CompSys705

Missed beginning of the lecture. Fixing OASIS bugs. State formulas are checked at a CTL node. Path formulas are checked all paths.

Homework: draw CTL for AG EFq and EG AFq.

Minimal set of CTL: EX, EG, EU. Fixed point algorithm to check mdel expressed as minimal CTL. Break the formula into parts. Fixed point algorithms.

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Interview redux

Well after having ran out of time for a proper interview last time, the company managed to sort out transportation for me to get back down to Hamilton for that interview.  I had to wake up at 6 o'clock again to make a 7:40 am InterCity bus from the Sky Tower.  The toilets were third world standard.  Poo land.  There were 7 others on the trip down and took around 2 hours.  I was being a complete tourist and taking random pictures every so often.  When the bus got to the Hamilton bus stop, the first thing I looked for was an outlet for my memory leak.  The weather made for brisk walking.  The time was close to 10am.  So, come to Alexandra Street, I made my way into the KPMG tower and took the lift up to 9.  The lift stopped at level 7 and surprisingly the firmware manager stepped into the lift.  First thing I thought about was the elevator pitch but all I did was raise an eye brow to send an acknowledge signal and he basically did the same so he sent back a ready signal.  At this point we rendezvoused with a hand shake.  Must have been a random sight for the two others in the lift.  So we reached the 9th floor and I got a quick 10 min break to freshen myself.

So, just the firmware guy in a fume ridden room.  First thing to do was to go through the test.  Got asked what I meant when I had (counter + 1) / 16.  Probably wrong syntax but the division was supposed to act as a modulus so the counter value would be between 0 and 15 all the time.  Probably needed the percentage sign.  Next was that RTL diagram with the useless "and" gate that would always be false.  So got asked how I could optimise the circuit.  Simple, take out the and gate and operands.  Then the multiplexer becomes useless and because the binary counter is clocked, the output register is not needed.  Then assuming that the initial state of the counter is not important, you can remove the "+ 1" logic.  All you're left with would be an up counter.

Next question, to do with metastability.  This is where the self rooting comes into play.  First, if there is a 200M clock and a 50M clock and you wanted to transfer data at irregular periods from the higher clocked domain to the lower clocked domain, what problems will you have?  If you have a block in the middle of the two domains, what signals do you need?  How do they communicate?  Assuming that the downstream (50M clock) component can always accept data, what signals can we remove?  Draw the timing graph of a data transfer from the upstream to downstream component.  How would the middle component be able to match the two clocks so that there is no glitching due to each of the clock edges being too close together?  All I can say is that there were a lot of *silence* and stares at the board.  I think the interviewer was very good at hiding the fact that I was pissing him off with my stupidity.  Not enough focus.  So, that was probably the worse than the radio interview I had in year 2 where the lecturer kept saying I was wrong.

So, next question.  I think I had an advantage because I was told the same question after the first interview.  The objective is to make a mono-stable component.  The component accepts one pulse and outputs a long pulse.  The pulses are synchronous.  Since I knew a loop would be a fail, I used a variable to keep track of the down counting from 100,000.  The next question was, what would be synthesised?  Pretty much just a down counter with its 17 bit long output simplified down to a 1 bit number through bitwise "or".  The result of the "or" is the output.  No need to use compare logic.  A few control signals are needed and some use of precedence to get expected behaviour.  Much easier question.

The next thing on the list was just general questions.  What was the hardest thing you have come across?  What final year project are you working on?  Where did you learn VHDL from and what projects did you make?  The interviewer was writing quite a lot from the rather short answers that I was giving him.  I'm not very descriptive by nature when it comes to useful information.  Or maybe I'm able to "get to the point" super efficiently?

The interview concluded after about one and a half hours.  Not as long as the others.  Tough though.  There were also some Waikato University students there.  There were wearing similar outfits to one another.  I don't think they are a competition for us because they looked quite young.  Chances are they are only interested in a summer job.  One of the guys started a chat with me.  Started with the obvious question: Are you here for an interview?  Anyway, they didn't learn much about VHDL but they have used micros quite a bit.  They also learnt C# but nothing much apart from C for programming their micros.  They took the absurdly hard algorithm, C and Linux tests as well.

