SEEKING THE MARKS OF KNITTING WITHIN THE HISTORY: NALBINDING

Being a textile surface formation method basing on binding and passing the loops prepared separately with an assistant such as crochet needle, knitting needle or shuttle and coming from the ball through one another, weft knitted fabric’s development process within the history has mostly been associated with hand-knit started with knitting needles. Together with this, scientific examinations and dating methods conducted on the needles and breadths brought out in the archaeological digs carried out world-wide proves that the commencement of hand-knit within the history dates back older times. The findings came up in archaeological digs show that knitting began with world-widely known nalbinding technique or single needle knitting. Nalbinding is based on binding the loops formed with needle and thread to one another in the form of a cyclic hoop within themselves. Although nalbinding is expressed in several Turkish resources related to knitting, it is an old technique that is not commonly used. This technique used in Northern Europe shows similarity with shuttled knitting, fishnet knitting, point lace techniques commonly known in Anatolia and in terms of formation of surface with thread hoop and usage of single thread carrier. Even though nalbinding technique is not common in Anatolia, the fact that some needles thought to have been used as knitting needle were found in the recent archaeological digs (Başur Höyük–Siirt, Körtik Tepe-Diyarbakır) makes us consider that the history of knitting dates back to 11.000 BC in these lands and knitting technique made by using knitting needle might have been used in Anatolia. Besides this, there is not an assessment on whether nalbinding was used in Turkey or not. It is observed that there is an increasing interest in nalbinding technique, which is used for gloves, socks and knit cap around the world since 1970s. Revival of this technique in Scandinavian countries is in question. For that reason, this research was designed for the ones showing interest to textile design techniques as a collection to introduce the history and technique of nalbinding technique, and its needles over knitting needles found out in recent archaeological digs conducted in Turkey and around the world. Keywords: Knitting, nalbinding, single needle knitting, knitting in archaeological digs, knitting textile findings

Integrating EfficientNet into an HAFNet Structure for Building Mapping in High-Resolution Optical Earth Observation Data

Automated extraction of buildings from Earth observation (EO) data is important for various applications, including updating of maps, risk assessment, urban planning, and policy-making. Combining data from different sensors, such as high-resolution multispectral images (HRI) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data, has shown great potential in building extraction. Deep learning (DL) is increasingly used in multi-modal data fusion and urban object extraction. However, DL-based multi-modal fusion networks may under-perform due to insufficient learning of “joint features” from multiple sources and oversimplified approaches to fusing multi-modal features. Recently, a hybrid attention-aware fusion network (HAFNet) has been proposed for building extraction from a dataset, including co-located Very-High-Resolution (VHR) optical images and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) joint data. The system reported good performances thanks to the adaptivity of the attention mechanism to the features of the information content of the three streams but suffered from model over-parametrization, which inevitably leads to long training times and heavy computational load. In this paper, the authors propose a restructuring of the scheme, which involved replacing VGG-16-like encoders with the recently proposed EfficientNet, whose advantages counteract exactly the issues found with the HAFNet scheme. The novel configuration was tested on multiple benchmark datasets, reporting great improvements in terms of processing times, and also in terms of accuracy. The new scheme, called HAFNetE (HAFNet with EfficientNet integration), appears indeed capable of achieving good results with less parameters, translating into better computational efficiency. Based on these findings, we can conclude that, given the current advancements in single-thread schemes, the classical multi-thread HAFNet scheme could be effectively transformed by the HAFNetE scheme by replacing VGG-16 with EfficientNet blocks on each single thread. The remarkable reduction achieved in computational requirements moves the system one step closer to on-board implementation in a possible, future “urban mapping” satellite constellation.

Keep the thread up! From humour to poetry. Silence as a spur to read and speak

The purpose of this article is to proceed with a semiotic examination of several wordless picturebooks focussed on the use of a thread, Considering that it is the visual image which first and foremost prompts the meaning in iconotexts, we shall deal with it more particularly through the examination of two French picturebooks: the first one by Robert Scouvart, Histoire d’un fil (The Story of a Thread, Magnard 1990) shows how a single thread can magically delineate different characters introduced in an alluring play on words. The book will offer a distanced staging of the reading process through a humorous use of stereotypes close to those resorted to in comic strips. In the second part of my presentation we shall deal with Boutique Tic Tic, (Shop Pop Pop) by Frédéric Clément, (Albin Michel Jeunesse, 2018) a poetical description introduced under the aesthetic spell of Lewis Carrol’s The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, as suggested by the image of the white rabbit winking from a globe on the cover page. The book in the end will tell how a magical thread can unexpectedly and poetically have a « golden voice » during « a long minute of silence of Big Ben »… An original achievement fully illustrating Sandra Becket’s declaration that « the ‘interactive’ and ‘cinematic’ qualities of similar productions [...] make them books for the ‘digital age.’ (2012, p. 99) Keywords: the magic thread, album without words, Histoire d'un fil, Boutique Tic Tic, humour, poetry.

