The Failure of Domestic and International Mechanisms to Redress the Harmful Effects of Australian Immigration Detention

Australia\u27s Migration Act explicitly permits the government to detain non-citizens seeking entry without visas, including those who request asylum. Detainees wait up to five years for their immigration claims to be processed in detention centers managed by Australasian Correctional Management ( ACM ), a subsidiary of U.S. corporation Wackenhut Corrections. Arriving asylum-seekers often suffer the lasting effects of torture, threats of death, and other traumatic conditions-effects that are exacerbated by detention conditions. This Comment emphasizes detention\u27s effects on children, who suffer health and other problems while detained. Detainees, Australian citizens, and overseas commentators are now protesting against the detention policy. The government\u27s response has been unsympathetic and legal challenges have been largely eliminated by Migration Act amendments that have virtually foreclosed judicial review. Further, while international claims are possible under treaties to which Australia is a party, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child ( CRC ), they are generally difficult to enforce. Even the Alien Tort Claims Act ( ATCA ), which grants jurisdiction to United States Federal District Courts over international claims by foreign citizens, fails to offer redress for torts endured while in immigration detention, despite a recent development from the Ninth Circuit that further extends the ATCA\u27s reach over multinational corporations. The ATCA remains ineffective because of difficulties in holding the U.S. parent, Wackenhut, liable for the actions of its foreign subsidiary, the detention management firm, ACM

Managing Overheads in Asynchronous Many-Task Runtime Systems

Asynchronous Many-Task (AMT) runtime systems are based on the idea of dividing an algorithm into small units of work, known as tasks. The runtime system is then responsible for scheduling and executing these tasks in an efficient manner by taking into account the resources provided to it and the associated data dependencies between the tasks. One of the primary challenges faced by AMTs is managing such fine-grained parallelism and the overheads associated with creating, scheduling and executing tasks. This work develops methodologies for assessing and managing overheads associated with fine-grained task execution in HPX, our exemplar Asynchronous Many-Task runtime system. Known optimization techniques, viz. active message coalescing, task inlining and parallel loop iteration chunking are applied to HPX. Active message coalescing, where messages bound to the same destination are aggregated into a single message, is presented as a solution to minimize overheads associated with fine-grained communications. Methodologies and metrics for analyzing fine-grained communication overheads are developed. The metrics identified and implemented in this research aid in evaluating network efficiency by giving us an intrinsic view of the underlying network overhead that would be difficult to measure using conventional methods. Task inlining, a method that allows runtime systems to manage the overheads introduced by a large number of tasks by merging tasks together into one thread of execution, is presented as a technique for minimizing fine-grained task overheads. A runtime policy that dynamically decides whether to inline a task is developed and evaluated on different processor architectures. A methodology to derive a largely machine independent constant that allows controlling task granularity is developed. Finally, the machine independent constant derived in the context of task inlining is applied to chunking of parallel loop iterations, which confirms its applicability to reduce overheads, in the context of finding the optimal chunk size of the combined loop iterations

The Code

This Code may be published without permission as long as it is not changed in any way and it carries the copyright notice. Copyright (c) 2018 by the Association for Computing Machinery.Computing professionals' actions change the world. To act responsibly, they should reflect upon the wider impacts of their work, consistently supporting the public good. The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct ("the Code") expresses the conscience of the profession. The Code is designed to inspire and guide the ethical conduct of all computing professionals, including current and aspiring practitioners, instructors, students, influencers, and anyone who uses computing technology in an impactful way. Additionally, the Code serves as a basis for remediation when violations occur. The Code includes principles formulated as statements of responsibility, based on the understanding that the public good is always the primary consideration. Each principle is supplemented by guidelines, which provide explanations to assist computing professionals in understanding and applying the principle

Implications of Structured Programming for Machine Architecture

Based on an empirical study of more than 10,000 lines of program text written in a GOTO-less language, a machine architecture specifically designed for structured programs is proposed. Since assignment, CALL, RETURN, and IF statements together account for 93 percent of all executable statements, special care is given to ensure that these statements can be implemented efficiently. A highly compact instruction encoding scheme is presented, which can reduce program size by a factor of 3. Unlike a Huffman code, which utilizes variable length fields, this method uses only fixed length (1-byte) opcode and address fields. The most frequent instructions consist of a single 1-byte field. As a consequence, instruction decoding time is minimized, and the machine is efficient with respect to both space and time. © 1978, ACM. All rights reserved

An exploratory study of information systems subject indexing

The motivation for detailed study of information systems research subject indexing schemes is explained, along with an analysis of two indexing schemes proposed for use in the area.  A number of reference disciplines are examined for their ability to provide insights and analysis approaches

Information Outlook, March 2007

Volume 11, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2007/1002/thumbnail.jp

Ethics In Information Systems: Student Performance In Evaluating Ethical Dilemmas

The explosion in information technology in the last 20 years, and in particular, data communications networks, has had a major impact on ethical thinking and ethical issues. This has been manifested in the recent accounting and business scandals, as it is becoming apparent that the ethical dimensions of information systems-related business decisions cannot be safely ignored. It is important for business educators to introduce students to relevant ethical situations that they may face in the business world. This paper discusses the Information Systems ethical environment and students performance on business ethics cases in a telecommunications course. The results of this evaluation show that more exposure to ethical situations is needed, as students are not prepared to make sound ethical judgements