MooseJEE: A Moose Extension to Enable the assessment of JEAs

Java Enterprise Applications (JEAs) are large systems that integrate multiple technologies and programming languages. With the purpose to support the analysis of JEAs we have developed MooseJEE an extension of the \emphMoose environment capable to model the typical elements of JEAs.

Hoisting C Structures Into Clay In Device Drivers

This project addresses the unreliability of operating system code, in particular in device drivers. Device driver software is the interface between the operating system and the device's hardware. Device drivers are written in low level code, making them difficult to understand. Almost all device drivers are written in the programming language C which allows for direct manipulation of memory. Due to the complexity of manual movement of data, most mistakes in operating systems occur in device driver code. The programming language Clay can be used to check device driver code at compile-time. Clay does most of its error checking statically to minimize the overhead of run-time checks in order to stay competitive with C's performance time. The Clay compiler can detect a lot more types of errors than the C compiler like buffer overflows, kernel stack overflows, NULL pointer uses, freed memory uses, and aliasing errors. Clay code that successfully compiles is guaranteed to run without failing on errors that Clay can detect. Even though C is unsafe, currently most device drivers are written in it. Not only are device drivers the part of the operating system most likely to fail, they also are the largest part of the operating system. As rewriting every existing device driver in Clay by hand would be impractical, this thesis is part of a project to automate translation of existing drivers from C to Clay. Although C and Clay both allow low level manipulation of data and fill the same niche for developing low level code, they have different syntax, type systems, and paradigms. This paper explores how C can be translated into Clay. It identifies what part of C device drivers cannot be translated into Clay and what information drivers in Clay will require that C cannot provide. It also explains how these translations will occur by explaining how each C structure is represented in the compiler and how these structures are changed to represent a Clay structure.

Restructuring Justice: Moving Towards Gender-Responsive Programming and Alternatives to Incarceration for Non-Violent Female Offenders

The United States¿ Federal and State laws differentiate between acceptable (or, legal) and unacceptable (illegal) behavior by prescribing restrictive punishment to citizens and/or groups that violate these established rules. These regulations are written to treat every person equally and to fairly serve justice; furthermore, the sanctions placed on offenders seek to reform illegal behavior through limitations on freedoms and rehabilitative programs. Despite the effort to treat all offenders fairly regardless of social identity categories (e.g., sex, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, ability, and gender and sexual orientation) and to humanely eliminate illegal behavior, the American penal system perpetuates de facto discrimination against a multitude of peoples. Furthermore, soaring recidivism rates caused by unsuccessful re-entry of incarcerated offenders puts economic stress on Federal and State budgets. For these reasons, offenders, policy-makers, and law-abiding citizens should all have a vested interest in reforming the prison system. This thesis focuses on the failure of the United States corrections system to adequately address the gender-specific needs of non-violent female offenders. Several factors contribute to the gender-specific discrimination that women experience in the criminal justice system: 1) Trends in female criminality that skew women¿s crime towards drug-related crimes, prostitution, and property offenses; 2) Mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes that are disproportionate to the crime committed; 3) So-called ¿gender-neutral¿ educational, vocational, substance abuse, and mental health programming that intends to equally rehabilitate men and women, but in fact favors men; and 4) The isolating nature of prison structures that inhibits smooth re-entry into society. I argue that a shift in the placement and treatment of non-violent female offenders is necessary for effective rehabilitation and for reducing recidivism rates. The first component of this shift is the design and implementation of gender- responsive treatment (GRT) rather than gender-neutral approaches in rehabilitative programming. The second shift is the utilization of alternatives to incarceration, which provide both more humane treatment of offenders and smoother reintegration to society. Drawing on recent scholarship, information from prison advocacy organizations, and research with men in an alternative program, I provide a critical analysis of current policies and alternative programs, and suggest several proposals for future gender- responsive programs in prisons and in place of incarceration. I argue that the expansion of gender-responsive programming and alternatives to incarceration respond to the marginalization of female offenders, address concerns about the financial sustainability of the United States criminal justice system, and tackle high recidivism rates.

On the Integration of Smalltalk and Java

After decades of development in programming languages and programming environments, Smalltalk is still one of few environments that provide advanced features and is still widely used in the industry. However, as Java became prevalent, the ability to call Java code from Smalltalk and vice versa becomes important. Traditional approaches to integrate the Java and Smalltalk languages are through low-level communication between separate Java and Smalltalk virtual machines. We are not aware of any attempt to execute and integrate the Java language directly in the Smalltalk environment. A direct integration allows for very tight and almost seamless integration of the languages and their objects within a single environment. Yet integration and language interoperability impose challenging issues related to method naming conventions, method overloading, exception handling and thread-locking mechanisms. In this paper we describe ways to overcome these challenges and to integrate Java into the Smalltalk environment. Using techniques described in this paper, the programmer can call Java code from Smalltalk using standard Smalltalk idioms while the semantics of each language remains preserved. We present STX:LIBJAVA - an implementation of Java virtual machine within Smalltalk/X - as a validation of our approach

