This paper is based on a real-life experience with behavior specification of a nontrivial component-based application. The experience is that model checking of such a specification yields very long error traces (providing counterexamples) in the order of magnitude of hundreds of states. Analyzing and interpreting such an error trace to localize and debug the actual specification is a tedious wo...

Many origin-of-life researchers now regard the origin of biological information as the central problem facing origin-of-life research. Yet, the term ‘information’ can designate several theoretically distinct concepts. By distinguishing between specified and unspecified information, this essay seeks to eliminate definitional ambiguity associated with the term ‘information’ as used in biology. It...

A condensed specification of a multi-level marketing enterprise in the Z specification language is presented and a number of proof obligations that result from operations on the state is stated. The feasibility of using certain reasoning heuristics for discharging proof obligations emerging from the specification is investigated and we show how two important proof obligations arising from the s...

Firearms account for a substantial proportion of external causes of death, injury, and disability across the world. Legislation to regulate firearms has often been passed with the intent of reducing problems related to their use. However, lack of clarity around which interventions are effective remains a major challenge for policy development. Aiming to meet this challenge, we systematically re...

This paper analyses the relationship between the level of a return guarantee in an equity–linked pension scheme and the proportion of an investor’s contribution needed to finance this guarantee. Three types of schemes are considered: investment guarantee, contribution guarantee and participation surplus. The evaluation of each scheme involves pricing an Asian option, for which relatively tight ...

BACKGROUND Earlier investigations have shown mortality effects of community socio-economic resources. However, the sex differences have not been clear, and the estimates may well have been biased because of inadequate control for community factors affecting both the socio-economic resources and mortality. The objective of this study was to see whether any effects appeared when time-invariant co...

happiness is among the concepts which were subject of empirical studies in 1960s. this concept has been used interchangeably with such concepts as joy, satisfaction with life and the like. while meaningfully correlating with the feeling of joy and satisfaction with life, as indicated by numerous researches, the feeling of happiness is affected by different factors and situations. the present re...

social happiness is one of the humanity’s most necessary innate needs and which plays a crucial role in the sublimity of individuals and society. reaching this would occur once individual has either physical or mental health. one of the effective factors in increasing the amount of individuals’ social happiness especially in women is providing them with mental dimension of security e.g. felling...

conclusions the results showed that heart failure had a negative impact on the quality of life for patients. therefore, evaluation and improvement of quality of life for these patients should be considered one of the duties of nurses. background currently, examining the quality of life is considered an important aspect of the study of chronic diseases. heart failure affects the quality of life ...

objectives: quality of life, when referring to an individual’s health, is called health-related quality of life. the purpose of this study is to assess self-perceived hearing loss related quality of life of adolescents with hearing loss and its relationship with sex, age sub-groups or school settings with domains of quality of life. methods: a school based survey was conducted in tehran city. u...