Models are frequently used to represent complex systems in order to test the systems before they are deployed. Some of the most complicated models are those that represent multi-agent systems (MAS), where there are multiple decision makers. Brahms is an agent-oriented language that models MAS. Three major qualities affect the behavior of these MAS models: workframes that change the state of the system, communication activities that coordinate information between agents, and the schedule of workframes. The primary method to test these models that exists is repeated simulation. Simulation is useful insofar as interesting test cases are used that enable the simulation to explore different behaviors of the model, but simulation alone cannot be fully relied upon to adequately cover the test space, especially in the case of non-deterministic concurrent systems. It takes an exponential number of simulation trials to uncover schedules that reveal unexpected behaviors. This thesis defines a coverage metric to make simulation more meaningful before verification of the model. The coverage metric is divided into three different metrics: workframe coverage, communication coverage, and schedule coverage. Each coverage metric is defined through static analysis of the system, resulting in the coverage requirements of that system. These coverage requirements are compared to the logged output of the simulation run to calculate the coverage of the system. The use of the coverage metric is illustrated in several empirical studies and explored in a detailed case study of the SATS concept (Small Aircraft Transportation System). SATS outlines the procedures aircraft follow around runways that do not have communication towers. The coverage metric quantifies the test effort, and can be used as a basis for future automated test generation and active test.

In March 2002, Idaho Falls Post Register owner/publisher Jerry Brady announced his intent to run as the Democratic challenger in the Idaho gubernatorial race. His decision left the newspaper and its editorial staff scrambling for an appropriate way to objectively cover the state's most prominent race involving the man who signed the checks. In an effort to meet this expectation, the newspaper established a detailed plan, which included Brady moving away from the newspaper's operations, both physically and editorially. Additionally, the Post Register brought in an outside media professional to monitor its coverage of the race and hosted several meetings for readers. While several studies have examined the relationship between politics and journalism, there have not been any significant studies related to a newspaper covering one of its own, which is the focus of this work. Using a case study approach, this study examines the Post Register's plan for covering the gubernatorial race and analyzes whether the paper followed its plan. The study includes a content analysis of the campaign-related articles published by the paper based on five components of objectivity as presented by Mindich (1999). These components include detachment, nonpartisanship, inverted pyramid, facticity, and balance. From this analysis, this study aims to answer the question, "Was the Post Register objective in its coverage of the race?" The study addresses the concept of objectivity and examines three general perspectives of journalistic morality and the viewpoints within those perspectives in an effort to determine which would apply to the Post Register's situation. They include the individualist perspective (autonomy, existentialism), the collectivist perspective (communitarianism), and the dialectic perspective (public journalism). The findings reveal that the Post Register staff stuck to their coverage plan and was objective in its coverage of the race. The author suggests that these two elements are related. In other words, because the Post Register staff adopted a coverage plan and stuck to it, they were able to remain objective. The author concludes that Post Register was not rooted in one specific viewpoint. The editorial staff chose to use public journalism tactics as tools toward maintaining a perceived autonomy. In the process, they most heartily embraced the communitarian belief. In other words, if the readers are happy, we must be doing a good job.

Tese de Mestrado Integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2012

No description available.

On average 322 million people worldwide are affected by depression. It is one of the leading causes of death in the United States and is often paired with anxiety. Although there are several ways to treat both depression and anxiety, the most popular way is through the use of anti-depressant medication. Typical alternative methods are talk therapy and acupuncture, which brings me to my question: Are anti-depressants truly the most effective way to treat depression or are they ultimately the most cost effective for patients suffering from the mental illness because they are the type of treatment most covered by insurance companies?

Most of the hardware products today, especially those that people interact with, are controlled by software. There are many devices with inbuilt software which many people do not bother to notice. Software may be critical in terms of strict quality requirements due to failures which enable risks of endangering the production and more importantly the lives of people. The testing team of Westermo Network Technologies AB faced a challenge with not being able to identify the coverage of tested cases in software. Identifying the coverage of total executed test cases enables the possibility of knowing the potential future quality of a software. By reaching such a stage a software will likely not suffer from failures due to higher quality, therefore the lives of people and the production at stake will not get harmed. The essential problem is that test cases are both tested and skipped, which makes it more difficult for the company to identify what has been actually tested and skipped. The purpose of this thesis is to identify and calculate the coverage of test cases, the process was mainly to understand the essence in the identification of executed test cases. The ethical aspect of putting people's lives at stake is what inspired us to investigate software failures. Software is typically tested before a release, therefore our investigation was to research testing process of software. When investigating test result over many days and test systems we developed a coverage calculator system which helps Westermo to decide and determine the release of tested software, either the software test result is acceptable for a release or not.

acase@tulane.edu / The Sustainable Development agenda, which will be driving the development discourse of the world in next fifteen years, has 17 goals and 169 target. Goal 3 is related to health and it has 13 targets. Target 3.8 states “Achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all”. This target - related to universal health coverage (UHC) is considered the linchpin of all other health targets. Although more than 100 countries across the world are pursuing UHC reforms, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to achieving UHC. It has been recommended that governments should develop approaches that fit the social, economic, demographic, and political context of their countries. Pakistan, the sixth most populous country in the world, underwent its first democratic transition after elections 2013. The 18th constitutional amendment of devolution has made health a provincial subject in the country. As promised in election manifestoes, all the three major political parties ruling provincial governments have recently committed to health financing reforms for achieving UHC. Though the existing literature provides a few key health financing indicators at the national level, there is a paucity of evidence for planning and monitoring UHC reforms at the provincial level. This dissertation, comprised of three papers, addressed this gap by providing empirical evidence on: i) incidence and determinants of catastrophic health expenditure, ii), efficiency of division level health systems in producing UHC tracer indicators. and iii) provincial progress towards Universal health coverage and associated in-equities from 2001-14. / 1 / Faraz Khalid

