Understanding Program Slices

Program slicing is a useful analysis for aiding different software engineering activities. In the past decades, various notions of program slices have been evolved as well as a number of methods to compute them. By now program slicing has numerous applications in software maintenance, program comprehension, reverse engineering, program integration, and software testing. Usability of program slicing for real world programs depends on many factors such as precision, speed, and scalability, which have already been addressed in the literature. However, only a little attention has been brought to the practical demand: when the slices are large or difficult to understand, which often occur in the case of larger programs, how to give an explanation for the user why a particular element has been included in the resulting slice. This paper describes a reasoning method about elements of static program slices

4D Ariadne the Static Debugger of Java Programs

Development environments support the programmer in numerous ways from syntax highlighting to different refactoring and code generating methods. However, there are cases where these tools are limited or not usable, such as getting familiar with large and complex source codes written by a third person; finding the complexities of huge projects or finding semantic errors.In this paper we present our static analyzer tool, called 4D Ariadne, which concentrates on these problems. 4D Ariadne is a static debugger of Object Oriented applications written in Java programming language. It calculates data dependencies of objects being able to compute them both forward and backward. As 4D Ariadne provides only the direct influences to the user, it can be considered as an alternative of traditional debuggers, without executing the code. 4D Ariadne also provides dynamic call graphs representing polymorphic properties of objects

Book reviews

Book reviews of the following works: René Bannerjea: Eskimos in Europe: How they got there and what happened to them afterwards. Bíró Family Nyomdaipari és Kereskedelmi Vállalat, London & Budapest, 2004, 470 pp. ; Jenő Kiss - Ferenc Pusztai (Hrsg.): Magyar nyelvtörténet [Ungarische Sprachgeschichte]}. Osiris Kiadó, Budapest, 2003, 950 pp. ; Mária Ladányi - Csilla Dér - Helga Hattyár (eds): "...még onnét is eljutni túlra''. Nyelvészeti és irodalmi tanulmányok Horváth Katalin tiszteletére ["...getting even beyond that..."]. Linguistic and literary studies in honor of Katalin Horváth]. Tinta Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 2004, 499 pp. ; Yuri Alekseevich Tambovtsev: Tipologija funktsionirovanija fonem v zvukovoj tsepochke indoevropejskih, paleoaziatskih, uralo-altaiskih i drugih jazykov mira: kompaktnost' podgrupp, grupp, semej i drugih jazykovyh taksonov [A typology of the functioning of phonemes in sound sequences in Indo-European, Paleo-Asiatic, Ural-Altaic and other languages of the world: The compactness of subgroups, groups, families and other language taxons]}. Sibirskij Nezavysimyj Institut, Novosibirsk, 2003, 143 pp

Biologia futura: combinatorial stress responses in fungi

In the ever-changing fungal environment, fungi have to cope with a wide array of very different stresses. These stresses frequently act in combination rather than independently, i.e., they quickly follow one another or occur concomitantly. Combinatorial stress response studies revealed that the response of fungi to a stressor is highly dependent on the simultaneous action of other stressors or even on earlier stresses to which the fungi adapted. Several important phenomena were discovered, such as stress pathway interference, acquired stress tolerance, stress response memory or stress cross-protection/sensitization, which cannot be interpreted when we study the consequences of a single stressor alone. Due to the interactions between stressors and stress responses, a stress response that develops under a combined stress is not the simple summation of stress responses observed during single stress treatments. Based on the knowledge collected from single stress treatment experiments, we cannot predict how fungi will respond to a certain combination of stresses or even whether this combination will be more harmful than single stress treatments. This uncertainty warns us that if we want to understand how fungi adapt to a certain habitat (e.g., to the human body) to find a point of weakness in this adaptation, we must understand how the fungi cope with combinations of stresses, rather than with single stressors

Autolytic hydrolases affect sexual and asexual development of Aspergillus nidulans

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What does a strongly excited 't Hooft-Polyakov magnetic monopole do?

The time evolution of strongly exited SU(2) Bogomolny-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) magnetic monopoles in Minkowski spacetime is investigated by means of numerical simulations based on the technique of conformal compactification and on the use of hyperboloidal initial value problem. It is found that an initially static monopole does not radiate the entire energy of the exciting pulse toward future null infinity. Rather, a long-lasting quasi-stable `breathing state' develops in the central region and certain expanding shell structures -- built up by very high frequency oscillations -- are formed in the far away region.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

Interaction of Aqueous Bovine Serum Albumin with Silica Aerogel Microparticles: Sorption Induced Aggregation

Mesoporous silica aerogels have a wide range of potential applications in biotechnology, the food industry, pharmacy and medicine. Understanding the nature of the interactions of biomolecules with these porous nanostructured materials is essential for achieving optimum performance in the targeted applications. In this study, the well-characterized bovine serum albumin (BSA) was chosen as a model protein to probe protein–aerogel interactions in the solution phase. Aqueous BSA was mixed with suspended silica aerogel microparticles, and the colloid system was monitored on-line by UV–vis spectrophotometry and turbidimetry. The global mathematical analysis of the time-resolved data reveals that the fast sorption of the protein on the aerogel microparticles follows a multistep binding mechanism. The extensive sorption of the protein eventually induces the aggregation of the covered aerogel due to the alteration of the electrical double layer of the particles. The interaction of BSA and silica aerogel is the strongest between pH = 4 and 5, because their native surface charges are the opposite in this pH range, as indicated by their respective zeta potentials