In this paper we discuss technology appropriation in the context of close personal relationships. We review literature that reveals how collaborative appropriation is a natural and necessary feature of technology adoption by relational partners. We then advance a position whereby appropriations in close relationships can be characterised as a form of discretionary effort investment. We end by r...

Best-effort CPU scheduling is an attractive model for desktop computing because it is simple to use. However, best-effort models do not provide support for applications with deadlines. Soft real-time schedulers allocate the CPU for workloads containing soft deadlines by relying on developers and users to supply timing requirements to the system. BEST is an enhanced best-effort scheduler designe...

This article reports findings from a program of research on the systematic influence implicitly perceived facial expressions emotions effort mobilization in cognitive tasks. Recently published implicit-affect-primes-effort (IAPE) model (Gendolla, 2012) has revealed replicated evidence for this effect: sadness, anger, fear, and happiness effort-related cardiac response during performance. In fur...

The network is a crucial resource in cloud computing, but in contrast to other resources such as CPU or memory, the network is currently shared in a best effort manner. However, sharing the network in a datacenter is more challenging than sharing other resources. The key difficulty is that the network allocation for a VM X depends not only on the VMs running on the same machine with X, but also...

Grammatical agreement is present in many of the world’s languages today and has become an essential feature that guides linguistic processing. When two words in a sentence are said to “agree”, this means that they share certain features such as “gender”, “number”, “person” or others. The primary hypothesis of this paper is that marking agreement within one linguistic phrase reduces processing e...

Time-share CPU schedulers permeate general-purpose computer systems, yet provide little support for real-time constraints. We demonstrate that by making inferences from the behavior of applications, soft real-time scheduling performance is achievable using a best-effort policy in which the scheduler has no a priori knowledge of application resource needs. In a typical time-share scheduler, rece...

During recent years, for the ever-growing number of users with the exponential growth of high-data-rate traffic demand, quality of experience (QoE) has emerged as an important issue, providing important measures and assessment metrics for users, service providers and operators. Meanwhile, rapid development of information and communications technology significantly contributes to the increasing ...