The Year 2000 Problem
Computers' Year-2000 problem (Y2K), whereby some computer software won't recognize any digits as representing years in the 21st century, may well strike hoteliers particularly hard due to hotels' reliance on date-sensitive data (room reservations, for example). Moreover, unless hotels' software is updated, Y2K will manifest itself sooner among hotels than in many other industries, as hotels begin to book rooms in the year 2000. Hoteliers can (1) choose to do nothing (i.e., wait and see what actually happens), (2) debug their existing computer applications, or (3) purchase and install all new systems software. Some methods to remove the Y2K problem include these five techniques: size expansion, data encoding, date shift, soft windows, and hard windows. Replacing existing application software with new, Y2K-compliant computer software will resolve the problem. That approach, however, means that all of a hotel's related computer-program requirements be accounted for—which is an enormous undertaking. Moreover, new computer systems are costly, and “off the shelf” business software rarely is of much help to hoteliers. As a result, hotels' computer systems and software most often require extensive customization. Time is short; hoteliers don't have until 2000 to solve their Y2K problems, since a hotel's existing reservation system may not be able to recognize reservations for the year 2000 (“00”). In practical terms, the time required for software development and testing is substantial. Therefore, hotels need to handle the Y2K issue immediately.
A new twist in US health care data standards development: adoption of electronic health care transactions standards for administrative simplification.
To reduce the costs of common administrative transactions, health plans, payers and providers encouraged the US Congress to legislate administrative simplification of specific electronic health data transactions. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 created incentives for a public-private partnership to develop and implement standards for the uniformity of health care data used in electronic administrative health transactions and standards for the privacy and security of individually identifiable health information. The standards' requirements of HIPAA and how they have been met by the US government hold promise for accelerating the uniform adoption of standards developed by accredited standards developing organizations. The transactions designated by Congress, the process of choosing the standards in the Department of Health and Human Services, the principles that guided these choices, and the actual choices, are presented here. A successful partnership for administrative health data standards can pave the way for success in clinical health data standards and their application in computer-based patient record systems.
A traffic scheduling framework in broadband wireless access systems
In this paper, we present a traffic scheduling framework for allocating the upstream channel bandwidth in broadband wireless access systems, where both voice and data applications are supported. Our traffic scheduling framework is aimed at supporting diverse QoS requirements and obtaining high utilization of the upstream bandwidth. It prioritizes traffic streams according to different classes of service, and provides fair access of bandwidth to the users. The presented framework consists of three algorithms: a calibration algorithm for the jittered constant bit rate (CBR) traffic, a scheduling algorithm for the jittered CBR traffic, and a scheduling algorithm for the unspecified bit rate traffic. The proposed algorithms are feasible when either the asynchronous transfer mode or multi-protocol label switching protocol is deployed at the network edge. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms in achieving high bandwidth utilization and the good traffic performance in terms of both cell loss ratio and mean queuing delay.