Termination Of Programs Research Articles

The Realities of Strategic Planning: Program Termination at East Central University

It is not difficult to find advice for colleges and universities about management and restructuring during periods of financial stress. Texts and chapters on strategic planning (Keller, 1983; Rowley, Lujan, & Dolen, 1997; Schuster, Smith, Corak, & Yamada, 1994) and restructuring in lieu of retrenchment (Karr & Kelley, 1996; Leslie & Fretwell, 1996; MacTaggart, 1996; Myers, 1996) provide recipes for proactively managing a university through hard times. These texts and chapters guide managers interested in such topics as environmental scanning, resource reallocation, dealing with faculty, and the role of campus culture. Primarily, however, these sources provide “macro” case studies: they aggregate examples of restructuring at colleges and uni-

Termination and normalisation under strategy Proofs in ELAN

In this paper, we review several methods for proving termination of rewrite programs or answer questions about normal forms. We concentrate on the methods that have been designed in ELAN and which are useful for studying termination and normal forms of ELAN programs. We address several problems: general termination of a rewrite program, innermost termination on sets of ground terms, computation or approximation of the set of normal forms, modular termination of the union of rewrite systems, estimation of the number of normal forms for a non-deterministic rewrite program with strategies. For each point we briefly present one method, explain its scope and give references to other methods concerning the same problem, before describing the implementation in ELAN. We conclude with some open questions.

Therapeutic value of exercise training in Parkinson's disease.

The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of an intensive exercise training on motor disability, mood, and subjective well-being in parkinsonian patients. The study was designed as an open long-term pilot trial over 20 wk. Sixteen slightly to moderately affected idiopathic parkinsonian patients (PD) were included. An intensive standardized exercise training was performed twice weekly over 14 wk in all patients. Evaluations were performed before the start of the study (exam. 1), after 7 wk (exam 2), 14 wk (exam 3), and 20 wk (exam 4/long-term effect). The test battery included: 1) basic motor test (BMT) [test for muscle strength, flexibility, and coordination]; 2) Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) and Columbia University Rating Scale (CURS) for PD-specific motor disability; and 3) registration of psychometric data by Mini Mental State (MMS) for dementia and the Adjective Mood Questionnaire of Zeersen (AMQZ) and Sickness Impact Profile (SIP) for subjective well-being. UPDRS sigma score (P < 0.0001), CURS sigma score (P < 0.0001) and BMT 2 score (P < 0.0001) improved significantly by exercise training. Six weeks after termination of the training program, the majority of the patients had lost only minor components of their regained motor skills. There was no significant change in cognitive function during the study. The results of open interviews referring to subjective well-being were confirmed by the AMQZ and SIP. As an unexpected side effect, dyskinesias seemed to be better controlled. Motor disability as well as mood and subjective well-being can be clearly improved by intensive sports activities in early to medium stage PD patients. A sustained ongoing benefit outlasting the active training period for at least 6 wk can be achieved but the exact duration of this benefit is open.

Effective fault tolerance for agent-based cluster computing

Long-lived parallel applications running on workstation clusters are vulnerable to single-node or multiple-node failures. Fault recovery is therefore important in avoiding immature program termination. However, much of the runtime overhead imposed by fault tolerance schemes is generally due to the cost of transferring the checkpoint states of applications by disk I/O operations. In this paper, we propose a fault tolerant model in which disk I/O operations are not required because checkpoint states are transferred between replicated parallel applications. We also describe how the resource consumption of the replicated applications can be effective. To achieve this, applications are constructed as computation agents that can reconfigure dynamically according to resource availability. The fault tolerant model has been implemented and tested on a workstation cluster and a Fujitsu AP3000 multi-processor machine. The measurements of our experiments have showed that efficient fault tolerance can be achieved by replicating parallel applications on workstation clusters.

South African diplomacy and security complex theory

South African diplomacy went through four broad phases in the period from 1990 to early 1999, and their identification is the starting point for an examination of the role of the 'new' South Africa's foreign policy. Earliest signs of a new foreign policy were the negotiated settlement of the Namibian dispute in the late 1980s and the termination of South Africa's nuclear deterrence programme which opened up the prospect of closer collaboration in Africa and admission to global efforts to stem proliferation. The rapid pace of change meant that, by the time the Government of National Unity assumed power in 1994, some of the African National Council's foreign policy and diplomatic initiatives have been overtaken. After 1994 the priority shifted to Africa, the southern hemisphere and the Non-Aligned Movement, and to universal moral and humanitarian issues. The author reviews the consistency of policy in subsequent years, South African initiatives on Nigeria, Libya and Lesotho, and the adoption of a new set of priorities in the early part of 1999.

The Use of Day Reporting as an Intermediate Sanction: A Study of Offender Targeting and Program Termination

The 1994 North Carolina Structured Sentencing Act led to the increased use of intermediate sanctions such as day reporting centers. This study evaluates offender targeting and program termination among a sample of 204 offenders who were sentenced to a day reporting center (DRC) in a southeastern North Carolina county. Despite sentencing guidelines, judges sentenced some offenders to the day reporting center who were ineligible. Issues of net-widening and judicial compliance are addressed. Results show that the rate of program termination was high. Logistic regression analysis shows some offender characteristics that affect the likelihood of termination from the DRC.