Throughout history the science of mass communication has been a topic of public and academic interest. In the past 3 decades portrayals of various minority groups have been of concern to researchers, health professionals and member of these groups. This study examines how people with disabilities are portrayed within the New Zealand print media and whether or not a traditional (often negative) or progressive (often positive) modes of representations predominate in coverage. Progressive focus views disability and the problems surrounding it as being located in society's failure to accommodate all members of the population. In contrast, traditional focus views people with disabilities as dysfunctional because he or she is unable to function in an environment designed by or for people without disabilities. The research corpus comprises relating to intellectual and physical disabilities and people with disabilities published in three major newspapers of New Zealand; The New Zealand Herald, The Dominion Post and The Sunday Star Times between the 1st of June and the 1st of August 2006 (N=101). These articles were collected and the content of each article was analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Aspects such as structure, content, terminology, sources used and attributes assigned to the people with disabilities were analysed within each article as a means of determining whether an article was positive, negative or neutral. Results show that within the New Zealand print media disability is generally portrayed in a positive or neutral manner. Moreover, it was discovered that Clogston's (1989) classifications of traditional and progressive focus were problematic because results indicated that a traditional mode of focus was dominate but this did not reflect a negative portrayal of disability. This may have been due to the disparities between the findings of this thesis and previous research conducted in other countries over a decade ago. Furthermore, it was found that the main source within each article was the government and this supported past research (Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien, 1980).

This thesis examines the role of both the local and international media during the May 2000 coup, to determine whether the coverage was fair and to suggest solutions for the future. It will first discuss and compare literature that has been written on the Fiji coups, focusing on literature on the media and the coups in particular. According to Fowler (1991) the role of a journalist is to collect facts, report them objectively and present them fairly and without bias in language which is designed to be unambiguous, undistorting and agreeable to readers. However, in most times this is not the case. A thematic content analysis will be done on news articles that appeared in The Fiji Times, The New Zealand Herald and The Australian to find common themes during the coverage of the crisis. A lot of criticism of the both the local and international media’s role during the May 2000 coup emerged after the crisis. Critics included editors and journalists of the local and international media and political and historical analysts who knew the ‘real reasons’ behind the coup and did not see this being reported. A summary of interviews with journalists and editors who covered the coup, both local and overseas, will give an insight into their thoughts and reactions during the coup. It will also determine whether the journalists suffered from the Stockholm syndrome. The Stockholm syndrome describes the behaviour of kidnap victims or people who associate a lot with the captors, and who over time become sympathetic to their captors. The name is derived from a 1973 hostage siege in Stockholm, Sweden when at the end of six days of captivity at a bank; several kidnap victims actually resisted rescue attempts, and afterwards refused to testify against their captors. During the Fiji coup, apart from Speights supporters, journalists were the only ones who spent a lot of time with the coup leader either at press conferences or staying at Parliament to get good stories. As a result, some journalists began to ‘sway’ towards Speight or began to experience the Stockholm syndrome which was reflected in their stories. The thesis concludes that a few journalists in Fiji did suffer from the Stockholm syndrome. It also concludes that a crisis manual is needed for media organisations in Fiji to avoid the same mistakes being repeated as in the last three coups. The overseas media on the other hand need to attach themselves to the local media to avoid parachute journalism and inaccurate reporting. Overseas media organisations need to assign special reporters to Pacific Island affairs to understand the culture and other complex issues which would help in reporting their issues fairly and accurately.

Node scheduling is one of the most effective techniques to maximize the lifetime of a wireless sensor network. It is the process of selecting a subset of nodes to monitor the sensor field on behalf of redundant nodes. At every round of the scheduling a small group of nodes are active while the rest of the sensor nodes are in sleep mode. In this thesis, we propose a novel node scheduling solution for wireless sensor networks. The main characteristic of our approach is its independence from location information as well as distance information. Moreover, it does not rely on unrealistic circular radio propagation models. In order to have a comprehensive solution, we have considered different relations between sensing range and transmission range. When these ranges are equal in addition to the case that transmission range is higher than sensing range, we devise a node scheduling scheme based on the concept of Minimum Dominating Set. Two heuristics are presented to determine a collection of minimum dominating sets of the graph of the wireless sensor network. At each round of the scheduling only one set is active. Minimum dominating sets are scheduled to be rotated periodically. Moreover, every set is synchronized prior to the end of its active period in order to minimize the effect of clock drift of sensor nodes. Two components are considered to address node failures during the on-duty period of minimum dominating sets. These are probing environment and adaptive sleeping. The former is responsible for probing the working nodes of the active set to detect any node failure. The latter adjusts the frequency of probing for minimizing the overhead of probing while preserving an adequate level of robustness for discovery of node failure. This framework is based on the PEAS protocol that has been developed by Fan Ye et al. [98, 99]. We propose a different node scheduling scheme with a three-tier architecture for the case that sensing range is higher than transmission range. The coverage tier includes a set of nodes to monitor the region of the interest. We propose a heuristic to determine a collection of d-dominating sets of the graph of the wireless sensor network. At every round of the scheduling one d-dominating set forms the coverage tier. Connectivity tier consists of sensor nodes that relay the data collected at the coverage tier back to the base station. Finally, the coverage management tier is responsible for managing different patterns of coverage such as cyclic or uniform coverage.