The Vampire and the FOOL

This paper presents new features recently implemented in the theorem prover Vampire, namely support for first-order logic with a first class boolean sort (FOOL) and polymorphic arrays. In addition to having a first class boolean sort, FOOL also contains if-then-else and let-in expressions. We argue that presented extensions facilitate reasoning-based program analysis, both by increasing the expressivity of first-order reasoners and by gains in efficiency

TOOLympics 2019: An Overview of Competitions in Formal Methods

Evaluation of scientific contributions can be done in many different ways. For the various research communities working on the verification of systems (software, hardware, or the underlying involved mechanisms), it is important to bring together the community and to compare the state of the art, in order to identify progress of and new challenges in the research area. Competitions are a suitable way to do that. The first verification competition was created in 1992 (SAT competition), shortly followed by the CASC competition in 1996. Since the year 2000, the number of dedicated verification competitions is steadily increasing. Many of these events now happen regularly, gathering researchers that would like to understand how well their research prototypes work in practice. Scientific results have to be reproducible, and powerful computers are becoming cheaper and cheaper, thus, these competitions are becoming an important means for advancing research in verification technology. TOOLympics 2019 is an event to celebrate the achievements of the various competitions, and to understand their commonalities and differences. This volume is dedicated to the presentation of the 16 competitions that joined TOOLympics as part of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the TACAS conference

Flavor Symmetry and Topology Change in Nuclear Symmetry Energy for Compact Stars

The nuclear symmetry energy figures crucially in the structure of asymmetric nuclei and, more importantly, in the equation of state (EoS) of compact stars. At present it is almost totally unknown, both experimentally and theoretically, in the density regime appropriate for the interior of neutron stars. Basing on a strong-coupled structure of dense baryonic matter encoded in the skyrmion crystal approach with a topology change and resorting to the notion of generalized HLS (hidden local symmetry) in hadronic interactions, we address a variety of hitherto unexplored issues of nuclear interactions associated with the symmetry energy, i.e., kaon condensation and hyperons, possible topology change in dense matter, nuclear tensor forces, conformal symmetry and chiral symmetry etc in the EoS of dense compact-star matter. One of the surprising results coming from the hidden local symmetry structure that is distinct from what is given by standard phenomenological approaches is that at high density, baryonic matter is driven by RG flow to the "dilaton-limit fixed point (DLFP)" constrained by "mended symmetries." We further propose how to formulate kaon condensation and hyperons in compact-star matter in a framework anchored on a single effective Lagrangian by treating hyperons as the Callan-Klebanov kaon-skyrmion bound states simulated on crystal lattice. This formulation suggests that hyperons can figure in the stellar matter -- if at all -- when or after kaons condense, in contrast to the standard phenomenological approaches where the hyperons appear as the first strangeness degree of freedom in matter thereby suppressing or delaying kaon condensation. In our simplified description of the stellar structure in terms of symmetry energies which is compatible with that of the 1.97 solar mass star, kaon condensation plays a role of "doorway state" to strange-quark matter.Comment: 48 pages, 6 figures, version for publicatio

Costs of vitamin D testing and prescribing among children in primary care

Vitamin D has attracted considerable interest in recent years, with a marked increase in diagnosis of vitamin D deficiency seen among children in clinical practice in the UK. The economic implications of this change in diagnostic behaviour have not been explored. We performed a cohort study to examine longitudinal trends in healthcare expenditure arising from vitamin D testing and prescribing for children in primary care in England, using the electronic healthcare records of 722,525 children aged 0–17 years held in The Health Improvement Network database. Combined costs of vitamin D tests and prescriptions increased from £1647 per 100,000 person-years in 2008 (95% CI, £934 to £3007) to £28,913 per 100,000 person-years in 2014 (95% CI, £26,361 to £31,739). The total cost of vitamin D prescriptions and tests for children in primary care at the national level in England in 2014 was estimated to be £4.31 million (95% CI, £2.96–£6.48 million). CONCLUSION: There has been a marked increase in healthcare expenditure on vitamin D tests and prescriptions for children in primary care over the past decade. Future research should explore the drivers for this change in diagnostic behaviour and the reasons prompting investigation of vitamin D status in clinical practice

Numerical Investigation of Monopole Chains

We present numerical results for chains of SU(2) BPS monopoles constructed from Nahm data. The long chain limit reveals an asymmetric behavior transverse to the periodic direction, with the asymmetry becoming more pronounced at shorter separations. This analysis is motivated by a search for semiclassical finite temperature instantons in the 3D SU(2) Georgi-Glashow model, but it appears that in the periodic limit the instanton chains either have logarithmically divergent action or wash themselves out.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures; v2 minor changes, published versio

Baby Skyrme models for a class of potentials

We consider a class of (2+1) dimensional baby Skyrme models with potentials that have more than one vacum. These potentials are generalisation of old and new baby Skyrme models;they involve more complicated dependence on phi_3.We find that when the potential is invariant under phi_3 -> -phi_3 the configuration corresponding to the baby skyrmions lying "on top of each other" are the minima of the energy. However when the potential breaks this symmetry the lowest field configurations correspond to separated baby skyrmions. We compute the energy distributions for skyrmions of degrees between one and eight and discuss their geometrical shapes and binding energies. We also compare the 2-skyrmion states for these potentials. Most of our work has been performed numerically with the model being formulated in terms of three real scalar fields (satisfying one constraint).Comment: LaTeX, 14 pages, 10 figure

Trends in sexually transmitted infections in general practice 1990-2000: population based study using data from the UK general practice research database

Objective: To describe the contribution of primary care to the diagnosis and management of sexually transmitted infections in the United Kingdom, 1990-2000, in the context of increasing incidence of infections in genitourinary medicine clinics. Design: Population based study. Setting: UK primary care. Participants: Patients registered in the UK general practice research database. Main outcome measures: Incidence of diagnosed sexually transmitted infections in primary care and estimation of the proportion of major such infections diagnosed in primary care. Results: An estimated 23.0% of chlamydia cases in women but only 5.3% in men were diagnosed and treated in primary care during 1998-2000, along with 49.2% cases of non-specific urethritis and urethral discharge in men and 5.7% cases of gonorrhoea in women and 2.9% in men. Rates of diagnosis in primary care rose substantially in the late 1990s. Conclusions: A substantial and increasing number of sexually transmitted infections are diagnosed and treated in primary care in the United Kingdom, with sex ratios differing from those in genitourinary medicine clinics. Large numbers of men are treated in primary care for presumptive sexually transmitted infections