A Programmable, Scalable-Throughput Interleaver

The interleaver stages of digital communication standards show a surprisingly large variation in throughput, state sizes, and permutation functions. Furthermore, data rates for 4G standards such as LTE-Advanced will exceed typical baseband clock frequencies of handheld devices. Multistream operation for Software Defined Radio and iterative decoding algorithms will call for ever higher interleave data rates. Our interleave machine is built around 8 single-port SRAM banks and can be programmed to generate up to 8 addresses every clock cycle. The scalable architecture combines SIMD and VLIW concepts with an efficient resolution of bank conflicts. A wide range of cellular, connectivity, and broadcast interleavers have been mapped on this machine, with throughputs up to more than 0.5 Gsymbol/second. Although it was designed for channel interleaving, the application domain of the interleaver extends also to Turbo interleaving. The presented configuration of the architecture is designed as a part of a programmable outer receiver on a prototype board. It offers (near) universal programmability to enable the implementation of new interleavers. The interleaver measures 2.09 mm2 in 65 nm CMOS (including memories) and proves functional on silicon

A programmable, scalable-throughput interleaver

Abstract The interleaver stages of digital communication standards show a surprisingly large variation in throughput, state sizes, and permutation functions. Furthermore, data rates for 4G standards such as LTE-Advanced will exceed typical baseband clock frequencies of handheld devices. Multistream operation for Software Defined Radio and iterative decoding algorithms will call for ever higher interleave data rates. Our interleave machine is built around 8 single-port SRAM banks and can be programmed to generate up to 8 addresses every clock cycle. The scalable architecture combines SIMD and VLIW concepts with an efficient resolution of bank conflicts. A wide range of cellular, connectivity, and broadcast interleavers have been mapped on this machine, with throughputs up to more than 0.5 Gsymbol/second. Although it was designed for channel interleaving, the application domain of the interleaver extends also to Turbo interleaving. The presented configuration of the architecture is designed as a part of a programmable outer receiver on a prototype board. It offers (near) universal programmability to enable the implementation of new interleavers. The interleaver measures 2.09 mm2 in 65 nm CMOS (including memories) and proves functional on silicon

Moving Across Rural Spaces: A Content Analysis of Contemporary Realistic Fiction Picturebooks With Rural Settings

Romanticized rural storytelling creates difficulties for rural children in finding mirrors, seeing people like themselves and places like their homes as principal characters and settings in picturebooks. The same romanticism likewise makes it unlikely for picturebook readers in cities and suburbs to find realistic windows into rural life. Despite children’s book publishers’ purposeful increases in realistic representations of children across racial and cultural groups in recent decades, realistic and diverse narratives within rural spaces remain underrepresented, if not invisible. Drawing on critical rural theory (Fulkerson & Thomas, 2014; Williams, 1973) and tenets of nostalgia and the rural idyll (Boym, 2001, 2007; Sanders, 2013), this article examines representations of rural life in picturebooks with integral rural settings, focusing on stereotypical representations of isolation, nostalgia, and rural childhoods. The analysis highlights how depictions of movement have a direct effect on how characters interact across the rural space and how movement from one place to another, or lack thereof, influences agency, time, and story endings. The authors call for more diverse books focused on rural narratives that would work to dismantle the single story that stereotypes contribute to and to do justice to the complexity and diversity of rural life

Wreading, Performing, and Reflecting: The Application of Narrative Hypertext and Virtual World Experiences to Social Work Education

In this dissertation I propose the use of a new media composition of narrative hypertext, performances in a virtual world, and a dialogic process of writing to provide a continuum of learning opportunities in social work education. I suggest that the structure of the hypertext narrative, embedded with hypermedia, mirrors the dissociative aspects of traumatic memory. I argue that work with the multivocality and multisequentiality of narrative hypertext emulates the process of discovery in the clinical interview. The immersive component of work in a virtual world deepens the realism and affective impact of simulations and creates opportunities to practice and demonstrate engagement, assessment, and intervention skills. The writing component of the new media composition actively engages students in a dialogic process that hones the development of self-reflexive practice and a professional social work identity. In developing the project, I enlisted the input of two groups of key informants. Content experts provided background that informed the narrative and scripts. A second group of faculty, students, and practitioners provided input on project design and identified potential barriers to success and anticipated outcomes. Informants suggest that the continuum of media engages students with a variety of learning styles, offers safe ways to practice skills as a precursor to interviews with actual clients, and allows for exploration of diverse identities as an avatar. Potential barriers include the time and resources required to learn new technologies and the potential for students to be triggered by trauma content. Informants offered recommendations to address the barriers. Three changes were immediately incorporated into the structure and content of the project to address these concerns

An exploratory study of work-related imagined interactions with real-life coworkers

Communication between individuals in social systems includes not only interpersonal, external acts of discourse, but also intrapersonal communications within each person\u27s interior cognitive space. One type of intrapersonal communication, imagined interactions, involves mentally imagining communication encounters with others in an internal dialogue symbolic of real-life conversations. This research project explored the phenomenon of imagined interactions with real-life coworkers as a component of the interior work lives of working adults. The research question was: How do supervisors utilize imagined interactions to make sense of and manage workplace relationships? An existing survey instrument, the Survey of Imagined Interactions, was modified to limit responses to imagined interactions in work-related scenarios and with real-life coworkers. A total of 88 participants completed the questionnaire. All respondents reported engaging in work-related imagined interactions with their real-life coworkers. A mixed methods data analysis resulted in findings related to the frequency, variation, topics, conversational partners, and emotional valence of work-related imagined interactions. The findings provide insight into how working adults engage imagined interactions for self-understanding, relationship maintenance, emotional catharsis, conversational rehearsal, job preparation, and navigating difficult relationships, especially with their boss. The analysis also resulted in a finding about methodological approaches which suggests that qualitative data provides greater insight into work-related imagined interactions than quantitative data. Taken as a whole, these findings provide an important baseline for understanding the emotional and relational dynamics that trigger imagined interactions in real-life work scenarios. This exploratory research study makes an interdisciplinary connection between the communication sciences and the organizational sciences, and introduces the construct of imagined interactions into the organizational, leadership, and common vernacular. The results lay the groundwork for continued scholarship on how the ubiquitous phenomenon of imagined interactions contributes to workplace relationship maintenance and overall job performance