So anyway, the HR person escorted me to the QuickCat shuttle and luckily we got there in time because the driver was already outside waiting and had already phoned saying that I was not there.  There was one other passenger inside and they were going to the airport.  Sounded like they came from Ireland.  Got back to Uni at about 3 pm and started panicking for the 704 presentation.  But first, had to go to the Marae for 403.

Fin251

Lecturer went through the different valuation models. Couldn't quite get them all down. Going through another WACC and EV example. Module finished.

Lecturer is now answering questions a head of the test.

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EngGen403

Whenua is the land and after birth. Okanagan is the relationship between living systems. RMA formed to stop numerous tribunal claims and the abandonment of costly proposals.

Consultation: enough time, reality, genuine effort, intermediate situation, informed, multiple solutions. Talk to the Hapu not the Iwi. The Iwi will see the approach as a threat. The Hapu manages the land so it's more appropriate to negotiate with them.

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CompSys704

Got to lecture late again and seems like I missed the important part if it. Lecture continuing from analog to digital sampling. Image frequencies, aliasing. Hardware implementation can be more elegant and require less corresponding instructions. Lots of multiplier and adder units. DSP have limited range and decimal format. FPGAs have lots of hardcore multiplier units built into it.

DSP are good data processors but are bad control processors. Merge with general processors.

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EngGen403

Indigenous knowledge and sustainability issues. Lecture has introduced himself in Maori which is basically by telling us the environment of his home.

Indigenous views versus western views. Western views are more concerned with extracting maximum value and money. Indigenous views are more concerned with the interaction of nature and its binding forces.

Maori environmental resource management passed onto generations as mythical stories that are memorable to the children. Whakapapa: Maori genealogy of the environment.

Mauri is the binding lifeforce and intrinsic values of ecosystems: social, economic, environmental, cultural. A distinction between using NPV calculations to make a sustainablility decision because long term effects are not taken into account.

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Fin251

Test on Friday just before mid-semester break. (Karen is absolutely screwed for it.....yay~!!!)

Return in bonds can be calculated by constant growth model but it is not the preferred model. Bonds should be valued by the yield to maturity.

Karen has forgotten to turn off the sound of her macbook therefore she is too scared to turn it on...

Preferred stocks are valued by the perpetuity model because the dividend is assumed to be constant and expected.

Lecturer is going through a Weighted Average Cost of Capital example. Calculate the percentage of capital from the different sources. Calculate the return from each source. Bonds are taxed. Multiple each weight with it's respective return.

CAPM: Capital asset pricing model. Calculated from face value of return with a multiple of the risk premium added on.

WACC should only be used if the project is a "carbon copy" of the firm. If that is the case then only invest in a project I it's IRR is greater than the return demanded by debt. Carbon copy meaning the nature of the project being very similar to the firm's normal operations.

Increasing debt will increase financial risk, lenders demand higher return, shareholders may require higher return. The WACC may actually increase because the debt no longer remains cheap.

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CompSys704

Lecturer talking about digital signal processing. There are some advantages like no additive noise, reliable reproduction and disadvantages like processing time and introduction of quantization noise.

Typical operations: convolution, correlation, digital filtering, transformation, and modulation.

Input filter > ADC > Digital Processor > DAC > Output filter

Low pass filteringto reduce bandwidth and noise which is usually high frequency. The rest of the lecture is basically a rehash of communications systems.

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CompSys705

Verification up to now has been implementation verification. Now into the design or property verification.

Static logics stay fixed over time. Dynamic logic is temporal and is dependent on time, modal logic.

Proposition

Statement that is true or false. Formula: a statement built from symbols.

Propositional logic

A set of propositions and a set of connectives. Every proposition is a formula.

Predicate

Verb and its complement.

Predicate logic

Made of predicate symbols, constant symbols, variables, function symbols and connectives. Atom is the simplest predicate formula.

Logic based verification. Kripke structure = < Q, q, Atomic Propositions, ->, L>. Labeling function assigns outputs to states. Transition relation is total to imply no dead locking states. A path is such that a state is related to another state.

