bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A software testing course for computer science majors
Authors: Kazemian Fereydoun , Howles Trudy
Published: May 2006

The ability to program is a fundamental skill for Computer Science (CS) majors, and most CS programs introduce programming concepts through a sequence of courses. In fact, "programming courses offer skills and training that meets many of the needs expressed by students, their near-term employers, and non-CS faculty" [3, p. 24]. However, in most of these courses, relatively little time is spent in teaching students how to program well and how to test and locate defects; much of the focus is in teaching language constructs, syntax, and basics of programming. As more topics are introduced and the discipline continues to broaden, it has become nearly impossible to add new topics or required courses without removing others. This paper documents the rationale and procedures in developing an undergraduate testing and debugging elective course for Computer Science majors. It identifies the methodology used to select available tools, and documents the rationale in designing the course and developing its outcomes.
Choice in the classroom
Authors: Aycock John , Uhl Jim
Published: May 2006

Not all decisions that an instructor makes about a course are well-founded and set in stone. Indeed, for some decisions, students can be empowered with choices that allow them to take control of some aspects of their coursework. We describe two techniques for accomplishing this: time banks and contract weighting.
Time banks
are a way of allowing students to customize assignment deadlines;
contract weighting
is a novel derivation of contract grading which allows students to set their own assignment weights. Both have been tried in the classroom, and proffer benefits to the students and the instructor. Surprisingly, neither requires much effort from the instructor to implement. We report on six years' worth of experience with times banks and one year of experience with contract weighting.
A synthesis of computing concepts
Authors: Cassel Lillian N. , Hacquebard Anneke , McGettrick Andrew , Davies Gordon , LeBlanc Richard , Riedesel Charles , Varol Yaakov L , Finley Gail T. , Mann Samuel , Sloan Robert H.
Published: May 2006

This is the report of Working Group 4 of the ITiCSE Conference of 2005. The working group met to introduce some new participants into an ongoing project designed to explore the representation of all the computing and information related disciplines in a single, comprehensive, graphical and interactive structure. The goal of the work is to support the classification of research work, the development of curriculum recommendations and accreditation criteria, and the analysis of proposed programs of study.
Conditional XPath
Authors: Marx Maarten
Published: May 2006

XPath 1.0 is a variable free language designed to specify paths between nodes in XML documents. Such paths can alternatively be specified in first-order logic. The logical abstraction of XPath 1.0, usually called Navigational or Core XPath, is not powerful enough to express every first-order definable path. In this article, we show that there exists a natural expansion of Core XPath in which every first-order definable path in XML document trees is expressible. This expansion is called Conditional XPath. It contains additional axis relations of the form (child::n[F])+, denoting the transitive closure of the path expressed by child::n[F]. The difference with XPath's descendant::n[F] is that the path (child::n[F])+ is conditional on the fact that all nodes in between the start and end node of the path should also be labeled by n and should make the predicate F true. This result can be viewed as the XPath analogue of the expressive completeness of the relational algebra with respect to first-order logic.
DFTI---a new interface for Fast Fourier Transform libraries
Authors: Tang Ping Tak Peter
Published: May 2006

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm that calculates the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) is one of the major breakthroughs in scientific computing and is now an indispensable tool in a vast number of fields. Unfortunately, software applications that provide fast computation of DFT via FFT differ vastly in functionality and lack uniformity. A widely accepted Applications Programmer Interface (API) for DFT would advance the field of scientific computing significantly. In this article, we present the specification of DFTI, a new interface that combines functionality with ease of use. This API is our strawman proposal toward a common interface for DFT calculations.
PDE.Mart
Authors: Mu Mo
Published: May 2006

PDE.Mart
is a network-based problem-solving environment (PSE) for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) in numerical simulations and academic research, as well as in educational settings. The client-server protocol consists of a Web-browser-enabled graphical user interface,
PDE-GUI
, that runs on client machines to manage the server connection, geometric and model specifications, computational method selection, and postprocessing; a server system,
PDE-Server
, to build computational engines and provide PDE solution services on the host machine; and a library,
PDE-LIB
, that contains building blocks for developing network-based and PDE-oriented PSEs.
Algorithm 849
Authors: Davis Timothy A.
Published: May 2006

The LDL software package is a set of short, concise routines for factorizing symmetric positive-definite sparse matrices, with some applicability to symmetric indefinite matrices. Its primary purpose is to illustrate much of the basic theory of sparse matrix algorithms in as concise a code as possible, including an elegant method of sparse symmetric factorization that computes the factorization row-by-row but stores it column-by-column. The entire symbolic and numeric factorization consists of less than 50 executable lines of code. The package is written in C, and includes a MATLAB interface.
A word-to-phrase statistical translation model
Authors: Federico Marcello , Bertoldi Nicola
Published: May 2006

