tools to achieve client-centricity are effective. The major contribution of the study is that it focuses specifically on the perceptions of contact-personnel and thus provides additional knowledge of what the bank (through its client-facing staff) itself considers important with regards to client-centricity.
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This Perspective is attempted to broaden the scope of the debate on regional power connectivity to go beyond factors that are proximate to the electricity industry. It turns to major regionalist studies as a source of insights for...
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This Perspective is attempted to broaden the scope of the debate on regional power connectivity to go beyond factors that are proximate to the electricity industry. It turns to major regionalist studies as a source of insights for identifying the wider connects of regional power connectivity, i.e., aspects of the geo-political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts that are significantly affected by, and affect the case for, regional power connectivity. These insights are then translated into three suggestions as to how to deepen regional power connectivity based on an appreciation of its wider connects. This Perspective represents a point of departure from the existing, industry-centric, perspective on the topic that is largely neglectful of the significance of the wider contexts within which regional power connectivity has been progressed. It therefore contributes to the development of more effective policy solutions for deepening regional power connectivity.
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Cloud computing is a model of distributed systems. This system allows users to access virtual resources including the processing power, storage, applications, etc. Storage as a Service (SaaS) is one of the cloud computing services...
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Cloud computing is a model of distributed systems. This system allows users to access virtual resources including the processing power, storage, applications, etc. Storage as a Service (SaaS) is one of the cloud computing services. Cloud storage systems provide this service for the end-users, and deliver data availability and durability as well as global accessibility throughout the Internet. High data availability and scalability are very crucial criteria for the end-users in cloud storage systems. To achieve them, we need replication in these systems. However, the replication brings about asynchronization of data among replicas in different cloud data-centers. It reduces the performance of the cloud storage systems as well. Therefore, replication is one of the crucial challenges in cloud storage systems. These systems need to ensure that the data are synchronized among different replicas by implementing consistency policies. In this paper, we present the Strict Timed Causal Consistency (STCC) as a hybrid consistency model which can be considered as an extension to the cloud computing. This consistency model has two components: client-side, and server-side. At the client-side, this model supports monotonia read, monotonic write, read your write, and write follow read consistencies. At the server-side, it supports the Timed Causal Consistency (TCC) as well. Additionally, it is stronger than the client-centric and is more flexible than the data-centric approaches. In spite of partition tolerance, our proposed method guarantees the consistency and satisfies data availability. Cassandra is a NoSQL database with high scalability and availability. Cassandra comes with multiple consistency levels as a service such as ONE, ALL, QUORUM, etc. We have examined the proposed approach with respect to different consistency levels of Cassandra and Causal Consistency (CC). Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) consists of a number of workloads which are used to evaluate our proposed method. We have executed different workloads on the Cassandra clusters and with respect to which we have made a comparison between the performance of our proposed method and the four other different consistency levels in Cassandra. The experimental results based on the comparison between the proposed method and ONE, ALL, QUORUM, as well as the CC consistencies, on a Cassandra cluster with 24 nodes, testify that on average our approach has reduced the stale read rate by 24% on workload-A, and on workload-B by 25%. Also, the system throughput with respect to workload-A has increased by more than 20%. Besides, when we applied our proposed STCC on workload-B the system throughput increased by almost 35%.
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IPPA (Individually Prioritised Problem Assessment) is a new instrument to assess the effectiveness of assistive technology provision. It assesses the impact that problems have on daily life as perceived by the end-user. In an inte...
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IPPA (Individually Prioritised Problem Assessment) is a new instrument to assess the effectiveness of assistive technology provision. It assesses the impact that problems have on daily life as perceived by the end-user. In an international trial, 248 clients of service delivery centres were interviewed using the instrument, of whom 188 also participated in a follow-up interview. Respondents had problems in mobility, hearing, speech-related communication or self-care. In addition to IPPA, SIP68 and EuroQol were administered for validation purposes. The instrument fits well into the process of service delivery (and even facilitates the actual assessment). The direction of changes measured by IPPA is consistent with the direction of changes measured by SIP68 and EuroQol, supporting construct validity. Changes measured by IPPA are considerably larger, supporting our view that solving problems is a key outcome in provision of assistive devices. Results support the ideas behind the instrument and are promising enough to continue.
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Distributed cognition is widely recognized as an approach to the study of all cognition. It identifies the distribution of cognitive processes between persons and technology, among people, and across time in the development of the...
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Distributed cognition is widely recognized as an approach to the study of all cognition. It identifies the distribution of cognitive processes between persons and technology, among people, and across time in the development of the social and material contexts for thinking. This paper suggests an ectoderm-centric perspective as the basis for distributed cognition, and in so doing redefines distributed cognition as the ability of an organism to interact with its environment for the purpose of satisfying its most basic physiological (internal and external) and social needs in order to survive and sustain itself. Underlying this ectoderm-centric perspective is a proposed theory of reactive and interactive learning.
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The paper proposes a client-centric computing model that allows for adaptive execution of service-oriented applications. The model can flexibly dispatch application tasks to the client side and the network side, dynamically adjust...
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The paper proposes a client-centric computing model that allows for adaptive execution of service-oriented applications. The model can flexibly dispatch application tasks to the client side and the network side, dynamically adjust an execution scheme to adapt to environmental changes, and thus is expected to achieve better scalability, higher performance and more controllable privacy. Scheduling algorithms and the rescheduling strategies are proposed for the model. Experiments show that with the model the performance of service-oriented application execution can be improved.
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