Computational tree logic

A tree that starts from a state and keeps building as paths continue to be taken. Basically a graph unrolled in time.

Linear temporal logics

Going up a tree

Branching time logics

Going down the tree.

Temporal operators

X: next time, F: future, G: global, U: until.

Path quantifiers

E: existential, A: universal.

Every term must be preceded by a path quantifier to be considered CTL.

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Fin251

When cosidering the risk (beta), consider the risk of the project and not the risk of the company. Cyclical revenue or costs infers a high beta value because of variability.

On to topic 6. Cost of capital: in terms of the firm, it is the expected return it's investors expect (how much it costs to borrow). Capital structure: how the firm's capital is made up. Weighted average cost of capital (WACC) made up of debt, preference shares and ordinary shares. Preference shares rank ahead of ordinary shares. Dividends are fixed for preference shares.

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EngGen403 tutorial

Tutorial today was slightly awkward.  Tutor made a good job of aligning us "immigrants" with the Treat of Waitangi by saying other countries would have gone through some sort of land wars and the drawing up of some sort of privileges in the later years for the natives.

Not sure what use we have for the Resource Management Act.  The indirect cases would be supply lines for electronics being disturbed because of building consent issues or a guy chopping down a tree, or the use of unsustainable materials, or the use of environmentally unfriendly materials.  Poo Land.

Lastly we had to practise singing a Maori song.

Fin251

30% Bonds and 70% Stocks will give you a good portfolio. Infinite diversification will not remove all the risk from your portfolio. It will reach a limit (market risk). For an investor with good diversification, the measure of risk is how the portfolio risk will change with each additional stock. Market portfolio: includes assets that are easy to value ~metals, ~real estate, bills, stocks, bonds, ~art.

Beta: sensitivity of stock return to market return. Market risk premium: difference between the expected expected market return and Treasury bonds. Capital Asset Pricing Model gives the return on a stock that takes into account the systematic and market risk of the stock. Doesn't take into account for company size and value/growth factor.

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EngGen403

Integrated environment management and sustainability in New Zealand. Integrated environmental management: Nominative + Strategic + Operational. Legislation passed to better care for the environment in times of development.

Administrative reforms

Introducing ministries and commissioners.

Legislative reforms

Rules to follow.

Resource Management (promotes but does not define the use of resources). Regulates use and protection of air and water. Sustainable management of natural and physical resources. Produce an integrated effects based policies. Improve public access to planning and project specifications. Improve Maori consultation. Establishes a specialist Environmental Court.

Building Act. Minerals. Forests. Fisheries. Resource consents still required for external activities.

Lecturer going through a wind farm example. Seems like section 5 (sustainable management) is the main stumbling block for project approval.

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CompSys704

Got to lecture 30 min late because u was busy proof-reading my sustainability assignment. Wasted. Anyway, the lecturer is talking about the Kahn Process Network. In reality FIFOs (destructive) of unlimited lengths are required. If the buffers were unlimited then the process would be deterministic. Process works on concurrent systems and scheduling is dynamic.

Dataflow Process Networks specify when data is set to be processed. Tokens (number of data packets) specified statically.

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EngGen403

Lecture on the Treaty of Waitangi. Since 1987 New Zealand have focussed little on the purpose encapsulated by the Treaty but more on the words that appears in it. Act of Parliament: highest source of law in New Zealand. What is Reasonable? Crown? Partnership? Two friends got owned by the lecturer asking them for definitions.

Some acts looked at: energy, minerals. Section 6 states all persons exercising power must take all 4 factors into account.

Treaty principals not race based law, rather, property rights. Lecturer keeps hovering over to us. Dangerous. A lot of the consultation appears to have a spiritual basis. The Crown still vetoes the recommendations by Maori consultants.

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Fin251

Lecturer seems to be going through an example of the last question of the assignment. Calculating the weighted discount rate. More examples of calculating mean, variance and standard deviation.

Risk premiums: maturity is the extra return from a long term security, market premium is the return on stocks in excess of risk free return. Risk adverse: taking in risk for higher return. Diversification: spreading risk among different investment. Unique risk: unsystematic,
risk affecting only one firm. Market risk: systematic, economy wide sources of risk that affects the overall stockmarket.

