Interested Clients Research Articles

Cooperative Media Data Streaming with Scalable Video Coding

Peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming has become a promising approach for disseminating streaming media content from the server to a large number of interested clients. It still faces many challenges, however, such as high churn rate of peer clients, uplink bandwidth constraints of participating peers, and heterogeneity of client capacities. To resolve these issues, this paper presents a new P2P streaming framework that combines with the advantages of both mesh-based multisource overlay networks and scalable video coding techniques, specifically with multiple description coding (MDC), to improve the streaming quality of participating clients. In this paper, an optimized allocation policy (OAP) algorithm was proposed for multidescriptions allocation. Extensive simulations show that the proposed system achieves higher quality of service by peer-assisted cooperative streaming and MDC coding. In addition, we investigate an efficient cooperative caching mechanism for streaming service. The target is to provide low-latency and high-quality services by virtue of peer collaboration. The storage and replacement of caching content are based on a segment-based strategy. Through comparison, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and compare with the traditional LRUF scheme through extensive experiments over large Internet-like topologies. Results show that the system outperforms some previous schemes in resource utilization and is more robust and resilient to node departure, which demonstrate that it is well suited for quality adaptive cooperative streaming applications.

Delivering NCOF operational marine data through the Internet

The National Centre for Ocean Forecasting (NCOF) partnership is now promoting the delivery of operational marine forecasting data over the internet, with the aim of pioneering new relationships with interested clients in government and commercial companies, and with marine and climate research organisations. This paper reviews some of the objectives of this work, particularly regarding standard protocols and service capabilities that are needed to make the products more useful.

Motivational interviewing with hazardous drinkers

To test the effectiveness of motivational interviewing in a population of hazardous drinkers utilizing community health care centers in rural southeastern Idaho. This study targeted rural people at risk for alcohol dependence utilizing low-income community health care centers in rural southeastern Idaho. The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) was used to screen interested clients' alcohol use. Clients achieving an AUDIT score indicating hazardous alcohol use were recruited into the study and randomized into a control or treatment group. Twenty-six hazardous drinkers attending five low-income community health centers participated in the study. The experimental group participated in one motivational interviewing session with the investigator, a family nurse practitioner (NP). The comparison group received no treatment. Alcohol use was tracked for 6 weeks after successful recruitment into the program. Participants in the study significantly decreased their average number of drinks per day. At time 1 (pretreatment), the control group drank 4.37 drinks per day and the treatment group drank 4.65 drinks per day. At time 2 (posttest), the control group drank 3.77 drinks per day and the treatment group drank 1.95 drinks per day. The effects of the motivational interviewing treatment on hazardous drinking also were measured by serum gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT), a liver function test. There was also a significant decrease in the GGT from pretest to posttest in the treatment group. The results of this investigation found that motivational interviewing shows promise as an effective intervention for hazardous drinkers attending low-income community clinics. Although other possible explanations could be postulated for the positive changes in sample participants, the data indicate that the motivational interviewing approach was responsible for a significant portion of the positive changes within the current sample. The information collected from the study adds to the literature on hazardous drinking, research, and treatment of this significant problem. Negotiating change in behavior is part of the practice of NPs. People struggling with alcohol use are more likely to encounter NPs, family doctors, or social workers than counselors specializing in alcohol treatment. Motivational interviewing is specifically designed for preparing people for change. Because most people resist being told what to do, that is, "you have to stop drinking," use of motivational interviewing principles can decrease resistance and optimize change. Additionally, identifying and intervening with hazardous drinking in a primary care setting can reduce healthcare costs and reduce the stigma of specialist care. Adding this valuable communication skill to the competencies of NPs is important to both clients and NPs.

Cooperative Proxy Caching for Wireless Base Stations

This paper proposes a mobile cache model to facilitate the cooperative proxy caching in wireless base stations. This mobile cache model uses a network cache line to record the caching state information about a web document for effective data search and cache space management. Based on the proposed mobile cache model, a P2P cooperative proxy caching scheme is proposed to use a self‐configured and self‐managed virtual proxy graph (VPG), independent of the underlying wireless network structure and adaptive to the network and geographic environment changes, to achieve efficient data search, data cache and date replication. Based on demand, the aggregate effect of data caching, searching and replicating actions by individual proxy servers automatically migrates the cached web documents closer to the interested clients. In addition, a cache line migration (CLM) strategy is proposed to flow and replicate the heads of network cache lines of web documents associated with a moving mobile host to the new base station during the mobile host handoff. These replicated cache line heads provide direct links to the cached web documents accessed by the moving mobile hosts in the previous base station, thus improving the mobile web caching performance. Performance studies have shown that the proposed P2P cooperative proxy caching schemes significantly outperform existing caching schemes.

