Program Statements Research Articles

Stakeholders’ Awareness and Acceptability of PRMSU’s Revised Vision Statement and Mission and the Goals and Objectives of the Communication and Information Technology Programs

Vision, mission, goals, and objectives (VMGOs) function as the founda-tion of an educational institution. The Accrediting Agency for Chartered Colleges and Universities in the Philippines (AACCUP) underscored that an educational institution is assessed according to the degree how its VMGOs are achieved, but not in comparison with others. This descrip-tive cross-sectional survey research was used to gauge the level of awareness and acceptability of the stakeholders on the PRMSU vision statement and mission and the goals and objectives (VMGO) of the Communication and Information Technology Programs of PRMSU Sta Cruz Campus. The stakeholders are “very much aware” of the universi-ty’s new vision statement, mission, goals, and objectives of the teacher education program, they have full participation in the revision of the vision statement. The VMGO is clear, understandable, and acceptable as perceived by the stakeholders. Massive information dissemination of the new vision statement in all media types is recommended. Further-more, stakeholders must be encouraged to share their part in realizing the university’s VMGO.

Construction Method of a Digital-Twin Simulation System for SCARA Robots Based on Modular Communication.

Due to the high cost of robots, the algorithm testing cost for physical robots is high, and the construction of motion control programs is complex, with low operation fault tolerance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a low-cost, cross-platform SCARA robot digital-twin simulation system based on the concept of digital twins. This method establishes a 5D architecture based on the characteristics of different platforms, classifies data and integrates functions, and designs a data-processing layer for motion trajectory calculation and data storage for a virtual-reality robot. To address the complexity of data interaction under different cross-platform communication forms, an editable, modular, cross-platform communication system is constructed, and various control commands are encapsulated into simple programming statements for easy invocation. Experimental results showed that, based on modular communication control, users can accurately control data communication and synchronous motion between virtual and physical models using simple command statements, reducing the development cost of control algorithms. Meanwhile, the virtual-robot simulation system, as a data mapping of the real experimental platform, accurately simulated the physical robot's operating state and spatial environment. The robot algorithms tested using the virtual simulation system can be successfully applied to real robot platforms, accurately reproducing the operating results of the virtual system.

A Federal Inmate’s Right to Stay Home

Since the start of the COVID–19 pandemic, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (“BOP”) has, for the first time in history, placed tens of thousands of inmates onto home confinement. Likely due to the unprecedented nature and rapid release of inmates to contain the virus, the BOP failed to timely update their policies and procedures surrounding the disciplinary system of inmates on home confinement. This failure to update resulted in the BOP removing inmates from home confinement and placing them back in prison for minor violations. Furthermore, when the BOP chose to remove an inmate from home confinement, it did so without any proceeding, hearing, or even an explanation. The lack of due process occurred because the BOP continued to use its Inmate Discipline Program Statement—procedures for addressing infractions in prison—as a model for remanding inmates on home confinement back to prison. Instead, the BOP should be following the two-step due process procedures the Supreme Court has outlined for those inmates on parole—a program that is nearly indistinguishable from home confinement. Inmates on home confinement are entitled to the constitutional protections of this two-step process because they have a liberty interest in remaining on home confinement. To ensure the BOP protects the due process rights of inmates on home confinement, this Comment proposes a change in the BOP’s disciplinary system. This Comment first proposes that the BOP promulgate the Morrissey procedural due process rights for inmates on home confinement into the Code of Federal Regulations. This Comment secondly proposes that the BOP revises its Inmate Discipline Program Statement to reflect the prohibited acts and available sanctions that uniquely apply to inmates on home confinement. Collectively, this new regulatory scheme will afford inmates on home confinement the constitutional protections guaranteed to them by the Fifth Amendment, and it will provide clarity to courts when determining the constitutionality of remanding inmates to prison.

How About Bug-Triggering Paths? - Understanding and Characterizing Learning-Based Vulnerability Detectors

