Policy and programs have given relatively little attention to adolescents ’ work experience; in particular, they have largely overlooked the benefits that safe and appropriate livelihood opportunities offer to younger and older adolescents, notably girls. Such work can strengthen adolescents ’ economic and social capacities, help them gain autonomy, and improve their future prospects for participation in the labor market. Formal policy concern with adolescent work has centered almost exclusively on the contentious subject of child labor and on the protection of children from exploitative work. In 1973, the legal age at which children could be employed on a full-time basis was raised to 15; the International Labour Organization (ILO) has since recommended that this age be raised to 16. The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) provided the most comprehensive policy guidelines on the subject; it, too, centers on protection rather than on the potential benefits of work for pay. For example, Article 32 of the CRC recognizes the rights of children (defined as persons up to the age of 18) to be protected from work that threatens their health, education, or development. Such protections are essential, but they are not the last word on policy that is needed to promote adolescents’

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The inability of common benchmarks to gracefully scale to evaluate systems of various size and configuration contributes greatly to the incapacity usually shown in comparing varied systems under a common metric. This paper looks at an older, self-scaling I/O benchmark whose results can be normalized using techniques of predicted performance for comparative evaluation of a diverse range of stand-alone computer systems. We assert that there is no reason these comparisons need stop at local disk workstations and show the comparison to produce a valid evaluation of network file-system enabled computers using SUN’s NFS protocol. 1.

The Network File System (NFS) utilizes a stateless protocol between clients and servers; the major advantage of this statelessness is that NFS crash recovery is very easy. However, the protocol requires that data modification operations such as write be fully committed to stable storage before replying to the client. The cost of this is significant in terms of response latency and server CPU and I/O loading. This paper describes a write gathering technique that exploits the fact that there are often several write requests for the same file presented to the server at about the same time. With this technique the data portions of these writes are combined and a single metadata update is done that applies to them all. No replies are sent to the client until after this metadata update has been fully committed, thus the NFS crash recovery design is not violated. This technique can be used in most NFS server implementations and requires no client modifications. 1.