A Modal Logic for Termgraph Rewriting

We propose a modal logic tailored to describe graph transformations and discuss some of its properties. We focus on a particular class of graphs called termgraphs. They are first-order terms augmented with sharing and cycles. Termgraphs allow one to describe classical data-structures (possibly with pointers) such as doubly-linked lists, circular lists etc. We show how the proposed logic can faithfully describe (i) termgraphs as well as (ii) the application of a termgraph rewrite rule (i.e. matching and replacement) and (iii) the computation of normal forms with respect to a given rewrite system. We also show how the proposed logic, which is more expressive than propositional dynamic logic, can be used to specify shapes of classical data-structures (e.g. binary trees, circular lists etc.)

An Examination of American-born Muslim College Students’ Attitudes toward Mental Health

Despite American Muslims’ growing numbers in the United States, their frequent encounters with prejudice, and their increased self-reports of emotional stress, little research has been geared toward understanding American Muslims’ attitudes toward mental health, specifically those born and raised in the United States. On the basis of current demographic trends, it is reasonable to suggest that American-born Muslims represent the future of Islam in the United States. This study examined the mental health attitudes of American-born Muslim college students (N = 184). A primarily quantitative survey approach was employed to address several research hypotheses and questions on the topic of young adult American Muslims’ attitudes toward mental health. Additional comments by participants to an open-ended survey question richly described how some of the study’s foci manifest themselves in real life situations. Participants indicated the presence in their community of concerning levels of depression, anxiety, social pressures, stress, and family conflict. Participants reported flexible general coping strategies and positive reactions to seeking professional mental health treatment. While religiousness was strongly associated with religious coping, neither was correlated with help-seeking attitudes; perhaps the process of seeking external help is different from seeking guidance from within the meanings of one’s faith. Therefore, even highly religious Muslims in the survey who were apt to utilize religious coping strategies were just as willing to seek professional help as young adult American Muslims who were less religious, and this finding held true for both men and women. A preference was expressed for individual therapy above all other treatment modalities. The professional characteristics most desired in treatment providers were multicultural competence and an understanding of developmental issues associated with young adulthood. Participants expressed concerns about the perceived lack of multicultural competence in the mental health field and the lack of Muslim treatment providers. It is hoped that this study’s results will provide mental health practitioners and other stakeholders, such as community leaders and policy makers, with a strong understanding of the beliefs and needs of American-born Muslims with regard to mental health care

The vertical distribution of zooplankton in the Goggausee (the influence of algae and Chaoborus flavicans) [Translation from: Carinthia II 166/186 373-385, 1976]

The Goggausee, a small, shallow, meromictic lake(700m long, 150m wide, max. depth=12m, mean depth=6m), was the site of a week long study (19-26 May 1974) of the limnology department of the University of Vienna. The study comprised pollen analysis and palaeolimnological studies on the one hand, as well as a stock- taking of physiochemical factors, primary production, bacteria, zooplankton, zoo benthos and fish on the other. This paper studies the zooplankton of the lake. The Goggausee is a meromictic lake, with its anoxic deep water, that restricts the vertical distribution of most zooplankton. The aim of the study was to pursue the vertical distribution of the rotifers and Crustacea. Density of individuals, biomass, percentages of zooplankton together and crustaceans and rotifers as groups. Special consideration is given to the the Dipteran Chaoborus flavicans

Stiffness control of pneumatic actuators to simulate human tissues behavior on medical haptic simulators

In order to increase the realism of medical simulators, haptic interfaces could be used to simulate the patient's body behavior. It is especially interesting to reproduce the stiffness of different soft tissues with corresponding haptic behaviors. In this paper, two control laws, impedance control and back-stepping associated with a closed-loop stiffness tuning, are introduced and applied to a pneumatic actuator. Both controllers have been obtained by using the A-T transform which is suitable to model the behavior of a pneumatic system, in a strict-feedback form. Both control laws allow to tune the system stiffness. A comparison of their performances is presented, based on experimental results

Goal-conflict detection based on temporal satisfiability checking

Goal-oriented requirements engineering approaches propose capturing how a system should behave through the speci ca- tion of high-level goals, from which requirements can then be systematically derived. Goals may however admit subtle situations that make them diverge, i.e., not be satis able as a whole under speci c circumstances feasible within the domain, called boundary conditions . While previous work al- lows one to identify boundary conditions for con icting goals written in LTL, it does so through a pattern-based approach, that supports a limited set of patterns, and only produces pre-determined formulations of boundary conditions. We present a novel automated approach to compute bound- ary conditions for general classes of con icting goals expressed in LTL, using a tableaux-based LTL satis ability procedure. A tableau for an LTL formula is a nite representation of all its satisfying models, which we process to produce boundary conditions that violate the formula, indicating divergence situations. We show that our technique can automatically produce boundary conditions that are more general than those obtainable through existing previous pattern-based approaches, and can also generate boundary conditions for goals that are not captured by these patterns

Grounding power on actions and mental attitudes

International audienceThe main objective of this work is to develop a logic called IAL (Intentional Agency Logic) in which we can reason about mental states of agents, action occurrences, and agentive and group powers. IAL will be exploited for a formal analysis of different forms of power such as an agent i's power of achieving a certain result and an agent i's power over another agent j (alias social power)

Significance of the compliance of the joints on the dynamic slip resistance of a bioinspired hoof

Robust mechanisms for slip resistance are an open challenge in legged locomotion. Animals such as goats show impressive ability to resist slippage on cliffs. It is not fully known what attributes in their body determine this ability. Studying the slip resistance dynamics of the goat may offer insight toward the biologically inspired design of robotic hooves. This article tests how the embodiment of the hoof contributes to solving the problem of slip resistance. We ran numerical simulations and experiments using a passive robotic goat hoof for different compliance levels of its three joints. We established that compliant yaw and pitch and stiff roll can increase the energy required to slide the hoof by ≈ 20% compared to the baseline (stiff hoof). Compliant roll and pitch allow the robotic hoof to adapt to the irregularities of the terrain. This produces an antilock braking system-like behavior of the robotic hoof for slip resistance. Therefore, the pastern and coffin joints have a substantial effect on the slip resistance of the robotic hoof, while the fetlock joint has the lowest contribution. These shed insights into how robotic hooves can be used to autonomously improve slip resistance

The classification of irreducible admissible mod p representations of a p-adic GL_n

Let F be a finite extension of Q_p. Using the mod p Satake transform, we define what it means for an irreducible admissible smooth representation of an F-split p-adic reductive group over \bar F_p to be supersingular. We then give the classification of irreducible admissible smooth GL_n(F)-representations over \bar F_p in terms of supersingular representations. As a consequence we deduce that supersingular is the same as supercuspidal. These results generalise the work of Barthel-Livne for n = 2. For general split reductive groups we obtain similar results under stronger hypotheses.Comment: 55 pages, to appear in Inventiones Mathematica