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This paper examines the design and evaluation of a TV on Demand (TVoD) system, consisting of a globally accessible storage architecture where all TV content broadcast over a period of time is made available for streaming. The proposed architecture consists of idle Internet Service Provider (ISP) servers that can be rented and released dynamically as the client load dictates. This paper examines issues of resource management and content placement within this Video Content Distribution Network (VCDN). The existing placement algorithm is computationally expensive and in some cases, infeasible to execute within any reasonable length of time. This work proposes a number of new placement heuristics each of which attempts intelligently to reduce the search space so that only the best proxies are considered for replica placement. An extensive evaluation of these placement algorithms is carried out to identify a good placement algorithm without being computationally expensive.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and synthesize major streams of research on quality of student experience in higher education, to present an agenda for future research.

The paper presents a systematic review of research published in high-quality journals during the period 2000 to 2014 in the areas of quality of student experience and higher education.

Findings highlight current research trends on the quality of student experience in higher education. Results show five prevailing research streams: exploration of learning experience; exploration of student experience; gender differences in assessment of higher education experience; improvement in quality of student experience; and student satisfaction with higher education experience.

The identification of the five research streams provides the basis for a synthesis of key issues identified within each research stream. In addition, the identification of purposes and limitations in existing research supports attempts to address issues of the quality of student experiences in higher education.

Literature currently portrays the quality of student experience as a student-centric idea. Together with the purposes and limitations identified in existing research, the paper proposes an agenda for future research that increases the variety of research streams to provide a deeper understanding of the student experience and to enhance the delivery of quality in higher education.

The findings contribute to the research scene by providing important insights in terms of the current trends and focus of existing research in the area of quality of student experiences in higher education.

To outline the kinds of problems and dilemmas which researchers might experience in professional sports settings and to highlight the way in which gender might shape those experiences.

An ethnography of professional football.

Few social researchers have managed to breach the institutional bounds of professional sport and fewer still have carried out ethnographic work within this context. Gender inevitably impacts the complexion of sporting domains and this manifests itself in everyday behaviours and sub-cultural practices. Qualitative research has the potential to uncover the nuances of individual and collective behaviours within such settings and to shed light upon the ways in which gender relations shape the contours of institutional life.

To situate current debate around methods within wider discussions of gender and social research and against the backdrop of theoretical shifts in the conceptualisation of masculinities.

This article employs a system analytic framework to categorize the available research literature on the politics of education in order to explain the inter‐relationship of private and public interests and of different levels in primary and secondary American schools. The objectives are several: to explain and develop the analytical framework of David Easton; to illustrate its heuristic utility by categorizing empirically‐based research within the components of that framework, and to suggest and encourage future research directions in the subject. Education has escaped application of traditional policy analysis in America because educators have convinced scholars and laymen that they are “non‐political,” a label which even most political scientists have accepted without challenge. However, during the 1960s, a few scholars in education and political science began to apply political analytical methods to public school conflict. This research has begun to change perceptions of education and to provide a beginning set of research projects whose data support tentative generalization about the policy‐making process and the total system of public schools. This orientation is bound to increase because of increasing national government intervention in local schools, both through integration and financial policies. These have provoked growing conflict locally over the proper direction of school policies. In this article, we see how such stress is transmitted in the form of “demands” and “supports” into the “political system”, that persistent social mechanism known in all societies in different forms provides an “authoritative allocation of values and resources”. The political system, in this case public school bodies, “converts” such “inputs” into “outputs” of public policy, which in their administration create outcomes which later cause a “feedback” into the political system as the material for new policy demands. For each component of this Eastonian system, this article examines relevant research, providing an extensive annotated bibliography. From this review, it is possible to suggest lines of needed research.

Government primary schools in Australia increasingly take up the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Programme (IB-PYP) to supplement government-mandated curriculum and governance expectations. The purpose of this paper is to explore how teachers navigate and contest dual policy-practice expectations in the Victorian Government IB-PYP context.

This study used a narrative inquiry approach. The narratives of two teachers were generated through a narrative interview and then re-storied with participants through a set of conceptual lenses drawn out of the policy assemblage and affect studies theoretical spaces.

The stories participants told show that competing mandatory local policy expressions are experienced and contested both to stabilize a technocratic rationality and produce alternative critical-political educational futures.

There a few accounts of teachers' policy experience in government school settings implementing the IB-PYP. In addressing this gap, this paper directly responds to prior claims of the IB's failure to promote an emancipatory pedagogy, showing instead that when teachers who bring a more critical understanding of educational purpose to their work take up the IB-PYP policy to support the enactment of that purpose.

These days every important trend in business converges on the decision to relocate.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between learning processes (LP) – group learning (GL) and training processes – and job satisfaction (JS), by taking into consideration the mediating role of organizational size (OZ) and employees’ educational level (EEL).

Data were collected from the Spanish wine sector. The survey was addressed to the workers, and 230 valid questionnaires were obtained. The authors have proven their model of research through a model of structural equations, that is, by means of the partial least squares technique.

This paper proposes that LP play a significant role in determining the effects on JS, and OZ and EEL mediate the relationship between GL and JS.

Owing to certain features of the sample and the use of measurement scales, the final results should be considered with caution. Further research in other contexts using qualitative methods is needed to validate these findings.

When seeking to improve employee JS, practitioners should take into account the link between LP and JS. It is especially necessary to consider the diversity in learning groups.

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between LP and JS and checks the mediation of OZ and worker education of workers between group learning and JS.