Analog and Mixed Signal Verification

More and more electronic systems have components that are not purely digital. Verification of such systems is a much less developed discipline than the digital equivalents and the application of formal (mathematically complete) techniques is a nascent area. In this paper, we will discuss the nature of analog circuit design and describe the way verification is done in practice today. We will describe some “formal” approaches coming from the analog design community. We will describe some of the approaches to formal verification that have been presented in recent literature. Finally, we will mention some areas where there are opportunities for future work

Modeling Security Policy and the Effect for End-Users

Many "good practices" in computer security are based on assumptions and local evidence that do not generalize. There are few quantifiable methods of establishing or refuting the validity of these practices from a user perspective. We propose a formal model of security policies that allows us to evaluate the claimed benefits to the user of the system quantitatively. We illustrate the use of the model by looking at a security policy we all live with daily: The Password Policy

The Distribution of Fitness Effects of Spontaneous Mutations in Vibrio fischeri

Mutations are the ultimate source of the biological diversity on which natural selection acts, but the vast majority of these mutations are harmful. As such, mutations lead to disease states like cancer, extinction of small populations, and can drive pathogen evolution. Unfortunately, because mutations are rare and past studies have been subject to detection biases, very little is known about the distribution of fitness effects from naturally occurring mutations. In this study, we used mutation accumulation and full genome sequencing to capture naturally occurring mutations before they were exposed to the sieve of natural selection in Vibrio fischeri. We then measured the effects of these mutations on the fitness of the individuals harboring these mutations. We hypothesized that most mutations would be deleterious, and that deletions and insertions would be more detrimental to fitness than base substitutions, particularly in coding regions. Additionally, we expected to show that mutations on primary chromosomes, which are more highly expressed and evolutionarily conserved, would have more harmful effects than mutations on accessory secondary chromosomes. Using a subset of eleven mutation accumulation isolates, each harboring between two and nine mutations, we show that the majority of mutations have minor deleterious effects, with a subset of those errors resulting in more drastic fitness declines. However, extending this study to more genotypes will be required to examine the relationship between particular mutation types and fitness. Ultimately, an enhanced understanding of the relationship between genotype and fitness will broaden our understanding of the distribution of mutational effects and elucidate the susceptibility of different genome regions to deleterious variation

Constraints, creativity and challenges: educators and students writing together

Australia's national curriculum calls for the prioritisation of teaching and learning in literacies. From 2013 there is also a requirement for schools to familiarise students with a broad range of literature, and teachers are required to engage children in creating plays, stories and poems in traditional and multimodal forms. Similarly, universities must prepare future teachers with a deep understanding of the creative processes involved in thinking about, writing and editing such works, with a consideration of audience and genre. Drawing upon the experiences of pre-service teachers in their co-writing with young students, the author considers how writing within literary genres may support possibility thinking, relational and dialogic pedagogies and learner agency, as well as what challenges and constraining factors may operate upon the teacher writer partnership