BACKGROUND Substance-related deaths account for a great number of suicides. AIM To investigate levels and characteristics of suicide verdicts, as opposed to accidental deaths, in substance misusers. METHODS Psychological autopsy study of cases from the UK National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths (np-SAD) during the period 2001-2007. RESULTS Between January 2001 and December 2007, 2108...

Two studies were conducted to explore psychological factors that contribute to the influence of inadmissible evidence (i.e., the backfire effect) on jurors' verdicts. On the basis of hypotheses derived from terror management theory, we predicted that reminders of mortality, in contrast to an aversive control topic, should lead participants to be less punitive when confronted with inadmissible (...

This paper presents a combination of verification and conformance testing techniques to support the formal validation of reactive systems. The idea is to use symbolic test selection techniques to extract subgraphs (components) from a specification, and to perform the verification on the components rather than on the whole specification. Under reasonable sufficient conditions, this constitutes a...

Incorrect beliefs about the properties of memory have broad implications: the media conflate normal forgetting and inadvertent memory distortion with intentional deceit, juries issue verdicts based on flawed intuitions about the accuracy and confidence of testimony, and students misunderstand the role of memory in learning. We conducted a large representative telephone survey of the U.S. popula...

Following FDIR, we separate the detection of faults from the identification of failures. The diagnosis layer collects the verdicts of the distributed monitors and deduces an explanation for the current system state. For this purpose, the diagnosis layer may infer a (minimal) set of system components, which must be assumed to be faulty in order to explain the currently observed system state. The...

Predecisional distortion is jurors' biased interpretation of new evidence to support whichever verdict is tentatively favored as a trial progresses. In 2 experiments, students and prospective jurors distorted evidence from a mock trial. Further, the magnitude of prospective jurors' distortion was twice that of students. Consistent with previous research, distortion increased with juror confiden...

There are two aspects to testing: (1) the selection of appropriate test inputs and (2) the analysis of the observed interactions of the implementation under test (IUT) in order to determine whether they conform to the IUT's specification. The paper considers the second aspect with particular attention to the testing of OSI communication protocol implementations. A system is described which anal...