February 1983 - Vol. 26 No. 2
Features
Regulation of electronic funds transfer: impact and legal issues
This paper investigates the implications and impact of current legislation on the future of the electronic funds transfer systems (EFT). The relevant statutes are introduced and analyzed. Problem areas are discussed together with examples of court rulings. The investigation reveals that the regulations do not provide enough safeguards for the consumer and do not clear up the ambiguities from a combination of competing laws, regulations, and conflicting jurisdictions. Legislators, on both the national and state level, and federal and state governments need to cooperate more closely to produce uniform legislation that specifically addresses the current problems in an EFT environment. Courts need to realize the legislature's intent and the benefits that can be gained before ruling on the current issues.
The Computer Museum member’s first field trip: the Northbay AN/FSQ7 SAGE site
The Computer Museum's first considered priority is to save history, the second is to display it, and the third is to interpret its historic role.
A simple guide to five normal forms in relational database theory
The concepts behind the five principal normal forms in relational database theory are presented in simple terms.
Monte Carlo debugging: a brief tutorial
Monte Carlo debugging, which has been relied upon for some applications at the author's data center, is briefly discussed with the presentation of some guidelines.
Some factors affecting program repair maintenance: an empirical study
An empirical study of 447 operational commercial and clerical Cobol programs in one Australian organization and two U.S. organizations was carried out to determine whether program complexity, programming style, programmer quality, and the number of times a program was released affected program repair maintenance. In the Australian organization only program complexity and programming style were statistically significant. In the two U.S. organizations only the number of times a program was released was statistically significant. For all organizations repair maintenance constituted a minor problem: over 90 percent of the programs studied had undergone less than three repair maintenance activities during their lifetime.
On the synthesis of decision tables
Synthesis of decision rules, each depicting a part of a decision process, is necessary in order to know the decision process in total perspective and to validate the consistency and the correctness of the decision logic. This paper proposes a method to synthesize a set of decision tables, each one of them representing a part of the decision logic, and thus serves as a tool for the system analyst in the system design phase.
The computational metaphor and quantum physics
Concurrent computational systems, viewed as sets of cooperating processes, are shown to have close analogies in the world of quantum physics. In particular, analogies exist between processes and particles, between a process' state and a particle's mass, between a process'state changes and a particle's velocity, and between interprocess communications and particle interactions. This view allows the application in the computational world of special relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, the law of conservation of momentum, and many of particle physics' fundamental results. This paper describes the basic analogy and some fundamental results. It is the authors' belief that new insights into a computational processes will be gained as the analogy is developed and vice versa. It is conceivable that established results of the computational sciences may contribute to a new understanding of some of the problems of physics. Other process-oriented sciences, such as biology, economics, and psychology, could also benefit from such development.
