Sequential Requests Research Articles

(Un-)persuasive robots: Exploring the effect of anthropomorphic cues on the foot-in-the-door effect across three experimental studies

The foot-in-the-door is a sequential request strategy (Freedman and Fraser, 1966): The probability of compliance with a larger request increases if a smaller request is submitted in advance. We conducted three studies in different experimental settings investigating the foot-in-the-door (FITD) effect in human-robot interaction (HRI): An online questionnaire, laboratory experiment and field study. We investigated the FITD effect when applied by a robot and varied anthropomorphic cues along two factors: (1) more or less facial features displayed in the robot face and (2) the robot either self-disclosed ‘personal’ information or not. The experimental setting significantly influenced compliance with the robot's requests, with more items answered in the laboratory experiment compared to the online questionnaire and field study conditions. There was no difference between the latter two. There were no significant effects of facial features, self-disclosure, or the use of the FITD technique, neither on compliance with the large request nor on robot perception. The participants' trusting disposition significantly affected how they perceived the robot. These results highlight the complexity of HRI and the need to carefully consider the experimental setting when conducting and comparing studies on the FITD effect in HRI.

Dual Locality-Based Flash Translation Layer for NAND Flash-Based Consumer Electronics

NAND flash memory shows prominent performance, so it has been used as storage devices of consumer electronics, such as the smart phones and tablet personal computers. As the storage management software of NAND flash memory, the page-level flash translation layer (PLFTL) owns very high I/O access performance for consumer electronics. As an improved version of PLFTL, the demand-based PLFTL selectively keeps active mapping entries in the DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) and the demand-based PLFTL mainly considers the temporal locality of workloads. However, the spatial locality also appears in many workloads. To exploit the temporal locality and spatial locality of workloads, a novel dual locality-based FTL (DL-FTL) is proposed in this paper. DL-FTL uses the sequential cache mapping state table (S-CMST) and sequential physical address cache mapping table (SPA-CMT) to process the sequential requests. To decrease the update counts of translation pages, the mapping entries that are evicted from S-CMST will be written back to NAND flash memory using a batch update strategy. The experimental results show that our proposed DL-FTL raises the cache hit ratio by up to 66.39% and reduces the system response time by up to 21.64% on average, compared with the demand-based PLFTL.

Simple Heuristics for Near-Optimal Appointment Scheduling in Primary Care.

In primary care allocating appointments to sequential requests can result in sub-optimal scheduling. Optimal scheduling requires hiring of consultants to analyze historical patterns. Many practices focus their resources on larger problems instead of optimizing appointment schedules. We simulate simple heuristics to compare their performance with optimal schedules uncovered using offline optimization models. We use uncapacitated appointment calendars for a nationally representative heterogeneous primary care panel to meet all patients' requests. The stochastic nature of appointment requests gives a distribution for daily appointments and for the uncovered optimal capacity. The First Minimum heuristic gives near-optimal schedules and can be easily implemented in small practices using pen-and-paper, without any investment in computer-systems.

Preference for Consistency as a Moderator of the Low-Ball Technique

This study aims to fill the knowledge gap related to the role of the preference for consistency in understanding the effectiveness of sequential social influence techniques. Previous research has shown, at least in part, that these effects are moderated by the preference for consistency. For those who prefer consistency in their beliefs and behaviors, the foot-in-the-door technique will be a more effective tool of inducing compliance while people with a low preference for consistency, who value unpredictability, are more susceptible to the door-in-the-face technique. So far, there has been no research on the role of preference for consistency in the effectiveness of the third sequential request technique—low-ball. Our results suggest that, indeed, the preference for consistency is a strong moderator of the latter mentioned technique. While the low-ball technique was generally successful in inducing compliance, the strongest effect was noticed among people with a high preference for consistency.

