Optics options for the 2015 LHC run

A review of the possible optics configurations for the 2015 LHC run will be made. The rationale behind the various scenarios will also be presented together with the latest results of the validation studies. Special runs, such as Van der Meer and high-beta, will be discussed too. Finally, the next steps and the related milestones will be discussed with the goal of achieving a consensual decision on the optics configuration to be used for the LHC in the coming weeks

Touch Typing Tutor for visually impaired children and young people

Touch Typing Tutor is a software programme which was designed to assist teaching touch typing skills to visually impaired children. It was first designed and written in the 1990s by Graeme Douglas and Alan Gamble and then updated in 2000 and is now available as freeware. The programme was specially designed to meet the needs of visually impaired people (in particular children and young people). For example, it provides the means to set up different colours, dimensions and fonts for the exercise text displayed, and has speech capability. These features make it possible for Touch Typing Tutor to be operated independently by the learner. This program is easy to use, with a full set of touch typing exercises supplied. Additional exercises can easily be created using any text editor which is capable of writing plain ASCII files (e.g. the Windows 'Notepad'), and organised into lessons. This means that you are able to use Touch Typing Tutor to teach according to the scheme of your choice - no particular approach is built into the program itself - even replacing the entire suite of lessons with your own if you wish. The software has been used extensively in the UK as well as other parts of the world (particularly Africa)

User's and Administrator's Manual of AMGA Metadata Catalog v 2.4.0 (EMI-3)

User's and Administrator's Manual of AMGA Metadata Catalog v 2.4.0 (EMI-3

UNICORE COMMANDLINE CLIENT: USER MANUAL

The UNICORE Commandline client (UCC) is a full-featured client for the UNICORE Grid middlewar

Logging and bookkeeping, Administrator's guide

Logging and Bookkeeping (LB for short) is a Grid service that keeps a short-term trace of Grid jobs as they are processed by individual Grid component

Void Analysis of Hadronic Density Fluctuations at Phase Transition

The event-to-event fluctuations of hadron multiplicities are studied for a quark system undergoing second-order phase transition to hadrons. Emphasis is placed on the search for an observable signature that is realistic for heavy-ion collisions. It is suggested that in the 2-dimensional y-phi space the produced particles selected in a very narrow p_T window may exhibit clustering patterns even when integrated over the entire emission time. Using the Ising model to simulate the critical phenomenon and taking into account a p_T distribution that depends on the emission time, we study in the framework of the void analysis proposed earlier and find scaling behavior. The scaling exponents turn out to be larger than the ones found before for pure configurations without mixing. The signature is robust in that it is insensitive to the precise scheme of simulating time evolution. Thus it should reveal whether or not the dense matter created in heavy-ion collisions is a quark-gluon plasma before hadronization.Comment: 11 pages in LaTeX + 6 figures in p

Feedback driven adaptive combinatorial testing

The configuration spaces of modern software systems are too large to test exhaustively. Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) approaches, such as covering arrays, systematically sample the configuration space and test only the selected configurations. The basic justification for CIT approaches is that they can cost-effectively exercise all system behaviors caused by the settings of t or fewer options. We conjecture, however, that in practice many such behaviors are not actually tested because of masking effects – failures that perturb execution so as to prevent some behaviors from being exercised. In this work we present a feedback-driven, adaptive, combinatorial testing approach aimed at detecting and working around masking effects. At each iteration we detect potential masking effects, heuristically isolate their likely causes, and then generate new covering arrays that allow previously masked combinations to be tested in the subsequent iteration. We empirically assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach on two large widely used open source software systems. Our results suggest that masking effects do exist and that our approach provides a promising and efficient way to work around them