Public Information and Household Expectations in Developing Countries: Evidence From a Natural Experiment

Governments provide public information about economic conditions to reduce information imperfections and facilitate efficient allocation of resources. Do households in developing countries rely on public signals to inform themselves about market conditions? To identify the importance of public information in households’ price expectations, we take advantage of a unique natural experiment in Ecuador where the published inflation rate had been different from the true rate over a period of 14 months due to a software error. We find that the public signal about prices plays an important role in households’ price expectations; the effect is stronger for better educated families, older people and men.Public Information, Price Expectations, Developing Countries, Natural Experiment, Heterogeneity

Method Families Concept: Application to Decision-Making Methods

International audienceThe role of variability in Software engineering grows increasingly as it allows developing solutions that can be easily adapted to a specific context and reusing existing knowledge. In order to deal with variability in the method engineering (ME) domain, we suggest applying the notion of method families. Method components are organized as a method family, which is configured in the given situation into a method line. In this paper, we motivate the concept of method families by comparing the existing approaches of ME. We detail then the concept of method families and illustrate it with a family of decision-making (DM) methods that we call MADISE

Eight years of rider measurement in the Android malware ecosystem: evolution and lessons learned

Despite the growing threat posed by Android malware, the research community is still lacking a comprehensive view of common behaviors and trends exposed by malware families active on the platform. Without such view, the researchers incur the risk of developing systems that only detect outdated threats, missing the most recent ones. In this paper, we conduct the largest measurement of Android malware behavior to date, analyzing over 1.2 million malware samples that belong to 1.2K families over a period of eight years (from 2010 to 2017). We aim at understanding how the behavior of Android malware has evolved over time, focusing on repackaging malware. In this type of threats different innocuous apps are piggybacked with a malicious payload (rider), allowing inexpensive malware manufacturing. One of the main challenges posed when studying repackaged malware is slicing the app to split benign components apart from the malicious ones. To address this problem, we use differential analysis to isolate software components that are irrelevant to the campaign and study the behavior of malicious riders alone. Our analysis framework relies on collective repositories and recent advances on the systematization of intelligence extracted from multiple anti-virus vendors. We find that since its infancy in 2010, the Android malware ecosystem has changed significantly, both in the type of malicious activity performed by the malicious samples and in the level of obfuscation used by malware to avoid detection. We then show that our framework can aid analysts who attempt to study unknown malware families. Finally, we discuss what our findings mean for Android malware detection research, highlighting areas that need further attention by the research community.Accepted manuscrip

ORGANIZED SYMPOSIA, ANNUAL MEETING SAEA, LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS, FEBRUARY 1990.

Education: the key to sustained development in the rural south, Brady J. Deaton; The design, funding and extension of interdisciplinary water quality research, Larry D. Sanders; Fee access to recreational activities by private landowners, Dennis K. Smith; A new challenge for agricultural economics: public policy education & analysis during program implementation, Larry D. Sanders; Software design and development for the direct support of extension programs and extension field staff, G.A. Barnaby, Jr.; International market research: are we developing relevant instructional and research programs for students and agribusinesses in the international market, Glenn C.W. Ames; The economics of selective crop and animal specialty enterprises as alternative sources of income and employmnet for small scale farm families, Tesfa G. Gebremedhin; Applications of international trade theory to agriculture, Gail L. CramerTeaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Analysis of professionals and family foster care on advantages and difficulties of visits between foster children and their biological families

Contact between a foster child and birth parents play an important role in relation to the foster child’s wellbeing. The main aim of this study is to give voice to social workers and foster families about contact visits. This research is part of a project financed by the regional government of Andalusia (Spain) (SEJ-7106) regarding contact visits in foster care. Two focus groups were organized, one with 8 social workers from four foster care agencies and another with 8 foster carers (4 were recruited through the Association of Foster Families in Andalusia and 4 through fostering agencies). Access to foster care agencies and foster families was obtained through the official Andalusian Child Protective Services (SPM). The focal groups were audio-recorded. Transcripts (of the two focus groups gave rise to primary documents for the hermeneutic unit under study. All this information was exported from an Excel database to the ATLAS.ti v7.0 software. The transcripts were examined using an inductive method of open coding in order to identify themes among participants’ responses. Results show that both groups agreed on the utility of visits to maintain the children’s attachment to their birth family, to bring a greater sense of continuity to the children’s life story, to enhance the psychological wellbeing of the foster children and to know the real situation of their birth family. In relation to the difficulties remarked in the course of the visits, one of the issues mentioned by both groups refers to a lack in the coordination among the social workers, the SPM and the foster families involved. The other issue brings together several complaints to the SPM, such as the fact of not providing information about taking decisions regarding the future of the child; the lack of support and preparation of the foster carers, the children and the birth families about visits; as well as the shortage of social workers and economic aids provided by the SPM. The conclusions of this study highlight the need to improve contact visits by developing intervention strategies targeted at all those involved (foster children, family foster care, birth family and social workers). These findings have important implications for practice.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Reuse at the Software Productivity Consortium