Hyperledger F abric Block chain for data S ecurity in IOT D evices

Data security for IOT devices is very import aspect these days as the world is moving towards digitalization. Consider a smart energy meter which provides a way to monitor the energy consumption at home, data security in such smart meter reading is very important. If the Power reading signals are tampered, then it may cause serious economic loss for the authorities. The personal information infringement of user can occur at the database and may fall in the hands of unethical persons. In order to address these issues in this paper we propose to use a permissioned blockchain network. Blockchain maintains time stamped ledger records that are very hard to tamper. Every transaction is recorded and distributed across many participant nodes, these records are immutable because they have blocks of data which are linked to each other with strong cryptographic hash. The blockchain network is built using hyperledger fabric, where all the participant nodes are registered and only registered nodes involve in consensus process of transaction. In fabric, MSP (membership service provider) identifies the identity of the participant nodes through X.509 digital certificates issued by certificate authority. Along with creation of blockchain network for the application, a mobile client, a web client, an Arduino client and web server is created. The Arduino client is the hardware module that has an energy meter (SDM120) measuring the energy consumption of the user and sends this information serially to NODEMCU. NODEMCU POSTs the read energy details to the web server at particular api, web server POSTs the details to the Blockchain Network, where transactions undergoes consensus to add this information to blockchain ledger. Now data is decentralized and every peer node has the local copy of ledger. The updated information can be queried and seen on the web Client and Mobile client user interfaces. Anonymity-enhanced blockchain has been implemented to avoid the disclosure of personal information or data. Also performance analysis of the application is carried out for number of sequential requests and concurrent requests from many users using different tools.

WAL-SSD: Address Remapping-Based Write-Ahead-Logging Solid-State Disks

Recent advances in flash memory technology have reduced the cost-per-bit of flash storage devices such as solid-state drives (SSDs), thereby enabling the development of large-capacity SSDs for enterprise-scale storage. However, two major concerns arise in designing SSDs. First, the size of the address mapping table is increasing in proportion to the capacity of the SSD. The SSD-internal firmware, called flash translation layer (FTL), must maintain the address mapping table in the internal DRAM. Although the previously proposed demand map loading technique uses a small size of cached map table, the technique aggravates poor random performance. Second, there are many redundant writes in storage workloads, which have an adverse effect on the performance and lifetime of the SSD. For example, many transaction-supporting applications use the write-ahead-log (WAL) scheme, which writes the same data twice. To resolve these problems, we propose a novel transaction-supporting SSD, called WAL-SSD, which logs transaction data at the internally-managed WAL area and relocates the data atomically via the FTL-level remap operation at the transaction checkpointing. It can also be used to transform random write requests to sequential requests. We implemented a prototype of WAL-SSD with a real SSD device. Experiments demonstrate the performance improvement by WAL-SSD with three use cases: remap-journaling, atomic multi-block update, and random write logging.

VBBMS: A Novel Buffer Management Strategy for NAND Flash Storage Devices

NAND flash storage devices are gaining popularity in consumer electronic devices, such as digital cameras, tablet PCs, and smartphones, due to their attractive features. However, write operations significantly limit the performance of the flash storage in consumer electronics devices due to their long latency and heavy overhead of garbage collection. Hence, NAND flash storage devices generally use RAM memory as a buffer to improve their write performance and to extend their lifetime. This paper proposes a novel buffer management algorithm (BMA), called as virtual-block-based buffer management scheme (VBBMS), which can make full use of both temporal and spatial localities at virtual-block level. The main difference with the existing BMAs is that the management granularity of VBBMS is a virtual block, while the management granularity of existing BMAs is a page or a block. In addition, VBBMS divides RAM into random request service region (RRSR), which is responsible for handling random requests, and sequential request service region (SRSR), which is responsible for handling sequential requests. When replacement happens, VBBMS selects victim virtual-block according to LRU policy in RRSR and first-in first-out (FIFO) policy in SRSR. VBBMS has been extensively evaluated under various realistic workloads, and our benchmark results show that VBBMS can improve buffer hit ratio, reduce response time, and erase times, compared to five existing BMAs.

