scholarly journals Compositional relaxed concurrency

Author(s):  
Mark Batty

There is a broad design space for concurrent computer processors: they can be optimized for low power, low latency or high throughput. This freedom to tune each processor design to its niche has led to an increasing diversity of machines, from powerful pocketable devices to those responsible for complex and critical tasks, such as car guidance systems. Given this context, academic concurrency research sounds notes of both caution and optimism. Caution because recent work has uncovered flaws in the way we explain the subtle memory behaviour of concurrent systems: specifications have been shown to be incorrect, leading to bugs throughout the many layers of the system. And optimism because our tools and methods for verifying the correctness of concurrent code—although built above an idealized model of concurrency—are becoming more mature. This paper looks at the way we specify the memory behaviour of concurrent systems and suggests a new direction. Currently, there is a siloed approach, with each processor and programming language specified separately in an incomparable way. But this does not match the structure of our programs, which may use multiple processors and languages together. Instead we propose a compositional approach, where program components carry with them a description of the sort of concurrency they rely on, and there is a mechanism for composing these. This will support not only components written for the multiple varied processors found in a modern system but also those that use idealized models of concurrency, providing a sound footing for mature verification techniques. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Verified trustworthy software systems’.

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Patterson

This article addresses the increasingly popular approach to Freud and his work which sees him primarily as a literary writer rather than a psychologist, and takes this as the context for an examination of Joyce Crick's recent translation of The Interpretation of Dreams. It claims that translation lies at the heart of psychoanalysis, and that the many interlocking and overlapping implications of the word need to be granted a greater degree of complexity. Those who argue that Freud is really a creative writer are themselves doing a work of translation, and one which fails to pay sufficiently careful attention to the role of translation in writing itself (including the notion of repression itself as a failure to translate). Lesley Chamberlain's The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud is taken as an example of the way Freud gets translated into a novelist or an artist, and her claims for his ‘bizarre poems' are criticized. The rest of the article looks closely at Crick's new translation and its claim to be restoring Freud the stylist, an ordinary language Freud, to the English reader. The experience of reading Crick's translation is compared with that of reading Strachey's, rather to the latter's advantage.


Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.


Author(s):  
Richard Wigmans

This chapter describes some of the many pitfalls that may be encountered when developing the calorimeter system for a particle physics experiment. Several of the examples chosen for this chapter are based on the author’s own experience. Typically, the performance of a new calorimeter is tested in a particle beam provided by an accelerator. The potential pitfalls encountered in correctly assessing this performance both concern the analysis and the interpretation of the data collected in such tests. The analysis should be carried out with unbiased event samples. Several consequences of violating this principle are illustrated with practical examples. For the interpretation of the results, it is very important to realize that the conditions in a testbeam are fundamentally different than in practice. This has consequences for the meaning of the term “energy resolution”. It is shown that the way in which the results of beam tests are quoted may create a misleading impression of the quality of the tested instrument.


Slavic Review ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 640-650
Author(s):  
Richard Mowbray Haywood
Keyword(s):  
The Many ◽  

Perhaps the most famous anecdote of the many connected with the reign of Tsar Nicholas I concerns the way in which he supposedly determined the route of the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. When asked by his officials the route along which it should be built, the tsar, on the spur of the moment, it is claimed, took a ruler, laid it on a map, and arbitrarily and hastily drew an absolutely straight line between the two capitals. The all-powerful despot had spoken, and his decision was carried out by his servile courtiers, regardless of consequences.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1948 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-237
Author(s):  
C. ANDERSON ALDRICH
Keyword(s):  
The Many ◽  

This book adds another volume to the many already published on the subject of child care. Its preface and foreword are written by Donovan J. McCune, M.D., and Norvelle C. LaMar, M.D., respectively, who endorse the author's statements. There is little in the way of advice to which I would not subscribe. In fact it is remarkable that So many pages can be filled with so much advice which is highly acceptable. Miss Turner has done a masterful job of summarizing the liberal ideas of our times. However, one begins to doubt the efficacy of any book so full of instructions without an adequate discussion of the "whys" of liberal ideas.


