Daily Archives: November 16, 2016

Freedom in the 50 States 2015-2016 | Fiscal Freedom | Cato …

Posted: November 16, 2016 at 4:29 am

William P. Ruger

William P. Ruger is Vice President of Policy and Research at the Charles Koch Institute and Charles Koch Foundation. Ruger is the author of the biography Milton Friedman and a coauthor of The State of Texas: Government, Politics, and Policy. His work has been published in International Studies Quarterly, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, Armed Forces and Society, and other outlets. Ruger earned an AB from the College of William and Mary and a PhD in politics from Brandeis University. He is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.

Jason Sorens is Lecturer in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. His primary research interests include fiscal federalism, public policy in federal systems, secessionism, and ethnic politics. His work has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Peace Research, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, and other academic journals, and his book Secessionism: Identity, Interest, and Strategy was published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2012. Sorens received his BA in economics and philosophy, with honors, from Washington and Lee University and his PhD in political science from Yale University.

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Freedom in the 50 States 2015-2016 | Fiscal Freedom | Cato ...

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Memetics – Chielens

Posted: at 4:24 am

Introduction

When Richard Dawkins (pictured) coined the term meme in The Selfish Gene, he gave food for thought to the scientific community of the time. In the eleventh chapter of his book, Dawkins briefly introduces a unit of cultural transmission (189-201). Many other scientists since then have commented on and reacted to this theory. A controversy for one, a welcome new light in the dark world of science for the other, memetics has slowly emerged from Dawkins book and now has truly become an interdisciplinary field which has found proponents (and opponents) in sociology, biology, psychology and other fields.

Other scientist such as Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter and Susan Blackmore have become proponents of this theory and helped to make it to what it is now. The field even has its own Scientific Journal and is widely used in computer science (memetic algorithms) and marketing (viral marketing).

A lot of publications, scientific or popular press, have had memes as main subject. Susan Blackmore wrote the basic book on memetics, the Meme-Machine and more recently, Kate Distin wrote The Selfish Meme, a critical reassesment of Dawkins theory.

This section is only a brief introduction. I would advise the reader who is willing to delve in to the depths of memetics to take a closer look at the recommended reading section.

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Resource Based Economy Anonymous Medium

Posted: at 4:24 am

Survival of the Species

It has been stated on numerous occasions that the principal driving force for human achievement is working for the reward of monetary gain. The argument is a fallacy and isnt true. Even most communist countries use various forms of capitalist systems in their economic frame sets, and yet we have only a portion of people achieving a better life.

Time and time again weve heard the argument, without money there is no motivation or incentive to push humanity forward. Money being a motivator for human participation, for human achievement is flawed. The prime motivating factor of humanity is the survival of our species. It is inherent, it is in our genetic code, and it is in our very core ideology that we must try our damnedest to survive by nearly any means necessary. Our ancient ancestors constantly invented new ways of surviving, new tools for hunting without being motivated by money. They had a drive to survive in the harshest environments, and they prevailed because of their achievements, not because they got paid for hunting and gathering. The most incredible inventions in human history were not driven by greed, but by survival and war. The considerations behind creating one of the most destructive forces on the planet, the atomic bomb was to end World War II more swiftly. The end result of using the bomb was two destroyed Japanese cities, hundreds of thousands of people dead and an arms race between the east and west which resulted in humanity reaching for the stars.

Money is actually repressing humanity, inhibiting exploration, inhibiting the insurance of the survival of our species. We have a surplus of food; many poor people could easily be fed but are neglected because they dont have the right to eat because they didnt earn it. Its an enslaved mindset.

From the point of time when humanity started to walk upright, our survival has instinctively been territorial. Weve created borders, territories, and countries to insure various methods of segregationist survival. Even though humans are social creatures, who need love and affection, we still attune ourselves to our primal nature of territorial ownership. With all of humanitys great technological achievements, we need to stop thinking that survival of our species is only earth bound, since technically we are all currently stuck on this rock called earth. We, as a species need to move off planet to insure our survival since we have the technological means to do so. We are coded for survival; we are coded to explore our surroundings. To stay stationary on a rock which may eventually endure an extinction level event for humanity when we have the technological means to prevent our extinction goes against everything in our fiber of being.

Resource Based Economy, a Holistic Approach to Humanities Survival

A Resource Based Economy (RBE) is an economy that runs off of the current finite resources in our surroundings to insure human sustainability that has no use of money, no use of barter or trade. Part of the structuring of a RBE would be to insure humanity has developed awareness and consciousness that we are all one family and that we are all equal no matter what race, culture or religion we are. Technology and science are used to their fullest measure to develop and manage the planets resources to provide abundance for everyone without stripping the planet bare. In a RBE there is no state or government entity that owns earths resources, all resources are distributed and shared on a planetary level.