This article addresses the development of statistical models for phrase-based machine translation (MT) which extend a popular word-alignment model proposed by IBM in the early 90s. A novel decoding algorithm is directly derived from the optimization criterion which defines the statistical MT approach. Efficiency in decoding is achieved by applying dynamic programming, pruning strategies, and word reordering constraints. It is known that translation performance can be boosted by exploiting phrase (or multiword) translation pairs automatically extracted from a parallel corpus. New phrase-based models are obtained by introducing extra multiwords in the target language vocabulary and by estimating the corresponding parameters from either: (i) a word-based model, (ii) phrase-based statistics computed on the parallel corpus, or (iii) the interpolation of the two previous estimates. Word-based and phrase-based MT models are evaluated on a traveling domain task in two translation directions: Chinese-English (12k-word vocabulary) and Italian-English (16k-word vocabulary). Phrase-based models show Bleu score improvements over the word-based model by 19% and 13% relative, respectively.
On hobbits and the growth of APL
Authors: Bunderson C. Victor
Published: May 2006

When J. R. R. Tolkien was in the process of writing
The Lord of the Rings
, the unfolding of the take was apparently as much a process of discovery as of definition or creation. That is, as each part of the tale unfolded, it has to "fit" with the rest of what was known and felt about Middle Earth and its inhabitants. While an elaboration or extension would open up new vistas for the author and his readers, it could not be put down unless it had a sense of rightness, and a "ring of truth". The books are characterized by integrity, courtesy, a sure sense of what will bring pleasure to readers, and a sense of what will motivate them to read further, as well as bring them back for second and third readings. These values have captured the imagination of millions of readers, young and old. Not only do these enthusiasts buy books and records for themselves, they proselytize others.
COLLOQUE APL
Authors: Abrams Phillip S. , Breed Lawrence M.
Published: May 2006

September, in Paris, is one of the loveliest months of the year. The weather is warm and clear, with no hint of the winter to come. The tourists have left with the end of August and Paris is once again populated with Parisians. Paris was thus a perfect setting for the APL Conference/Colloque APL on the 9th and 10th of September 1971. At the Maison Internationale des Chemins de Fer, in the direct shadow of the Eiffel Tower, over two hundred people gathered for two days of APL discussion.
Quality Really is Job #1
Authors: O'Hanlon Charlene
Published: May 2006

I hate my car. I really do. Not because it’s a minivan—that was a lapse in judgment on my part that I can (and do) smack myself for, but that’s not the car’s fault. I hate my minivan because it is poorly made.
Gettin’ Your Kode On
Authors: Neville-Neil George
Published: May 2006

Another year is upon us and we are happy to have Kode Vicious still ranting against the ills of insecure programming, insufficient commenting, and numerous other forms of koding malpractice. Yet despite his best efforts, the bittersweet truth is that these problems are not going away anytime soon, and therefore should continue to provide ample fodder for future KV columns. Oh, to live in a world that doesn’t need KV’s advice or doctors, for that matter.
Is the crouching tiger a threat?
Authors: Glass Robert L.
Published: May 2006

Considering the changing representation of the computing community.
Unfolding partiality and disjunctions in stable model semantics
Authors: Janhunen Tomi , Niemelä Ilkka , Seipel Dietmar , Simons Patrik , You Jia-Huai
Published: May 2006

This article studies an implementation methodology for partial and disjunctive stable models where partiality and disjunctions are unfolded from a logic program so that an implementation of stable models for normal (disjunction-free) programs can be used as the core inference engine. The unfolding is done in two separate steps. First, it is shown that partial stable models can be captured by total stable models using a simple linear and modular program transformation. Hence, reasoning tasks concerning partial stable models can be solved using an implementation of total stable models. Disjunctive partial stable models have been lacking implementations which now become available as the translation handles also the disjunctive case. Second, it is shown how total stable models of disjunctive programs can be determined by computing stable models for normal programs. Thus an implementation of stable models of normal programs can be used as a core engine for implementing disjunctive programs. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by constructing a system for computing stable models of disjunctive programs using the SMODELS system as the core engine. The performance of the resulting system is compared to that of DLV, which is a state-of-the-art system for disjunctive programs.
Types for safe locking
Authors: Abadi Martin , Flanagan Cormac , Freund Stephen N.
Published: May 2006

This article presents a static race-detection analysis for multithreaded shared-memory programs, focusing on the Java programming language. The analysis is based on a type system that captures many common synchronization patterns. It supports classes with internal synchronization, classes that require client-side synchronization, and thread-local classes. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the type system, we have implemented it in a checker and applied it to over 40,000 lines of hand-annotated Java code. We found a number of race conditions in the standard Java libraries and other test programs. The checker required fewer than 20 additional type annotations per 1,000 lines of code. This article also describes two improvements that facilitate checking much larger programs: an algorithm for annotation inference and a user interface that clarifies warnings generated by the checker. These extensions have enabled us to use the checker for identifying race conditions in large-scale software systems with up to 500,000 lines of code.
Detection of electromyographic signals from facial muscles with neural networks
Authors: Niemenlehto Pekka-Henrik , Juhola Martti , Surakka Veikko
Published: May 2006