Machine learning and its promising branch deep learning have proven to be effective in a wide range of application domains. Recently, several efforts have shown success in applying deep learning techniques for automatic vulnerability discovery, as alternatives to traditional static bug detection. In principle, these learning-based approaches are built on top of classification models using supervised learning. Depending on the different granularities to detect vulnerabilities, these approaches rely on learning models which are typically trained with well-labeled source code to predict whether a program method, a program slice, or a particular code line contains a vulnerability or not. The effectiveness of these models is normally evaluated against conventional metrics including precision, recall and F1 score. In this paper, we show that despite yielding promising numbers, the above evaluation strategy can be insufficient and even misleading when evaluating the effectiveness of current learning-based approaches. This is because the underlying learning models only produce the classification results or report individual/isolated program statements, but are unable to pinpoint bug-triggering paths, which is an effective way for bug fixing and the main aim of static bug detection. Our key insight is that a program method or statement can only be stated as vulnerable in the context of a bug-triggering path. In this work, we systematically study the gap between recent learning-based approaches and conventional static bug detectors in terms of fine-grained metrics called BTP metrics using bug-triggering paths. We then characterize and compare the quality of the prediction results of existing learning-based detectors under different granularities. Finally, our comprehensive empirical study reveals several key issues and challenges in developing classification models to pinpoint bug-triggering paths and calls for more advanced learning-based bug detection techniques.

Visibility of Entry-Level Doctor of Physical Therapy Program's Mission, Vision, and Value Statement and Alignment with Professional Values

Introduction: This study aimed to assess the accessibility and alignment of core statements (mission, vision, and values) in entry-level Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) programs across the United States with the core beliefs of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). Methods: Two independent reviewers searched publicly available resources for the core statements of 271 Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education accredited DPT programs. The statements were cross-referenced against APTA Standards of Practice and Core Values. Descriptive statistical analysis assessed the public availability of program statements and their alignment with APTA core beliefs. Results: Among the programs, 95.6% had mission statements, 63.5% had assessable vision statements, and 58.7% had easily assessable value statements. The most common APTA core beliefs were Education, Excellence, Responsibility, and Evidence-Based Practice. Altruism, Advocacy, Duty, and Patient and Client Management were less prevalent. Discussion: The visibility and accessibility of core statements in DPT programs across the United States are low. Given their role in program accreditation, promoting transparency is crucial. Limited visibility hindered the concluding alignment of core statements and APTA core beliefs. Nonetheless, this information can motivate schools to enhance core statements for better alignment. Our study emphasizes the need for increased transparency of core statements in DPT programs, fostering informed decision making. Addressing these issues can facilitate better alignment with APTA principles in physical therapy education and practice.

A deep semantics-aware data augmentation method for fault localization

Context:Fault localization (FL) techniques are employed to identify the relationship between program statements and failures by analyzing runtime information. They rely on the statistics of input data to explore the underlying correlation rooted in it. Consequently, the quality of input data is of utmost importance for FL. However, in practice, passing tests significantly outnumber failing tests regarding a fault. This leads to a class imbalance challenge that can adversely affect the effectiveness of FL. Objective:To tackle the issue of imbalanced data in fault localization, we propose PRAM: a deeP semantic-awaRe dAta augmentation Method to improve the effectiveness of FL methods. Method:PRAM utilizes program dependencies to enhance the semantic context, thus showing how a failure is caused. Then, PRAM employs mixup method to synthesize new failing test samples by merging two real failing test cases with a random ratio to balance the input data. Finally, PRAM feeds the balanced data consisting of synthesized failing test cases and original test cases to FL techniques. To evaluate the effectiveness of PRAM, we conducted large-scale experiments on 330 versions of nine large-sized real programs for six state-of-the-art FL methods, two data optimization methods and two data augmentation methods. Results:Our experimental results show that PRAM outperforms in most cases for Top-K metrics and reduces the number of checked statements from 40.38% to 80.04% compared with the original FL methods. Furthermore, PRAM reduces the checked statements from 16.92% to 56.98% for data optimization methods and from 12.48% to 26.82% for data augmentation methods. Conclusion:The experimental results show that PRAM is not only more effective than the original FL methods but also more effective than two representative data optimization methods and two data augmentation methods, which indicates that PRAM is a universal effective data augmentation method for various FL methods.

Языческая манифестация XXI в. (2022 год: итоги и перспективы). Статья II.

Slavic paganism of the last third of 20th — first quarter of 21st century is a religious phenomenon with an established history and a specific set of methodical recommendations for “survival” in a hostile (less neutral) environment, replenishment of the ranks of neophytes, creation of a new community, private references: priests, soldiers, family, social, economic and other. Features of pagan manifestation, for the first time mentioned in the program statements of A.A. Dobrovolsky (Dobroslav), were supplemented and adapted in accordance with actual trends by ideologues of the “second” and “third” waves. The Young Pagan Collective “teaching manual” includes prescriptions concerning self-development, nature centrism, concepts of counteracting external threats, the attitude towards state power, author’s vision of solving problems of national and racial issues. The set of existing issues has made adjustments to the internal program of actions. The creation of specialized information resources “Red Tape” and “Xenophobia”, containing data on persecutions of representatives of the worldview under study should be considered as the climax response to the challenges of paganism. The proposed paper is based on the answers of leaders of the pagan microworld to the question: “What line of issues and challenges is now existing before the Slavic paganism of the post-millennium?”. According to the analysis of respondents' data, the most urgent problems of the ethno-oriented variant of the movement include the categories of endemic complications (external negative factor), resulting in emergence of phenomena of pagan self-isolation and nativist “inquisition”.