Market risk is the only risk you should be compensating for because a diversified portfolio should already be compensating for unique risk.

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CompSys704

Going through the HiDRA general architecture again with multiple processors - slaves and masters. Shares memory blocks are divided into two - half is used or slave passing data to the master and the other half for master passing data to the slave.

CRAL instructions. These are concurrent reactive functions with 4 pseudo instructions.

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CompSys705

Bisimulation. Whenever one process does an action, the other process must also be able to take the same action and both processes must reach the same state.

Partition refinement: separating a set into mutually exclusive sets. Greatest fixed point: start with the largest set and apply a transformation function such that the next set settles down to itself. Least fixed point: start with the smallest set and apply a function such that it continues to grow until it reaches saturation.

Going through the bisinulation algorithm which is quite a complex ball of steps. matchP is a set where the elements belongs to the partition such that the transitions on an action is not null or itself.

Weak bisimulation is observational equivalence.

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Fin251

Continuing with inflation example.

Real & flexible options: making follow-on investments (following projects will make a higher return bit requires the initial investment), bailing out or abandoning (selling the project for a high value), switching production (flexible facilities), time investment (delaying or fast tracking based on valuations of product being sold).

New module on risk and the cost of capital opportunity. Volatility: shares > bonds > bills. Risk: the dispersion of possible outcomes around the expected outcome. Measured statistically with the standard deviation.

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Fusion of ICT and RT for quality of life

ICT: information communication technology
RT: robot technology

Two big trends: tendung towards or at a ubiquitous society. Ubiquitous society is society in which innovation of society occurs through the improvement of industrial productivity. The steps in realization by things being intelligent and networking: computerization, online step (cyber space), convergence step (broadband), then the ubiquitous step.

Networking + smart + mobility. Diffusion of digital convergence in social economy. IT based convergence -> industry + industry. Convergence between different genre -> generate new trends. Three areas in future digital convergence: Human + IT, Things + IT, Space + IT.

The objective of paradigm change is the improvement in the quality of life: technology, social structure, culture, physical. Intelligent services: context aware, personalized and customized, adaptive, automative. Quality of life: social aspects - happiness, good relationship, health - physical, mental intellectual, satisfaction - work, sacrifice, happiness. Intelligent services should improve people's quality of life. Examples: I-pot and the Nike+ products.

The use of the Internet for entertainment is great in Korea. A lot of money to be had in creating online versions of reallife entertainment solutions. Personal life extending into the Internet. Some fairly bad influences on personal life: online brotherhood, dialog through SMS, netizen communication language, always on generation.

Concept of ubiquitous robot companion: robots that provide various requested services whenever and wherever. Sensors embedded everywhere in the environment. Use distribution of robot parts to utilize the maximum robot function. Robot simulacrum protocol used for communicating with thin client robots.

Research into providing service for the elderly throgh care robots. Robot made for gauging the health of the elderly person. It is not used for taking care of them.

The assumption is that devices are used as the primary way of dealling with people's quality of life. Robots are still a foreign so people's initial reactions are probably negative. Emotion needs to be added torobots to give them a human touch. Improve the number of smiles.

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EngGen403 tutorial

Simple tutorial session. Reflecting on this week's lectures. Risk management. The rest of the tutorial session was on assignment 2.

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Fin251

Got to lecture late and "fixed" a broken table. Good old engineering skills. Lecturer going through an example with a company's projected project expenditure. If the NPV is positive, you can be sure that the IRR will also be positive.

Challenges to budgeting: ensuring consisten forecasts, conflict of interests, forecast bias, identifying good projects. Handling uncertainty meet in projects. Accounting break even is flawed because it doesn't take into account the initial outlay of the investment that needs to be recovered. NPV is better as it turns the initial outlay into an annuity. Sensitivity, scenario and break even analysis.

Going back to inflation. Be consistent in handling inflation. Use nominal interest rates with nominal cash flows. Likewise, use real interest rates with real cash flows. Real analysis is harder.