Parallel Makespan Calculation for Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with Minimal and Maximal Idle Time

In this paper, a flow shop scheduling problem with minimal and maximal machine idle time with the goal of minimizing makespan is considered. The mathematical model of the problem is presented. A generalization of the prefix sum, called the job shift scan, for computing required shifts for overlapping jobs is proposed. A work-efficient algorithm for computing the job shift scan in parallel for the PRAM model with n processors is proposed and its time complexity of O(logn) is proven. Then, an algorithm for computing the makespan in time O(mlogn) in parallel using the prefix sum and job shift scan is proposed. Computer experiments on GPU were conducted using the CUDA platform. The results indicate multi-thread GPU vs. single-thread GPU speedups of up to 350 and 1000 for job shift scan and makespan calculation algorithms, respectively. Multi-thread GPU vs. single-thread CPU speedups up to 4.5 and 14.7, respectively, were observed as well. The experiments on the Taillard-based problem instances using a simulated annealing solving method and employing the parallel makespan calculation show that the method is able to perform many more iterations in the given time limit and obtain better results than the non-parallel version.

Equivalence checking for weak bi-Kleene algebra

Pomset automata are an operational model of weak bi-Kleene algebra, which describes programs that can fork an execution into parallel threads, upon completion of which execution can join to resume as a single thread. We characterize a fragment of pomset automata that admits a decision procedure for language equivalence. Furthermore, we prove that this fragment corresponds precisely to series-rational expressions, i.e., rational expressions with an additional operator for bounded parallelism. As a consequence, we obtain a new proof that equivalence of series-rational expressions is decidable.

FragGeneScanRs: better and faster gene prediction for short reads

FragGeneScanRs is a better and faster Rust implementation of the FragGeneScan gene prediction model for short and error-prone reads. Its command line interface is backward compatible and adds extra features for more flexible usage. Compared to the original C implementation, shotgun metagenomic reads are processed up to 22 times faster using a single thread, with better scaling for multithreaded execution. The Rust code of FragGeneScanRs is freely available from GitHub under the GPL-3.0 license, with instructions for installation, usage and other documentation.

Can Multi-threaded Flux Tubes in Coronal Arcades Support a Magnetohydrodynamic Avalanche?

Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities allow energy to be released from stressed magnetic fields, commonly modelled in cylindrical flux tubes linking parallel planes, but, more recently, also in curved arcades containing flux tubes with both footpoints in the same photospheric plane. Uncurved cylindrical flux tubes containing multiple individual threads have been shown to be capable of sustaining an MHD avalanche, whereby a single unstable thread can destabilise many. We examine the properties of multi-threaded coronal loops, wherein each thread is created by photospheric driving in a realistic, curved coronal arcade structure (with both footpoints of each thread in the same plane). We use three-dimensional MHD simulations to study the evolution of single- and multi-threaded coronal loops, which become unstable and reconnect, while varying the driving velocity of individual threads. Experiments containing a single thread destabilise in a manner indicative of an ideal MHD instability and consistent with previous examples in the literature. The introduction of additional threads modifies this picture, with aspects of the model geometry and relative driving speeds of individual threads affecting the ability of any thread to destabilise others. In both single- and multi-threaded cases, continuous driving of the remnants of disrupted threads produces secondary, aperiodic bursts of energetic release.

Fast Key-Value Lookups with Node Tracker

Lookup operations for in-memory databases are heavily memory bound, because they often rely on pointer-chasing linked data structure traversals. They also have many branches that are hard-to-predict due to random key lookups. In this study, we show that although cache misses are the primary bottleneck for these applications, without a method for eliminating the branch mispredictions only a small fraction of the performance benefit is achieved through prefetching alone. We propose the Node Tracker (NT), a novel programmable prefetcher/pre-execution unit that is highly effective in exploiting inter key-lookup parallelism to improve single-thread performance. We extend NT with branch outcome streaming (BOS) to reduce branch mispredictions and show that this achieves an extra 3× speedup. Finally, we evaluate the NT as a pre-execution unit and demonstrate that we can further improve the performance in both single- and multi-threaded execution modes. Our results show that, on average, NT improves single-thread performance by 4.1× when used as a prefetcher; 11.9× as a prefetcher with BOS; 14.9× as a pre-execution unit and 18.8× as a pre-execution unit with BOS. Finally, with 24 cores of the latter version, we achieve a speedup of 203× and 11× over the single-core and 24-core baselines, respectively.