A Resource Scheduling Algorithm with High Task Request Acceptance Rate for Multi-platform Avionics System

Honey, which is medicinally very important, is the major product of honeybees. The role of the honeybee queen is crucial in maintaining the health and stability of the colony as it is responsible for reproducing and maintaining the population of the hive. Productive and healthy honeybee queens ensure the success of the colony. Various factors, such as parasites, diseases, lack of food and habitat, climate change, genetic defects, and exposure to pesticides, can lead to the failure of the queen bee. Therefore, applications of artificial queen‐rearing techniques in beekeeping positively affect the growth of honeybee queens with desirable characteristics. This current research was conducted at the KUST Model Bee Form of Kohat University of Science and Technology, on Apis mellifera honeybee colonies during spring 2021. In this study, the Doolittle grafting method was used for the rearing of the A. mellifera queen bee. A total of 230 larvae of different ages (12–24, 24–48, and 48–72 h old larvae were used for grafting. Of these 230 grafted larvae, the number of queen cup cells accepted was 139 and the number of emerged queen cup cells was 82. The queen cell acceptance rate was significant (P = 0.000; P < 0.05). The effect of larval age, and the addition of royal jelly in queen cup cells prior to grafting, on the acceptance rate of queen cup cells was also studied. Young larvae, that is, from 12–24 up to 48 h of age, showed high acceptance rates. The acceptance rates of 12–24, 24–48 and 48–72 h old larvae were 76.7%, 55.7% and 20.0%, respectively. This shows that a queen produced from a 1 day old larva has the highest acceptance rate. The addition of royal jelly into queen cup cells before grafting showed the highest larval acceptance rate in March and April. In this study the acceptance rate for queen cup cells with wet and dry grafting were 89.5% and 46.1%, respectively. However further studies are recommended to determine the effect of all factors on the morphology of the queen.

The neural principles of behavior modification using socioemotional facial feedback cues in economic decision-making

The possibility of using renewable feedstocks for biodiesel production and reducing gas emissions makes it an attractive large-scale substitute to traditional fossil diesel. Although renewability is one of the main driving forces in biodiesel use, traditional production routes employ methanol as the transesterification agent, a chemical generated from fossil carbon. Aiming at further improving biodiesel’s sustainable performance, the replacement of methanol by ethanol has been proposed. Use of the ethylic production route could further reduce CO2 emissions, energy consumption and generate more jobs. The objective of this study is to unveil whether substituting methanol for ethanol does indeed result in a less carbon and energy intensive production chain while also increasing job generation and decreasing social strife. To assess production chain performance a lifecycle approach was used composed by: (i) Data assemblage from literature to represent the ethylic/methylic biodiesel systems; (ii) Construction of quantitative indicators to compare material and energetic flows; and (iii) Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for data interpretation and relevance ranking of calculated social/environmental indicators. Focus was given to CO2 emissions, energy consumption and social aspects of sustainability. Results show that use of ethanol does indeed reduce CO2 emissions, due to extra agricultural carbon sinks in the production chain but increases energy consumption and energy loss. Methanol also resulted in a chain with higher average wages, more jobs generated and less forced labor cases but with a higher accident rate and a high salary disparity. PCA showed that carbon intensity is one of the most important environmental metrics while energy consumption was considered secondary, but the high correlation between these aspects highly impact chain sustainability. PCA also greatly differentiated agricultural and industrial links of respective production chains, with industrial links being governed by CO2 emissions and process safety and agricultural links by water consumption, land use and energy loss. A distinct tradeoff was seen between environmental and social considerations of sustainability and between carbon intensity and energy consumption reductions. As a result, substitution is only justified in scenarios in which CO2 emissions outweigh energy intensity and social aspects.

