Using Tutorials to Increase the Office of Career Service’s Presence on Campus

This capstone project analyzes a specific student population, the community college student, and how career services can impact their experience while in college. It examines online career services that prepare students for their job search while also increasing the office of career service’s presence on campus. Information gathered from the Career Services Coordinator (CSC) was used to determine what specific tools and strategy will support student’s efforts and maximize the CSC’s time. Research from Reese & Miller (2006) on career assessment and the career decision self-efficacy scale, supports the tutorials created for the Community College students. The implementation of specific tutorials (resume writing, cover letter writing, and LinkedIn) that the Career Office can direct faculty, staff and students to prior to scheduling a career counseling appointment makes better use of everyone’s time. Formative assessments, brief quizzes, and rubrics allow students to self-check their deliverables prior to meeting with a Career Counselor. The CSC will use Kirkpatrick’s Model to evaluate whether the tutorials meet the learning objectives, the behavior changes proposed, and overall results to students and the Career Office

Economic, Cultural, and Political Influences of the West in China (1940-Present)

China has experienced extreme change politically, culturally and economically in a short amount of time. This paper examines the role of the West in the development of China as we know it today. It is broken into four sections: The Rise of Communism, China As a Planning Economy, Re-linking the Global Economy, and Modern China. Each period will be evaluated based upon the role that Western governments and companies have played in transforming China

Betrayal, Distrust, and Rationality: Smart Counter-Collusion Contracts for Verifiable Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become an irreversible trend. Together comes the pressing need for verifiability, to assure the client the correctness of computation outsourced to the cloud. Existing verifiable computation techniques all have a high overhead, thus if being deployed in the clouds, would render cloud computing more expensive than the on-premises counterpart. To achieve verifiability at a reasonable cost, we leverage game theory and propose a smart contract based solution. In a nutshell, a client lets two clouds compute the same task, and uses smart contracts to stimulate tension, betrayal and distrust between the clouds, so that rational clouds will not collude and cheat. In the absence of collusion, verification of correctness can be done easily by crosschecking the results from the two clouds. We provide a formal analysis of the games induced by the contracts, and prove that the contracts will be effective under certain reasonable assumptions. By resorting to game theory and smart contracts, we are able to avoid heavy cryptographic protocols. The client only needs to pay two clouds to compute in the clear, and a small transaction fee to use the smart contracts. We also conducted a feasibility study that involves implementing the contracts in Solidity and running them on the official Ethereum network.Comment: Published in ACM CCS 2017, this is the full version with all appendice

Does in utero exposure of antiepileptic drugs lead to failure to reach full cognitive potential?

AbstractA clinical scenario of a young female on 800mg of sodium valproate (VPA) who has recently failed lamotrigine (LTG) and levetiracetam (LEV) and who is currently planning a pregnancy is presented. Currently available data pertaining to the longer-term development of children exposed to antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) are reviewed along with considerations around the methodology and interpretation of such research. There is an accumulation of data highlighting significant risks associated with prenatal exposed to VPA, with the level of risk being mediated by dose. The majority of published evidence does not find a significant risk associated with carbamazepine (CBZ) exposure in utero for global cognitive abilities however the evidence for more specific cognitive skills are unclear. Limited data indicate that LTG may be a preferred treatment to VPA in terms of foetal outcome but further evidence is required. Too little data pertaining to LEV exposure is available and a lack of evidence regarding risk of this and other new AEDs should not be interpreted as evidence of safety

A Semantic Framework for the Security Analysis of Ethereum smart contracts

Smart contracts are programs running on cryptocurrency (e.g., Ethereum) blockchains, whose popularity stem from the possibility to perform financial transactions, such as payments and auctions, in a distributed environment without need for any trusted third party. Given their financial nature, bugs or vulnerabilities in these programs may lead to catastrophic consequences, as witnessed by recent attacks. Unfortunately, programming smart contracts is a delicate task that requires strong expertise: Ethereum smart contracts are written in Solidity, a dedicated language resembling JavaScript, and shipped over the blockchain in the EVM bytecode format. In order to rigorously verify the security of smart contracts, it is of paramount importance to formalize their semantics as well as the security properties of interest, in particular at the level of the bytecode being executed. In this paper, we present the first complete small-step semantics of EVM bytecode, which we formalize in the F* proof assistant, obtaining executable code that we successfully validate against the official Ethereum test suite. Furthermore, we formally define for the first time a number of central security properties for smart contracts, such as call integrity, atomicity, and independence from miner controlled parameters. This formalization relies on a combination of hyper- and safety properties. Along this work, we identified various mistakes and imprecisions in existing semantics and verification tools for Ethereum smart contracts, thereby demonstrating once more the importance of rigorous semantic foundations for the design of security verification techniques.Comment: The EAPLS Best Paper Award at ETAP