The Cowl - v.77 - n.8 - Nov 1, 2012

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Vol 77 - No. 8 - November 1, 2012. 24 pages

The Cowl - v.82 - n.11 - Nov 30, 2017

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 82, Number 11 - November 30, 2017. 24 pages

Coding Guidelines and Undecidability

The C and C++ programming languages are widely used for the implementation of software in critical systems. They are complex languages with subtle features and peculiarities that might baffle even the more expert programmers. Hence, the general prescription of language subsetting, which occurs in most functional safety standards and amounts to only using a "safer" subset of the language, is particularly applicable to them. Coding guidelines are the preferred way of expressing language subsets. Some guidelines are formulated in terms of the programming language and its implementation only: in this case they are amenable to automatic checking. However, due to fundamental limitations of computing, some guidelines are undecidable, that is, they are based on program properties that no current and future algorithm can capture in all cases. The most mature and widespread coding standards, the MISRA ones, explicitly tag guidelines with undecidable or decidable. It turns out that this information is not of secondary nature and must be taken into account for a full understanding of what the guideline is asking for. As a matter of fact, undecidability is a common source of confusion affecting many users of coding standards and of the associated checking tools. In this paper, we recall the notions of decidability and undecidability in terms that are understandable to any C/C++ programmer. The paper includes a systematic study of all the undecidable MISRA C:2012 guidelines, discussing the reasons for the undecidability and its consequences. We pay particular attention to undecidable guidelines that have decidable approximations whose enforcement would not overly constrain the source code. We also discuss some coding guidelines for which compliance is hard, if not impossible, to prove, even beyond the issue of decidability.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

The Spotlight, 1999 January 29

The Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library acknowledges the generous support of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in supporting the processing and digitization of a number of historic collections as part of the project: Our Story: Digitizing Publications and Photographs of the Historically Black Atlanta University Center Institutions.</em

Applicability of HCI Techniques to Systems Interface Design

PhDThis thesis seeks to identify reasons why HCI techniques are unsuitable for application in real world design projects. User-oriented systems design and evaluation require that many considerations such as the psychology of users, the applications and target tasks be born in mind simultaneously. A selection of influential HCI design and evaluative techniques from HCI research literature are reviewed and characterised in terms of their analytic scope. Two studies of systems designers' approaches to user-oriented design and evaluation were carried out in order to gain a clearer picture of the design process as it occurs in applied and commercial projects. It was found that designers frequently lack adequate information about users, carrying Out, at best, informal user-evaluations of prototypes. Most notably HCI design and evaluative techniques, of the type common in the literature, are not being used in applied and commercial design practice. They seem to be complex, often limited in scope, and possessed of inadequate or unrepresentative views of the design process within which they might be applied. It was noted that design practice is highly varied with only a small number of common goal directed classes of activity being identified. These together with observed user-oriented information sources and design constraints provide a useful schema for viewing applied and commercial design practice. A further study of HCI specialists' practice in commercial environments was undertaken, in order to identify particular user-oriented design approaches and HCI techniques suitable for application in practice. The specialists were able to describe desirable, and undesirable properties of the techniques they used which made it possible to identify a list of specific desirable features for HCI techniques. A framework for assessing applicability of HCI techniques was developed from the findings of the thesis. This is demonstrated using an example project from the design studies and may prove valuable in supporting design, evaluation, critiquing and selection of HCI techniques

The Wooster Voice (Wooster, OH), 1986-09-26

This edition of the College of Wooster student run newspaper was published on September 26 of 1986 and it is twelve pages long. Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism, will present on campus. A lecture by Karl Johannes Geiringer, an expert on Brahms, Haydn, and Bach is also scheduled to lecture at the college. One author reviews the year\u27s incarnation of the Bacchanalia party. Students prepare for Party on the Green, which will feature Buckwheat Zydeco. Athletic updates for the past week are featured on pages ten to twelve.https://openworks.wooster.edu/voice1981-1990/1384/thumbnail.jp

THE CONTEXT OF SUCCESSFUL NAVIGATION OF GENDERED NORMS IN OUTDOOR ADVENTURE RECREATION: THE CASE OF PROFESSIONAL FEMALE ADVENTURE ATHLETES