Responsible “Helicopter Shopping” Through Selective Resource Management

When hospitals have a patient in urgent need of transport to a higher level of care, and in situations in which a patient's life depends on rapid transport over long distances, helicopter air ambulance (HAA) services often are the best option. An HAA response, however, can be limited by weather conditions, equipment maintenance issues, landing zone availability, distance, flight team limitations, and/or other safety factors. With the growth of the air medical industry and the availability of multiple HAA providers, a practice known as “helicopter shopping,” can occur in situations when safe transport may be limited by the above-mentioned factors. Helicopter shopping is defined as a process of making sequential requests to multiple HAA providers in an effort to secure air medical resources for a call response that some agencies turn down due to the factors described above. 1 International Association of Flight Paramedics. Position Paper on Helicopter Shopping. http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.iafccp.org/resource/resmgr/docs/helicoptershopping.pdf. Published September 2006. Accessed October 2017. Google Scholar This material may not be modified without the expressed permission of the Air & Surface Transport Nurses Association. This joint statement also has been endorsed by the Air Medical Physician Association (AMPA) and the Association of Critical Care Transport (ACCT). The Air & Surface Transport Nurses Association (ASTNA) is a nonprofit membership organization for the advancement of transport nursing and quality patient care. In furtherance of this mission, ASTNA may develop and publish position statements, best practices, educational materials, research results and other materials (ASTNA statements), which contain opinions, recommendations and information. ASTNA statements should not be taken as applying to any particular situation or constituting advice, and may be used only as general educational references. Decisions in the field of transport nursing and patient care require independent judgement, fact-specific knowledge and the application of experience by those making decisions. ASTNA statements are not an endorsement of any course of action and the opinions, recommendations and information in ASTNA statements may change at any time. ASTNA has no obligation to update, correct, or clarify any ASTNA statements. ASTNA assumes no liability to individuals or property arising out of or relating to ASTNA positions.

Improving Spatial Locality in Virtual Machine for Flash Storage

Flash-based solid-state drives (SSD) are being widely adopted in virtualized environments to improve the I/O performance due to their low latency and high throughput compared with existing hard disk drives. In the virtualized environment, the performance of SSDs fluctuates significantly according to the I/O patterns from the virtual machine. For example, random writes have a significantly negative impact on the performance of SSDs compared with sequential writes due to the characteristics of SSDs. In this paper, we propose an address reshaping technique for SSDs in the virtualization layer to improve the spatial locality and the performance of random writes. Our scheme transforms random write requests into sequential write requests in the virtualization layer and thus enables the virtualization layer to issue the transformed sequential requests to SSDs. The experimental results show that the optimized scheme improves the performance by up to 97% compared with the existing scheme under random write workloads.

BASIC PRINCIPLES OF BUILDING BLACK-BOX VULNERABILITY SCANNER OF WEB RESOURCE

The article discusses the main provisions for constructing a vulnerability scanner for a web resource based on the «black box» technique. The definitions of the Mealy automaton are introduced, applicable to the web application. An example of the use of the Mealy automaton for constructing transition graphs on the links of a web resource is given. An algorithm for constructing a graph based on sent requests and received answers is proposed. Describe the alleged problems that arise in the scanner. There are proposed ways of solving the problems obtained with the use of additional mechanisms and work algorithms. When the algorithm is running and transitions are added, the new vertex is colored with one of the colors, if a repeated state is detected. As a result, we have a colored graph, which may collapse in the same colors. The user in the browser moving inside the web application performs sequential actions, the scanning technique is as close as possible to the real actions of the average user and provides a top-down view of the content, as well as the probability of clicking on the link. Thus determined group of sequential requests that change the state of the scanner.

New Methods for Resolving Conflicting Requests with Examples from Medical Residency Scheduling

In scheduling medical residents, the objective is often to maximize resident satisfaction across the space of feasible schedules, relative to the many hard constraints that ensure appropriate patient coverage, adequate training opportunities, etc. A common metric of resident satisfaction is the number of time‐off requests that are granted. Simply maximizing this total, however, may lead to undesirable schedules since some requests have higher priority than others. For example, it might be better to grant one resident's request for a family member's wedding in place of two residents’ requests to attend a rugby game. Another approach is to assign a weight to each request and maximize the total weight of granted requests, but determining weights that accurately represent residents’ and schedulers’ preferences can be quite challenging. Instead, we propose to identify the exhaustive collection of maximally feasible and minimally infeasible sets of requests which can then be used by schedulers to select their preferred solution. Specifically, we have developed two algorithms, which we call Sequential Request Selection Via Cuts (Sequential RSVC) and Simultaneous Request Selection Via Cuts (Simultaneous RSVC), to identify these sets by solving two sequences of optimization problems. We present these algorithms along with computational results based on a real‐world problem of scheduling residents at the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Pediatric Emergency Department. Although we focus our exposition on the problem of resident scheduling, our approach is applicable to a broad class of problems with soft constraints.

Vigi4Med Scraper: A Framework for Web Forum Structured Data Extraction and Semantic Representation.

