An important issue in fault-tolerant asynchronous computing is the respective power of an object type with respect to another object type. This question has received a lot of attention, mainly in the context of the consensus problem where a major advance has been the introduction of the consensus number notion that allows ranking the synchronization power of base object types (atomic registers,...

The seminal impossibility of reaching consensus in an asynchronous and crash prone system was established for a weak variant of the problem, usually called weak consensus, where a set of processes need to decide on a common value out of two possible values 0 or 1. On the other hand, abstractions that were shown to be, in some precise sense, minimal to circumvent the impossibility were determine...

This paper presents a meta protocol that allows the dynamic replacement of replication control protocols in replicated databases. The meta protocol is motivated by the diversity of concurrency control and replication control protocols that implement different transaction isolation levels. The replacement of protocols allows applications to dynamically adapt themselves to consistency and data ac...

The notion of a consensus, although it means little in science, is often used in support of the claim of man-made warming. Even quite recently we've seen reports about more than 400 people, mainly highly qualified scientists who "reject the consensus". But what is the history of claims of a consensus and what exactly is the consensus to which these claims refer, and even more importantly, do th...

Thresholds for the majority of software metrics are still not known. This might be the reason why a measurement method that should be part of a software quality assessment process is not yet present in object-oriented software industry. In this work, we applied an empirical method to 111 system dataset, identifying thresholds for 17 object-oriented software metrics. Furthermore, we propose some...

Agent-oriented system development aims to simplify the construction of complex systems by introducing a natural abstraction layer on top of the object-oriented paradigm composed of autonomous interacting actors. One main advantage of the agent metaphor is that an agent can be described similar to the characteristics of the human mind consisting of several interrelated concepts which constitute ...

Adaptive networks are well-suited to perform decentralized information processing and optimization tasks and to model various types of self-organized and complex behavior encountered in nature. Adaptive networks consist of a collection of agents with processing and learning abilities. The agents are linked together through a connection topology, and they cooperate with each other through local ...

The objective of the Arrowhead Framework is to efficiently support the development, deployment and operation of interconnected, cooperative systems. It is based on the Service Oriented Architecture philosophy. The building elements of the framework are systems that provide and consume services, and cooperate as systems of systems. Some commonly used systems, such as orchestration, authorization...

Remarkable advances in modern biology have enhanced our understanding of disease, permitting us to define-and potentially to treat-illness at the cellular and molecular level. The challenge we now face as physicians and physician-scientists is ensuring that these advances find expression in clinical practice. Thus far, the distance from the bench to the bedside has been surprisingly difficult t...

A large number of taxonomies are used to rate the quality of an individual study and the strength of a recommendation based on a body of evidence. We have developed a new grading scale that will be used by several family medicine and primary care journals (required or optional), with the goal of allowing readers to learn one taxonomy that will apply to many sources of evidence. Our scale is cal...