Parental care in animals can be costly and is shared between both parents in many bird species. Not surprisingly, most studies of how parental care is shared between the sexes are in sexually dimorphic species, and much less in known about sexually monomorphic species where sex cannot be determined in the field. This has prevented a full understanding of parental care behaviors – which are intrinsically linked to fitness – in species such as the Red-headed Woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus) that is experiencing population declines throughout much of its range. In this study we assessed whether Redheaded Woodpecker brooding time, nestling provisioning rates, and nest cleaning rates vary as a function of parent sex, habitat type (savanna and closed canopy forest), brood size, nestling age, temperature and/or date. We recorded and analyzed 128 hours of high-quality video from 21 broods at Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia where this species is relatively abundant. We captured and color-banded Red-headed Woodpeckers, taking breast feather samples for genetic sexing, and determined brood size and chick age of nests using an extendable pole camera. Using generalized linear mixed models, we found the best predictor of nestling provisioning was an interaction between chick age and date; older chicks were fed more frequently in early summer (before 7 July) compared to late summer. The seasonal reduction in provisioning could be related to a reduction in resource availability, but whether or not provisioning in later nests affects nestling survival warrants further study. We found chick age and parent sex to be the best predictors in brooding models, with females brooding more when chicks are less than 10 days old and males being the only parent to enter the cavity after 10 days. Additionally, males almost exclusively remove fecal sacs from nests, highlighting an observational method to determine sex of breeding adults in the field. Such division of reproductive roles is similar to what is known for dimorphic woodpecker species and likely indicates energetic constraints due to the need for high parental investment from both sexes. Parental care is inextricably linked with habitat quality and home range size. Parents will travel to obtain the resources necessary to provision their young, and larger home ranges during the demanding nestling provisioning stage may indicate increased effort resulting from fewer available resources near the nest. We estimated home range sizes of 25 breeding adult Red-headed Woodpeckers using PinPoint GPS tags and 95% kernel density estimates (KDEs) with plug-in smoothing factors. We modeled the effects of habitat, sex, nest stage, date, and distance to nearest neighbor on home range estimates. Red-headed Woodpecker males have larger home ranges than females, and late summer home ranges are smaller than those measured before 7 July. More study is needed to determine if sex or date is a stronger factor on home range, given our naive sampling which resulted in more females sampled in late summer and observations that did not continue to the end of the breeding season (late August). Since we found date to be an influential factor to both provisioning rate and home range size, it is possible that seasonal resource changes are an important, unstudied factor related to nationwide declines of this species.

This study uses institutional ethnography (IE) to address the question of how young women, considered to be “at risk” youth, make decisions about their working lives. Based on interviews with young women and program workers in housing, employment, young mothers’ and girls’ programs, field observations, and document analysis at Gen-Y (pseudonym for a women’s community-based social services agency), young women’s provisioning experiences are used to critique current program and policy models that feature notions of choice and risk. Provisioning is a concept that captures a wide range of work and work-related activities that young women perform for themselves and people they feel responsible for. IE is applied to understand how institutional processes and practices give rise to the conditions under which young women participants at Gen-Y make career and life decisions.

This study uses institutional ethnography (IE) to address the question of how young women, considered to be “at risk” youth, make decisions about their working lives. Based on interviews with young women and program workers in housing, employment, young mothers’ and girls’ programs, field observations, and document analysis at Gen-Y (pseudonym for a women’s community-based social services agency), young women’s provisioning experiences are used to critique current program and policy models that feature notions of choice and risk. Provisioning is a concept that captures a wide range of work and work-related activities that young women perform for themselves and people they feel responsible for. IE is applied to understand how institutional processes and practices give rise to the conditions under which young women participants at Gen-Y make career and life decisions.

Static provisioning of storage resources may lead to over-provisioning of resources, which increases costs, or under-provisioning, which runs the risk of violating application-level QoS goals. Toward this end, virtualization technologies have made automated provisioning of storage resources easier allowing more effective management of the resources. In this work, we present an approach that suggests a series of dynamic provisioning decisions to meet the I/O demands of a time-varying workload while avoiding unnecessary costs and Service Level Objective (SLO) violations. We also do a case-study to analyze the practical feasibility of dynamic provisioning and the associated performance effects in a virtualized environment, which forms the basis of our approach. Our approach is able to suggest the optimal provisioning decisions, for a given workload, that minimize cost and meet the SLO. We evaluate the approach using workload data obtained from real systems to demonstrate its cost-effectiveness, sensitivity to various system parameters, and runtime feasibility for use in real systems.

