text:
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:introduction}

The increasing use of the Internet as a provider of services and a major
information media has changed significantly, in the last decade, users
expectations in terms of performance. It is simply considered no longer
acceptable to wait a number of seconds to access a service or an information.
Users, these days, expect a browser to perform like a home TV or a radio,
completely ignoring the basic differences between the functioning behind,  and
sometime cultivating unrealistic desires, especially regarding  failures
and robustness. This is one of the consequences of interpreting IT  systems as
information providers (due to the explosions of sites like Wikipedia  or
on-line encyclopedias) instead of a means for running calculations, as occurred
10 or 15 years ago.
A perfect example of this situation is described in~\cite{linder:2006a}:
according to Google, an extra 0.5 seconds in search page generation would kill user satisfaction, with a
consequent 20\% traffic drop.

During the events of September 11, 2001 almost every news website became
unavailable for hours \cite{lefebvre:2001} showing the weaknesses (but it
would be better to say the differences) of the Internet compared to the
traditional information media. Situations like these certainly require a
deeper investigation of the social impact of such approach in information
retrieval (and ``keyboard dependency'') but this topic is definitely out of
scope for this paper. Thus, given this ``embedded human behavior'', IT
scientists can only interpret this need as a new challenge for performance
requirements: customers expect not only resilience ({\it i.e.}, the capacity of
the system to recover from damage), but also performance.
Besides, under-performing systems are rarely profitable.

These aspects easily trigger an important discussion regarding resilience and
performance in this context. Given the higher and higher expectations in terms
of performance, how will an average user be able to distinguish between a slow
service and a stuck or failed one? Although apart from~\cite{linder:2006a} we
are not aware of any other proper study in this field, it is not
difficult to imagine that any under-performing system
will simply be ignored and treated like a failed one. Thus, in the authors'
point of view, it would be simply unrealistic to consider resilience and
performance as two characteristics that can be analyzed separately. The nature of the problem
forces us to consider Quality of Service (QoS) as part of system robustness.
Our opinion is that the issues related to service quality will eventually become
a significant factor in distinguishing the success or the failure of service
providers. Being extremely difficult for service providers to meet the promised
performance guarantees in the face of unpredictable demand, one possible
approach is the adoption of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), contracts
specifying a level of performance that must be met and compensations in  case
of failure.

It is worth saying that the notions of compensations and failure here are
different from the ones previously discussed by one of the authors  (for
example in \cite{MazzaraBPEL2009}). Here the compensation is a penalty to be
paid, while the failure is intended as a failure in meeting the specified
level of performance. In the previous works the compensation was instead a process  with
a designer-dependent logic with the goal of partially recovering a transaction
made of a composition of different services. There are certainly analogies, but
a deeper investigation here is not possible due to space constraints. The
basic idea is that the theory presented in \cite{MazzaraL06} and the mechanism
used there to dynamically trigger a compensation process can be exploited also
to model the kind of scenarios presented in this work but with the evident
open issue of time modelling.

\subsection*{Paper Contribution and Organization}

This paper addresses some of the performance problems arising when IT
companies sell the service of running jobs subject to QoS, and thus
robustness, constraints. We focus on session-based traffic because, even
though it is widely used ({\it e.g.}, Amazon or eBay), it is very difficult  to
handle; session-based traffic requires ad-hoc techniques, as job-based
admission control policies drop requests at random and thus all clients
connecting to the system would be likely to experience connection failures or
broken sessions under heavy load, even though there might be capacity on the
system to serve all requests properly for a subset of clients. Also, since
active sessions can be aborted at any time, there could be an inefficient use
of resources because aborted sessions do not perform any useful work, but they
waste the available resources.

The contributions of the paper are threefold. First, we provide a formal model
describing the problem we want to tackle, that is to measure and optimize the
performance of a QoS-aware service provisioning system in terms of the average
revenue received per unit time. According to this model, we then propose and
implement an SLA-driven service provisioning system running jobs subject to
QoS contracts. The middleware collects demand and performance statistics, and
estimates traffic parameters in order to make dynamic decisions concerning
server allocation and admission control. The system architecture presented in
this work is based on Web Services technology and when we mention the word
``service'' we actually mean the specific technology. Anyway, this is just an
implementation choice that we will explain later. Other solutions would be
certainly possible. Finally, we evaluate and validate our proposal through
several experiments, showing the robustness of our approach under different
traffic conditions.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Relevant related work is
discussed in Section~\ref{sec:related_work}, the problem we want to tackle is
formally modelled in Section~\ref{sec:problem_defintion} and policies for dynamic reconfiguration are discussed in Section~\ref{sec:policies}.
Section~\ref{sec:architecture} then presents the system's architecture and discusses
how the system deals with session-based traffic, while
Section~\ref{sec:experiments} presents a number of experiments we have  carried
out. Finally, Section~\ref{sec:conclusions} concludes the paper highlighting
possible directions for future work.

\section{Related Work}
\label{sec:related_work}

There is an extensive literature on adaptive resource management techniques for
commercial data centers~({\it e.g.},~\cite{rajkumar:1997}, ~\cite{ghosh:2003},
~\cite{hansen:2004}). Yet, since previous work does not take into account the
economic issues related to SLAs, service providers would still need to
over-provision their data centers in order to address highly variable traffic
conditions. Moreover, existing studies do not consider admission policies as a
mechanism to protect data centers against overload
conditions~\cite{lefebvre:2001}.  However, as will become clear later in
this paper, admission control algorithms have a significant effect on revenues.

The problem of autonomously configuring a computing cluster in order to satisfy
SLA requirements is addressed in several papers. Some of them consider the
economic issues occurring when services are offered as part of a contract,
however they do not address the problems affecting overloaded server systems
({\it e.g.}, \cite{chandra:2003}, \cite{li:2005}, \cite{zhang:2004}), while
others include simple admission control schemes without taking any economic parameter into account.

Finally, while there is an extensive literature on request-based admission
control ({\it e.g.},~\cite{urgaonkar:2005}, \cite{mazzucco:2007}),
session-based admission control is much less well studied. Also, nobody has
studied the effects of combining admission control, resource allocation and
economics when trying to model a commercial service provisioning system
subject to QoS constraints. For example, \cite{villela:2007},
~\cite{urgaonkar:2005} and~\cite{levy:2003}  consider some economic models
dealing with single jobs, but they focus on allocating server capacity only,
while admission policies are not taken into account. Yet, revenues can be
improved very significantly by imposing suitable conditions for accepting
jobs. To our knowledge, the most closely related work is
perhaps~\cite{mazzucco:2007}, that studies the effects of SLAs and  allocation
and admission policies on the maximum achievable revenues in the context of
individual jobs. However, in E-business systems such as Amazon or eBay,
requests coming from the same customer are related and thus they can be
grouped into sessions. Unfortunately, if admission control policies like the
one discussed in~\cite{mazzucco:2007} are in operation, a user trying to
execute several related jobs would not know in advance whether all jobs will be
accepted or not. In this paper, instead, we implement some admission  policies
specifically designed to deal with session-based  traffic;
our approach uses a combination of admission control
algorithms, service differentiation, resource allocation techniques and
economic parameters to make the service provisioning system as profitable as possible.

\section{Problem Formulation}
\label{sec:problem_defintion}
In this section we present a mathematical model of the real world problem we
intend to tackle. The reason for having a formal model is to abstract from the
details we do not want to investigate, focusing only on those that are of
interest for this work. The risk of formal models is always the over
abstraction of problems; furthermore, interactions between aspects that are
included in the model and aspects that are excluded can complicate the
situation. We intend to keep the model manageable and thus the proposed model is
based on the concept of utility functions, a simple and common way for
achieving self-optimization in distributed computing systems. While different
kinds of utility functions can be employed, in this paper the average revenue obtained by  the
service provider per unit time is the considered metric. In a nutshell, the
model can be defined as follows: the user agrees to pay a specified amount for
each accepted session, and also to submit the jobs belonging to it at a
specified rate. On the other hand, the provider promises to run all jobs
belonging to the session, and to pay a penalty if the average performance for
the session falls under a certain threshold.

