Automating Requirements Traceability: Two Decades of Learning from KDD

This paper summarizes our experience with using Knowledge Discovery in Data (KDD) methodology for automated requirements tracing, and discusses our insights.Comment: The work of the second author has been supported in part by NSF grants CCF-1511117 and CICI 1642134; 4 pages; in Proceedings of IEEE Requirements Engineering 201

A Difficult Proposition: Oral Contraceptives' Switch from Prescription to Over-the-counter Status

The choice between maintaining oral contraceptives at their current prescription drug status or switching the drugs to over-the-counter status, like so many other decisions in Food and Drug Law, has as much to do with science, as it does with politics and economics. If the second component of section 503(b)(1)(B) of the FD&C Act gave more formulaic guidance for determining which drugs were exempt from its reach, then determination of drugs’ prescription/nonprescription status would be simpler. Yet if this were indeed the case, then the amended statute would not leave room to analyze the total social cost versus the total social benefit that a drug’s availability over-the-counter would inspire. Protection of the public health, Congress’s ultimate purpose for the FD&C Act and its 1951 amendments, would be difficult to achieve. Although the pill’s lower toxicity level translates to less risk of harmful side effects than was the case when it was first introduced in the 1960s, the pill is still not without its risks, especially for women with high risk group characteristics. Maintaining the pill’s prescription status ensures a pre-use screening by a clinician and decreases the probability of oral contraceptive use by high risk consumers. This is a compelling reason to maintain the status quo, but is restriction of a contraceptive, especially with the establishment of contraception as a fundamental privacy right, the least costly solution to maintaining the public health? If we have any faith in the increasing intelligence of consumers and in information and education efforts such as package labeling and patient package inserts, perhaps increase in high risk women actually using oral contraceptives will not be as great as opponents of a switch to over-the-counter status predict

Dish vs. Univision: Is Parol Evidence Rule in the Game?

Dish Network has taken Univision, a broadcast television network, to court over Univision’s Facebook streaming of the Liga MX soccer games. In simplistic form, the issue before the District Court in the Southern District of New York, was whether a difference in the telecast language makes the same soccer match into two different telecasts. Univision streamed soccer matches in English on Facebook, and Dish Network provided the same games in Spanish on television. Univision asserts that this is not a problem because the agreement between the two companies was limited to Spanish games. Therefore, in Univision’s view, it is free to provide these matches in English. Additionally, Univision claims that there are other differences, such as the announcers, the commentary, the audio production, audio path, and graphics. Dish Network, however, argues that their rights under the contract do not have these limitations. When Univision moved for a motion to dismiss, U.S. District Court Judge Nathan agreed with Dish Network in a sealed decision and denied Univision’s motion. Until Judge Nathan’s decision is redacted and unsealed, we can only surmise how the contract was interpreted. Nevertheless, and please excuse the puns, is New York contract law shielding Dish Network and preventing Univision from scoring the goal? This post was originally published on the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal website on September 19, 2018. The original post can be accessed via the Archived Link button above

Social Capital and Health. Exploring Associations between Bonding, Bridging, Vertical Social Capital and Life Expectancy, Adult, and Infant Mortality in 43 Countries, while Controlling for Absolute and Relative Incomes

In recent years the concept of social capital has become particularly popular in epidemiologic literature for its hypothesized effects on health inequalities observable at national levels. This project evolves around the theory of social capital, particularly the interaction of its bonding, bridging and vertical forms and dimensions for health outcomes. It also incorporates a competing viewpoint arguing that social capital is a weak predictor of health outcomes, while the bulk of the effect on health should stem from material and structural causes behind absolute and relative deprivation. Using the most recent wave of the World Values Survey the study explores associations between state-level endowments of social capital and population health, also controlling for levels of absolute and relative income. Results indicate weak, inconsistent associations between social capital and health outcomes, captured by life expectancy, adult, and infant mortality in a sample of 43 countries. Instead, alternative neomaterial indicators preserve their significance across the full spectrum of models and specifications. Results challenge the popular belief that social capital is of considerable importance to health and indicate that economic determinants continue to be of primary significance, rather than the sense of community or trust

Technique Integration for Requirements Assessment

In determining whether to permit a safety-critical software system to be certified and in performing independent verification and validation (IV&V) of safety- or mission-critical systems, the requirements traceability matrix (RTM) delivered by the developer must be assessed for accuracy. The current state of the practice is to perform this work manually, or with the help of general-purpose tools such as word processors and spreadsheets Such work is error-prone and person-power intensive. In this paper, we extend our prior work in application of Information Retrieval (IR) methods for candidate link generation to the problem of RTM accuracy assessment. We build voting committees from five IR methods, and use a variety of voting schemes to accept or reject links from given candidate RTMs. We report on the results of two experiments. In the first experiment, we used 25 candidate RTMs built by human analysts for a small tracing task involving a portion of a NASA scientific instrument specification. In the second experiment, we randomly seeded faults in the RTM for the entire specification. Results of the experiments are presented