Data Replication

The (latest) crisis in confidence in social psychology has generated much heated discussion about the importance of replication, including how it should be carried out as well as interpreted by scholars in the field. For example, what does it mean if a replication attempt “fails”—does it mean that the original results, or the theory that predicted them, have been falsified? And how should “failed” replications affect our belief in the validity of the original research? In this paper, we consider the replication debate from a historical and philosophical perspective, and provide a conceptual analysis of both replication and falsification as they pertain to this important discussion. Along the way, we highlight the importance of auxiliary assumptions (for both testing theories and attempting replications), and introduce a Bayesian framework for assessing “failed” replications in terms of how they should affect our confidence in original findings.

In a much-publicized paper, Zhong and Liljenquist (2006) reported evidence that feelings of moral cleanliness are grounded in feelings of physical cleanliness: a threat to people’s moral purity leads them to seek, literally, to cleanse themselves. In an attempt to replicate and build upon these findings, we conducted a pilot study in which we unexpectedly failed to replicate the original results from the second study of Zhong and Liljenquist’s report. To investigate the source of this issue, we conducted a series of direct replications of Study 2 as reported in Zhong and Liljenquist (2006). We used the authors’ original materials and methods; we investigated samples that were more representative of the general population than in the original experiments; we investigated samples from different countries and cultures; and we substantially increased the power of our statistical tests. Nevertheless, we still failed to replicate Zhong and Liljenquist’s initial reported findings. Our research suggests that more work is needed to clarify the scope and robustness of the original results.

Food advert exposure has been shown to influence calorie intake and food choice in 9-11 year olds. However, little is known about the effect of food advertisements on feeding behaviour in younger children. Therefore, we conducted a study with 93 children aged 5-7 years, 28 of whom were over weight or obese. The children were exposed to 10 non-food adverts and 10 food adverts in a repeated measures design. Their consumption of sweet and savoury, high and low fat snack foods, and fruit were measured following both sessions. Food advert exposure produced a significant increase in total food intake in young children. The collection of recognition data was incomplete. These data replicate previous findings in that exposure to food adverts increases food intake in all children, but recognition of food adverts is related to body mass index (BMI). Beyond their effects on brand choice, exposure to food advertisements (commercials) promotes over-consumption in younger children. r

Today Wikipedia is one of the most famous online encyclopedias providing very useful information in various areas of the human knowledge. The most important thing is that anyone can write and edit the articles in the encyclopedia or we can say that it is written collaboratively by the readers. Since its creation the site has achieved a phenomenal growth in many aspects such as the count of content and users. This growth has put the Web-based encyclopedia on pressure in terms of scalability and performance. To deal with these potential problems it uses MySQL Scale-Out approach and database replication as the solution. Using the Scale-Out helps Wikipedia to handle with the significant number of queries and the growing number of users and articles.

The sounds produced when we touch textured surfaces frequently provide information regarding the structure of those surfaces. It has recently been demonstrated that the perception of the texture of the hands can be modified simply by manipulating the frequency content of such touch-related sounds. We investigated whether similar auditory manipulations change people’s perception of the roughness of abrasive surfaces (experiment 1). Participants were required to make speeded, forced-choice discrimination responses regarding the roughness of a series of abrasive samples which they touched briefly. Analysis of discrimination errors verified that tactile roughness perception was modulated by the frequency content of the auditory feedback. Specifically, attenuating high frequencies led to a bias towards an increased perception of tactile smoothness. In experiment 2, we replicated the rubbing-hands manipulation of previous experimenters while participants rated either the perceived roughness or wetness of their hands. The wetness scale data replicated the results in the literature, while the roughness scale data replicated the result from experiment 1. A final experiment showed that delaying the auditory feedback from the hand-rubbing reduced the magnitude of this parchment-skin illusion. These experiments demonstrate the dramatic effect that auditory frequency manipulations can have on the perceived tactile roughness and moistness of surfaces, and are consistent with the proposal that different auditory perceptual dimensions may have varying salience for different surfaces.

