A method for the manual extraction of business rules from legacy source code

One of the main barriers to the successful migration of legacy systems is lack of information about the system to be migrated.With the complexity of modern information systems, it is rarely the case that an organisation has a complete end-to-endunderstanding of its systems, business processes and information. This is particularly true of the business rules enforced by suchsystems, which are often poorly documented (if at all) and incompletely understood by those who own, use and maintain suchsystems. These business rules must be migrated, along with the other system functionality, but this is difficult when they areburied deep within the source code of the system. In this paper, we propose a method for the discovery of business rules throughinspection of the source code of legacy systems. We also describe the results of a comprehensive evaluation exercise undertakenwithin BT, in which the method was applied to a legacy system about to undergo migration. The results of this study indicatedconsiderable success for the method in extracting valid business rules, but also highlighted some weaknesses. Most significantly,the cost of applying the method is a factor of the size and complexity of the system being analysed, and not of the number ofbusiness rules elicited. In order to address this, we propose a cut-down version of the method that can be used to produce a quickestimate of the likely yield of business rules from a program. Together, these two forms of the method aid personnel engaged insystem migration projects in making maximum use of the scarce resources are available for business rule discovery.     

Modifications to the Water Vapor Continuum in the Microwave Suggested by Ground-Based 150-GHz Observations

Ground-based observations from two different radiometers are used to evaluate commonly used microwave/millimeter-wave propagation models at 150 GHz. This frequency has strong sensitivity to changes in precipitable water vapor (PWV) and cloud liquid water. The observations were collected near Hesselbach, Germany, as part of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program's support of the General Observing Period and the Convective and Orographic Precipitation Study. The observations from the two radiometers agree well with each other, with a slope of 0.993 and a mean bias of 0.12 K. The observations demonstrate that the relative sensitivity of the different absorption models to PWV in clear-sky conditions at 150 GHz is significant and that four models differ significantly from the observed brightness temperature. These models were modified to get agreement with the 150-GHz observations, where the PWV ranged from 0.35 to 2.88 cm. The models were modified by adjusting the strength of the foreign- and self-broadened water vapor continuum coefficients, where the magnitude was model dependent. In all cases, the adjustment to the two components of the water vapor continuum was in opposite directions (i.e., increasing the contribution from the foreign-broadened component while decreasing contribution from the self-broadened component or vice versa). While the original models had significant disagreements relative to each other, the resulting modified models show much better agreement relative to each other throughout the microwave spectrum. The modified models were evaluated using independent observations at 31.4 GHz.     

Defect reduction in Hg1−xCdxTe grown by molecular beam epitaxy on Cd0.96Zn0.04Te(211)B

A study on preparation of Cd_0.96Zn_0.04Te(211)B substrates for growth of Hg_1−xCd_xTe epitaxial layers by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) was investigated. The objective was to investigate the impact of starting substrate surface quality on surface defects such as voids and hillocks commonly observed on MBE Hg_1−xCd_xTe layers. The results of this study indicate that, when the Cd_0.96Zn_0.04Te(211)B substrates are properly prepared, surface defects on the resulting MBE Hg_1−xCd_xTe films are reduced to minimum (size, ∼0.1 m and density ∼500/cm²) so that these MBE Hg_1−xCd_x Te films have surface quality as good as that of liquid phase epitaxial (LPE) Hg_1−xCd_xTe films currently in production in this laboratory.     

Comparison of high-temperature-superconductor and metal-basedresonators

A 50-Ω coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonator designed for a fundamental frequency of about 4.75 GHz was fabricated on LaAlO₃ . Two versions were fabricated: the first using 1.9-μm-thick gold and the second using 0.6-μm-thick YBa₂Cu₃O ₇. The devices were identically packaged and tested at 77 K. It was found that the high-temperature superconductor (HTS) resonator had a surface resistance, R_s, about six to nine times lower than the Au one. At 45 K, the R_s of the HTS resonator decreases by another factor of 4 compared with its 77 K value. Device characteristics for the HTS resonator are presented     

一种新型的移动增值服务——动态电话簿

今天的手机采用相对简单的接口就可以进行电话呼叫。虽然相对于传统固定电话拨号略微复杂了一些,但是移动电话接口还是包括了内置电话录和其它崭新的功能。然而,通信远不限于语音通话。现在我们的手机上有文本消息、一键通、图像邮件和多用户游戏。而我们的P C电脑支持即时通信     

The inverse problem utilizing the boundary element method for a nonstandard female torso

