Computing: Ipsative Assessment (C:IA) is a tool developed to help ameliorate the issues potentially causing student dissatisfaction regarding assessment and feedback within UK higher education. Using Newcastle University as a case study the system was given to a small group of students as a trial. This poster discusses some of the causes of the dissatisfaction that our students faced with their assessment and feedback, and how using the system we attempt to reduce the impact of these issues.

Active Learning in Computing (ALiC) is the first Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) project for Computing Science in England. Funded by HEFCE, the initiative seeks to prepare students for the realities of working in their chosen field by aligning their learning experiences and transferable skill sets with those sought by today's software engineering industry. One way ALiC achieves this is by introducing cross-site, collaborative group-programming tasks into the curriculum. Running over an academic year, this approach encourages active interaction and dialogue between student teams at Newcastle and Durham universities, and develops strong, real-world problem solving skills in participants.

This paper extends the work described in "An Approach to the Formalisation of a Certification Policy", 7th International Symposium on System and Information Security (SSI 2005) by developing the preliminary formalisation process. It addresses the issue of rating the trustworthiness level of entities holding certificates issued by otherwise unconnected certification authorities by defining a set of criteria that have to apply to the certificate policy (CP) that rules their certificates. A semantic meaning of these criteria is given in this paper.

One of the most important issues affecting host mobility is the location and routing scheme that allows hosts to move seamlessly from one site to another. This paper presents a method that exploits the locality properties of a host's pattern of movement and access history. Two concepts, "local region" and "patron service" are introduced based on the locality features. For each mobile host, the local region is a set of designated subnetworks within which a mobile host often moves, and the patrons are the hosts from which the majority of traffic for the mobile host originated. These are used to confine the effects of a host moving, so location updates are sent only to its local area, and to those source hosts which are most likely to call again. Our scheme has the advantages of limiting location updates, and providing optimal routing, while increasing network and host scalability.>

UNIX United is an architecture for a distributed system based on UNIX. As it is compatible with UNIX at the system call level, any program written for a normal UNIX system can be transparently extended to exploit the richer environment of UNIX United. As it relies on having a UNIX system beneath it, the implementation of UNIX United, called the Newcastle Connection, provides an interesting example of the construction of a very powerful distributed system with only a modicum of effort. A description of the basic semantics of UNIX United is followed by that of the architecture implied by the protocol between components in a UNIX United system, and of a software structure appropriate to the architecture and the protocol.

Abstract The UNIX UNIX is a trademark of AT&T Bell Laboratories. operating system has been extended to support a crash resistant file system. This paper describes the modifications which were made to the UNIX kernel to support such a file system and the associated recovery facilities for maintaining the internal consistency of files despite the failure of the host processor, transient hardware failures and decay of the storage medium.

Abstract In this paper we describe a software subsystem that can be added to each of a set of physically interconnected UNIX or UNIX look‐alike systems, so as to construct a distributed system which is functionally indistinguishable at both the user and the program level from a conventional single‐processor UNIX system. The techniques used are applicable to a variety and multiplicity of both local and wide area networks, and enable all issues of inter‐processor communication, network protocols, etc., to be hidden. A brief account is given of experience with such a distributed system, which is currently operational on a set of PDPlls connected by a Cambridge Ring. The final sections compare our scheme to various precursor schemes and discuss its potential relevance to other operating systems.