Abstract: Despite the numerous studies on the determinants of subjective wellbeing (SWB), there are still under-researched areas as follows: a full-model approach allowing un-confounded and robust estimations, extension of cross-contextual approaches, and an account of recent changes in Hofstede value dimensions. The present study aims to overcome those limitations with analyses of 59 countries from 1981 to 2013, rendering the following main findings. Individual education’s effect was methodologically affected by the reference category level of dummy variables. I found weak influence of GPRGE (governance, political rights, and gender equality) and individualism, which were associable with the ambivalent nature of intellectual autonomy. Regarding crosscontextual effects, I found that people from underdeveloped societies keep more to current pleasure, and that demand for welfare is higher in affluent and individualistic societies. A culture of uncertainty avoidance reduced the effect of national employment, because of its demotivating aspects in the workplace. Overall, variables related with hedonism, social relation, and wealth showed coherently strong effects, but social progress factors had weak relevance.

Replication is an essential cornerstone of cloud storage where 24x7 availability is needed. Failures are normal rather than exceptional in the cloud computing environments. Aiming to provide high reliability and cost effective storage, replicating based on data popularity is an advisable choice. Before committing a service level agreement (SLA) to the customers of a cloud, the service provider needs to carry out analysis of the system on which cloud storage is hosted. Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is an open source storage platform and designed to be deployed in low-cost hardware. PC Cluster based Cloud Storage System is implemented with HDFS by enhancing replication management scheme. Data objects are distributed and replicated in a cluster of commodity nodes located in the cloud. In this paper, we propose a Markov chain model for replication system which is able to adapt the load changes of cloud storage. According to the performance evaluation, the system can be able to adapt the different workloads (i.e data access rates) while maintaining the high reliability and long mean time to absorption.

Cloud computing is growing rapidly over the years and it faces challenges especially in resource management. Resource
management in cloud computing is necessary due to its distributed nature with different user demands. Quality of Service
(QoS), load balancing and throughput are identified as some of the benefits of proper resource management. This research
focuses on job scheduling and resource load balancing in cloud environment. We proposed an efficient algorithm based
on multi-criteria strategy. The algorithm consists of two main phases. In the first phase the shortest job completion time
is measured based on the completion time of three techniques i.e. min-min, max-min and suffrage. Meanwhile in the
second phase genetic algorithm is implemented for resource load balancing. Cloud Sim simulator is used to measure the
performance and efficiency of the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm enhances jobs scheduling and resource
load balancing by ensuring an efficient utilization of the available resources.

Trichotillomania (TTM) is a chronic impulse control disorder characterized by repetitive hair-pulling resulting in alopecia. Although this condition is frequently observed in children and adolescents, research on pediatric TTM has been hampered by the absence of validated measures. The aim of the present study was to develop and test a new selfreport measure of pediatric TTM, the Trichotillomania Scale for Children (TSC), a measure that can be completed by children and/or their parents. One hundred thirteen

Commentary on: Rolf A. Zwaan, Alexander Etz, Richard E. Lucas, and M. Brent Donnellan (2017). Making Replication Mainstream. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, published online: 25 October 2017, pp. 1-50; forthcoming at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences *******Abstract:
Before replication becomes mainstream, the potential for generating theoretical knowledge better be clear. Replicating statistically significant non-random data shows that an original study made a discovery; replicating a specified theoretical effect shows that an original study corroborated a theory. Yet only in the latter case is replication a necessary, sound, and worthwhile strategy.

I propose a simple and computationally undemanding method for extending Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton (2010)'s Unified Democracy Scores (UDS) from 2015 all the way back to the beginning of the 19th century (and in some cases to the late 18th century), adding information from several democracy datasets not included in their original paper or subsequent releases. The resulting scores are easy to recalculate by individual users depending on the purpose of the research, and come with smaller standard errors than the original UD scores. I use this method to produce an " extended UDS " dataset that covers 24111 country-years for 224 states and several non-state territories, including all of the country years in the updated Gleditsch and Ward panel of independent states since the Congress of Vienna (Gleditsch and Ward, 1999), all microstates in Kristian Gleditsch's list of microstates, and several unrecognized de facto states.

Geospatial data sharing is an increasingly important subject as large amount of data is produced by variety of sources, stored in incompatible formats, and accessible through different GIS applications. Past efforts to enable sharing have produced standardized data format such as GML and data access protocols such as Web Feature Service (WFS). While these standards help enabling client applications to gain access to heterogeneous data stored in different formats from diverse sources, the usability of the access is limited due to the lack of data semantics encoded in the WFS feature types. Past research has used ontology languages to describe the semantics of geospatial data but ontology-based queries cannot be applied directly to legacy data stored in databases or shapefiles, or to feature data in WFS services. This paper presents a method to enable ontology query on spatial data available from WFS services and on data stored in databases. We do not create ontology instances explicitly and thus avoid the problems of data replication. Instead, user queries are rewritten to WFS getFeature requests and SQL queries to database. The method also has the benefits of being able to utilize existing tools of databases, WFS, and GML while enabling query based on ontology semantics.

