Incomplete Programs Research Articles

I paid into it with every paycheck I earned: How benefit type and beneficiary contributions shape attitudes about increasing or decreasing administrative burdens for social protections

AbstractAdministrative burdens are an important policy tool that has received growing scholarly attention. Burdens are consequential and serve as a contributor to incomplete program take‐up. However, our knowledge is limited on how program characteristics affect public attitudes toward burden‐increasing or decreasing policies. Based on our knowledge of public attitudes toward the welfare state, two such characteristics, whether benefits are “earned” and whether they come in the form of in‐kind services or cash payments, may also affect perceptions of administrative burdens. Using a nationally representative survey (N = 2904), we tested support for two administrative burdens (in‐person interviews and requirements for government‐issued documents) and two administrative easings (presumptive eligibility and express lane eligibility) for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in the United States. In general, we found no strong and consistent differences along both dimensions. However, Republicans, Conservatives, and those high in racial resentment consistently favored increasing burdens and opposed decreasing burdens with the opposite effect for Democrats, Liberals, and those low in racial resentment. Americans supported administrative burdens in the form of documentation requirements across all programs. However, they were open to burden decreases.

ASTSDL: predicting the functionality of incomplete programming code via an AST-sequence-based deep learning model

ASTSDL: predicting the functionality of incomplete programming code via an AST-sequence-based deep learning model

Tuition Costs of Master's of Health Professions Education Programs: A Cross-Sectional Analysis.

The increasing professionalization of medical education during the past 2 decades has ushered in an era in which formal degrees, particularly master's of health professions education (MHPE), have become important for career advancement in medical education. Although tuition costs can pose a substantial barrier for many seeking advanced degrees in health professions education, data on tuition associated with these programs are lacking. This study examines the accessibility of pertinent cost-related information available to prospective students and the variability of costs among programs worldwide. The authors conducted an internet-based, cross-sectional study, augmented with emails and direct contact with educators, to extract tuition-related data for MHPE programs between March 29, 2022, and September 20, 2022. Costs were converted to an annual total within each jurisdiction's currency and converted to US dollars on August 18, 2022. Of the 121 programs included in the final cost analysis, only 56 had publicly available cost information. Excluding programs free to local students, the mean (SD) total tuition cost was $19,169 ($16,649), and the median (interquartile range) cost was $13,784 ($9,401-22,650) (n = 109). North America had the highest mean (SD) tuition for local students ($26,751 [$22,538]), followed by Australia and New Zealand ($19,778 [$10,514]) and Europe ($14,872 [$7,731]), whereas Africa had the lowest ($2,598 [$1,650]). The region with the highest mean (SD) tuition for international students was North America ($38,217 [$19,500]), followed by Australia and New Zealand ($36,891 [$10,397]) and Europe ($22,677 [$10,010]), whereas Africa had the lowest ($3,237 [$1,189]). There is substantial variability in the geographic distribution of MHPE programs and marked differences in tuition. Incomplete program websites and limited responsiveness from many programs contributed to a lack of transparency regarding potential financial implications. Greater efforts are necessary to ensure equitable access to health professions education.

Cash transfers after electoral violence: A case study of citizen‐state relations in Nakuru, Kenya

AbstractThis paper examines the impacts of three cash transfer programs, one for orphans and vulnerable children (CT‐OVC), one for older persons (OPCT) and a universal social pension (Inua Jamii Senior Citizens' Scheme), for citizen‐state relations in areas of Kenya that experienced high levels of electoral violence in 2007. Drawing on 40 interviews with civil servants and community leaders and 16 focus group discussions with both beneficiaries and non‐beneficiaries of the cash transfer programs conducted across two sub‐counties in Nakuru, this paper argues that the central state, in the wake of post‐electoral violence, effectively mobilised state power to make and enforce geographic targeting decisions down to the village level in an effort to mitigate ethnic tensions and strengthen citizen‐state relations. The paper further argues that the success of such localised distribution in strengthening citizen‐state relations has been limited due to incomplete program coverage, limited information about targeting procedures, and citizens' prior experiences with the state which collectively undermine citizens' perceptions of inclusion and exclusion at the local level. These findings are brought into conversation with other research on cash transfers and citizenship across Kenya to parse out the ways in which the impacts of cash transfer programs for citizen‐state relations are mediated by state infrastructural power, citizens' prior experiences with the state, and key aspects of program design. The paper also examines the implications of these findings for other countries across Africa that have experienced generalised electoral violence.

