Northern Ireland: The Politics of Constraint

The article surveys the interrupted experience of devolution in Northern Ireland since 1999 and draws a number of comparisons between the first devolved Assembly and Executive and their successors elected in 2007. It underlines the significance of the changed political, electoral and paramilitary context in the period leading up to the 2007 Assembly election which, together with a number of procedural changes effected by the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, enabled the restoration of power-sharing devolution to occur. Against the background of its legislative and policy record and the wider altered state of Northern Ireland, it concludes that the contrived consociational model of governance can work, up to a point, but perhaps as much because of the politics of constraint than consociationalism's much vaunted promise to reflect and engender the politics of accommodation.

Handling Inconsistency In Distributed Software Requirements Specifications Based On Prioritized Merging

Developing a desirable framework for handling inconsistencies in software requirements specifications is a challenging problem. It has been widely recognized that the relative priority of requirements can help developers to make some necessary trade-off decisions for resolving con- flicts. However, for most distributed development such as viewpoints-based approaches, different stakeholders may assign different levels of priority to the same shared requirements statement from their own perspectives. The disagreement in the local levels of priority assigned to the same shared requirements statement often puts developers into a dilemma during the inconsistency handling process. The main contribution of this paper is to present a prioritized merging-based framework for handling inconsistency in distributed software requirements specifications. Given a set of distributed inconsistent requirements collections with the local prioritization, we first construct a requirements specification with a prioritization from an overall perspective. We provide two approaches to constructing a requirements specification with the global prioritization, including a merging-based construction and a priority vector-based construction. Following this, we derive proposals for handling inconsistencies from the globally prioritized requirements specification in terms of prioritized merging. Moreover, from the overall perspective, these proposals may be viewed as the most appropriate to modifying the given inconsistent requirements specification in the sense of the ordering relation over all the consistent subsets of the requirements specification. Finally, we consider applying negotiation-based techniques to viewpoints so as to identify an acceptable common proposal from these proposals.

Helical resonator filters with improved power handling capabilities for space applications

The power-handling capabilities of helical resonator filters for space applications are discussed. Emerging difficulties due to the multipaction effects are highlighted. A method is proposed to increase specified power handling without significantly sacrificing the size/quality factor. Experimental verification is attained by means of a fabricated prototype for which measured filter response and multipaction test results are obtained and presented.

Image segmentation based on multi-scan constraint satisfaction neural network

A novel image segmentation method based on a constraint satisfaction neural network (CSNN) is presented. The new method uses CSNN-based relaxation but with a modified scanning scheme of the image. The pixels are visited with more distant intervals and wider neighborhoods in the first level of the algorithm. The intervals between pixels and their neighborhoods are reduced in the following stages of the algorithm. This method contributes to the formation of more regular segments rapidly and consistently. A cluster validity index to determine the number of segments is also added to complete the proposed method into a fully automatic unsupervised segmentation scheme. The results are compared quantitatively by means of a novel segmentation evaluation criterion. The results are promising.

From inconsistency handling to non-canonical requirements management: A logical perspective

As a class of defects in software requirements specification, inconsistency has been widely studied in both requirements engineering and software engineering. It has been increasingly recognized that maintaining consistency alone often results in some other types of non-canonical requirements, including incompleteness of a requirements specification, vague requirements statements, and redundant requirements statements. It is therefore desirable for inconsistency handling to take into account the related non-canonical requirements in requirements engineering. To address this issue, we propose an intuitive generalization of logical techniques for handling inconsistency to those that are suitable for managing non-canonical requirements, which deals with incompleteness and redundancy, in addition to inconsistency. We first argue that measuring non-canonical requirements plays a crucial role in handling them effectively. We then present a measure-driven logic framework for managing non-canonical requirements. The framework consists of five main parts, identifying non-canonical requirements, measuring them, generating candidate proposals for handling them, choosing commonly acceptable proposals, and revising them according to the chosen proposals. This generalization can be considered as an attempt to handle non-canonical requirements along with logic-based inconsistency handling in requirements engineering.