The purpose of this study is to enquire into the policies and methods of staff development followed by the Social Welfare Branch with respect to its Field Service staff. The survey involves understanding its generalized, multi-service program, the philosophy and goals of the social legislation of British Columbia, and the administrative organization which brings these social welfare services to citizens. The concurrent development of professional social work practice, and the planning of staff development opportunities as a means of obtaining qualified personnel are outlined. Related to the Agency's role in continuing the professional growth of staff on the job are standards of practice and the appropriate use of personnel. The implementation of a costly welfare program places responsibility upon the Social Welfare Branch to ensure that these services are administered by qualified personnel. In common with other professions that of social work is continuously using new knowledge to refine practice. As it is the personnel who give life to a service program research was first directed to the qualifications, professional and otherwise, of staff employed on the survey date, February 1, 1952. Because of the key position of the District Supervisor, a job analysis to show time distribution by type of work performed was completed. While not a true indication of the quality of work, it is suggestive of the availability of District Supervisors to staff. As a supplementary means of gauging the way in which District Supervisors work the survey questionnaire requested information concerning supervisory procedures. Other data concerning staff development methods was obtained from Branch files, and interviews with administrative personnel: Division Heads, Regional Administrators, Field Consultants, District Supervisors, the Training Supervisor, and the Assistant Director of Welfare. The study showed that it is the objective of the Social Welfare Branch to offer professional services,to employ qualified personnel, and to promote their professional development on the job. The findings confirmed what was already known about the excessive volume of work placed upon the Field Staff which makes it difficult to maintain satisfactory standards of practice. It is apparent the administrative function of the District Supervisor limits unduly the teaching requirements of this position. In order that a well-planned staff development program be carried out it is recommended administrative responsibility and additional personnel for function be given to the Division of Training, and a budget for this program be allocated. To raise the qualifications of Field Staff to a desirable professional standard the extension of bursaries and educational leaves with pay especially for District Supervisors, would have permanent results. Administrative reorganization to separate out the function of Personnel would facilitate better focus upon the staff development program. Several suggestions concerning the In-Service Training Plan are referred to in the text. / Arts, Faculty of / Social Work, School of / Graduate

In this thesis, we present a new register-transfer level (RTL) test generation method that makes use of two coverage metrics, Branch Coverage, and Mutation Coverage across two stages, to cover hard-to-reach points previously unreached. We start with a preprocessing stage by converting the RTL source to a C++ equivalent using a modified Verilator, which also automatically creates mutants and the corresponding mutated C++ design, based on arithmetic, logical and relational operators during conversion. With the help of extracted Data Dependency and Control Flow Graphs, in every <golden, mutation> pair, branches containing variables dependent on the mutated statement are instrumented to track them. The first stage uses Evolutionary algorithms with Ant Colony Optimization to generate test vectors with mutation coverage as the metric. Two new filtering techniques are also proposed which optimize the first stage by eliminating the need for generating tests for redundant mutants. The next stage is the original BEACON which now takes the generated mutation test vectors as the initial population unlike random vectors, and output final test vectors. These test vectors succeed in improving the coverage up to 70%, compared to the previous approaches for most of the ITC99 benchmarks. With the application of filtering techniques, we also observed a speedup by 85% in the test generation runtime and also up to 78% reduction in test vector size when compared with those generated by the previous techniques. / MS / In the recent years, Verification has become one of the major bottlenecks in integrated circuit design process, which is exacerbated by the increasing design complexities today. Today designers start the design process by abstracting the initial design in a manner similar to software programming language using a higher abstraction language called Hardware Descriptive Language(HDL). Hence, an HDL based design also contains a number of case statements and if-else statements, also called branches, similar to a software design. Branches indicate decision points in the design and high branch coverage based tests can give us an assurance that the design is properly exercised as compared to those given by randomly generated tests. In this thesis, we introduce a new test generation methodology which generates tests using the help of user introduced mutants to ensure higher branch coverage. Mutation testing is similar to a fault testing method, in which an error or a fault is deliberately introduced into the design and we check if the tests generated are able to detect the fault. An important property of a mutant is that: when a mutant is applied and if the mutated part of the design is exercised by the given test suite, then the following data and control flow path taken can be different from that taken on the original design. This important property along with proper guidance is used in our work to reach some branches which are difficult to cover by random test vectors, and this is the main basis of this thesis. Applying this method, we observed that the branch coverage increased with a decrease in test generation runtime and test vector length when compared to previously proposed techniques.

