Recent events in North Africa and the Gulf States have highlighted both the fragility of states worldwide and the ability of coordinated dissidents to challenge or topple regimes. The common processes of 'loads' generated by dissident activities and the core features of state resilience and its 'capacity' to withstand these 'loads' have been explored in the traditional "real world" view. More recently, however, there has been increased attention to the "cyber world" -- the role of cyber technologies in coordinating and amplifying dissident messages, as well as in aiding regimes in suppressing anti-regime dissidents. As of yet, these two views (real and cyber) have not been integrated into a common framework that seeks to explain overall changes in regime stability over time. Further, emerging uses of social media technologies, such as Twitter have not fully been examined within an overall framework of state stability that represents the nature and dynamics of 'loads' generated by dissident activities in the real (i.e. protests) and cyber (i.e. planning and coordination via cyber venues) domains.

Assertions are recognized in the industry to be a major improvement in functional RTL verification flows. Today's standard assertion languages, such as SVA [1] and PSL [2], are very expressive, capable of describing sophisticated temporal design behavior at different abstraction levels. Nevertheless, most assertion users stick to writing simple assertions because of the intricacy and effort required to debug complex assertions -- one of the major bottlenecks in assertion based verification. We present debugging and diagnosis techniques that automatically identify those parts of an assertion that cause the assertion to fail for a given design and that provide additional automation to efficiently identify the root cause of the failure. These techniques enable major effort savings when working with complex assertions, allowing engineers to use the full capabilities of assertion languages. This enables further productivity and quality improvements in functional verification by lifting mainstream assertion usage to higher abstraction levels such as efficient capture and verification of high-level design features, operations, and transactions. Advanced debugging automation is key for this progress - solving a problem that many designers and verification engineers face in their daily work.