<p>It has been suggested that Canadian society increasingly promotes a rhetoric of tolerance, through the dissemination of multicultural and politically correct discourses. At the same time, there has been a growth in the popularity of performances that seemingly counters this national image; that of risqué stand-up comedy. This dissertation explores if an institutionalized rhetoric of multiculturalism and “PC”, popularized since the late 1980s, is pierced, protracted and parodied within risqué stand-up comedy while remaining confined within spatial and temporal boundaries. Furthermore, this relationship between comedy and multicultural and “PC” discourses illuminates the nature of power circulating within our dialogues about issues of discrimination in contemporary Canadian society. This thesis establishes that both stand-up comic performances and politically correct rhetoric share a carnivalesque nature that while degrades authorial discourses, is ultimately constrained within its self-definition.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

Thesis (M. A. (Communication Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / The purpose of this study was to investigate the approach to land and unemployment as main electoral themes during 2019 elections in South Africa by the ANC and EFF. A qualitative, exploratory research was conducted to determine how these issues were articulated and approached using emotional and cognitive messages in the production of political content. This was to determine the implications of their use regarding issues of emphasis and ownership by political parties on the decision of constituencies. The hubs of data collection for this study were political street posters and Facebook advertisements. This study paid particular focus on the manners in which both parties framed the subjects of land and unemployment. Thus, thematic content analysis was used to determine the themes that emerged from the Facebook advertisements while semiotic analysis was applied on the data that emanated from street posters. The selection of the posters and Facebook political advertisements was guided by the issues the researcher intended to study which reflected on the ANC and EFF political advertisements. A total of 8 posters (N=8) were selected and analysed (4 for each party) and a total of 10 Facebook advertisements (5 for each party) were used for the generation of data in this study. A semi-structured interview was also conducted. The findings revealed that there are connections among political issues, images of politicians and the decision of voters. People vote based on these connections. The study therefore recommends that areas of content production need to be improved in the production of political advertisements, and that scholars need to improve the existing literature on political communication to educate the public (voters) about the persuasive strategies of the political parties

With rapid growth in computer hardware technologies and architectures, software programs have become increasingly complex and error-prone. This software complexity has resulted in program crashes and even security threats. Correctness Debugging is making sure that the program does not exhibit any unintended behavior at runtime. A fully correct program without good performance does not lend any commercial success to the software product. Performance Debugging ensures good performance on hardware platforms. A number of prior debugging solutions either suffer from huge performance overheads or incur high implementation costs. We propose low-cost and efficient hardware solutions that target three specific correctness and performance problems, namely, memory debugging, taint propagation and comprehensive cache miss classification. Experiments show that our mechanisms incur low performance overheads and can be designed with minimal changes to existing processor hardware. While architects invest time and resources into designing high-end architectures, we show that it is equally important to incorporate useful debugging features into these processors in order to enhance the ease of use for programmers.