Performance of modern pipelined processor depends on steady flow of useful instructions for processing. Branch instruction disrupts sequential flow of instructions by presenting multiple paths through which a program can proceed. By predicting branch outcome early, branch predictors allow processor to continue fetching instructions from the predicted path. History-based dynamic branch predictors have shown to reach high prediction accuracy, yet certain branch types continue to mispredict. These are multitarget indirect branches and data-dependent direct and indirect branches. These are hard-to-predict branches since their outcome do not always exhibit repeatable patterns. This thesis describes branch prediction schemes for improving prediction accuracy of hard-to-predict branches using data value correlation. In these schemes, instead of relying on branch history information, compiler identifies program instructions whose output value strongly correlates with branch outcome. These correlated instructions are tracked at run-time, and their output is used for making branch predictions. Specifically, this thesis proposes following two branch prediction schemes: (i) Value-based BTB indexing (VBBI) is a low cost, compiler-guided scheme for predicting multi-target indirect branches. For every indirect branch, compiler identifies an instruction whose output strongly correlates with targets taken by the indirect branch. At run-time, multiple branch targets are stored and subsequently accessed from BTB using index formed by hashing indirect branch PC with output of the correlated instruction. (ii) Store-Load-Branch (SLB) predictor is a compiler-assisted branch prediction scheme for data-dependent branches. Typically, data-dependent branches are associated with program data structures such as arrays, linked list etc., and follow store-load-branch execution sequence. A set of memory locations is written at an earlier point in a program. Later, these locations are read, and used for evaluating branch condition. Branch outcome depends on values stored in data structure, which, normally do not have repeatable patterns. In SLB scheme, compiler identifies all program points where data structure associated with a data-dependent branch is modified. These marked store instructions are tracked at run-time, and stored values are used for computing branch flags ahead of time. Later, when branch instruction is fetched, pre-computed flags are read, and used for making predictions. This thesis introduces new branch prediction schemes, describes hardware structures and compiler analysis for implementing these schemes, evaluates their performance impact, and estimates their area, power and timing overhead. / text

Adult stonefly emergence, nymphal growth, drift and microdistribution were examined in Battle Branch, a secondorder, spring-fed stream, from November, 1982 to May, 1984. Adults of 22 species emerged successionally, with specific adults present every month. Searching emergent objects and the stream margin was best for collection of winter and early spring emerging species. Sweeping the streamside and light trapping were most efficient for late spring and summer emerging species. Nymphal growth for nine abundant species generally fit double log or semilog models. Drift was low, but did show a post-sunset pulse. Generally, leaf material was found to be significantly related (p<O.001) to density, diversity and biomass of stoneflies in Battle Branch.

Submitted by Viviane Lima da Cunha (viviane@biblioteca.ufpb.br) on 2016-02-17T11:41:50Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 1276201 bytes, checksum: 9dd8fad80c483276a40101ee6a782d5b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-02-17T11:41:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 1276201 bytes, checksum: 9dd8fad80c483276a40101ee6a782d5b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-07-21 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This work deals with the p-Cluster Editing Problem (p-CEP), which consists in performing a minimum number of editions (additions or removals of edges) in a graph G in order to transform it in a disjoint union of p cliques (clusters), where G and p are input data. p-CEP is a NP-Hard problem with applications in areas such as computational biology and machine learning. To solve this problem, we propose two new mathematical formulations and improvements in a formulation from the literature, as well as new valid inequalities. The three formulations were studied both theoretically, by comparing their linear relaxations, and practically, by implementing three exact algorithms: two based on Branch-and-Cut (BC) and one based on Branch-and-Price (BP). The proposed algorithms were tested in instances with up to 211 vertices. The results show the performance of the algorithms according to the graph density and the ratio between p and the number of vertices. Overall, the BC algorithms were superior to the BP algorithm. However, the latter obtained the best dual bounds in some instances. / Este trabalho trata do Problema de Edi¸c˜ao de p-Clusters (p-PEC), o qual consiste em realizar um n´umero m´ınimo de edi¸c˜oes (adi¸c˜oes ou remo¸c˜oes de arestas) em um grafo G de modo a transform´a-lo em uma uni˜ao disjunta de p cliques (ou clusters), sendo G e p dados de entrada. O p-PEC ´e um problema NP-Dif´ıcil que possui aplica¸c˜oes em ´areas como biologia computacional e aprendizagem de m´aquina. Para resolvˆe-lo, foram propostas duas novas formula¸c˜oes matem´aticas e melhorias em uma formula¸c˜ao proveniente da literatura, bem como novas desigualdades v´alidas. As trˆes formula¸c˜oes consideradas foram estudadas tanto teoricamente, atrav´es da compara¸c˜ao entre as relaxa¸c˜oes lineares, quanto empiricamente, atrav´es do desenvolvimento de trˆes algoritmos exatos: dois baseados em Branch-and-Cut (BC) e um baseado em Branch-and-Price (BP). Os algoritmos foram testados em instˆancias com at´e 211 v´ertices. Os resultados mostram o impacto da raz˜ao entre p e o n´umero de v´ertices, da densidade do grafo e das desigualdades nos desempenhos dos algoritmos. No geral, os algoritmos BC foram superiores ao algoritmo BP. Por´em, em algumas instˆancias, os melhores limites duais foram obtidos pelo algoritmo BP.

