Small Requests Research Articles

Reduce by how much? Calibrating meat reduction appeals to maximize their effectiveness

Meat-rich diets have a negative impact on animal welfare, consumer health, and the environment. In recent years, research has begun to explore which approaches are most effective at reducing consumption. A question that has been the subject of extensive debate is whether appeals are more effective when they ask people to reduce vs. eliminate meat from their diets. On the one hand, the negative externalities resulting from meat consumption are reduced more if a person fully abstains from eating meat. On the other, stronger requests likely lead to lower compliance rates. Thus, to identify which appeal leads to the overall greatest reduction in meat consumption, one has to balance, (a) how many individuals comply with the request and, (b) by how much individuals reduce their consumption if they comply. In two studies, with participants from the US, UK, Australia, and the Netherlands (N = 705), we explored participants’ reported meat consumption and willingness to comply with different week-long meat reduction appeals (10–100%) to identify which would lead to the greatest overall reduction in intended meat consumption. As expected, larger requests lead to lower reported willingness to comply. Mid-range requests (40–70%) were more effective than small requests (10%) or elimination requests (100%). Although we find some differences across countries, mid-range requests were most effective in each sample. Our findings provide first insights into how to calibrate appeals to achieve the greatest reduction in overall meat consumption.

Optimizing inference serving on serverless platforms

Serverless computing is gaining popularity for machine learning (ML) serving workload due to its autonomous resource scaling, easy to use and pay-per-use cost model. Existing serverless platforms work well for image-based ML inference, where requests are homogeneous in service demands. That said, recent advances in natural language processing could not fully benefit from existing serverless platforms as their requests are intrinsically heterogeneous. Batching requests for processing can significantly increase ML serving efficiency while reducing monetary cost, thanks to the pay-per-use pricing model adopted by serverless platforms. Yet, batching heterogeneous ML requests leads to additional computation overhead as small requests need to be "padded" to the same size as large requests within the same batch. Reaching effective batching decisions (i.e., which requests should be batched together and why) is non-trivial: the padding overhead coupled with the serverless auto-scaling forms a complex optimization problem. To address this, we develop Multi-Buffer Serving (MBS), a framework that optimizes the batching of heterogeneous ML inference serving requests to minimize their monetary cost while meeting their service level objectives (SLOs). The core of MBS is a performance and cost estimator driven by analytical models supercharged by a Bayesian optimizer. MBS is prototyped and evaluated on AWS using bursty workloads. Experimental results show that MBS preserves SLOs while outperforming the state-of-the-art by up to 8 x in terms of cost savings while minimizing the padding overhead by up to 37 x with 3 x less number of serverless function invocations.

PostMan: Rapidly Mitigating Bursty Traffic via On-Demand Offloading of Packet Processing

Unexpected bursty traffic brought by certain sudden events, such as news in the spotlight on a social network or discounted items on sale, can cause severe load imbalance in backend services. Migrating hot data - the standard approach to achieve load balance - meets a challenge when handling such unexpected load imbalance, because migrating data will slow down the server that is already under heavy pressure. This article proposes PostMan, an alternative approach to rapidly mitigate load imbalance for services processing small requests. Motivated by the observation that processing large packets incurs far less CPU overhead than processing small ones, PostMan deploys a number of middleboxes called helpers to assemble small packets into large ones for the heavily-loaded server. This approach essentially offloads the overhead of packet processing from the heavily-loaded server to helpers. To minimize the overhead, PostMan activates helpers on demand, only when bursty traffic is detected. The heavily-loaded server determines when clients connect/disconnect to/from helpers based on the real-time load statistics. To tolerate helper failures, PostMan can migrate connections across helpers and can ensure packet ordering despite such migration. Driven by real-world workloads, our evaluation shows that, with the help of PostMan, a Memcached server can mitigate bursty traffic within hundreds of milliseconds, while migrating data takes tens of seconds and increases the latency during migration.

