61,344 research outputs found
All Together Now: Collaboration and Innovation for Youth Engagement
Each new generation must become active, informed, responsible, and effective citizens. As a teacher we surveyed for this report said, civic education "is essential if we are to continue as a free democratic society. Not to educate the next generation will ensure the destruction of our American way of life as we know it."Data show that many young Americans are reasonably well informed and active. For instance, 45% of citizens between the ages of 18 and 29 voted in the 2012 election. In a national survey conducted for this Commission, 76% of people under the age of 25 who voted could correctly answer at least one (out of two) factual questions about where the presidential candidates stood on a campaign issue and state their own opinion on that issue.On the other hand, more than half of young people did not vote. And on some topics, most young people were misinformed. A majority (51.2%) of under 25-year olds believed that the federal government spends more on foreign aid than on Social Security, when in fact Social Security costs about 20 times more. (Older adults have also been found to be misinformed on similar topics.) Our research, like many other studies, finds that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to be informed and to vote.These shortcomings cannot be attributed to the schools alone, since families, friends, political campaigns, election officials, the mass media, social media, and community-based organizations are among the other important influences on young people. In fact, our research shows that while schools matter, civic education must be a shared responsibility.The outcomes are acceptable only when all the relevant institutions invite, support, and educate young people to engage in politics and civic life. Improving the quality and quantity of youth participation will require new collaborations; for example, state election officials and schools should work together to make voting procedures understandable and to educate students about voting rules
FORTEST: Formal methods and testing
Formal methods have traditionally been used for specification and development of software. However there are potential benefits for the testing stage as well. The panel session associated with this paper explores the usefulness
or otherwise of formal methods in various contexts for improving software testing. A number of different possibilities for the use of formal methods are explored and questions raised. The contributors are all members of the UK FORTEST Network on formal methods and testing. Although
the authors generally believe that formal methods
are useful in aiding the testing process, this paper is intended to provoke discussion. Dissenters are encouraged to put their views to the panel or individually to the authors
A posteriori metadata from automated provenance tracking: Integration of AiiDA and TCOD
In order to make results of computational scientific research findable,
accessible, interoperable and re-usable, it is necessary to decorate them with
standardised metadata. However, there are a number of technical and practical
challenges that make this process difficult to achieve in practice. Here the
implementation of a protocol is presented to tag crystal structures with their
computed properties, without the need of human intervention to curate the data.
This protocol leverages the capabilities of AiiDA, an open-source platform to
manage and automate scientific computational workflows, and TCOD, an
open-access database storing computed materials properties using a well-defined
and exhaustive ontology. Based on these, the complete procedure to deposit
computed data in the TCOD database is automated. All relevant metadata are
extracted from the full provenance information that AiiDA tracks and stores
automatically while managing the calculations. Such a protocol also enables
reproducibility of scientific data in the field of computational materials
science. As a proof of concept, the AiiDA-TCOD interface is used to deposit 170
theoretical structures together with their computed properties and their full
provenance graphs, consisting in over 4600 AiiDA nodes
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Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine
This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and
the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and
extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the
core of this infrastructural software can be customised to
meet new requirements and add features such as debugging,
execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service
selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to
cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose
the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself
but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of
Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running
processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly"
means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow
Aspect-Oriented Programming
Aspect-oriented programming is a promising idea that can improve the quality of software by reduce the problem of code tangling and improving the separation of concerns. At ECOOP'97, the first AOP workshop brought together a number of researchers interested in aspect-orientation. At ECOOP'98, during the second AOP workshop the participants reported on progress in some research topics and raised more issues that were further discussed. \ud
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This year, the ideas and concepts of AOP have been spread and adopted more widely, and, accordingly, the workshop received many submissions covering areas from design and application of aspects to design and implementation of aspect languages
Enabling Families to Weather Emergencies and Develop: The Role of Assets
Discusses the need for low-income families to build assets for emergencies and employment gaps as well as for long-term stability. Suggests policies to improve savings and ownership opportunities such as incentives and better regulation of small loans
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