We observe that existing methods for failure-tolerance are inefficient in their use of time, storage and computational resources. We aim to harness the power of idle desktop computers for data-parallel computations, which are particularly sensitive to failure, and propose spreadspectrum computation as a suite of techniques to mitigate failures in an internet-scale distributed system. Spread-spe...

Correspondence Intrathecal drug spread Editor—I read with interest the review by Hocking and Wildsmith 1 on intrathecal drug spread. I feel they omitted to mention an important aspect of drug spread that could have a bearing for all blocks. They quite rightly stated that vasoconstrictors added to intrathe-cal local anaesthetic could prolong the duration of a block, although not affect the heigh...

In this paper, we explore a nonlinear mathematical model to study the spread of asthma due to inhaled pollutants from industry as well as tobacco smoke from smokers in a variable size population. The model is analyzed using stability theory of differential equations and computer simulation. It is shown that with an increase in the level of air pollutants concentration, the asthmatic (diseased) ...

Cleveland (1979, 1993) introduced the spread-location plot as a diagnostic plot suitable for many types of fitted statistical models. The spread-location plot which plots the absolute residual or square-root absolute residual vs. fitted value along with a robust loess smooth is a useful replacement for the customary practice of plotting residuals vs. fitted values. In this note, we show that ne...

Now that books purporting to show that man is just an ape at heart, and in other ways, are making the best seller lists, a handbook of the tribe itself should command more than ordinary interest. The idea of this book seems an excellent one: it indeed appears to meet its objective as a useful, working volume (a little bit on the bulky side) of the living primates. Falling between Osman Hill's m...

Fix d ≥ 2, and let X be either Z or the points of a Poisson process in R of intensity 1. Given parameters r and p, join each pair of points of X within distance r independently with probability p. This is the simplest case of a ‘spread-out’ percolation model studied by Penrose [8], who showed that, as r → ∞, the average degree of the corresponding random graph at the percolation threshold tends...

Asian influenza was truly the Phineas Fogg of diseases, spreading around the world in less than twice eighty days with a rapidity to delight the most sanguine of Jules Verne virologists. This global dissemination has been attributed to the capacity of Asian virus to infect a highly susceptible population (1, 2). Beyond belaboring the obvious, what more needs to be said about how Asian influenza...