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The present paper has a negative aim and a positive aim, both limited in the present context to a sketch or outline. The negative aim, today less controversial, is to show that Aristotle's theory of final causality has little or nothing to do with the teleology rejected by modern science and that, therefore, far from having been rendered obsolete, it has yet to be fully understood. This aim will be met through the identification and brief discussion of some key points on which Aristotle's theory differs from teleology as still commonly understood. The positive aim is more controversial as it proposes that we take an ontology of life as the proper context for understanding the significance and nature of final causation in Aristotle. The argument for final causation, in other words, is that, without it, we would lose the phenomenon of life and, indeed, of nature altogether, reducing nature to the inanimate and mechanical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Safety-related systems are those whose failure could result in loss of life, injury, or damage to property. The use of software and programmable electronic systems in safety-related domains, which include aerospace, commercial aviation, medicine, and nuclear power generation, is increasing. Ensuring that digital systems will operate at least as dependably as the mechanical and analog systems they replace is essential, but achieving this level of dependability in a digital system can be exceptional difficult. Analyzing safety-related failures of digital systems can yield lessons for improving development and assurance practices in order to reduce the risk of future accidents, but the same factors that complicate the safety assurance of these systems also affect failure analysis. To address this problem, this paper introduces a novel approach of failure analysis. First, we provide a method of incorporating safety case to predict the failure of safety-related systems; second, we present how the safety case of a system guides iterative improvements in system safety through failure analysis; third, we provide an engineering example for its application and a method to evaluate the acceptance rate and accuracy rate of safety argument. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Programmers extensively use application programming interfaces (APIs) to leverage existing libraries and frameworks. However, correctly and efficiently choosing and using APIs from unfamiliar libraries and frameworks is still a non-trivial task. Programmers often need to ruminate on API documentations (that are often incomplete) or inspect code examples (that are often absent) to learn API usage patterns. Recently, various techniques have been proposed to alleviate this problem by creating API summarizations, mining code examples, or showing common API call sequences. However, few techniques focus on recommending API parameters. In this paper, we propose an automated technique, called Precise, to address this problem. Differing from common code completion systems, Precise mines existing code bases, uses an abstract usage instance representation for each API usage example, and then builds a parameter usage database. Upon a request, Precise queries the database for abstract usage instances in similar contexts and generates parameter candidates by concretizing the instances adaptively. The experimental results show that our technique is more general and applicable than existing code completion systems, specially, 64% of the parameter recommendations are useful and 53% of the recommendations are exactly the same as the actual parameters needed. We have also performed a user study to show our technique is useful in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Good communication skills for each person are the basis for quality learning and quality life. Throughout the history of humankind, since people started to communicate and to hold opinions and beliefs, they have always attempted not only to share information, but also to make influence on others. An argument is an individual's verbal action in order to convince others. The specificity of arguments depends on the situation in communication and on the goal of communication, i.e., on the purpose of an utterance. An argument belongs to the sender of information and to the audience, i.e., recipients of information, to which it is dedicated. In modern society, to be aware of what to say and how to say is not a luxury, but a necessity. Ignorance of how to dispute is one of the greatest sources of cultural inequality. The ability to argue can be considered as one of the higher-order thinking skills, because an individual must not only be able to express his/her ideas coherently, but also refer to facts and exclude the most important ones. International research shows that pupils' higher-order thinking is insufficient; there are great differences between pupils of different schools and regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The algorithm for determination of module and argument of complex reflection coefficient (CRC) of microwave circuits, which is based on digital processing of the measurement signal in the spectral domain, is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]