Explaining Violation Traces with Finite State Natural Language Generation Models

An essential element of any verification technique is that of identifying and communicating to the user, system behaviour which leads to a deviation from the expected behaviour. Such behaviours are typically made available as long traces of system actions which would benefit from a natural language explanation of the trace and especially in the context of business logic level specifications. In this paper we present a natural language generation model which can be used to explain such traces. A key idea is that the explanation language is a CNL that is, formally speaking, regular language susceptible transformations that can be expressed with finite state machinery. At the same time it admits various forms of abstraction and simplification which contribute to the naturalness of explanations that are communicated to the user

Coherent Pion Production by Neutrinos

I concentrate in this article on the reaction--coherent pion production by neutrinos incident on nuclei. A special effort is made in order to describe the approximations entering the calculation. I conclude that the reaction is well understood and with appropriate data for hadronic reactions is can be computed for low and high energies. Because of shortage of space I omitted the resonance analysis, which is described in articles with my collaborators.Comment: 4 pages. Proceedings of Conf. to be published by APS-Proceeding

Transaction costs and their implications to formation of contractual arrangements: aspects of machinery contracting by family farmers in the centro-serra region of Rio Grande do Sul.

A mecanização da produção agrícola desempenha um importante e crescente papel no curso do desenvolvimento agrícola e rural. A mecanização oferece diversas melhorias potenciais nos sistemas de produção tais como o incremento da produtividade da terra e do trabalho, a redução dos riscos, e aumento da qualidade e segurança alimentar de produtos de origem animal e vegetal. Entretanto, os investimentos necessários para compra de máquinas, especialmente para pequenos produtores, podem não ser a opção de menor custo em comparação com a obtenção de serviços de mecanização por meio de diferentes arranjos contratuais. Para .. escolher a melhor forma de contratar serviços de mecanização é necessário avaliar tanto os . custos convencionais das máquinas quanto os custos de transação, O principal objetivo desta pesquisa foi estimar a importância dos custos de transação na tomada de decisão sobre a seleção de arranjos contratuais alternativos para contratação de serviços de mecanização. Nossa hipótese era de. que os custos de transação podem ser maiores que os custos das máquinas, podendo, com isso, ser de cruclal Importância na seleção do tipo de arranjo contratual para contratar serviços de mecanização. Os dados empíricos de custos de máquinas e de transação foram coletados junto a agricultores familiares da Região Centro-Serra (RS), os quais contrataram serviços de colheita para milho de diferentes fornecedores formais e informais. Os resultados mostraram que os custos de transação podem ser mais elevados que os custos das máquinas e, com isso, influenciam de forma significativa a preferência agricultores familiares por determinado tipo de arranjo contratual para obtenção de serviços de mecanização. ABSTRACT - The mechanization of agricultural production plays an important and in course of time increasing role in the course of agricultural and rural development. Mechanization offers several potential improvements to farming systems such as increased land and labor productivity, reduction of risks, and increase of quality and food safety of animal and plant products. However, investments in own machinery, in particular for small holders, may not be the least-cost option in comparison with outsourcing the required machinery services through different contractual relationships. To choose the optimal contract for obtaining machinery services, it is necessary to evaluate conventional machinery costs as well as transaction costs. The main objective of this research was to assess the role of transaction costs in the choice among alternative contractual arrangements for provision of machinery services. Our hypothesis was that transaction costs can be higher than machinery costs, and therefore, they can play a leading role in the choice of contractual arrangements for provision of machinery services. The empirical data on conventional machinery and transaction costs were collected from farms in Southern Brazil that procure services for maize harvest through various informal and formal contractual forms. We found that transaction costs can be higher than conventional machinery costs, and therefore, influence the choice of contractual arrangement

Charge Symmetry Violation Corrections to Determination of the Weinberg Angle in Neutrino Reactions

We show that the correction to the Paschos-Wolfenstein relation associated with charge symmetry violation in the valence quark distributions is essentially model independent. It is proportional to a ratio of quark momenta that is independent of Q^2. This result provides a natural explanation of the surprisingly good agreement found between our earlier estimates within several different models. When applied to the recent NuTeV measurement, this effect significantly reduces the discrepancy with other determinations of the Weinberg angle.Comment: 7 pages, no figures; expanded discussion of N.ne.Z correction

