Equivalent Programming Research Articles

Training of learning video making on the equivalency programme at SPNF SKB Boto, West Sumbawa Regency

The program aims to increase the insight and skills in the field of information and communication technology for tutors of the SPNF SKB Boto Equivalence Program, West Sumbawa Regency. This is expected to improve the quality of teaching and learning through the convenience of students in understanding the teaching material provided. The method of this training activity is carried out by the lecture method and independent practice in three stages, namely: delivery of basic material, training and practice demonstrations and evaluation. The result of this training video learning is increasing the understanding and insight of the participants in making learning videos and to be able to practice making simple learning videos so that they can support online learning in the SPNF SKB Boto environment, West Sumbawa Regency.

Mental health and criminal justice: bridging two worlds

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to describe programs that aim at programs to divert people with a mental condition from the criminal justice system to mental health services are being initiated, but reporting is limited and fragmented. This study described programs that aim at diverting persons with mental health conditions out of criminal justice systems to community mental health services, with the intention to inform research and practice.Design/methodology/approachA scoping review was used to map and synthesise diversion programs. Ten online data bases were searched. Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews was used to direct the selection of sources. Research and evaluation publications and grey literature published from 2010 to 2021 in English language were included.FindingsEight distinct diversion programs were identified across 24 countries or territories covering five phases of the criminal justice process. Diversion programs included crisis intervention teams, the electronic linkage system, mobile crisis units, the criminal justice liaison program, problem-solving courts, the abstinence-based program, the community equivalence program and the forensic assertive community treatment program. Although distinct programs have the potential to form a system of diversion across the continuum of the criminal justice process, only two territories moved in that direction. Diversion programs reported overwhelmingly originated from high-income countries.Practical implicationsStigma that labels people with mental health conditions as violent and dangerous need to be addressed. It is important to place diversion systems on national policy agendas and advocate for evidence-based interventions.Originality/valueThe study provides a blueprint on diversion systems to set a research agenda and develop a road map, tailored towards local contexts.

Award rate inequities in biomedical research

PurposeThe analysis of existing institutional research proposal databases can provide novel insights into science funding parity. The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between race/ethnicity and extramural research proposal and award rates across a medical school faculty and to determine whether there was evidence that researchers changed their submission strategies because of differential inequities across submission categories.MethodThe authors performed an analysis of 14,263 biomedical research proposals with proposed start dates between 2010–2022 from the University of Michigan Medical School, measuring the proposal submission and award rates for each racial/ethnic group across 4 possible submission categories (R01 & Equivalent programs, other federal, industry, and non-profit).ResultsResearchers from each self-identified racial/ethnic group (Asian, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino) pursued a different proposal submission strategy than the majority group (White). The authors found that Black/African American researchers experienced negative award rate differentials across all submission categories, which resulted in the lowest R01 & Equivalent and Other Federal submission rates of any racial/ethnic group and the highest submission rate to non-profit sources. The authors did not find support for the hypothesis that researchers changed submission strategies in response to award rate inequalities across submission categories.ConclusionsBiomedical researchers from different racial/ethnic groups follow markedly different proposal submission strategies within the University of Michigan Medical School. There is also a clear relationship between race/ethnicity and rates of proposal award. Black/African American and Asian researchers appear disadvantaged across all submission categories relative to White researchers. This study can be easily replicated by other academic research institutions, revealing opportunities for positive intervention.

Strong Equivalence of Logic Programs with Ordered Disjunction: A Logical Perspective

AbstractLogic Programs with Ordered Disjunction (LPODs) extend classical logic programs with the capability of expressing preferential disjunctions in the heads of program rules. The initial semantics of LPODs, although simple and quite intuitive, is not purely model-theoretic. As a result, certain properties of programs appear non-trivial to formalize in purely logical terms. For example, the current characterization of strong equivalence for LPODs, does not coincide with logical equivalence in some specific logic. This comes in sharp contrast with the well-known characterization of strong equivalence for classical logic programs, which coincides with logical equivalence in the logic of here-and-there. In this paper we obtain a purely logical characterization of strong equivalence for LPODs as logical equivalence in a four-valued logic. Moreover, we provide a new proof of the coNP-completeness of strong equivalence for LPODs, which has an interest in its own right since it relies on the special structure of such programs. Our results are based on the recent logical semantics of LPODs, a fact which we believe indicates that this new semantics may prove to be a useful tool in the further study of LPODs.

