The Thomas Appointment

The 10-minute appointment.

Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree : An Althusserian Perspective

With the beginning of the 19th century, England entered into a transitional period. Sociologists believe that in each era of transformation, the ruling class tries to establish its own values, but some resistance to these new values is inevitable. Thomas Hardy's novels in general, and Under the Greenwood Tree specifically, are no exception. Based on these notions, this paper tries to interpret ...

Robust Appointment Scheduling

We consider the problem of appointment scheduling in a robust optimization framework. The appointment scheduling problem arises in many service operations, for example health care. For each job, we are given its minimum and maximum possible execution times. The objective is to find an appointment schedule for which the cost in the worst case scenario of the realization of the processing times o...

Automated Appointment Scheduling

We describe a spoken language system that schedules appointments over the telephone. The system has a calendar of available times for some service that callers want to obtain. The system and the caller engage in a cooperative dialogue until a mutually satisfactory appointment time can be found and scheduled. The system has three parts: a speech recog-nizer based on neural network phoneme classi...

Threading by Appointment

We propose a concurrent programming model called threading-by-appointment (TAP). Unlike traditional threads, TAP threads can only communicate with system components or other threads by appointment. For example, a TAP thread cannot simply try to access some shared resource. Instead, a TAP thread must make an appointment with the shared resource in advance. Only at the time of the appointment, th...