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This study of 216 congestive heart failure (CHF) patients at a large teaching hospital in south‐central Ontario was undertaken to determine whether the patients managed in an outpatient heart failure clinic used fewer hospital resources (as expressed in number of admissions, complexity of admission, and length of stay (LOS)) than a matched cohort who were not managed in an outpatient clinic. Statistical significance of LOS opportunities could not be demonstrated (owing to sample size), however, the heart failure clinic is making a positive impact on all types of admissions (CHF and non‐CHF) in terms of LOS and suggests that management in an outpatient setting for chronic disease states is important for acute care hospitals to consider.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with a problem of admission control in computer networks when some of their parameters are uncertain. The case is considered when the most common probabilistic description of the uncertainty cannot be used and another approach should be applied.

The uncertain versions of admission control problem with quality of service requirements are considered. The uncertain variables are used to describe possible values of the unknown parameters in computer networks.

Given are formulations for the admission control problem in computer networks with unknown values of the capacities based on the network utility maximization concept. Solution algorithms for all these problems are proposed.

It is assumed that an expert can describe possible values of uncertain network parameters in the form of a certainty distribution. Then the formalism of uncertain variables is applied and the knowledge of an expert is modelled with the use of certainty distributions. Decisions strongly depends on the quality of an expert's knowledge.

Obtained admission control algorithms can be useful for planning and designing of computer networks.

A new approach to the admission control problem in computer networks in the presence of uncertainty, in the case when the uncertain variable can be applied, is proposed and discussed.

Graduate admission has become a critical process for quality assurance in tertiary education. Hitherto, most research has investigated the validity of admissions instruments. However, surprisingly little work has been conducted on the overall organization of admission, which often remains “informal, ad hoc, and lacking in continuity.” The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to systematically design an admissions process for effectiveness, fairness, and the ability to continually improve, and determine how to condense and analyze the massive amount of data available from student records to obtain high-value feedback for admissions decision making.

An admissions process was systematically designed based on results from process management theory. Tenets of decision theory were applied to the organization of decision making and validity theory was utilized for validating admissions instruments. Performance of the implemented process was evaluated via student records covering a seven-year period.

The authors have designed a four-phase admissions process that ensures high quality through screening, scoping, selection, and evaluation/feedback. The last phase introduces closed-loop control and facilitates stabilization and continual improvement. Additionally, the authors have established a three-stage decision-making hierarchy that promotes consistency and equal treatment in admissions. The evaluations of undergraduate achievements and GRE® General Test scores indicate that both are valid admissions instruments in the European context. Finally, the evaluation of the implemented process provides evidence that decision making has effectively improved over the years and has become more consistent.

The systematic design of the admissions process presented generalizes well and is a significant contribution to the organization of decentralized graduate admission.

Low security is a poorly understood concept, particularly in relation to people with an intellectual disability. Characteristics of patients offered an admission to low secure intellectual disability settings have not been robustly demonstrated. The same applies to staff perceptions of low security. The aims of the study were to ascertain the characteristics of patients referred to a low secure intellectual disability unit which lead to an offer of admission, identify the views of staff working on the unit on the concept of low security, and use both sets of data to discuss low secure provision for people with intellectual disability. A case‐controlled study was carried out for 33 patients referred to the unit over 42 months. The characteristics of 18 patients offered an admission were compared with those of 15 patients not offered an admission, and five of the staff working on the unit were interviewed about the concept of low security. Patients offered an admission were more able than those not offered an admission, posed more risks and were more complex diagnostically. Staff working on the unit agreed that their patients were complex, but felt that they were appropriately placed overall. The challenges of low secure provision were discussed by staff. Patients sampled were complex and heterogeneous, but not necessarily ‘forensic’. Their complexity requires sophisticated care plans and management strategies. This study has implications for referrers, staff, patients and managers, and highlights areas for future research.

This paper aims to provide an overview of representative multimedia applications in the cultural heritage sector, as well as research results on quality of service (QoS) mechanisms in internet protocol (IP) networks that support such applications.

The paper's approach is a literature review.

Cultural heritage multimedia applications require greater bandwidth capacity, especially where multiple users share the connections. For such applications, scalability and reliability of quality of service depend on packet‐level QoS mechanisms operating in a full end‐to‐end basis.

The paper provides a foundation for future research directions in the professional communication context. For instance, the QoS mechanisms in possible network infrastructures could be used to explore effective multimedia data dissemination across cultural heritage institutions.