The sounds produced when we touch textured surfaces frequently provide information regarding the structure of those surfaces. It has recently been demonstrated that the perception of the texture of the hands can be modified simply by manipulating the frequency content of such touch-related sounds. We investigated whether similar auditory manipulations change people's perception of the roughness of abrasive surfaces (experiment 1). Participants were required to make speeded, forced-choice discrimination responses regarding the roughness of a series of abrasive samples which they touched briefly. Analysis of discrimination errors verified that tactile roughness perception was modulated by the frequency content of the auditory feedback. Specifically, attenuating high frequencies led to a bias towards an increased perception of tactile smoothness. In experiment 2, we replicated the rubbing-hands manipulation of previous experimenters while participants rated either the perceived roughness or wetness of their hands. The wetness scale data replicated the results in the literature, while the roughness scale data replicated the result from experiment 1. A final experiment showed that delaying the auditory feedback from the hand-rubbing reduced the magnitude of this parchment-skin illusion. These experiments demonstrate the dramatic effect that auditory frequency manipulations can have on the perceived tactile roughness and moistness of surfaces, and are consistent with the proposal that different auditory perceptual dimensions may have varying salience for different surfaces.

As we delve deeper into the ‘Digital Age’, we witness an explosive growth in the volume, velocity, and variety of the data available on the Internet. For example, in 2012 about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data was created on a daily basis that originated from myriad of sources and applications including mobile devices, sensors, individual archives, social networks, Internet of Things, enterprises, cameras, software logs, etc.
Such ‘Data Explosions’ has led to one of the most challenging research issues of the current Information and Communication Technology era: how to optimally manage (e.g., store, replicated, filter, and the like) such large amount of data and identify new ways to analyze large amounts of data for unlocking information. It is clear that such large data streams cannot be managed by setting up on-premises enterprise database systems as it leads to a large up-front cost in buying and administering the hardware and software systems. Therefore, next generation data management systems must
be deployed on cloud. The cloud computing paradigm provides scalable and elastic resources, such as data and services accessible over the Internet Every Cloud Service Provider must assure that data is efficiently processed and distributed in a way that does not compromise end-users’ Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of data availability, data search delay, data analysis delay, and the like. In the aforementioned perspective,
data replication is used in the cloud for improving the performance (e.g., read and write delay) of applications that access data. Through replication a data intensive application or system can achieve high availability, better fault tolerance, and data recovery. In this paper, we survey data management and replication approaches (from 2007 to 2011) that are developed by both industrial and research communities. The focus of the survey is to discuss and characterize the existing approaches of data replication and management that tackle the resource usage and QoS provisioning with different levels of efficiencies.Moreover, the breakdownof both influential expressions (data replication and management) to provide different QoS attributes is deliberated. Furthermore, the performance advantages and disadvantages of data replication and management approaches in the cloud computing environments are analyzed. Open issues and future challenges related to data consistency, scalability, load balancing, processing and placement are also reported.

One of the basic services in grids is the transfer of data between remote machines. Files may be transferred at the explicit request of the user or as part of delegated resource management services, such as data replication or job scheduling. GridFTP is an important tool for such data transfers since it builds on the common FTP protocol, has a large user base with multiple implementations, and it uses the GSI security model that allows delegated operations. This paper presents a workload analysis of the implementation of the GridFTP protocol provided by the Globus Toolkit. We studied more than 1.5 years of traces reported from all over the world by Globus GridFTP installed components. Our study focuses on three dimensions: first, it quantifies the volume of data transferred and characterizes user behavior. Second, it attempts to show how tuning capabilities are used in practice. Finally, it quantifies the user base as recorded in the database and highlights the usage trends of this software component.