En stor del av fordonsindustrin tillverkar mot order och använder sig av modulsystem för att effektivt kunna anpassa produkterna efter varierande kundbehov. Ett ökat antal varianter av moduler har bidragit till utvecklingen av just-in-sequence (JIS), ett koncept som har vidareutvecklats från just-in-time och ställer krav på att leveranser sker vid rätt tidpunkt, i rätt mängd, av rätt kvalitet och dessutom i en förbestämd sekvens. Produktionsstopp eller störningar som uppstår i sekvenserna kan orsaka stora kostnader hos kunden, vilket gör leverantören till en viktig aktör. Syftet med studien har i och med detta varit att undersöka hur leverantörer med ett kundorderstyrt produktionsflöde kan säkerställa sekvensleveranser, med fokus på planering och uppföljning. En fallstudie har genomförts på Scania Ferruform i Luleå och mer specifikt på företagets tillverkning av sidobalkar. Företaget genomför uppföljning av produktionen genom att bland annat mäta sekvensriktigheten, vilket speglar hur stor andel av färdigvarulagret som kan levereras i rätt sekvens till kunderna. Risken att störningar uppstår hos kunden, både internt och externt, kan reduceras genom att förbättra sekvensriktigheten. Studien har utifrån detta undersökt hur sekvensriktigheten kan förbättras, med avseende på planering och uppföljning. Planeringen har avgränsats till att främst undersöka körplaneringen, vilken sker efter frisläppning av order till verkstaden. Med hjälp av den upprättade teoretiska referensramen kunde empiriska data analyseras. Först och främst visar slutsatserna på att det finns en tydlig koppling mellan uppföljning och körplaneringen, men även till sekvensriktigheten. Körplaneringen är huvudsakligen operatörsstyrd, dock med grund i en initial körplan. Detta innebär att verkstadspersonalen har stor möjlighet att påverka produktionsordningen utifrån frisläppta order. Ofta sker även detta i syfte att optimera den egna processen, vilket i detta flöde innefattar bland annat minimering av omställningstid, skrotminimering och uppfyllande av nyckeltal. Den automatiska planeringsfunktionen som används har visat sig vara bristfällig och tillsammans med begränsningar i produktionens utformning skapar detta ett behov av att manuellt genomföra körplanering. Slutsatserna kring uppföljning i produktionen är att den i nuläget inte skapar några incitament till att prioritera sekvensriktigheten. Istället finns ett fokus inom produktionen att uppnå det skiftmål som finns, vilket beskriver antalet balkar som bör tillverkas under skiftet. Detta innebär vid tillfälle att den balk som ur sekvensperspektiv bör tillverkas prioriteras bort i syfte att uppnå målet angående antal balkar. Det som även kan konstateras genom studien är det faktum att produktionens utformning många gånger begränsar möjligheten att tillverka enligt sekvens, vilket ibland tvingar fram beslut som inte gynnar sekvensriktigheten. Rekommendationerna till företaget innebär att på kort sikt skapa incitament till att förbättra sekvensriktigheten, genom att införa nyckeltal som är anpassade efter detta. Sekvensriktighet kan införas som ett nyckeltal, men på grund av att procentsiffran kan vara svårtolkad rekommenderas även kompletterande mått. På längre sikt innebär rekommendationerna att utveckla den automatiska funktionen för produktionsplanering. Om denna kan ta hänsyn till de faktorer som leder till manuell körplanering i nuläget, kan detta reducera behovet av att genomföra körplanering i flödets olika processer. I sin tur kan detta skapa förutsättningar för en bättre sekvensriktighet och minskad risk för suboptimering. / A majority of the automotive industry are applying a make-to-order strategy in the manufacturing process. Many of them also use a modular system to efficiently adapt the products to changing customer requirements. An increasing amount of variations of the modules has led to the development of just-in-sequence, a concept that has developed further from just-in-time and that requires deliveries at the right time, in the right amount, of the right quantity and in a predetermined sequence. Disturbances that occur in the sequence can cause problems and high costs for the customer, which increases the role of the supplier. The purpose of the study has therefore been to examine how suppliers with a customer order driven production flow can ensure sequenced deliveries. A case study has been conducted at Scania Ferruform in Luleå and more specifically at the sidemember production unit. The sequence correctness is one measure that is used for monitoring and follow-up, and it reflects the share of the finished good inventory that can be delivered in sequence to the customers. Improving the sequence correctness can decrease the risk of disturbances occurring in the delivery and thereby at the customer, both internally and externally. The study has therefore had the focus of exploring how the sequence correctness can be improved, with regards to planning and monitoring. In this particular study, the planning has been limited to shop planning of production orders only. The empirically collected data were analysed with the theoretical frame of reference as a basis. The conclusions first of all show that there is a distinct connection between the follow-up process and shop planning, but also that these are directly connected to the sequence correctness. The operators in the different processes mainly control the shop planning, although with the basis of an initial plan based on the released orders. This means that the shop floor operators have a great opportunity to affect the production sequence. This planning is often performed in the purpose of optimizing an individual process of choice, which in this production flow involves for example minimizing setup time, minimizing scrap and fulfilling performance measures that are used. The automatic planning function that is used has proven to be inadequate, which creates a need for manually adjusting the sequence planning. When it comes to monitoring and follow-up of the production, the conclusion is that these do not give any incentives for prioritizing the sequence correctness. Instead there is a focus on achieving the goal of the number of sidemembers to be produced during each working shift. At some points, this means that sidemembers that should be produced with regards to the sequence correctness are not prioritized for the purpose of achieving the target of the number of sidemembers produced. Something that can also be stated is the fact that the production and facility layout limits the possibility to produce according to the customer sequence, which sometimes compels decisions that do not facilitate the sequence correctness. The recommendations to the company in short-term is to create incentives to improve the sequence correctness by implementing performance measures in the production that are adapted to this. Sequence correctness can be one of these measures, but measures to complement this are suggested because of the difficulty of interpreting the result. In the long-term however, the automatic production planning function should be developed. The need for adapting the shop plan in the different processes can be reduced if it can automatically take factors into account that today require manual planning. In turn, this can create a possibility of achieving better sequence correctness and reduce the risk of sub optimization.