1957 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 24-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernestine Friedl

The rural population of the province of Boeotia in Greece now makes considerable use of hospital care for childbirth and for serious illness.1 Both men and women, even those of the older generation, allow themselves to be hospitalized without objection, often, indeed quite willingly. This is a new phenomenon. It is a particularly interesting one because of the many psychological and practical obstacles in the way of the hospitalization of a Greek village patient. Traditionally, there has been a tendency to view hospitalization as a form of desertion of the sick person by the members of his family.2 Transportation to and from the villages to the provincial town in which the hospitals are located is difficult and expensive. Besides, doctors' bills and hospital costs themselves are quite high by local standards.


1991 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-10
Author(s):  
Rosalind Cottrell

When I was growing up in the 1950s in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the urban Delta, the closest I came to an anthropologist was the man who dug the dump site near our home looking for old scrap iron to sell. Certainly there was no expectation for me to become an anthropologist from my grandmother, the matriarch of our family. However, she had moved to the city after the death of her husband with expectations of a better life for her four girls. Stressing education as "the way out," she told stories about her slave uncle who recognized the value of education and learned to read from two young girls he drove to school. In turn, he taught this daily lesson to his family around the fire each night. The many evenings sitting on our front porch, and on the front porch of neighbors, watching and listening to grandma's stories and the stories of others, set a foundation for anthropology in my life and led to my becoming a medical anthropologist.


2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-35
Author(s):  
Robin Poynor

Ògún, the Yorùbá god of iron, is venerated throughout the Atlantic world. While many African-based religions coexist in Florida, the shrines discussed here were developed by individuals connected with Oyotunji Village in South Carolina. South Florida's urban shrines differ remarkably from north central Florida's rural shrines. I suggest several factors determine this variation: changing characteristics of Ògún, differing circumstances of the shrines' creators, the environment in which the owners work, and whether the setting is urban or rural. Urban shrines reflect religious competition where many manifestations of òrìṣà worship coexist but are not in agreement. In these shrines, Ògún is vengeful protector. The urban shrines tend to be visually strident, filled with jagged forms of protective weapons. In rural north central Florida, Ògún is clearer of the way, a builder, and reflects the personalities of those who venerate him. These shrines are less harsh and are filled with tools.


10.29007/7lrd ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Cassar ◽  
Adrian Francalanza ◽  
Duncan Attard ◽  
Luca Aceto ◽  
Anna Ingolfsdottir

Ensuring formal correctness for actor-based, concurrent systems is a difficult task, pri- marily because exhaustive, static analysis verification techniques such as model checking quickly run into state-explosion problems. Runtime monitoring techniques such as Run- time Verification and Adaptation circumvent this limitation by verifying the correctness of a program by dynamically analysing its executions. This paper gives an overview of a suite of monitoring tools available for verifying and adapting actor-based Erlang programs.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Neilson

This paper seeks to highlight the importance of metaphors for marine conservation and policy. It argues that themanner in which the oceans are perceived, often as an alien landscape, can limit the way language is utilised inmarine conservation efforts. This limitation can produce unhelpful environmental metaphors that, instead ofacting as catalysts for action, produce negative and reactionary responses. It illustrates this point through theexample of what has become known as the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch.’ It postulates that if there is a disconnectbetween the many complex environmental issues facing the world's oceans and the way they are perceived, thenmore focus should be placed on developing pre-determined culturally embedded metaphors, which can conjurerelatable imagery, but that are also rooted in scientific evidence. It recommends that, in an extension to existingpublic perception research (PPR) on how different communities value the ocean environment, there is room forshared metaphors of the oceanic environment to be developed that can help raise awareness within a particularcultural setting.


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