Download Hi-Res ImageDownload to MS-PowerPointCite This:Environ. Sci. Technol. 2013, 47, 14, 7591-7592

Structural decompositions of energy consumption between 1995 and 2009: Evidence from WIOD

In Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) each node has the possibility to move freely in the space and communicate with each other over wireless link without any centralized controller or base station. These characteristics makes MANET useful and practical in several fields like military scenarios, sensor networks, Rescue operations, students on campus, etc. but this kind of network still suffers from a number of problems, power consumption is one of the most crucial design concerns in Mobile Ad-hoc networks as the nodes in MANET have battery limited. In this paper, we will discuss about the aspect of energy consumption in MANET's routing protocols. A performance comparison of four routing protocols Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) and Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) with respect to average energy consumption are explained thoroughly. Then, an evaluation of how the varying parameters of network in diverse scenarios affect the power consumption in these four protocols is discussed. A detailed simulation model using Network Simulator 2 (NS2) with different mobility and traffic models is used to study their energy consumption.

In recent years, most of the research in the field of smart grids integrating renewable energy sources assumed energy efficiency as a scheduling objective. However, the aspects of energy consumption or energy demand have not been described clearly, even though they have been proven to be an effective way of reducing energy consumption. In this context, this study aimed to cover a key research challenge in the field, such as the development of an intelligent strategy for solving energy consumption scheduling problems. The added value of our proposal consists of classifying individual consumption profiles assigned to each operation cycle phase, instead of considering an average of non-varying consumption of household appliances. Within this hybrid approach, the proposed explainable system, based on self-organizing maps of neural networks, fuzzy clustering algorithm, and scheduling technics, correlates the complex interrelation between power generated from renewable energy sources in a smart grid, prosumers’ load behaviors, and the consumption profile of controllable or uncontrollable appliances. The tests were made using green energy consumption and production from real monitored data sets. The load-shifting algorithm that was used to reduce energy consumption from the national energy grid proved its effectiveness. In fact, consumers paid 25% less for the energy they used from the national energy grid during the times when the amount of electricity produced from renewable sources was reduced as a result of weather conditions.

Grid resource management and scheduling are confronted with a great challenge. This paper presented a dynamic resource price-adjusting (RPA) strategy in computational Grid. Three new concepts and two new evaluation standards are defined. On the basis of these theories, a Grid resource scheduling algorithm based on marker-driven using dynamic RPA strategy is proposed. With the help of GridSim toolkit, the simulation of resource scheduling algorithm proposed in the paper is realized, and the new algorithm is compared with GridSim DBC (deadline and budget constrained) scheduling algorithms. The experimental results show that the new algorithm improves the performance of Grid in aspect of increasing the task accomplishment ratio and solving the problem of load imbalance.

The acceptance of COVID-19 vaccine at early stage of development and approval: A global systematic review and meta-analysis

Nowadays, chip multi-processors (CMP) are being widely used in embedded systems due to their superior performance for parallel computing. However, they also incur significantly large power consumption. To solve this issue, designers of embedded operating system must provide an efficient thread scheduling algorithm, which not only maximizes the system performance, but also minimizes the energy consumption. Further, if the scheduler makes decisions without considering the precedence relationships among threads, the decisions could conflict with the thread behavior which could result in poor performance and large energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a synchronization-aware dynamic thread scheduling algorithm (SA), which reduces the busy-waiting time caused by spinlock, and with performance improvement and energy saving. SA has two major objectives, including (1) overall high performance, in terms of less completion time and less turnaround time, and (2) low energy consumption for all threads. The experimental results show that SA indeed improves performance and reduces energy consumption compared to the original scheduling algorithm of Linux kernel version 2.6. In a real-world case, the Digital Video Recording (DVR) system, SA achieves performance speedup by at most 1.21 and saves the energy consumption by at most 28.6%.