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EngGen403

Risks in the market and non-market place. Non-market things are markets that are not traded like wildlife or air. Modelling failure rate. Pretty much using economics and betting as a way to calculate risk. The analogy is a little far fetched for us engineers.

Best to look at finance notes.

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CompSys704

Was at a job interview so missed the last lecture. RTOS modelling in hardware. Model system and decide what hardware features should be taken advantage of by using simulation.

Motivation for reactive processors: remove polling of environment, Esterel. Current Esterel approaches to compilation: software that creates code that can run on general processors, hardware that creates gate-level netlist or state machines. New proposed approach uses reactive processors to create simplified code and speed ups.

ReMIC has a non-reactive core with a RISC like processor. Going through the data and control path of the processor.

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EngGen403

Engineering and medicine. There were cases where mechanical failure of Bjork Shiley valves caused patients' hearts to fail. This is quite critical because of the location of these valves in such a critical organ.

Some factors: Strut failures due to fracturing of wielded legs, opening angle, size, age, material used, people who wielded the struts.

Markov analysis done for who should get surgery to replace the valves. Has a confidence interval as well as the average success rate. Ethics coming into play. Negligence and salvaging bad products. Class lawsuits against Pfizer (new owner).

Types of ethics that can be invoked:

• Relativism
• Divine
• Utilitarian
• Deontology
• Virtue

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Fin251

Missed last week's lecture but oh well. Going into investment timing where the value of what you want to buy is changing over a period.

Comparing investments of unequal periods: Find the lowest common multiple between the periods so that you are comparing fairly, or change the cash flow stream into an eqivalent annual annuity, or calculate the profitability index when capital is limited. Capital rationing for setting limits on funds for an investment.

New module: cash flows. Incremental: indirect efforts, sunk costs, opportunity costs, investment in working capital, overhead costs, ignore financing flows.

Calculating cash flow: investment from fixed assets (initial/salvage) + investment from working capital (accounts receivables/inventory) + from operations (revenue - cash expenses - taxes paid).

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Interview

Just spent the whole day down in Hamilton for a job interview. Six others, all from the University of Auckland, travelled down. Took around one and a half hours each way. I wouldn't have been a pleasant journey if you didn't make sure your bladder was empty. If not, you'd be squirming to flush our your memory leak. Core dumps can be archived.

The first test was an IQ test which constisted mainly of words and number associations. Then there were different tests for people who were going for different positions: VHDL and software. For VHDL, the test was not timed. The software test, which I was originally given, came in three parts: Algorithms, Linux proficiency, and C code.

The algorithm part was not do-able at all.  I didn't understand the significance of the big O notation, space, and amortise of the functions we had to write:

• For a singly linked list a with an unknown number of elements n, write a function called get_n that takes in the list and a number k that returns the (n - k)th element from the list.
• For a singly linked list a, write a function called check_linked that checks for cycles in the linked list and returns true if there are or false if not.
• For an array a with a known number of elements n, write a function that rotates the list at element k.
• Something about having a list of page tables that can be written to by Applications and asking how we could make sure they weren't being used by other Applications requesting the pages being written to in an efficient way.
• A question that was too long for me to remember.  Something about managing a list of resources and figuring out the resource intensive ones.  They noted that going through the whole list would be too inefficient so they proposed a relaxed algorithm which had something to do with n bins and sets.
• A router can delay the transmission of packets.  There will be 24*60*60 = 86,400 different values for time.  Find a way to reduce the number of values below 1000.

The Linux proficiency test was hard as well.  It was a collection of short questions mainly about what commands should be used to get certain information and some administration questions.

The C test was a bit better but my brain wasn't holding up well enough.  Some of the questions were:

• What is wrong with this: x = x++;  ?
• Find the bug in the internet checksum code.  (Casting of addr inconsistently)
• In this source code, why is the assert always failing?  (Passing of a pointer and allocating memory to it and asserting that the pointer is no longer a null reference)
• Explain why the outputs are like this?  (int a[10] created and print outs of its size and each of its elements are made)
• What is another way to do the same: node_t->size ?
• What other ways are there to do a[2] without using the ++, += and comma operators?
• Write a recursive function that performs the factorial calculation.
• Complete the function for inserting an element into a linked list.