Incomplete program take-up during a crisis: evidence from the COVID-19 shock in one U.S. state

In the U.S., means-tested cash, in-kind assistance, and social insurance are part of a patchwork safety net, often run with substantial involvement of state and local governments. Take-up–participation among eligible persons in this system is incomplete. A large literature points to both neo-classical and behavioral science explanations for low take-up. In this paper, we explore the response of the safety net to COVID-19 using newly-collected survey data from one U.S. state–Utah. The rich Utah data ask about income and demographics as well as use of three social safety net programs which collectively provided a large share of relief spending: the Unemployment Insurance program, a social insurance program providing workers who lose their jobs with payments; the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides benefit cards for purchasing unprepared food at retailers; and Economic Impact Payments, which provided relatively universal relief payments to individuals. The data do not suffice to determine eligibility for all of the programs, so we focus on participation per capita. These data also collect information on several measures of hardship and why individuals did not receive any of the 3 programs. We test for explanations that differentiate need, lack of information, transaction costs/administrative burden, stigma, and lack of eligibility. We use measures of hardship to assess targeting. We find that lack of knowledge as well as difficulty applying, and stigma in the UI program each play a role as reasons for not participating in the programs.

L2S: A Framework for Synthesizing the Most Probable Program under a Specification

In many scenarios, we need to find the most likely program that meets a specification under a local context, where the local context can be an incomplete program, a partial specification, natural language description, and so on. We call such a problem program estimation . In this article, we propose a framework, LingLong Synthesis Framework (L2S) , to address this problem. Compared with existing work, our work is novel in the following aspects. (1) We propose a theory of expansion rules to describe how to decompose a program into choices. (2) We propose an approach based on abstract interpretation to efficiently prune off the program sub-space that does not satisfy the specification. (3) We prove that the probability of a program is the product of the probabilities of choosing expansion rules, regardless of the choosing order. (4) We reduce the program estimation problem to a pathfinding problem, enabling existing pathfinding algorithms to solve this problem. L2S has been applied to program generation and program repair. In this article, we report our instantiation of this framework for synthesizing conditional expressions (L2S-Cond) and repairing conditional statements (L2S-Hanabi). The experiments on L2S-Cond show that each option enabled by L2S, including the expansion rules, the pruning technique, and the use of different pathfinding algorithms, plays a major role in the performance of the approach. The default configuration of L2S-Cond correctly predicts nearly 60% of the conditional expressions in the top 5 candidates. Moreover, we evaluate L2S-Hanabi on 272 bugs from two real-world Java defects benchmarks, namely Defects4J and Bugs.jar. L2S-Hanabi correctly fixes 32 bugs with a high precision of 84%. In terms of repairing conditional statement bugs, L2S-Hanabi significantly outperforms all existing approaches in both precision and recall.

A relational shape abstract domain

Static analyses aim at inferring semantic properties of programs. We distinguish two important classes of static analyses: state analyses and relational analyses. While state analyses aim at computing an over-approximation of reachable states of programs, relational analyses aim at computing functional properties over the input–output states of programs. Several advantages of relational analyses are their ability to analyze incomplete programs, such as libraries or classes, but also to make the analysis modular, using input–output relations as composable summaries for procedures. In the case of numerical programs, several analyses have been proposed that utilize relational numerical abstract domains to describe relations. On the other hand, designing abstractions for relations over input–output memory states and taking shapes into account is challenging. In this paper, we propose a set of novel logical connectives to describe such relations, which are inspired by separation logic. This logic can express that certain memory areas are unchanged, freshly allocated, or freed, or that only part of the memory was modified. Using these connectives, we build an abstract domain and design a static analysis that over-approximates relations over memory states containing inductive structures. We implement this analysis and report on the analysis of basic libraries of programs manipulating lists and trees.

Code completion for programming education based on deep learning

In solving programming problems, it is difficult for beginners to create a program from scratch. One way to navigate this difficulty is to suggest the next word following an incomplete program. In the present study, we propose a method for code completion characterised by two principal elements: the prediction of the next within-vocabulary word and the prediction of the next referenceable identifier. For the prediction of within-vocabulary words, a neural language model based on an LSTM network with an attention mechanism is proposed. Additionally, for the prediction of referenceable identifiers, a model based on a pointer network to a given incomplete program is proposed. For evaluation of the proposed method, source code accumulated in an online judge system is used. The results of the experiment demonstrate that in both statically and dynamically typed languages, the proposed method can predict the next word to a high degree of accuracy.

