Utility computing has the potential to revolutionize the way we purchase, organize, and distribute computational power and services. It will do so by offloading resource provisioning to centralized sites that can benefit from economies of scale, careful, failure-resilient construction, flexibility and changeability of hardware choices, and scalable and business-driven management techniques. But...

Software metrics aim to measure the inherent complexity of software systems with a view toward predicting the overall project cost and evaluating the quality and effectiveness of the design. Aspect Oriented Software design is an emerging paradigm that provides new mechanisms to support the modularization of concerns, which otherwise would crosscut the OO system decomposition. There are various ...

More attention is paid to the quality of models along with the growing importance of modelling in software development. We performed a systematic review of studies discussing model quality published since 2000 to identify what model quality means and how it can be improved. From forty studies covered in the review, six model quality goals were identified; i.e., correctness, completeness, consis...

This article reports an empirical study on effectiveness of software development teams. Itwas predicted thatboth the extent to whieh design methods are used and team leaders' goal orientation is related to team effectiveness. Follow-up data (6-12 months after first assessment) were available from 25 German and Swiss software development projeets. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that use...

We consider the problem of increasing the threshold parameter of a secret-sharing scheme after the setup (share distribution) phase, without further communication between the dealer and the shareholders. Previous solutions to this problem require one to start off with a non-standard scheme designed specifically for this purpose, or to have secure channels between shareholders. In contrast, we s...

Traumatic memories haunt the lives of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and other illnesses. Fortunately, recent research into the changeability of long-term memories may someday develop into treatments for such individuals. But before this can happen, writes Cristina Alberini, Ph.D., of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, researchers must determine just how effectively...

As an environmental phenomenon, hurricanes cause significant property damage and loss of life in coastal areas almost every year. Research concerning hurricanes and their aftermath is gaining more and more attentions nowadays. The potential changeability of hurricane data and hurricane models requires robust, maintainable and easily extensible software system for hurricane simulation. With focu...