Programmers' performance on structured versus nonstructured function definitions

A control-flow model for functional programs is used in an experimental comparison of the performance of programmers on structured versus nonstructured Miranda function definitions. The performance is taken as a measure of the comprehensibility of functional programs. The experimental set-up is similar to the Scanlan study (1989). However, in the present study, a two-factor repeated measures design is used in the statistical analysis. The control-flow model appears to be useful in the shaping of the experiment. A significantly better performance has been found for structured function definitions on both dependent variables: the time needed to answer questions about the function definitions and the proportion correct answers. Moreover, for structured function definitions, a counter-intuitive result has been obtained: there are significantly fewer errors in larger definitions than in smaller ones

VALUING THE PROTECTION OF MINIMUM INSTREAM FLOWS IN NEW MEXICO

Currently, New Mexico law does not provide any legal avenue of protecting instream flows. A change in the status quo requires that a prima facie case be made— establishing sufficient evidence of the public benefits from maintaining instream flows to warrant consideration, or standing, in future water policy deliberations. Using the contingent valuation (CV) method, we investigate the nonmarket benefits of protecting minimum instream flows in New Mexico. Results from a dichotomous choice CV telephone survey show significant nonmarket values for protecting instream flows that are sensitive to a change in scope and insensitive to a group-size reminder.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Darwinian Data Structure Selection

Data structure selection and tuning is laborious but can vastly improve an application's performance and memory footprint. Some data structures share a common interface and enjoy multiple implementations. We call them Darwinian Data Structures (DDS), since we can subject their implementations to survival of the fittest. We introduce ARTEMIS a multi-objective, cloud-based search-based optimisation framework that automatically finds optimal, tuned DDS modulo a test suite, then changes an application to use that DDS. ARTEMIS achieves substantial performance improvements for \emph{every} project in $5$ Java projects from DaCapo benchmark, $8$ popular projects and $30$ uniformly sampled projects from GitHub. For execution time, CPU usage, and memory consumption, ARTEMIS finds at least one solution that improves \emph{all} measures for $86\%$ ($37/43$) of the projects. The median improvement across the best solutions is $4.8\%$, $10.1\%$, $5.1\%$ for runtime, memory and CPU usage. These aggregate results understate ARTEMIS's potential impact. Some of the benchmarks it improves are libraries or utility functions. Two examples are gson, a ubiquitous Java serialization framework, and xalan, Apache's XML transformation tool. ARTEMIS improves gson by $16.5$\%, $1\%$ and $2.2\%$ for memory, runtime, and CPU; ARTEMIS improves xalan's memory consumption by $23.5$\%. \emph{Every} client of these projects will benefit from these performance improvements.Comment: 11 page

Virtual personal assistant

Abstract This report discusses ways in which new technology could be harnessed to create an intelligent Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA) with a focus on user-based information. It will look at examples of intelligent programs with natural language processing that are currently available, with different categories of support, and examine the potential usefulness of one specific piece of software as a VPA. This engages the ability to communicate socially through natural language processing, holding (and analysing) information within the context of the user. It is suggested that new technologies may soon make the idea of virtual personal assistants a reality. Experiments conducted on this system, combined with user testing, have provided evidence that a basic program with natural language processing algorithms in the form of a VPA, with basic natural language processing and the ability to function without the need for other type of human input (or programming) may already be viable