To determine whether recommendations made by pharmacists and accepted by hospital physicians resulted in fewer postdischarge readmissions and urgent care visits compared with recommendations that were not implemented. Prospective substudy of pharmacist recommendations. Tertiary care academic medical center and private community-based physician practices and community pharmacies. A total of 192 patients aged 18years or older who were a subsample of a randomized, prospective study, who were admitted with a previous diagnosis of one of nine cardiovascular or pulmonary diseases or diabetes mellitus or had received oral anticoagulation therapy and who were discharged to community-based care provided by private physicians and community pharmacists. Pharmacy case managers performed evaluations for patients and made recommendations to inpatient physicians. Patients received drug therapy counseling, a drug therapy list, and a wallet card at discharge. Data were collected from patients and private physicians for 90days after discharge. Pharmacy case managers made 546 recommendations to inpatient physicians for 187 patients (97%). Overall, 260 (48%) of the 546 recommendations were accepted. The acceptance rate was lower for patients who had an urgent care visit compared with the other patients (33.6% vs 52.2%, p=0.033). High acceptance rates were noted for updating the record after medication reconciliation (36 patients [78%]) and when there was an actual allergy (2 [100%] of 2 patients) or medication error (2 [100%] of 2 patients). Physicians were less likely to accept recommendations related to drug indications (p<0.001), drug efficacy (p=0.041), and therapeutic drug and disease state monitoring (p=0.011). Recommendations made for patients with a relatively greater number of drugs were also less likely to be accepted (p=0.003). Recommendations to reconcile medications or address actual drug allergies or medication errors were frequently accepted. However, only 48% of all recommendations were accepted by inpatient physicians, and there was no impact on health care use 90days after discharge. This study suggests that recommendations by pharmacy case managers were underused, and the low acceptance rate may have reduced the potential to avoid readmissions.

20628 Background: A 2005 study of treatment practices of elderly patients diagnosed before 2000 in Ontario, concluded that age remains a cause of disparity in cancer delivery and that this has remained unchanged over a 30 year period (Journal of Clinical Oncology 23:3802–10). Methods: We performed a retrospective chart review of all elderly patients (age ≥ 75 yrs) referred to the Cancer Centre of Southeastern Ontario in 2006. Patients were identified by a computer search. We collected data on patient demographics (age, gender, marital status, Charlson comorbidity score, cancer type, stage) and treatment (type, intent, acceptance/refusal). Results: A total of 454 patients, representing 17% of all new referrals, were identified. Patient characteristics were as follows: median age 80.0 yrs (75–99), males 49%, married 44.3%, patients with Charlson comorbidity score ≥5 41%. The commonest cancer sites were: gastrointestinal (22%), breast (17%), genitourinary (16%) and lung (15%). 39% of patients had undergone surgery with curative intent; 35% were referred for consideration of palliative treatments. Treatment was discussed and/or recommended as follows: chemotherapy 44%, hormonal therapy 22%, radiation 62%. Acceptance rates were highest for hormonal therapy (92%), intermediate for radiation (77%) and lowest for chemotherapy (47%). 21% of patients did not receive any cancer treatment. In bivariate analysis, the following factors were associated with a higher probability of accepting therapy: chemotherapy - non-palliative intent (p< 0.001), lower Charlson score (≤5) (p=0.003), type of cancer (p<0.001); hormonal therapy - male gender (p=0.036); radiation - married status (p=0.056), age <80 yrs ((p=0.04). Conclusions: We conclude: 1) elderly patients represent a significant proportion of all new referrals to our centre; 2) a substantial portion are referred for consideration of palliative treatments for advanced disease; 3) although hormonal therapy and radiation are associated with high acceptance rates, acceptance rates for chemotherapy are substantially lower, especially in pts with higher Charlson comorbidity scores and in the palliative setting. No significant financial relationships to disclose.