Multiple-Description Coding for Overlay Network Streaming

We consider the problem of distributing video data from one sender to a population of interested clients. Deploying an overlay network with an application-layer multicast, we propose a scalable forward-error-correction-based, multiple-description coding packetization scheme to achieve optimal performance for each client

Constructing collaborative desktop storage caches for large scientific datasets

High-end computing is suffering a data deluge from experiments, simulations, and apparatus that creates overwhelming application dataset sizes. This has led to the proliferation of high-end mass storage systems, storage area clusters, and data centers. These storage facilities offer a large range of choices in terms of capacity and access rate, as well as strong data availability and consistency support. However, for most end-users, the “last mile” in their analysis pipeline often requires data processing and visualization at local computers, typically local desktop workstations. End-user workstations---despite having more processing power than ever before---are ill-equipped to cope with such data demands due to insufficient secondary storage space and I/O rates. Meanwhile, a large portion of desktop storage is unused.We propose the FreeLoader framework, which aggregates unused desktop storage space and I/O bandwidth into a shared cache/scratch space, for hosting large, immutable datasets and exploiting data access locality. This article presents the FreeLoader architecture, component design, and performance results based on our proof-of-concept prototype. Its architecture comprises contributing benefactor nodes, steered by a management layer, providing services such as data integrity, high performance, load balancing, and impact control. Our experiments show that FreeLoader is an appealing low-cost solution to storing massive datasets by delivering higher data access rates than traditional storage facilities, namely, local or remote shared file systems, storage systems, and Internet data repositories. In particular, we present novel data striping techniques that allow FreeLoader to efficiently aggregate a workstation's network communication bandwidth and local I/O bandwidth. In addition, the performance impact on the native workload of donor machines is small and can be effectively controlled. Further, we show that security features such as data encryptions and integrity checks can be easily added as filters for interested clients. Finally, we demonstrate how legacy applications can use the FreeLoader API to store and retrieve datasets.

The Individual Placement and Support Model vs. the Menu Approach to Supported Employment

Two models of provision of employment services to a caseload of severely and persistently mentally ill are explored: the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) model and the Menu Approach. The priority of the IPS model is to return interested clients to community-based, competitive, integrated employment with time-unlimited follow-along support. However, the IPS model offers little to clients unwilling or unable to work competitively. The priority of the Menu Approach is to assertively offer supported employment services to the agency's entire caseload, interested or not, and to provide the many benefits of a work experience to as many clients as possible. However, evidence points to this model reducing the likelihood of rapid direct entry into the competitive workplace. A case history illustrates the occupational therapist's role as an employment specialist offering both agency-based and community-based support services in an assertive community treatment program.

Experience with a commercial Java implementation of group communication using reliable multicast

Tantus Reliable Multicast is an implementation of a set of group communication primitives for use by a particular local area network application. The system provides resilience against any single point of failure in the network, total sequencing of messages and events, and automatic notification of loss of group members. It has been designed to be used by a trading room system, or by any similar systems that have strong requirements for secure recording of transactions and immediate notification of data changes to multiple interested clients. Both the API and the daemon, in their latest implementations, have been written in Java.This paper describes the considerations that have gone into the design decisions for the product, and experience in developing and testing the product.The product has been developed for Tantus plc, (tantus.co.uk) and provides some of the underlying software for that company's commercial trading room and distributed database systems. The product and all its source code, documentation, etc., are the property of Tantus plc, whom I thank for permission to publish this paper.

A successful approach to immunizing men who have sex with men against hepatitis B.

This paper reports the success of outreach efforts to immunize adults at high risk of acquiring hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. Local health department testers recruited clients when they sought anonymous HIV testing. Interested clients were serologically tested for HBV infection. Susceptibles were offered a free hepatitis B vaccine. Of 189 clients who were tested, 161 (86%) were susceptible to HBV infection and 140 (74%) were men who have sex with men (MSM). Of the susceptibles, 82 (51%) started the hepatitis B vaccine series. Sixty-five (80%) received three doses of hepatitis B vaccine and an additional 10 (12%) received two doses. Completing the hepatitis B vaccine series was associated with being a MSM (odds ratio [OR] 8.8, confidence interval [CI] 1.5-56.0) and with not being an injection drug user (IDU) (OR 0.2, CI 0.02-1.0). One way to provide hepatitis B vaccine to MSM is to attach an immunization program to a successful anonymous HIV testing program. The feasibility of implementing such programs would increase if public vaccine policymakers made more federally purchased hepatitis B vaccine available for adults.

What Nurses Should Know About Natural Family Planning

Two common natural family planning (NFP) methods are the ovulation method based on characteristics of cervical mucus and the symptothermal method based on changes in cervical mucus, basal body temperature, and the cervix. Both methods are effective when used correctly. Nurses should understand the principles of NFP and introduce these methods in discussions of family planning options. Interested clients should be referred to a certified NFP instructor for education and supervision.