More formally, the provider has a cluster of $N$ servers, used to run $m$
different type of services, while the traffic is session-based. A session is defined as follows:

\begin{definition}[Session]
 A session of type $i$ is a collection of $k_i$ jobs, submitted at a rate of $\gamma_i$ jobs per second.
\end{definition}

One strong assumption behind this model is the request of \textit{session
integrity} ({\it i.e.}, if a session is accepted, all jobs in it will be executed), as it is critical for commercial services. From a business perspective, the higher the number of completed sessions, the higher the revenue is likely to be, while the same does not apply to single jobs. Apart from the penalties resulting from the failure to meet the promised QoS standards, sessions that are broken or delayed at some critical stages, such as checkout, could mean loss of revenue for the service owners. From a customer's point of view, instead, breaking session integrity would generate a lot of frustration because the service would appear as not reliable. We assume that the QoS experienced by an accepted session of type $i$ is measured by the observed average waiting time:

\begin{equation}
 W_i = \dfrac{1}{k_{i}} \sum_{j=1}^{k_i} w_j \mbox{,}
\label{eq:avg_wt}
\end{equation}
where $w_j$ is the waiting time of the $j$th job of the session, {\it i.e}, the interval between its arrival and the start of its service.
Also, we assume that the provisioning contract includes an SLA specifying clauses related to charge, obligation and penalty.

\begin{definition}[Charge]
For each accepted session of type $i$, a user shall pay a charge of $c_i$.
\end{definition}

How to determine the amount of charge for each successfully executed session is outside the scope of this paper. However, intuitively, this could depend on the number of jobs in the session, $k_i$, and their submission rate, $\gamma_i$, or on the obligation. It is certainly expected that for stricter obligations there will be higher charges.

\begin{definition}[Obligation]
The observed average waiting time, $W_i$, of an accepted session of type $i$ shall not exceed $q_i$.
\end{definition}

\begin{definition}[Penalty]
For each accepted session of type $i$ whose average waiting time exceeds the obligation ({\it i.e.}, $W_i>q_i$), the provider is liable to pay to the user a penalty of $r_i$.
\end{definition}

While the performance of computing systems can be measured using different metrics, in this paper we are interested in the average revenue received per unit time, as it is more meaningful from a business perpective than values such as the throughput or average response times.
 Thus, as far as the provider is concerned, the performance of the system is
 measured by the average revenue, $R$, received per unit time. That quantity
 can be computed using the following expression:

\begin{equation}
R = \sum_{i=1}^{m} a_{i} [c_{i} - r_{i}P(W_{i} > q_{i})] \mbox{.}
\label{eq:revenue_jobs_global}
\end{equation}

About Equation~\eqref{eq:revenue_jobs_global}, it is perhaps worth noting that
 while it resembles the utility function discussed in~\cite{mazzucco:2007}, here
 $a_i$ refers to the average number of type $i$ sessions that are accepted
 into the system per unit time, while $P(W_i>q_i)$ is the probability that the
 observed average waiting time of a type $i$ session exceeds the obligation~$q_i$.
Also, while no assumption about the relative magnitudes of charges and
 penalties is made, the problem is interesting mainly if $c_i\leq r_i$.
 Otherwise one could guarantee a positive (but not optimal) revenue by
 accepting all traffic, regardless of loads and obligations.
Finally, Equation~\eqref{eq:revenue_jobs_global} uses a ``flat penalty''
factor: if $W_i > q_i$ the provider must pay a penalty $r_i$, no matter  what
the amount of the delay is. Such a model can be easily extended.  For example,
one could introduce penalties that are proportional to the amount  by which the
waiting time exceeds the obligation $q$ (the effect of that would be to
replace the term $P(W_i > q_i)$ in Equation~\eqref{eq:revenue_jobs_global}
with $E(min(0, W_i - q_i))$).

Finally, instead of allocating whole servers to one of the $m$ offered services, the provider might want to share servers between different job types. If this is the case, it is possible to control the fraction of service capacity each service type is entitled to use, for example via block of threads. Those threads would thus play the role of servers.

\section{Policies for Dynamic Reconfiguration}
\label{sec:policies}

Because of the random nature of Internet traffic and changes in demand pattern over time, accurate capacity planning is very difficult in the short time period and almost impossible in the long time period. On the other hand, if servers are statically assigned to the provided services, some of them might get overloaded, while others might be underutilized. It is clear that in such scenarios it could be advantageous to reallocate unused resources to oversubscribed services, even at the cost of switching overheads, either in terms of time or money.

The question that arises in that context is how to decide whether, and if so when, to perform such system dynamic reconfiguration. Posed in its full generality, this is a complex problem which does not always yield an exact and explicit solution. Thus, it might be better to use some heuristic policies which, even though not optimal, perform reasonably well and are easily implementable.
Within the control of the host are the ``resource allocation'' and ``job admission'' policies.
The first decides how to partition the
total number of servers, $N$, among the $m$ service pools. That is, it assigns
$n_i$ servers to jobs of type $i$ ($n_1 + n_2 + \ldots + n_m = N$). The
allocation policy may deliberately make the decision to deny service to
one or more job types (this will certainly happen if the number of offered
services exceeds the number of servers).
The server allocation policy is invoked at session arrival and session completion
instants, while the admission policy is invoked at session arrival instants in
order to decide whether the incoming session should be accepted or rejected.
Of course, the allocation and admission policies are coupled: admission
decisions depend on the allocated servers and vice versa.
Moreover, they should be able to react to changes in user demand.

During the intervals between consecutive policy invocations, the number of
active sessions remains constant. Those intervals, which will be referred to as
``observation windows'', are used by the controlling software in order to collect traffic
statistics and obtain current estimates, as the queueing analysis carried out
at each configuration epoch requires estimates of the average arrival rates
($\lambda_{i}$) and service times ($b_{i}$), and squared coefficient of
variation of request interarrival ($ca_{i}^{2}$) and services times
($cs_{i}^{2}$).
Please note that all of the above parameters are time varying and stochastic in
nature, and thus their values should be estimated at each configuration
interval. However, if the estimates are accurate enough, the arrival rates and service times can be approximate as independent and
identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables inside each window, thus allowing for online optimizations

In this paper, we implement and experiment with various heuristic policies. As
allocation algorithm we use the `Offered Loads' heuristic (see
Fig.~\ref{fig:allocation}), a simple adaptive policy that, using the traffic
estimates collected during the previous observation window, allocates the servers roughly in proportion to the offered
loads, $\rho_i=\lambda_i b_i$, and to a set of coefficients, $\alpha_i$,
reflecting the economic importance of the different job types (for service differentiation
purposes):

\begin{equation}\label{lalloc}
n_i = \left\lfloor N \frac{\rho_i \alpha_i}{\sum_{j=1}^{m}{\rho_j
\alpha_j}} + 0.5  \right \rfloor \mbox{,}
\end{equation}

\noindent (adding 0.5 and truncating is the round-off operation). Then, if the
sum of the resulting allocations is either less or greater
than $N$, adjust the number of allocated servers so that they add up to $N$.

\begin{figure}[ht!]
\vspace{-5mm}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{allocation.eps}
\caption{Dynamic resource allocation. Resources are allocated in proportion to the measured load.}
\label{fig:allocation}
\vspace{-5mm}
\end{figure}

For admission purposes we have embedded into our system three heuristics,
`Current State', 'Threshold' and `Long-Run'. The first two algorithms are
formally described in~\cite{mazzucco:2008}, and thus we only summarize them
here. The `Current State' policy estimates, at every arrival epoch, the changes
in expected revenue, and accepts the incoming session (possibly in conjunction
with a reallocation of servers from other queues) only if the change in expected
revenue is positive. In order to compute that value, it uses the state of each
queue, which is specified by the number of currently active sessions, the
number of completed jobs and average waiting time achieved so far (for each
session).

The `Threshold' heuristic uses a threshold, $M_i$, for each job type, and an
incoming session is accepted into the system only if less than $M_i$ sessions are active.
Each threshold $M_i$ is chosen so as to maximize $R_i$. We have carried out some
numerical experiments, and found that $R_i$ is a unimodal function of $M_i$.
That is, it has a single maximum, which may be at $M_i = \infty$ for lightly
loaded systems. That observation implies that one can search for the optimal
admission threshold by evaluating $R_i$ for consecutive values of $M_i$,
stopping either when $R_i$ starts decreasing or, if that does not happen, when the
increase becomes smaller than some $\epsilon$. Such searches are typically very fast.

Finally, the `Long-Run' heuristic assumes that jobs of type $i$ are
submitted with the same arrival rate, that all sessions of type $i$ have the
same number of jobs, and that each queue is subject to a constant load of
sessions $L_i$.
Suppose that queue $i$ is subjected to a constant load of $L_i$ streams
({\it i.e.}, as soon as one session completes, a new one replaces it) and has
$n_i$ servers allocated to it. Since each session consists of $k_i$ jobs
submitted at rate $\gamma_i$, the average period during which a session is
active is roughly $k_i/\gamma_i$ while, from Little's theorem, the rate at which
streams are initiated is $L_i \gamma_i/k_i$.
The above observations imply that, if over a long period, the numbers of active streams in
the system are given by the vector $L = (L_1, L_2, \ldots, L_m)$, and the server
allocation is given by the vector $n = (n_1, n_2, \ldots , n_m)$, the total
expected revenue earned per unit time can be computed using
Equation~\eqref{eq:revenue_jobs_global}, where the average number of type $i$
sessions accepted per unit time, $a_i$, is replaced by $L_i \gamma_i / k_i$.