Education Behind Bars: Problems and Strategies for Teaching English to Protégés of Central Lombok Juvenile Detention Center

This research investigates the encountered problems and strategies for teaching English to an inclusive classroom contains of law-conflicted students. This research is based on an educational ethnography study conducted in Tojong-Ojong in Central Lombok District, Indonesia. This research highlights on the issues regarding the problems faced and strategies applied by the English teacher, challenging teachers’ capability to assist the troubled students on the subject, their utilization of teaching approach with limited learning resources while adjusting the needs’ of these students, and managing the impact of internal and external on students’ engagement and disengagement in the learning process. This penitentiary applies to equivalency program of A,B,C packages. However, this study focuses on protégés with C-Package equivalency, involving 12 students in total. There is only 1 certified English teacher assisted with a tutor without significant teaching qualification. Qualitative method was applied in this study by combining teacher interview, students’ questionnaire, observation with video and audio recording, and field notes. The results of the collected data shows several problems occurred during the teaching and learning process and what strategies used by teacher to overcome them. The problems and strategies were categorized into three parts. The problems were concerning (1) teacher-related, (2) student-related and (3) teaching related problems, while the strategies including (1) course materials, (2) teaching approach, and (3) teacher strategies.

Strong Equivalence of Logic Programs with Counting

AbstractIn answer set programming, two groups of rules are considered strongly equivalent if they have the same meaning in any context. In some cases, strong equivalence of programs in the input language of the grounder gringo can be established by deriving rules of each program from rules of the other. The possibility of such proofs has been demonstrated for a subset of that language that includes comparisons, arithmetic operations, and simple choice rules, but not aggregates. This method is extended here to a class of programs in which some uses of the #count aggregate are allowed.

Cameleer A deductive verification tool for OCaml

OCaml is particularly well-fitted for formal verification. On one hand, it is a multi-paradigm language with a well-defined semantics, allowing one to write clean, concise, type-safe, and efficient code. On the other hand, it is a language of choice for the implementation of sensible software, e.g., industrial compilers, proof assistants, and automated solvers. Yet, with the notable exception of some interactive tools, formal verification has been seldom applied to OCaml-written programs. In this paper, we present the ongoing project Cameleer, aiming for the development of a deductive verification tool for OCaml, with a clear focus on proof automation. We leverage on the recently proposed GOSPEL, Generic OCaml SPE cification Language, to attach rigorous, yet readable, behavioral specification to OCaml code. The formally-specified program is fed to our toolchain, which translates it into an equivalent program in WhyML, the programming and specification language of the Why3 verification framework. Finally, Why3 is used to compute verification conditions for the generated program, which can be discharged by off-the-shelf SMT solvers. We present successful applications of the Cameleer tool to prove functional correctness of several significant case studies, like FIFO queues (ephemeral and applicative implementations) and leftist heaps, issued from existing OCaml libraries.

Comparing the Reasoning Capabilities of Equilibrium Theories and Answer Set Programs

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well established logical approach in artificial intelligence that is widely used for knowledge representation and problem solving. Equilibrium logic extends answer set semantics to more general classes of programs and theories. When intertheory relations are studied in ASP, or in the more general form of equilibrium logic, they are usually understood in the form of comparisons of the answer sets or equilibrium models of theories or programs. This is the case for strong and uniform equivalence and their relativised and projective versions. However, there are many potential areas of application of ASP for which query answering is relevant and a comparison of programs in terms of what can be inferred from them may be important. We formulate and study some natural equivalence and entailment concepts for programs and theories that are couched in terms of inference and query answering. We show that, for the most part, these new intertheory relations coincide with their model-theoretic counterparts. We also extend some previous results on projective entailment for theories and for the new connective called fork.

