Arcturus user's guide

This document describes the Arcturus programming environment, a first realization of an advanced programming environment based on the programming language Ada. It is the first environment that supplies interactive, "statement (or declaration) at a time" execution of Ada program fragments

Supervising Offline Partial Evaluation of Logic Programs using Online Techniques

A major impediment for more widespread use of offline partial evaluation is the difficulty of obtaining and maintaining annotations for larger, realistic programs. Existing automatic binding-time analyses still only have limited applicability and annotations often have to be created or improved and maintained by hand, leading to errors. We present a technique to help overcome this problem by using online control techniques which supervise the specialisation process in order to help the development and maintenance of correct annotations by identifying errors. We discuss an implementation in the Logen system and show on a series of examples that this approach is effective: very few false alarms were raised while infinite loops were detected quickly. We also present the integration of this technique into a web interface, which highlights problematic annotations directly in the source code. A method to automatically fix incorrect annotations is presented, allowing the approach to be also used as a pragmatic binding time analysis. Finally we show how our method can be used for efficiently locating built-in errors in Prolog source code

The Dynamics of US Labor Force Attachment

No abstract.

Inflation targeting and private sector forecasts

Transparency is one of the biggest innovations in central bank policy of the past quarter century. Modern central bankers believe that they should be as clear about their objectives and actions as possible. However, is greater transparency always beneficial? Recent work suggests that when private agents have diverse sources of information, public information can cause them to overreact to the signals from the central bank, leading the economy to be too sensitive to common forecast errors. Greater transparency could be destabilizing. While this theoretical result has clear intuitive appeal, it turns on a combination of assumptions and conditions, so it remains to be established that it is of empirical relevance. ; In this paper we study the degree to which increased information about monetary policy might lead to individuals coordinating their forecasts. Specifically, we estimate a series of simple models to measure the impact of inflation targeting on the dispersion of private sector forecasts of inflation. Using a panel data set that includes 15 countries over 20 years we find no convincing evidence that adopting an inflation targeting regime leads to a reduction in the dispersion of private sector forecasts of inflation. While for some specifications adoption of inflation target does seem to reduce the standard deviation of inflation forecasts, the impact is rarely precise and always small.

Characterisation of bacterioplankton communities in the meltwater ponds of Bratina Island, Victoria Land, Antarctica

A unique collection of Antarctic aquatic environments (meltwater ponds) lies in close proximity on the rock and sediment-covered undulating surface of the McMurdo Ice Shelf, near Bratina Island (Victoria Land, Antarctica). During the 2009–10 mid-austral summer, sets of discrete water samples were collected across the vertical geochemical gradients of five meltwater ponds (Egg, P70E, Legin, Salt and Orange) for geochemical and microbial community structure analysis. Bacterial DNA fingerprints (using Automated Ribosomal Intergenic Spacer Analysis) statistically clustered communities within ponds based on ANOSIM (R = 0.766, P = 0.001); however, one highly stratified pond (Egg) had two distinct depth-related bacterial communities (R = 0.975, P = 0.008). 454 pyrosequencing at three depths within Egg also identified phylum level shifts and increased diversity with depth, Bacteroidetes being the dominant phyla in the surface sample and Proteobacteria being dominant in the bottom two depths. BEST analysis, which attempts to link community structure and the geochemistry of a pond, identified conductivity and pH individually, and to a lesser extent Ag109, NO2 and V51 as dominant influences to the microbial community structure in these ponds. Increasing abundances of major halo-tolerant OTUs across the strong conductivity gradient reinforce it as the primary driver of community structure in this stud

The water cycle in a changing climate

Millions of people across the globe are already affected by natural variability in the water cycle. A multidisciplinary team of experts from the University of East Anglia and the University of Nottingham, led by Timothy Osborn, Professor of Climate Science at the world-renowned Climatic Research Unit, set out the empirical evidence - and argue the need for implementation of measured adaptation mechanisms that take into account uncertainties in the projection of future precipitation patterns

Levels and Variations of Violation in Rape.

This chapter investigates the variations in crime scene behaviour revealed in a sample of victim statements in cases of stranger sexual assault. Building on previous findings by Canter and Heritage (1990), and Canter (1994), it was hypothesised that there existed a scale of differing levels of violation by the offender. This scale, based upon actions in the offence, ranged from personal violation, through to physical violation and finally, at the most extreme level, sexual violation. Offences could also be differentiated at the personal and physical levels in terms of hostile, controlling, stealing or involving thematic emphases to the criminal’s actions. To test these hypotheses, crime scene data from the first detected offences of 112 British rapists were analysed using a multi-dimensional scaling procedure to explore the relationships amongst crime scene actions. The results provided empirical support for the four action themes as different expressions of various intensities of violation. The implications that these findings have for the investigation of stranger sexual assault and treatment of victims are discussed

Is the responsibilization of the cyber security risk reasonable and judicious?

Cyber criminals appear to be plying their trade without much hindrance. Home computer users are particularly vulnerable to attack by an increasingly sophisticated and globally dispersed hacker group. The smartphone era has exacerbated the situation, offering hackers even more attack surfaces to exploit. It might not be entirely coincidental that cyber crime has mushroomed in parallel with governments pursuing a neoliberalist agenda. This agenda has a strong drive towards individualizing risk i.e. advising citizens how to take care of themselves, and then leaving them to face the consequences if they choose not to follow the advice. In effect, citizens are “responsibilized .” Whereas responsibilization is effective for some risks, the responsibilization of cyber security is, we believe, contributing to the global success of cyber attacks. There is, consequently, a case to be made for governments taking a more active role than the mere provision of advice, which is the case in many countries. We conclude with a concrete proposal for a risk regulation regime that would more effectively mitigate and ameliorate cyber risk