Some RBE advocates have suggested the need to rebuild new cities completely from the ground up, but that would be a blatant misuse of resources. We already have cities that we occupy; people have homes that they are attached to. It would take fewer resources to adapt already existing cities to fit the needs of the people.

We must first recognize that we live on a planet with finite resources, and we will eventually run the risk of having a resource shortfall, especially with the population explosions predicted for the near future. If there is a resource shortfall it would be detrimental to our species as a whole. We must eventually move away from extracting resources such as ore and minerals from earth, and utilize our technology to acquire the mass amounts of infinite resources that can be attained only in outer space. Setting up off world colonies, having robotic harvesters in the asteroid belt, mining missions to dead planets and even instituting food production off world would greatly improve humanitys chances at survival.

Currently, humanity is in despair. We have abundance shortfalls because corporations and governments rely on outdated systems that are thousands of years old. Poverty, homelessness and starvation only exist because we allow them to exist. Degradation of human life only exists because we allow it to exist.

Eventually, humanity will come to a point (and were close to that point) where it will have to make a decision. Insure the survival of our species and accept that we are a global community or continue down the path of greed and selfishness, initiating an ultimate slow decay and extinction of the human race.

Automation is on the rise, and it will continue to become more prevalent. As unemployment rises because of automated servants, workers and artificial intelligence taking over human labor and thinking, how will our future progeny pay bills under the current economic model? Understand that Moores Law is in effect; computing power tends to double itself every two years. Eventually, computers, machines, robots and Artificial Intelligence's will be in every occupation. They will learn to fix themselves, they will learn to troubleshoot and do anything a human would be able to do in any situation eventually. What then? We need a new economic model that would be symbiotic with our technology; the current capitalist economic model would only create a complete dystopian atmosphere for nearly every human on the planet. Why not embrace an economic model that would allow all humans who wished to participate in it (voluntarily) to flourish?

The only holistic approach that can be identified right now that would secure humanities future would be to embrace a RBE. Continuing on our careless capitalist corptocracy will insure that humanity eventually becomes a forgotten remnant of the universe we occupy. No one enjoys belonging to a scarcity based economic system, unless theyre at the top of the food chain.

Scarcity is an illusion.

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Test automation – Wikipedia

Posted: at 4:24 am

In software testing, test automation is the use of special software (separate from the software being tested) to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes.[1] Test automation can automate some repetitive but necessary tasks in a formalized testing process already in place, or perform additional testing that would be difficult to do manually. Test automation is critical for continuous delivery and continuous testing.

Some software testing tasks, such as extensive low-level interface regression testing, can be laborious and time-consuming to do manually. In addition, a manual approach might not always be effective in finding certain classes of defects. Test automation offers a possibility to perform these types of testing effectively. Once automated tests have been developed, they can be run quickly and repeatedly. Many times, this can be a cost-effective method for regression testing of software products that have a long maintenance life. Even minor patches over the lifetime of the application can cause existing features to break which were working at an earlier point in time.

There are many approaches to test automation, however below are the general approaches used widely:

Test automation tools can be expensive, and are usually employed in combination with manual testing. Test automation can be made cost-effective in the long term, especially when used repeatedly in regression testing.For example A test case for common flow of an application can be a good candidate for test automation. such test case required to be executed (regression testing) every time when there is new future or enhancement done in the application. Using test automation, Manual testing effort can be eliminated.

In automated testing the Test Engineer or Software quality assurance person must have software coding ability, since the test cases are written in the form of source code which, when run, produce output according to the assertions that are a part of it.

One way to generate test cases automatically is model-based testing through use of a model of the system for test case generation, but research continues into a variety of alternative methodologies for doing so.[citation needed] In some cases, the model-based approach enables non-technical users to create automated business test cases in plain English so that no programming of any kind is needed in order to configure them for multiple operating systems, browsers, and smart devices.[2]

What to automate, when to automate, or even whether one really needs automation are crucial decisions which the testing (or development) team must make. Selecting the correct features of the product for automation largely determines the success of the automation. Automating unstable features or features that are undergoing changes should be avoided.[3]

A growing trend in software development is the use of testing frameworks such as the xUnit frameworks (for example, JUnit and NUnit) that allow the execution of unit tests to determine whether various sections of the code are acting as expected under various circumstances. Test cases describe tests that need to be run on the program to verify that the program runs as expected.

