One of Us: Multilevel Models Examining the Impact of Descriptive Representation on Civic Engagement

This paper examines the impact of descriptive representation in comparative perspective. The goals are to establish (1) whether descriptive representation mobilizes attitudinal and behavioral indicators of civic engagement; (2) whether the strength of any such relationship differs for women and young people; and (3) whether this relationship is evident cross?nationally. The first section provides an overview of existing research on descriptive representation and the civic engagement of women and young people. The second section presents the research design. The third reports and discusses the findings of the multilevel models and what these suggest about relationships between descriptive representation in national parliaments and patterns in civic engagement among citizens. The paper concludes with a summary of the major findings and reflects upon their implications for understanding and altering long?standing inequalities in civic engagement.

The role of the corporate mega-firm

Published in December 2016This article discusses the role of the corporate mega-firm in shaping the dreams, aspirations, and ambitions of Australian law students. In sum, I argue that students begin law school with clear social and moral convictions and leave as apolitical, passive enforcers of the law, unable to question the legal rules and principles they have been taught. Instead of pursuing careers in social justice and other areas of public advocacy, students are taught to believe that corporate law and corporate work are the only models of success. In the face of an onslaught of corporate messaging, advertising and media, it is difficult for students to retain a sense of their own moral compass. By the end of their degrees, law students often begin to rationalise a newly market-centric outlook on life, resulting in the loss of a new generation of public advocates to corporate positions.Joshua Kroo

The effect of grassland shifts on the avifauna of a South African savanna

Bibliography: leaves 88-94.Two distinct grassland types occur within Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park (HiP); short stoloniferous grazing lawns and tall, tussock-like 'bunch' grasslands. Grazing lawns are maintained by grazing mammals, among which White Rhinoceros Ceratotherium simum is of major importance. By contrast, tall bunch grasslands are promoted by frequent burning. The extent of each grassland type within the park is highly dynamic and can be altered by changes in mammal numbers and/or fire regimes. Such changes may have cascading consequences on other components of the ecosystem if they show specialisation towards one or other grassland state. This study compared avifaunal assemblages of grazing lawns and bunch grasslands to assess how bird species of the park might change with shifts in the grassland mosaic. Distinct bird communities were associated with each grassland type, including several specialists, and bird distribution as linked to vegetation structure, rather than floristics

Formal Methods and Safety for Automated Vehicles: Modeling, Abstractions, and Synthesis of Tactical Planners

One goal of developing automated road vehicles is to completely free people from driving tasks. Automated vehicles with no human driver must handle all traffic situations that human drivers are expected to handle, possibly more. Though human drivers cause a lot of traffic accidents, they still have a very low accident and failure rate that automated vehicles must match.Tactical planners are responsible for making discrete decisions for the coming seconds or minutes. As with all subsystems in an automated vehicle, these planners need to be supported with a credible and convincing argument of their correctness. The planners interact with other road users in a feedback loop, so their correctness depends on their behavior in relation to other drivers and road users over time. One way to ascertain their correctness is to test the vehicles in real traffic. But to be sufficiently certain that a tactical planner is safe, it has to be tested on 255 million miles with no accidents.Formal methods can, in contrast to testing, mathematically prove that given requirements are fulfilled. Hence, these methods are a promising alternative for making credible arguments for tactical planners’ correctness. The topic of this thesis is the use of formal methods in the automotive industry to design safe tactical planners. What is interesting is both how automotive systems can be modeled in formal frameworks, and how formal methods can be used practically within the automotive development process.The main findings of this thesis are that it is viable to formally express desired properties of tactical planners, and to use formal methods to prove their correctness. However, the difficulty to anticipate and inspect the interaction of several desired properties is found to be an obstacle. Model Checking, Reactive Synthesis, and Supervisory Control Theory have been used in the design and development process of tactical planners, and these methods have their benefits, depending on the application. To be feasible and useful, these methods need to operate on both a high and a low level of abstraction, and this thesis contributes an automatic abstraction method that bridges this divide.It is also found that artifacts from formal methods tools may be used to convincingly argue that a realization of a tactical planner is safe, and that such an argument puts formal requirements on the vehicle’s other subsystems and its surroundings

