Flexible Invariants Through Semantic Collaboration

Modular reasoning about class invariants is challenging in the presence of dependencies among collaborating objects that need to maintain global consistency. This paper presents semantic collaboration: a novel methodology to specify and reason about class invariants of sequential object-oriented programs, which models dependencies between collaborating objects by semantic means. Combined with a simple ownership mechanism and useful default schemes, semantic collaboration achieves the flexibility necessary to reason about complicated inter-object dependencies but requires limited annotation burden when applied to standard specification patterns. The methodology is implemented in AutoProof, our program verifier for the Eiffel programming language (but it is applicable to any language supporting some form of representation invariants). An evaluation on several challenge problems proposed in the literature demonstrates that it can handle a variety of idiomatic collaboration patterns, and is more widely applicable than the existing invariant methodologies.Comment: 22 page

Factors affecting the self-esteem hypothesis : self-serving biases in the intergroup situation

The purpose of this research was to assess whether an individual's engagement of self-serving strategies was dependent upon (a) one's level of self-esteem, (b) the stability of one's self-esteem, and (c) the relevance or importance of the evaluative feedback. The research was tested using an intergroup paradigm, as supporting evidence within this paradigm had demonstrated that only high self-esteem individuals were capable of engaging in self-enhancing strategies or intergroup bias when their self view was threatened with negative evaluative feedback. One-hundred and eighty female college students comprised the sample. The 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 analysis of variance provided converging evidence that both high and low self-esteem individuals are capable of engaging in self-serving strategies but it depends on a combination of factors. When performance feedback is negative and related to one's intelligence and creative ability, low self-esteem individuals do not demonstrate the same engagement of self-serving strategies as demonstrated by high selfesteem individuals. When negative performance feedback does not implicate one's intellectual or creative ability, low self-esteem individuals are capable of engaging in self-serving strategies. The ability to engage in self-serving strategies was further related to the stability of self-esteem with unstable high self-esteem being the most reactive to evaluative feedback that implicates their intellectual and creative ability. These results were demonstrated most effectively when direct measures were used to assess self-serving biases within individuals

The quality of group childcare settings used by 3-4 year old children in Sure Start local programme areas and the relationship with child outcomes (Research report DFE-RR068)

"Influenced by research indicating long-term benefits of early childhood programmes for disadvantaged children, the Government of the time set up Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) from 1998 to reduce child poverty and social exclusion. By 2004, 524 SSLPs targeted families with children 0-4 years of age in the 20% most deprived communities. In 2005 it was decided to develop SSLPs further by turning them into children’s centres and roll out the programme nationally, ensuring that comprehensive early education and family support services are available for every community. The National Evaluation of Sure Start has been undertaking research relevant to the development of SSLPs since 2001. This part of the study focuses on 150 SSLP areas from the first four rounds of SSLPs, which are all in deprived areas." - Page iii

An Acrostic Approach to Teaching Public Speaking in the Hybrid Communication Course

Given the time and pedagogical demands of teaching the principles of public speaking in the hybrid course, both instructors and students are assisted by using a summative, yet sufficiently through, approach to teaching these principles. As acrostic approach described in a preparation outline format and built upon the word S-P-E-A-K provides an integrated, summative and sufficiently thorough instructional approach to meet these demands

A Worldwide Test of the Predictive Validity of Ideal Partner Preference-Matching

©American Psychological Association, [2024]. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. The final article is available, upon publication, at: [ARTICLE DOI]”Ideal partner preferences (i.e., ratings of the desirability of attributes like attractiveness or intelligence) are the source of numerous foundational findings in the interdisciplinary literature on human mating. Recently, research on the predictive validity of ideal partner preference-matching (i.e., do people positively evaluate partners who match versus mismatch their ideals?) has become mired in several problems. First, articles exhibit discrepant analytic and reporting practices. Second, different findings emerge across laboratories worldwide, perhaps because they sample different relationship contexts and/or populations. This registered report—partnered with the Psychological Science Accelerator—uses a highly powered design (N=10,358) across 43 countries and 22 languages to estimate preference-matching effect sizes. The most rigorous tests revealed significant preference-matching effects in the whole sample and for partnered and single participants separately. The “corrected pattern metric” that collapses across 35 traits revealed a zero-order effect of β=.19 and an effect of β=.11 when included alongside a normative preference-matching metric. Specific traits in the “level metric” (interaction) tests revealed very small (average β=.04) effects. Effect sizes were similar for partnered participants who reported ideals before entering a relationship, and there was no consistent evidence that individual differences moderated any effects. Comparisons between stated and revealed preferences shed light on gender differences and similarities: For attractiveness, men’s and (especially) women’s stated preferences underestimated revealed preferences (i.e., they thought attractiveness was less important than it actually was). For earning potential, men’s stated preferences underestimated—and women’s stated preferences overestimated—revealed preferences. Implications for the literature on human mating are discussed.Unfunde

Salient research dimensions across STEM

The Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) represents a next-generation platform designed to structure scholarly contributions as a knowledge graph, enhancing the readability for both machines and humans. This thesis investigates the structured representation of research, particularly identifying universally applicable dimensions across various fields to facilitate comparisons on similar research issues. By analyzing comparison tables from selected survey articles across ten STEM domains—including Agriculture, Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, Engineering, Materials Science, Mathematics, and Medicine—the research delineates both domain-independent and domain-dependent dimensions. Furthermore, this study explores the capability of generative AI technologies, like ChatGPT, to predict these dimensions, paralleling human annotation. The findings contribute to the development of advanced generative-AI-powered search systems like ORKG Ask, which could standardize research comparison dimensions across specific problems while accommodating domain specificity elsewhere. The thesis culminates in the creation of multiple ORKG templates, comparisons, and reviews, laying groundwork for future developments in scholarly communication

Holistic specifications for robust programs

Functional specifications describe what program components can do: the sufficient conditions to invoke components' operations. They allow us to reason about the use of components in a closed world setting, where components interact with known client code, and where the client code must establish the appropriate pre-conditions before calling into a component. Sufficient conditions are not enough to reason about the use of components in an \emph{open world} setting, where components interact with external code, possibly of unknown provenance, and where components may evolve over time. In this open world setting, we must also consider the possible external code. \emph{necessary} conditions, i.e, what are the conditions without which an effect will not happen. In this paper we propose the Chainmail specification language for writing {holistic specifications that focus on necessary conditions (as well as sufficient conditions). We give a formal semantics for \Chainmail, and discuss several examples. The core of \Chainmail has been mechanised in the Coq proof assistant