The goal of this research was to investigate neural network-based methods to be applied in the processing of biomedical signals. We developed a neural network-based method for the detection of voluntarily produced changes in facial muscle action potentials. Electromyographic signals were recorded from the
corrugator supercilii
and
zygomaticus major
facial muscles. The facial muscle action potentials of thirty subjects were measured while they performed a series of voluntary contractions of these muscles. Wavelet denoising or digital bandpass filtering was applied to the preprocessing of the signals. A neural network was exploited for an offline classification of various phases of these signals. The results show that the neural network-based technique developed functioned very well, producing a reliable recognition accuracy of 96 to 99%. Because of these promising results, we will proceed in the development of this method for real-time applications that benefit from the analysis of electromyographic signals.
Towards a process model of information systems implementation
Authors: Kim Hee-Woong , Pan Shan L.
Published: May 2006

The failure rate of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementations is estimated to be greater than 65%. Lowering the failure rate and supporting the success of information systems (IS) are the ultimate goals of IS practitioners and researchers. However, most previous research in the area has focused on identifying factors such as critical success factors (CSFs) that are correlated with IS success. There has been little research on how IS implementation may lead to successful results. The state of knowledge in IS implementation may be likened to cooking with a list of ingredients but not the recipe. Drawing on process theory, this study examines the process of IS implementation by explaining how factors of IS implementation influence each other and how interactions among them produce results. Based on one successful case and two unsuccessful cases, we develop the process model of IS implementation, by which the process of IS implementation and the dynamics of IS success can be explained. The proposed model facilitates an understanding of how repeating patterns of IS failure can be reversed, and could serve to guide new IS implementation projects.
What drives market transactions in B2B exchanges?
Authors: Ordanini Andrea
Published: May 2006

A successful digital marketplace exploits content, governance, and structure in its business model to help generate revenue-producing transactions between buyer and seller firms.
2005
Authors: Chrobak Marek
Published: May 2006

This quarter's column contains a survey of work on online algorithms from last year. It covers papers from the following conferences: SODA, STACS, STOC, ICALP, ESA, WADS, COCOON, ISAAC, FCT, FOCS and MFCS. The bibliography of online algorithms (see www.cs.ucr.edu/~marek/pubs/online.bib) has been updated, and it now contains all the papers discussed in this survey -- and more.
Letters
Authors: O'Hanlon Charlene
Published: May 2006

Questioning MDD
Review of "Wiki: Web Collaboration by Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser and Richard Heigl," Springer, 2005, $64.95, ISBN: 3540259953
Authors: Paquette Marc
Published: May 2006

Review of "Wiki: Web Collaboration by Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser and Richard Heigl," Springer, 2005, $64.95, ISBN: 3540259953
Developing collaborative skills early in the CS curriculum in a laboratory environment
Authors: McKinney Dawn , Denton Leo F.
Published: May 2006

The research on teaching and learning over the past 50 years suggests that the early use of collaborative learning leads to higher interest, higher retention, and higher academic performance in students. Early use of these techniques can also increase the sense of belonging for students and can lead to the early development of collaborative skills to prepare students for team experiences in subsequent courses and future careers. During the weekly lab sessions of a second semester introduction to programming course students engaged in collaborative learning experiences through team-based problem solving, project planning, pair programming, and other agile software development practices. Course objectives provided specific goals and criteria for assessment relative to these skills. The assessment in the authors' prior work identified several problem areas which led to specific initiatives to address those problems: (a) instructor-chosen teams, (b) early instruction and reflection on team skills, (c) feedback on team performance, and (d) the use of an IDE that incorporates an automated test-driven development tool. This paper describes the implementation and assessment of these efforts. A significant increase in student team skills from the middle of the semester to the end of the semester was observed.
Multimodal communication in the classroom
Authors: Denning Tamara , Griswold William G. , Simon Beth , Wilkerson Michelle
Published: May 2006

Experimentation has shown that in-class educational technologies, by permitting anonymous, authored participation, can dramatically alter student communications in the classroom. Now, the appearance of dual pen-and-keyboard computing devices in the university classroom, notably Tablet PCs, motivates thinking critically about how different expressive modalities could improve in-class student problem -solving and communication.This paper describes the use of Ubiquitous Presenter 2.0 in a study to discover the driving issues of multimodality for both in-class technologies and student exercises. This paper sensitizes instructors to the issues of modality and makes specific recommendations for application design. We find that the choice of modality is not merely one of efficiency or naturalness, but is loaded with numerous personal, social, and material considerations. Although use of the pen (over typed text) is generally preferred, we find that choice itself is critical to encouraging student creativity, collaboration, and communication.
Pedagogical techniques supported by the use of student devices in teaching software engineering
Authors: Razmov Valentin , Anderson Richard
Published: May 2006