\section{System Architecture}
\label{sec:architecture}

The three-tier software architecture presented in this work is based on Web Services technology. Web Services are self-describing, open components that support rapid, low-cost composition of distributed applications and their adoption looks like a promising solution to low cost and immediate integration with other applications and partners. The use of Web Services, in fact, eases the interoperability between different systems because they use open protocols and standards such as SOAP and HTTP. Computing systems are usually designed according to this three-tier software architecture (front-end, business logic and storage) but in this paper we focus mainly on the second one, as business logic computation is often the bottleneck for Internet services. Of course, user-perceived performance depends also on disk and network workloads at other tiers. However, front-end servers are not typically subject to a very high workload, and thus over-provision is usually the cheapest solution to meet service quality requirements, while different solutions exist to address some of the issues occurring at both the presentation and database tiers (see \cite{stewart:2005} and \cite{doyle:2003} for more details).

\begin{figure}[!ht]
\vspace{-5mm}
\begin{center}
\fbox{
\includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{arch2.eps}}
\caption{Architecture overview. Dotted lines indicate asynchronous messages.}
\label{fig:architecture_overview}
\end{center}
\vspace{-5mm}
\end{figure}

The architecture we propose, shown in Figure~\ref{fig:architecture_overview}, uses a dedicated hosting model and follows the mediation service pattern~\cite{hohpe:2004}. The middleware  hides the IT infrastructure from the clients, creating an illusion of a single system by using a Layer-7 two-way architecture~\cite{cardellini:2002}, while the load balancer uses a
packet double-rewriting algorithm ({\it i.e.}, it forwards packets in both
directions, client-to-server and server-to-client) and takes rou\-ting
decisions using only the information available at the application layer of the OSI stack, such as target URL or cookie. This makes adding or removing servers at runtime straightforward, as clients do not know where their requests will be executed.
All incoming jobs are sent to the Controller (arrow 1), which performs the resource allocation, admission control and monitoring functions. For each type of service there is a corresponding Service Handler, which schedules incoming jobs for execution, collects traffic statistics through a profiler, and manages the currently allocated pool of servers. If the admission policy does not require global state information  ({\it e.g.}, threshold-based policies), then it too may be delegated to the Service Handlers.  If the same service is offered at different QoS levels and a threshold-based admission policy is employed, the Service Handler will be instantiated at dif\-fe\-ren\-tia\-ted service levels. Each level will have its own SLA management function instantiated that strives to meet that level of service specified by the differentiation. If the load is too high for any of the differentiated services, then the admission policy will start rejecting incoming traffic in order to maintain an adequate level of performance.  For policies that take into account the state of
all queues at every decision epoch ({\it i.e.}, state-based policies), instead,
there is no need to use different Service Handlers to deal with different QoS levels, as sessions can specify their own QoS requirements.

\subsection*{Session Arrival}

Here we discuss the steps taken at session arrival instants by state-based policies.
In order to guarantee the correctness of the computation (multiple threads could see the
system in different states), consecutive requests are serialized by using a
pipeline with a single executor.
Every time a new session of type $i$ enters the system, the program sketched
in Algorithm 1 is executed.
The algorithm first estimates the current
arrival rates and the potential arrival rates if the session was accepted
(the only arrival rate which changes is the one of queue $i$,
line~\ref{alg:new_arr_rate}), and simulates a new server allocation
using the potential arrival rates (line~\ref{alg:virtual_allocation}).
Then it computes the expected change in revenue, $\Delta R$.
The decision of accepting the new session, eventually with a reallocation of servers from other queues to
queue $i$, would increase the amount of charges by $c_{i}$, but it will also
increase the arrival rate at queue $i$ by $\gamma_{i}$. Thus, if the session was
accepted, there would be a possible penalty of $r_{i}$ in case the performance of
the new session was not met, and also different probabilities of paying
penalties for all the active sessions.

\vspace{-5mm}

\begin{algorithm}[ht!]
 \SetAlgoNoLine
  \SetKwInOut{Input}{Input}
  \SetKwInOut{Output}{Output}
  \Input{A session arriving at queue $i$, $s_i$}
  \Output{The cookie for the session, if accepted, $-1$ otherwise}
  \BlankLine

  \textbf{Phase I: Estimate $\Delta R$}\;

  $(\lambda_{1}, \ldots, \lambda_{m}) \leftarrow
  \FuncSty{EstimateCurArrRate()}$\; \nllabel{alg:cur_arr_rate}

  $(\lambda^{\prime}_{1}, \ldots,
  \lambda^{\prime}_{m}) \leftarrow (\lambda_{1}, \ldots, \lambda_{i-1},
  (\lambda_{i} + \gamma_{i}), \lambda_{i+1}, \ldots, \lambda_{m})$
  \; \nllabel{alg:new_arr_rate}

  $(n^{\prime}_{1}, \ldots, n^{\prime}_{m}) \leftarrow$
  \FuncSty{SimulateAllocation($\lambda^{\prime}_{1}, \ldots,
  \lambda^{\prime}_{m}$)}\; \nllabel{alg:virtual_allocation}

  $\Delta R \leftarrow c_{i} - [r_{i} \times
  g(q_{i}, \lambda^{\prime}_{i}, k_{i}, n^{\prime}_{i})]$\;
  \nllabel{alg:delta_R_init}

  \For{$j \leftarrow 1$ \KwTo $m$}{
 	\ForEach{session $t$ in queue $j$}{
 		$q_{j, t} \leftarrow \displaystyle{\frac{q_{j} k_{j} - u_{t} l_{t}}{k_{j} -
 		l_{t}}}$\;

 		$\Delta g_{j} \leftarrow g(q_{j, t}, \lambda^{\prime}_{j}, k_{j}
 		- l_{t}, n^{\prime}_{j}) -
 		g(q_{j, t}, \lambda_{j}, k_{j} - l_{t}, n_{j})$
 		\; \nllabel{alg:delta_g_j}
 		$\Delta R \leftarrow \Delta R - (r_{j} \times \Delta g)$\;
 	}
  } \nllabel{alg:delta_R_end

  \textbf{Phase II: generate the cookie and re-allocate servers}\;
  \eIf{$\Delta R > 0$}{ \nllabel{alg:accept_init}
  	$cookie \leftarrow$ \FuncSty{GenerateCookie($i$)}\;
  	\FuncSty{AddSession($queue_{i}, session$)}\;
  	\FuncSty{SetAllocation($n^{\prime}_{1}, \ldots, n^{\prime}_{m}$)}\;
  	\nllabel{alg:accept_end} }{
  	$cookie \leftarrow -1$\; \nllabel{alg:reject}
  }
  \Return{$cookie$}\;
\label{alg:session_arrival}
\caption{Session arrival, state-based policies.}
\end{algorithm}

\vspace{-5mm}

Denote by $g(x, \lambda, k, n)$ the
probability that the average waiting time for $k$ jobs exceeds the threshold
$x$, given that the arrival rate is $\lambda$ and that there are $n$ servers.
Having defined $g()$, the expected change in revenue resulting from a
decision to switch servers among queues and to accept a new session is computed in
lines~\ref{alg:delta_R_init}--\ref{alg:delta_R_end} as:

\begin{equation}
\Delta R = c_{i} - r_{i} g(q_{i}, \lambda_{i} + \gamma_{i}, k_{i},
n^{\prime}_{i}) - \sum_{j=1}^{m} r_{j} \sum_{t=1}^{L_{j}} \Delta
g_{j}(\cdot_{t})
\mbox{,}
\end{equation}

\noindent where $\Delta g_{j}(\cdot_{t})$ is the change in probability of
paying a penalty for session $t$ at queue $j$, see line~\ref{alg:delta_g_j},
while $L_{j}$ is the number of active sessions at queue $j$.
For session $t$ at queue $j$, the number of completed jobs is identified by
$l_{t}$, while the average waiting time over those jobs is $u_{t}$. Thus, the overall waiting
time that should not be exceeded over the remaining $k_{j} - l_{t}$ jobs,
trouble a penalty of $r_{j}$, is

\begin{equation}
q_{j, t} = \displaystyle{\frac{q_{j} k_{j} - u_{t} l_{t}}{k_{j} - l_{t}}}
\mbox{.}
\end{equation}

At the end of the for loop, if the expected change in revenue is positive the
new session is accepted, the cookie is generated, and server reallocation is put in operation
(lines~\ref{alg:accept_init}--\ref{alg:accept_end}). Otherwise, the session is
rejected and the server reallocation remains unchanged, see line~\ref{alg:reject}.

