KAOS is a popular and useful goal oriented requirements engineering (GORE) language, which can be used in business requirements modelling, specification, and analysis. Currently, KAOS is being used in areas such as business process modelling, and enterprise architecture (EA). But, an incomplete or malformed KAOS model can result to incomplete and erroneous requirements analysis, which in turn c...

Server security is paramount to any organization. All too often, network defenses focus entirely on the perimeter, leaving networks looking like pieces of candy—having a hard outer shell and a soft gooey inside. In today's threat landscape, defenders must operate under the presumption of compromise. Attacks involving spearphishing, social engineering, weak bring your own device (BYOD) security,...

During metazoan development cells destined for different fates become asymmetric, not just in morphology and developmental potential but also in cell-cycle timing. A recent study has now shown that differential cell-cycle timing in the first cell divisions of the Caenorhabditis elegans embryo is in part controlled by a DNA replication checkpoint.

A low-density parity-check code is a code specified by a parity-check matrix with the following properties : each column contains a small fixed numberj > 3 of I’s and each row contains a small fixed number k > j of 1’s. The typical minimum distance of these codes increases linearly with block length for a fixed rate and fixed j. When used with maximum likelihood decoding on a snfhciently quiet ...

The applicability of model-checking is often restricted by the size of the considered system. To overcome this limitation, a number of techniques have been investigated. Prominent among these are data independence, abstraction, and compositionality. This paper presents a methodology based on deductive reasoning and model-checking which combines these techniques. As we show, the combination of a...

Even if a mesh is valid and all of the elements are approximately the same size, the quality, as measured by parameters such as aspect ratio, skew, and Jacobian quality metrics, may be poor. Theoretically, the FE solution should approach the exact solution as the size of the largest element approaches zero. It has been demonstrated, however, that if dihedral angles approach π as the element siz...

A longstanding problem with generalized stochastic Petri nets and extensions is that of what to do when more than one zero-timed event is scheduled to occur at the same time. If the order is left unspecified, it could lead to ambiguity that affects reward variables. Stochastic activity nets (SANs) [6, 7] have used the well-specified condition to avoid this problem. However, the existing algorit...

In this paper, we propose a novel electronic bearer check system (EBC). This system allows the consumer to pay any amount of money below an upper-boundary on the Internet within an expiration period. During each transaction, the consumer does not need to contact the bank’s server. Furthermore, this electronic bearer check can be transferred to any third party. The off-line characteristic of our...

Low Density Parity Check Codes originally invented by Gallagher and subsequently rediscovered by multiple groups 30 years later has become the best known error correcting code in a variety of situations. In this paper, we review regular and irregular LDPC codes. We describe a number of message passing decoders for decoding these codes and explain their operation via examples. Density evolution,...