School of Systems and Enterprises

In general, the structure of an economy, in this case that of a typical sub-Saharan African country consists of many more sectors than will be considered in this paper. However, based on readily available research data and experience of the author, Agriculture, Healthcare and Education suffices to produce and fully understand the phenomena under consideration. Furthermore, these sectors account for more than 75% of all donor aid to emerging regions. My hypothesis is to derive a first level model to be used as a base in developing further thorough model disaggregation of an overall outlook of the dynamics within a developing country which typically relies heavily for donor support. One of the interesting observations from the model simulation shown in figure 1.3 reveals that should donor funding seize, most governments in developing countries will operate at a plateau in regards to the spending of public expenditure- although such governments will survive.

During the nascent stages of the internet, there were the overarching constraints of availability and usage of technologies. Combined, these were the fundamental inhabitations in poor regions of the world and accounted for the derivation of the now ubiquitous phrase, – the digital divide. In a wave of changing social dynamics, partly if not rather largely attributable to the successes and pull forces of the information age, the world’s populations living in urban centers have crossed the threshold of over 50 percent. Because of this, many cities in developing countries are bedeviled with overwhelming demands coupled with limited resources.

It has therefore become essential for cities in developing countries to act as incubators of modern innovations, foster collaborations and to establish effective partnerships with other cities they can learn from. In this paper, I have singled out and engage in a conceptualized discussion on the urbanization challenge to ICT4D. Urban dynamics, including the new force of cities is one subtle evolving complexity that underlines the future goals of ICT4D interventions. More strikingly, the complex urban system is more deceptive than merely hiding the causes the problems ICT4D is attempting to solve. This paper suggests a method of attack and awareness far distant from futurology.

Society deems detention facilities successful when total life cycle cost is minimized without compromising safe, secure, and constitutional incapacitation. However, this consensus view represents only a minor subset of the potential of jails. System boundaries should be expanded, and a much larger set of outcomes considered. This case study of the design of a high-rise jail embodies transdisciplinary exploration of operational integration, architectural design, and engineering disciplines. The resulting 1,200-bed facility will rise 193.5 feet (59 meters) and cost an estimated $1.4 billion dollars. Sociotechnical systems ultimately determine conditions of confinement and the successful administration of justice within facilities that incarcerate. While organizational and detainee culture contribute to the criminogenic | rehabilitative continuum of outcomes, design can rise to the level of organizational culture, psychological drivers, and policies, procedures, and post orders in its ...

The formation of protein-polyelectrolyte complexes has been directly demonstrated for several enzymes in solution including alcohol oxidase, horseradish peroxidase, lactate oxidase and glucose oxidase using agarose gel electrophoresis. The combination of such complexes with polyhydroxyl compounds has been found to significantly enhance the shelf-life of biosensors when stored in a dehydrated form, examples of lactate and malate biosensors are given.

As more computing centers collect files to use in data-mining or datamarts, managing long-term storage space becomes more important. We describe a new way to more accurately predict which files will be used in the future. This new method is an order-of-magnitude more accurate than any current technique. Fifty to eighty percent of all user files can be compressed or moved to tertiary storage with little impact on the user perceived performance. This paper supports these conclusions with an analysis of long-term (5-8 months) data collected on different types of computing environments.

We compare and contrast long-term file system activity for different Unix environments for periods of 120 to 280 days. Our focus is on finding common long-term activity trends and reference patterns. Our analysis shows that 90% of all files are not used after initial creation, those that are used are normally short-lived, and that if a file is not used in some manner the day after it is created, it will probably never be used. Additionally, we find approximately 1% of all files are used daily. This information allows us to more accurately predict the files which are never used. These files can be compressed or moved to tertiary storage enabling either more users per disk or larger user disk quotas.

The traditional systems engineering (SE) methodologies for integration, verification, validation, test and evaluation (IVVT&E) throughout the lifecycle are focused on expected outcomes (behavior, capabilities), which may not necessarily apply for system of systems (SoS), where some emergent behavior and knowledge may be needed in untested scenarios (unknown environments). Next-generation SoS consisting of partially or fully decentralized systems are incorporating advances in computing, sensing, and communications operations to address uncertainty and emergence in SoS. Thus, current standardized and formalized IVVT&E methodologies will need to be modified, adapted, or an evolutionary IVVT&E framework for SoS is required to test and evaluate integrated SoS capabilities in unknown scenarios. This paper discusses several potential strategies and explores possible methodologies that may be applied to develop a SoS IVVT&E framework, as applied to an unmanned aerial system (UAS), based on existing architectural frameworks such as Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF).

We address the challenge of selecting influential individuals for the marketing of a new product in a social network; we imagine a business attempting to sell a new technology and compare three strategies for selecting seed adopters of the innovation in scalefree networks with the goal of maximizing the adoption within the network. We model the system using a local threshold process for adoption decisions and with a cost associated with creating each seed adopter. We compare random selection, selection of nodes with highest degree and selection of nodes with highest betweenness centrality. We then consider the situation in which the cost of identifying the target nodes is considered; the decision maker must make a trade-off between identifying the best nodes and saving resources for converting the seed nodes to the new technology.

This paper introduces a framework for studying the interactions of autonomous system components and the design of the connectivity structure in Systems of Systems (SoSs). This framework, which uses complex network models, is also used to study the connectivity structure's impact on resource management. We discuss resource sharing as a mechanism that adds a level of flexibility to distributed systems and describe the connectivity structures that enhance components' access to the resources available within the system. The framework introduced in this paper explicitly incorporates costs of connection and the benefits that are received by direct and indirect access to resources and provides measures of the optimality of connectivity structures. We discuss central and a distributed schemes that, respectively, represent systems in which a central planner determines the connectivity structure and systems in which distributed components are allowed to add and sever connections to im...