\section{Experiments}
\label{sec:experiments}

Several experiments were carried out in order to evaluate the robustness of our approach under different traffic conditions.
However, because of space constraints, only some of them are discussed here. As
discussed in Section \ref{sec:problem_defintion}, the metric of interest is the
average revenue earned per unit time. CPU-bound jobs, whose lengths and arrival instants were randomly generated, queued and executed. We use synthetic load as this makes it easier to experiment with different traffic patterns. Moreover, we abstract from the hardware details such as number of cores or amount of memory; this way a job takes the same time everywhere, no matter on which hardware it is executed. Apart from the random network delays, messages are subject to random processing overhead, which cannot be controlled. Also, it could not be guaranteed that the servers were dedicated to these tasks, as there could be random demands from other users.
Each server can execute only one job at any time, {\it i.e.}, the system does not allow processor sharing (in Section~\ref{sec:conclusions} we suggest the possibility to extend the current system by running multiple jobs concurrently in a controller way in order to maintain the same QoS guarantees).
The scheduling policy is FIFO, with no preemption, while servers allocated to queue $i$ cannot be idle if there are jobs of type $i$ waiting. Finally, messages are sent using the HTTP protocol, as this is the most widely used protocol to exchange SOAP messages over the Internet.
In order to reduce the number of variables, the following parameters were kept fixed:
\begin{itemize}
\item The server capacity is guaranteed by a cluster of 20 servers offering four job types, {\it i.e.}, $N=20$, $m=4$.
\item The obligations undertaken by the provider are that the average observed waiting time of the session should not exceed the average required service time, {\it i.e.}, $q_i = b_i$.
\item All sessions consist of 50 jobs, {\it i.e.}, $k=50$. The job arrival rates are $\gamma_1 = \gamma_2 = \gamma_3 = 2$, while that for type 4 is $\gamma_4 = 1$. The average service time for all jobs is $b=1$.
\item Sessions are submitted with rate $\delta_1 = 0.1$, $\delta_2 = 0.04$ and $\delta_3 = 0.08$.
\item The total offered load ranges between 60\% to over 100\% ({\it i.e.}, the
system would be overloaded if all sessions were accepted) by varying the
submission rate of type 4 jobs, $\delta_4 \in (0.02, 0.2)$.
\end{itemize}

In the following two experiments we assume that the traffic is Markovian, that
is, the sessions and jobs enter the system according to independent Poisson
processes, while service times are exponentially distributed.

The first experiment, shown in Figure~\ref{fig:chap8_ 4_exp_c_eq_r}, measures
the average revenues obtained by the heuristic policies proposed in
Section~\ref{sec:policies} when all charges and penalties are the same, {\it
i.e.}, $c_i=r_i$, $\forall$ $i$: if the average waiting time exceeds the obligation, users get their money back. For comparison, the effect of not having an admission policy is also displayed.

\begin{figure}[!ht]
\vspace{-8mm}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics{fig4.eps}
\caption{[Experiment 1] Observed revenues when $c_i=r_i=10$, $\forall$~$i$.}
\label{fig:chap8_ 4_exp_c_eq_r}
\end{center}
\vspace{-8mm}
\end{figure}

Each point in the figure represents a run lasting about 2 hours. In that time, between 1,400 (low load) and 1,700 (high load) sessions of all types are accepted, corresponding to about 70,000 -- 85,000 jobs. Samples of achieved revenues are collected every 10 minutes and are used at the end of the run to compute the corresponding 95\% confidence interval (Student's $t$-distribution was used).
The most notable feature of this graph is that while the performance of the `Admit all' policy becomes steadily worse as soon as the load increases and drops to 0 when it approaches the saturation point, the heuristic algorithms produce revenues that grow with the offered load. According to the information we have logged during the experiments, they achieve that growth not only by accepting more sessions, but also by rejecting more sessions at higher loads.

In some cases, values other than the average revenue per unit time might be of
interest. A possible example is the rate at which the sessions of type $i$ are
rejected, or the percentage of accepted sessions whose performance falls below
the minimum promised performance levels. For the the `Threshold'
heuristic, the former is given by:

\begin{equation}
X_{i} = \lambda_{i} p_{i, M_{i}} \mbox{,}
\end{equation}

\noindent where $p_{i, M_{i}}$ is the probability that a session of type $i$ is
rejected, that is, that there are $M_{i}$ active sessions in the $i$th queue
(no mathematical formula exists for the state-based policies).

Also, the performance of the various policies can be better understood by
observing other metrics; a policy might under-perform either because
it accepts too many sessions, thus failing to deliver the promised QoS
(like the `Admit All' policy in Fig.~\ref{fig:qos}), or because it rejects too
many sessions, thus missing income opportunities, like in the case of the
`Threshold' policy. Fig.~\ref{fig:pdf} shows very clearly that the `Threshold'
policy is very conservative, as almost all of the accepted sessions experience
an average waiting time of less than 0.1 seconds, while the minimum
acceptable performance level is set to 1 second.

\vspace{-5mm}

\begin{figure}[ht!]
\centering
\subfigure[]{
\includegraphics[width=0.45\textwidth]{qos.eps}
\label{fig:qos}
}
\subfigure[]{
\includegraphics[width=0.45\textwidth]{pdf_session_4_wt.eps}
\label{fig:pdf}
}
\caption{[Experiment 1] Other metrics: (a) SLA met for different policies, and
(b) Probability density function (PDF) of the observed average waiting
time for type 4 sessions, $\delta_{4} = 0.2$.}
\label{fig:other}
\end{figure}

\vspace{-5mm}

The second result concerns a similar experiment, except that now charges and
related penalties differ between each job type:  $c_1= 10$, $c_2=20$, $c_3=30$
and $c_4=40$, $c_i=r_i$. The main difference compared to the previous
experiment is that now it is more profitable to run, say, jobs of type 4  than
jobs of type 3. Figure~\ref{fig:chap8_ 4_exp_c_neq_r} shows that the maximum
achievable revenues are now much higher than before in virtue of the higher
charge values for type 2, 3 and 4 streams. Moreover, the `Long Run' heuristic
still performs very well, while the difference between the `Current State' and
the `Threshold' policies is about 25\%.

\begin{figure}[!ht]
\vspace{-5mm}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{4_exp_c_neq_r.eps}
\caption{[Experiment 2] Observed revenues when $c_1=10$,$c_2=20$, $c_3=30$,$c_4=40$, $r_i=c_i$.}
\label{fig:chap8_ 4_exp_c_neq_r}
\end{center}
\vspace{-10mm}
\end{figure}

Next, we depart from the assumption that traffic is Markovian. A higher
variability is introduced by generating jobs with hyperexponentially
distributed service times: 80\% of them are short, with mean service time  0.2
seconds, and 20\% are much longer, with mean service time 4.2 seconds.  The
overall average service time is still 1 second, but the squared
coefficient of variation of service times is now 6.15, {\it i.e.}. $cs^{2} =
6.15$. The aim of increasing variability is to make the system less predictable
and decision making more difficult. The charges are the same as in Figure~\ref{fig:chap8_ 4_exp_c_neq_r}, however if
the SLA is not met, users get back twice what they paid, {\it i.e.}, $r_i =
2c_i$. The most notable feature of the graph shown in  Figure~\ref{fig:chap8_
4_hexp_2c_eq_r} is that now the revenues obtained by the `Admit all' policy
become negative as soon as the load starts increasing because penalties are
very punitive. On the other hand, the behavior of the three policies is
similar. The `Current State' and `Long Run' algorithms performs worse than in
the Markovian case (with $r_i = 2c_i$, not shown), while the wise `Thre\-shold'
heuristic performs almost the same way.
Similar results were obtained in the case of bursty arrivals. They are not
shown here for the sake of space.

\begin{figure}[!ht]
\vspace{-8mm}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{4_hexp_2c_eq_r.eps}
\caption{[Experiment 3] Observed revenues for different policies and two-phase
hyperexponentially distributed service times: $cs^{2}_{i}=6.15$, $r_i= 2c_i$,
charges as in Figure~\ref{fig:chap8_ 4_exp_c_neq_r}.}
\label{fig:chap8_ 4_hexp_2c_eq_r}
\end{center}
\vspace{-10mm}
\end{figure}

\section{Conclusions and Future Work}
\label{sec:conclusions}

\vspace{-2mm}

In this paper we have presented a SLA-driven Service Provisioning System running jobs subject to QoS contracts. The system uses a utility function whose aim is to maximize the average revenue earned per unit time. We have demonstrated that policy decisions such as server allocations and admission control can have a significant effect on the revenue.
The experiments we have discussed show that our system can successfully deal with session-based traffic under different traffic conditions.
Possible directions for future research include sharing a server among several types of services or expensive system reconfigurations, either in terms of money or time (Amazon EC2, for example, can take up to 10 minutes to launch a new instance). Also in order to further improve the efficiency of the available servers, a concurrency level higher than one could be used. Of course, since the SLAs are still in operation, it is not possible to change the concurrency level at random: instead, the same QoS level as if jobs were ran alone should be maintained. Finally, one might want to increase the capacity of a data center by allowing it to be composed by several clusters. Such clusters may belong to the same organization or to different entities.

\small

\noindent \textit{Acknowledgments}: we would like to thank the EU FP7 DEPLOY Project (Industrial deployment of system engineering methods providing high dependability and productivity). More details at http://www.deploy-project.eu/.

