InterNetNews server: inside an open-source project

What do you get when you give your source code away and encourage programmers around the world to make changes to it? Some Internet software development engineers believe you get a robust system with a large market share and development that is highly responsive to user needs. The team behind the InterNetNews Usenet server package is one such group of believers. INN provides programs to exchange Usenet messages with other servers and to deliver those messages to end users. The Internet Software Consortium oversees the INN and has been supporting its development under an open model. INN is a moderate-sized software project with more than 430 files containing nearly 150,000 lines in the uncompiled distribution. Programs are written mainly in C, Bourne shell, and Perl. The CVS revision control system manages all changes to files. The paper describes the logistics of InterNetNews     

Guidelines for applying research results

The software engineering literature is full of research reports that relate the conclusions of case studies, surveys, and formal experiments. But it is not always easy to tell which results apply to you. When results conflict, how do you know which study to believe? To understand how to sort through these studies, and decide if you should perform your own study, the author has put together the Non-Trivial Pursuits game board, that tells you when you have enough information to draw a valid conclusion about a relationship between factors. To begin, suppose your project team is interested in improving the quality of the code it produces. You want to determine what factors improve quality so that your team can use appropriate techniques or tools to generate better code. Your first attempt to find out what affects code quality is to examine population studies, in which characteristics of a large developer population are examined for associations among variables     

On the distribution of performance from multiple neural-networktrials

The performance of neural network simulations is often reported in terms of the mean and standard deviation of a number of simulations performed with different starting conditions. However, in many cases, the distribution of the individual results does not approximate a Gaussian distribution, may not be symmetric, and may be multimodal. We present the distribution of results for practical problems and show that assuming Gaussian distributions can significantly affect the interpretation of results, especially those of comparison studies. For a controlled task which we consider, we find that the distribution of performance is skewed toward better performance for smoother target functions and skewed toward worse performance for more complex target functions. We propose new guidelines for reporting performance which provide more information about the actual distribution.     

Polarization Phase-Based Method For Material Classification In Computer Vision

A robust and accurate polarization phase-based technique for material classification is presented. The novelty of this technique is three-fold in (i) its theoretical development, (ii) application, and, (iii) experimental implementation. The concept of phase of polarization of a light wave is introduced to computer vision for discrimination between materials according to their intrinsic electrical conductivity, such as distinguishing conducting metals, and poorly conducting dielectrics. Previous work has used intensity, color and polarization component ratios. This new method is based on the physical principle that metals retard orthogonal components of light upon reflection while dielectrics do not. This method has significant complementary advantages with respect to existing techniques, is computationally efficient, and can be easily implemented with existing imaging technology. Experiments for real circuit board inspection, nonconductive and conductive glass, and, outdoor object recognition have been performed to demonstrate its accuracy and potential capabilities.     

Sindi: an intelligent assistant for highway design

We present a system to support highway engineers in the tasks of preliminary highway design. The system is based on the ideas of heuristic search and explicit preference setting. The system has been implemented and installed in a Spanish engineering firm.     

Differing Conceptions of Moral Exemplarity: Just, Brave, and Caring.

People's conceptions of different types of moral exemplarity were examined in an attempt to augment the current emphasis on moral rationality with a fuller understanding of moral personality. In Study 1 (with 805 adults), a free-listing procedure was used to generate the attributes of 3 types of moral exemplars (just, brave, and caring). In Study 2 (with 401 undergraduates), prototypicality- and personality-rating procedures were used to generate a personality profile for each type of moral exemplar and to examine the relations among them. In Study 3 (with 240 undergraduates), a similarity-sorting procedure was used to identify the typologies implicit in people's understanding of these different types of moral exemplarity. The findings indicate that moral excellence can be exemplified in rather divergent ways and that understanding of moral functioning would be enhanced by attention to this wider range of moral virtues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Panic and Comorbid Anxiety Symptoms in a National Anxiety Screening Sample: Implications for Clinical Interventions.

Questionnaire data from 2,033 participants in the National Anxiety Disorders Screening Day sample were used to assess the presence of panic and comorbid anxiety problems. These participants were selected from more than 15,000 attendees on the basis of never having received treatment for a psychiatric disorder and meeting screening criteria for panic disorder. With each comorbid anxiety problem (generalized anxiety disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, social phobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder), participants had a corresponding increase in interference in daily living as well as readiness to seek treatment. The addition of generalized anxiety or depression with panic symptoms resulted in marked increases in interference scores. Clinical treatment implications for panic disorder are discussed in terms of the effects of comorbid anxiety problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Qualitative Diagnosis of Condition Systems

A condition system is a collection of Petri nets that interact with each other and the external environment through condition signals. Some of these condition signals may be unobservable. In this paper, a system fault is defined in terms of observed behavior versus expected behavior, where the expected behavior is defined through condition system models. A diagnosis of this fault localizes the subsystem that is the source of the discrepancy between output and expected observations. We show that the structure of the interacting subsystems define a diagnostic causal model that captures the causal structure of subsystem dependencies. The diagnostic causal model can then be used to determine a set of subsystems that might be the source of a fault.     

Behavior of Pt Atoms on Oxide Supports During Reduction Treatments at Elevated Temperatures,Characterized by Aberration Corrected Stem Imaging

Abstract  

Aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy at the sub-?ngstr?m resolution allows imaging the structure of catalytic materials at the single atom level and permits fundamental studies of the behavior of heavy metal catalytic species as a result of elevated temperature gas-treatments. The present study is aimed at understanding the development of clusters and nanoparticles of Pt on γ-alumina during reduction treatments of a pre-oxidized highly dispersed catalyst. A special built ex situ reactor and a specimen holder allowing cyclic anaerobic transfer between the reactor and microscope were used for the study. The number of atoms in a nascent cluster can be determined along with the general shape of the cluster. Reduction experiments without air exposure of the sample showed that although clusters are formed at 500 °C, many Pt atoms are not associated with the cluster and are still dispersed on the catalyst support. After a 700 °C reduction, all of the Pt atoms are associated with the clusters. Movement of the clusters on the catalyst support is different depending upon the catalyst support.