In data-intensive distributed systems, replication is the most widely used approach to offer high data availability, low bandwidth consumption, increased fault-tolerance and improved scalability of the overall system. Replication-based systems implement replica control protocols that enforce a specified semantics of accessing the data. Also, the performance depends on a number of factors, the chief of which is the protocol used to maintain consistency among object replica. In this paper, we propose a new low-cost and high data availability protocol called the box-shaped grid structure for maintaining consistency of replicated data on networked distributed computing systems. We show that the proposed protocol provides high data availability, low communication costs, and increased fault-tolerance as compared to the baseline replica control protocols.

As a pillar of Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT), analytic transparency calls for radical honesty about how political scientists infer conclusions from their data. However, honesty about one's research practices often means discarding the linguistic template of deductive proceduralism that structures most writing, which in turn diminishes the prospects for successful publication. This dissonance reflects a unique dilemma: transparency initiatives reflect a vision of research drawn from the biomedical and natural sciences, and struggle with the messier, iterative, and open-ended nature of political science scholarship. Analytic transparency requires not only better individual practices, such as active citations, but also institutional strategies that reward radical honesty. Journals can provide authors with protected space to reveal research practices, further blind the review process, and experiment with special issues. More broadly, analytic openness can be mandated through procedural monitoring, such as real-time recording of research activities and keystroke logging for statistical programs.

As we delve deeper into the ‗Digital Age', we witness an explosive growth in the volume, velocity, and variety of the data available on the Internet. For example, in 2012 about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data was created on a daily basis that originated from myriad of sources and applications including mobile devices, sensors, individual archives, social networks, Internet of Things, enterprises, cameras, software logs, etc. Such ‗Data Explosions' has led to one of the most challenging research issues of the current Information and Communication Technology (ICT) era: how to optimally manage (e.g., store, replicated, filter, and the like) such large amount of data and identify new ways to analyze large amounts of data for unlocking information. It is clear that such large data streams cannot be managed by setting up on-premises enterprise database systems as it leads to a large up-front cost in buying and administering the hardware and software systems. Therefore, next generation data management systems must be deployed on cloud. The cloud computing paradigm provides scalable and elastic resources, such as data and services accessible over the Internet Every Cloud Service Provider (CSP) must assure that data is efficiently processed and distributed in a way that does not compromise end-users' Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of data availability, data search delay, data analysis delay, and the like. In the aforementioned perspective, data replication is used in the cloud for improving the performance (e.g., read and write delay) of applications that access data. Through replication a data intensive application or system can achieve high availability, better fault tolerance, and data recovery. In this paper, we survey data management and replication approaches (from 2007-2011) that are developed by both industrial and research communities.

INTRODUCTION: While surgical resection has been shown to improve short-term local disease control, it remains debated whether surgical resection is associated with improved overall survival in patients with malignant primary osseous spinal neoplasms. We reviewed survival data from a US cancer registry spanning 30 years to determine if surgical resection was independently associated with overall survival.

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are becoming an integral part of the ubiquitous computing and communication environment, providing new infrastructure for multimedia applications such as video phone, multimedia-on-demand, and others. In order to access multimedia information in MANET, Quality of Service (QoS) needs to be considered, such as high success rate to access multimedia data, bounded end-to-end delay, and others. In this paper, we present a data accessibility service for a group of mobile users to access desired data with high success rate. This accessibility service is only possible if we utilize advanced data advertising, lookup and replication services, as well as a novel predictive location-based QoS routing protocol in an integrated fashion. Using cross-layer design, we illustrate how the QoS routing protocol assists data advertising, lookup and replication services to achieve high data access success rate. Simulation results have shown that our design is successful in a dynamic MANET.

A sample of 93 veterans (92.4% males), with a median age of 41, (Mean=43.5) attending clinics for problem drinking, drug abuse and other mental disorders was screened for problems associated with the diagnosis of pathological gambling. The diagnostic instrument employed was the South Oaks Gambling Screen developed by Lesieur and Blume. The data replicate earlier findings indicating a link between parental problem gambling and pathological gambling. The results extended this association to include grandparents thus firming the familial relationship. Several epidemiological measures were defined and illustrated. These included relative risk, the odds ratio, attributable risk percent and population attributable risk percent. The data were consistent with previous research that substance abusers are about six times as likely to be addicted to gambling as the general population.