Tightly-Coupled and Fault-Tolerant Communication in Parallel Systems

The demand for processing power is increasing steadily. In the past, single processor architectures clearly dominated the markets. As instruction level parallelism is limited in most applications, significant performance can only be achieved in the future by exploiting parallelism at the higher levels of thread or process parallelism. As a consequence, modern “processors” incorporate multiple processor cores that form a single shared memory multiprocessor. In such systems, high performance devices like network interface controllers are connected to processors and memory like every other input/output device over a hierarchy of peripheral interconnects. Thus, one target must be to couple coprocessors physically closer to main memory and to the processors of a computing node. This removes the overhead of today’s peripheral interconnect structures. Such a step is the direct connection of HyperTransport (HT) devices to Opteron processors, which is presented in this thesis. Also, this work analyzes how communication from a device to processors can be optimized on the protocol level. As today’s computing nodes are shared memory systems, the cache coherence protocol is the central protocol for data exchange between processors and devices. Consequently, the analysis extends to classes of devices that are cache coherence protocol aware. Also, the concept of a transfer cache is proposed in this thesis, which reduces latency significantly even for non-coherent devices. The trend to the exploitation of process and thread level parallelism leads to a steady increase of system sizes. Networks that are used in such large systems are very susceptible to both hard and transient faults. Most transient fault rates are constant per bit that is stored or transmitted. With increasing system sizes and higher clock frequencies, the number of faults in time increases drastically. In the end, the error rate may rise at a level where high level error recovery becomes too costly if lower layers do not perform error correction that is transparent to the layers above. The second part of this thesis describes a direct interconnection network that provides a reliable transport service even without the use of end-to-end protocols. Also, a novel hardware based solution for intermediate routing is developed in this thesis, which allows an efficient, deadlock free routing around faulty links

What is memory? The present state of the engram

The mechanism of memory remains one of the great unsolved problems of biology. Grappling with the question more than a hundred years ago, the German zoologist Richard Semon formulated the concept of the engram, lasting connections in the brain that result from simultaneous "excitations", whose precise physical nature and consequences were out of reach of the biology of his day. Neuroscientists now have the knowledge and tools to tackle this question, however, and this Forum brings together leading contemporary views on the mechanisms of memory and what the engram means today

Politics of memory and journalism’s memory work: changes of commemoration practices of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in the Estonian and Russian press 1989 – 2014

The current thesis set out to explore the dynamics of collective memory and identity in anniversary journalism, using the case study of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (MRP) signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in 1939. MRP was chosen due to offering multiple layers of commemoration and also being politically relevant in the present day, and not only domestically or bilaterally but starting from 2009 also at pan-European level. The empirical material comprised newspaper articles from the Estonian (both in the Estonian and Russian language) and Russian press between 1989-2004, thus also allowing for a comparison across different mnemonic communities. The theoretical part of the thesis dealt with the key concepts of collective memory and identity, politics of memory and journalism’s memory work (anniversary journalism). Content analysis was used to achieve the research aim. The given study provides an overview of the emergence and gradual disappearance – the dynamics – of the commemoration of the MRP in the Estonian press. The results give ground to conclude that the current politics of memory behind the MRP, now mostly at European level, will keep the anniversary date of 23 August as a worthy object of research for memory scholars. However, even if the relevance of 23 August is increasing, it will most likely not be the MRP as the centrepoint. It remains to be seen to which extent it will become a commemoration day of the Baltic Way and/or for the victims of totalitarian regimes. As for Russia and the Russian press, the relevance of the MRP and 23 August will most likely depend on the role this date will become to hold in the European politics of memory, since the thesis showed the journalistic treatment of the MRP in the Russian press to be mostly of reactionary nature to others’ initiatives.http://www.ester.ee/record=b448692

“The Illusion of Collaboration”: An Integrated Examination of the Antecedents, Processes, and Consequences of Online Group Work

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) presents postsecondary educators with a conundrum: how to design and support small-group activities without stifling deep and meaningful learning. The literature indicates that students are not consistently practicing higher-order cognitive activities, educators are not reliably designing or facilitating them, and/or researchers are not locating or identifying them where they are occurring. The aim of this dissertation is to explore these deficits by identifying the antecedent conditions that most affect collaboration. Specifically, I answer the question, how do learner’s prior knowledge, characteristics, and experiences manifest in their collaborative processes. Addressing a gap in the literature, this study employs distance ethnography to assess at a fine-grain level the social and cognitive interactions of a trio of collaborators in a natural setting—an object-oriented, small-group project in an online writing course. The results reveal several ways that learner dispositions and prior knowledge manifest as barriers to productive interactions, including tendencies toward indirect and unidirectional communication; siloed workspaces and individual orientations to group assignments; unequal coordination work; and the preservation of individual autonomy to the detriment of group knowledge objects. The study has pedagogical and theoretical implications related to the theory of transactional distance (TTD) and collaborative cognitive load theory (CCLT) and pedagogical and methodological implications for the integration of reflective-practitioner journals