Construction Legislation – Current and Future in the Legal System of the Slovak Republic

Abstract The importance of addressing the effective functioning of competence execution in the construction sector primarily lies in its impact on the efficiency and quality of these competences. Currently, in Slovakia (SR), municipalities exercise the competences of spatial planning and building regulations within their transferred competence from the state. Through the government’s program statement for the years 2020–2024, the SR government committed to abolish municipal building authorities. With the new legislation that becomes effective on April 1, 2024, there will be a reverse transfer of construction competence from municipalities to state administration, to the newly created Office for Spatial Planning and Construction of the Slovak Republic and regional building authorities.The authors take a critical approach to the original construction legislation (de lege lata) as well as to the newly adopted laws on construction and spatial planning in terms of substantive and procedural provisions, noting the exclusion of the application of Administrative Code in spatial and building proceedings. Through our research on this issue, we suggest de lege ferenda two alternatives regarding the exercise of construction competences at the municipal and state levels and the preservation of dual jurisdiction in building proceedings according to the current administrative procedure.

Trace matrix optimization for fault localization

Fault localization (FL) techniques gather trace information as input data and analyze it to identify the relationship between program statements and failures. Therefore, the input trace matrix is essential for fault localization. However, the current trace matrix faces two main challenges. Firstly, the occurrences of coincidental correctness (CC), which refer to the execution of faulty statements that lead to correct program output, adversely impact the effectiveness of FL. Secondly, the significant disparity in the number of failing and passing test cases poses a data imbalance problem for fault localization. To overcome these issues, we propose TRAIN: a Two-stage tRace mAtrix optImizatioN method for fault localization. In the first stage of optimization, TRAIN leverages an improved cluster analysis to identify and exclude the CC tests to optimize the trace matrix. Subsequently, in the second stage, TRAIN utilizes data augmentation to enhance the failing test cases to further balance the trace matrix. The optimized trace matrix is then used as input data in the FL pipeline to locate the faulty statements. Through extensive experiments conducted on 330 faulty versions of nine large-sized programs (obtained from Defects4J, ManyBugs, and SIR) using six state-of-the-art FL methods, TRAIN demonstrates remarkable improvements in FL effectiveness.

73rd Session of the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme Statement by Gillian Triggs

73rd Session of the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme Statement by Gillian Triggs

Flexible Correct-by-Construction Programming

Correctness-by-Construction (CbC) is an incremental program construction process to construct functionally correct programs. The programs are constructed stepwise along with a specification that is inherently guaranteed to be satisfied. CbC is complex to use without specialized tool support, since it needs a set of predefined refinement rules of fixed granularity which are additional rules on top of the programming language. Each refinement rule introduces a specific programming statement and developers cannot depart from these rules to construct programs. CbC allows to develop software in a structured and incremental way to ensure correctness, but the limited flexibility is a disadvantage of CbC. In this work, we compare classic CbC with CbC-Block and TraitCbC. Both approaches CbC-Block and TraitCbC, are related to CbC, but they have new language constructs that enable a more flexible software construction approach. We provide for both approaches a programming guideline, which similar to CbC, leads to well-structured programs. CbC-Block extends CbC by adding a refinement rule to insert any block of statements. Therefore, we introduce CbC-Block as an extension of CbC. TraitCbC implements correctness-by-construction on the basis of traits with specified methods. We formally introduce TraitCbC and prove soundness of the construction strategy. All three development approaches are qualitatively compared regarding their programming constructs, tool support, and usability to assess which is best suited for certain tasks and developers.

Automated Debugging : Still a Dream ?