Grid computing is a type of distributed computing system that provides access to various computational resources which are shared by different organizations, in order to create an integrated powerful virtual computer. Nowadays, grid is known as an essential technology which is used for different kinds of high performance applications and it is believed that it will be applied more and more in the future as technology progresses. Data replication is a common method used in distributed environments to improve ease of data access and to provide a high level of data availability, increased fault tolerance and data reliability; and that's why this method is used for data management in data grid systems. Since the data files are very large and the Grid storages are limited, managing replicas in storage for the purpose of more effective utilization requires more attention. In this paper, a novel data replication strategy, called Replication with Dynamic Threshold (RDT) is proposed that uses a new threshold for characterizing the number of appropriate sites for replication. Appropriate sites have the higher number of access for that particular replica from other sites. It also minimizes access latency by selecting the best replica when various sites hold replicas. The simulated results with OptorSim, i.e. European Data Grid simulator show that the RDT strategy gives better performance compared to the other algorithms and prevents the unnecessary creation of replicas which leads to efficient storage usage.

The neurohormone oxytocin (OT) has been one the most studied peptides in behavioural sciences over the past two decades. Primarily known for its crucial role in labour and lactation, a rapidly growing literature suggests that intranasal OT (IN-OT) may also play a role in the emotional and social lives of humans. However, the lack of a convincing theoretical framework explaining the effects of IN-OT that would also allow the prediction of which moderators exert their effects and when has raised healthy skepticism regarding the robustness of human behavioural IN-OT research. Poor knowledge of the exact pharmacokinetic properties of OT, as well as crucial statistical and methodological issues and the absence of direct replication efforts, may have lead to a publication bias in the IN-OT literature, with many unpublished studies with null results remaining buried in laboratory drawers. Is there a file drawer problem in IN-OT research? If this is the case, it may also be true in our own laboratory. The present study aims to answer this question, document the extent of the problem and discuss its implications for OT research. For eight studies (including 13 dependent variables overall, as assessed through 25 different paradigms) performed in our laboratory between 2009 and 2014 on 453 subjects, the results obtained were too often not those that were expected. Only five publications emerged from our studies and only one of these reported a null finding. After realising that our publication portfolio has become less and less representative of our actual findings and because the nonpublica-tion of our data might contribute to generating a publication bias in IN-OT research, we decided to retrieve these studies from our drawer and encourage other laboratories to do the same.

As the use of the Internet continues to grow explosively, edge computing has emerged as an important technique for delivering Web content over the Internet. Edge computing moves data and computation closer to end-users for fast local access and better load distribution. Current approaches use caching, which does not work well with highly dynamic data. In this paper, we propose a different approach to enhance edge computing. Our approach lies in a wide area data replication protocol that enables the delivery of dynamic content with full consistency guarantees and with all the benefits of edge computing, such as low latency and high scalability. What is more, the proposed solution is fully transparent to the applications that are brought to the edge. Our extensive evaluations in a real wide area network using TPC-W show promising results. Figure 10. Scenario 2: Clustered edge servers (10 servers) at four cites

With traditional PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), people think towards the future: first comes product development, then manufacturing, then support and finally disposal -- data flows only in forward direction. With the CL2M (Closed-Loop Lifecycle Management) concept, there are also flows going backwards, enabling better visibility and control of the product throughout its PLC (Product Life Cycle). CL2M uses "intelligent products" to gather information at any instant of the PLC and to make it available on downstream or upstream PLC phases. However, information is often deported on a database and is accessed remotely via a network pointer carried by the product. To bring the CL2M concept a step further, this paper addresses a dual challenge: i) providing a new kind of intelligent material capable of undergoing physical transformations without losing its communication ability and the data that is stored on it, ii) providing a framework to achieve a high degree of data synchronization (i.e. enabling data updates on the product, regardless of the network availability). An applicative scenario is presented, showing how this kind of material is put into practice in the context of "communicating medical garments" and how the requirements of the desired degree of data synchronization can be reached.

The purpose of this study was to use Direct Instruction (DI) flashcards to teach high use sight words. The participant was a second grade student with a learning disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). The study was conducted in an elementary resource room in a low-income elementary school located in the Pacific Northwest. The behavior measured was number correct for high frequency words. An ABAB design was employed to evaluate the effectiveness of DI flashcards. The results showed mastery of 137 out of 150 high frequency words over time. In addition, the number of correct sight words increased over time. This outcome was replicated during the return to a second baseline. The lack of a reversal when DI flashcards were withdrawn was discussed.