Disseminating active map information to mobile hosts

The article describes an active map service (AMS) that supports context-aware computing by providing clients with information about located-objects and how those objects change over time. The authors focus on the communication issues of disseminating information from an active map server to its clients, and in particular, address how to deal with various overload situations that can occur. Simple unicast callbacks to interested clients work well enough if only a few located-objects are moving at any given time and only a few clients wish to know about any given move. However, if many people are moving about in the same region and many clients are interested in their motion, then the AMS may experience overload due to the quadratic nature of the communications involved. This overload affects both the server as well as any slow communications links being used. Mobile distributed computing enables users to interact with many different mobile and stationary computers over the course of the day. Navigating a mobile environment can be aided by active maps that describe the location and characteristics of objects within some region as they change over time.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The characteristics of clients and public health nurses in child health services interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the characteristics of clients (i.e. mothers) and public health nurses in child health services based on interviews of the mothers and the public health nurses. In addition, the meaning of the visit to the participants is described. The data were collected by interviewing 20 mothers in their homes and 20 public health nurses. Grounded theory was used in the data analysis. Four categories describing the clients were found: disengaged clients, interested but shy clients, interested but disappointed clients and eager and responsible clients. Three types of public health nurses were identified according to their own descriptions: families' needs are the more important, balancing and orders are the most identified. Client's satisfaction depended on the mother's mood, the child's behavior during the visit, having the same nurse and especially the public health nurse's character or personality. The paper emphasizes the importance of nursing research on interactions in health care, especially client-public health nurse relationships and their consequences for both parties.

Behavioral Contracting in an Urban Health Promotion Project

A health promotion project involving 223 participants was conducted by the Department of Family Medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Participants were screenedforfive cardiovascular riskfactors: blood lipids, obesity, smoking, blood pressure and physical fitness; they were reassessed at six-month and two-year intervals. Following the initial screening, participants were asked to meet with the project health educator to sign one or more "behavioral contracts" to make behavior or life-style changes designed to improve risk factor status. Individual and group interventions were provided to all interested clients. Of the individuals screened, 179 of the 223 returned for at least one health counseling session. Contractors were most successful in improving exercise habits and making dietary changes to reduce cholesterol. These changes were reflected in improved treadmill performance and significant reductions in serum cholesterol. Smokers and the overweight showed poor success rates, few smokers were willing to sign a smoking cessation contract, and there was a high dropout ratefrom weightcontrol counseling.

AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF THE BROAD RANGE TAILORED TEST OF VERBAL ABILITY

ABSTRACTThis document is the final report of a study designed to investigate the performance of the Broad‐Range Tailored Test of Verbal Ability. The Broad‐Range Tailored Test (BRTT) is a computerized adaptive test developed by Frederic M. Lord. It employs a maximum likelihood selection strategy to choose items from an item pool stored on magnetic disk. The items selected are tailored to the individual testee and are presented on a computer terminal. Each testee responds to 25 items; at the conclusion of the test the computer calculates a verbal ability score for the individual. The test was designed to yield a verbal ability score from the fifth grade level to the graduate school level.Performance of the BRTT had been investigated by means of simulation studies. The current study is the first empirical test of its performance. Two forms of the BRTT were administered to 146 high school students. The students also answered a posttest questionnaire in which they indicated their reactions to this form of testing.Analyses revealed that the BRTT was more reliable than the PSAT for a number of scores derived from the data. The test‐retest reliability of the BRTT was .8719 at the 25th item; reliability of the PSAT verbal score (scaled down to 25 items) was .65. Analyses of the reliability of the BRTT vs. the PSAT revealed that the tailored test was also more reliable than the conventional test at shorter lengths. Correlations between scores on the BRTT and PSAT were reasonably high—typically about .86. This finding confirms theoretical expectation regarding the increased efficiency of adaptive, as compared to conventional tests.The study investigated nine of observed scores and score transformations. The most useful of these was found to be the expected proportion correct over the entire item pool. This score was highly reliable and was found to be parallel with respect to the mean values across forms A and B. θ, the commonly‐employed latent‐trait parameter and Ω, a monotone transformation of θ, did not exhibit this characteristic.The information functions of the BRTT were calculated and compared favorably with simulation results previously reported by Lord. Thus the accuracy of the BRTT was in accord with theoretical expectation.Student response to the computerized testing procedure was generally quite favorable. Students found the human‐computer interface easy to use and less fatiguing than a long pencil‐and‐paper test.Operationally, the system performed well. Detailed analysis of 11 anomalous cases, suggested refinements to the system. Response time was adequate and consistent. Reliability of the hardware and software was excellent. These results suggest that computerized adaptive testing is ready to take the first steps out of the laboratory environment and find its place in the educational community.The recommendations emerging from this study are: (1) that the organization collaborate with an interested client to develop an adaptive test for use in an educational setting; (2) that the potential for microprocessor‐based systems for the delivery of adaptive testing be evaluated; (3) that extensions to item response theory and the development of alternative models for the provision of adaptive testing be explored; and (4) that high priority be accorded the development of innovative assessment strategies for computer presentation. Such items might involve simulation and gaming, constructed responses, graphics, motion, sound, and time‐dependent responses.