Test automation mostly using unit testing is a key feature of agile software development, where it is known as test-driven development (TDD). Unit tests are written to define the functionality before the code is written. However, these unit tests evolve and are extended as coding progresses, issues are discovered and the code is subjected to refactoring.[4] Only when all the tests for all the demanded features pass is the code considered complete. Proponents argue that it produces software that is both more reliable and less costly than code that is tested by manual exploration.[citation needed] It is considered more reliable because the code coverage is better, and because it is run constantly during development rather than once at the end of a waterfall development cycle. The developer discovers defects immediately upon making a change, when it is least expensive to fix. Finally, code refactoring is safer when unit testing is used; transforming the code into a simpler form with less code duplication, but equivalent behavior, is much less likely to introduce new defects when the refactored code is covered by unit tests.

Many test automation tools provide record and playback features that allow users to interactively record user actions and replay them back any number of times, comparing actual results to those expected. The advantage of this approach is that it requires little or no software development. This approach can be applied to any application that has a graphical user interface. However, reliance on these features poses major reliability and maintainability problems. Relabelling a button or moving it to another part of the window may require the test to be re-recorded. Record and playback also often adds irrelevant activities or incorrectly records some activities.[citation needed]

A variation on this type of tool is for testing of web sites. Here, the "interface" is the web page. However, such a framework utilizes entirely different techniques because it is rendering HTML and listening to DOM Events instead of operating system events. Headless browsers or solutions based on Selenium Web Driver are normally used for this purpose.[5][6][7]

Another variation of this type of test automation tool is for testing mobile applications. This is very useful given the number of different sizes, resolutions, and operating systems used on mobile phones. For this variation, a framework is used in order to instantiate actions on the mobile device and to gather results of the actions.[8][bettersourceneeded]

Another variation is script-less test automation that does not use record and playback, but instead builds a model[clarification needed] of the application and then enables the tester to create test cases by simply inserting test parameters and conditions, which requires no scripting skills.

API testing is also being widely used by software testers due to the difficulty of creating and maintaining GUI-based automation testing. It involves directly testing APIs as part of integration testing, to determine if they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security.[9] Since APIs lack a GUI, API testing is performed at the message layer.[10] API testing is considered critical when an API serves as the primary interface to application logic since GUI tests can be difficult to maintain with the short release cycles and frequent changes commonly used with agile software development and DevOps.[11][12]

Continuous testing is the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate.[13][14] For Continuous Testing, the scope of testing extends from validating bottom-up requirements or user stories to assessing the system requirements associated with overarching business goals.[15]

Testing tools can help automate tasks such as product installation, test data creation, GUI interaction, problem detection (consider parsing or polling agents equipped with oracles, defect logging, etc., without necessarily automating tests in an end-to-end fashion.

One must keep satisfying popular requirements when thinking of test automation:

A test automation framework is an integrated system that sets the rules of automation of a specific product. This system integrates the function libraries, test data sources, object details and various reusable modules. These components act as small building blocks which need to be assembled to represent a business process. The framework provides the basis of test automation and simplifies the automation effort.

The main advantage of a framework of assumptions, concepts and tools that provide support for automated software testing is the low cost for maintenance. If there is change to any test case then only the test case file needs to be updated and the driver Script and startup script will remain the same. Ideally, there is no need to update the scripts in case of changes to the application.

Choosing the right framework/scripting technique helps in maintaining lower costs. The costs associated with test scripting are due to development and maintenance efforts. The approach of scripting used during test automation has effect on costs.

Various framework/scripting techniques are generally used:

The Testing framework is responsible for:[16]

Test automation interface are platforms that provide a single workspace for incorporating multiple testing tools and frameworks for System/Integration testing of application under test. The goal of Test Automation Interface is to simplify the process of mapping tests to business criteria without coding coming in the way of the process. Test automation interface are expected to improve the efficiency and flexibility of maintaining test scripts.[17]

Test Automation Interface consists of the following core modules:

Interface engines are built on top of Interface Environment. Interface engine consists of a parser and a test runner. The parser is present to parse the object files coming from the object repository into the test specific scripting language. The test runner executes the test scripts using a test harness.[17]

Object repositories are a collection of UI/Application object data recorded by the testing tool while exploring the application under test.[17]

Tools are specifically designed to target some particular test environment, such as Windows and web automation tools, etc. Tools serve as a driving agent for an automation process. However, an automation framework is not a tool to perform a specific task, but rather an infrastructure that provides the solution where different tools can do their job in a unified manner. This provides a common platform for the automation engineer.

There are various types of frameworks. They are categorized on the basis of the automation component they leverage. These are:

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