The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard defines Radiology medical device interoperability and image data exchange between modalities, image databases - Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) - and image review end-points. However the scope of DICOM and PACS technology is currently limited to the trusted and static environment of the hospital. In order to meet the demand for ad-hoc tele-radiology and image guided medical procedures within the global healthcare enterprise, a new technology must provide mobility, security, flexible scale of operations, and rapid responsiveness for DICOM medical devices and subsequently medical image data. Grid technology, an informatics approach to securely federate independently operated computing, storage, and data management resources at the global scale over public networks, meets these core requirements. Here we present an approach to federate DICOM and PACS devices for large-scale medical image workflows wi...

Grid Computing is a type of parallel and distributed systems that is designed to provide reliable access to data and computational resources in wide area networks. These resources are distributed in different geographical locations, however are organized to provide an integrated service. Effective data management in today`s enterprise environment is an important issue. Also, Performance is one of the challenges of using these environments. For improving the performance of file access and easing the sharing amongst distributed systems, replication techniques are used. Data replication is a common method used in distributed environments, where essential data is stored in multiple locations, so that a user can access the data from a site in his area. In this paper, we present a survey on basic and new replication techniques that have been proposed by other researchers. After that, we have a full comparative study on these replication strategies. Also, at the end of the paper, we summarize the results and points of these replication techniques.

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This study examined how avatar body size (normal, obese) and opponent character body size (normal, obese) influenced physical activity while male participants played an exergame. Males operating normal weight avatars showed more physical activity than those using obese avatars. Perceived avatar and opponent character body-size differences moderated the effect of avatar appearance on physical activity. Participants showed decreased physical activity when the opponent character was perceived as slightly more obese than their avatar. Participants also showed decreased physical activity when their avatar was perceived as more obese than the opponent character. We discuss theoretical implications and applications of using virtual characters to increase gamers' physical activity. These findings are also compared to an earlier study with an all-female sample.

In this paper, a review for consistency of data replication protocols has been investigated. A brief deliberation about consistency models in data replication is shown. Also we debate on propagation techniques such as eager and lazy propagation. Differences of replication protocols from consistency view point are studied. Also the advantages and disadvantages of the replication protocols are shown. We advent into essential technical details and positive comparisons, in order to determine their respective contributions as well as restrictions are made. Finally, some literature research strategies in replication and consistency techniques are reviewed.

In this paper we investigate the performance issues of data replication in a loosely coupled distributed database system, where a set of database servers are connected via a network. A database replication scheme, Replication with Divergence, which allows some degree of divergence between the primary and the secondary copies of the same data object, is compared to other two schemes that, respectively, disallows replication and maintains all replicated copies consistent at all times. The impact of some tunable factors, such as cache size and the update propagation probability, on the performance of Replication with Divergence is also investigated. These results shed light on the performance issues that were not addressed in previous studies on replication of distributed database systems.

In data grids, many distributed scientific and engineering applications often require access to a large amount of data (terabytes or petabytes). Data access time depends on bandwidth, especially in a cluster grid. Network bandwidth within the same cluster is larger than across clusters. In a communication environment, the major bottleneck to supporting fast data access in Grids is the high latencies of Wide Area Networks (WANs) and Internet. Effective scheduling in such network architecture can reduce the amount of data transferred across the Internet by dispatching a job to where the needed data are present. Another solution is to use a data replication mechanism to generate multiple copies of the existing data to reduce access opportunities from a remote site. To utilize the above two concepts, in this paper we develop a job scheduling policy, called HCS (Hierarchical Cluster Scheduling), and a dynamic data replication strategy, called HRS (Hierarchical Replication Strategy), to improve the data access efficiencies in a cluster grid. We simulate our algorithm to evaluate various combinations of data access patterns. We also implement HCS and HRS in the Taiwan Unigrid environment. The simulation and experiment results show that HCS and HRS successfully reduces data access time and the amount of inter-cluster-communications in comparison with other strategies in a cluster grid.

