During the software maintenance phase, regression testing is certainly an expensive but necessary activity to make sure the new versions of the system do not “regress”. As software evolves, chances are that not only the implementation changes, but that the specification of the system changes too. We argue that guiding regression testing by the system specifications will be more accurate and cos...

Recent published and preliminary precision electroweak measurements are reviewed, including new results on the mass of the top quark and mass and width of the W boson. The experimental results are compared with the predictions of the Standard Model and are used to constrain its free parameters, notably the mass of the Higgs boson. The agreement between measurements and expectations from theory ...

Software testing consumes a large percentage of total software development costs. Yet, it is still usually performed manually in a non rigorous fashion. In this work we suggest how state of the art practices in the area of testing can be applied to the systematic generation of tests from model-based formal specifications.

We consider an observer who makes a finite number of observations of an industry producing a homogeneous good, where each observation consists of the market price and firm-specific production quantities. We develop a revealed preference test (in the form of a linear program) for the hypothesis that the firms are playing a Cournot game, assuming that they have convex cost functions that do not c...

The present status of precision electroweak data is reviewed. These data include measurements of ee → ff , taken at the Z resonance at LEP, which are used to determine the mass and width of the Z boson. In addition, measurements have also been made of the forward-backward asymmetries for leptons and heavy quarks, and also the final state polarisation of the τ -lepton. At SLAC, where the electro...

We analyze the size dependence and temporal stability of firm bankruptcy risk in the US economy by applying Zipf scaling techniques. We focus on a single risk factor--the debt-to-asset ratio R--in order to study the stability of the Zipf distribution of R over time. We find that the Zipf exponent increases during market crashes, implying that firms go bankrupt with larger values of R. Based on ...

Measurements made by the four LEP experiments of electroweak parameters and the strong couphng constant are presented. These are used in an overaU Standard Model fit and a constraint on the mass of the top quark is derived. 1. Precision Measurements of Electroweak Parameters During 1989, 1990 and 1991 the four main experiments at the LEP e+ecollider (ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL) have recorded da...

We develop a novel hypothesis testing framework for causal inference among pairs of phenotypes in the context of segregating populations. Our model selection test extends Vuong’s test to the case of three misspecified models, to handle the full range of possible causal relationships among a pair of traits, namely, causal, reactive or independent models. The ability to properly address misspecif...

We perform the QCD testing of the Quasilocal Quark Model (QQM) based on Operator Product Expansion (OPE). The quark current correlators calculated in framework of the model, are compared to their OPE in QCD at intermediate energies. The QQM provides a reasonable resolution for mass spectrum of parity doublers in scalar and vector meson channels.