Service-oriented systems (SOS) have recently emerged as context-independent component-based systems. In contrast to components, services can be created, invoked, composed and destroyed at run-time. Services are assumed to be platform independent and available for use within heterogeneous applications. One of the main assets in SOS is service composability. It allows the development of composite services with the main goal of reusable functionality provided by existing services in a low cost and rapid development process at run-time. However, in such distributed systems it becomes difficult to guarantee the quality of services (QoS), both in isolation, as well as of the newly created service compositions. Means of checking correctness of service composition can enable optimization w.r.t. the function and resource-usage of composed services, as well as provide a higher degree of QoS assurance of a service composition. To accomplish such goals, we employ model-checking technique for both single and composed services. The verification eventually provides necessaryinformation about QoS, already at early development stage.This thesis presents the research that we have been carrying out, on developing of methods and tools for specification, modeling, and formal analysis of services and service compositions in SOS. In this work, we first show how to formally check QoS in terms of performance and reliability for formallyspecified component-based systems (CBS). Next, we outline the commonalities and differences between SOS and CBS. Third, we develop constructs for the formal description of services using the resource-aware timed behavioral language called REMES, including development of language to support service compositions. At last, we show how to check service and service composition(functional, timing and resource-wise) correctness by employing the strongest post condition semantics. For less complex services and service compositions we choose to prove correctness using Hoare triples and the guarded command language. In case of complex services described as priced timed automata(PTA), we prove correctness via algorithmic computation of strongest post-condition of PTA. / Q-ImPreSS

I en värld av påstådda dikotomiska ytterligheter söker studenterna svar på frågan om politisk korrekthet påverkar socionomens arbete. Studien hämtar inspiration från Glenn Lourys teoretisering av begreppet ”politisk korrekthet” för att finna konkreta mekanismer bakom begreppet som socialt fenomen. Studien är kvalitativ och utgår från 8 intervjuer av yrkessamma socionomer. Med hjälp av Goffmans dramaturgi och delvis narrativ analys finner studenterna, bland annat, att socionomen behandlar sina värderingar som ett tudelat ämne: privata och professionella. Detta ger socionomen en möjlighet att distansera sina egna uppfattningar och ta på sig en ”socionomkostym” för att utföra sitt arbete utan att uppleva negativa sanktioner från klienter, kollegor eller ledning. / In a world of alleged dichotomic extremes, students seek answers to the question if political correctness affects the social work. The study draws inspiration from Glenn Loury's theorization of the concept of "political correctness" to find concrete mechanisms behind the concept as a social phenomenon. The study is qualitative and is based on 8 interviews of professional social workers. With the help of Goffman's dramaturgy and partly narrative analysis, the students find, among other things, that the social worker treats his values as a two-part topic: private and professional. This gives the social worker the possibility to distance their own perceptions and wear a ”social worker suit” to carry out their work without experiencing negative sanctions from clients, colleagues or management.

