In the past 50 years or so dietary fiber has become an increasingly significant area of nutritional focus, debate, and research. Advances in food production practices have resulted in more and more refined foods being available and consumed throughout the world and particularly in developed nations such as the United States. While refined foods are typically more palatable to consumers, the content of dietary fiber is greatly reduced. Currently many diseases are believed to be associated with a lack of dietary fiber intake, and furthermore significant health benefits are thought possible via increased consumption of many dietary fibers. These issues are discussed in Chapter 2- Dietary Fiber and Disease.
There is not a well accepted definition for dietary fiber, but most reference the human inability to fully digest fibers, fibers being made up of various monomer units of variable length, and some mention plant origin. In many ways the definition of dietary fiber is connected to the analytical methods used to quantify it, which there are many, several of which are detailed in Chapter 5- Analytical Techniques for Dietary Fiber. Newer ingredients that are not quantified by typical fiber analysis methods have created the need for additional assays.
Queues serve as a major scheduling device in computer networks, both at the network level and at the application level. A fundamental and important property of a queue service discipline is its fairness. Recent empirical studies show fairness in queues to be highly important to queueing customers in practical scenarios. The objective of this tutorial is to discuss the issue of queue fairness and its dilemmas, and to review the research conducted on this subject. We discuss the fundamental principles related to queue fairness in the perspective of the relevant applications, with some emphasis on computer communications networks. This is conducted in the context of the recent research in this area and the queueing related fairness measures which have been proposed in recent years. We describe, discuss and compare their properties, and evaluate their relevance to the various practical applications.
Queues serve as a major building block in computer networks and are used to schedule and prioritize tasks both at the network level and at the application level. With the advances of the Internet more and more services move from the “physical world” into the “network controlled” world and require the use of computer and communications controlled queues. Examples include file servers used for the download of music, video, games and other applications, and call-centers.
The summer of 2007 was hot for financial markets and central banks. Troubles in the credit markets negatively affected banks, liquidity evaporated in the interbank markets and central banks intervened on a scale not often seen before. Many market observers immediately argued that during the long period of low interest rates, stretching from 2001 to 2005, banks softened their lending standards and loaded up on excess risk. During the crisis many market participants, nevertheless, clamoured for central banks to reduce the interest rates again to alleviate their financial predicament.
Hazardous times for monetary policy indeed: on the one hand, low interest rates may create excessive risk-taking; on the other hand, low interest rates may reduce the risk of outstanding bank credit. In this paper we provide the first hard evidence on this treacherous dilemma by answering the following questions: Do low interest rates encourage bank risk-taking, but at the same time reduce credit risk on outstanding loans? What is the impact of the stance and path of monetary policy on credit risk? And, do monetary and output changes have a similar effect on bank risk?