This paper describes our experiences in promoting a learning environment where active student involvement and interaction, as well as openness to diversity of ideas are supported through innovative uses of technology in the classroom. In the context of an undergraduate course in software engineering, for two consecutive terms we have experimented with an existing software system for Tablet PCs that supports a set of classroom interaction styles. Our goal has been to determine if the use of the technology can increase the effectiveness of pedagogical techniques that naturally fit our instructional needs.We have found that
student submissions
-- a style of interaction whereby the instructor poses a question written on a slide and displayed on a tablet in front of each student, then students write their answers in digital ink and submit back to the instructor -- are a powerful tool for supporting the learning environment we aim to create in the classroom. We show that student submissions can help the instructor to engage all students, not merely the vocal ones, and to emphasize the value of diversity of opinions. They also enable immediate feedback from students to instructor -- something difficult in an environment without technological enhancements but which contributes to an improved understanding of everyone's needs and expectations.The discussion of how we used student submissions to support these pedagogical techniques may be relevant to educators interested in fostering student learning through creative uses of technology, as well as to instructors looking to expand their repertoires of teaching methods in software engineering and in other similar subjects.
A learner-centered approach to teaching ethics in computing
Authors: Applin Anne G.
Published: May 2006

This paper presents an approach to teaching Computer Ethics that blends the use of contemporary media, subscriptions to digests of current technology news, and reflective writing in a learner-centered strategy. This approach is designed to make use of activities and assignments that take advantage of (1) student interest in contemporary media (video and film) to provide motivation and context beyond historical case studies, (2) breaking news about technology and technology use in education to provide current real world context, and (3) reflective writing to stimulate thinking critically about the course content outside the classroom context. Digests published three times weekly provide a constant flow of current real-world issues that can be used for focused reflective writing. Contemporary media productions are viewed and then a writing assignment in a structured learning log is used to focus on ethical issues raised by the film. We present an example using a feature length film and subsequent learning log assignment.
Zero cost indexing for improved processor cache performance
Authors: Givargis Tony
Published: May 2006

The increasing use of microprocessor cores in embedded systems as well as mobile and portable devices creates an opportunity for customizing the cache subsystem for improved performance. In traditional cache design, the index portion of the memory address bus consists of the
K
least significant bits, where
K
= log
2
D
and
D
is the depth of the cache. However, in devices where the application set is known and characterized (e.g., systems that execute a fixed application set) there is an opportunity to improve cache performance by choosing a near-optimal set of bits used as index into the cache. This technique does not add any overhead in terms of area or delay. In this article, we present an efficient heuristic algorithm for selecting
K
index bits for improved cache performance. We show the feasibility of our algorithm by applying it to a large number of embedded system applications as well as the integer SPEC CPU 2000 benchmarks. Specifically, for data traces, we show up to 45% reduction in cache misses. Likewise, for instruction traces, we show up to 31% reduction in cache misses. When a unified data/instruction cache architecture is considered, our results show an average improvement of 14.5% for the Powerstone benchmarks and an average improvement of 15.2% for the SPEC'00 benchmarks.
Reliable crosstalk-driven interconnect optimization
Authors: Jiang Iris Hui-Ru , Pan Song-Ra , Chang Yao-Wen , Jou Jing-Yang
Published: May 2006

As technology advances apace, crosstalk becomes a design metric of comparable importance to area and delay. This article focuses mainly on the crosstalk issue, specifically on the impacts of physical design and process variation on crosstalk. While the feature size shrinks below 0.25μ
m
, the impact of process variation on crosstalk increases rapidly. Hence, a crosstalk insensitive design is desirable in the deep submicron regime. In this article,
crosstalk sensitivity
is referred to as the influence of process variation on crosstalk in a circuit. We show that the lower bound of crosstalk sensitivity grows quadratically, while that of crosstalk increases linearly. Therefore, designers should also consider crosstalk sensitivity, when optimizing other design objectives such as crosstalk, area, and delay. According to our modeling, these objectives are all in posynomial forms, and thus the multi-objective optimization problem can optimally be solved by Lagrangian relaxation. Experimental results show that our method is effective and efficient. For instance, a circuit of 2856 gates and 5272 wires is optimized using 13-minute runtime and 2.8-MB memory on a Pentium III 1.0 GHz PC with 256-MB memory. In particular, by relaxing Lagrange multipliers to the critical paths, it takes only two iterations for all solutions to converge to the global optimal, which is much more efficient than related previous work. This relaxation scheme provides a key insight into the rapid convergence in Lagrangian relaxation.
Compilation framework for code size reduction using reduced bit-width ISAs (rISAs)
Authors: Shrivastava Aviral , Biswas Partha , Halambi Ashok , Dutt Nikil , Nicolau Alex
Published: May 2006