The extraction of information from social media is an essential yet complicated step for data analysis in multiple domains. In this paper, we present Vigi4Med Scraper, a generic open source framework for extracting structured data from web forums. Our framework is highly configurable; using a configuration file, the user can freely choose the data to extract from any web forum. The extracted data are anonymized and represented in a semantic structure using Resource Description Framework (RDF) graphs. This representation enables efficient manipulation by data analysis algorithms and allows the collected data to be directly linked to any existing semantic resource. To avoid server overload, an integrated proxy with caching functionality imposes a minimal delay between sequential requests. Vigi4Med Scraper represents the first step of Vigi4Med, a project to detect adverse drug reactions (ADRs) from social networks founded by the French drug safety agency Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament (ANSM). Vigi4Med Scraper has successfully extracted greater than 200 gigabytes of data from the web forums of over 20 different websites.

Adequacy of clinical information supplied by clinicians for histopathologic diagnosis: The university of Benin teaching hospital experince

Background: The volume of workload in histopathology laboratories need to be accurately measured so that resources can be used appropriately in a challenging clinical environment. Aims: The main objective of this work is to assess the adequacy of clinical information provided by clinicians requesting for histopathological investigations. Materials and Methods: A total of 1659 sequential histopathological request forms sent to Department of Histopathology of the University of Benin Teaching Hospital between January 1, and December 31, 2005, were retrospectively studied and analyzed. The provision of data by surgeons and physicians were compared in a Microsoft Excel 2000 Spreadsheet using the Chi-square test with Yates's correction where appropriate. Given the number of variables being assessed, a Bonferonni correction was applied, and a value of P = 0.001 was therefore considered the limit of significance. Results: A total of 1659 pathology request cards were audited in this study. Of these, 1382 cases accounting for 83.3% were a request made by surgeons while 277 constituting 16.7% were a request sent by physicians. Hence, the ratio of a request made by surgeons and physicians were 5:1. Among the request made by surgeons, the most common request was from the Surgery Department accounting for 783 (47.2%) of all requests. Among the 277 requests made by physicians, the department of internal medicine had the highest volume accounting for 122 (7.35%) of all cases. A total of 1415 out of 1659 were found to be inadequately completed accounting for 85.3%. There were significant differences in the information on ethnicity, date, time and clinical summary recorded by surgeons and physicians and the P

Sequential appointment scheduling considering patient choice and service fairness

Effective appointment scheduling system is very important to the efficiency of the clinic and the satisfaction of the patients. In practice, the clinic scheduler usually assigns the patients to an available slot before the call terminates and the appointment time can’t be adjusted any more. In this paper, a sequential appointment scheduling method is proposed to balance the benefits of clinic and patients’ satisfaction considering patient choice and service fairness simultaneously. It determines the optimal booking number of patients and optimal scheduling time for each patient to maximise the profit of the outpatient clinic over a session-day. The profit considered in this paper is the total revenue of all arriving patients minus the cost of waiting time, idle time and overtime, which not only considers the rewards from booking decision, but also precisely formulates the charge on service process depending on scheduling. A general patient choice behaviour is incorporated into the model as well. Two myopic scheduling algorithms are developed to optimally solve the sequential appointment scheduling problems with and without considering service fairness, respectively. Particularly, instead of exhaustive search in every step, a property is identified to speed the search process by reducing search space in the proposed myopic scheduling algorithms. After analysing the effects of model parameters on the optimal schedule and system performances, some insights are obtained to help clinics manage sequential appointment requests. The results show that the objective function evolution is unimodal and the allowance of patient choice can increase the number of patients seen in a day, but lower down the expected profit on account of less flexibility. The clinics provide uniform service to patients arriving in different intervals at the expense of less mean and larger variance of the profit.

Improvement in laboratory test turnaround times for inpatients following move to hub and spoke model of delivery

ObjectivesThe relative merits of hub and spoke models of service delivery are often debated, but accessing data on how they may benefit service delivery can be difficult, and may hinder the adoption of a model which can benefit the health community. Our aim was to provide objective data that would either support or refute one potential benefit of service redesign, namely the effect on turnaround times within the acute hospital. Design and methodsData on turnaround times for sequential requests containing creatinine as a request item received from inpatient locations at two acute hospitals were extracted from the laboratory computer system. Monthly data was collected for a period of 5 months prior to and the same 5 month period following the service redesign. Data was subjected to statistical process control (SPC) analysis. ResultsThere was a statistically significant reduction (P<0.05) in the average turnaround time of at least 29% for routine requests and 22% for urgent requests, accompanied by a statistically significant reduction (P<0.05) in upper control limits of least 46% – improving the predictability of result availability and reducing the 95% confidence interval for turnaround times. ConclusionsAdoption of a “hub and spoke” model has the potential to support laboratories in improving both urgent and non-urgent turnaround times in a cost-efficient manner within acute hospitals, and reduce the variability in turnaround time.