\bibliographystyle{abbrv}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


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text:
As Orphanages Close in Africa, Women Take On the Burden of Care
Child's rights advocates welcome a global turn away from placing abandoned children in institutions. But while most people agree that home care is best for children, much of that extra care is being taken on by women. Experts say men will need to step up to make community care feasible.
Written by Dominic Kirui Published on  June 11, 2018 Read time Approx. 5 minutes
Masinde pours a mixture of sesame seeds and groundnuts into boiled sugar to make "simsim," which she sells to make a living. But she fears the cost of raising children will force her to give up her business and move. Dominic Kirui
AREA FOUR, MATHARE – Volunteering in orphanages used to be a rite of passage for young, wealthy people from the Western world who wanted to "do good" in Africa, while celebrities such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie famously adopted African orphans from institutions. But now, public opinion is turning against institutionalized care for orphans, as NGOs and governments shift focus to family and community care.
That's partially because many "orphans" in institutions are not orphans at all. A widely used, but hard to verify, statistic says that 80 percent of children in orphanages worldwide still have a living parent.
And orphanages are widely accepted as being bad for children. A 2014 study by UNICEF and the Kenyan government showed that institutional care has a negative impact on the social, emotional, cognitive and intellectual development of the 2.4 million orphans in the country, 30-45 percent of whom end up in charitable institutions.
Rwanda has led the charge in transitioning from institutional to foster care. The government has successfully closed down many of its children's homes and hopes to end orphanage care entirely by 2020, and is helping integrate the children in families and the community for care.
Epaphrodite Nsabimana, a Rwandan scholar who also works for British charity Hope and Homes for Children, says that institutional care for children is unwanted, unnecessary and damaging, pointing to years of research that back this up.
"It is like using an umbrella in a house with a leaking roof; it's not a solution to care for children," Nsabimana says.
The Kenyan government is considering following Rwanda's example and closing its orphanages. But the movement away from institutional care has implications for the already disproportionate burden of unpaid care shouldered by women in many countries.
In the Mathare slum of Kenya, 54-year-old Ruth Masinde is raising her three grandchildren, aged 10, 11 and 13, alone. They were abandoned by her daughter seven years ago, and Masinde has not seen or heard from her daughter since she left.
"She left them with my mother who is 90 years old back home in Bungoma and I received calls from my sisters who asked me to come for my grandchildren as my mother was too old to care for them," Masinde, who runs a business making and selling sesame snacks, says.
Among Kenya's Luhya tribe, care for orphaned or abandoned children is provided by extended family: Institutional care is seen as a last resort when a child's family cannot be traced.
Masinde sweeps outside her house, which she shares with her three grandchildren, who were abandoned by their parents. (Dominic Kirui)
When a child is put into community care, either with their own family or a foster family, the job of raising the child inevitably falls to women. And as Masinde says, it comes with an extra cost.
She says taking on the care of her grandchildren has not been easy after a lifetime spent as a single mother. "It feels to me like I am starting a new family of my own, several years after my three daughters moved out of my house," she says.
Her grandchildren have so far been supported to go to school by Tushinde Children's Trust, a United Kingdom-based charity that works in her area, but she says that she has been informed that the support will come to an end this year, and she will need to work and pay for their school fees herself.
"I will just be forced to take them to my rural home in Bungoma because I will not afford to make that amount of money and pay their fees when I am struggling to provide their food now," Masinde says.
Megan Wright, the founder and director of Tushinde, says she started the organization after she noticed that the majority of the cases of families in crisis are of women who are left with the task of bringing up children if a husband leaves or a relative dies.
Through its family support program, Tushinde now supports women who have taken on the care of orphans and abandoned children by paying school fees for the children, providing business training and giving grants, helping the women establish businesses through which they independently support their families.
"Every family referred needs a social worker to professionally plan their care and children need better education, as they are mostly behind in school and sometimes have behavioral problems," Wright says.
"Financial support for every family is also important to ensure children don't go hungry. There should also be forums where the families get together to support each other and also health education and life-skills classes are provided by the social workers and specialized trainers."
Nsabimana says governments can make sure that the move away from institutions does not disproportionately affect women.
"By investing in early childhood development and family-strengthening services instead of institutions, many more children and families can be helped to become self-reliant and positively contribute to the society," he said in an email.
He adds that it is up to foster fathers to step up and provide care for children.
"Family- and community-based care promotes the involvement of all relevant adults (mother, father or guardians) in caring for the child by fulfilling equitably their parental roles and responsibilities.
"Responsible fatherhood, which focuses on the development of healthy father-child relationships, is encouraged and promoted. During the family preparation stage of deinstitutionalization, we ensure that both males and females develop relevant positive parenting skills. Governments are also encouraged to develop gender-sensitive policies to promote gender equality in fulfilling parental responsibilities."
A few blocks away from Masinde's home is the family of Martin Aero and Hellen Akoth, who live with four of their biological children as well as their 11-year-old nephew, Edwin. Edwin moved in with the family when his father, Aero's brother, died and his mother could not take care of him due to mental health problems.
Hellen Akoth holds her sleeping son at their home in Mathare. (Dominic Kirui)
Akoth says that their lives have changed, and her business has suffered, since Edwin came to stay with them. "I used to run a business just across the street selling French fries but since then, we have to pay Edwin's school fees and those of three of our children."
She had to use her capital money for food and other household needs. She later realized that she had spent all her profits, and couldn't run the business anymore.
"I had to close it down and fully depend on my husband," Akoth says.
Aero works as a mason, but jobs are not always available and sometimes his family goes hungry. But that does not mean he does not want to look after his brother's children.
"Despite this, I also plan to go back home and bring the rest of my brother's children to stay with me because I am told that they do not go to school now and I cannot sit and watch that happen," Aero says. "They are my blood and I will strive to always give them a good life."
Kenya Orphanages Rwanda
In Kenya, Having a Child With Cerebral Palsy Can Mean Losing Your Job
When Having Children With a Disability Means Raising Them Alone
Meet the Women Catching Their Share of Kenya's Fishing Industry
In Rural Kenya, Women Swap Charity for Tea Boxes
'I Do Not Feel Free': The Women Trapped in Domestic Work in Egypt
Exploited and Unprotected: The Life of Pakistan's Home-Based Workers
For Ethiopian Women, Work Abroad Is Opportunity and Risk of a Lifetime
Kenyan Women Pooling Their Cash to Become Landlords
Still No Guarantee of an Equal Share in Divorce for Kenyan Women
The Women Selling Beauty Secrets From a Region Best Known for Boko Haram
South Sudanese Women Defy Society to Take On Men's Work
One is a motorcycle taxi driver; the other a motorcycle mechanic. Meet two South Sudanese women challenging norms and prejudices by working jobs that are usually the reserve of men. April 3, 2017
Bearing the Burden: Why Clean Water Is Vital to Elevating Women and Girls out of Poverty
To End Sexual Slavery of India's Devadasi, Economic Empowerment is Key
Deeply Talks: Advocating for Widows' Rights
Dominic Kirui
Dominic Kirui is a freelance journalist currently living in Nairobi, covering climate change, food security, culture, conflict, politics, gender and global development.
What We Want Out of the G7: Four Gender Experts Weigh In
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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text:
Primary election results certified; bumper turnout reported
LAS CRUCES - Doña Ana County commissioners on Tuesday certified the results of a primary election canvass that took place in recent days.
Primary election results certified; bumper turnout reported LAS CRUCES - Doña Ana County commissioners on Tuesday certified the results of a primary election canvass that took place in recent days. Check out this story on lcsun-news.com: http://lcsun.co/1tpDHq7
Diana Alba Soular, Las Cruces Sun-News Published 6:54 p.m. MT June 14, 2016
Primary day in New Mexico is June 7(Photo: Niyazz, Getty Images/iStockphoto)
"It was an excellent turnout for Doña Ana County, and probably the largest turnout that we have ever had in a primary election," Doña Ana County Deputy Clerk Scott Krahling said.
In all, 24,247 voters cast ballots in the June 7 election, according to clerk's office numbers. Of registered voters across all parties, this was a 23 percent turnout. However, only Republicans and Democrats were eligible to vote in the primary election. Among those two parties only, it was a 30 percent turnout.
In 2014, 10 percent of all registered voters showed up to the primary election. In 2012, 12 percent turned out.
In the election, 16,760 Democrats cast ballots, according to Krahling. Republicans who voted totaled 7,487.
Krahling said the number of people voting early is growing each election. In addition, a number of "firsts" happened this year, he said. A total of 38 voters age 17 cast ballots. Memorial Day voting took place for the first time and 460 people voted that day. In all, 1,875 residents registered online through a new online registration process offered by the state. He credited election staff and poll workers for a "successful" election and said the office is looking at ways to improve for the general election.
Commissioners voted 5-0 to certify the results. For races with geographical boundaries outside of Doña Ana County, the state must still sign off upon the election results as part of its vote canvass.
Diana Alba Soular may be reached at 575-541-5443, dalba@lcsun-news.com or @AlbaSoular on Twitter.
Read or Share this story: http://lcsun.co/1tpDHq7


My sister and I decided to do a little photo shoot with the kiddies today. Sorry there are so many, but this is the best way for me to share these pictures with daddy.
I will forever remember the day this sweet boy came into our world! He has brought so much joy to our lives. Dirk is such a sweet boy! He loves to play with his sisters and will do anything to play outside. It is the cutest thing, at night when the girls are in bed, he will crawl back to their door and scratch like a dog on their door. Just begging to get in and play. Every morning Mayzie asks when he is going to wake up. The minute she hears him make a sound, she goes running in his room and gives him snuggles.
Curt is such a proud daddy when it comes to his little boy. He worked very hard to make sure Dirks first word was BALL. Dirk is always super excited when daddy walks in the door from work. I still haven't worried about getting Dirk to sleep through the night. I just enjoy our alone time. I love watching Dirk grow and love watching my girls interact with him. I look forward to many memories to come.
Seeing as Dirk's first word was ball and he loves to play with balls, I had to make a ball cake.
He wanted to get his hands on that cake so bad!!