Provisioning And The Service Provisioning Markup Language / Workshop "Netz- und Service-Infrastrukturen" Provisioning und die Service Provisioning Markup Language

ITC/USA 2012 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Eighth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2012 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / Space Link Extension (SLE) is a set of recommended standards for mission cross support developed by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS). The SLE recommendations define protocols for extending the space link from ground terminals to other facilities deeper within a ground network, allowing distributed access to space link telecommand and telemetry services. The SLE protocols are widely used to provide cross support between sites, programs, and agencies. In traditional SLE deployments, individual service instances have been manually provisioned well in advance of the commencement of cross support for a particular mission, and hardware and software resources have been allocated to those service instances at the time of provisioning. While valid, this approach requires that dedicated resources be provided for each mission and service instance, and limits an SLE provider's ability to reallocate resources in real time based on system availability or other factors. This paper discusses an alternative approach to SLE service provisioning, in which individual service instances are assigned resources from a common resource pool at the time that each service instance is initialized. The paper addresses the key design elements and technical tradeoffs involved in this approach, and discusses the potential benefits with regard to load balancing, equipment reuse, and resiliency against system failure.

Static provisioning of storage resources may lead to over-provisioning of resources, which increases costs, or under-provisioning, which runs the risk of violating application-level QoS goals. Toward this end, virtualization technologies have made automated provisioning of storage resources easier allowing more effective management of the resources. In this work, we present an approach that suggests a series of dynamic provisioning decisions to meet the I/O demands of a time-varying workload while avoiding unnecessary costs and Service Level Objective (SLO) violations. We also do a case-study to analyze the practical feasibility of dynamic provisioning and the associated performance effects in a virtualized environment, which forms the basis of our approach. Our approach is able to suggest the optimal provisioning decisions, for a given workload, that minimize cost and meet the SLO. We evaluate the approach using workload data obtained from real systems to demonstrate its cost-effectiveness, sensitivity to various system parameters, and runtime feasibility for use in real systems.

A research of foraging represents a relatively new phenomenon abroad. In Czechia, on the other hand, this is an ordinary issue with a long-time tradition, but until recently it has not received much attention by the scientific community. For this reason the following diploma thesis deals with this activity. It consists of two main units. The first part aims to create the theoretical framework necessary for the introduction into the foraging study. There is a familiarization with the trend of the self-provisioning in general both in Czechia and abroad. A substantial part of the theoretical framework deals with the quantity and the typology of harvested products, the reasons for foraging, the characteristics of the harvesters, etc. It also outlines the problem of western academics' interpretation of foraging in post-communist conditions as a survival strategy. In the second part, using the mixed research methods, the thesis seeks to find out what is the tradition of foraging in Czech conditions during recent decades, who are the harvesters and what are the reasons and motivations to harvest. By statistical data analysis and by interviewing method, it is confirmed that people across a variety of demographic and socio-economic characteristics are harvesting and motivation is certainly not a bad...

This master’s thesis intention is to develop a Java language framework with XAP providing state provisioning function. The idea is that the state from an application should be transferred between different application instances opening up for continuous application use. By using our framework prototype, applications which are provided by XAP can implement the state provisioning function. We first introduce our framework and its core mechanisms. To be able to verify it, we also present an evaluation of the feasibility and practicability of our framework.

The point of this project is to cover a gap in today’s supply of provisioning systems for VoIP endpoint devices. Today the norm is that every manufacturer of endpoints builds their own system to provision their endpoints, but most operators use a vast verity of products to meet their customers’ needs. This system is based on open source software to allow adaptations to different environments and demands from customers and to require no license fee thus being affordable to the small size and midsized operators. This thesis is mainly an engineering type of thesis and the main bulk of the work has been put in developing the solution.