With traditional PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), people think towards the future: first comes product development, then manufacturing, then support and finally disposal -data flows only in forward direction. With the CL 2 M (Closed-Loop Lifecycle Management) concept, there are also flows going backwards, enabling better visibility and control of the product throughout its PLC (Product Life Cycle). CL 2 M uses "intelligent products" to gather information at any instant of the PLC and to make it available on downstream or upstream PLC phases. However, information is often deported on a database and is accessed remotely via a network pointer carried by the product. To bring the CL 2 M concept a step further, this paper addresses a dual challenge: i) providing a new kind of intelligent material capable of undergoing physical transformations without losing its communication ability and the data that is stored on it, ii) providing a framework to achieve a high degree of data synchronization (i.e. enabling data updates on the product, regardless of the network availability). An applicative scenario is presented, showing how this kind of material is put into practice in the context of "communicating medical garments" and how the requirements of the desired degree of data synchronization can be reached.

Data Grids seek to harness geographically distributed resources for large-scale data-intensive problems. Such problems, involving loosely coupled jobs and large data-sets, are found in fields like high-energy physics, astronomy and bioinformatics. A variety of factors need to be considered for effective scheduling of resources in such environments: eg, resource utilization, response time, global and local allocation policies and scalability. We propose a general and extensible scheduling architecture that addresses these issues. ...

Data Grids seek to harness geographically distributed resources for large-scale data-intensive problems. Such problems, involving loosely coupled jobs and large data-sets, are found in fields like high-energy physics, astronomy and bioinformatics. A variety of factors need to be considered for effective scheduling of resources in such environments: eg, resource utilization, response time, global and local allocation policies and scalability. We propose a general and extensible scheduling architecture that addresses these issues. ...

Cloud computing is a concept of providing user and application oriented services in a virtual environment. Users can use the various cloud services as per their requirements dynamically. Different users have different requirements in terms of application reliability, performance and fault tolerance. Static and rigid fault tolerance policies provide a consistent degree of fault tolerance as well as overhead. In this research work we have proposed a method to implement dynamic fault tolerance considering customer requirements. The cloud users have been classified in to sub classes as per the fault tolerance requirements. Their jobs have also been classified into compute intensive and data intensive categories. The varying degree of fault tolerance has been applied consisting of replication and input buffer. From the simulation based experiments we have found that the proposed dynamic method performs better than the existing methods.

Background: Swedish male smokers are more likely than female smokers to switch to smokeless tobacco (snus) and males' smoking cessation rate is higher than that of females. These results have fuelled international debate over promoting smokeless tobacco for harm reduction. This study examines whether similar results emerge in the United States, one of few other western countries where smokeless tobacco has long been widely available. Methods: US data source: national sample in Tobacco Use Supplement to Current Population Survey, 2002, with 1-year follow-up in 2003. Analyses included adult selfrespondents in this longitudinal sample (n = 15 056). Population-weighted rates of quitting smoking and switching to smokeless tobacco were computed for the 1-year period. Results: Among US men, few current smokers switched to smokeless tobacco (0.3% in 12 months). Few former smokers turned to smokeless tobacco (1.7%). Switching between cigarettes and smokeless tobacco, infrequent among current tobacco users (,4%), was more often from smokeless to smoking. Men quit smokeless tobacco at three times the rate of quitting cigarettes (38.8% vs 11.6%, p,0.001). Overall, US men have no advantage over women in quitting smoking (11.7% vs 12.4%, p = 0.65), even though men are far likelier to use smokeless tobacco. Conclusion: The Swedish results are not replicated in the United States. Both male and female US smokers appear to have higher quit rates for smoking than have their Swedish counterparts, despite greater use of smokeless tobacco in Sweden. Promoting smokeless tobacco for harm reduction in countries with ongoing tobacco control programmes may not result in any positive population effect on smoking cessation.

In peer-to-peer content distribution the lack of a central authority makes authentication difficult. Without authentication, adversary nodes can spoof identity and falsify messages in the overlay. This enables malicious nodes to launch man-in-the-middle or denial-of-service attacks. In this paper, we present a trust based content distribution for peer-to-peer overlay networks, which is built on the trust management scheme. The main concept is, before sending or accepting the traffic, the trust of the peer must be validated. Based on the success of data delivery and searching time, we calculate the trust index of a node. Then the aggregated trust index of the peers whose value is below the threshold value is considered as distrusted and the corresponding traffic is blocked. By simulation results we show that our proposed scheme achieves increased success ratio with reduced delay and drop.