Females have long found it difficult to find entrance to and acceptance in the outdoors because of socially engrained gender expectations, a lack of female role models, and fear. Despite the hurdles, research indicates that females who participate in outdoor recreation are more empowered, and have higher levels of self-esteem, self-trust, self-worth, assertiveness, self-sufficiency, independence, confidence, and body image (McDermott, 2004; Pohl, Borrie, & Patterson, 2000). Therefore, it is important that females are not only encouraged to participate in outdoor recreation, but empowered to do so. Current research on females\u27 leisure in the outdoors largely focuses on women who are casual or amateur participants (e.g., Little, 2002). What has not been investigated is how women who participate at the highest levels of their sport have successfully negotiated the many constraints to their outdoor recreation participation. Three main theories acted as a framework in guiding this study: the social cognitive theory of gender development and differentiation (Bussey & Bandura, 1999), leisure constraints (e.g., Crawford & Godbey, 1987), and poststructural feminism (as applied by Aitchison, 2003). In addition, the research was conducted in the spirit of Parry\u27s (2003) call for a sixth phase of feminist leisure research. That is, this study seeks to move beyond simply understanding the experiences of women\u27s leisure in a gendered society, and towards a focus on how these gendered norms can be broken down and challenged. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to understand what specific constraints professional female mountain guides have faced and their methods for successfully navigating through them on their way to an elite level of participation and performance in mountaineering. Data analysis revealed that the professional outdoor athletes face the same types of constraints to outdoor recreation as amateur participants. These constraints include fear, a lack of confidence, and gender relations. The findings also indicate that the professional athletes identified similar negotiation strategies including a reliance on social support, the development and use of resiliency strategies, and an unwavering passion for the outdoors. The results of this study provide a starting point for improving on or creating interventions aimed at increasing women\u27s participation in outdoor adventure recreation

Programming with human computation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-156).Amazon's Mechanical Turk provides a programmatically accessible micro-task market, allowing a program to hire human workers. This has opened the door to a rich field of research in human computation where programs orchestrate the efforts of humans to help solve problems. This thesis explores challenges that programmers face in this space: both technical challenges like managing high-latency, as well as psychological challenges like designing effective interfaces for human workers. We offer tools and experiments to overcome these challenges in an effort to help future researchers better understand and harness the power of human computation. The main tool this thesis offers is the crash-and-rerun programming model for managing high-latency tasks on MTurk, along with the TurKit toolkit which implements crash-and-rerun. TurKit provides a straightforward imperative programming environment where MTurk is abstracted as a function call. Based on our experience using TurKit, we propose a simple model of human computation algorithms involving creation and decision tasks. These tasks suggest two natural workflows: iterative and parallel, where iterative tasks build on each other and parallel tasks do not. We run a series of experiments comparing the merits of each workflow, where iteration appears to increase quality, but has limitations like reducing the variety of responses and getting stuck in local maxima. Next we build a larger system composed of several iterative and parallel workflows to solve a real world problem, that of transcribing medical forms, and report our experience. The thesis ends with a discussion of the current state-of-the-art of human computation, and suggests directions for future work.by Greg Little.Ph.D

Standardized development of computer software. Part 1: Methods

This work is a two-volume set on standards for modern software engineering methodology. This volume presents a tutorial and practical guide to the efficient development of reliable computer software, a unified and coordinated discipline for design, coding, testing, documentation, and project organization and management. The aim of the monograph is to provide formal disciplines for increasing the probability of securing software that is characterized by high degrees of initial correctness, readability, and maintainability, and to promote practices which aid in the consistent and orderly development of a total software system within schedule and budgetary constraints. These disciplines are set forth as a set of rules to be applied during software development to drastically reduce the time traditionally spent in debugging, to increase documentation quality, to foster understandability among those who must come in contact with it, and to facilitate operations and alterations of the program as requirements on the program environment change

Internet of services-based business model: a case study in the livestock industry

Purpose – Considering the relevance of innovative business models in the digitally transformed market andthe lack of clarity on the internet of services (IoS) contribution for a business model deployment in currentliterature, this study aims to fill this gap by evaluating a business model that converges to an IoS adoption ina direct sale of free-range eggs from farmers to consumers.Design/methodology/approach – From the bibliographical research regarding the IoS and businessmodel, the authors developed an IoS-based model framework. The framework has been evaluated in a realbusiness scenario by using a single case study through an interview with the entrepreneur and documentalanalysis.Findings – As the main result, a framework with the attributes can be considered a tool for an IoS-basedbusiness model deployment. The case study concluded that the business is aligned with the IoS adoption, andthe framework presents adherence to it.Research limitations/implications – The case study was limited to only one company owing to theIoS’s novelty and the lack of correlated business models. Although the case study limits to the agriculturefield, the proposed framework may be broadly applied.Originality/value – Considering that the lack of a comprehensive business model causes newbusinesses to face challenges, it is relevant bringing up the present case study of the IoS-based businessmodel, which correlates these two subjects, still poorly explored in the scientific literature: IoS andbusiness models