Mechanisms and impacts of an incentive-based conservation program with evidence from a randomized control trial.

Conservation science needs more high-quality impact evaluations, especially ones that explore mechanisms of success or failure. Randomized control trials (RCTs) provide particularly robust evidence of the effectiveness of interventions (although they have been criticized as reductionist and unable to provide insights into mechanisms), but there have been few such experiments investigating conservation at the landscape scale. We explored the impact of Watershared, an incentive-based conservation program in the Bolivian Andes, with one of the few RCTs of landscape-scale conservation in existence. There is strong interest in such incentive-based conservation approaches as some argue they can avoid negative social impacts sometimes associated with protected areas. We focused on social and environmental outcomes based on responses from a household survey in 129 communities randomly allocated to control or treatment (conducted both at the baseline in 2010 and repeated in 2015-2016). We controlled for incomplete program uptake by combining standard RCT analysis with matching methods and investigated mechanisms by exploring intermediate and ultimate outcomes according to the underlying theory of change. Previous analyses, focused on single biophysical outcomes, showed that over its first 5 years Watershared did not slow deforestation or improve water quality at the landscape scale. We found that Watershared influenced some outcomes measured using the survey, but the effects were complex, and some were unexpected. We thus demonstrated how RCTs can provide insights into the pathways of impact, as well as whether an intervention has impact. This paper, one of the first registered reports in conservation science, demonstrates how preregistration can help make complex research designs more transparent, avoid cherry picking, and reduce publication bias.

Abstract extensionality: on the properties of incomplete abstract interpretations

In this paper we generalise the notion of extensional (functional) equivalence of programs to abstract equivalences induced by abstract interpretations . The standard notion of extensional equivalence is recovered as the special case, induced by the concrete interpretation. Some properties of the extensional equivalence, such as the one spelled out in Rice’s theorem, lift to the abstract equivalences in suitably generalised forms. On the other hand, the generalised framework gives rise to interesting and important new properties, and allows refined, non-extensional analyses. In particular, since programs turn out to be extensionally equivalent if and only if they are equivalent just for the concrete interpretation, it follows that any non-trivial abstract interpretation uncovers some intensional aspect of programs. This striking result is also effective, in the sense that it allows constructing, for any non-trivial abstraction, a pair of programs that are extensionally equivalent, but have different abstract semantics. The construction is based on the fact that abstract interpretations are always sound, but that they can be made incomplete through suitable code transformations. To construct these transformations, we introduce a novel technique for building incompleteness cliques of extensionally equivalent yet abstractly distinguishable programs: They are built together with abstract interpretations that produce false alarms. While programs are forced into incompleteness cliques using both control-flow and data-flow transformations, the main result follows from limitations of data-flow transformations with respect to control-flow ones. A further consequence is that the class of incomplete programs for a non-trivial abstraction is Turing complete. The obtained results also shed a new light on the relation between the techniques of code obfuscation and the precision in program analysis.

Estudo sobre aquisição de alimentos da agricultura familiar para o programa nacional de alimentação escolar

O presente artigo teve como objetivo verificar como os municípios paraibanos estão aplicando os recursos repassados pelo Fundo Nacional da Educação (FNDE) para o Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar (PNAE). Segundo a Lei nº 11.947/2009, atualmente em vigor, no mínimo 30% das aquisições pelas Administrações Públicas de gêneros alimentícios para atender o PNAE devem ser oriundos da agricultura familiar ou do empreendedor familiar rural. Assim, selecionou-se no estado da Paraíba uma amostra de 17 municípios entre os anos de 2011 a 2015. Os resultados apontaram que a maioria dos municípios efetua as compras de agricultores familiares para atendimento do programa de forma desorganizada e com pouca gerência, onde se constatou anos onde há o cumprimento da lei, ou seja, destinação de no mínimo 30% dos recursos do PNAE vindos do agricultor familiar, intercalados por anos sem aquisições da agricultura.