Software debugging is the process of finding and fixing incorrect statements in programs. The process of debugging takes a lot of time and is challenging. Therefore, the field of automated debugging, which is focused on automating the discovery and correction of a failure's underlying cause, has made huge progress in the past. By applying automated approaches to identify and correct any erroneous statements in a program, the cost of producing software may be significantly decreased while also improving the quality of the final product. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the application of automated debugging in the current market scenario. Techniques like Delta Debugging, Path-based Weakest Preconditions, Fault Localization, and Program Slicing have been demonstrated to be quite effective in dealing with the identification and resolution of inconsistencies. This paper also aims to examine the question, "Is Automated Debugging still a dream? ". Key Words: Automated Debugging, Delta Debugging, Program Slicing.

Explaining software fault predictions to spreadsheet users

A variety of automated software fault prediction techniques was proposed in recent years, in particular for the important class of spreadsheet programs. Software fault prediction techniques commonly create ranked lists of “suspicious” program statements for developers to inspect. Existing research, however, suggests that solely providing such ranked lists may not always be effective. In particular, it was found that developers often seek for explanations for the outcomes provided by a debugging tool and that such explanations may be key for developers to trust and rely on the tool. Research on how to explain the outcomes of fault prediction techniques, which are often based on complex machine learning models, is scarce, and little is known regarding how such explanations are perceived by developers. With this work, we aim to narrow this research gap and study the perception of different forms of explanations by spreadsheet users in the context of a machine learning based fault prediction tool. A between-subjects user study (N=120) revealed significant differences between the explored explanation styles. In particular, we found that well-designed natural language explanations can indeed help users better understand why certain spreadsheet cells were marked by the debugging tool and that such explanations can be effective to increase the users’ trust compared to a black box system.Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board.

Political Discussions on Social Responsibility with Regard to the Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal in the Czech Republic

The article presents the political discussion on the Danube-Oder-Elbe (DOE) international water corridor in the Czech Republic in the period 2010-2021. The issue has become highly politicised among Czech political bodies in the last decade. The article presents the development of political interests in the DOE issue in the Czech Republic regard to the concept of the social responsibility. Due to the fundamentally contradictory changes in the Czech government's policy towards DOE during the period under study, the authors focus on analysing expert documents (e.g., expert strategies, action plans for the Czech Republic, DOE studies, government programme statements) and political decisions in the Czech Republic on the given topic in the last decade. The authors present the results of the research by content analysis of relevant documents, which were examined by cluster analysis on the relationship "costs of solving negative financial externalities" and "DOE ownership". The methodology used is a combination of cluster analysis, PRISMA analysis and descriptive analysis. The research results show that the analysed documents show a high degree of mutual incoherence.

Event-aware precise dynamic slicing for automatic debugging of Android applications

Dynamic slicing aims to find the program statements that affect the values computed at some point of interest (i.e., a particular statement or variable) under a given program input. It is an enabling technique for many software engineering tasks (e.g., program understanding and debugging). Due to Android’s event-driven nature, dynamic slicing for Android is more challenging than that for traditional Java programs. Its asynchronous events drive the execution of an app through inter-component communications. These non-deterministic user events often yield a large search space when applying existing dynamic slicing techniques, which introduce redundant statements into the resulting slice. We present ESDroid, an Event-aware dynamic Slicing technique for AnDroid applications. The novelty of our approach lies in the combination of segment-based delta debugging and backward dynamic slicing to narrow the search space to produce precise slices for Android. Our experiment across 38 apps shows that ESDroid can help with slicing buggy code from exception program points. We compare the effectiveness of ESDroid with the state-of-the-art dynamic slicing tools (AndroidSlicer and Mandoline). ESDroid outperforms both tools by reporting up to 72% fewer spurious statements than AndroidSlicer, and 50% fewer than Mandoline in the resulting slice (the number of instructions to be examined).

О В.Ф. ЭРНЕ И Е.Н. ТРУБЕЦКОМ: НЕКОТОРЫЕ ЗАМЕЧАНИЯ

The article considers the creative relationship between two notable Russian thinkers of the early twentieth century – Vladimir Frantsevich Ern (1882–1917) and Evgeny Nikolaevich Trubetskoy (1863–1919). For Ern, once a student and then an associate professor at Moscow University, the philosophical ideas of E.N. Trubetskoy’s brother, Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy (1862–1905), turned out to be extremely important, Ern directly called him his teacher. As for the relations between the two representatives of the religious and philosophical group “Way”, E.N. Trubetskoy and V.F. Ern, despite the proximity of the ideological and theoretical platform, it is rather a history of confrontations. One example is E.N. Trubetskoy’s disagreement with the original version of the collective program statement of the Way group, in the creation of which Ern was directly involved. However, during their stay in Italy, both thinkers discover a similar understanding of modern Catholicism and V.S. Solovyov’s theocratic utopia. The article also deals with P.A. Florensky, M.K. Morozova, A.F. Losev.