For many embedded applications, program code size is a critical design factor. One promising approach for reducing code size is to employ a “dual instruction set”, where processor architectures support a normal (usually 32-bit) Instruction Set, and a narrow, space-efficient (usually 16-bit) Instruction Set with a limited set of opcodes and access to a limited set of registers. This feature however, requires compilers that can reduce code size by compiling for both Instruction Sets. Existing compiler techniques operate at the routine-level granularity and are unable to make the trade-off between increased register pressure (resulting in more spills) and decreased code size. We present a compilation framework for such dual instruction sets, which uses a profitability based compiler heuristic that operates at the instruction-level granularity and is able to effectively take advantage of both Instruction Sets. We demonstrate consistent and improved code size reduction (on average 22%), for the MIPS 32/16 bit ISA. We also show that the code compression obtained by this “dual instruction set” technique is heavily dependent on the application characteristics and the narrow Instruction Set itself.
The collaborate/integrate business technology strategy
Authors: Andriole Stephen J.
Published: May 2006

Before investing in the technology, business managers must focus on their collaborative business future and the extent to which their technology can be integrated.
Scoping identity theft
Authors: Mercuri Rebecca T.
Published: May 2006

The computer's role in identity theft incidents may have been misgauged through overestimates of reported losses.
Innovation as language action
Authors: Denning Peter J. , Dunham Robert
Published: May 2006

By learning seven foundational practices, anyone can become a skillful innovator.
Content-based retrieval of 3D models
Authors: Bimbo Alberto Del , Pala Pietro
Published: May 2006

In the past few years, there has been an increasing availability of technologies for the acquisition of digital 3D models of real objects and the consequent use of these models in a variety of applications, in medicine, engineering, and cultural heritage. In this framework, content-based retrieval of 3D objects is becoming an important subject of research, and finding adequate descriptors to capture global or local characteristics of the shape has become one of the main investigation goals. In this article, we present a comparative analysis of a few different solutions for description and retrieval by similarity of 3D models that are representative of the principal classes of approaches proposed. We have developed an experimental analysis by comparing these methods according to their robustness to deformations, the ability to capture an object's structural complexity, and the resolution at which models are considered.
Architectural implications of quantum computing technologies
Authors: Meter Rodney Van , Oskin Mark
Published: May 2006

In this article we present a classification scheme for quantum computing technologies that is based on the characteristics most relevant to computer systems architecture. The engineering trade-offs of execution speed, decoherence of the quantum states, and size of systems are described. Concurrency, storage capacity, and interconnection network topology influence algorithmic efficiency, while quantum error correction and necessary quantum state measurement are the ultimate drivers of logical clock speed. We discuss several proposed technologies. Finally, we use our taxonomy to explore architectural implications for common arithmetic circuits, examine the implementation of quantum error correction, and discuss cluster-state quantum computation.
ALITER
Authors: Gao Xiaofeng , Simon Beth , Snavely Allan
Published: May 2006

Binary instrumentation tools are very useful for collecting traces of program events. Common uses for such traces include trace-driven simulation and performance modeling. However commonly available general-purpose instrumentation tools are inefficient for capturing fine-grained events as for example a sequence of dynamic memory addresses. We introduce ALITER, an asynchronous lightweight instrumentation tool for event recording which is extremely light in terms of tracing overhead as compared to commonly available binary instrumentation tools. The tool creates a buffer in the instrumented code space and inlines buffer maintenance instructions into the instrumented code. User supplied analysis routines are only invoked when the buffer is fairly full. This approach, i. e. having a user code space buffer managed under ALITER's control, ensures that most control transfers between user code and instrumentation code are eliminated. In addition, storing events to the buffer and checking buffer status are implemented very cheaply. Thus traditional sources of tracing overheads are greatly reduced. Overall we report less than a 2-fold slowdown to collect memory traces of the selected benchmarks; this contrasts with tens and even hundreds of fold slowdown using generally available instrumentation tools.
Review of “Extrusion Detection: Security Monitoring for Internal Intrusions by Richard Bejtlich,” Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005, $49.99, ISBN: 0321349962.
Authors: State Radu
Published: May 2006

Review of “Extrusion Detection: Security Monitoring for Internal Intrusions by Richard Bejtlich,” Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005, $49.99, ISBN: 0321349962.
Influencing factors in outsourced software maintenance
Authors: Bhatt Pankaj , K Williams , Shroff Gautam , Misra Arun K.
Published: May 2006