Computing zeta functions of large polynomial systems over finite fields

We improve the algorithms of Lauder-Wan [11] and Harvey [8] to compute the zeta function of a system of m polynomial equations in n variables, over the q element finite field Fq, for large m. The dependence on m in the original algorithms was exponential in m. Our main result is a reduction of the dependence on m from exponential to polynomial. As an application, we speed up a doubly exponential algorithm from a recent software verification paper [3] (on universal equivalence of programs over finite fields) to singly exponential time. One key new ingredient is an effective, finite field version of the classical Kronecker theorem which (set-theoretically) reduces the number of defining equations for a polynomial system over Fq when q is suitably large.

Equivalent Mutants Detection Based on Weighted Software Behavior Graph

The equivalent mutants problem is one of the crucial problems in mutation testing. In consequence of its existence, the effectiveness of mutation testing is underestimated. In addition, it will produce a certain amount of useless overhead. Equivalent mutants cannot be detected by any test input. The existing works mostly focus on static analysis to detect, or avoid generating, the equivalent mutants. The essence of these methods is to use prior knowledge to establish some rules of program equivalence. However, (1) it needs a lot of professional labor to sort out the equivalence rules, and (2) only a small part of the rules can be determined in advance, because of the diversity of mutation operators and mutation targets. Consequently, the best result reported so far is 50% of the equivalent mutants can be detected. Since it is generally believed that manual judgment of program equivalence is the most reliable, this paper proposes a novel method to automatically detect equivalent mutants by tracing program behavior like the professionals. The weighted software behavior graph is utilized in the detection of equivalent mutants for the first time. This method can not only figure out different execution paths, but also be sensitive to execution frequency. By comparing the weighted software behavior graphs of an alive mutant and its original program, we are able to examine more precisely whether the alive mutant is the same as the original program, in terms of the state of infection and/or the propagation. Evaluation results on an open dataset of manually evaluated equivalent mutants show that our approach can detect 77.5% of all the equivalent mutants, which is much higher than the existing static methods.

Educación in Our Own Terms: Survivance Amongst Latinx Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers in K-12 Schools and Beyond

ABSTRACT The author examines how Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers (MSFW) engaged in survivance, active presence and resistance, in transition from K-12 schools to a High School Equivalency Program (HEP). Ethnographic methods were used to understand the educational experiences of Latinx students from MSFW backgrounds while pursuing a General Educational Development degree (GED) in a Midwest HEP program. Findings illustrate how K-12 schools produced inequities for MSFW students to pursue a GED as a form of survivance. This study reframes the deficit discourse surrounding MSFW’s departure from K-12 schools to one focused on agency and collective survivance.

Pengelolaan Metode Pembelajaran Mandiri bagi Warga Belajar Program Kesetaraan Kejar Paket C di PKBM Bintang Flobamora Kupang

This study aims to describe the planning, implementation and evaluation of the management of independent learning methods for learning residents of the Kejar Paket C equivalence program at PKBM Bintang Flobamora Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara. This study uses a descriptive method with a qualitative approach. Purposive sampling technique was used to determine the research subjects which consisted of 2 tutors and 4 study residents. Data was collected using observation techniques, interviews and documentation studies. Analysis of research data was carried out through data reduction, data presentation and drawing conclusions. In addition, this study also uses triangulation to ensure the validity of the data. The results showed that the learning community was not fully involved in the learning planning stage and the learning objectives were still focused on developing knowledge competencies. The implementation of the independent learning method is also still not fully successful because the learning community still has a wrong understanding of the true meaning of independent learning. The evaluation in the form of a post test that was carried out turned out to be only able to measure the development of cognitive aspects and had not touched other developmental aspects as well as the obstacles faced during the independent learning process in order to improve towards better development.

Is Supervised Pastoral Education (SPE) "Substantially Equivalent" to a Recognized Psychotherapy Program in Ontario?

After completing their Supervised Pastoral Education units provided by the Canadian Association for Spiritual Care, two soon-to-be-certified Spiritual Care Practitioners applied to the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario. Both were rejected because their Supervised Pastoral Education program was not deemed to be "substantially equivalent" to a recognized psychotherapy program. This came as a surprise since similarly qualified Canadian Association for Spiritual Care Practitioners in Ontario are also members of the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario through a process called "grandparenting." Using the 10 characteristics of a College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario recognized program, this paper examines Canadian Association for Spiritual Care's SPE program in detail, showing how closely it aligns with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario's description of an equivalent psychotherapy program. I conclude by suggesting the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario should embrace Supervised Pastoral Education as an equivalent program and grant memberships, not just to those grand parented in, but to future Canadian Association for Spiritual Care Practitioners.

