An assessment of social sciences coverage by four prominent full-text online aggregated journal packages

The cost effectiveness and quality of full-text journals are analyzed for four prominent online aggregated journal packages: EBSCOhost Academic Search FullTEXT, UMI Proquest Direct Periodicals Research II, IAC’s Expanded Academic ASAP, and H.W. Wilson’s OmniFile. Price data from EBSCO’s Librarians’ Handbook are used to assess the total and average value of social sciences journals in each package. Quality of social sciences journals coverage is compared based on citation impact factors as recorded in Journal Citation Reports—Social Sciences Edition.     

Road cycle TT performance: Relationship to the power-duration model and association with FTP

Purpose: To determine the accuracy of critical power (CP) and W? (the curvature constant of the power-duration relationship) derived from self-paced time-trial (TT) prediction trials using mobile power meters to predict 16.1-km road cycling TT performance. This study also aimed to assess the agreement between functional threshold power (FTP) and CP.

Methods: Twelve competitive male cyclists completed an incremental test to exhaustion, a FTP test and 4–5 self-paced TT bouts on a stationary bike within the lab, and a 16.1 km road TT, using mobile power meters.

Results: CP and W? derived from the power-duration relationship closely predicted TT performance. The 16.1-km road TT completion time (26.7 ± 2.2 min) was not significantly different from and was significantly correlated with the predicted time-to-completion (27.5 ± 3.3 min, r = 0.89, P < 0.01). CP and FTP were not significantly different (275 ± 40 W vs. 278 ± 42 W, P > 0.05); however, the limits of agreement between CP and FTP were 30 to -36 W.

Discussion: The findings of this study indicate that CP and W? determined using mobile power meters during maximal, self-paced TT prediction trials can be used to accurately predict 16.1-km cycling performance, supporting the application of the CP and W? for performance prediction. However, the limits of agreement were too large to consider FTP and CP interchangeable.     

Multi-postpath-based lookahead multiconstraint QoS routing

Multiconstraint QoS (quality of service) routing is an essential mechanism for QoS-guaranteed services. Unfortunately, the multiconstraint QoS routing problem is NP-complete. In this paper, we propose a heuristic multiconstraint QoS routing scheme, MPLMR (multi-postpath-based lookahead multiconstraint routing). MPLMR is a routing scheme using an extended shortest-path algorithm. As in previous schemes such as TAMCRA and H_MCOP, MPLMR stores a limited number of subpaths between the source node and each intermediate node, and extends these subpaths toward the destination node. However, MPLMR uses an improved “lookahead” method to estimate the path length of the full path to which each subpath is extended. MPLMR then selects and stores the subpaths that have higher likelihood than other subpaths to be extended to feasible paths. We show via simulation that MPLMR has a smaller probability of missing a feasible path than competing schemes in the literature.