Motivé par le besoin de la « Conception par Réutilisation », les modèles de processus configurables ont été proposés pour représenter de manière générique des modèles de processus similaires. Ils doivent être configurés en fonction des besoins d’une organisation en sélectionnant des options. Comme les modèles de processus configurables peuvent être larges et complexes, leur configuration sans assistance est sans doute une tâche difficile, longue et source d'erreurs.De plus, les organisations adoptent de plus en plus des environnements Cloud pour déployer et exécuter leurs processus afin de bénéficier de ressources dynamiques à la demande. Néanmoins, en l'absence d'une description explicite et formelle de la perspective de ressources dans les processus métier existants, la correction de la gestion des ressources du Cloud ne peut pas être vérifiée.Dans cette thèse, nous visons à (i) fournir de l’assistance et de l’aide à la configuration aux analystes avec des options correctes, et (ii) améliorer le support de la spécification et de la vérification des ressources Cloud dans les processus métier. Pour ce faire, nous proposons une approche formelle pour aider à la configuration étape par étape en considérant des contraintes structurelles et métier. Nous proposons ensuite une approche comportementale pour la vérification de la configuration tout en réduisant le problème bien connu de l'explosion d'espace d'état. Ce travail permet d'extraire les options de configuration sans blocage d’un seul coup. Enfin, nous proposons une spécification formelle pour le comportement d'allocation des ressources Cloud dans les modèles de processus métier. Cette spécification est utilisée pour valider et vérifier la cohérence de l'allocation des ressources Cloud en fonction des besoins des utilisateurs et des capacités des ressources / Motivated by the need for the “Design by Reuse”, Configurable process models are proposed to represent in a generic manner similar process models. They need to be configured according to an organization needs by selecting design options. As the configurable process models may be large and complex, their configuration with no assistance is undoubtedly a difficult, time-consuming and error-prone task.Moreover, organizations are increasingly adopting cloud environments for deploying and executing their processes to benefit from dynamically scalable resources on demand. Nevertheless, due to the lack of an explicit and formal description of the resource perspective in the existing business processes, the correctness of Cloud resources management cannot be verified.In this thesis, we target to (i) provide guidance and assistance to the analysts in process model configuration with correct options, and to (ii) improve the support of Cloud resource specification and verification in business processes. To do so, we propose a formal approach for assisting the configuration step-by-step with respect to structural and business domain constraints. We thereafter propose a behavioral approach for configuration verification while reducing the well-known state space explosion problem. This work allows to extract configuration choices that satisfy the deadlock-freeness property at one time. Finally, we propose a formal specification for Cloud resource allocation behavior in business process models. This specification is used to formally validate and check the consistency of the Cloud resource allocation in process models according to user requirements and resource capabilities

<p>U radu je izvr&scaron;eno teoretsko istraživanje i analiza postojećih stavova i re&scaron;enja u oblasti validacije i provere kvaliteta modela podataka. Kreiran je teorijski model ontolo&scaron;ki zasnovane analize semantičke korektnosti modela podataka primenom sistema automatskog rezonovanja i izvr&scaron;ena praktična implementacija teorijskog modela, &scaron;to je potvrđeno i sprovedenim eksperimentalnim istraživanjem. Razvijena je softverska aplikacija za formalizaciju modela podataka i mapiranje ontologije u oblik Prolog klauzula. Formirana su pravila zaključivanja na predikatskom računu prvog reda, koja su integrisana sa modelom podataka i domenskom ontologijom. Upitima u okviru Prolog sistema, vr&scaron;i se provera semantičke korektnosti modela podataka. Definisana je i metrika ontolo&scaron;kog kvaliteta modela podataka koja se bazira na odgovorima sistema automatskog rezonovanja.</p> / <p>Work presents a theoretical study and analysis of existing theories and solutions in the area of data model validation and quality checking. It is created a theoretical model of ontology based analysis of data model semantic correctness by applying automated reasoning system which is practicaly implemented and confirmed by the conducted experimental research. A software application is developed for data model formalization and ontology mapping in Prolog clauses form. Reasoning rules are formed the in first-order predicate logic, which are integrated with the data model and domain ontology. Semantic correctness of the data model is checked with queries within Prolog system. Metrics of ontological quality of the data model are defined which are based on automated reasoning system replies.</p>