BackgroundIn 2006, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended non‐targeted, opt‐out HIV screening in all healthcare settings, including emergency departments (EDs). Multiple HIV testing programs have been implemented in EDs across the United States with varying designs and testing platforms. We report findings from a free, non‐targeted, rapid HIV testing program in 2 EDs in the Southeastern United States.MethodsFrom 2008 to 2012, adults ≥18 years of age were offered free rapid HIV testing using an oral swab test (OraQuick ADVANCE Rapid HIV‐1/2 antibody test) in the EDs of a large academic medical center and an affiliated community hospital in Durham, North Carolina.ResultsIn total, 5443 ED patients were offered HIV testing. The overall acceptance rate was 66.9% (3639/5443). Younger persons were significantly more likely to accept testing (78.2% for 18–29 years old vs 67.1% for ≥30 years old; P < 0.001) as were Black participants (72.6% Black vs 66.5% White; P < 0.001). Acceptance rates improved significantly after opt‐out oral consent replaced written consent (71.3% vs 63.1%; P < 0.001). Seven new HIV diagnoses were confirmed during the testing program, resulting in a seropositivity rate of 0.19% (7/3639). There were 8 false–positive rapid oral HIV tests (positive predictive value = 46.7%).ConclusionsAlthough the number of new HIV diagnoses was low, implementation of this rapid, non‐targeted ED screening program was feasible with high acceptance rates, particularly after introducing the opt‐out oral consent approach.

In order to solve the problems of uneven spatial distribution of data nodes and unclear weight relationship of virtual scheduling features in cloud computing platform, a virtual resource scheduling method based on improved ant colony algorithm is studied and designed to improve the performance of virtual resource scheduling in cloud computing platform by this method. After analyzing the information resource sequence change of the cloud computing platform, according to the STR - Tree partition graph, a simulated annealing-based algorithm is employed to classify the resource types after optimal scheduling into IO types, middle types and CPU types, and the time span and load balance are set as the measurement indexes. The simulation results show that after applying this method, the occupied resources of the main platform are 535 MB, which are much lower than the other two comparison algorithms, and the method has improved the allocation rationality, resource balance, maximum queue length and energy consumption. This result indicates that applying this virtual resource scheduling method can effectively improve the intelligent scheduling of virtual resources in the cloud computing platform.

<h3>Background and Importance</h3> Antimicrobial stewardship programmes (ASP) have gained increasing relevance in recent years, particularly in critically ill patients admitted to intensive care units (ICU). These patients often receive multiple antibiotics due to their clinical complexity, which makes stewardship interventions essential for improving treatment adequacy and reducing unnecessary exposure. <h3>Aim and Objectives</h3> To evaluate the acceptance rate of antibiotic stewardship interventions in critically ill patients. <h3>Material and Methods</h3> A retrospective, observational, single-centre study was conducted over six months (January–June 2024). All ASP interventions regarding antimicrobial therapy in ICU patients were included. Interventions were classified as antibiotic discontinuation, de-escalation, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (pK/pD) optimisation, escalation, and requests for additional diagnostic tests such as blood cultures. <h3>Results</h3> A total of 197 recommendations were issued, of which 84.7% (n=167) were accepted by treating physicians. The most frequent intervention was antibiotic discontinuation (n=111), accepted in 82.9% (n=92) of cases. Agents most frequently discontinued were J01XX group antibiotics (linezolid, tedizolid, daptomycin) (n=46), with an acceptance rate of 82.6% (n=38). De-escalation accounted for 19.8% (n=39) of interventions, with 82.1% acceptance (n=32). The most frequent targets were ceftolozane/tazobactam, ceftazidime/avibactam, and ceftaroline (n=18), accepted in 66.7% (n=12), followed by carbapenems (n=10), accepted in 90% (n=9). pK/pD optimisation (n=14) achieved the highest acceptance rate among major interventions (85.7%, n=12). Escalation was proposed in 12 cases, accepted in 91.7% (n=11). Additional diagnostic tests were recommended in 13 cases, with full acceptance (100%). <h3>Conclusion and Relevance</h3> Antibiotic discontinuation was the most frequent ASP intervention, whereas de-escalation and pK/pD optimisation achieved the highest acceptance rates. Overall, the high acceptance rate (84.7%) highlights the value of multidisciplinary stewardship teams in optimising antimicrobial therapy and ensuring adequate treatment of critically ill patients. The hospital pharmacist plays a key role in this team due to their knowledge of these medications. <h3>Conflict of Interest</h3> No conflict of interest