Fragmentation-Aware Traffic Grooming with Lane Changes in Spectrally–Spatially Flexible Optical Networks

Traffic in current networks is constantly increasing due to the growing popularity of various network services. The currently deployed backbone optical networks apply wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) techniques in single-core single-mode fibers (SMFs) to transmit the light. However, the capacity of SMFs is limited due to physical constraints, and new technologies are required in the near future. Spectrally–spatially-flexible optical networks (SS-FONs) are proposed to provide a substantial capacity increase by exploring the spatial dimension. However, before this technology will reach maturity, various aspects need to be addressed. In particular, during traffic grooming, multiple small requests are aggregated into large-capacity optical corridors in an optical layer to increase the spectral efficiency. As the summary traffic volume is dynamically changing, it may be required to set up and tear down optical channels, which results in network fragmentation. As a consequence, in a congested network, part of the requests can be blocked due to the lack of spectrum resources. Thus, the grooming of traffic and the creation of lightpaths should be carefully designed to minimize network fragmentation. In this study, we present several fragmentation metrics and develop a fragmentation-aware traffic grooming algorithm that reduces the bandwidth blocking probability.

Merging and Prioritizing Optimization in Block I/O Scheduling of Disk Storage

I/O merging optimization at the block I/O layer of disk storage is widely adopted to reduce I/O response time. But it may result in certain overhead of merging judgment in the case of a large number of concurrent I/O requests accessing disk storage, and place negative effects on the response of small requests. This paper proposes a divide and conquer scheduling scheme at the block layer of I/O stack, to satisfy a large number of concurrent I/O requests with less I/O response time and ensure the fairness of each request response by decreasing the average I/O latency. First, we propose a horizontal visibility graph-based approach to cluster relevant block requests, according to their offsets (i.e., logic block numbers). Next, it carries out the optimization operation of merging consecutive block I/O requests within each cluster, as only these requests in the same cluster are most likely to be issued by a specific application. Then, we have introduced the functionality of merging judgment when performing merging optimization to effectively guarantee the average I/O response time. After that, the merged requests in the queue will be reordered on the basis of their priorities, to purposely cut down the average I/O response time. Finally, the prioritized requests are supposed to be delivered to the disk storage, for being serviced. Through a series of experiments, we show that compared to the benchmark, the newly proposed scheme can not only cut down the I/O response time by more than 18.2%, but also decrease the average I/O response time up to 71.7%.

Evaluating, Improving, and Appreciating Peer Review at IJTMB

Peer review is a mainstay of scientific publishing and, while peer reviewers and scientists report satisfaction with the process, peer review has not been without criticism. Within this editorial, the peer review process at the IJTMB is defined and explained. Further, seven steps are identified by the editors as a way to improve efficiency of the peer review and publication process. Those seven steps are: 1) Ask authors to submit possible reviewers; 2) Ask reviewers to update profiles; 3) Ask reviewers to "refer a friend"; 4) Thank reviewers regularly; 5) Ask published authors to review for the Journal; 6) Reduce the length of time to accept peer review invitation; and 7) Reduce requested time to complete peer review. We believe these small requests and changes can have a big effect on the quality of reviews and speed in which manuscripts are published. This manuscript will present instructions for completing peer review profiles. Finally, we more formally recognize and thank peer reviewers from 2018-2020.

An Explorative Study of How Visceral States Influence the Relationship between Social Proof Heuristics and Donation Behavior When Consumers Are Using Self-Service Kiosks

Self-service kiosks are increasingly being used in situations where a person is out to buy food and/or drinks. Several cause-related marketing initiatives have capitalized on using self-service technology to include small donation requests at the point of purchase. In this context, it is highly likely that during such purchase situations, a person is under the influence of a visceral state like hunger or thirst. This study investigated how a simulated visceral state of thirst could influence donation behavior. More specifically, how donation social proof indicators presented on self-service kiosk screens can impact likelihood to buy. Results of a conjoint study (n = 83) demonstrate that, in a visceral state situation, only a high level of social proof related to donation has a positive impact on likelihood to buy. Any other level of social proof (medium, low and not mentioned), decrease the likelihood to buy in such situations. A scenario simulation analysis shows that cases which included a high level of social proof have relatively higher preference. Consequently, antecedent situational variables like visceral states must be taken into consideration when cause-related marketing activities such as social proof (related to donation) are used in self-service kiosks.