The paper provides an overview of which technologies/mechanisms are being used most broadly and which might provide the most potential for cultural heritage institutions managers considering experimenting in the multimedia communications area.

QoS mechanisms that support multimedia applications in the cultural heritage sector need to become well known by cultural heritage institutions managers and professional associations in the fields of libraries, museums and archives. This paper provides a useful overview of the topic.

This paper discusses various facets of quality of service (QOS), a technology that allows network managers to prioritize data to optimize bandwidth use and maintain data quality. Given the wide variety and high volume of data as well as bandwidth limitations on networks today, QOS has gained great importance in recent years. Successful implementation of QOS requires selecting from the wide array of models and algorithms available and careful consideration of other technical and organizational issues. Different QOS models and algorithms have been discussed to provide the network manager with an insight into these technologies that can aid in the selection of QOS models and algorithms. Various technical and organizational implementation issues, including how QOS is implemented in routers, have been discussed to assist the network manager to be aware of these issues and properly implement QOS.

Cloud computing is qualified to present proper limitless storage and computation resources to users as services throughout the internet. Software as a service (SaaS) layer is the key paradigm perspective in the software layer of the cloud computing. SaaS is connected by business applications to access consumers on existing public, private and hybrid cloud models. This purpose of this paper is to present a discussion and analysis on the SaaS layer based on business applications in the cloud environment in form of a classical taxonomy to recognize the existing techniques, challenges and efforts.

Existing techniques, challenges and efforts are classified into four categories: platform-dependent, application-dependent, data-dependent and security-dependent mechanisms. The SaaS layer mechanisms are compared with each other according to the important factors such as the structural properties, quality of service metrics, applied algorithms and measurement tools.

The benefits and weaknesses of each research study are analyzed. In the comparison results, the authors observed that the application-based method, the non-heuristic algorithms, the business process method have the highest percentage of the usage in this literature.

The SaaS layer mechanisms based on business applications have some main features such as high accessibility, compatibility, reusability and collaboration to provide activated application and operation services for user with help of Web browsers. A comprehensive analysis was presented as originality on the SaaS layer mechanisms based on business applications for high level of the cloud environment that 46 peer-reviewed studies were considered.

This paper aims to discuss problems, requirements and current trends for deploying group communication in real‐world scenarios from an integrated perspective.

The Hybrid Shared Tree is introduced – a new architecture and routing approach to combine network – and subnetwork‐layer multicast services in end‐system domains with transparent, structured overlays on the inter‐domain level.

The paper finds that The Hybrid Shared Tree solution is highly scalable and robust and offers provider‐oriented features to stimulate deployment.

A straightforward perspective is indicated in the paper for a mobility‐agnostic routing layer for future use.

The research aims to describe Sri Lanka's education system, discuss reforms that have been implemented within the school, university and vocational education sectors in the recent past and suggest potentially fruitful reforms whilst identifying the various constraints which can affect their implementation.

A descriptive approach is employed, with extensive review of related literature and the use of relevant secondary data where appropriate.

The research shows the need for considerable reform of Sri Lanka's education system, especially with regard to improving the quality of state education and encouraging greater private sector participation.

The research shows the deficiencies Sri Lanka's education system suffers from and suggests means to overcome them. However, the political and social pressures may present obstacles upon the implementation of such courses of action.

The recommendations offered by the research could make a contribution towards transforming the education system in Sri Lanka into one which can produce empowered individuals who can find employment within the emerging sectors of the economy and thereby improve overall living standards in the country.

The paper makes a novel contribution by encompassing school, tertiary and vocational education in Sri Lanka. It shows the numerous problems that could arise in a context where a universal system of free education from the primary to the tertiary level exists vis‐à‐vis a flourishing private sector, and would be of value to education policy‐planners in Sri Lanka and other countries with both state and private sector provision of education.

In code‐division multiple‐access (CDMA) systems, the number of mobile users that each cell can support is limited by the total received power or interference received at each base station (BS) and can vary with time. The total received power can be used as an indicator of traffic load in call admission control. In this paper, we propose a call admission control (CAC) scheme based on the total received power for CDMA systems supporting integrated voice/data services. Based on the current measure of the received power, we develop an algorithm to estimate the updated total received power due to a new incoming call. We analyze the optimal admission threshold for both power limited cells and interference limited cells. We model the system by a multi‐dimensional Markov chain and compute the system performance in terms of new call blocking probability, forced termination probability of voice calls, average transmission delay of data calls and outage probability. We compare our results with an existing degradation scheme.