A study of the effectiveness of a phonetic and activity approach to the teaching of spelling in grade four,

Includes appendices. Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

SafeSlice: A model slicing and design safety inspection tool for SysML

Software safety certification involves checking that the software design meets the (software) safety requirements. In practice, inspections are one of the primary vehicles for ensuring that safety requirements are satisfied by the design. Unless the safety-related aspects of the design are clearly delineated, the inspections conducted by safety assessors would have to consider the entire design, although only small fragments of the design may be related to safety. In a model-driven development context, this means that the assessors have to browse through large models, understand them, and identify the safety-related fragments. This is time-consuming and error-prone, specially noting that the assessors are often third-party regulatory bodies who were not involved in the design. To address this problem, we describe in this paper a prototype tool called, SafeSlice, that enables one to automatically extract the safety-related slices (fragments) of design models. The main enabler for our slicing technique is the traceability between the safety requirements and the design, established by following a structured design methodology that we propose. Our work is grounded on SysML, which is being increasingly used for expressing the design of safety-critical systems. We have validated our work through two case studies and a control experiment which we briefly outline in the paper. © 2011 ACM

Analytical solution of a model for complex food webs

We investigate numerically and analytically a recently proposed model for food webs [Nature {\bf 404}, 180 (2000)] in the limit of large web sizes and sparse interaction matrices. We obtain analytical expressions for several quantities with ecological interest, in particular the probability distributions for the number of prey and the number of predators. We find that these distributions have fast-decaying exponential and Gaussian tails, respectively. We also find that our analytical expressions are robust to changes in the details of the model.Comment: 4 pages (RevTeX). Final versio

Assessment of human influenza pandemic scenarios in Europe

The response to the emergence of the 2009 influenza A(H1N1) pandemic was the result of a decade of pandemic planning, largely centred on the threat of an avian influenza A(H5N1) pandemic. Based on a literature review, this study aims to define a set of new pandemic scenarios that could be used in case of a future influenza pandemic. A total of 338 documents were identified using a searching strategy based on seven combinations of keywords. Eighty-three of these documents provided useful information on the 13 virus-related and health-system-related parameters initially considered for describing scenarios. Among these, four parameters were finally selected (clinical attack rate, case fatality rate, hospital admission rate, and intensive care admission rate) and four different levels of severity for each of them were set. The definition of six most likely scenarios results from the combination of four different levels of severity of the four final parameters (256 possible scenarios). Although it has some limitations, this approach allows for more flexible scenarios and hence it is far from the classic scenarios structure used for pandemic plans until 2009

The invariant-comb approach and its relation to the balancedness of multipartite entangled states

The invariant-comb approach is a method to construct entanglement measures for multipartite systems of qubits. The essential step is the construction of an antilinear operator that we call {\em comb} in reference to the {\em hairy-ball theorem}. An appealing feature of this approach is that for qubits (or spins 1/2) the combs are automatically invariant under SL(2,\CC), which implies that the obtained invariants are entanglement monotones by construction. By asking which property of a state determines whether or not it is detected by a polynomial SL(2,\CC) invariant we find that it is the presence of a {\em balanced part} that persists under local unitary transformations. We present a detailed analysis for the maximally entangled states detected by such polynomial invariants, which leads to the concept of {\em irreducibly balanced} states. The latter indicates a tight connection with SLOCC classifications of qubit entanglement. \\ Combs may also help to define measures for multipartite entanglement of higher-dimensional subsystems. However, for higher spins there are many independent combs such that it is non-trivial to find an invariant one. By restricting the allowed local operations to rotations of the coordinate system (i.e. again to the SL(2,\CC)) we manage to define a unique extension of the concurrence to general half-integer spin with an analytic convex-roof expression for mixed states.Comment: 17 pages, revtex4. Substantially extended manuscript (e.g. proofs have been added); title and abstract modified

Hematological Changes in Women and Infants Exposed to an AZT-Containing Regimen for Prevention of Mother-to-child-transmission of HIV in Tanzania.

Tanzanian guidelines for prevention of mother-to-child-transmission of HIV (PMTCT) recommend an antiretroviral combination regimen involving zidovudine (AZT) during pregnancy, single-dosed nevirapine at labor onset, AZT plus Lamivudine (3TC) during delivery, and AZT/3TC for 1-4 weeks postpartum. As drug toxicities are a relevant concern, we assessed hematological alterations in AZT-exposed women and their infants. A cohort of HIV-positive women, either with AZT intake (n = 82, group 1) or without AZT intake (n = 62, group 2) for PMTCT during pregnancy, was established at Kyela District Hospital, Tanzania. The cohort also included the infants of group 1 with an in-utero AZT exposure ≥4 weeks, receiving AZT for 1 week postpartum (n = 41), and infants of group 2 without in-utero AZT exposure, receiving a prolonged 4-week AZT tail (n = 58). Complete blood counts were evaluated during pregnancy, birth, weeks 4-6 and 12. For women of group 1 with antenatal AZT intake, we found a statistically significant decrease in hemoglobin level, red blood cells, white blood cells, granulocytes, as well as an increase in red cell distribution width and platelet count. At delivery, the median red blood cell count was significantly lower and the median platelet count was significantly higher in women of group 1 compared to group 2. At birth, infants from group 1 showed a lower median hemoglobin level and granulocyte count and a higher frequency of anemia and granulocytopenia. At 4-6 weeks postpartum, the mean neutrophil granulocyte count was significantly lower and neutropenia was significantly more frequent in infants of group 2. AZT exposure during pregnancy as well as after birth resulted in significant hematological alterations for women and their newborns, although these changes were mostly mild and transient in nature. Research involving larger cohorts is needed to further analyze the impact of AZT-containing regimens on maternal and infant health

Can we avoid high coupling?

It is considered good software design practice to organize source code into modules and to favour within-module connections (cohesion) over between-module connections (coupling), leading to the oft-repeated maxim "low coupling/high cohesion". Prior research into network theory and its application to software systems has found evidence that many important properties in real software systems exhibit approximately scale-free structure, including coupling; researchers have claimed that such scale-free structures are ubiquitous. This implies that high coupling must be unavoidable, statistically speaking, apparently contradicting standard ideas about software structure. We present a model that leads to the simple predictions that approximately scale-free structures ought to arise both for between-module connectivity and overall connectivity, and not as the result of poor design or optimization shortcuts. These predictions are borne out by our large-scale empirical study. Hence we conclude that high coupling is not avoidable--and that this is in fact quite reasonable

Invariant and polynomial identities for higher rank matrices

We exhibit explicit expressions, in terms of components, of discriminants, determinants, characteristic polynomials and polynomial identities for matrices of higher rank. We define permutation tensors and in term of them we construct discriminants and the determinant as the discriminant of order $d$, where $d$ is the dimension of the matrix. The characteristic polynomials and the Cayley--Hamilton theorem for higher rank matrices are obtained there from