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If the doldrums of seasonal affective disorder have you wishing you were hopping the next flight out of Dodge, there's no better time to start planning a restorative cold-weather escape. The good news: There's a getaway for every personality, from sun worshipers looking to fly south for the winter to snow lovers seeking the next adrenaline rush. Here are seven of the best winter weekend getaways in the U.S.
Home to the Sundance Film Festival, Park City is a sybaritic winter escape favored by celebrities and trendsetters with a penchant for trailside hijinks. Make like them and drop your bags at Washington School House, a luxury boutique hotel in an 1889 school building in the heart of downtown. Skiers looking to avoid snowboarders take the free shuttle to Deer Valley Resort, then sip their après-ski cocktails at High West, a legendary western-style whiskey distillery in Old Town with an intimate wood-clad bar. You'll need a dinner reservation at Handle, an elegant dining room that turns out cold-weather specialties (bison short rib, squash and parmesan bisque). Looking for something more low-key? The beers at No Name Saloon are best served with a side of buffalo burgers.
New Mexico's capital has a reputation for New Age mysticism, but the truth is there's something for everyone in Santa Fe. That's especially true in the winter, when colder temperatures creep into the surrounding Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Outdoorsy types can hit the slopes on a daytrip to the ski town of Taos, an hour and a half away. Art connoisseurs beeline to the Georgia O'Keeffe museum, and foodies flock to sample the gumbo at the Cajun-inspired Trinity Kitchen food truck, conveniently parked outside of the immersive Meow Wolf art installation. At the end of the day, head back to your room at Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi, a cozy 58-room refuge that's decorated with hand-made local textiles and artifacts, kiva fireplaces, and warm wood ceilings.
Hidden between the Teton and Gros Ventre mountains, Jackson Hole is an outdoor enthusiast's paradise. Throughout the year, the 19th-century frontier town plays the backdrop to every manner of sport, from hiking and fly-fishing to horseback riding, but the town seems to hit its stride in the winter, when skiing and dogsledding take over. Relive the region's rugged past at the Anvil Hotel, an updated 1950s motel that looks like it could have lodged Jackson's founders—albeit a bit more stylishly. If over-the-top indulgence is more your speed, look no further than Amangani, a lavish mountain resort from one of the world's most luxurious hotel brands. Then start your day with the house-made breakfast pastries (or, perhaps, the taleggio honey toast) at Persephone Bakery before making your way to the gondola in Teton Village.
The spectacular foliage gets Vermont top billing as an autumn getaway, but the northern resort town of Stowe has a reputation as the ultimate New England winter destination. Witness the picturesque downtown, which summons all the nostalgia of a Norman Rockwell painting with its towering steeple and cute shops, or the snowcapped Green Mountains that beckon skiers with their wooded trails. Bed down at Field Guide, a boutique stay whose 30 Scandi-Mod rooms are outfitted with papier-mâché taxidermy and whimsical patterned wallpapers, then hit the slopes. Not much for downhill racing? Don't miss the Tyrolean charm of the Trapp Family Lodge, owned by the family that inspired the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic The Sound of Music.
There's no wrong time to visit Las Vegas—the show always goes on—but you'll get the best deals on airfare and hotel rooms during the colder months. It's not uncommon to find rooms at blowout hotels like The Venetian for half of what you'd pay during the peak season. For the ideal trip, snag a room at Wynn, where you can party like a jetsetter for less, then venture off the Strip to experience Sin City's more authentic delights. Temperatures during this time typically run in the 60s, making hiking daytrips to places like Red Rock Canyon and the Valley of Fire much more enjoyable than, say, during the dead of summer, when the mercury can register well over 100 degrees.
With its pastel facades and year-round greenery, New Orleans provides plenty of inspiration for beating the winter blues. The city comes on strong in the wrought-iron balconies, magnolia trees, and cobblestoned streets on view in romantic neighborhoods from Jackson Square and the Garden District to the French Quarter. Then there's the music, an eclectic mix of brass and bass best enjoyed at the legendary jazz venue Preservation Hall, not to mention the food; leaving without sampling the pillowy sweetness of the beignets at Café Du Monde is a cardinal sin. An ideal base for your warm-weather holiday: The Ace or for something less hipster and more old-world, the Henry Howard Hotel, a Greek Revival Mansion with Corinthian columns and wrought-iron balconies.
When the temperature drops, snowbirds who prefer to fly south for the winter would do well to make a pit stop in Charleston. The city offers all of the hedonistic pleasures of its northern counterparts, perhaps best experienced through the diverse and much-lauded food scene. You'll find Asian-inspired specialties (think green fish curry, Sichuan eggplant, and Vietnamese shrimp crepes) at Xao Bao Biscuit; low-country staples like wood-fired oysters and slow-smoked ribs are the draw at Husk, the restaurant that started it all. Sleep off your food coma at The Vendue, billed as the city's first art hotel thanks to its roster of rotating exhibits, then wake up to shop till you drop, whether in the ubiquitous antiques stores on King Street or at Fritz Porter, an emporium for contemporary homewares and textiles.


Hi, new here. Advice on pleaser domina?
Well, Pleasers have always been a fairly well designed/rugged brand. So, I don't think you can go wrong starting out with them. Most styles are not pure leather, but that is OK. I don't know about their sizing except to say that they usually have larger sizes for us guys. So, you would want to be sure they are returnable/exchangeable if fit becomes an issue.
How would you approach the topic if you wanted to buy a new car or a new sofa?
It sounds like your making something super simple into something complicated and instead of having your own goals of what you want her to do, just ask her straight out "How would you feel about trying some 6" heels?"
Soon as you ask, you may well get a direct answer yes/no or an "I'll think about it" and go from there.
Just be clear that it should not be "YOUR" end goal, it should be something you both enjoy sharing, and lets avoid the "fetish" please, this is not a sexual website.
Tech is right. That being said, there are ways to approach this in casual ways.
- - The shopping technique where you point out interesting styles you think would look good on her.
- - Thumb through her Vogue magazine during a random conversation and point out heels (and other outfits) you think might look good on her.
By doing this, you may get an idea of what she will or won't wear, and why.


Myelin is an electrically insulating material that forms a sheath around the axons of neurons in the central nervous system, and increases the speed at which impulses are propagated. Diseases related to the damage of myelin are referred to as demyelinating disorders. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the most prevalent demyelinating condition with recurrent attacks of inflammation of the central nervous system that can result in accumulated disability including blindness and paralysis over time1. However, it is increasingly recognised that there are patients with demyelination who have a different mechanism of action to MS. The identification of an antibody targeting the aquaporin-4 (AQP4) water channel in 2005, in a subgroup patients with demyelination, has been crucial for the distinction of these patients from those with MS2. The differentiation of patients with AQP4 antibodies and MS is essential as the treatment regimes and outcomes vary significantly between the two diagnoses. However, there remain many patients who are AQP4 antibody-negative3 and also do not fulfil diagnostic criteria for MS, suggestive of other causes which are yet to be identified. Antibodies to myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG), a protein found in myelin, have been described since 2007 in some children with demyelination, but until recently were not previously found in adults4.
In the last three years and as the subject of my PhD, our group has been instrumental in identifying a subgroup of adult patients with demyelination who have antibodies to MOG5. MOG antibodies are rapidly emerging as a novel diagnostic biomarker of inflammation of the optic nerve resulting in blindness (optic neuritis), and inflammation of the spinal cord resulting in paralysis (transverse myelitis). Our research team is currently the only group in Australasia that offers the gold standard diagnostic laboratory test (a cellbased assay analysed by flow cytometry) for detecting MOG antibodies in patient serum and provides a report to clinicians, and I am responsible for initiating and providing this service for adult patients nationally. Two of my first author publications were the first descriptions in the literature specifically highlighting the association of MOG antibodies in adults with simultaneous bilateral optic neuritis and detailing the clinical phenotype of these patients5,6, with subsequent studies by other groups confirming our findings7,8. Another one of my first-author publications9 was the first original report in the literature to directly compare the radiological characteristics of optic neuritis in patients with MOG antibodies, AQP4 antibodies, and MS, and identify features which would help clinicians make an earlier and more accurate diagnosis for their patients. My publications have therefore been among the first to identify MOG antibodyassociated demyelination as a truly separate entity to MS and AQP4 antibody-positive demyelination, with a unique clinical and radiological profile. Patients with MOG antibody-associated demyelination can have relapsing disease that can result in blindness and paralysis. There is currently no consensus in the literature on the best way to treat this newly identified group of patients. As outlined in this application, I intend to define the clinical course of these patients, identify the best and most effective treatment regimes to manage them, and ultimately improve their outcomes and minimise disability. Having trained in specialised laboratory techniques during my PhD, I am equipped to design and conduct research exploring pathophysiologic mechanisms of antibody-associated disease. Having undergone my training in clinical neurology and with subspecialty clinical exposure, I have built my expertise in the diagnosis and management of these complex patients. I am therefore in a unique position to execute translational and clinically relevant research in the field of antibody-associated neurological diseases. My publications thus far have provided the first descriptions of the clinical and radiological phenotype of patients with MOG antibody-associated demyelination, and have already influenced clinical practice by assisting physicians to make an earlier diagnosis and promote rapid initiation of immunotherapy. My published research has therefore already improved health service delivery and outcomes for patients in Australia and internationally, and I believe this innovative proposed research project will significantly contribute to this goal.


