At the recent CIPA 2007 Congress, the authors presented a paper which described the development, application and refinement of a simple, cost effective method to record and document rock-art (Chandler and Bryan, 2007). This was based on prior development of a recording methodology for capturing Aboriginal rock-art (Chandler et al., 2005a), including both pictographs and petroglyphs, at a range ...

Cloud computing service providers' offer their customers' services maximizing their revenues, whereas customers wish to minimize their costs. In this paper we shall concentrate on consumers' point of view. Cloud computing services are composed of services organized according to a hierarchy of software application services, beneath them platform services which also use infrastructure services. P...

In this paper the use of inexpensive standard hardware and software is proposed in place of high-cost commercial solutions to set up graphical VR environments and simulations with a human in the control loop. For this purpose a generic simulation environment for implementation of control simulation and evaluation experiments using VR with haptic feedback has been developed. As example setups a ...

Software cost estimation is known to be a challenging task at best, and these challenges are increased for programmers operating outside the support of an established team programming environment. While many software cost estimation models exist with varying levels of support, the nature of metrics collected for these models is seldom applicable to the solitary programmer. In addition, the work...

BACKGROUND Women's crisis houses have been developed in the UK as a less stigmatising and less institutional alternative to traditional psychiatric wards. AIMS To examine the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of women's crisis houses by first examining the feasibility of a pilot patient-preference randomised controlled trial (PP-RCT) design (ISRCTN20804014). METHOD We used a PP-RCT study...

Blood banking systems in the United States over the past decade have been faced with a volatile demand for blood, specifically, a decrease in demand for red blood cells, for a variety of reasons. This change in the blood supply chain landscape, accompanied by an increasing emphasis on cost efficiency, is a driver of Mergers & Acquisitions between blood banks. In this paper, we first present sup...

This paper evaluates the determinants of bank performance in China. In particular, we examine the effects of stock market volatility, competition and ownership on bank performance in China. The sample comprises a total of 11 banks (four state-owned and seven joint-stock commercial banks) listed in the Chinese Stock Exchanges. The period under consideration extends from 2003-2009. The Generalize...

A solid travelling salesman problem (STSP) is a travelling salesman problem (TSP) where the salesman visits all the cities only once in his tour using dierent conveyances to travel from one city to another. Costs and environmental eect factors for travelling between the cities using dierent conveyances are dierent. Goal of the problem is to nd a complete tour with minimum cost that damages the ...

In this paper, we investigate issues involved in designing and using a cost model for query optimization in parallel database environments. The large range of possible multiprocessor computers, the different requirements of data-intensive applications to be supported, and the high number of parallel algorithms and information access methods make a multi-environment oriented approach necessary f...

The emergence of inexpensive 3D-TVs, affordable input and rendering hardware and open-source software has created a yeasty atmosphere for the development of low-cost immersive systems. A low cost system (here dubbed an IQ-station), fashioned from commercial off-theshelf technology (COTS), coupled with targeted immersive applications can be a viable laboratory instrument for enhancing scientific...