A configurable vector processor for accelerating speech coding algorithms

The growing demand for voice-over-packer (VoIP) services and multimedia-rich applications has made increasingly important the efficient, real-time implementation of low-bit rates speech coders on embedded VLSI platforms. Such speech coders are designed to substantially reduce the bandwidth requirements thus enabling dense multichannel gateways in small form factor. This however comes at a high computational cost which mandates the use of very high performance embedded processors. This thesis investigates the potential acceleration of two major ITU-T speech coding algorithms, namely G.729A and G.723.1, through their efficient implementation on a configurable extensible vector embedded CPU architecture. New scalar and vector ISAs were introduced which resulted in up to 80% reduction in the dynamic instruction count of both workloads. These instructions were subsequently encapsulated into a parametric, hybrid SISD (scalar processor)–SIMD (vector) processor. This work presents the research and implementation of the vector datapath of this vector coprocessor which is tightly-coupled to a Sparc-V8 compliant CPU, the optimization and simulation methodologies employed and the use of Electronic System Level (ESL) techniques to rapidly design SIMD datapaths

The Nature of Influence: Fu\u27ad Rifqa\u27s Wilderness Poetry at the Intersection of Nation and Modernity

Fundamental changes in the form and content of Arabic poetry occurred rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, resulting in the development of free verse and prose poetry as well as the jettison of traditional requirements including end-stopped two-hemistich long lines, strict adherence to meter, and monorhyme. These changes draw from innovation within Arabic poetry, competing nationalist agendas, increased translation of European texts into Arabic, and the productive engagement of Arab poets with Western literatures. In 1957, Syrian poet Fu’ād Rifqa embarks upon a five-decade poetic project of intentional intertextuality that acknowledges these sometimes collaborative, sometimes competing narratives. Rifqa’s poetry creates a dialectic between literary and cultural influences through shifting metaphors drawn from the natural world and Mesopotamian and Greek mythology while also reflecting the evolution of form and content from both Arab Romanticism and Modernism as well as his extensive engagement with German Romantic and post-Romantic poets Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. This dissertation examines the interplay between influence and innovation throughout Rifqa’s self-aware poetry by first examining the development of Rifqa’s preferred combination of landscape and character, the forest-philosopher, in Arab Romantic poetry. Romantic Mahjar poets writing from Lebanese and Syrian diaspora communities in the Americas quieted the declamatory tone of poetry as they transformed the poet from rational orator into questioning youth in the setting of the forest, rather than urban or desert settings of classical import. Alongside his avant-garde contemporaries, Rifqa’s early work mobilizes natural and mythological metaphors from the first-person perspective in service of the ideological agenda of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. After breaking with the party in 1961, Rifqa’s forest philosophers complete the Romantic move away from the oratorical mode through their silence and narrative distance. Rifqa’s revisions on this theme demonstrate the role of the poet as reflective mediator of modernity through the synthesis of influences from German Romanticism that resonate with his experience of transition. Engaging contemporary structural innovations in Arabic avant-garde poetry, Rifqa underscores poetry’s role in individual and cultural transformation, and cultural exchange’s role in poetry, through a poetic based largely in landscape

`Bashtendikayt' and `Banayung' : theme and imagery in the earlier poetry of Abraham Sutzkever