Termination of logic programs with delay declarations

This paper proposes a method for proving termination of logic programs with delay declarations. The method is based on the notion of recurrent logic program, which is used to prove programs terminating with respect to an arbitrary selection rule. Most importantly, we use the notion of bounded query (as proposed by M. Bozem) in the definition of cover, a new notion which forms the kernel of our approach. We introduce the class of delay recurrent programs and prove that programs in this class terminate for all local delay selection rules, provided that the delay conditions imply boundedness. The corresponding method can be also used to transform a logic program into a terminating logic program with delay declarations.

THE POLICY TERMINATION PROCESS

ABSTRACTThe purposes of this article are twofold. First, from a review of the extant literature on termination of policies, programs, and organizations, we identify the “crucial variables” that are believed to affect termination. In doing so, we develop a descriptive model of program termination. Then, we utilize this model as a hueristic device to examine the termination of federal revenue‐sharing programs in 1986. After reviewing the available literature on this topic and analyzing the case of revenue‐sharing, the article concludes that program termination is affected by three categories of variables: 1) inherent characteristics of the program in question; 2) the political environment within which termination takes place; and 3)

Termination of well-moded programs

We study the termination properties of well-moded programs, and we show that, under suitable conditions, for these programs there exists an algebraic characterization-in the style of Apt and Pedreschi, Studies in pure prolog: termination, in: J.W. Lloyd (Ed.), Proceedings of the Simposium in Computational Logic, Springer, Berlin, 1990, pp. 150–176-of the property of being terminating. This characterization enjoys the properties of being compositional and, to some extent, of being easy to check.

Acceptable Programs Revisited

Acceptable logic programs have been studied extensively in the context of proving termination of Prolog programs. It is difficult, however, to establish acceptability from the definition since this depends on finding a suitable model, which need not be a Herbrand model in general, together with a suitable level mapping that one can use to check the conditions which characterize acceptability. In this paper, we will see that when working over a fixed but arbitrary preinterpretation, a method can be provided for obtaining both a suitable model and a canonical level mapping which are sufficient for this purpose. Furthermore, the canonical model and level mapping obtained will turn out to be sufficient for discussing termination of non-ground queries.

The theoretical foundations of LPTP (a logic program theorem prover)

This article contains the theoretical foundations of LPTP, a logic program theorem prover that has been implemented in Prolog by the author. LPTP is an interactive theorem prover in which one can prove correctness properties of pure Prolog programs that contain negation and built-in predicates like is 2 and call n + 1 . The largest example program that has been verified using LPTP is 635 lines long including its specification. The full formal correctness proof is 13 128 lines long (133 pages). The formal theory underlying LPTP is the inductive extension of pure Prolog programs. This is a first-order theory that contains induction principles corresponding to the definition of the predicates in the program plus appropriate axioms for built-in predicates. The inductive extension allows to express modes and types of predicates. These can then be used to prove termination and correctness properties of programs. The main result of this article is that the inductive extension is an adequate axiomatization of the operational semantics of pure Prolog with built-in predicates.

Attrition Revisited

Attrition of subjects from therapeutic treatment programs, long recognized as a bane of evaluation researchers, is the focus of hundreds of studies purporting to explain, measure or correct it. This article discusses the scope and limitations of research regarding the causes of premature termination from psychotherapeutic and substance abuse programs and examines the applicability of proposed methodological remedies for assessing and countering attrition to the specific problem of research involving dropouts from treatment. By and large, research on the causes of attrition suffers from inadequate conceptualization and weak methodological designs. The researcher’s anticipation and measurement of factors driving premature program termination is key to the effective assessment and correction of problematic attrition in treatment evaluations. The phenomenon of attrition from treatment requires more rigorous attention from the evaluation community.

Transformational methodology for proving termination of logic programs

A methodology for proving the termination of well-moded logic programs is developed by reducing the termination problem of logic programs to that of term rewriting systems. A transformation procedure is presented to derive a term rewriting system from a given well-moded logic program such that the termination of the derived rewrite system implies the termination of the logic program for all well-moded queries under a class of selection rules. This facilitates applicability of a vast source of termination orderings proposed in the literature on term rewriting, for proving termination of logic programs. The termination of various benchmark programs has been established with this approach. Unlike other mechanizable approaches, the proposed approach does not require any preprocessing and works well, even in the presence of mutual recursion. The transformation has also been implemented as a front end to Rewrite Rule Laboratory (RRL) and has been used in establishing termination of nontrivial Prolog programs such as a prototype compiler for ProCoS, PL 0 language.

