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Telephone Line (telephone + line)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	50%

Selected Abstracts

Analyzing the Trade-off Between Investing in Service Channels and Satisfying the Targeted User Service for Brazilian Internet Service Providers

INTERNATIONAL TRANSACTIONS IN OPERATIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2002
Gisele C. Fontanella
The computer connection to the Internet is provided by firms known as internet service providers (ISPs). The simplest mode of physical connection is when the user connects to an ISP's service channel by an ordinary telephone line (dial-up). Finding an available channel may not be an easy task, especially during the peak hours of many Brazilian ISPs. This results in a problem for the ISPs, which is how to achieve the most appropriate trade-off between investing in capacity and satisfying the target user service level. This paper analyzes this trade-off based on a three-step approach: (i) determine user arrival and service processes in chosen periods, (ii) select an appropriate queueing model using some simplifying assumptions, and (iii) generate trade-off curves between system performance measures. To illustrate the application of this approach, some results derived from a case study performed at an ISP in Sao Paulo state are given. [source]

Cannabis Use and Sexual Health

THE JOURNAL OF SEXUAL MEDICINE, Issue 2pt1 2010
Anthony M.A. Smith PhD
ABSTRACT Introduction., Cannabis is the most commonly used illicit substance worldwide. Despite this, its impact on sexual health is largely unknown. Aim., The aim of this article is to examine the association between cannabis use and a range of sexual health outcomes. Main Outcome Measures., The main outcome measures include the number of sexual partners in the past year, condom use at most recent vaginal or anal intercourse, diagnosis with a sexually transmissible infection in the previous year, and the occurrence of sexual problems. Methods., Method used in this article includes a computer-assisted telephone survey of 8,656 Australians aged 16,64 years resident in Australian households with a fixed telephone line. Results., Of the 8,650 who answered the questions about cannabis use, 754 (8.7%) reported cannabis use in the previous year with 126 (1.5%) reporting daily use, 126 reported (1.5%) weekly use, and 502 (5.8%) reported use less often than weekly. After adjusting for demographic factors, daily cannabis use compared with no use was associated with an increased likelihood of reporting two or more sexual partners in the previous year in both men (adjusted odds ratio 2.08, 95% confidence interval 1.11,3.89; P = 0.02) and women (2.58, 1.08,6.18; P = 0.03). Daily cannabis use was associated with reporting a diagnosis of a sexually transmissible infection in women but not men (7.19, 1.28,40.31; P = 0.02 and 1.45, 0.17,12.42; P = 0.74, respectively). Frequency of cannabis use was unrelated to sexual problems in women but daily use vs. no use was associated with increased reporting among men of an inability to reach orgasm (3.94, 1.71,9.07; P < 0.01), reaching orgasm too quickly (2.68, 1.41,5.08; P < 0.01), and too slowly (2.05, 1.02,4.12; P = 0.04). Conclusions., Frequent cannabis use is associated with higher numbers of sexual partners for both men and women, and difficulties in men's ability to orgasm as desired. Smith AMA, Ferris JA, Simpson JM, Shelley J, Pitts M, and Richters J. Cannabis use and sexual health. J Sex Med 2010;7:787,793. [source]

The effect of information and communication technologies on urban structure

ECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 54 2008
Yannis M. Ioannides
SUMMARY Cities This paper examines the effects of information and communication technologies (ICT) on urban structure. Improvements in ICT may lead to changes in urban structure, for example, because they reduce the costs of communicating ideas from a distance. Hence, they may weaken local agglomeration forces and thus provide incentives for economic activity to relocate to smaller urban centres. We use international data on city size distributions in different countries and on country-level characteristics to test the effect of ICT. We find robust evidence that increases in the number of telephone lines per capita encourage the spatial dispersion of population in that they lead to a more concentrated distribution of city sizes. So far the evidence on internet usage is more speculative, although it goes in the same direction. We argue that the internet is likely to have similar, or even larger, effects on urban structures once its use has spread more thoroughly through different economies. , Yannis M. Ioannides, Henry G. Overman, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg and Kurt Schmidheiny [source]

Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2010
JULIA ELYACHAR
ABSTRACT In this article, I draw on ethnographic research in Cairo to analyze outcomes of Egyptian women's practices of sociality. In Cairo, "phatic labor" creates a social infrastructure of communicative channels that are as essential to economy as roads, bridges, or telephone lines. Projects to empower Egyptian women via finance made these communicative channels visible as an economic infrastructure for projects oriented around the pursuit of profit. A social infrastructure that had functioned as a kind of semiotic commons became visible as a resource that could be privatized or formatted as a public good. [source]