Proof Transformation with Built-in Equality Predicate

One of the main reasons why computer generated proofs are not widely accepted is often their complexity and incomprehensibility. Especially proofs of mathematical theorems with equations are normally presented in an inadequate and not intuitive way. This is even more of a problem for the presentation of inferences drawn by automated reasoning components in other AI systems. For first order logic, proof transformation procedures have been designed in order to structure proofs and state them in a formalism that is more familiar to human mathematicians. In this report we generalize these approaches, so that proofs involving equational reasoning can also be handled. To this end extended refutation graphs are introduced to represent combined resolution and paramodulation proofs. In the process of transforming these proofs into natural deduction proofs with equality, the inherent structure can also be extracted by exploiting topological properties of refutation graphs

Formal Methods Specification and Analysis Guidebook for the Verification of Software and Computer Systems

This guidebook, the second of a two-volume series, is intended to facilitate the transfer of formal methods to the avionics and aerospace community. The 1st volume concentrates on administrative and planning issues [NASA-95a], and the second volume focuses on the technical issues involved in applying formal methods to avionics and aerospace software systems. Hereafter, the term "guidebook" refers exclusively to the second volume of the series. The title of this second volume, A Practitioner's Companion, conveys its intent. The guidebook is written primarily for the nonexpert and requires little or no prior experience with formal methods techniques and tools. However, it does attempt to distill some of the more subtle ingredients in the productive application of formal methods. To the extent that it succeeds, those conversant with formal methods will also nd the guidebook useful. The discussion is illustrated through the development of a realistic example, relevant fragments of which appear in each chapter. The guidebook focuses primarily on the use of formal methods for analysis of requirements and high-level design, the stages at which formal methods have been most productively applied. Although much of the discussion applies to low-level design and implementation, the guidebook does not discuss issues involved in the later life cycle application of formal methods

Japan and Taiwan in the wake of bio-globalization : drugs, race and standards

Thesis (Ph. D. in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2005.Also issued in a 2 v. set, printed in leaves.MIT Dewey Library copy: 2 v. set.Includes bibliographical references (p. 518-545).This is a study of Japan and Taiwan's different responses to the expansion of the global drug industry. The thesis focuses on the problematic of "voicing," of how a state can make its interests heard in the International Conference on Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH). The ICH is a unique project that facilitates the formation of a single global market by creating universal standards for clinical trials and drug approvals. Tracing, through "slow motion" ethnography, step by step, why Japan claims a racial difference requires additional local clinical trials with "Asian bodies," this thesis rejects conventional interpretations of protectionism for Japan's resistance to globalization. It argues that more than protectionism is involved, and that a rich ethnographic understanding of Japan's medical infrastructure is required to understand the claim of biological, cultural, and national differences, as well as biostatistical arguments about the ambiguities of "extrapolation" of clinical data from one place to another.(cont.) The inherent ambiguities of efforts to create "bridging" studies as a temporary solution to these problematics created a deadlock in the ICH, and provided an opening for Taiwan, another Asian state, which does not enjoy formal recognition from the world, to speak for itself to this conference, and to create the fragile, but politically critical, possibility of becoming a clinical trial center for Asian populations. The language of genomics and biostatistics become in the more recent period the vehicles for both Japanese and Taiwanese efforts at "voicing" their concerns. Both genomics and biostatistics look different in these contexts than they do from the United States or European Union. In sum, (1) Japan's and Taiwan's response, as well as "global ethnographic objects" such as the ICH, provide important tools to rethink the comparative method as well as universalizing claims of harmonization. (2) Race, culture, and the nation-state are transformed as categories through the contemporary reworkings of genomics and biostatistics. (3) The thesis demonstrates that abstract accounts of the spread of clinical trials and resistance in various parts of the world are not to be trusted unless they include detailed probings of local understandings, identity issues, and problems of voicing.by Wen-Hua Kuo.Ph.D.in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HAST

The Affect-Emotion Gap: Soft Power, Nation Branding, and Cultural Administration in Japan

This dissertation analyzes the appropriation of the political theory "soft power" within Japanese national bureaucracies as a discursive mechanism through which anxious concerns for Japan's present are manufactured into hopeful sentiments for its future. In doing so, it examines how certain nonconscious capacities to feel, affects , are made knowable in more formally narrated and perceived sentiments, emotions . These terms constitute the two sides of what I call the affect-emotion gap , whereby the slippages between what one feels and what one knows about what one feels are made into sites of political and economic investment. Based on two years of fieldwork conducted at the major national bureaucracies engaged with cultural diplomacy and policy in Japan--the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and the Japan Foundation--I observe how soft power ideologies are translated into administrative policies that seek to turn aesthetic production, specifically within the field of Japanese popular culture, into political resource. Ultimately, I argue that the uneasy accommodation of soft power ideology to everyday bureaucratic practice reveals a contradictory movement in which soft power is at once delegitimized as practical policy and activated as discursive ideology which, in suturing economic anxiety in the present to hope for Japan's culture industries in the future, nonetheless sustains soft power's circulation