This study analyses the poetry which Sutzkever wrote between 1935 and 1954, emphasising the themes of the poetic word and the poet's role. During this formative period Sutzkever established his complex of images, and laid the foundation for the often hermetic later poetry. The earlier work is characterised by tension between the aesthetic and the ethical, the ikh and the world. The earliest manifests both strands, combining Romantic individualism with awareness of the social nature of poetry. In 'Valdiks' (1940), nature imagery develops into an inner language expressing an aesthetic vision, giving way in the war years to doubts, but also to a conviction of the poet's ethical task ('Di festung', 1945). In Israel Sutzkever achieved new confidence in his poetic identity, which he expressed through Jewish and biblical imagery ('In fayer-vogn', 1952). The African environment gave him a sense of freedom and renewed nature inspiration, and he explored new imagery of paganism, sensuality and myth ('Helfandn bay nakht', 1950-1954). The poeme 'Ode tsu der toyb' (1954) is the climax of the first period, resolving the conflict between aesthetic and ethical, past and present, and pointing the way towards the mature aestheticism of the later work. The study focusses on significant aspects of this process. Sutzkever's constant underlying theme is the nature of poetry itself. He investigates this through permanent images which develop specific symbolic connotations and become a metapoetic language. The resolution of the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical lies in Sutzkever's belief in the equivalence of the spiritual and the corporeal, in the power of the word, and in the unbreakable goldene keyt of birth, death and renewal. The later aestheticism is foreshadowed in this period by the idea of the essence of poetry as the ineffable silence which the poet struggles to reach through the word

Red Pilled - The Allure of Digital Hate

Hate is being reinvented. Over the last two decades, online platforms have been used to repackage racist, sexist and xenophobic ideologies into new sociotechnical forms. Digital hate is ancient but novel, deploying the Internet to boost its allure and broaden its appeal. To understand the logic of hate, the author investigates four objects: 8chan, the cesspool of the Internet, QAnon, the popular meta-conspiracy, Parler, a social media site, and Gab, the "platform for the people." Drawing together powerful human stories with insights from media studies, psychology, political science, and race and cultural studies, he portrays how digital hate infiltrates hearts and minds

The Poetics of Empire: a model of time and a problem of language in medieval and in postcolonial writing

A gendered trope of auctoritas links Dante's Commedia with the postcolonial novels, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. The recurrence of a circular motif inscribing mystery - present at the levels of structure, theme and language - in these texts, undermines both the logo/ethnocentricity ascribed to medieval writing, and the criticisms levelled at postcolonial writers for writing in colonising languages. The explicit constructions of gender, and the traditionally peripheral role of woman, find a central place in these texts ultimately concerned with the positing of loss and absence. The hierarchical universe which emerges from a dual cause - God is the first cause and man the efficient cause - in the medieval Scholastic view, together with the circular persuasive ends of poetry derived from Aristotle, provide a means ofjustification not only for the fictive forms of medieval poetry but also for the postcolonial writer's choice of English. In both cases, language - whether fallen or foreign - is at an ultimate remove and has already betrayed its enunciator.At a textual level, circular-simultaneous-with-hierarchical imagery - synthesised in the medieval "ladder of love" - repeatedly asserts an emphasis on artifice in these works. The concern with explicitly fictive representations of Origin - lost Edens and pasts - develops this means-to-ends argument. The textual echoes between these writings depend to a significant degree on key female protagonists who are both multivalent and explicitly fictive in the terms of their presentation. In this they conform to Kristeva's spatial model of poetic language in the Chora. The shift from a frustrated verbal emphasis to a visual emphasis, enabled by these figures, evokes the fantasies of lost primal scenes - the Edens of pre-lapsarian and precolonial pasts - and returns us, via the Lacanian gestalt of the phallic-mother complex, to the medieval perspectival resolution to the problem of freewill versus Divine Providence.Dante's use of auctoritas vis-a-vis the Courtly Love tradition suggests a feminine basis to his methodology - both in its circular dynamic and in the feminine basis of the ladder of love which characterises it. T. S. Eliot's allusions to Dante, which explicitly rewrite the motif of the ladder, elicit a final justification not only of the use ofEnglish by postcolonial writers, but of their allusions to Western canonical writers - Tennyson, Yeats, Conrad. In the model of "significant re-enaction" presented in Eliot's cyclical response to Dante, a valid means of signing difference (within a frame of similarity) is proposed. The feminine figure of auctoritas developed here, and characterised in these texts by the goddess Circe, becomes the ultimate sign of a process highlighted in the writings produced by these two Empires - Holy Roman and British Imperial - but by no means exclusive to it