A polynomial reduction of forks into logic programs

In this research note we present additional results for an earlier published paper [1]. There, we studied the problem of projective strong equivalence (PSE) of logic programs, that is, checking whether two logic programs (or propositional formulas) have the same behaviour (under the stable model semantics) regardless of a common context and ignoring the effect of local auxiliary atoms. PSE is related to another problem called strongly persistent forgetting that consists in keeping a program's behaviour after removing its auxiliary atoms, something that is known to be not always possible in Answer Set Programming. In [1], we introduced a new connective ‘|’ called fork and proved that, in this extended language, it is always possible to forget auxiliary atoms, but at the price of obtaining a result containing forks. We also proved that forks can be translated back to logic programs introducing new hidden auxiliary atoms, but this translation was exponential in the worst case. In this note we provide a new polynomial translation of arbitrary forks into regular programs that allows us to prove that brave and cautious reasoning with forks has the same complexity as that of ordinary (disjunctive) logic programs and paves the way for an efficient implementation of forks. To this aim, we rely on a pair of new PSE invariance properties.

Fairness and communication-based semantics for session-typed languages

Polarized SILL is a programming language that combines functional programming with session-typed message-passing concurrency. It features general recursion; code and channel transmission; and synchronous and asynchronous communication. To reason about Polarized SILL programs, we develop the first program equivalence framework based on observable communications.We give meaning to Polarized SILL programs using an observed communication semantics (OCS). Our OCS is the first to support general recursion and code transmission. We then develop a communication-based testing equivalences framework and show that one of the equivalences captured by our framework coincides with barbed congruence, the canonical notion of process equivalence.Polarized SILL's operational semantics is specified using a multiset rewriting system. We introduce fairness for multiset rewriting systems to ensure that our OCS is well-defined in the presence of non-terminating processes, and use fairness properties to simplify reasoning about processes.This work lays the foundation for observational reasoning for session-typed languages with general recursion.

Uncertainty Theory-Based Structural Reliability Analysis and Design Optimization under Epistemic Uncertainty

Reliability analysis and trade-offs between safety and cost with insufficient data represent an inevitable problem during the early stage of structural design. In this paper, efficient uncertainty theory-based reliability analysis and a design method are proposed under epistemic uncertainty. The factors influencing the structure are regarded as uncertain variables. Based on this, a new metric termed uncertain measure is employed to define an uncertainty reliability indicator (URI) for estimating the reliable degree of structure. Two solving methods, namely, the crisp equivalent analytical method and uncertain simulation (US) method, are introduced to calculate the URI and acquire reliability. Thereafter, a URI-based design optimization (URBDO) model is constructed with target reliability constraints. To solve the URBDO model and obtain optimal solutions, crisp equivalent programming and a genetic-algorithm combined US approach are developed. Four physical examples are solved to verify the adaptability and advantage of the established model and corresponding solving techniques.

Co-Optimization of Design and Fabrication Plans for Carpentry

Past work on optimizing fabrication plans given a carpentry design can provide Pareto-optimal plans trading off between material waste, fabrication time, precision, and other considerations. However, when developing fabrication plans, experts rarely restrict to a single design , instead considering families of design variations , sometimes adjusting designs to simplify fabrication. Jointly exploring the design and fabrication plan spaces for each design is intractable using current techniques. We present a new approach to jointly optimize design and fabrication plans for carpentered objects. To make this bi-level optimization tractable, we adapt recent work from program synthesis based on equality graphs (e-graphs), which encode sets of equivalent programs. Our insight is that subproblems within our bi-level problem share significant substructures. By representing both designs and fabrication plans in a new bag of parts (BOP) e-graph, we amortize the cost of optimizing design components shared among multiple candidates. Even using BOP e-graphs, the optimization space grows quickly in practice. Hence, we also show how a feedback-guided search strategy dubbed Iterative Contraction and Expansion on E-graphs (ICEE) can keep the size of the e-graph manageable and direct the search towards promising candidates. We illustrate the advantages of our pipeline through examples from the carpentry domain.

