children affected by HIV and AIDS Globally, an estimated 15.2 million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. In countries where the AIDS epidemic has struck hardest, traditional family and community coping mechanisms for children are under considerable strain. 1 Women and older people often bear the bulk of the caring. This is particularly evident in sub-Saharan Africa, where children who have lost one or both parents often live in households headed by older carers who have low levels of education and are thus unlikely to have a regular source of income. 2 For children affected by HIV and AIDS, the risks of poverty and loss of livelihood are compounded by the risk of losing family care- their first line of protection. While cash transfers alone are not the solution, they can be an important element of an overall care package for children. 3 Social protection measures – including social transfers (cash, in-kind [food] or vouchers), family support services, and alternative care – can help mitigate the impact of HIV and AIDS by reducing poverty and family separation. Integrated social protection, in line with the internationally agreed Framework for

The installation of high-speed networks using optical fiber and high bandwidth messsage forwarding gateways is changing the physical capabilities of information systems. These capabilities must be complemented with corresponding software systems advances to obtain a real benefit. Without smart

We present our research on active caching in the WWW. We drew some key conclusions on the service properties and its significance, according to the results of our analysis of the WWW content. These conclusions include the percentage values of the potentially outdated Web content in the overall Web content after an object's lifetime has passed. This paper provides reasons for using active caching; it may be of interest for researchers of the WWW and for Internet Service Providers.

We consider the problem of detecting communities or modules in networks, groups of vertices with a higher-than-average density of edges connecting them. Previous work indicates that a robust approach to this problem is the maximization of the benefit function known as “modularity ” over possible

, and a practical design for location-hidden services via rendezvous points. Tor works on the real-world Internet, requires no special privileges or kernel modifications, requires little synchronization or coordination between nodes, and provides a reasonable tradeoff between anonymity, usability

increasingly prominent as a strategy for attempting to improve simultaneously the productivity and the quality of the work experience of employees in contemporary organizations. Although the benefits of work redesign (or "job enrichment" or "job enlargement") are widely touted

Simple, stateless networking protocols provide a low-cost and predictable foundation upon which to build decentralised applications. Sensornets are complex, containing emergent behaviour; identifying protocols offering appropriate behaviour may be difficult. In this paper we evaluate the relative performance of gossiping protocol variants in non-ideal sensornets. We examine the extent to which a “standard ” gossiping protocol might be outperformed by variants of this standard, each specialised and optimised to mitigate anticipated problems. We categorise and measure the undesired behaviours that remain, as a foundation for future protocols which will address these specific issues. 1

in mental accounting activities. Three components of mental accounting receive the most attention. This first captures how outcomes are perceived and experienced, and how decisions are made and subsequently evaluated. The accounting system provides the inputs to be both ex ante and ex post cost-benefit

The most natural, compositional, way of modeling real-time systems uses a dense domain for time. The satis ability of timing constraints that are capable of expressing punctuality in this model, however, is known to be undecidable. We introduce a temporal language that can constrain the time

Abstract: Object-oriented programming languages (OOPLs like C++, Java, etc.) have established themselves in the development of complex software systems for more than a decade. With the integration of object-oriented concepts, object-relational database management systems (ORDBMSs) aim at supporting new generation software systems better and more efficiently. Facing the situation that nowadays more and more software development teams use OOPLs ‘on top of’ (O)RDBMSs, i. e., access (object-)relational databases from applications developed in OOPLs, this paper reports on our investigations on assessing the contribution of object-relational database technology to object-oriented software development. First, a conceptual examination shows that there is still a considerable gap between the object-relational paradigm (as represented by the SQL:1999 standard) and the object-oriented paradigm. Second, empirical studies (performed by using our new benchmark approach) point at mechanisms, which are not part of SQL:1999 but would allow to reduce the mentioned gap. Thus, we encourage the integration of such mechanisms, e. g., support for navigation and complex objects (structured query results), into ORDBMSs in order to be really beneficial for new generation software systems. 1