The Software Productivity Consortium is sponsored by 14 aerospace companies as a developer of software engineering methods and tools. Software reuse and prototyping are currently the major emphasis areas. The Methodology and Measurement Project in the Software Technology Exploration Division has developed some concepts for reuse which they intend to develop into a synthesis process. They have identified two approaches to software reuse: opportunistic and systematic. The assumptions underlying the systematic approach, phrased as hypotheses, are the following: the redevelopment hypothesis, i.e., software developers solve the same problems repeatedly; the oracle hypothesis, i.e., developers are able to predict variations from one redevelopment to others; and the organizational hypothesis, i.e., software must be organized according to behavior and structure to take advantage of the predictions that the developers make. The conceptual basis for reuse includes: program families, information hiding, abstract interfaces, uses and information hiding hierarchies, and process structure. The primary reusable software characteristics are black-box descriptions, structural descriptions, and composition and decomposition based on program families. Automated support can be provided for systematic reuse, and the Consortium is developing a prototype reuse library and guidebook. The software synthesis process that the Consortium is aiming toward includes modeling, refinement, prototyping, reuse, assessment, and new construction

Product Families Development and Simulation of Well Completion System Products by Using Business Simulation Software

Particularly, high - mix, low - volume manufacturing industries such as companies that produce Christmas Tree components are very common these days. Being in high product mix, process flow is hard to be seen when products have a multitude of options, variations in production lead times. Besides, manufacturing organizations will also be constrained on capacity issue. Resources have to be shared and it is difficult to dedicate equipment to any specific of product. Productive manufacturing industries should have a total understanding on how their production system is performed so that the right product families can be developed. Inaccurate product families might result in creating more wastes such as bottleneck which eventually a longer production lead time will be required for a product to be manufactured. This project paper is about developing a new model of product families for a manufacturer that produce Christmas Tree components. The new model of product families is expected to reduce the production lead time. Product families that have been developed will be simulated by using Business Simulation Software – WITNESS. A new model of product families will be compared with existing product families. The new model of product families will be accepted if production lead time can be improved by five percent. The methodology of forming product families will be based techniques discussed by Duggan (2012) – Creating Mixed Model Value Streams

Product line architecture recovery with outlier filtering in software families: the Apo-Games case study

Software product line (SPL) approach has been widely adopted to achieve systematic reuse in families of software products. Despite its benefits, developing an SPL from scratch requires high up-front investment. Because of that, organizations commonly create product variants with opportunistic reuse approaches (e.g., copy-and-paste or clone-and-own). However, maintenance and evolution of a large number of product variants is a challenging task. In this context, a family of products developed opportunistically is a good starting point to adopt SPLs, known as extractive approach for SPL adoption. One of the initial phases of the extractive approach is the recovery and definition of a product line architecture (PLA) based on existing software variants, to support variant derivation and also to allow the customization according to customers’ needs. The problem of defining a PLA from existing system variants is that some variants can become highly unrelated to their predecessors, known as outlier variants. The inclusion of outlier variants in the PLA recovery leads to additional effort and noise in the common structure and complicates architectural decisions. In this work, we present an automatic approach to identify and filter outlier variants during the recovery and definition of PLAs. Our approach identifies the minimum subset of cross-product architectural information for an effective PLA recovery. To evaluate our approach, we focus on real-world variants of the Apo-Games family. We recover a PLA taking as input 34 Apo-Game variants developed by using opportunistic reuse. The results provided evidence that our automatic approach is able to identify and filter outlier variants, allowing to eliminate exclusive packages and classes without removing the whole variant. We consider that the recovered PLA can help domain experts to take informed decisions to support SPL adoption.This research was partially funded by INES 2.0; CNPq grants 465614/2014-0 and 408356/2018-9; and FAPESB grants JCB0060/2016 and BOL2443/201

A Code Tagging Approach to Software Product Line Development:An Application to Satellite Communication Libraries

International audienceSoftware product line engineering seeks to systematise reuse when developing families of similar software systems so as to minimise development time, cost and defects. To realise variability at the code level, product line methods classically advocate usage of inheritance, components, frameworks, aspects or generative techniques. However, these might require unaffordable paradigm shifts for developers if the software was not thought at the outset as a product line. Furthermore, these techniques can be conflicting with a company's coding practices or external regulations. These concerns were the motivation for the industry- university collaboration described in this paper in which we developed a minimally intrusive coding technique based on tags. The approach was complemented with traceability from code to feature diagrams which were exploited for automated configuration. It is supported by a toolchain and is now in use in the partner company for the development of flight grade satellite communica- tion software libraries