Software lifecycle management is a complex phenomenon with each stage posing its unique technical and other challenges. Maintenance and enhancement of software brings in its own share of complexities to this phase. While uncertainties associated with software baseline in themselves pose a huge challenge in planning and estimation of maintenance activities, there are several other factors that contribute to overall success of software maintenance project especially in an outsourcing scenario. This paper brings out the results of an analysis of some such factors, their interrelationship and influence on software maintenance activities and effort.
A consistent history authentication protocol
Authors: Rotondi Guido , Guerrera Gianpiero
Published: May 2006

Traditional strong authentication systems rely on a certification chain to delegate the authority of trusting an intermediate end. However, in some practical life scenarios a relayed authentication is not accepted and thus it would be advisable a straight proof of trustiness with a direct interaction with the involved party. Our protocol introduces a registry of certified operations from which it descends the authentication and the consequent proof of identity. Despite the fact that such system requires for registrar initialization, the
Consistent History Protocol
provides a reasonable degree of reliability in identifying subjects at the steady state. As application, we deployed the protocol in the indirect electronic data collection scenario, where large data flows have to be exchanged and certified among a set of mutually trusted Institutions. The experimental results report the processing overhead introduced by the authentication protocol, which results negligible with respect a classical strong authentication method built around the
OpenSSL
library.
Be here now
Authors: Wing Michael
Published: May 2006

Be here now. Improve this moment by responding to the people and the situation around you, deliberately, not randomly. Of course, one must plan, too, but don't get carried away.
A historical perspective on runtime assertion checking in software development
Authors: Clarke Lori A. , Rosenblum David S.
Published: May 2006

This report presents initial results in the area of software testing and analysis produced as part of the Software Engineering Impact Project. The report describes the historical development of runtime assertion checking, including a description of the origins of and significant features associated with assertion checking mechanisms, and initial findings about current industrial use. A future report will provide a more comprehensive assessment of development practice, for which we invite readers of this report to contribute information.
Dean Wright
Authors: Lee Newton
Published: May 2006

Mr. Dean Wright is Oscar-nominated visual-effects supervisor for "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)." His visual effects filmography includes many Academy Award nominated films and winning movies such as "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)," "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)," "The Sixth Sense (1999)," and "Titanic (1997)." He also worked on the production of "Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)." In the video interview, you will hear Dean's answers to the following questions:1. What were the biggest challenge and the biggest innovation for visual effects on The Chronicles of Narnia?2. How many types of creatures and species were created digitally?3. How did you decide when to use CG versus miniatures to create a visual effect?4. Can you tell us about motion capture that was used extensively on The Chronicles of Narnia?5. How would you compare and contrast the visual effects on The Chronicles of Narnia and some of the other movies (that you worked on) such as The Lord of the Rings?
A distributed traffic control scheme based on edge-centric resource management
Authors: Jiang Yingxin , Striegel Aaron
Published: May 2006

The correct admission of flows in the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) environment is critical to provide stable and predictable quality of service (QoS) to the end user. Without a scalable and precise admission control scheme, the service provider is faced with either over-provisioning the network or accepting periods of best-effort like behavior. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for admission control that exploits the unique architectural aspects of DiffServ. Through the use of periodic heartbeats emanating from edge routers to probe the network state on the available egress paths, edge routers are able to quickly conduct admission control with a tunable degree of precision. In this paper, we detail our approach, Edge-centric Resource Management (ERM), and conduct detailed simulation studies regarding the effectiveness of the approach.
Reflections on network architecture
Authors: Calvert Ken
Published: May 2006

After a long period when networking research seemed to be focused mainly on making the existing Internet work better, interest in "clean slate" approaches to network architecture seems to be growing. Beginning with the DARPA program in the mid-1990's, researchers working on
active networks
explored such an approach, based on the idea of a programming interface as the basic interoperability mechanism of the network. This note draws on the author's experiences in that effort and attempts to extract some observations or "lessons learned" that may be relevant to more general network architecture research.
The information technology era of the vehicular industry
Authors: Ernst Thierry
Published: May 2006

In this note, we discuss the emerging era of information technology in the vehicular industry. After reviewing the motivations leading to the use of information technology in vehicles, we investigate the networking requirements of the necessary communication system based on IP (Internet Protocol). Existing work that could meet these requirements is highlighted together with some existing projects. We also briefly introduce some research and deployment issues that will have to be considered.
Ellipticity Conditions of the Shallow Water Balance Equations for Atmospheric Data
Authors: Bourchtein Andrei
Published: May 2006

Nonlinear normal mode initialization equations, which provide required balance relations for atmospheric data, are considered in the generalized case of shallow water equations in arbitrary orthogonal coordinates. Using the concept of ellipticity in the sense of Douglis–Nirenberg, the conditions of well posedness of boundary value problems for balance equations are derived in the cases of constrained streamfunction, constrained potential vorticity, and constrained pressure fields.
Recent Reforms and the Development of the Securities Market in Bangladesh
Authors: Solaiman S. M.
Published: May 2006