Infection control practices in Jimma, Ethiopia

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are frequent adverse outcomes of medical care. The HAI burden in low- and middle-income countries is much higher and associated with more severe outcomes. The Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) model provides a framework that can be used to identify barriers and facilitators of infection control practices and evaluate interactions between structures, processes, and outcomes. 
 A qualitative study was done to evaluate the implementation of effective infection control practices at Jimma University Hospital in Jimma, Ethiopia. Twenty-two semi-structured interviews of hospital employees, selected by convenience sampling, were conducted to assess the five components of SEIPS framework: person, physical environment, tasks, organization and tools. The interviews were transcribed, coded for themes, and analyzed using the software Dedoose (Version 8.0.42 SocioCultural Research Consultants, Los Angeles, CA).
 Staff overwhelmingly reported a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) as a barrier to adequate infection prevention and control (IPC) practices but cited poor supply chain management versus financial resources as the cause. Most interviewees also noted unreliable water availability as an impediment for hand hygiene. Prominent facilitators of effective IPC included a manageable workload, sufficient budget, and positive individual attitude towards improving IPC. The major barriers were identified as an inconsistent and incomplete training program for employees, a lack of IPC policies, and a nurse rotation program that increases unit staff turnover. 
 Interventions designed to address the identified barriers include developing IPC policies and protocols, regularly scheduled IPC training, and establishing an HAI surveillance program to better identify IPC trends and track progress. Innovative interventions are needed to improve IPC practices, such as faculty training on supply chain management and utilization of simple local resources to increase hand washing practices.

Анализ корректности работы с памятью с использованием расширения теории символьных графов памяти предикатами над символьными значениями

Safety-critical systems require additional effort to comply with specifications. One of the required specification is correct memory usage. The article describes an efficient method for static verification against memory safety errors as a combination of Symbolic Memory Graphs and predicate abstraction on symbolic values used in graph. In this article, we introduce an extension of Symbolic Memory Graphs. In addition to symbolic values, the graph stores predicates over symbolic values, which allow to track the relationship between symbolic values in the graph. We also expand existing vertex types to support arbitrary abstract regions, which allow us to represent such dynamic data structures as lists and trees. One of the types of abstract regions is also the ODM region, which presents a special kind of on-demand memory that occurs when analyzing incomplete programs. For this memory, the size and structure of the contents are not known in advance, but it is believed that such memory can be operated safely. The method is implemented in CPAchecker tool. Practical usage is demonstrated on Linux kernel modules. The practical contribution of our work is to reduce false error messages by constructing more accurate abstractions using predicates over symbolic values.

Factors associated with adherence to school meals by adolescents in State public schools in Colombo, Paraná State, Brazil

This study aimed to estimate the prevalence of adherence to school meals and associated factors among adolescent schoolchildren (N = 1,569). The adolescents completed an on-line questionnaire on adherence to school meals, and their parents answered another questionnaire on socioeconomic data. The chi-square test was used to assess the association between adherence to school meals and gender, nutritional status, per capita family income, maternal schooling, adolescents' opinions on the dining hall layout, whether they considered school meals healthy, and consumption of other foods. Variables with statistical significance for adherence to school meals were included in the multilevel proportional odds logistic regression model. The covariates for comprising the final model were defined by backward selection methods. The results of the adjusted model were presented as odds ratios with respective 95% confidence intervals (95%CI). Prevalence of adherence to school meals was low, especially effective adherence (19.8%). Adherence was associated with per capita family income less than one minimum wage, lower consumption of foods outside of school meals, the fact that adolescents considered the dining hall space adequate, and believing that school meals are healthy. Adherence to school meals in this study falls short of universal coverage for the program. Different factors contribute to incomplete program implementation, which may hinder achieving the food and nutritional security policy under the Brazilian National School Feeding Program (PNAE).

Difference of Vertical Transmission in HIV-Infected Women with Complete and Incomplete PMTCT

Objective: To analyze any differences on vertical transmission in
 groups with complete and incomplete program as well as the factors
 influencing completion.
 
 Method: This was a retrospective cohort study performed by data
 collection from medical records and/or interviews from January
 2010 to February 2012. The variables analyzed subject characteristics,
 applied PMTCT program and risk factors affecting transmission.
 