An investigation of concrete curing practice in the Cape Town area

Includes bibliographical references.[Watermark not visible] This project describes the results from the use of durability index tests as a tool for the investigation of the concrete curing practice in the Cape Town area. The object of the tests was to determine the effect environmental conditions have on the physical properties of the outer skin of concrete. The laboratory work involved the exposure of three concrete strengths to various relative humidities. The site work involved testing the cured outer surface of concrete at 28 days on six construction sites. The oxygen permeability and water sorptivity tests were used to investigate the outer surface of concrete. The laboratory work showed that curing at a relative humidity of 90 had a beneficial effect on the durability index values, while curing at 60 relative humidity was less effective. The permeability and sorptivity of the site results remained constant as the actual strength increased. Furthermore, permeability and sorptivity increased as the average evaporation rate increased

High-level Programming on Low-level Platforms: Two Domain-specific Languages based on Haskell

In this thesis, we describe our research on how to program low-level platforms with high-level languages.As an example, consider applications that run on microcontrollers. Such applicationsmay need to specify precise temporal behavior, carefully manage power usage, and handle cryptographic keys.Low-level platforms are programmed using low-level languages such as C/C++, where the lack of expressiveness canlead to error-prone code.We investigate whether we can use high-level languages to program these platforms, by embedding domain-specific languagesin a host language, Haskell. A high-level language offers better expressivity and shields the developer from low-leveldetails, yielding code that more concretely describes what the application is supposed to do. Furthermore, a richer runtimesystem could ease the burden of e.g. memory management and scheduling of coroutines.The papers in this thesis indicate that it is possible to program these devices using a high-level language. We developtwo domain-specific languages, Scoria and HasTEE. Scoria is evaluated on NRF52 microcontrollers, where we run applicationsthat require precise, temporal behavior and perform I/O. HasTEE is evaluated on machines whose processor has supportfor Intel Software Guard Extension and shows that the type system of Haskell can be used to automatically partition a Haskellapplication and run it in a trusted execution environment

Correct-by-Construction Tactical Planners for Automated Cars

One goal of developing automated cars is to completely free people from driving tasks. Automated cars that require no human driver need to handle all traffic situations that a human driver is expected to handle, and possibly more. Although human drivers cause a lot of traffic accidents, they still have a very low accident and failure rate that automated systems must match.Tactical planners are responsible for making discrete decisions during the coming seconds or minute. As with all subsystems in an automated car, these planners need to be supported with a credible and convincing argument of their correctness. The planners\u27 decisions affect the environment and the planners need to interact with other road users in a feedback loop, so the correctness of the planners depend on their behavior in relation to other drivers and the environment over time. One possibility to ascertain their correctness is to deploy the planners in real traffic. To be sufficiently certain that a tactical planner is safe by that methods, it needs to be tested on 255 million miles without having an accident.Formal methods can, in contrast to testing, mathematically prove that the requirements are fulfilled. Hence, they are a promising alternative for making credible arguments of tactical planners\u27 correctness. The topic of this thesis is how formal methods can be used in the automotive industry to design safe tactical planners. What is interesting is both how automotive systems should be modeled in formal frameworks, and how formal methods can be used practically within the automotive development process.The main findings of this thesis are that it is natural to express desired properties of tactical planners in formal languages and use formal methods to prove their correctness. Model Checking, Reactive Synthesis, and Supervisory Control Theory have been used in the design and development process of tactical planners, and all three methods have their benefits, depending on the application.Formal synthesis is an especially interesting class of formal methods because they can automatically generate a planner based on requirements and models. Formal synthesis removes the need to manually develop and implement the planner, so the development efforts can be directed to formalizing good requirements on the planner and good assumptions on the environment. However, formal synthesis has two limitations: the resulting planner is a black box that is difficult to inspect, and it is difficult to find a level of abstraction that allows detailed requirements and generic planners