Background: Waterpipe smoking (WPS) is widely believed to be a safe and hazard-free tobacco habit. However, a number of studies have indicated that exposure to several toxicants and carcinogens through WPS is strongly related to serious health hazards. The current paper presents a narrative review on the effects of WPS on cancer outcome. Methods: The addressed focused question was “Is there an ...

The most straightforward but also most inflexible configuration approach for invocation of remote services is to hard wire the location, interface, behavior and other properties of remote services into the local application. Loosely coupled decentralized systems call for solutions that are more flexible and can seamlessly adapt to changing conditions. While advances have recently been made in t...

The HelioClim-1 database offers daily means of surface solar irradiance for the period 1985-2005 and has been created from archives of images of the Meteosat First Generation satellites. Expectations of users regarding access to similar data were carefully analyzed, especially regarding dissemination of and access to data, and were taken at the heart of the design of the database. Efforts were ...

An efficient implementation of large graph processing algorithms on distributed-memory machines requires a balanced partitioning of the graph across the machines. In a previous paper we presented an algorithm, named Workload Partitioning and Scheduling (WPS), that uses domainspecific knowledge to guide a sampling procedure in large implicitly-defined graphs. WPS’s sampling procedure is used for...

1 Introduction The rise of digital sensors and the Sensor Web is expected to have wide reaching implications for the monitoring of the physical and human world [1] and has already resulted in an explosion in the volume and availability of spatially referenced data pertaining to our surroundings. While this deluge of easily accessible near real-time data brings numerous opportunities, it also pr...

Models are central tools for modern scientists and decision makers, and there are many existing frameworks to support their creation, execution and composition. Many frameworks are based on proprietary interfaces, and do not lend themselves to the integration of models from diverse disciplines. Web based systems, or systems based on web services, such as Taverna and Kepler, allow composition of...

Evaluating the reliability of loosely coupled Software as a Service through the paradigm of a cluster-based and non-cluster-based web server is considered to be an important attribute for the service delivery and execution. We proposed a novel method for measuring the reliability of Software as a Service execution through load testing. The fault count of the model against the stresses of users ...