In the construction of a large software system, it is inevitable that some aspects of program behavior will cut across the structure of the code. The changes that are needed to support a new feature, for example, may be spread across several different points in the original program, making them harder to maintain and harder to reuse. The designers of “aspect-oriented” programming languages aim ...

ESSENCE is a hash function submitted to the NIST Hash Competition that stands out as a hardware-friendly and highly parallelizable design. Previous analysis showed some non-randomness in the compression function which could not be extended to an attack on the hash function and ESSENCE remained unbroken. Preliminary analysis in its documentation argues that it resists standard differential crypt...

D riving the rapid advance in knowledge of peptidebinding to major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules is the prospect of predicting which peptides from foreign proteins are likely to be antigenic, and thus effective immunogens in vivo. Despite the numerous peptides that theoretically could be generated from a foreign protein, in practice cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) focus upon just a f...

P N Rastogi is Professor of Sociology, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. The success of any organization depends on its leadership. Although a good deal of research has been done on leadership, it is difficult to say what it is. Recent research classifies leaders broadly into two types: transactional and transforming (Burns, 1978). In t...

We present a model independent method of reconstructing the Lagrangian for the k-essence field driving the present acceleration of the universe. We consider the simplest k-essence model for which the potential is constant. Later we use three parametrizations for the Hubble parameter H(z), consistent with recent the SN1a data, to yield the Lagrangian F . Our reconstruction program does not gener...

In most industries, ranging from information systems development to construction, an overwhelming proportion of projects are delayed beyond estimated completion time. This fact constitutes somewhat of a puzzle for existing theory. The present paper studies project delays and optimal contracts under moral hazard in a setting with time to build. Within this setup, project delays are found to be m...

Set theoretic essences of knowledge and of its associatedness are considered. A concept of microset is being used for this purpose and levels of microelements that appear in different directions are being considered. Associatedness of knowledge is defined on the basis of the associatedness of sets. It is demonstrated that associations of knowledge create equivalence classes in the semantic syst...

The idea that aging is a purposeful, programmed series of events is intuitively appealing based on its many conserved aspects and the demonstrated feasibility of modifying life span by manipulating single genes or pathways. Yet, the case for a nonadaptive basis of aging is strong and now all but generally accepted in the field. Here, we briefly review why the case for programmed aging is weak, ...

Programming languages serve a dual purpose: to communicate programs to computers, and to communicate programs to humans. Indeed, it is this dual purpose that makes programming language design a constrained and challenging problem. Inheritance is an essential aspect of that second purpose: it is a tool to improve communication. Humans understand new concepts most readily by first looking at a nu...