Well after those three tests, we were given a small tour of the office space by the Appliance person.  They seemed really bubbly and joyful but we were too brain dead to laugh with him.  We were pretty quiet.  So after killing a bit of time through more talking and asking of random questions, lunch was finally ready.  The company has a free lunch on Fridays so we got to join in.  The way they laid out the food, it was more like a "make your own sandwich" sort of thing. We were also made to sit amongst the other workers so we could another feel for the company. Alienating ourselves by us all sitting at the same table would have looked awkward.  The table I was at, there was an American guy who worked for AoL and some other small companies and he did some security work for the predecessor to CIA.  We ended up talking about different types of briberies and using buffer overflows for hacking.

So after lunch had finished, we got started with the interviewing process.  I was picked to go first and funny enough I didn't get too nervous.  Got asked a few questions about what specific part of a project I enjoyed at University and what paper I found most useful.  They went over the C test with me which I got 6/10 and I think they were pleased with it; especially the x = x++ question, thought they were debating as to whether my answer was "the" correct answer.  Then I got asked about the different types of storage class specifiers for variables; auto, extern, void, static, and register.  Somehow bashed my way through that with the help of "braces" to explain the scope and lifetime of the variables.  Then I got to ask my questions and the important one was:  How was it decided that certain candidates would be given the software test or the VHDL test?  The answer was, they considered our CV and the papers we took and decided which areas they felt we'd be best suited.  Additionally they were interviewing people for the Card software side rather than just Appliances so that cleared things up a bit.  But I did stress that I had expected to do the VHDL test rather than the software test since I expressed my interest in that area in the feedback form when the company came to University for an exhibition.  So after that realisation, I got to do the VHDL test and I ended up taking about one and a half hours to do it which wasn't very long considering the others took more than two hours each.

Some of the VHDL questions:

• Given this circuit, express it in VHDL.  How can you increase the clock frequency of this circuit?
• Find 3 syntax and 1 functional error in the following VHDL code.  Why will this VHDL code not be used when implementing on a Xilinx FPGA.
• What are the disadvantages to a logic element with 4 inputs to an LUT with a flip-flop at the output?
• What are the disadvantages of clocked memory resources?
• What is the metastability problem?  How can you make a circuit more tolerant of metastable signals?
• Draw the output for the clock selector circuit.  What is the problem with this circuit?  Fix the problem identified and draw your circuit and expected output.

So after finishing this test, I had nothing to do since the interviews for VHDL were taking a very long time.  I found another guy who had finished his interview so we decided to take a stroll through Hamilton but we didn't get far from the office when it started to rain.  We waited underneath some shelter for a while, hoping that the rain would ease back.  But it didn't so we decided to go back into the office.  That was a bit sad.  We got back into the office and now more people had finished their interviews.  So the usual discussion about what questions were asked and feedback the interviewers gave began.  It didn't seem like anybody had much of an advantage.  Everybody got perplexed by the questions the interviewers asked.  The first guy who got interviewed for VHDL only got out after an hour and half of interviewing; which is a very long time, indeed.  Apparently they were asked to complete more questions on a whiteboard.

I never got the chance to get an interview with the VHDL guys which was a shame because it seemed more of appropriate to have been interviewed by them and I was up for the whiteboard challenge!  Well I was told that even though I didn't get interviewed, the VHDL test that I did should be enough for them to figure out if they wanted to interview me later on.  Hope they do, or hope that I got the Card job.  Either way, having a job in Auckland would be good.  That was pretty much the end of the day.  The cab had arrived so we were off back home!

Fin251

Came to lecture late because the bus was very late. Lecture seems to be on growth decomposition. Something to do with companies reinvesting profit (plowback) into new projects with a certain level of Return on Equity or giving the profit back to investors (payback). Present Value of Growth Opportunities. It's better to allow the company to reinvest some of it's profits into projects that derive higher return on equity than the required rate of return demanded by
investors.

