How to Use a Business Library

Speech delivered on the Bryant\u27s View radio program by Miss Dorothy E. Keith, Bryant College Librarian, on the Bryant\u27s View radio program, Thursday, May 10, 1956, Station WPRO

RT-Syn: A real-time software system generator

This paper presents research into providing highly reusable and maintainable components by using automatic software synthesis techniques. This proposal uses domain knowledge combined with automatic software synthesis techniques to engineer large-scale mission-critical real-time software. The hypothesis centers on a software synthesis architecture that specifically incorporates application-specific (in this case real-time) knowledge. This architecture synthesizes complex system software to meet a behavioral specification and external interaction design constraints. Some examples of these external constraints are communication protocols, precisions, timing, and space limitations. The incorporation of application-specific knowledge facilitates the generation of mathematical software metrics which are used to narrow the design space, thereby making software synthesis tractable. Success has the potential to dramatically reduce mission-critical system life-cycle costs not only by reducing development time, but more importantly facilitating maintenance, modifications, and extensions of complex mission-critical software systems, which are currently dominating life cycle costs

Echoes of the sea around us—Human hopes in the balance

Earth’s human life-support system shows signs of failing. Human capacity to alter landscapes and the atmosphere is reaching catastrophic levels. Only the oceans seemed to be beyond control, but still they are not beyond human influence. Limited experience in protecting nature’s integrity, health, and resilience in seascapes offers the potential to reverse sliding global environmental conditions by providing realistic expectations, offering moral fortitude, stimulating imagination, and proffering hope. The ocean’s capacity to evoke human awe and inspiration may be sufficient to focusmankind on the global existential threats we face. It is now vital to heed Rachael Carson’s 1937 prescient observation “Against this cosmic background the lifetime of a particular plant or animal appears not as a drama complete in itself but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.” The world will keep spinning, whether people are able to enjoy the ride or not

Latin Heritage Month. Carlos Juan Finlay: Outrageous, Courageous and Correct

In 1855, a modest Cuban physician named Carlos Juan Finlay graduated from Jefferson Medical College. He was among JMC’s first dozen Hispanic graduates, initially signing the registrar’s log as “Charles”. He left Philadelphia at the age of 22 to begin private practice. Preceptor and close friend S. Weir Mitchell, among others, urged Finlay to work among the burgeoning Spanishspeaking population in New York City, but he returned to Cuba and set up practice in Matanzas, a town near Havana. He took a binocular microscope with him, similar to one used byMitchell, which would serve him well for many years. During his years of medical practice, Finlay developed a keen interest in urban communicable disease. He rejected the common assumption that “miasma”, or fumes producing contagious disease, were the source of infection, and conducted meticulous studies to confirm his theories. While he is best known for his research showing that mosquitoes transmit yellow fever, he also correctly deduced that cholera was water-borne, and that the cotton used to tie the umbilical cord on newborns carried infantile tetanus. His views on cholera and yellow fever earned him the title of “crank” and he was largely ignored. During the 1867-68 cholera epidemic in Havana, he tried to publish his findings in the local paper and was rebuffed by censors. He quietly boiled the water in his home to prevent cholera in his family.https://jdc.jefferson.edu/jeffhistoryposters/1002/thumbnail.jp

Stature

A letter from the guest editor