 Result: Seventy-five pregnant women who were HIV-positive were
 initially recruited, but 21 subjects were excluded due to incomplete
 medical records. In the first group (n=27) who received complete
 PMTCT, no vertical transmission was identified, while in the second
 group (n=27) with incomplete PMTCT, seven children were found to
 be HIV-positive. Rupture of membrane for more than 4 hours was
 the only significant risk factor for vertical transmission (p=0.001,
 RR=64.5, 95% CI=6.14-677.6).
 
 Conclusion: There was a significant difference in the occurrence of
 vertical transmission between complete and incomplete PMTCT
 program. Complete PMTCT program may provide protective effect
 against the occurrence of vertical transmission by 25.9%.
 
 Keywords: HIV, PMTCT, vertical transmission

Ask-Elle: an Adaptable Programming Tutor for Haskell Giving Automated Feedback

Ask-Elle is a tutor for learning the higher-order, strongly-typed functional programming language Haskell. It supports the stepwise development of Haskell programs by verifying the correctness of incomplete programs, and by providing hints. Programming exercises are added to Ask-Elle by providing a task description for the exercise, one or more model solutions, and properties that a solution should satisfy. The properties and model solutions can be annotated with feedback messages, and the amount of flexibility that is allowed in student solutions can be adjusted. The main contribution of our work is the design of a tutor that combines (1) the incremental development of different solutions in various forms to a programming exercise with (2) automated feedback and (3) teacher-specified programming exercises, solutions, and properties. The main functionality is obtained by means of strategy-based model tracing and property-based testing. We have tested the feasibility of our approach in several experiments, in which we analyse both intermediate and final student solutions to programming exercises, amongst others.

A snake addressing scheme for phase change memory testing

Phase change memory (PCM) is one of the most promising candidates for next generation nonvolatile memory. However, PCM suffers from a variety of faults due to its special device structure and operation mechanism. A snake addressing scheme is introduced into the test algorithms of PCM to reduce the test time and excite proximity disturb faults more effectively. The March test algorithm with the proposed snake addressing scheme is less complex than most traditional test algorithms. In addition to conventional faults, it is capable of covering disturb and parasitic faults. Moreover, when incorporated with the sneak path testing method, it is able to test the read fault, read recovery fault, incomplete program fault 0, and false write fault.

Queer Provisionality: Mapping the Generative Failures of the Transborder Immigrant Tool

Alison Reed investigates the border- and boundary-crossing performance of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0’sTransBorder Immigrant Tool (TBT), an incomplete cell phone program that offers GPS, guidance, and poetry to those attempting to cross into the United States across the Mexico/US border. Reed suggests a provocation-based performance of “queer provisionality,” revealing the aesthetics of oppressive power structures by juxtaposing them to social utopias. Interrogating the national neoliberal project of both US liberalism and US conservatism, Reed’s essay is also a transcription of the performances launched around TBT, the social and political machinery set into motion by Electronic Disturbance Theater’s failed utopian project.

Hubris: the recurring pandemic.

The 2014 Ebola outbreak has been seen by many as a "perfect storm" and an "unprecedented" public health calamity. This article attempts to place this most current of epidemics, one currently struggling for pandemic status, in an historical frame. At least since the 1600 s protocols and programs for the containment of epidemic disease have been known, and mapped. And yet it was almost six months after warnings about this epidemic were first sounded that incomplete programs of control and surveillance were instituted. In effect, we have forgotten the basics of what was once common knowledge in public health. Having placed our faith in bacteriology, virology, and pharmacology, we have forgotten the lessons learned, long ago.

KOMPARACE NÁRODNÍCH ROZVOJOVÝCH PLÁNŮ ČESKÉ REPUBLIKY

National Development Plan of the Czech Republic is the basic strategic document related with drawing on financial support from the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund of the European Union for the given programming period. In case of the Czech Republic, two such documents have been drafted: one for the incomplete programming period of 2004-2006 and the other for full programming period of 2007-2013.This paper deals with the comparison of individual parts of both National Development Plans. The paper follows the binding structure of National Development Plans and describes, in logical order, current development of the Czech Republic, SWOT analysis, selected goals and strategies, focus of priority axes and operational programmes (omitting areas that deal with the management and monitoring of financial help and financial frameworks).The paper focus on individual development tendencies that can be discovered in these strategic documents and creates a specific view that shows the existing development of the National Development Plans and exposes certain factors that may be used in the development of the next National Development Plan.