Attrition revisited

Attrition of subjects from therapeutic treatment programs, long recognized as a bane of evaluation researchers, is the focus of hundreds of studies purporting to explain, measure or correct it. This article discusses the scope and limitations of research regarding the causes of premature termination from psychotherapeutic and substance abuse programs and examines the applicability of proposed methodological remedies for assessing and countering attrition to the specific problem of research involving dropouts from treatment. By and large, research on the causes of attrition suffers from inadequate conceptualization and weak methodological designs. The researcher's anticipation and measurement of factors driving premature program termination is key to the effective assessment and correction of problematic attrition in treatment evaluations. The phenomenon of attrition from treatment requires more rigorous attention from the evaluation community.

Task termination and Ada 95

Ada 83 removed from the programmer the burden of coding potentially complex termination conditions between clients and servers by introducing an 'or terminate' option to the select statement. With the introduction of indirect communication (emphasised by the provision of protected objects in Ada 95), it is no longer straightforward to obtain program termination. This paper illustrates the problem and suggests that adding a terminate alternative to an entry call might solve the problem. The advantages and disadvantages of the approach are discussed.

Proving termination of GHC programs

A transformational approach for proving termination of parallel logic programs such as GHC programs is proposed. A transformation from GHC programs to term rewriting systems is developed; it exploits the fact that unifications in GHC-resolution correspond to matchings. The termination of a GHC program for a class of queries is implied by the termination of the resulting rewrite system. This approach facilitates the applicability of a wide range of termination techniques developed for rewrite systems in proving termination of GHC programs. The method consists of three steps: (a) deriving moding information from a given GHC program, (b) transforming the GHC program into a term rewriting system using the moding information, and finally (c) proving termination of the resulting rewrite system. Using this method, the termination of many benchmark GHC programs such as quick-sort, merge-sort, merge, split, fair-split and append, etc., can be proved.

Reduction of phobic behaviour for animals in a boy with mental retardation

The purpose of the present treatment programme was to eliminate phobic behaviour in a mentally retarded boy when confronted with different animals, such as dogs, cats, COWS, birds, horses, sheep, and rabbits. The intention was to determine the number of different types of dogs required in order to reach the desired general (overall) effects. Furthermore, the study was conducted in order to determine whether the obtained effects were also apparent in the presence of the other categories of animals outside the treatment setting. The treatment included a pre-post-test design combined with a multiple probe design across situations (animals). Test probes were taken after each step in the programme in order to determine whether any generalized effects of unfamiliar exemplars had occurred. The treatment included a DRI (differential reinforcement of incompatible behaviour) procedure, involving reinforcement of correct reading about the animals and responses such as patting and walking the dog on a leash. This study also introduced heart rate as a dependent measure in the treatment of phobic reaction. A remarkable effect was shown across different animals and this was consistent at the follow-ups 12 and 18 months after termination of the treatment programme.

Transient modelling of capillary electrophoresis: Isotachophoresis

Different algorithms for transient modelling of capillary electrophoresis have been described in several papers. Programs based on such algorithms were applied to various modes of CE. Surprisingly, simulations of capillary isotachophoresis (cITP) at realistic current densities (>1 kA/m2) were not reported. Using these programs for practical cITP conditions resulted in either severe oscillations, mass-balance violation or unexpected program termination. This paper addresses several numerical paths available for modelling one-dimensional capillary electrophoretic behaviour. Tests for determining the validity of the presented solutions with respect to cITP were mass balance checks, zone boundary thickness and the Kohlrausch regulating function. Six different numerical schemes fulfilled these requirements, yet only few could be used for simulating practical current density situations without causing the aforementioned problems. Attention was paid to space discretization (central difference and quadratic upwind) and time integration (implicit, explicit). A single computer program comprising these strategies was developed. Special features for studying transient state phenomena were visualization of concentrations, velocities, Peclet and Courant numbers, electric field strength, conductivity, pH, buffering capacity and charge excess. All parameters could be displayed in both the space domain (profile) as well as in the time domain (electropherogram).

Early Orientation &amp; Later School Achievement

Most research on the long-term outcomes of early enrichment programs aimed at low-income children suggests that the effects of experiences such as participation in Head Start do help to overcome experiential disadvantages. However, these gains tend to wash out by the time children reach the third grade (McKey et al., 1985), or after termination of follow-through programs (Becker & Gersten, 1982). Even when long-term effects of early intervention can be demonstrated (Campbell & Ramey, 1994; Currie & Thomas, 1993; Miller & Bizzell, 1983,1984), often, only a small subgroup of children actually achieves the intended gains (Hebbler, 1985).

A procedural semantics for stratified database updates

This paper investigates efficient evaluation of database updates and presents a procedural semantics for stratified update programs that extend stratified logic programs with bulk updates and hypothetical reasoning. Bulk rules with universal quantification in the body allow an arbitrary update to be applied simultaneously for every answer of an arbitrary query. Hypothetical reasoning is supported by testing the success or failure of an update. The procedural semantics offers efficient goaldoriented tabled evaluation of database updates. It guarantees termination for functiondfree stratified update programs and avoids repeated computation of identical subgoals.