An Optimal Self-Stabilizing Firing Squad

Consider a fully connected network where up to $t$ processes may crash, and all processes start in an arbitrary memory state. The self-stabilizing firing squad problem consists of eventually guaranteeing simultaneous response to an external input. This is modeled by requiring that the non-crashed processes "fire" simultaneously if some correct process received an external "GO" input, and that they only fire as a response to some process receiving such an input. This paper presents FireAlg, the first self-stabilizing firing squad algorithm. The FireAlg algorithm is optimal in two respects: (a) Once the algorithm is in a safe state, it fires in response to a GO input as fast as any other algorithm does, and (b) Starting from an arbitrary state, it converges to a safe state as fast as any other algorithm does.Comment: Shorter version to appear in SSS0

Evaluating Programs That Address Ideological Issues: Ethical and Practical Considerations for Practitioners and Evaluators

There are important practical and ethical considerations for organizations in conducting their own, or commissioning external, evaluations and for both practitioners and evaluators, when assessing programs built on strongly held ideological or philosophical approaches. Assessing whether programs “work” has strong political, financial, and/or moral implications, particularly when expending public dollars, and may challenge objectivity about a particular program or approach. Using a case study of the evaluation of a school-based abstinence-until-marriage program, this article discusses the challenges, lessons learned, and ethical responsibilities regarding decisions about evaluation, specifically associated with ideologically driven programs. Organizations should consider various stakeholders and views associated with their program to help identify potential pitfalls in evaluation. Once identified, the program or agency needs to carefully consider its answers to two key questions: Do they want the answer and are they willing to modify the program? Having decided to evaluate, the choice of evaluator is critical to assuring that ethical principles are maintained and potential skepticism or criticism of findings can be addressed appropriately. The relationship between program and evaluator, including agreements about ownership and eventual publication and/or promotion of data, should be addressed at the outset. Programs and organizations should consider, at the outset, their ethical responsibility when findings are not expected or desired. Ultimately, agencies, organizations, and programs have an ethical responsibility to use their data to provide health promotion programs, whether ideologically founded or not, that appropriately and effectively address the problems they seek to solve

Sweetclover Production and Management

Sweetclover was introduced into the United States from southeastern Asia in the early 1700s. As late as 1910 it was legislated against as a weed in some states. We now know that sweetclover is valuable for hay, silage, pasture, seed, soil improvement, and as a source of nectar and pollen for honey bees

Feeding Kochia to South Dakota Livestock - Kochia Scopana —Fireweed, burning bush, summer cypress, Mexican fireweed, tumbleweed, and Dakota alfalfa

Kochia scoparia has been put up as hay for many years as an alternate feed for South Dakota livestock. Frequently, it is mixed with other hay or silage during winter feeding periods. The quality of kochia forage is extremely variable, however, and in certain situations kochia causes livestock poisoning. Many unknowns exist, so use caution when feeding this plant to livestock

Protection Against a Bovine Viral Diarrhea Virus (BVDV) Type 1 Challenge in Calves Vaccinated with a Bovine Herpesvirus-1 (BHV-1)-BVDV Recombinant

A recently developed recombinant bovine herpesvirus 1 (BHV-1) virus containing the envelope protein gp53 of bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) type 1, BHV-1 (v1V31), was assessed for its ability to protect against BVDV in calves. Four calves were vaccinated intranasally with the recombinant BHV-1-BVDV vaccine and did not exhibit any clinical signs following vaccination. The vaccine virus was recovered from all vaccinated calves on days 8 through 10 and the replication appeared to be restricted to nasal passages. Twenty-eight days after vaccination, the four vaccinated and four control calves were challenged with the type 1 BVDV, strain NY-1. All calves had slight temperature elevations but the clinical signs were more severe in the control calves. The platelet counts were significantly depressed in the control calves. Prior to challenge, neither group had BVDV serum neutralizing antibody. The vaccinated calves developed higher serum antibody levels 2 months following challenge, indicating a secondary immune response. Necropsy was performed six weeks following infection. No latent BHV-1 virus was detected from the trigeminal ganglion of any of the vaccinated calves. The recombinant BHV-1 virus vaccine containing a single BVDV protein provided partial protection against BVDV infection

Efficacy-aware Business Process Modeling

In business process design, business objective models can fulfill the role of formal requirement definitions. Matching process models against objective models would, for instance, enable sound comparison of implementation alternatives. For that purpose, objective models should be available independently of their concrete implementation in a business process. This issue is not addressed by common business process management concepts yet. Moreover, process models are currently not sufficiently expressive to determine business process efficacy in the sense of fulfilling a business objective. Therefore, this paper develops and integrates constructs required for efficacy-aware process modeling and apt to extend common modeling approaches. The concept is illustrated with a sample scenario. Overall, it serves as an enabler for progressive applications like automated process optimization

Florida Tech Robotic Mining Team

Florida Tech Robotic Mining team is a multidisciplinary group that aims to design and build a multirobot system to compete in the 2015 NASA Robotics Mining Competition

Retroactive causation and the temporal construction of news: contingency and necessity, content and form

This article affords particular attention to the relationship between memory, the narrativization of news and its linear construction, conceived as journalism’s ‘memory- work’. In elaborating upon this ‘work’, it is proposed that the Hegelian notion of retroactive causation (as used by Slavoj Žižek) can examine how analyses of news journalists ‘retroactively’ employ the past in the temporal construction of news. In fact, such retroactive (re)ordering directs attention to the ways in which journalists contingently select ‘a past’ to confer meaning on the present. With regard to current literature, it is noted that a retroactive analysis can highlight two important dialectics within the practice of news journalism: 1) the relation between contingency and necessity; and, 2) the relation between content and form. Indeed, it is argued that this theoretical account offers a novel approach to examining the significance of memory in news journalism as well as the inconsistencies which underscore journalism’s memory-work. It is in accordance with such inconsistency that broader reflections on time, temporality and our relations to the past can be made

‘Maintaining balance and harmony’: Javanese perceptions of health and cardiovascular disease

Community intervention programmes to reduce cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors within urban communities in developing countries are rare. One possible explanation is the difficulty of designing an intervention that corresponds to the local context and culture

The Interplay Between Post-Critical Beliefs and Anxiety: An Exploratory Study in a Polish Sample

The present research investigates the relationship between anxiety and the religiosity dimensions that Wulff (Psychology of religion: classic and contemporary views, Wiley, New York, 1991; Psychology of religion. Classic and contemporary views, Wiley, New York, 1997; Psychologia religii. Klasyczna i współczesna, Wydawnictwo Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, Warszawa, 1999) described as Exclusion vs. Inclusion of Transcendence and Literal vs. Symbolic. The researchers used the Post-Critical Belief scale (Hutsebaut in J Empir Theol 9(2):48–66, 1996; J Empir Theol 10(1):39–54, 1997) to measure Wulff’s religiosity dimensions and the IPAT scale (Krug et al. 1967) to measure anxiety. Results from an adult sample (N = 83) suggest that three dimensions show significant relations with anxiety. Orthodoxy correlated negatively with suspiciousness (L) and positively with guilt proneness (O) factor—in the whole sample. Among women, Historical Relativism negatively correlated with suspiciousness (L), lack of integration (Q3), general anxiety and covert anxiety. Among men, Historical Relativism positively correlated with tension (Q4) and emotional instability (C), general anxiety, covert anxiety and overt anxiety. External Critique was correlated with suspiciousness (L) by men