Using software development progress data to understand threats to project outcomes

Peer reviewe

The discipline of Natural Design

If we define design work as those cognitive and practical things to which designers give their valuable effort, then our Natural Design framework allows the recording and replaying of design work. Natural Design provides a meta-structural framework that has developed through our observations of engineering design in safety and mission critical industries, such as aircraft design. Our previous work has produced parametrisable models of design work for software intensive systems, and we now look to make an initial assessment of our natural design framework for its fit to the more creative design practices. In this paper we briefly sketch the framework and subsequently attempt to locate ‘creativity’ in it. We find that, although there are good strong hooks for what the designer does, we are forced to find a role for the community of the designer in the creative process in our framework, something that was only implicit in our previous work. Keywords: Natural design; Engineering design; Creativity</p

A Work in Progress: Philadelphia's 311 System After One Year

Evaluates the first year of the city's municipal information and service-request system's implementation, including costs, call volume, types of requests, and user satisfaction. Points out areas for improvement and constraints due to the budget crisis

Helping Former Foster Youth Graduate from College

Campus support programs provide financial, academic, and other types of supports to help former foster youth succeed in college. However, relatively little is known about the impact of these programs on college retention or graduation rates. This study lays the groundwork for an impact evaluation by examining program implementation from two different perspectives. Researchers conducted telephone interviews with the directors of 10 campus support programs in California and Washington State. The interviews covered a variety of domains, including the population served, referral sources and recruitment, the application process, the provision of services and supports, program staff, relationships with stakeholders, and data collection. In addition, participants from 8 of the 10 programs completed a web-based survey that asked about their perceptions of and experiences with the program. The survey included questions about students' demographic characteristics, referral and recruitment, the application process, reasons for participating in the program, services and supports received, unmet needs, contact with staff, and recommendations for improvement. The report concludes with several recommendations for moving forward with a methodologically sound impact evaluation of campus support programs for former foster youth

The heavy top quark and supersymmetry

Three aspects of supersymmetric theories are discussed: electroweak symmetry breaking, the issues of flavor, and gauge unification. The heavy top quark plays an important, sometimes dominant, role in each case. Additional symmetries lead to extensions of the standard model which can provide an understanding for many of the outstanding problems of particle physics. A broken supersymmetric extension of spacetime allows electroweak symmetry breaking to follow from the dynamics of the heavy top quark; an extension of isospin provides a constrained framework for understanding the pattern of quark and lepton masses; and a grand unified extension of the standard model gauge group provides an elegant understanding of the gauge quantum numbers of the components of a generation. Experimental signatures for each of these additional symmetries are discussed.Comment: 60 pages, 1 ps file; lectures delivered at the 1995 SLAC Summer Institut

NEUTROSOPHIC LOGIC, WAVE MECHANICS, AND OTHER STORIES

There is beginning for anything; we used to hear that phrase. The same wisdom word applies to the authors too. What began in 2005 as a short email on some ideas related to interpretation of the Wave Mechanics results in a number of papers and books up to now. Some of these papers can be found in Progress in Physics or elsewhere. It is often recognized that when a mathematician meets a physics-inclined mind then the result is either a series of endless debates or publication. In this story, authors preferred to publish rather than perish. Therefore, the purpose with this book is to present a selection of published papers in a compilation which enable the readers to find some coherent ideas which appear in those articles. For this reason, the ordering of the papers here is based on categories of ideas

A semi-implicit Hall-MHD solver using whistler wave preconditioning

The dispersive character of the Hall-MHD solutions, in particular the whistler waves, is a strong restriction to numerical treatments of this system. Numerical stability demands a time step dependence of the form $\Delta t\propto (\Delta x)^2$ for explicit calculations. A new semi--implicit scheme for integrating the induction equation is proposed and applied to a reconnection problem. It it based on a fix point iteration with a physically motivated preconditioning. Due to its convergence properties, short wavelengths converge faster than long ones, thus it can be used as a smoother in a nonlinear multigrid method