Tentative Hold Research Articles

A high performance backoff protocol for fast execution of composite web services

Using web services to expose applications over the Internet is now a widely accepted practice. Currently, there are several ongoing efforts that provide ways to effectively compose web services distributed across different organizations. One of the problems underlying the deployment of such composite services on the web, however, is service co-allocation that arises when a composite service needs to ensure all the required component services to be available for execution at the same time. Motivated by this, this paper presents a new decentralized protocol, named web service co-allocation protocol (WSCP), which can facilitate fast execution of composite web services. The proposed framework is an enhancement of the famous two phase commit protocol through the incorporation of tentative hold phase as well as the employment of a new high performance backoff protocol developed to better address the dynamics of the service co-allocation problem. The simulation results show that the proposed approach yields significant improvements over existing protocols.

An adaptive coordination framework for fast atomic multi-business transactions using web services

Web services are emerging as an effective means for carrying out automated transactions between multiple business parties. While there are several specific protocols that have been discussed to address the problem of coordinating web services-enabled business transactions, we consider the tentative hold protocol (THP) that allows the placement of tentative holds on business resources prior to actual transactions in order to provide increased flexibility in coordination. In this paper, we present a formal coordination framework for applying THP in conjunction with two phase commit protocol to the problem in which service providers independently manage resources and clients seek to acquire the resources from multiple providers as a single atomic transaction. The proposed framework facilitates the performance optimization of THP through effective parameterization with the notion of overhold size and hold duration. Subsequently, a detailed analysis is carried out to obtain an efficient method that can optimize the performance by adaptively determining the hold duration. The simulation results show that the proposed adaptive approach yields a significant improvement over other non-adaptive policies.

The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies

The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies. By Rasma Karklins. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005. 219p. 25.95 paper.Comedian Flip Wilson headlined his first nationwide television special in September 1969. Risking his tentative hold on a new (white) audience, Wilson joked about a minister's wife who justified her latest shopping spree by claiming, “The Devil made me buy this dress.” This declaration of self-indulgence later developed into “the Devil made me do it” and became a staple for one of the show's most popular recurring characters, Geraldine Jones. A comic genius, Flip Wilson understood the importance of a tag line that would resonate with his audience. Few fantasies can be more widespread than abdicating personal responsibility in the pursuit of a good time.

Automatic multibusiness transactions

The Tentative Hold Protocol (THP) helps automate the coordination of multi-business interactions, providing cost savings and enabling new business models in the process. Automating the exchange of critical information using this protocol prior to a transaction decreases the effect of outdated data, reduces the potential for cancellations, and improves the odds of successfully completing transactions. This article describes THP, explains how to use it synergistically with other technologies, describes some scenarios from different industries in which it could be applied, and provides greater technical detail about its components and limitations.

Nahuas, Gachupines, Patriarchs and Piris1: Nicaraguan History through Highland Peasant Eyes

History, the art of trying to know the past in order to understand the present, and perhaps even catch a glimpse of the future, is lived by all but written by few. Latin American history is no exception to this rule. Writers of the region's history have, with but rare exceptions, either been members of its Europeanate elite or foreigners, with perspectives reflecting their origins? Perhaps while elites ruled unchallenged this sufficed. But today, as democracy takes tentative hold, once marginal and historically unnoticed groups are emerging as important political players and major demandeurs of attention and quotas of power in country after country as the newly unleashed processes of free trade, open economies and one-man-one-vote democracy cause profound changes to social systems and structures.3 This makes it useful to consider now how these new players view the world, since their perspectives and interests, even if they could once be ignored, are now important. The highlands mountain peasant indio campesinos of Nicaragua, an erstwhile marginalized group with well over a million members, have just emerged from facelessness into national prominence and can therefore serve as a case in point.' As a consequence of the Sandinista revolution and highlands peasant resistance to it (the latter a process inaccurately known to the outside world as the Contra War) the campesinos of Nicaragua's central mountains regained an important measure of historical group coherence. Since they number about 35% of the country's population, this has made them a major new political force and, as a consequence of their having voted heavily in Nicaragua's 1996 national elections, arguably that nation's most decisive yet least known electoral constituency, with the power to decide virtually any national election.5 Pre-literate and historically marginalized, Nicaragua's highlander campesinos have no written history of their own and they and the region they inhabit are virtually black holes even to academics. With extremely rare exceptions, scholarly studies of them simply do not exist.6 Their emergence as possibly the decisive constituency in the country makes it important to begin to fill in this gap. This study attempts to initiate that process by trying to see Nicaraguan history through their eyes. It is, in a sense, a case study of one of many such marginal groups that, stimulated by newly emergent participatory democratic processes, are beginning to emerge into political prominence in the region. Other such groups include Peru's Quechuas, Bolivia's Aymaras, and Guatemala's highlands Maya, and numerous less precisely defined post-tribal/sub-national populations. It is hoped that this particular case study, limited though it is, may serve as a model, or at least an inspiration to others to take another look at similar heretofore marginalized peoples in Latin America, or even elsewhere, and to begin asking of questions about them as well. If the world is indeed finally drawing out of its authoritarian past into a more democratic future, such exercises might well prove of more than mere passing value. A caveat: since the writer is neither a Nicaraguan nor highlander campesino, this attempt will, of necessity, involve a certain degree of pretentiousness, and the view will be inexact. Nonetheless, the writer feels that his credentials to write a proxy history for this people, while imperfect, are arguably at least above average, including as they do over 42 years Nicaragua and Central America experience, 15 years living and working in five of the republics of the region, bilingual Spanish, and more than ten years working directly with and studying Nicaragua's highlands peasant populace, including preparation of a successful doctoral dissertation on them. With that point made, the reader is now invited to accompany the writer in an attempt to refocus the mind's eyes, to look at Nicaraguan history not, as has been traditional, from the center out but in a new way, from the periphery in, from the point of view of a constituent mass, a once faceless people who have just emerged as a major actor on the national scene. …