Current Process of Optimisation of the Legal System of the Czech Republic, including the Implementation of the Present EU Strategy in the Fight against Terrorism and Radicalism

The programme statement of the new government of the Czech Republic (CR) from the beginning of 2022 about the current security situation in the country and the European Union (EU) foresees the implementation of a significant optimisation of legal regulations in dealing with crises and emergency events. In addition to the experience of the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, the worsening effects of weather, and the current negative indicators in the economy, the government decided to focus its legislative efforts on combating terrorism in line with the policy of both the EU and NATO. The paper provides an overview of relevant EU documents and discusses some specific problems encountered by the Member States, including the CR. In these regards, due attention is also paid to the consistent implementation of the EU Directives into national legislation. The paper also discusses some of the Department of Crisis Management activities as part of scientific research at the Police Academy of the CR in Prague (PACR), which is partially related to the optimisation of the legislative process in the security field.

THE FIRST EXPERIENCE OF RUSSIAN PARLIAMENTARISM IN THE ASSESSMENTS OF S.A. KOTLYAREVSKY

The article considers the views of the historian and jurist Sergey Andreevich Kotlyarevsky on the First State Duma of 1906 as the first legislative body of the people's representation, which marked the movement of the Russian Empire towards constitutional reforms. Through the prism of socio-political activity carried out by S.A. Kotlyarevsky, who was a deputy of the first Duma convocation and directly participated in the events preceding and accompanying its work, an important milestone in the history of the national state and law is highlighted. Being not only a scientist, but a practical ideologist as well, he developed the concept of the law-governed state, the provisions of which were reflected in the program statements of the Constitutional Democrats party, which became one of the active participants in the political processes of the period under review. It is noted that a progressive and obviously democratic nature of the scientist's views sound up-to-date in the principles of building the Russian state. One of them is the idea of universal suffrage and the party principle of building parliamentary representation. At this, it is pointed out that it is necessary to transform the state system in the key of reforming the political system, dialogue of forces and legal ways of resolving conflict issues. It is indicated that his views were developed on the basis of his personal experience of participation in the political events under consideration, in connection with which he gives a negative assessment to the work of the first Russian legislative body and erroneous positions of political parties. However, it was with the institution of parliamentarism, which had great potential for the peaceful transformation of the country, that the hopes and ideas of the scientist and socio-political figure about the embodiment of constitutionalism and the rule of law in Russia were connected.

Bolt-on, Compact, and Rapid Program Slicing for Notebooks

Computational notebooks are commonly used for iterative workflows, such as in exploratory data analysis. This process lends itself to the accumulation of old code and hidden state, making it hard for users to reason about the lineage of, e.g., plots depicting insights or trained machine learning models. One way to reason about code used to generate various notebook data artifacts is to compute aprogram slice, but traditional static approaches to slicing can be both inaccurate (failing to contain relevant code for artifacts) and conservative (containing unnecessary code for an artifacts). We present nbslicer, a dynamic slicer optimized for the notebook setting whose instrumentation for resolving dynamic data dependencies is bothbolt-on(and therefore portable) andswitchable(allowing it to be selectively disabled in order to reduce instrumentation overhead). We demonstrate Nbslicer's ability to construct small and accuratebackward slices(i.e., historical cell dependencies) andforward slices(i.e., cells affected by the "rerun" of an earlier cell), thereby improving reproducibility in notebooks and enabling faster reactive re-execution, respectively. Comparing nbslicer with a static slicer on 374 real notebook sessions, we found that nbslicer filters out far more superfluous program statements while maintaining slice correctness, giving slices that are, on average, 66% and 54% smaller for backward and forward slices, respectively.

Changes in Housing Discourse in Four Czech Municipalities. Will Young People Get Support?

In post-communist countries, the early years of housing policy after 1989 were characterised by the withdrawal of the state. Municipalities played an important role in the housing privatisation process in the Czech Republic. Thirty years later, a global boom in housing prices occurred in major urban centres. Young people are facing the problem of decreasing housing affordability. The analyses of the programme statements of electoral parties and coalition agreements in selected regional centres reveals the issue’s increasing saliency as well as a change in the overall discourse of housing. Moreover, local path dependencies and ways of bridging ideological differences in a coalition are explained. Electoral programmes tend to focus on young families rather than young people in general. In the crisis of housing affordability, those groups that have something to offer cities are preferred in party programme statements.