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Berryfin International provides a variety of partnership programs rewarding the introduction of active clients. Please contact our Partnerships team using the details below to discuss your requirements.
To find out more about any of our Partnership schemes please contact us on +44 203 868 9727 or partnerships@berryfinex.com for more details.


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Committee / Managers
Hurling Teams
Total Honours
Club Notes - 18th July
Jack The Joker
Our ever popular Jack the Joker fundraiser continues this Sunday night in Crotty's Bar where the jackpot is €3600 as on Sunday night Danny McGrath was drawn out of the drum and chose card number 7 which when turned wasn't the joker but he did win €50. The Walsh family and Fran Walsh won €25 each.
Intermediate Football
Our intermediate football team played Sliabh gCua on Friday night last in their final league game of the Championship. Thanks to a hard earned win here they now advance to the semi final of the Championship.
On Sunday night last we played The Nire in the County Championship in Fraher Field. Having held the lead at half time we managed to maintain this lead up to the full time whistle. This win means we now qualify for the quarter finals of the Championship and the final of the County League.
TEAM: S. ENRIGHT, C. McCARTHY, J. ELSTED, S. BRIGGS, D. McGRATH, C. PRUNTY, B. LOOBY, J. HURNEY, J. BERESFORD, N. MONTGOMERY, G. HURNEY, S. WHELAN BARRETT, M. FERNCOMBE, P. HURNEY, D. LOOBY.
SUBS: S. O'HARE, T. LOOBY, J. O'MAHONY.
Junior Hurling
This Friday night we play Colligan in Fraher Field at 7:30pm in the Western Junior A championship whilst on Sunday morning our Junior C team play An Rinn in Bushy Park at 12 pm.
Booking of Pitches
We would like to remind all our coaches to please ensure that they book the pitches with Michael O'Donovan before training.
Club Bingo
Our club bingo session continues in the CBS Hall this Sunday night with a jackpot of €400.
Fixtures (2)
Juvenile (300)
County Senior Football Championship Group B Table
Club Notes - 4th July
County Senior Hurling Championship Group A Table
Abbeyside / Ballinacourty GAA Club was formed in 1967 as a result of the amalgamation of Abbeyside Hurling and Football Clubs and Ballinacourty Football Club. It is situated within the Parish of Abbeyside, Ballinroad and Garranbane. Located on the eastern side of the River Colligan, it forms the northern and eastern shorelines of Dungarvan Harbour from Abbeyside Church to Ballinacourty Lighthouse
Abbeyside/Ballinacourty GAA Club has been growing at a dramatic pace over the past 10 years with the population of our parish increasing rapidly. We must ensure that we have the best facilities for all our players. We want to ensure that the next generation have the facilities that they need and deserve. We are asking supporters and friends to support this project over the next five years.
Past generations have had their visions for the future of our club. These are our current aims and with these achieved we hope to hand on the club to future generations in the same healthy state it was passed onto us.
Abbeyside/Ballinacourty GAA Club, Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, Ireland.
Website by: Déise Design