This paper proposes a new method of rapidly deriving the transfer matrix for the boundary element method (BEM) forward problem from a tailored female torso geometry in the clinical setting. The method allows rapid calculation of epicardial potentials (EP) from body surface potentials (BSP). The use of EPs in previous studies has been shown to improve the successful detection of the life-threatening cardiac condition--acute myocardial infarction. The MRI scanning of a cardiac patient in the clinical setting is not practical and other methods are required to accurately deduce torso geometries for calculation of the transfer matrix. The new method allows the noninvasive calculation of tailored torso geometries from a standard female torso and five measurements taken from the body surface of a patient. This scaling of the torso has been successfully validated by carrying out EP calculations on 40 scaled torsos and ten female subjects. It utilizes the BEM in the calculation of the transfer matrix as the BEM depends only upon the topology of the surfaces of the torso and the heart, the former can now be accurately deduced, leaving only the latter geometry as an unknown.     

Gecko‐Inspired Dry Adhesive for Robotic Applications

Most geckos can rapidly attach and detach from almost any kind of surface. This ability is attributed to the hierarchical structure of their feet (involving toe pads, setal arrays, and spatulae), and how they are moved (articulated) to generate strong adhesion and friction forces on gripping that rapidly relax on releasing. Inspired by the gecko's bioadhesive system, various structured surfaces have been fabricated suitable for robotic applications. In this study, x–y–z asymmetric, micrometer‐sized rectangular flaps composed of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) were fabricated using massively parallel micro‐electromechanical systems (MEMS) techniques with the intention of creating directionally responsive, high‐to‐low frictional‐adhesion toe pads exhibiting properties similar to those found in geckos. Using a surface forces apparatus (SFA), the friction and adhesion forces of both vertical (symmetric) and angled/tilted (x–y–z asymmetric) microflaps under various loading, unloading and shearing conditIons were investigated. It was found that the anisotropic structure of tilted microflaps gives very different adhesion and tribological forces when articulated along different x–y–z directions: high friction and adhesion forces when articulated in the y–z plane along the tilt (+y) direction, which is also the direction of motion, and weak friction and adhesion forces when articulated against the tilt (–y) direction. These results demonstrate that asymmetric angled structures, as occur in geckos, are required to enable the gecko to optimize the requirements of high friction and adhesion on gripping, and low frictional‐adhesion on releasing. These properties are intimately coupled to a (also optimum) articulation mechanism. We discuss how both of these features can be simultaneously optimized in the design of robotic systems that can mimic the gecko adhesive system.     

Design of an ultra fast pipelined wavelength scheduler for optical burst switching

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is an emerging technology that allows variable size data bursts to be transported directly over DWDM links without encountering O/E/O conversion. In OBS, before the transmission of a data burst, a burst header is transmitted through an electronic control path, setting up and tearing down optical paths on-the-fly. Data bursts can remain in the optical domain and pass through the OBS network transparently. Unfortunately, system performance will be greatly degraded, if burst scheduling requests cannot be processed in time. This article quantitatively studied the negative impact of control path overloading on the performance of OBS networks. Results have shown that control path overloading greatly affects the performance of the OBS routers, especially for systems with large WDM channel counts. In order to remove this performance bottleneck, we have designed and implemented an ultra fast pipelined burst scheduler that is able to process a burst request every two clock cycles, regardless of the number of WDM channels per link. The design has been implemented in Verilog HDL and synthesized to FPGAs. Circuit level simulation results confirm the correctness of the design. The circuit has achieved 100 MHz in Altera Cyclone II devices, allowing the scheduler to process a burst request every 20 ns. To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the fastest implementation of burst scheduling algorithms.     

High-Brightness Wavelength Beam Combined Semiconductor Laser Diode Arrays

We report the wavelength beam combining of an array of high-power high-brightness 970-nm slab-coupled optical waveguide lasers. A 50-W peak power under quasi-continuous-wave (CW) operation was measured in an output beam with a beam quality of M_x,y ²=1.2, and 30 W under CW operation was measured with a beam quality of M_x,y ²=2     

4-bit adder-accumulator at 41-GHz clock frequency in InP DHBT technology

A 41-GHz 4-b adder-accumulator test circuit implemented in InP double heterojunction bipolar transistor (DHBT) technology using 624 transistors is reported. High clock rates are obtained by combining the logic functions into pipelined latches. The adder-accumulator contains a single-level parallel-gated carry circuit that is used as a step toward reduced power consumption. The carry circuit has a maximum clock frequency of 55 GHz. The accumulator architecture employs modular, pipelined 2-b adders and is cascadable to 2 N-bits. The test circuit includes a 4-b digital to analog converter (DAC) that facilitates demonstration of high-speed operation.