University of the Nations

Twenty-six young scientists, mainly from Germany and Brazil, participated in the workshop “How do we want to live tomorrow?” and identified four central research topics: a) integrated watershed management in urban regions, b) sustainable sanitation and rainwater management, c) micropollutants and d) information flow and people’s involvement.

This paper develops a mathematical characterisation of object-oriented concepts by defining an observation-oriented semantics for an object-oriented language (OOL) with a rich variety of features including subtypes, visibility, inheritance, dynamic binding and polymorphism. The language is expressive enough for the specification of object-oriented designs and programs. We also propose a calculus based on this model to support both structural and behavioural refinement of object-oriented designs. We take the approach of the development of the design calculus based on the standard predicate logic in Hoare and He’s Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP). We also consider object reference in terms of object identity as values and mutually dependent methods.KeywordsObject OrientationRefinementSemanticsUTP

This paper is towards the development of a methodology for object-oriented software development. The intention is to support effective use of a formal model for specifying and reasoning during the requirements analysis and design of a software development process. The overall purpose is to enhance the application of the Unified Modelling Language (UML) with a formal semantics in the Rational Unified Software Development Process (RUP). The semantic framework defines the meaning of some UML submodels. It identifies both the static and dynamic relationships among these submodels. Thus, the focus of this paper is the development of a semantic model to consistently combine a use-case model and a conceptual class diagram to form a system specification.

Enhancing Global Governance analyzes the means by which global governance has been promoted by innovative diplomatic practices. The impetus for a new diplomacy has emerged not from traditional channels, but through a series of cross cutting coalitions among like-minded states and civil society. The question of how these alternative leadership forms have been expressed through the United Nations system, together with an evaluation of the impact they have achieved, provides the fundamental theme of this book. Following an overview of the frustrations concerning the nature of leadership from the UN Security Council, experts look at the manner in which innovative diplomatic practices played out in two significant case studies: the development of the Ottawa Treaty to ban anti-personnel landmines and the campaign to establish an international court. The book then reviews the application of new diplomacy approaches, first in the commercial domain of international activity, particularly in the application of codes of conduct that would affect both states and global business, and then in selected areas of the expanded security agenda; including child soldiers and the exportation of diamonds from areas of conflict.

A distributed real-time program is usually executed on a limited set of hardware resources and is required to satisfy timing constraints, despite anticipated hardware failures. Static analysis of the timing properties of such programs is often infeasible. This paper shows how to formally reason about these programs when scheduling decisions are made on-line and take into account deadlines, load and hardware failures. We use Timed CCS as a process language, define a language to describe anticipated faults and apply a version of a μ-calculus to specify and verify timing properties. This allows the property of schedulability to be the outcome of an equation-solving problem. And unlike conventional reasoning, the logic is fault-monotonic: if correctness is proved for a number of faults, correctness for any subset of these faults is guaranteed.KeywordsDynamic ScheduleSchedule DecisionHardware FailureShared ObjectSporadic TaskThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The target of mounting but often misplaced skepticism in the wake of the treachery and obscenity that today marks Bosnia-Herzegovina, the United Nations is in a state of real crisis.This collection of essays, while not uncritical of the United Nations, evinces faith in the UN's future.The product of a collaboration begun in 1992 between Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems, a journal of The University of Iowa's Program in International and Comparative Legal Studies (Iowa City), and the World Order Models Project (New York City), it aims to celebrate and progressively influence the future of the United Nations on the occasion of this, its fiftieth, anniversary: 26 June 1995.As we state in our Introduction, it seeks "to assist the process of giving direction and shape to the future of the United Nations and to do so in a manner that is consistent with notions of human dignity and humane governance.