Comparative statistical analyses often require data harmonization, yet the social sciences do not have clear operationalization frameworks that guide and homogenize variable coding decisions across disciplines. When faced with a need to harmonize variables researchers often look for guidance from various international studies that employ output harmonization, such as the Comparative Survey of Election Studies, which offer recoding structures for the same variable (e.g. marital status). More problematically there are no agreed documentation standards or journal requirements for reporting variable harmonization to facilitate a transparent replication process. We propose a conceptual and data-driven digital solution that creates harmonization documentation standards for publication and scholarly citation: QuickCharmStats 1.1. It is free and open-source software that allows for the organizing, documenting and publishing of data harmonization projects. QuickCharmStats starts at the conceptual level and its workflow ends with a variable recording syntax. It is therefore flexible enough to reflect a variety of theoretical justifications for variable harmonization. Using the socio-demographic variable 'marital status', we demonstrate how the CharmStats work-flow collates metadata while being guided by the scientific standards of transparency and replication. It encourages researchers to publish their harmonization work by providing researchers who complete the peer review process a permanent identifier. Those who contribute original data harmonization work to their discipline can now be credited through citations. Finally, we propose peer-review standards for harmonization documentation, describe a route to online publishing, and provide a referencing format to cite harmonization projects. Although CharmStats products are designed for social scientists our adherence to the scientific method ensures our products can be used by researchers across the sciences.

INTRODUCTION: While surgical resection has been shown to improve short-term local disease control, it remains debated whether surgical resection is associated with improved overall survival in patients with malignant primary osseous spinal neoplasms. We reviewed survival data from a US cancer registry spanning 30 years to determine if surgical resection was independently associated with overall survival.

Replication is one of the popular tools to determine the availability degree of resources (e.g., data files) in data grids. Since data grids involve limited file storages and high computing costs, replication process is very essential in these networks. This paper proposes a dynamic replication mechanism in a data grid that uses a weighted priority-based replication scheme, called WPRS. It specifies a value for each existing in a local storage based on three parameters including price, number of access time, and present time. When a resource is not available for a desired job, it is hired from other sites in the network. The proposed mechanism removes the file having the least value to increase the free space of data storage. Simulation results show that the proposed replication mechanism surpasses some of the existing replication methods in terms of the number of successful jobs, number of non-successful jobs, and buy price.

With "peer production" becoming commonplace and new standards like RDF or OWL paving the way for the much anticipated semantic web, a new breed of very large scale semantic systems is about to appear. Traditional semantic reconciliation methods, dependent upon shared vocabularies or global ontologies, cannot be used in such open and dynamic environments. Instead, new heuristics based on emerging properties and local consensuses have to be exploited in order to foster semantic interoperability in the large. In this paper, we outline the main differences between traditional semantic reconciliation methods and these new heuristics. Also, we characterize the resulting emergent semantics systems and provide a couple of hints vis-à-vis their potential applications.

tion. Abstract: In order to meet their temporal constraints, current applications such as Web-based services and electronic commerce use the technique of data replication. To take the replication benefit, we need to develop con- currency control mechanisms with high performance even when the distributed system is overloaded. In this paper, we present a protocol that uses a new notion called

Due to the third-generation mobile networks and high bandwidth wireless networks, grid computing has moved from traditional parallel and distributed model to mobility-based model. This paradigm shift has given rise to in-creased use of mobile grid based applications and services. There are many related issues and challenges for mobile grids; one of the key challenges is effectively replicating the data over available nodes, which may be mobile. Especially in a mobile grid environment the data could be made available to mobile nodes, so that the time accessing the data and transferring the data is minimized during mobility. The proposed distributed data replica placement mechanism is based on the Signal-to-Noise (SNR) ratio for mobile grids which is intended to address some of the drawbacks of the existing systems especially in selecting multiple nodes for replica placement in single iteration catering the needs of sudden burst of requests, which satisfies large and unpredictable spike of requests. The scheme makes use of minimum spanning tree to establish path for replica placement, in order to reduce the cost of sending the data between pair of nodes. The proposed replica placement has been successfully simulated, and results are analyzed for performance.

Data replication is gaining increased importance due to the increasing demand for availability, performance and fault tolerance in databases. The main challenge for deploying replicated databases on a large scale is to resolve conflicting update requests. In this paper, we propose a permission based dynamic primary copy algorithm to resolve conflicting requests among various sites of replicated databases. The contribution of this work is the reduction in the number of messages per update request. Further, we propose a novel approach for handling single-site fault tolerance including algorithms for detection, removal, and restoration of a faulty site in the database system.