Analysing the Security of Google's implementation of OpenID Connect

Many millions of users routinely use their Google accounts to log in to relying party (RP) websites supporting the Google OpenID Connect service. OpenID Connect, a newly standardised single-sign-on protocol, builds an identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol, which has itself been widely adopted to support identity management services. It adds identity management functionality to the OAuth 2.0 system and allows an RP to obtain assurances regarding the authenticity of an end user. A number of authors have analysed the security of the OAuth 2.0 protocol, but whether OpenID Connect is secure in practice remains an open question. We report on a large-scale practical study of Google's implementation of OpenID Connect, involving forensic examination of 103 RP websites which support its use for sign-in. Our study reveals serious vulnerabilities of a number of types, all of which allow an attacker to log in to an RP website as a victim user. Further examination suggests that these vulnerabilities are caused by a combination of Google's design of its OpenID Connect service and RP developers making design decisions which sacrifice security for simplicity of implementation. We also give practical recommendations for both RPs and OPs to help improve the security of real world OpenID Connect systems

Cotinine inhibits the pro-inflammatory response initiated by multiple cell surface Toll-like receptors in monocytic THP cells

Background The primary, stable metabolite of nicotine [(S)-3-(1-methyl-2-pyrrolidinyl) pyridine] in humans is cotinine [(S)-1-methyl-5-(3-pyridinyl)-2-pyrrolidinone]. We have previously shown that cotinine exposure induces convergence and amplification of the GSK3β-dependent PI3 kinase and cholinergic anti-inflammatory systems. The consequence is reduced pro-inflammatory cytokine secretion by human monocytes responding to bacteria or LPS, a TLR4 agonist. Findings Here we show that cotinine-induced inflammatory suppression may not be restricted to individual Toll-like receptors (TLRs). Indeed, in monocytic cells, cotinine suppresses the cytokine production that is normally resultant upon agonist-specific engagement of all of the major surface exposed TLRs (TLR 2/1; 2/6; 4 and 5), although the degree of suppression varies by TLR. Conclusions These results provide further mechanistic insight into the increased susceptibility to multiple bacterial infections known to occur in smokers. They also establish THP-1 cells as a potentially suitable model with which to study the influence of tobacco components and metabolites on TLR-initiated inflammatory events

Drug Hypersensitivity Syndrome toCarbamazepine and Human Herpes Virus 6 Infection: Case Reportand Literature Review

Abstract.: We describe a patient with a drug-induced hypersensitivity syndrome to carbamazepine and a concomitant active infection with human herpes virus 6 (HHV-6). The potential role of HHV-6 regarding the drug-induced hypersensitivity syndrome is discussed and the main clinical features of this potentially fatal adverse drug reaction are highlighte

An Investigation into the Use of Mutation Analysis for Automated Program Repair

Research in Search-Based Automated Program Repair has demonstrated promising results, but has nevertheless been largely confined to small, single-edit patches using a limited set of mutation operators. Tackling a broader spectrum of bugs will require multiple edits and a larger set of operators, leading to a combinatorial explosion of the search space. This motivates the need for more efficient search techniques. We propose to use the test case results of candidate patches to localise suitable fix locations. We analysed the test suite results of single-edit patches, generated from a random walk across 28 bugs in 6 programs. Based on the findings of this analysis, we propose a number of mutation-based fault localisation techniques, which we subsequently evaluate by measuring how accurately they locate the statements at which the search was able to generate a solution. After demonstrating that these techniques fail to result in a significant improvement, we discuss why this may be the case, despite the successes of mutation-based fault localisation in previous studies

Electroweak radiative corrections to deep-inelastic neutrino scattering - implications for NuTeV ?

We calculate the O(alpha) electroweak corrections to charged- and neutral-current deep-inelastic neutrino scattering off an isoscalar target. The full one-loop-corrected cross sections, including hard photonic corrections, are evaluated and compared to an earlier result which was used in the NuTeV analysis. In particular, we compare results that differ in input-parameter scheme, treatment of real photon radiation and factorization scheme. The associated shifts in the theoretical prediction for the ratio of neutral- and charged-current cross sections can be larger than the experimental accuracy of the NuTeV result.Comment: 19 pages late