Modified Dual-Path Allocation Algorithm in Elastic Optical Networks

Dual-path allocation problem is considered to be a case of multipath routing in Elastic Optical Networks. In this article, the optimization problem is formulated and a dual-path allocation algorithm that solves this problem proposed. In the considered problem all traffic for each request is broken into two equal parts, which are directed along two link-disjoint paths. After any link failure, half of the traffic for each affected request is realized. The proposed algorithm is based on the two weight matrices: the elements of the first one depend on the actual length of the links and their utilization, while the elements of the second one assume unit values if the links exist in the network. The proposed algorithm rejects smaller requests and provides a much lower bandwidth blocking probability than other analyzed algorithms.

Why Russia Cannot Become the Country of Prosperity

The citizens of any country in the world dream of living in a prosperous country, where the high level and quality of life of all its inhabitants, not just the rich. In Russia, ordinary people have small requests: to have a favorite job and earn well, have a roof over their heads, get education, raise children, go to resorts every year to improve their health, etc.The Russian political leadership is aware of these aspirations of the population and is trying to change the situation for the better:“It is investments in people that are the priority of public policy and the priority of state budget expenditures: improving the effectiveness of education systems, health care, pensions, creating incentives and tools for improving living conditions. It is these sectors that should become generators of domestic demand, causing growth in many other sectors - in science, research and development, in industry and infrastructure,“the Government’s Anti-Crisis Program [1].In this article, the authors have attempted to show why Russia can not yet become a prosperous country, which prevents it from developing the economy and the social sphere in such a way as to meet the criteria of a developed state.

Several Adaptive Replica Synchronization Approaches for Distributed file System

This survey paper explained the different approaches of synchronization of replicas of files placed on distributed systems. The survey tells some older and latest techniques of synchronization. Some techniques are by the interference of metadata servers and some are without any intrusion of MDS. In former technique SS storage servers are used for synchronization among replicas. To maximize the performance, scalability and reliability CEPH is a distributed file system. It makes distinction between meta data and data management by object storage file system run on object file systems. Excellent I/O and metadata management is done on CEPH. Commodity servers and disks are used for multitier distributed systems. Performance reliability, I/O rate, workload in writes operations and less overhead in synchronization are the main focus while synchronization of replicas. Hadoop and Google file system are the distributive file systems. Hadoop ensures the better input and output performance with minimal synchronization in replicas, data intensive applications and provides fault tolerance. Some strategies are used for data intensive applications. Parallel file system is type of distributed file system. Analysis enforces the best performance on small and large input output requests. Pattern direct and layout replication technique is one of the most optimized techniques for parallel file system. Data access performance, reliability, data consistency, centralized synchronization, less workload, less overhead is the main focus of all the techniques. Some other file systems like SOFA and frangipani do focus on data consistency and reduce of bandwidth.

Practical challenge-response for DNS

Authoritative DNS servers are susceptible to being leveraged in denial of service attacks in which the attacker sends DNS queries while masquerading as a victim---and hence causing the DNS server to send the responses to the victim. This reflection off innocent DNS servers hides the attackers identity and often allows the attackers to amplify their traffic by employing small requests to elicit large responses. Several challenge-response techniques have been proposed to establish a requester's identity before sending a full answer. However, none of these are practical in that they do not work in the face of "resolver pools"---or groups of DNS resolvers that work in concert to lookup records in the DNS. In these cases a challenge transmitted to some resolver R 1 may be handled by a resolver R 2 , hence leaving an authoritative DNS server wondering whether R 2 is in fact another resolver in the pool or a victim. We offer a practical challenge-response mechanism that uses challenge chains to establish identity in the face of resolver pools. We illustrate that the practical cost of our scheme in terms of added delay is small.

Sharing good fortune: Effects of scarcity on small donation requests

Based on studies linking positive outcomes to subsequent helping, it was hypothesized that when individuals receive their choice of items when supply is constrained they will show heightened prosocial behavior. Participants either received a choice of candy when it was plentiful, a choice of candy under scarce conditions, or no option to choose between candies under scarce conditions. All were subsequently invited to keep previously acquired school supplies or to donate them back. As hypothesized, when participants received their choice of candy their donation rate was higher in the scarce, versus the non-scarce, condition. Those not receiving choice due to scarcity behaved similarly to those who received choice under the condition of plenty. Discussion focuses on applications to encourage helpfulness.

