Enabling Entanglements to Emerge

From October 5 to 10, 2020, Performance Curators Initiative (PCI),1 a network of artists, curators, performance-makers, cultural workers, educators, practitioners, and enthusiasts based in the Philippines, held their third conference online via Zoom and streamed it on YouTube. Entitled “Conversations on Curation and Performance in the Time of Halting and Transformation,” I participated in this conference that opened a digital space for curators and performers around the world to talk about the effects of the global pandemic on the live arts. Connections, conversations, creative research, collaborations—as PCI founder and conference organizer Roselle Pineda notes—are the main focus of the network, which seeks to look at the relationship between “[p]erformance and curation, the role of curation in performance and role of performativity in curatorial practice” (from the network’s website). Pineda had invited me to register for the conference, which was focused on the role of curator as one who activates enabling spaces.

Simulation and performance assessment of a modified throttled load balancing algorithm in cloud computing environment

<span lang="EN-US">Load balancing is crucial to ensure scalability, reliability, minimize response time, and processing time and maximize resource utilization in cloud computing. However, the load fluctuation accompanied with the distribution of a huge number of requests among a set of virtual machines (VMs) is challenging and needs effective and practical load balancers. In this work, a two listed throttled load balancer (TLT-LB) algorithm is proposed and further simulated using the CloudAnalyst simulator. The TLT-LB algorithm is based on the modification of the conventional TLB algorithm to improve the distribution of the tasks between different VMs. The performance of the TLT-LB algorithm compared to the TLB, round robin (RR), and active monitoring load balancer (AMLB) algorithms has been evaluated using two different configurations. Interestingly, the TLT-LB significantly balances the load between the VMs by reducing the loading gap between the heaviest loaded and the lightest loaded VMs to be 6.45% compared to 68.55% for the TLB and AMLB algorithms. Furthermore, the TLT-LB algorithm considerably reduces the average response time and processing time compared to the TLB, RR, and AMLB algorithms.</span>

The Influence of Publicity and Sales Promotion on Marketing Performance in Nigeria

Sales promotion and publicity are key promotional marketing tools which have assisted organizations to wax stronger in a global competitive environment. This study investigates the significance of publicity and sales promotion in Nigeria. The research design adopted for this study is survey research design while the sampling technique adopted is simple random sampling technique The Chi-square method is used to test the hypothesis based on the responses from the five-point Likert rating scale of the structured questionnaire. The findings reveal that publicity and sales promotion are veritable tools for achieving organizational marketing goals in a competitive marketing environment. It is recommended that publicity and sales promotion should be well utilized to stimulate customers demand, boost organizational reputation without detriment to product quality and performance. JEL Codes: M31, M37 Keywords: publicity, sales promotion, digital marketing era, promotion mix, marketing tools, marketing performance