FDA Trying to Make Case for Tobacco Regulation

EVEN AS relaxing the enforcement of laws against the makers, sellers, buyers, and users of substances known to be addictive has gained tentative hold on the thinking of some government officials, others are working hard to discover whether the free ride long enjoyed by what some say is the most addictive of all so-called recreational substances ought to be reined in. In what appears to be an all-out push to make up for some 20 years of lost time, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has assigned a very high priority, according to its chief, to learning enough about nicotine to decide whether it should be regulated through legislation as drug. David Kessler, MD, the agency's director, says there has been shift in thinking since the 1970s, when the FDA last considered what, if anything, to do about nicotine. At that time, even though using tobacco was

The Image of the Indo-Caribbean Woman in Olive Senior's "The Arrival of the Snake Woman"

This paper looks at the portrayal of the Indian woman in the contemporary literature of the anglophone Caribbean. It attempts to examine the processes of readjustment and accommodation, acculturation, interculturation and indigenization in its attempt to explore Indo-Caribbean female experience: the psychosocial and spiritual growth and the quest for identity within the context of the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean. It explores the Indian woman's claim to a place as home in the multiracial, multicultural Caribbean vis a vis a tradition of colonial discourse which privileges European possession of the discovered lands of the New World while several culturally discrete groups, displaced by colonialism and indentureship, jostle for ontological space and identity in the colonial social reality. dominant transplanted group in the Caribbean can be seen to have a protest registered against disinheritance and dispossession in Caliban's now famous words of anger hurled at Prospero: island's mine, by Sycorax my mother in Shakespeare's political allegory Tempest. Many West Indian authors have portrayed various aspects of Indo-Caribbean female experience' and I have chosen to examine Olive Senior's short story, The Arrival of the Snake Woman2 because it seems to present a culmination of all the phases of readjustment and accommodation inherent in migration and displacement. It starts at the beginning of the process with the woman as an alien and works its way through the alienation and isolation of the exile, colonial victimization and racial exclusion to the conscious decision to integrate culturally and also to address the issue of her tentative hold on land and home. This paper also reveals that this short story is counterdiscursive: it depicts resistance to the colonial power base and questions the centre/ margin paradigm of dominant discourse in a manner which characterizes post-colonial writing. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin address themselves in Empire Writes Back (Routledge, 1989) to the question of the dismantling of the power hierarchy entrenched in colonial texts, the abrogation of European power and its false premises, the reappropriation of indigenous cultural forms and the recognition that hybridity and syncreticity are the most viable means to recuperation and selfhood in the semiotics of postcolonial writing and, although Senior's short story is not itself a rewriting of a colonial text, it is newer writing which intervenes in and resists dominant discourse about the other. It relates how the Indo-Caribbean woman manages in the colonial minefield. Senior's short story depicts a plural society in what is unmistakably colonial Jamaica, the temporal setting estimated at the first half of the twentieth century. At its heart, the work portrays racial antagonisms, cultural differences, alienation, exclu