The Bangladesh securities market has failed to achieve any significant growth since its inception in 1954. This stagnation is attributable to a number of factors that include, inter alia, the existence of weak legal and regulatory frameworks, the absence of active market professionals, the predominance of individual investors, and a serious dearth of foreign and institutional investors. Legal and regulatory weaknesses are considered to have critically hindered the market's potential growth. Some important laws are outdated, and the regulator has introduced some unrealistic reforms over the years. Most of the reforms accomplished thus far concentrate on incentives to investors and issuers alike, but nothing significant has been done for investor protection. This article argues that effective legal protection to investors is indispensable for the development of, and the restoration of public confidence in, the infant securities market of Bangladesh.
Collective Robotic Site Preparation
Authors: Parker Chris A. C. , Zhang Hong
Published: May 2006

Robotic site preparation has been identified as an integral precursor to human landings on Mars. Many species of social insect carry out the site preparation task when they construct their nests. A site preparation algorithm was developed based on the nest construction behavior of a particular spe cies of ant, Leptothorax albipennis. In this paper, we present a new approach to modeling the tempo ral behavior of a multiple-robot system and apply it to our construction algorithm. In order to validate our model, experiments with multiple physical robots were conducted. Not only did the results of our experiments closely follow the predictions of our model, but the sites prepared by our robots appeared very similar to the nests built by the ants that were our inspiration.
‘Team Spirit’
Authors: Leach James
Published: May 2006

This article focuses upon volleyball, the rhetoric of community building, and the potentially competitive nature of generative social relations. The setting for my discussion is the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. The article is also about places, and the deep and significant influence that both individual places, and indeed the imagination in relation to the potential of places, can play. It is an opening foray into the nature of various kinds of collaborative and institutional forms in Melanesia, showing, in this case, how the perception of a ‘community’ relies upon the active and generative differentiation of people and places. Through a mixture of narrative and analytic styles, personal anecdote, reported speech, published authority and descriptive evocation, I demonstrate that on the Rai Coast, landscape and place are not about what is ‘out there’ beyond people, but are sometimes about what is in people. As such, they are brought into people's projects, and action in relation to them shapes developments around the idea of ‘community’.
Identity, Memory and Countermemory
Authors: Hall Martin
Published: May 2006

Urban landscapes are both expressions of identity, and a means of shaping the relationships between those who inhabit them. They are palimpsests in which buildings, street layouts and monumental structures are interpreted and reinterpreted as changing expressions of relations of power. The urban landscape of the Cape of Good Hope started with the establishment of a Dutch East India Company outpost in 1652, was restructured by the British after 1795, and gave form to spatial segregation in the apartheid years. More recently, aspects of these historical landscapes have been reinvented as entertainment centres in the ‘experiential economy’. Differing ways of understanding these mixes of physical form, identity and recollection either lead to closure – retrospective celebrations in the interests of dominant interests – or to challenge: ‘countermemories’ that look for contradictions and uncertainties, keeping open the discourse of identity and relations of power.
Labels increase attention to novel objects in children with autism and comprehension-matched children with typical development
Authors: McDuffie Andrea S. , Yoder Paul J. , Stone Wendy L.
Published: May 2006

This study used an intact group comparison to examine attention following in 34 children aged 2 years diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) matched pairwise for vocabulary comprehension with a group of typically developing toddlers. For both groups of children, the presence of verbal labels during a referential task increased attention to a novel object over and above the attention-facilitating effect of child-directed talking without labeling.The typically developing children displayed more attention following than comprehension matched children with ASD across experimental conditions and there was no significant difference between the groups in the facilitative effect of hearing verbal labels. Implications for word-learning theory, intervention strategies and future research are considered.
European Integration, Intergovernmental Bargaining, and Convergence of Party Programmes
Authors: Dorussen Han , Nanou Kyriaki
Published: May 2006

Over the past 50 years, the European Union (EU) has dramatically increased its policy-making power. However, there remains considerable variation over time as well as across policy areas in the relative power of the EU and the member states. The variation is likely to influence EU-wide bargaining. Following the logic of bargaining games with domestically constrained actors, or two-level games, the changes in the bargaining environment may also influence party competition within the member states of the European Union. Using manifesto data for 1951–2001, this article examines convergence of party programmes across Western Europe. It is shown that European integration has increasingly constrained the range of policy platforms. Moreover, we generally find a stronger effect if and when countries are actually members of the EU. European integration bolsters programmatic convergence of Euro-friendly as well as Eurosceptic parties. However, European integration particularly influences the convergence of Eurosceptic parties in EU member states.
Child Protection and the Anglican Church of Australia
Authors: Blake Garth
Published: May 2006

