CEG 460/660: Introduction to Software Computer Engineering

This course is concerned with the techniques of designing and constructing large programs. Some of the required basic concepts necessarily have to be developed using small programs as examples. To this extent we also study programming-in-the-small. The overall objectives are to present an overview of issues in the development of sot1ware, to discuss terminology, to illustrate via example case studies, and to give sufficiently detailed advice on how to develop quality software. Hands-on experience is emphasized through the use of homework and a class project

An Examination of Innovation in Tennessee\u27s Charter Schools

Similar to other states, charter schools in Tennessee were established to improve student learning, provide options for parents, encourage the use of innovative methods, and provide new opportunities for teachers. With the passage of the TNPublic Charter School Law, the first four charter schools opened in the 2003-04 academic year. Since that time, evidence has accumulated that this cohort of schools has been able to demonstrate many of the purposes outlined in the TN charter school law. For example, teachers and parents have generally reported positive experiences with the schools as well as satisfaction with key outcomes. Additionally, although student achievement results have been mixed, the schools have all successfully renewed their charters. The extent to which the charter schools are being innovative, however, has not been well documented. Using a qualitative collective case study approach, the goal of this paper was to examine if the first cohort of TNcharter schools is utilizing innovative methods. The resulting themes across schools included the use of extended learning time, engaging students as individual learners, adopting a holistic view of education, high-levels of support for the school\u27s mission coupled with participative decision-making, and purposeful parent and community involvement with the schools. When examined in isolation, the charter school practices appear to be well-founded in the research literature, but do not ostensibly seem to be truly new. When the combination of practices is examined, however, then each school appears to provide a unique approach to educating their students, the vast majority of whom are economically disadvantaged and educationally at-risk. Additionally, the schools offered educational methods and opportunities that may not have otherwise been provided in their respective communities. This holistic, contextually-based examination of innovation also offers lessons for adoption and scale-up of practices by other schools

Leonard v. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co.: Why the High Water Mark in the Tort-Contract Debate May Cause the Next Wave of Insurance Litigation to Inundate the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals with Their Tort Claims

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John Gerstner and the Renewal of Reformed Evangelicalism in Modern America

John Gerstner (1914-1996) was a key figure in the renewal of Reformed evangelicalism in America in the second half of the twentieth century. Gerstner’s work as a church historian sought to shape evangelicalism, but also northern mainline Presbyterianism. In order to promote evangelical thought he wrote, taught, lectured, debated and preached widely. In order to achieve his aims he promoted the work of the great colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards. He also defended and endorsed biblical inerrancy and the Old Princeton theology. Gerstner was a critic of theological modernism and had reservations about the theology of Karl Barth—the great Swiss Reformed theologian. Part of Gerstner’s fame was his active participation in mainline Presbyterianism and in so many of the smaller Presbyterian denominations and in the wider evangelical movement. His renewal efforts within the United Presbyterian Church U.S.A. (later PCUSA) were largely a failure, but they did contribute to the surprising resurgence of Reformed evangelicalism. Evangelical marginalization in the mainline led Gerstner and other evangelicals to redirect their energy into new evangelical institutions, groups and denominations. Gerstner’s evangelical United Presbyterian Church of North America (UPCNA) background influenced the young scholar and the legacy of the UPCNA’s heritage can be detected in the popular forms of the Reformed evangelical movement that exist today. It is a central theme of this dissertation that Gerstner’s significance, at least partially, can be observed in the number of Reformed evangelical scholars and leaders who studied with him and play leading roles in the movement today

Statistical discrete particle simulation studies

A particle simulation code was developed that is suited to Multiple Instruction Multiple Data multiprocessor computers. The resulting code is designed to be portable between a large class of multiprocessor computer architectures, including hypercubes (e.g., Intel iPSC/860), shared memory machines (e.g., Cray, SGI, DASH), and simple uniprocessors (e.g., SUN, VAX, IBM PC). This code provides a powerful general framework that can be adapted to specific applications, such as thermomechanical modeling, general 3-D geometry support, or visualization support via a codeveloped CPlot data reduction and visualization system. Chemistry models were implemented and validated with comparison to continuum solutions of thermochemically relaxing gas mixtures and with experimental results from the high speed flow about a circular cylinder. Furthermore, the exchange of energy between translational and internal modes was modeled. New models were developed, combining greater efficiency than earlier phenomenological models. They offer greater physical detail by addressing vibrational energy as a discretely distributed quantity

Attack-Graph Threat Modeling Assessment of Ambulatory Medical Devices

The continued integration of technology into all aspects of society stresses the need to identify and understand the risk associated with assimilating new technologies. This necessity is heightened when technology is used for medical purposes like ambulatory devices that monitor a patient’s vital signs. This integration creates environments that are conducive to malicious activities. The potential impact presents new challenges for the medical community. \ \ Hence, this research presents attack graph modeling as a viable solution to identifying vulnerabilities, assessing risk, and forming mitigation strategies to defend ambulatory medical devices from attackers. Common and frequent vulnerabilities and attack strategies related to the various aspects of ambulatory devices, including Bluetooth enabled sensors and Android applications are identified in the literature. Based on this analysis, this research presents an attack graph modeling example on a theoretical device that highlights vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies to consider when designing ambulatory devices with similar components.

Spectrally arbitrary ray patterns

AbstractAn n×n ray pattern A is said to be spectrally arbitrary if for every monic nth degree polynomial f(x) with coefficients from C, there is a matrix in the pattern class of A such that its characteristic polynomial is f(x). In this article the authors extend the nilpotent-Jacobi method for sign patterns to ray patterns, establishing a means to show that an irreducible ray pattern and all its superpatterns are spectrally arbitrary. They use this method to establish that a particular family of n×n irreducible ray patterns with exactly 3n nonzeros is spectrally arbitrary. They then show that every n×n irreducible, spectrally arbitrary ray pattern has at least 3n-1 nonzeros

3D Ultrastructure of the Cochlear Outer Hair Cell Lateral Wall Revealed By Electron Tomography.

Outer Hair Cells (OHCs) in the mammalian cochlea display a unique type of voltage-induced mechanical movement termed electromotility, which amplifies auditory signals and contributes to the sensitivity and frequency selectivity of mammalian hearing. Electromotility occurs in the OHC lateral wall, but it is not fully understood how the supramolecular architecture of the lateral wall enables this unique form of cellular motility. Employing electron tomography of high-pressure frozen and freeze-substituted OHCs, we visualized the 3D structure and organization of the membrane and cytoskeletal components of the OHC lateral wall. The subsurface cisterna (SSC) is a highly prominent feature, and we report that the SSC membranes and lumen possess hexagonally ordered arrays of particles. We also find the SSC is tightly connected to adjacent actin filaments by short filamentous protein connections. Pillar proteins that join the plasma membrane to the cytoskeleton appear as variable structures considerably thinner than actin filaments and significantly more flexible than actin-SSC links. The structurally rich organization and rigidity of the SSC coupled with apparently weaker mechanical connections between the plasma membrane (PM) and cytoskeleton reveal that the membrane-cytoskeletal architecture of the OHC lateral wall is more complex than previously appreciated. These observations are important for our understanding of OHC mechanics and need to be considered in computational models of OHC electromotility that incorporate subcellular features