Cyber-physical systems design for runtime trustworthiness maintenance supported by tools

The trustworthiness of cyber-physical systems is a critical factor for establishing wide-spread adoption of these systems. Hence, especially the behavior of safety-critical software components needs to be monitored and managed during system operation. Runtime trustworthiness maintenance should be planned and prepared in early requirements and design phases. This involves the identification of threats that may occur and affect user’s trust at runtime, as well as related controls that can be executed to mitigate the threats. Furthermore, observable and measureable system quality properties have to be identified as indicators of threats, and interfaces for reporting these properties as well as for executing controls have to be designed and implemented. This paper presents a process model for preparing and designing systems for runtime trustworthiness maintenance, which is supported by several tools that facilitate the tasks to be performed by requirements engineers and system designer

Finding Homogeneity in Heterogeneity—A New Approach to Quantifying Landscape Mosaics Developed for the Lao PDR

A key challenge for land change science in general and research on swidden agriculture in particular, is linking land cover information to human–environment interactions over larger spatial areas. In Lao PDR, a country facing rapid and multi-level land change processes, this hinders informed policy- and decision-making. Crucial information on land use types and people involved is still lacking. This article proposes an alternative approach for the description of landscape mosaics. Instead of analyzing local land use combinations, we studied land cover mosaics at a meso-level of spatial scale and interpreted these in terms of human–environmental interactions. These landscape mosaics were then overlaid with population census data. Results showed that swidden agricultural landscapes, involving 17% of the population, dominate 29% of the country, while permanent agricultural landscapes involve 74% of the population in 29% of the territory. Forests still form an important component of these landscape mosaics

Secondary education reform in Lesotho and Zimbabwe and the needs of rural girls: Pronouncements, policy and practice

Analysis of the educational needs of rural girls in Lesotho and Zimbabwe suggests a number of shortcomings in the current form of secondary education, and ways in which it might be modified so as to serve this sizeable group of students better. Several of the shortcomings, notably in relation to curricular irrelevance and excessive focus on examinations, have long been recognised, including by politicians. Yet political pronouncements are seldom translated into policy, and even where policy is formulated, reforms are seldom implemented in schools. This paper makes use of interviews with educational decision-makers in the two southern African countries and a range of documentary sources to explore why, despite the considerable differences between the two contexts, much needed educational reforms have been implemented in neither

Genome-Wide Association Study Singles Out SCD and LEPR as the Two Main Loci Influencing Intramuscular Fat Content and Fatty Acid Composition in Duroc Pigs