In the last decade the sexual abuse of children by some clergy and church workers in the Anglican Church of Australia has become a serious public issue. There have been criminal convictions, civil litigation, inquiries, Church discipline and resignations. Initial responses in the 23 dioceses were reactive and inconsistent. Beginning in 2001 the General Synod took initiatives to develop national strategies to respond to this growing crisis. The culmination of these initiatives occurred at the 2004 General Synod. By the passing of several resolutions and canons the Church at a national level expressed a commitment to, and set out detailed comprehensive and uniform strategies for, the protection of children.
Static Viscoelastic Characteristics-Aggregation Structure Relationships of Monolayers at Air–Water Interface
Authors: Kajiyama Tisato , Morotomi Naoaki , Uchida Motoko , Oishi Yushi
Published: May 2006

The melting temperature, Tm of fatty acid monolayers on the water surface was evaluated from the relationships between the subphase temperature dependence of static viscoelasticities and the aggregation structure of those monolayers. Tms of myristic, palmitic, and stearic acids in a monolayer state are ca. 278 K, 301 K, and 317 K, respectively. These values are 26–50 K lower than those in respective three-dimensional crystalline states. With an increase of subphase temperature, the aggregation state of those monolayers on the water surface varied from an oriented crystalline state, an unoriented crystalline one, an amorphous one and finally, a dissoluble unstable state.
Novel Thermal Deoxygenation in Bornyl α-Azohydroperoxide to Give Camphor Hydrazone. A Retro-ene Reaction Assisted by the Steric Compression Effect
Authors: Tezuka Takahiro , Otsuka Takashi
Published: May 2006

Camphor hydrazone, its dimer, and oxygen are generated from bornyl α-azohydroperoxide by thermal reaction accompanied by several other products. The retro-ene elimination mechanism is proposed.
Host–Guest Sensory System for Detecting a Variety of Organic Compounds by Variations in Pyrene Excimer and Monomer Fluorescence Intensities
Authors: Ueno Akihiko , Suzuki Iwao , Osa Tetsuo
Published: May 2006

Pyrene-appended γ-cyclodextrin in solution changes pyrene excimer and monomer fluorescence intensities associated with the conversion from its dimer into host–guest complexes. This fluorescence variation was used to detect a variety of organic compounds, and this system has been shown to be sensitive particularly to some steroid compounds.
Starburst Molecules for Amorphous Molecular Materials. 4,4′,4″-Tris(N,N-diphenylamino)triphenylamine and 4,4′,4″-Tris[N-(3-methylphenyl)-N-phenylamino]triphenylamine
Authors: Shirota Yasuhiko , Kobata Tomokazu , Noma Naoki
Published: May 2006

A novel class of starburst molecules for making amorphous glassy organic materials, 4,4′,4″-tris(N,N-diphenylamino)triphenylamine (TDATA) and 4,4′,4″-tris[N-(3-methylphenyl)-N-phenylamino]triphenylamine (MTDATA), are synthesized and characterized. Their electrochemical and electronic properties as well as unique solid-state morphology are described.
Removal of Fluoride Ion by a Porous Spherical Resin Loaded with Hydrous Zirconium Oxide
Authors: Suzuki Toshishige M , Chida Chiyoko , Kanesato Masatoshi , Yokoyama Toshiro
Published: May 2006

A new composite material based on hydrous zirconium oxide and a porous polymer resin has been prepared by the impregnation of tetra(n-butoxy)zirconium into porous polymer beads followed by hydrolysis of the alkoxide. The adsorption properties of the Zr-loaded resin for fluoride ion have been described.
A New Synthetic Route and the Structural Analysis of Ni(tsalen). (N,N′-Ethylenebis(thiosalicylidenaminato))nickel(II)
Authors: Yamamura Takeshi , Tadokoro Makoto , Kuroda Reiko
Published: May 2006

A simple route to the nickel complex of thiosalen, Ni(tsalen), which is the correspondent of the classical salen compound, was developed. The molecular structure of Ni(tsalen) was studied also.
Transchlorination between Polychlorobiphenyl and Benzene
Authors: Shinoda Kiyonori , Yasuda Kensei , Ohta Minoru
Published: May 2006

Polychlorobiphenyl (PCB) was transchlorinated with benzene into biphenyl and chlorobenzene in the presence of palladium(II) chloride/cerium(III) chloride supported on activated charcoal. The transchlorination proceeded smoothly for a long time at 375 °C.
Enhanced Circular Dichroism of Self-Assembled Peptidic Amphiphiles
Authors: Shimizu Toshimi , Mori Mariko , Minamikawa Hiroyuki , Hato Masakatsu
Published: May 2006

Peptidic amphiphiles self-assembled to show the marked enhancement of circular dichroism in the aggregates. This fact was interpreted as the existence of the inter- and intramolecular strong exciton coupling of the amide and imide chromophores.