490 3 FEBRUARY 2017 • VOL 355 ISSUE 6324 sciencemag.org SCIENCE economic performance to polling data. Elections were about 80 to 90% predictable, despite uncertainties with available data. Polling data were very important to successful prediction, although it was necessary to correct for systematic biases. Unexpectedly, economic indicators were only weakly predictive. As data sources improve an...

The Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access system’s (WIMAX, IEEE 802.16) broadband networks is an attractive solution for high-bandwidth wireless access network. In the context of a wireless broadband access network, the term open real-time access implies the ability of multiple service BS (base station) to share the deployed access network infrastructure to make available to the SSs (...

Technology trends such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are transforming networking services in terms of flexibility and faster deployment times. SDN separates the control plane from the data plane with its centralised architecture compared with the distributed approach used in other management systems. However, management systems are still required to adapt the new emerging SDN-like techno...

In this paper, an approach is developed to improve the power efficiency of Bluetooth. The better efficiency is achieved by reducing the unnecessary polling operations in the Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate (BR/EDR) controllers. An analysis of the current low power modes in the Bluetooth BR/EDR controller indicates that their activation requires a critical and challenging parameter negotiation pha...

Existing software proposals for electronic payments can be divided into “on-line” schemes that require participation of a trusted party (the bank) in every transaction and are secure against overspending, and the “off-line” schemes that do not require a third party and guarantee only that overspending is detected when vendors submit their transaction records to the bank (usually at the end of t...

Direct-search methods are a class of popular derivative-free algorithms characterized by evaluating the objective function using a step size and a number of (polling) directions. When applied to the minimization of smooth functions, the polling directions are typically taken from positive spanning sets which in turn must have at least n+1 vectors in an n-dimensional variable space. In addition,...

We consider models of polling systems where switching times between channels are composed of two parts: walking times required to move from one channel (station) to another, and switch-in times that are incurred only when the server enters a station to render service. We analyze three Gated-type systems: (i) Cyclic polling with Gated regime, (ii) Cyclic polling with Globally-Gated regime, and (...

The trend of dynamically interconnecting the personal devices that people carry with them has led to the introduction of personal area networks (PANs) and personal networks (PNs). The Bluetooth wireless access technology is believed to be a potential enabler of PANs and PNs. This dissertation focuses on Bluetooth intra-piconet scheduling (also referred to as Bluetooth polling) that helps in mak...

Recently proposed end-to-end independently-verifiable (E2E) voting schemes provide encrypted paper receipts to voters, who may later check that these receipts are in the electronic ballot box. Unfortunately, few voters are likely to follow up on the voting process after leaving the voting site; as a result, few receipts will be checked. This paper describes an enhancement to E2E schemes that do...