Lecturer using the Gordon ratio to explain the 25% market downturn. Dividends are going down because profits are getting tighter. Investors are looking for higher returns because investors are more risk-adverse.

Starting on a new module concerned with investment appraisal techniques. Using NPV to determine of the project is worth while.

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EngGen403

Lecture seems to be focussed on design safety. Liabilities. Difference between risk we accept and risk imposed on us. Story telling a few engineering cases where engineering work has failed people though the identification of responsible parties are a bit vague. In other words, the lecturer stops short of suggesting who the responsible party/parties are.

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CompSys704

The last instruction of each task is a task complete instruction which stores the context of the task when it is executed again. Can compare two input signals in the Reactive Functional Unit.

Hybrid Reactive Architecture is biased towards FPGA implementation because of the use of embedded shared memories. Allows the integration of application specific programmes which is hardware with ReMIC which is software.

SystemJ: Java + Esterel + Communicating synchronous processClick domains connected with asynchronous channels. Java is non-deterministic but has threading support. Each clock domain contains reactions which are sequential instructions combined concurrently with signals between each other. SystemJ source code is translated to hardware and software components throgh Asynchronous Graph Code.

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EngEng403

Lecture started with another prepared speech.

Science

A body of knowledge or way of thinking.

Difference between pure and applied science? Sometimes science can be influenced by the scientist and the interpretations of words used. Falsifiable claims said to be scientific.

Lecture seems geared at creating good scientific claims. Telling us the motivations behind experiments. Sociologists and physicists playing pranks on each other by submitting bogus papers.

Assessing one's conscience when undertaking scientific work. Taking into account what is happening around them. Not disclosing information or findings that could be used for harm.

Whistle blower protection.

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Fin251

Continuation from valuating shares. Expected return is dividend plus resulting capital gain. Recursive Valuatuon Formula. Discount the future share price by your return. Investment horizon: length of time a sum of money is to be invested. Apparently, all investors will reach the same valuation no matter what this investment horizon is.

Instead of discountign future dividends to reach the final selling price, use some assumptions: Zero growth where EPS = Dividends per share; Constant growth where dividends grow in a compounded; Non - constant growth where a piecewise dividend rate is used.

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CompSys704

Original ReMIC: no support for context switching or execution of multiple tasks. Scheduling support being added. Each task has one external release signal. Task abstraction in the processor made of task descriptor and code. Task table is used to keep the task descriptors and the executing task index is used to point to the active task. All tasks are defined and ready to run and given a priority and the table entries are sorted by priority.

ReMIC extended to be realtime. Timers can be defined and connect timeout signals to task release signals.

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CompSys705

Did a short review of last week's lecture. Short example on writing a CCS for a simple communicating process model. Suppression of internal signals through restriction.

Two types of semantics: operational (rules) and denotational (objects). External non-determinism: system makes a choice. Notion of concurrency is interleaved as it is assumed that asynchronous concurrency is employed by the system.

Relation

A subset of SxS
Let S = {1, 2}
Then SxS = {(1, 1), (1, 2), (2, 1), (2, 2)}
R = {(1, 1), (2, 2), (1, 2)}
Must be reflexive, symmetric and transitive.

Processes with the same trace set may not behave equivalently.

Homework: Poset, Preorder, Total order, Equivalence, Power set.

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Fin251

Long term bonds are more price sensitive. Determining the value of a bond based on its risk; default premium. Influenced by credit rating (speculative/investment grade) and priority of being paid the face value. One basis point = 0.01%.

Corporate bond innovations: zero coupons where bonds are sold at a deep discount; floating rate bonds have their coupon rate reset periodically; convertible bond where bonds can be converted to shares.

Lecturer forgot that he skipped a couple of slides on Wednesday. Realised yield is tangible. Bond valuation now finished.

Valuing shares: Net Tangible Asset; earnings per share * P/E multiple; discounted cash flow.

Limitations of NTA

Based on historical cost less accumulated depreciation, ignores intangible assets and future growth. Liquidation value.

Limitations of multiples

Not practical with negative cash flow or growing rapidly, selecting comparable companies to guess P/E ratio, earnings not the same as cash flow, P/E ratio is based on market price which is speculative.

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