Aim of this master's thesis is to create a tool for checking correctness of design diagrams in UML. The work describes the UML language and connected standards, defines the problem of UML correctness and explains the approach of using incorrectness pattern database to check the UML correctness. Furthermore it suggests the QVT language as a suitable for implementing the incorrectness patterns. The problem is decomposed into shared incorrectness pattern database manageable via web interface, standalone tool for use from the command line and a plugin for the UML design software Visual Paradigm. All of the components are designed, implemented, tested and evaluated. The important aspect is the openness and extensibility of the tool.

The Swedish Armed Forces are currently considering extending the operational life of the Saab JAS 39 Gripen C/D multirole fighter aircraft by an additional 10 to 20 years. This has resulted in a need to upgrade many of the hardware components originally developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These upgrades include the Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) used to generate graphics in the aircraft’s Cockpit Display System (CDS), made programmable through the Symbol Programming Language (SPL). SPL is a proprietary Domain Specific Language (DSL) developed specifically to be used with the custom hardware in the Gripen’s CDS. An upgrade of the underlying hardware would necessitate migrating the old SPL software to some other format suitable for modern hardware. Large parts of this process could be automated with the help of a source-to-source compiler, i.e., a transpiler. In this thesis, we present a translation-verifying transpiler for a subset of SPL, dubbed μSPL, that outputs equivalent OpenGL/C++ programs. Verification is done at runtime against a reference program execution trace produced by the transpiler by means of symbolic execution in the operational semantics of μSPL. An observational study was made to evaluate the solution and the soundness of the μSPL semantics. From the results of the observational evaluation, we find that the chosen method for translation verification is contextually suitable, albeit with potential for improvement in the details of the implementation. / Försvarsmakten överväger i skrivande stund att förlänga tjänsteperioden för enhetflygplanet Saab JAS 39 Gripen C/D med ytterligare 10 till 20 år. Detta har resulterat i ett behov av att uppgradera många av de hårdvarukomponenter som ursprungligen togs fram för Gripenprojektet under sena 1980-talet och tidiga 1990-talet. Dessa uppgraderingar inkluderar applikationsspecifika integrerade kretsar (ASIC:ar) som används för att driva och generera symbolik för presentationssystemet Elektroniskt Presentationssystem 17 (EP-17) i cockpit på Gripen C/D. Dessa ASIC:ar är programmerbara med det egenutvecklade grafikprogramspråket SPL. En uppgradering av den underliggande hårdvaran skulle nödvändiggöra en migration av den SPL-mjukvara som redan är skriven till något format som är lämpligt för modern hårdvara. Stora delar av den här processen skulle kunna automatiseras med en automatisk översättare; en så kallad transpilator. I den här avhandlingen presenterar vi en översättningsverifierande transpilator för en delmängd av SPL, kallad μSPL, som översätter till ekvivalenta OpenGL/C++ program. Verifiering görs under körning mot ett exekveringsspår (execution trace) som producerats av transpilatorn parallellt med översättningen med hjälp av symbolisk exekvering i den operationella semantiken för μSPL. En observationell studie görs för att utvärdera lösningen och sundheten hos den använda μSPL-semantiken. Från den observationella studien framgår det att den föreslagna metoden för översättningsverifikation är lämplig i sammanhanget, med utrymme för förbättring i implementationsdetaljerna.