As Internet services become more popular and pervasive, a critical problem that arises is managing the performance of services under extreme overload. This paper presents a set of techniques for managing overload in complex, dynamic Internet services. These techniques are based on an adaptive admission control mechanism that attempts to bound the 90th-percentile response time of requests flowin...

In busy airports, too many departing flights take off out of the time slot required by the Central Flow Management Unit (CFMU). During ground traffic peaks, taxi out times and runway queuing delays increase, and it seems very hard and maybe unfeasible for ground controllers to organise properly the traffic so that aircraft take off at their scheduled time. In a first part, this paper shows how ...

The Internet has experienced exponential growth in the use of the World-Wide Web, and rapid growth in the use of other Internet services such as VSENET news and electronic mail. These applications qualitatively differ from other network applications in the stresses they impose on busy server systems. Unlike traditional distributed systems, Internet servers must cope with huge user communities, ...

Shoulder joint is the most common joint requiring reduction by emergency physicians. Successful reduction is based on the overcoming of resistance of the shoulder muscles. Pain is the most important factor in resistance increase and sedation; analgesia and, in certain cases, intra-articular anesthesia are preferred for reduction. The external rotation (ER) method can provide successful reductio...

Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust is a large acute trust serving around 500,000 people in West Kent and North East Sussex. It is also home to the Kent Oncology Centre, which provides oncology care to around 1.8 million people across the whole of Kent and a large part of Sussex. As a radiology department we had already established the use of proforma reporting for rectal cancers several ye...

Most medical lives are spent being busy. When we are honest with ourselves, usually in the early hours of the morning, we know that we haven't given enough time to colleagues, wives, children and other members of our families. Outside medicine we all meet friends who say as much, usually with exceptional politeness. A successful academic colleague, the son of a retired general medical practitio...

To assess differences in exposure to air pollution from traffic in relation to degree of urbanization and traffic density, we measured personal and home outdoor nitrogen dioxide (NO(2)) concentrations for 241 children from six different primary schools in the Netherlands. Three schools were situated in areas with varying degrees of urbanization (very urban, fairly urban, and nonurban) and three...

BACKGROUND For many patients with persecutory delusions, leaving home and going into crowded streets is a key clinical problem. In this study we aimed to inform treatment development by determining the psychological mechanisms whereby busy urban environments increase paranoia. In a randomized design with prespecified mediation analysis, we compared the effects on patients of going outside into ...

We consider an M/G/1 queue with subexponential service times. We give a simple derivation of the global and local asymptotics for the busy period. This analysis relies on the explicit formula for the joint distribution for the number of customers and the length of the busy period of the M/G/1 queue. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 60K25, 60G50, 60F10.

In a hands-busy and eyes-busy activity such as driving, spoken language technology is an important component of the multimodal human-machine interface (HMI) of an in-car infotainment system. Adding speech to the HMI introduces two distinct challenges: accurately acquiring the user’s speech in a noisy car environment, and creating a spoken dialog system that does not require the driver’s full at...