Improving Performance of Parallel I/O Systems through Selective and Layout-Aware SSD Cache

Parallel file systems (PFS) are widely-used to ease the I/O bottleneck of modern high-performance computing systems. However, PFSs do not work well for small requests, especially small random requests. Newer Solid State Drives (SSD) have excellent performance on small random data accesses, but also incur a high monetary cost. In this study, we propose SLA-Cache, a Selective and Layout-Aware Cache system that employs a small set of SSD-based file servers as a cache of conventional HDD-based file servers. SLA-Cache uses a novel scheme to identify performance-critical data, and conducts a selective cache admission (SCA) policy to fully utilize SSD-based file servers. Moreover, since data layout of the cache system can also largely influence its access performance, SLA-Cache applies a layout-aware cache placement scheme (LCP) to store data on SSD-based file servers. By storing data with an optimal layout requiring the lowest access cost among three typical layout candidates, LCP can further improve system performance. We have implemented SLA-Cache under the MPICH2 I/O library. Experimental results show that SLA-Cache can significantly improve I/O throughput, and is a promising approach for parallel applications.

Community Reminder: Participatory contextual reminder environments for local communities

Abstract Many projects have looked at how communities can co-design shared online repositories, such as Wikimapia and Wikipedia. However, little work has examined how local communities can give advice and support to their members by creating context-aware reminders that may include advice, tips and small requests. We developed the Community Reminder environment, a smartphone-based platform that supports community members to design and use context-aware reminders. We have conducted a one-month field study of Community Reminder to crowdsource and deliver safety-relevant information in a local community. The results show the benefits of involving community members in reminder design and connecting different perspectives. We also show that the proposed approach can broaden participation in local communities.

The effect of the two feet-in-the-door technique on tobacco deprivation

The ‘Foot-in-the-door’ (FITD) is a well-known compliance technique that increases compliance with a request. Many investigations on this paradigm have generally used prosocial requests to test the effect of the technique. A new evaluation of the effect of the FITD technique was carried out on tobacco deprivation. A two feet-in-the-door technique in which the target request was preceded by two small target requests was used to encourage students to stop smoking for 24 h. The results were compared with two single foot-in-the- door procedures in which the final request was only preceded by one small request, as well as with a control condition using only a 24 h stop-smoking request. Results showed that the single FITD and the two feet-in-the-door procedures were effective to increase verbal compliance (accepting to stop smoking) but only the two feet-in-the-door technique significantly increased behavioural compliance (not smoking for 24 h) with the request.

Performance model-directed data sieving for high-performance I/O

Many scientific computing applications and engineering simulations exhibit noncontiguous I/O access patterns. Data sieving is an important technique to improve the performance of noncontiguous I/O accesses by combining small and noncontiguous requests into a large and contiguous request. It has been proven effective even though more data are potentially accessed than demanded. In this study, we propose a new data sieving approach namely performance model-directed data sieving, or PMD data sieving in short. It improves the existing data sieving approach from two aspects: (1) dynamically determines when it is beneficial to perform data sieving; and (2) dynamically determines how to perform data sieving if beneficial. It improves the performance of the existing data sieving approach considerably and reduces the memory consumption as verified by both theoretical analysis and experimental results. Given the importance of supporting noncontiguous accesses effectively and reducing the memory pressure in a large-scale system, the proposed PMD data sieving approach in this research holds a great promise and will have an impact on high-performance I/O systems.

ASAP

For interactive networked applications like web browsing, every round-trip time (RTT) matters. We introduce ASAP, a new naming and transport protocol that reduces latency by shortcutting DNS requests and eliminating TCP's three-way handshake, while ensuring the key security property of verifiable provenance of client requests. ASAP eliminates between one and two RTTs, cutting the delay of small requests by up to two-thirds.