Master of Science / Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Todd W. Easton / Integer Programs (IP) are a class of discrete optimization problems that are utilized commercially to improve the function of various systems. Implementation is often aimed at reaching optimal financial objectives with constraints on resources and operation. While incredibly beneficial, IPs are NP-complete, with many IP models being unsolvable. Branch and bound (BB) is the primary method employed to solve IPs to optimality. BB is an exhaustive approach to enumerating all potential integer solutions for a given IP. By utilizing a hierarchical tree structure to tabulate progression of enumeration, BB can guarantee an optimal solution in finite time. However, BB can take an exponential number of iterations to solve an IP. Computationally, this can result in a tree structure that exceeds a computer’s memory capacity, or a prohibitively long solution time. This thesis introduces a modified version of BB call the Quaternary Hyperplane Branching Algorithm (QHBA). QHBA employs a quaternary branching scheme, utilizes hyperplane branching constraints, and generates internal cutting planes to increase efficiency. Implementation of these advancements theoretically improves QHBA in comparison to traditional BB. It can also be shown that QHBA guarantees an optimal solution in a finite number of iterations. A short computational study shows that QHBA results in a 26.7% decrease in solution times when compared to CPLEX, a commercially available IP solver.

With increasing demands on mobile communication transfer rates the circuits in mobile phones must be designed for higher performance while maintaining low power consumption for increased battery life. One possible way to improve an existing architecture is to implement instruction prefetching. By predicting which instructions will be executed ahead of time the instructions can be prefetched from memory to increase performance and some instructions which will be executed again shortly can be stored temporarily to avoid fetching them from the memory multiple times. By creating a trace driven simulator the existing hardware can be simulated while running a realistic scenario. Different methods of instruction prefetch can be implemented into this simulator to measure how they perform. It is shown that the execution time can be reduced by up to five percent and the amount of memory accesses can be reduced by up to 25 percent with a simple loop buffer and return stack. The execution time can be reduced even further with the more complex methods such as branch target prediction and branch condition prediction.

No description available.

The purpose of this study is to understand the transplantation and sustainability of Tibetan Buddhism through an ethnographic case study of the branches of Rokpa International in Scotland.  Using Bourdieu’s (1992) concepts of ‘field’ and ‘habitus’ this thesis examines the organisation and practice of Tibetan Buddhism in Scotland.  In so doing this thesis contributes a much needed sociological perspective to transplantation studies of Buddhism to the west. The themes of ‘detraditionalisation’ (Heelas, 1996b) and ‘cognitive surrender’ (Berger, 1973) are explored from a sociological rather than a theological perspective.  It is consequently argued that Rokpa Scotland can maintain claims of traditional authenticity by controlling the detraditionalisation process and regulating the flow of knowledge to western participants.  However, potential dangers to these claims were identified in the form of participants who adapt teachings outwith the control of the organisation.  Thus Rokpa Scotland need to manage different levels and types of participant in a milieu and understanding this milieu helps to understand the role and organisation of religion in the west in general.

In this article a new branch & bound method is described. It uses an artificial target to improve its bounding capabilities. Therefore the new approach is faster compared to the classical one. It is applied to the stochastic problem of optimal scenario tree reduction. The aspects of global optimization are emphasized here. All necessary components for that problem are developed and some experimental results underline the benefits of the new approach. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operations