Validation of the LittlEARS((R)) Auditory Questionnaire in children with normal hearing

OBJECTIVES: With more children receiving cochlear implants during infancy, there is a need for validated assessments of pre-verbal and early verbal auditory skills. The LittlEARS Auditory Questionnaire is presented here as the first module of the LittlEARS test battery. The LittlEARS Auditory Questionnaire was developed and piloted to assess the auditory behaviour of normal hearing children and hearing impaired children who receive a cochlear implant or hearing aid prior to 24 months of age. This paper presents results from two studies: one validating the LittlEARS Auditory Questionnaire on children with normal hearing who are German speaking and a second validating the norm curves found after adaptation and administration of the questionnaire to children with normal hearing in 15 different languages. METHODS: Scores from a group of 218 German and Austrian children with normal hearing between 5 days and 24 months of age were used to create a norm curve. The questionnaire was adapted from the German original into English and then 15 other languages to date. Regression curves were found based on parental responses from 3309 normal hearing infants and toddlers. Curves for each language were compared to the original German validation curve. RESULTS: The results of the first study were a norm curve which reflects the age-dependence of auditory behaviour, reliability and homogeneity as a measure of auditory behaviour, and calculations of expected and critical values as a function of age. Results of the second study show that the regression curves found for all the adapted languages are essentially equal to the German norm curve, as no statistically significant differences were found. CONCLUSIONS: The LittlEARS Auditory Questionnaire is a valid, language-independent tool for assessing the early auditory behaviour of infants and toddlers with normal hearing. The results of this study suggest that the LittlEARS Auditory Questionnaire could also be very useful for documenting children's progress with their current amplification, providing evidence of the need for implantation, or highlighting the need for follow-up in other developmental areas.

Perfect and Perfective in Hausa

In West African languages that have the relative TAM marking, i.e., a system of syntactically conditioned alternating TAM paradigms, it is generally considered that the paradigms in each alternating pair have necessarily the same meaning. This paper shows that in Hausa, the Completive, which appears in pragmatically neutral clauses, and the Relative Perfective, which appears in pragmatically marked clauses (such as relative clauses), have, respectively, a basic perfect and perfective semantics, and that in some marked cases the alternation is not possible. The paper also shows that the two paradigms have acquired derived uses in a way consistent with the results of typological studies in the domain of tense/aspect.

New approach to direct stenting using a novel "all-in-one" coronary stent system via 5 French diagnostic catheters: a pilot study

OBJECTIVES We sought to evaluate the strategy success and short term clinical outcomes of direct stenting via 5 French (F) diagnostic catheters using a novel bare metal stent with integrated delivery system (IDS) (Svelte Medical Systems, New Providence, NJ) and compare the results to a conventionally treated matched group. METHODS Fifteen consecutive patients with lesions deemed suitable for direct stenting using a bare metal stent were included. The primary endpoint was the strategy success defined as the ability to successfully treat a target lesion via a 5 F diagnostic catheter with a good angiographic result (TIMI III flow, residual stenosis ≤20%). Procedure and fluoroscopy times, contrast agent use, cost, and short-term clinical outcomes were compared to a matched group treated via conventional stenting. RESULTS The primary endpoint was reached in 14/15 patients (93%). There were no significant differences in procedural (58.6 min ± 12.7 vs. 57.4 min ± 14.2) or fluoroscopy times (10.0 min ± 4.3 vs.10.1 min ± 3.9) or contrast agent use (193.7 ml ± 54.8 vs. 181.4 ml ± 35.6). However, there were significant reductions in materials used in the study group compared to the control group equating to cost savings of almost US $600 per case (US $212.44 ± 258.09 vs. US $804.69 ± 468.11; P = 0.001). CONCLUSIONS Direct stenting using a novel bare metal stent with an IDS via 5 F diagnostic catheters is a viable alternative to conventional stenting in selected patients and is associated with significant cost savings.

Towards a Moldable Debugger

The debugger is an essential tool in any programming environment, as it helps developers understand the dynamic behaviour of software systems. However, traditional debuggers fail in answering domain-specific questions, as the semantics of what they show and do are fixed. In this paper we introduce our work towards a moldable debugger which, unlike traditional debuggers, both adapts itself and can be adapted to a particular debugging context. Thus, it allows developers to answer their questions by using concepts from their own application domains.

Parsing for agile modeling

In order to analyze software systems, it is necessary to model them. Static software models are commonly imported by parsing source code and related data. Unfortunately, building custom parsers for most programming languages is a non-trivial endeavour. This poses a major bottleneck for analyzing software systems programmed in languages for which importers do not already exist. Luckily, initial software models do not require detailed parsers, so it is possible to start analysis with a coarse-grained importer, which is then gradually refined. In this paper we propose an approach to "agile modeling" that exploits island grammars to extract initial coarse-grained models, parser combinators to enable gradual refinement of model importers, and various heuristics to recognize language structure, keywords and other language artifacts.