Energy efficient redundant configurations for real-time parallel reliable servers

Modular redundancy and temporal redundancy are traditional techniques to increase system reliability. In addition to being used as temporal redundancy, with technology advancements, slack time in a system can also be used by energy management schemes to save energy. In this paper, we consider the combination of modular and temporal redundancy to achieve energy efficient reliable real-time service provided by multiple servers. We first propose an efficient adaptive parallel recovery scheme that appropriately processes service requests in parallel to increase the number of faults that can be tolerated and thus system reliability. Then we explore schemes to determine the optimal redundant configurations of the parallel servers to minimize system energy consumption for a given reliability goal or to maximize system reliability for a given energy budget. Our analysis results show that small requests, optimistic approaches, and parallel recovery favor lower levels of modular redundancy, while large requests, pessimistic approaches and restricted serial recovery favor higher levels of modular redundancy.

A state-dependent GI/G/1 queue

We consider a state-dependent GI/G/1 queueing system characterized by the unfinished work U(t) in the system at time t. We introduce state-dependence by allowing (i) the arrival process to depend on the instantaneous value of U(t), (ii) the service rate, that is, the rate at which U(t) decreases in the absence of arrivals, to depend on U(t), and (iii) the customer's service requirement to depend on U(t*) where t* denotes the instant in which that customer entered the system. We consider the limit of short inter-arrival times and small service requests and compute asymptotic approximations to the stationary density of the unfinished work, including the stationary probability of finding the system empty, using the WKB method and the method of matched asymptotic expansions.

Factors affecting equity capital acquisition: The demand side

This article summarizes a study of 318 private entrepreneurs who have sought equity capital in amounts of $100,000 or more. These individuals are normally considered prime clients of venture capitalists. Entrepreneurs' success in acquiring funding is related to four general variable categories: (1) characteristics of the entrepreneurs including education, experience, and age; (2) characteristics of the enterprise including stage, industry type, and location (e.g., rural or urban); (3) characteristics of the request including amount, business plan, and prospective capital source; and (4) sources of advice including technology, preparation of the business plan, and places to seek funding. The study is unique because it includes many entrepreneurs who were unsuccessful in acquiring capital, thereby reducing the survey bias. In fact, only 59% of those surveyed actually acquired funding. This article provides specific insights into businesses seeking capital. For example, the entrepreneurs who are most successful in acquiring funding are those who are prepared to surrender a larger percentage of equity and who are very aggressive in going directly to a number of potential equity providers at an early stage. Contrary to common belief, older and more experienced entrepreneurs seem to have more difficulty acquiring financing. Likewise, entrepreneurs attempting to start businesses in rural areas are more apt to have difficulty acquiring equity capital in amounts of $100,000 or more. Entrepreneurs may experience difficulty in acquiring equity capital for certain business types in specific capital markets. Firms in the health/medical technology and communication fields, for example, have much more success acquiring funding in Minnesota and Wisconsin than those in electronics and factory automation. It is vital that the entrepreneur get to the proper source of capital, wherever it is to be found, as quickly as possible. This study also indicates that private investors not identified as formal venture capitalists are the primary source of financial assistance. The study revealed that the quality of advice provided to entrepreneurs may need improvement. Entrepreneurs who fail to seek assistance are less successful in acquiring equity capital. It is less clear where good advice is to be found. Attorneys appear to offer positive advice regarding marketing and referrals to non-venture capital sources. Bankers, in contrast, are more frequently associated with advice that fails to secure capital. Public agencies and university-related organizations are, in some cases, also associated with a failure to acquire capital. It may be that the weakest cases ultimately find their way to these sources of consultation. The article provides a number of specific public policy recommendations for those governments interested in improving equity capital market efficiency. For example, as entrepreneurs seeking equity capital in small amounts seem to have difficulty, public governments might choose to facilitate the movement of equity capital in smaller amounts by bundling several small requests together and then selling them to interested investors. The public might choose to improve information linkages between entrepreneurs and capitalists by educating intermediaries such as accountants, attorneys, and bankers regarding sources of equity capital or by developing publicly supported linkage networks to whom entrepreneurs might turn. Special information programs on sources of equity capital might also be instituted in rural areas or with specific groups experiencing capital access problems. Private equity capital markets are not apt to serve adequately certain types of businesses. There may be some need for providing direct capital subsidization to firms that are expanding or to those with growth potential that, for some reason, are unattractive to private capitalists (e.g., the entrepreneurs are older, the expected growth rate is slow). These businesses may have the potential of making a substantial contribution to a regional economy but lack the short-term, high-growth impact that attracts venture capitalists.