When Auto Trader needed to find Java Developers – the rarest unicorn of all – and bring their brand into the digital age, they knew who just to call. But they didn't expect TMP to turn up in a mobile-tweeting-DJ-steampunk-disco machine.
Hertfordshire has a reputation for delivering innovation that works. In 2010, it developed the very first multi-agency safeguarding hub. A year later, the council unveiled the first joint police/local authority Child Protection team. Now it's being backed by the Government's Innovation Fund to pilot a new model for social care – one that could pave the way for national reform. By creating single holistic family social care teams, Hertfordshire would address the domestic abuse, substance misuse and mental health issues that lead to children going into care. All they needed was the attraction strategy that would find these specialists.
Sainsbury's Data and Analytics Centre of Excellence, is a newly-restructured team built on delivering industry-leading insight.
Sainsbury's wanted to attract more thinkers, doers and risk takers – members of the data and analytics community looking for a new challenge. People who want to see how they can personally add value – and see the tangible results of their work. So how do you reach creative, inquisitive minds looking for something they won't find anywhere else? The first step is to ask TMP to help.
There's a lot more to the AA than roadside recovery – and yet, candidates are 'sleephunting', coming to the AA for the same old jobs. TMP was brought on board to help transform the candidates' experience and their business awareness.
The careers website is the most popular destination for jobseeker research so a great place to start. In partnership with the AA, we wanted to create a vastly different experience to the one canidates would ever expect.
Teach First is the largest graduate recruiter in the UK. Currently there's a teacher recruitment crisis which has seen pupil numbers rise dramatically while the number of graduates has dropped precipitously. TMP were asked to help address this balance. So we created and promoted an award-winning video for Teach First, which directly drove up interest and leads amongst potential teachers. The video was a great asset but we needed to get the promotion of it in front of the right audience.
Nuffield Health is Britain's largest not for profit healthcare business. They reinvest all profit into their staff, technology and facilities, in order to provide accessible, innovative ways for people to get and stay healthy.
They have built a pioneering, integrated network of more than 15,000 employees – all delivering services that go way beyond traditional healthcare provision. When vacancies come up they are often looking for candidates who are in great demand. So, TMP where asked to ensure their new careers website was the first one potential candidates would go to when they're looking for their next opportunity.
Seadrill is a world leader in offshore deepwater drilling. The company has some 5,000 skilled and highly competent employees, representing around 65 nationalities, operating in 15 countries on five continents.
Seadrill wanted to build a strategy that would help the organisation create long-term engagement with candidates and their existing audience to keep Seadrill at the forefront of their minds during quiet periods, as well as being recognised as an employer of choice during busy periods.
TMP was brought in to operate and community manage Seadrill's social profiles, ensure Seadrill have a continued presence on social media.
South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) is a highly regarded Mental Health Trust with over 4,500 staff, serving a community of 1.1 million and supporting almost 800,000 patient contacts across four hospital sites.
Historically they relied on standard nursing press and local print for recruitment campaigns, advertising on an ad-hoc basis which delivered inadequate results. The problem was obvious but the solution required some careful consideration from TMP.
At Transport for London (TfL) it is all about keeping London moving. It takes more than 30,000 people every day to achieve this as well as 210 new Graduates and Interns every year. The variety of projects they can be involved in, and have an impact on, is vast.
Joining any one of their programmes is a brilliant opportunity for both men and women, but there's still a perception – reflected by applications – that is a male dominated career. So TMP were asked to create TfL's Graduate & Apprentice campaign to help redress this balance.
Nuffield Health is one of the leading not for profit healthcare organisations within the UK. They run a network of hospitals, medical clinics, fitness and wellbeing clubs and diagnostic units offering connected healthcare provision to their customers and patients. TMP has worked with Nuffield Health for several years supporting tactical recruitment activity and leading on their employer brand strategy and development.
As part of the University of Manchester's strategic vision of becoming a top 25 global research university by 2020, an international recruitment campaign was designed to support this target. TMP were asked to establish their brand and raise their profile to help attract 100 exceptional academics from across the world whilst building the profile of the university.
Surrey Police needed to hire a number of experienced detectives. Research and insight indicated that Surrey was perceived as a sleepy region with few crime issues. TMP created a documentary style video, involving real detectives, which highlighted the reality and shared specific stories that would appeal to and attract our target audiences. The video was shared through social media, generating a high level of interest and hires.
Over the last 15 years Teach First have helped find, train and support people to become brilliant Teachers and inspire the young people who need them the most. Attracting people to this mission is not easy and needs great content to attract the right people. This is exactly the type of challenge that TMP really enjoy and we created an award-winning video which directly drove up interest and leads amongst potential Teachers.
Rentalcars.com, as the name suggests, is a car rental portal based in Manchester. The company has grown quickly from four people in 2006 to a multi-million pound business, with over 900 employees. It was recently acquired in 2010 by the Priceline Group (owners of Booking.com).
They're now a car hire booking portal conducting price comparisons and bookings with customers in 167 countries. As the parent organisation looked to expand, they needed to position this successful global organisation as an attractive employer. TMP were asked to help because of our experience in understanding and communicating an employer brand through digital channels.
The AA could see an opportunity to add significant additional capacity to an existing contact centre in the Midlands. However, before they put plans into action, they wanted to understand if this location and the talent available was able to support a much larger site alongside a shift away from customer service skills to more sales orientated roles. So they teamed up with TMP to find the answers.
KPMG wanted to develop a series of specialist sessions for specific graduate programmes which they were finding difficult to fill with a pipeline of diverse candidates. The programmes were in Deal Advisory, Audit and Technology.
The sessions were three hour events held at a number of universities across the country. These events would provide potential applicants with an insight into the day to day life of working in these roles.
IMI is a specialist engineering company, who design, manufacture and service highly engineered products that control the precise movement of fluids. They employs some 11,000 people, has manufacturing facilities in more than 20 countries and operates a global service network. When they needed a comprehensive global graduate recruitment campaign, IMI knew who to team up with – TMP. We provided support as part of a total talent solution to deliver a high quality candidate experience and efficient programme to fill these key roles. This included everything from recruitment marketing and campus promotion right through to candidate management and assessment.
Every year Her Majesty's Treasury (HMT) recruits up to 150 graduates into their Graduate Policy Adviser programme. Being able to work on and influence policies which effect a nation is an attractive proposition for graduates. This meant that they needed help to find the very best cadndidates from nearly 2,500 applications. TMP were the ideal partner to make the recruitment campaign process easier.
As part of the Government's Energy Company Smart Meter roll out SSE had a talent challenge. They needed to hire 1,500 Smart Meter Engineers in a short time-frame when all the energy companies are looking for the same skills and people. A long term client of TMP, SSE turned to their Talent Solutions Partner to share the problem and out source the project.
We have worked with Virgin Media since 2013 delivering a full RPO offering for their volume recruitment. As part of the recruitment process, we conduct telephone interviews for 14 different roles, each with its own telephone interview script. We currently conduct approximately 2,300 telephone interviews each month.
TMP has supported Virgin Media – one of the UK's volume recruiters – for a number of years. Together, we have worked across the full spectrum of branding and resourcing activity from the development of their EVP, design and build of their careers site and refer a friend site as well as the delivery of thousands of hires through an outsourced model backed up by offers and onboarding.
A part of a global business this specialist aerospace business in the North West, Safran Aircelle, needed a partner that could help transform their recruitment processes. When they were looking for high levels of engagement with the technical line managers, they realised TMP was the right partner for the job because we knew that we would be able to source engineering professionals and nurtured them through the process. This contract was a relatively low volume RPO but one that covered a number of highly technical scarce skill sets.
For over 320 years Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) has been at the heart of the British economy – making a difference to the lives of customers, businesses and communities.
When it came time to undertake detailed job analysis as part of a wider competency framework project, LBG teamed up with TMP to gain the best insights. Our Occupational Psychologists were tasked with undertaking the painstaking work that then builds into tools to drive efficiency and better selection and performance.
Rental Cars as the name suggests, is a car rental portal based in Manchester. The company has grown quickly from four people in 2006 to a multi-million pound business, with over 900 employees. With so many roles, Rental Cars wanted to truly understanding how the motivational fit and core competencies of a role so that they could hire the very best candidates and reduce attrition. So TMP's Occupational Psychologists were asked to uncover these astute insights and where able to make a really positive impact on these challenges.
After a period of limited recruitment activity for the West Midlands Police, TMP were asked to reshape and execute a recruitment campaign for Police Officers. We were excited to use our collective capabilities to create and deliver a total talent solution using assessment design and delivery alongside candidate management. Critical to the success of this project was the design and implementation of quality, robust and unbiased selection tools.
The NHS is an organisation with 1.3 million employees, a budget of £100 billion a year and consistently popular with graduates. So much so, they needed to find the top 100 ambitious, motivated leaders to join their Graduate Management Training Scheme from 16,500+ applications.
When the NHS realised they needed to create a new graduate assessment process to align to a new leadership model which needed to achieve challenging targets, encourage diversity and give an excellent candidates experience. They knew who to team up with; TMP, because we could deliver consistently high quality results no matter how many people applied.
"Find Harry Potter" was Virgin Money's brief to us. Our task was to find a creative entrepreneur to lead the bank into bold new territory with the role of Head of Innovation. And 'The world's most creative job interview' was our headline-grabbing, experiential assessment solution. It led to both the discovery of an exceptional leader, and the nationwide adoption of a new employer brand based assessment model.
If you are a tech company, hiring digital talent is tough but when you are a part of the civil service that no one has heard of then the challenge just gets bigger. The Parliamentary Digital Service (PDS) works with the House of Commons, the House of Lords and Parliament staff on their IT and digital needs. TMP were brought in to design and execute a talent solution that would build awareness of their existence and build talent pipeline to fill their roles short and medium term.
The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust employs 8,500 people and has the vision to become an Accountable Care Organisation (ACO). This is the catalyst for a large scale transformation in the way that the Trust operates. Key to achieving this is having the right people in the right places, and motivational leadership. So, when it came time to find an inspirational Director of Workforce, they teamed up with TMP.
This project combined our capabilities into a fit for purpose talent solution using Executive Search followed by a customised assessment activity, ensuring that the skills and cultural fit were the just right.
This is not your Dad's old magazine! Digital dynamo Auto Trader needed an employer site that would address embedded misconceptions. The site especially needed to appeal to hands on coders, and attract more women.
We developed a branded look and feel designed to educate and engage, bringing the culture to life, and giving a diverse audience (from coders to salespeople to graduates) easy access to content relevant to them.
Our solution merges clean, creative design with adventurous copywriting, showcasing Auto Trader's awesomeness. The site majors on people and storytelling while keeping job content well signposted and reducing clicks to apply.
We were asked to help the London College of Fashion to understand what factors might be preventing them from achieving a more diverse workforce and advise on how to start addressing them.
National Grid is international electricity and gas company based in the UK and north-eastern US. They play a vital role in connecting millions of people safely, reliably and efficiently to the energy they use. They're focused on delivering clean, sustainable and affordable energy.
In terms of business-as-usual activity and following specific stages of organisational development, National Grid needed to identify an effective means of capturing insight from departing employees. This had historically been challenging in terms of uptake and cost, which presented a risk for present and future performance. So TMP were asked to find the best solution.
TMP helped Creative Scotland to become the first official body to meet the government's call for the boards of all public bodies to have a 50:50 gender split by 2020 through a targeted campaign.
Essex County Council's was spending £850k annually on public notice advertising. But, budget pressures mean that they are always looking for new ways to work smarter and more efficiently. So they asked TMP to see if there were any ways they could cut back. We were able to save in excess £1.5m over three years.
KPMG in the UK is a leading provider of professional services, including audit, tax and advisory specialisms – delivering integrated solutions to our clients' issues. As an Apprentice at KPMG, students can access a FTSE 100 business straight after leaving school or college, while earning a salary, gaining skills, confidence and professional qualifications.
As school leavers consider their options they want to understand what's on offer and TMP were asked to make sure that the KPMG Apprenticeship opportunity is front of mind by setting up a campaign on Google that would drive students to the website to explore more.
TMP were asked to help Virgin Media improve its scores for these questions.
Unison Scotland reports that the 2017-18 draft budget will cut the local government spend by £327m, it's more important than ever that priority is given to all areas where reduced expenditure can be implemented.
TMP were awarded sole provider status on the Scottish Government Recruitment and Public Information Notice Framework because we were able to deliver savings to all the parties that engage in the partnership. The benefits of Public Notice services from TMP are being realised across Scotland and more potential exists for new partners.
With 3,600 qualified experienced social worker vacancies across the UK, employers have been forced to turn to expensive agency workers; UK councils spend a total of £300 million on agency social workers annually. Recent research conducted by TMP Worldwide and Community Care provided insight that the shortage is only likely to increase, with 43% of social workers considering moving out of the profession. The supply of Social Workers is not expected to match demand until 2022. TMP were brought in to help Coventry City Council to cut through a crowded market place and attract some of the hardest to reach candidates.
Why not join our talented team?


Immigration is not my favorite issue. And Sen. Brownback is quite obviously a good man. But for him to claim that he should be the darling of the conservative base even while he bucks it on immigration, that he was basically born marching for life even though he has morphed on the issue just like Governor Romney, and that he should be commander-in-chief even though his current position on Iraq is deeply troubling–that's a bit much.
UPDATE: Here's more on the conversion issue from reader/blogger Bill.


Welcome to RTC Magazine Digital subscriber! On this page, you can find the latest RTC Magazine issues in a downloadable PDF format or the ability to view it online. Both of these will enable you to search through the entire magazine, view all of the latest product advertisements and keep a digital archive of your favorite issues.


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