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Recent advances in hardware and software virtualization offer unprecedented management capabilities for the mapping of virtual resources to physical resources. It is highly desirable to further create a "service hosting abstraction" that allows application owners to focus on service level objectives (SLOs) for their applications. This calls for a resource management solution that achieves the SLOs for many applications in response to changing data center conditions and hides the complexity from both application owners and data center operators. In this paper, we describe an automated capacity and workload management system that integrates multiple resource controllers at three different scopes and time scales. Simulation and experimental results confirm that such an integrated solution ensures efficient and effective use of data center resources while reducing service level violations for high priority applications.

SUMMARY We examine recent developments in judgment and decision-making (JDM) research to provide insight into how two big ideas in this area can be leveraged as overlapping frameworks to examine and improve auditor judgment. The ideas are (1) that human thinking and reasoning can be characterized by a dual-process model and (2) that conscious and nonconscious goals drive cognition. Despite that these ideas are well established in the broader JDM literature and have great promise for improving auditor judgment, we observe minimal use of them in the audit JDM literature. Thus, we briefly outline these ideas, and we develop fundamental, high-level research questions related to audit JDM research that are based on these ideas. Finally, we provide guidance for designing and evaluating experiments that effectively use these frameworks, whether in auditing or other rich decision-making contexts. The frameworks can help researchers improve audit quality by enhancing our understanding of auditors' judgment processes and the factors that influence them, by allowing for new ways of thinking about how to improve auditor judgment, and by suggesting new interventions for improving auditor judgment.

Auditors experience significant problems auditing complex accounting estimates, and this increasingly puts financial reporting quality at risk. Based on analyses of the specific errors that auditors commit, we propose that auditors need to be able to think more broadly and incorporate information from a variety of sources in order to improve audit quality for these important accounts. We experimentally demonstrate that a deliberative mindset intervention improves auditors’ ability to identify unreasonable estimates by improving their ability to identify and incorporate into their analyses contradictory information from diverse parts of the audit and improving their ability to think critically about the evidence. We perform additional analyses to demonstrate that our intervention improves auditor performance by causing them to think differently rather than simply to work harder. We demonstrate that critical thinking can improve the identification of unreasonable estimates and, in doing so, we provide new directions for addressing audit quality issues.

To determine whether the concomitant effects of pregnancy and exercise yield substrate and endocrine patterns different from those expected during exercise alone, we compared the responses of glucose, lactate, free fatty acids, insulin, epinephrine (EP), norepinephrine (NE), human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), human placental lactogen (HPL), estriol, and progesterone (P) in nonpregnant women (NP; n = 7) and pregnant women in the second (TR2; n = 6) and third trimester (TR3; n = 8) of pregnancy, before, during, and after 30 min of bicycle ergometer exercise at heart rates of 130-140 beats/min. In general, all substrates and hormone concentrations increased with exercise (P less than 0.05), except insulin, which decreased (P less than 0.05), and HCG, which did not change (P = 0.08). Differences in selected hormone concentrations (P, estriol, HCG, and HPL) among groups were already present at rest because of the different stages of pregnancy. Differences among groups at rest were also found in insulin and NE (P less than 0.05). Significantly different responses to exercise (i.e., group x time interactions) were as follows. NP vs. TR2:P, estriol, HCG, HPL, EP, and NE (P less than 0.05); NP vs. TR3: glucose, EP, and NE (P less than 0.05); TR2 vs. TR3: lactate, EP, and NE (P less than 0.05).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)