Reduplication in Mapuzungun: form and function

Mapuzungun has reduplicative structures based on elements other than verb stems that are of very limited productivity. With verb stems, however, several formal patterns can be distinguished, which consist of the repetition of the lexical verb stem plus the addition of an apparently grammaticalized version of one of three verb roots or a zero morpheme. The previous literature has attempted to identify form/function correlations for these more or less productive verbal reduplicative patterns, and the present paper contributes to the discussion by surveying older studies and exploring several cases that suggest that such form/function correspondences are substantially less straightforward than a casual observer might think.

Evaluative Morphology in Georgian

With examples drawn from over 200 world languages, this ground-breaking volume presents a state-of-the-art overview of evaluative morphology. Offering an innovative approach to major theoretical questions, the Edinburgh Handbook analyses the field from a cross-linguistic perspective, considering semantic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic aspects, as well as word-formation processes and evaluative morphology acquisition. Complementing the synchronic approach with a diachronic perspective, this study establishes a picture of intriguing diversity in evaluative morphology manifestations, and offers a comprehensive analysis of the situation in dozens of languages and language families. Divided into 2 distinct parts, the handbook begins with 13 chapters discussing evaluative morphology in relation to areas such as pragmatics, semantics, linguistic universals and sociolinguistics. The second part is comprised of descriptive chapters, broken into the following subsets: Eurasia, South- East Asia and Oceania, Australia-New Guinea, Africa, North America and South America.

Nominal compounds in Mapudungun

It is perhaps unsurprising that the rich agglutinative-polysynthetic verb morphology of Mapudungun has drawn most attention in linguistic studies. So far unnoticed in the literature are Mapudungun complex noun phrases, which show a puzzling distribution in terms of the internal structure they display. Some complex NPs are head-final (mapu-che ‘people of the land’). Others are head-initial, and of these a subset appears to be less lexicalized. In some cases, all three possibilities are found with the same components: mamüll-che ‘wood people’, che-mamüll ‘people made of wood’, and che mamüll ‘wood-like people’. The present paper reviews the comparatively modest literature on these phenomena, deals with them in an account based on semantic factors, and places them in a broader typological context.

Experiences with OpenMP in tmLQCD

An overview is given of the lessons learned from the introduction of multi-threading using OpenMP in tmLQCD. In particular, programming style, performance measurements, cache misses, scaling, thread distribution for hybrid codes, race conditions, the overlapping of communication and computation and the measurement and reduction of certain overheads are discussed. Performance measurements and sampling profiles are given for different implementations of the hopping matrix computational kernel.

Top-Down Parsing with Parsing Contexts

The domain of context-free languages has been extensively explored and there exist numerous techniques for parsing (all or a subset of) context-free languages. Unfortunately, some programming languages are not context-free. Using standard context-free parsing techniques to parse a context-sensitive programming language poses a considerable challenge. Im- plementors of programming language parsers have adopted various techniques, such as hand-written parsers, special lex- ers, or post-processing of an ambiguous parser output to deal with that challenge. In this paper we suggest a simple extension of a top-down parser with contextual information. Contrary to the tradi- tional approach that uses only the input stream as an input to a parsing function, we use a parsing context that provides ac- cess to a stream and possibly to other context-sensitive infor- mation. At a same time we keep the context-free formalism so a grammar definition stays simple without mind-blowing context-sensitive rules. We show that our approach can be used for various purposes such as indent-sensitive parsing, a high-precision island parsing or XML (with arbitrary el- ement names) parsing. We demonstrate our solution with PetitParser, a parsing-expression grammar based, top-down, parser combinator framework written in Smalltalk.

Pdsg1 and Pdsg2, novel proteins involved in developmental genome remodelling in Paramecium

The epigenetic influence of maternal cells on the development of their progeny has long been studied in various eukaryotes. Multicellular organisms usually provide their zygotes not only with nutrients but also with functional elements required for proper development, such as coding and non-coding RNAs. These maternally deposited RNAs exhibit a variety of functions, from regulating gene expression to assuring genome integrity. In ciliates, such as Paramecium these RNAs participate in the programming of large-scale genome reorganization during development, distinguishing germline-limited DNA, which is excised, from somatic-destined DNA. Only a handful of proteins playing roles in this process have been identified so far, including typical RNAi-derived factors such as Dicer-like and Piwi proteins. Here we report and characterize two novel proteins, Pdsg1 and Pdsg2 (Paramecium protein involved in Development of the Somatic Genome 1 and 2), involved in Paramecium genome reorganization. We show that these proteins are necessary for the excision of germline-limited DNA during development and the survival of sexual progeny. Knockdown of PDSG1 and PDSG2 genes affects the populations of small RNAs known to be involved in the programming of DNA elimination (scanRNAs and iesRNAs) and chromatin modification patterns during development. Our results suggest an association between RNA-mediated trans-generational epigenetic signal and chromatin modifications in the process of Paramecium genome reorganization.