[EN] Intramuscular fat (IMF) content and fatty acid composition affect the organoleptic quality and nutritional value of pork. A genome-wide association study was performed on 138 Duroc pigs genotyped with a 60k SNP chip to detect biologically relevant genomic variants influencing fat content and composition. Despite the limited sample size, the genome-wide association study was powerful enough to detect the association between fatty acid composition and a known haplotypic variant in SCD (SSC14) and to reveal an association of IMF and fatty acid composition in the LEPR region (SSC6). The association of LEPR was later validated with an independent set of 853 pigs using a candidate quantitative trait nucleotide. The SCD gene is responsible for the biosynthesis of oleic acid (C18:1) from stearic acid. This locus affected the stearic to oleic desaturation index (C18:1/C18:0), C18: 1, and saturated (SFA) and monounsaturated (MUFA) fatty acids content. These effects were consistently detected in gluteus medius, longissimus dorsi, and subcutaneous fat. The association of LEPR with fatty acid composition was detected only in muscle and was, at least in part, a consequence of its effect on IMF content, with increased IMF resulting in more SFA, less polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), and greater SFA/PUFA ratio. Marker substitution effects estimated with a subset of 65 animals were used to predict the genomic estimated breeding values of 70 animals born 7 years later. Although predictions with the whole SNP chip information were in relatively high correlation with observed SFA, MUFA, and C18: 1/C18: 0 (0.48-0.60), IMF content and composition were in general better predicted by using only SNPs at the SCD and LEPR loci, in which case the correlation between predicted and observed values was in the range of 0.36 to 0.54 for all traits. Results indicate that markers in the SCD and LEPR genes can be useful to select for optimum fatty acid profiles of pork.This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO; grants AGL2012-33529 and AGL2015-65846-R).Ros-Freixedes, R.; Gol, S.; Pena, R.; Tor, M.; Ibañez Escriche, N.; Dekkers, J.; Estany, J. (2016). Genome-Wide Association Study Singles Out SCD and LEPR as the Two Main Loci Influencing Intramuscular Fat Content and Fatty Acid Composition in Duroc Pigs. PLoS ONE. 11(3). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152496S113Cameron, N. ., Enser, M., Nute, G. ., Whittington, F. ., Penman, J. ., Fisken, A. ., … Wood, J. . (2000). Genotype with nutrition interaction on fatty acid composition of intramuscular fat and the relationship with flavour of pig meat. Meat Science, 55(2), 187-195. doi:10.1016/s0309-1740(99)00142-4Christophersen, O. A., & Haug, A. (2011). 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Journal of Heredity, 97(5), 535-537. doi:10.1093/jhered/esl026Sanchez, M.-P., Iannuccelli, N., Basso, B., Bidanel, J.-P., Billon, Y., Gandemer, G., … Le Roy, P. (2007). Identification of QTL with effects on intramuscular fat content and fatty acid composition in a Duroc × Large White cross. BMC Genetics, 8(1), 55. doi:10.1186/1471-2156-8-55Guo, T., Ren, J., Yang, K., Ma, J., Zhang, Z., & Huang, L. (2009). Quantitative trait loci for fatty acid composition in longissimus dorsi and abdominal fat: results from a White Duroc × Erhualian intercross F2population. Animal Genetics, 40(2), 185-191. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2052.2008.01819.xC.M. Dekkers, J. (2012). Application of Genomics Tools to Animal Breeding. Current Genomics, 13(3), 207-212. doi:10.2174/138920212800543057Uemoto, Y., Nakano, H., Kikuchi, T., Sato, S., Ishida, M., Shibata, T., … Suzuki, K. (2011). 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Back the bid: the 2012 summer games and the governance of London

The Olympic Park being developed in east London for the 2012 Games is one large urban renewal project among many in the city. The impact of the Games on urban development may be of less significance than the impact on city politics. Bidding for and delivering the Games has contributed to a reassessment of the recent experiment with mayoral government. The paper examines these changing representations of the structures of London government that are now seen as a success. Much of the literature on Olympic cities is highly critical of the impact of the games, but the (current) substantial support for London2012 also needs to be explained. We examine how London has created opportunities for support, and moments and spaces for celebration when political leaders and Londoners can come together around particular representations of themselves and the city

Maintaining trustworthiness of socio-technical systems at run-time

Trustworthiness of dynamical and distributed socio-technical systems is a key factor for the success and wide adoption of these systems in digital businesses. Different trustworthiness attributes should be identified and accounted for when such systems are built, and in order to maintain their overall trustworthiness they should be monitored during run-time. Trustworthiness monitoring is a critical task which enables providers to significantly improve the systems’ overall acceptance. However, trustworthiness characteristics are poorly monitored, diagnosed and assessed by existing methods and technologies. In this paper, we address this problem and provide support for semi-automatic trustworthiness maintenance. We propose a trustworthiness maintenance framework for monitoring and managing the system’s trustworthiness properties in order to preserve the overall established trust during run-time. The framework provides an ontology for run-time trustworthiness maintenance, and respective business processes for identifying threats and enacting control decisions to mitigate these threats. We also present use cases and an architecture for developing trustworthiness maintenance systems that support system provider

Combining risk-management and computational approaches for trustworthiness evaluation of socio-technical systems

The analysis of existing software evaluation techniques reveals the need for evidence-based evaluation of systems’ trustworthiness. This paper aims at evaluating trustworthiness of socio-technical systems during design-time. Our approach combines two existing evaluation techniques: a computational approach and a risk management approach. The risk-based approach identifies threats to trustworthiness on an abstract level. Computational approaches are applied to evaluate the expected end-to-end system trustworthiness in terms of different trustworthiness metrics on a concrete asset instance level. Our hybrid approach, along with a complementary tool prototype, support the assessment of risks related to trustworthiness as well as the evaluation of a system with regard to trustworthiness requirements. The result of the evaluation can be used as evidence when comparing different system configurations