Feature evaluation for web crawler detection with data mining techniques

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is one of the most damaging attacks on the Internet security today. Recently, malicious web crawlers have been used to execute automated DDoS attacks on web sites across the WWW. In this study we examine the effect of applying seven well-established data mining classification algorithms on static web server access logs in order to: (1) classify user sessions as belonging to either automated web crawlers or human visitors and (2) identify which of the automated web crawlers sessions exhibit ‘malicious’ behavior and are potentially participants in a DDoS attack. The classification performance is evaluated in terms of classification accuracy, recall, precision and F1 score. Seven out of nine vector (i.e. web-session) features employed in our work are borrowed from earlier studies on classification of user sessions as belonging to web crawlers. However, we also introduce two novel web-session features: the consecutive sequential request ratio and standard deviation of page request depth. The effectiveness of the new features is evaluated in terms of the information gain and gain ratio metrics. The experimental results demonstrate the potential of the new features to improve the accuracy of data mining classifiers in identifying malicious and well-behaved web crawler sessions.

Exploring the “That's-Not-All” Effect: A Test of Theoretical Explanations

The “that's-not-all” (TNA) technique is a sequential request strategy in which an offer is improved before the message receiver responds. Although the TNA procedure has been the subject of several experiments, the theoretical mechanisms responsible for TNA effects are unclear. An experiment, utilizing a 3 (Request type: large TNA, moderate TNA, control) × 2 (Requester: prosocial, commercial organization) independent groups design, was conducted to investigate the moderators of the TNA effect. Three theoretical explanations were tested: perceptual contrast, reciprocal concessions, and social responsibility. The compliance rates were consistent with the traditional perceptual contrast and social responsibility explanations; however, the perceptual data were only consistent with social responsibility. The results have practical significance to people wishing to employ the TNA technique.

Mindlessness Revisited: Sequential Request Techniques Foster Compliance by Draining Self-control Resources

The present research extends previous findings suggesting that sequential request techniques, such as the Foot-in-the-Door (FITD) or Door-in-the-Face (DITF) technique, are primarily effective under conditions conducive of mindlessness. We forward that this mindlessness may be the product of the influence technique itself. More specifically, based on the notion of self-control as a limited resource, we hypothesize that actively responding to the initial request-phase of a FITD-compliance gaining procedure drains the target of his/her self-regulatory resources, thus creating the mindlessness so often observed in social influence settings. This resource depletion opens the door for compliance with the target request. The results were in line with these expectations. More specifically, we observed that active responding to an initial request of a FITD technique reduced the availability of self-regulatory resources. This state of resource depletion mediated the effect of the technique on behavioral compliance. In addition, the results of this study ruled out the alternate explanation that the effects were attributable to mood or a general tendency for acquiescence.

Dynamic resource location with tropical algebra

The traditional dynamic resource location problem attempts to minimize the cost of servicing a number of sequential requests, given foreknowledge of a limited number of requests. This paper presents an algebraic framework for addressing this question in general, and relates he algebraic properties of a generating set to questions in long-term optimizability, addressing the two questions: for a given graph, is there a finite quantity of future knowledge with which a server’s relocation scheme can be completely optimized, and if not, then how does the performance of a non-omniscient optimization scheme improve as the quantity of future knowledge increases?

Resource relocation on asymmetric networks

The necessary information to optimally serve sequential requests at the vertices of an undirected, unweighted graph with a single mobile resource is a known result of Chung, Graham, and Saks; however, generalizations of this concept to directed and weighted graphs present unforeseen and surprising changes in the necessary lookahead for strategic optimization. A pair of edges of unequal weights and opposite orientation can serve to simulate a communication or transportation connection with asymmetric costs, as may arise in a transportation network from prevailing winds or elevation changes, or in a communication network from aDSL or a similar technology. This research explores the complications introduced by asymmetric connections within even very small networks. We consider the dynamic relocation problem on a two-vertex system and nd that, even in this simplest possible asymmetric graph, the necessary lookahead for optimal relocation may be arbitrarily large. This investigation also gives rise to a linear-time algorithm to determine the optimizing real-time response to any request sequence which uniquely determines an optimal response.