The 1958 Pekeris-Accad-WEIZAC Ground-Breaking Collaboration that Computed Ground States of Two-Electron Atoms (and its 2010 Redux)

In order to appreciate how well off we mathematicians and scientists are today, with extremely fast hardware and lots and lots of memory, as well as with powerful software, both for numeric and symbolic computation, it may be a good idea to go back to the early days of electronic computers and compare how things went then. We have chosen, as a case study, a problem that was considered a huge challenge at the time. Namely, we looked at C.L. Pekeris's seminal 1958 work on the ground state energies of two-electron atoms. We went through all the computations ab initio with today's software and hardware, with a special emphasis on the symbolic computations which in 1958 had to be made by hand, and which nowadays can be automated and generalized.Comment: 8 pages, 2 photos, final version as it appeared in the journa

Poetical potentials: the value of poems in social impact education

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.For the technologist it is easy to remain in safe technological enclaves with a bespoke language, a community of like minds and a familiar knowledge base. However, progress requires pushing the boundaries, thinking beyond the traditional and the ordinary, and questioning accepted norms. It requires opening of minds. It may surprise the reader that poetry can offer the key to unlock the closed mind. This potential is explored through a variety of poems dealing, in a novel manner, with the social impact of technology

Program analysis for documentation

A program analysis for documentation (PAD) written in FORTRAN has three steps: listing the variables, describing the structure and writing the program specifications. Technical notes on editing criteria for reviewing program documentation, technical notes for PAD, and FORTRAN program analyzer for documentation are appended

Errors and Artefacts in Agent-Based Modelling

The objectives of this paper are to define and classify different types of errors and artefacts that can appear in the process of developing an agent-based model, and to propose activities aimed at avoiding them during the model construction and testing phases. To do this in a structured way, we review the main concepts of the process of developing such a model – establishing a general framework that summarises the process of designing, implementing, and using agent-based models. Within this framework we identify the various stages where different types of errors and artefacts may appear. Finally we propose activities that could be used to detect (and hence eliminate) each type of error or artefact.Verification, Replication, Artefact, Error, Agent-Based Modelling, Modelling Roles

Static Application-Level Race Detection in STM Haskell using Contracts

Writing concurrent programs is a hard task, even when using high-level synchronization primitives such as transactional memories together with a functional language with well-controlled side-effects such as Haskell, because the interferences generated by the processes to each other can occur at different levels and in a very subtle way. The problem occurs when a thread leaves or exposes the shared data in an inconsistent state with respect to the application logic or the real meaning of the data. In this paper, we propose to associate contracts to transactions and we define a program transformation that makes it possible to extend static contract checking in the context of STM Haskell. As a result, we are able to check statically that each transaction of a STM Haskell program handles the shared data in a such way that a given consistency property, expressed in the form of a user-defined boolean function, is preserved. This ensures that bad interference will not occur during the execution of the concurrent program.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2013, arXiv:1312.2218. [email protected]; [email protected]

The disappearing women: North West ICT project final report

Project Context The Disappearing Women: Northwest ICT project was embarked upon to further understand why more women leave the sector than are being recruited, 36% of new ICT recruits in the UK (in the first quarter of 2002) were women, yet in the same period, women accounted for 46% of all leavers or ‘disappearing’ women (The DTI Women in IT Champions report 2003, Grey and Healy 2004). This continuing trend shows a decline from 27% of women making up the ICT workforce in 1997 with a drop to 21% in 2004 (The DTI Women in IT Industry report 2005b). The number of women in the ICT sector remains disappointingly small considering that women make up around 50% of the total UK workforce and significantly this figure has gradually continued to fall despite numerous initiatives to attract more women into the sector (see Griffiths and Moore 2006 for a list of high profile ‘women in ICT’ initiatives). The research team’s first gender research project - Women in IT (WINIT) - ran for two years from January 2004 until March 2006 at the Information Systems Institute at The University of Salford and dealt solely with women who worked in the ICT sector in England. The WINIT Project via an online questionnaire and in-depth interviews gathered the stories and experiences of up to 500 participants and 19 interviewees respectively. The project enabled these women’s voices to be heard but the research team were constantly aware that a certain part of the female ICT workforce - the ‘disappearing’ women who had left ICT vowing never to return - had been overlooked and effectively silenced. It was these women who once found, may be able to facilitate a more in-depth understanding of why women were leaving the ICT sector. Having amassed skills and expertise, qualifications in ICT and crossed ICT recruitment barriers (DTI 2005a) the ‘disappearing’ women for whatever reasons decided to change their career trajectories and leave the sector. What ‘chilly’ (Falkner 2004) workplaces, disinterested organisational cultures and indifferent working conditions had these women encountered that became determining factors in leaving the ICT sector? There has been little (if any) research conducted involving this specific cohort of women and The Disappearing Women: North West ICT (DW: NW ICT) project seeks to make a research contribution to what is a continuing statistical and symbolic under-representation of women in the ICT labour market. The DW: NW ICT project was partly funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) from April 2006 until December 2006 under ESF Objective 3, Policy Field 5.1: Improving the Participation of Women. The DW: NW ICT project contributes research to priority 5 and its strategic objective to reduce the level of disadvantage faced by women in the labour market. The project was run in the Information Systems Group, Salford Business School of The University of Salford, Greater Manchester, UK. The report is structured as follows. The first section presents the backdrop for the research, looking in general at women in the ICT labour market in England and then women leaving the ICT sector focussing on the North West of England and more explicitly women leaving ICT employment in the North West of England. The research aims of the project form the following section; they have been loosely classified in to two groupings, the push and pull factors that are contributing to the high attrition rate of women leaving ICT. The methodology follows with the route taken in how this ‘hard to reach’ target sample were finally located, once contacted the life history interview process and procedures adopted is explained in full. The vignettes of the ‘disappearing’ women are included to allow the reader an opportunity to ‘get to know’ these women a little more closely. Key themes that have naturally emerged throughout the interview data analysis process are presented, including hostilities in the ICT workplace, significant events and the process of leaving ICT workplaces and finally stories of the ‘appearing’ women and their current situations are heard. A discussion regarding the findings of the DW: NW ICT project concludes this report