Alcohol use among adolescents

Alcohol is the most frequently used drug among adolescents today. Alcohol use among adolescents has been linked to many probable consequences and risks including: motor vehicle crashes, risky sexual behavior and an increased risk for sexually transmitted diseases, suicide, poor physical and mental health, lower social competence, and decreases in school achievement (Brown et al., 2007; Diego, Field, & Sanders, 2003; Wallace & Fisher, 2006). Research has shown that the earlier an adolescent initiates with the use of alcohol, the more likely that person will experience alcohol dependence in his or her life, with the onset of dependence occurring quickly and at younger ages (Brown et al., 2007; Brown, Catalano, Fleming, Haggerty, & Abbott, 2005; Diego et al., 2003; Hingson, Heeren, & Winter, 2006). Despite these risks, many adolescents continue to moderately consume alcohol. This paper will identify variables contributing to an adolescent\u27s choice of whether or not to use alcohol, state the possible effects of teen alcohol use, and present implications for school counselors, including effective prevention and treatment interventions for working with adolescents

Blueberry Progress Reports

The 1980 edition of the Blueberry Progress Reports was prepared for the Maine Blueberry Commission and the University of Maine Blueberry Advisory Committee by researchers with the Maine Life Sciences and Agriculture Experiment Station and Maine Cooperative Extension Service at the University of Maine, Orono. Projects in this report include: 1. Weed Control in Lowbush Blueberry Fields 2. Pruning of Blueberries 3. Integrated Pest Management of Blueberries in Maine 4. Physiology and Culture of the Lowbush Blueberry 5. Blueberry Diseases: Incidence and Control 6. Insects Affecting the Blueberry 7. Effect of Plant-Water Stress on Lowbush Blueberry Growth, Yield and Quality 8. Blueberry Extension Progress Report 9. Plan of Work -1981- Blueberry Extensio

A simple, verified validator for software pipelining

International audienceSoftware pipelining is a loop optimization that overlaps the execution of several iterations of a loop to expose more instruction-level parallelism. It can result in first-class performances characteristics, but at the cost of significant obfuscation of the code, making this optimization difficult to test and debug. In this paper, we present a translation validation algorithm that uses symbolic evaluation to detect semantics discrepancies between a loop and its pipelined version. Our algorithm can be implemented simply and efficiently, is provably sound, and appears to be complete with respect to most modulo scheduling algorithms. A conclusion of this case study is that it is possible and effective to use symbolic evaluation to reason about loop transformations

Blueberry Progress Reports

The 1978 edition of the Blueberry Progress Reports was prepared for the Maine Blueberry Commission and the University of Maine Blueberry Advisory Committee by researchers with the Maine Life Sciences and Agriculture Experiment Station and Maine Cooperative Extension Service at the University of Maine, Orono. Projects in this report include: 1. Weed Control in Blueberry Fields 2. Pruning of Blueberries 3. Integrated Management of Blueberry Fields 4. Factors Regulating Rhizome Initiation and Development in the Lowbush Blueberry 5. Effect of Plant-Water Stress on Lowbush Blueberry Growth Yield and Quality 6. Blossom Blight of Blueberries 7. Botrytis Blossom Blight of Lowbush Blueberries 8. Insects Affecting the Blueberry 9. Treatment of Blueberries with Potassium Sorbate to Reduce Spoilage During Temporary Storage 10. Cooperative Extension Activitie

Blueberry Progress Reports

The 1979 edition of the Blueberry Progress Reports was prepared for the Maine Blueberry Commission and the University of Maine Blueberry Advisory Committee by researchers with the Maine Life Sciences and Agriculture Experiment Station and Maine Cooperative Extension Service at the University of Maine, Orono. Projects in this report include: 1. Cooperative Extension Activities 2. Plan of Work - FY 1980 3. Weed Control in Lowbush Blueberry Fields 4. Pruning of Blueberries 5. Integrated Management of Blueberry Fields 6. Physiology and Culture of the Lowbush Blueberry 7. Effect of Plant-Water Stress on Lowbush Blueberry Growth, Yield and Quality 8. Blueberry Pathology 9. Botrytis Blossom Blight of Lowbush Blueberries 10. Insects Affecting the Blueberr

A formally verified compiler back-end

This article describes the development and formal verification (proof of semantic preservation) of a compiler back-end from Cminor (a simple imperative intermediate language) to PowerPC assembly code, using the Coq proof assistant both for programming the compiler and for proving its correctness. Such a verified compiler is useful in the context of formal methods applied to the certification of critical software: the verification of the compiler guarantees that the safety properties proved on the source code hold for the executable compiled code as well

Parameterized Synthesis with Safety Properties

Parameterized synthesis offers a solution to the problem of constructing correct and verified controllers for parameterized systems. Such systems occur naturally in practice (e.g., in the form of distributed protocols where the amount of processes is often unknown at design time and the protocol must work regardless of the number of processes). In this paper, we present a novel learning based approach to the synthesis of reactive controllers for parameterized systems from safety specifications. We use the framework of regular model checking to model the synthesis problem as an infinite-duration two-player game and show how one can utilize Angluin's well-known L* algorithm to learn correct-by-design controllers. This approach results in a synthesis procedure that is conceptually simpler than existing synthesis methods with a completeness guarantee, whenever a winning strategy can be expressed by a regular set. We have implemented our algorithm in a tool called L*-PSynth and have demonstrated its performance on a range of benchmarks, including robotic motion planning and distributed protocols. Despite the simplicity of L*-PSynth it competes well against (and in many cases even outperforms) the state-of-the-art tools for synthesizing parameterized systems.Comment: 18 page

Knowledge-Based Synthesis of Distributed Systems Using Event Structures

To produce a program guaranteed to satisfy a given specification one can synthesize it from a formal constructive proof that a computation satisfying that specification exists. This process is particularly effective if the specifications are written in a high-level language that makes it easy for designers to specify their goals. We consider a high-level specification language that results from adding knowledge to a fragment of Nuprl specifically tailored for specifying distributed protocols, called event theory. We then show how high-level knowledge-based programs can be synthesized from the knowledge-based specifications using a proof development system such as Nuprl. Methods of Halpern and Zuck then apply to convert these knowledge-based protocols to ordinary protocols. These methods can be expressed as heuristic transformation tactics in Nuprl.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appeared in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Reasoning LPAR 2004, pp. 449-46