Equivalence of the schemes of programs based on the algebraic approach to setting the semantics of programming languages

Objectives . The paper deals with the equivalence of program schemes. According to A.A. Lyapunov and Yu.I. Yanov, the founders of this theory, a program scheme is understood as a program model wherein abstraction from contensive values of operators and expressions is performed. In this case, the program structure containing symbolic notation of operators and expressions remains unchanged while maintaining their execution sequence. The programming language model presented in the paper contains basic constructs of sequential languages and is the core of the existing sequential programming languages. The paper aimed at developing an effective algorithm for studying equivalence (nonequivalence) of program schemes of sequential programming languages. Methods . An algebraic approach to specifying semantics of programming languages was used for studying the equivalence of program schemes. Results . A process semantics being the new algebraic approach to specifying the formal semantics of sequential programming languages was proposed. The process semantics was specified by matching programs (program schemes) with a set of computation sequences. The computation sequence was understood as the execution sequence of actions (commands and tests) of the program. Two types of concatenation operations (test–command and command–command) and the merge operation, which properties are given by axiomatic systems, were defined in the introduced semantic domain. The finiteness of the semantic value representation in the form of systems of recursive equations was proved. The algorithm for proving the equivalence (nonequivalence) of systems of recursive equations characterizing semantic values for a pair of program schemes was proposed, which implies the equivalence (nonequivalence) of programs in the strong sense. Conclusions . The paper demonstrates the efficient use of the proposed algorithm for proving the equivalence of sequential program schemes excluding side effects when calculating expressions, i.e., sequential computation of the expression more than once does not change anything. The example of proving the equivalence of program schemes by two methods—the well-known de Bakker–Scott fixed-point induction method and the method proposed by the author—is given. Comparison of the above methods testifies not only to the new method′s effectiveness but also to its significant simplicity, proved in practice by students who performed corresponding tasks when studying the Semantics of Programming Languages at the Institute of Information and Computing Technologies at the National Research University Moscow Power Engineering Institute (Moscow, Russia).

Developing Effective Recruitment Strategies for African American Men to Earn Alternative High School Credentials

African American men have among the worst high school completion rates of any population in the United States. The consequences of dropping out of school are serious and include high levels of unemployment and incarceration. Attempts at recruiting these men to return to complete a high school credential have not been broadly successful, and the current study was designed to identify the best ideas and practices of recruiting African American men into high-school equivalency completion programs. Using a snowball-generated sample of eight adult education program directors, interviews were conducted to identify strategies and approaches for recruiting African American men. Ultimately, program directors comments resulted in three broad categories of successful recruitment: using personal relationships that connect with men where they are, strategically using social media and online resources that are directly targeted toward these men, and utilizing the relationships and support networks of African American church communities. Responding program directors also stressed the need to meet these men at the physical and psychological places where they are, recognizing that these points of contact can and will change as the men age and face different personal circumstances. The findings provide key information for high-school equivalency program directors as they construct purposeful recruitment plans that also include measures for assessing the effectiveness of their recruitment campaigns.

Robust International Portfolio Optimization with Worst-Case Mean-LPM

This paper proposes a robust international portfolio optimization model with the consideration of worst-case lower partial moment (LPM) and worst-case mean return. In our model, we assume that the distributions and the first- and second-order moments of distributions of returns of assets and exchange rates are all ambiguous. The proposed model can be reformulated into an equivalent semidefinite programming (SDP) problem, which is computationally tractable. For investigation of the performance of our model, we also give two benchmark models. The first benchmark model is a scenario-based model which uses historical observations of returns to approximate the future distributions. The second benchmark model only considers the ambiguity of distributions but does not consider the ambiguity of the first- and second-order moments of distributions. We conduct empirical experiments in a rolling forward way to evaluate the out-of-sample performances of our proposed model, the two benchmark models, and an equally weighted model using the return measures and various risk-adjusted return measures. The result shows that our model has the best performance. It verifies that investors can obtain benefits when employing the robust model and considering the ambiguity of the first- and second-order moments of distributions.