Constructs and evaluation strategies for intelligent speculative parallelism - armageddon revisited

This report addresses speculative parallelism (the assignment of spare processing resources to tasks which are not known to be strictly required for the successful completion of a computation) at the user and application level. At this level, the execution of a program is seen as a (dynamic) tree —a graph, in general. A solution for a problem is a traversal of this graph from the initial state to a node known to be the answer. Speculative parallelism then represents the assignment of resources to múltiple branches of this graph even if they are not positively known to be on the path to a solution. In highly non-deterministic programs the branching factor can be very high and a naive assignment will very soon use up all the resources. This report presents work assignment strategies other than the usual depth-first and breadth-first. Instead, best-first strategies are used. Since their definition is application-dependent, the application language contains primitives that allow the user (or application programmer) to a) indícate when intelligent OR-parallelism should be used; b) provide the functions that define "best," and c) indícate when to use them. An abstract architecture enables those primitives to perform the search in a "speculative" way, using several processors, synchronizing them, killing the siblings of the path leading to the answer, etc. The user is freed from worrying about these interactions. Several search strategies are proposed and their implementation issues are addressed. "Armageddon," a global pruning method, is introduced, together with both a software and a hardware implementation for it. The concepts exposed are applicable to áreas of Artificial Intelligence such as extensive expert systems, planning, game playing, and in general to large search problems. The proposed strategies, although showing promise, have not been evaluated by simulation or experimentation

Meeting with God on the Mountains: Essays in Honor of Richard M. Davidson

This Festschrift in honor of Dr. Davidson is divided into four parts that reflect upon his main areas of study, lectures, and publications: (1) Old Testament Exegesis; (2) Intertextuality, Typology, and Ancient Near Eastern Background; (3) New Testament Studies; and (4) Theology and Church History.https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/books/1023/thumbnail.jp

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Fantastic Extrapolations: An Exploratory Bibliometric Investigation into the Historic Development of English-Language Fantasy and Science Fiction Scholarship Through Fifty Years of Extrapolation

There are relatively few bibliometric or citation analysis historical studies of the scholarly literature of arts or humanities fields as compared with the science, technical, medical, or social science disciplines; many studies focus on the journal literature and use the formal works cited reference lists as captured by citation indexes as the basis for their conclusions. This study looks at aspects of the scholarship of the literary and media-based popular culture field of fantasy and science fiction (F&SF; aka: fantastic, fantastika) studies through the first 50 years of Extrapolation (December 1959-Fall 2009), the oldest continuing scholarly journal in the field, in three areas: -- History and editorial purpose, types of contributions, and recognition by general-, literature-, and F&SF-focused indexing services; -- Analyses of the 785 scholars published in the journal, by gender, co-authorship, affiliation and status (geographical, institutional, ranks, disciplines, awards), their referencing practices, and identification of the 55 most frequently published scholars; and, -- Analyses of more than 15,000 references given to 2,035 primary (creative) authors and more than 8,000 individual creative works, including collaboratively authored media, religious, and other titles, by gender and national affiliation, and by types of works. publication sources, language, and ages/dates, as found in 937 articles by 656 different authors. The primary references analyzed come not only from the traditional bibliometric locations in Works Cited lists, but also from Notes, and the references found in the rarely if ever studied informal locations (implicit citations), primarily within the text of the articles. The most frequently referenced primary authors and works are identified: 118 authors (20-563 references), beginning with Ursula K. Le Guin (563 references; 105 different works), Robert A. Heinlein (519; 90), and H. G. Wells (328; 52); 182 primary (creative) works (10-191 references), starting with Star Trek: The Original Series (191 references), Star Trek: The Next Generation (106), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (77), Wells’ The Time Machine (73), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (71). This study should interest historians of arts and humanities scholarship, F&SF scholars, and librarians and archivists responsible for collection development and collections management in the areas of literature and media

From effects-based operations to effects-based force : on causality, complex adaptive system, and the biology of war

The author addresses a recent force employment concept called effects-based operations, which first appeared during the 1991 war against Iraq. The attributes of effects-based operations can be grouped around three common, but interrelated elements such as effects focus, advanced technology, and systems thinking. However, the characteristics upon which the common elements are built, such as causality/deduction for effects focus, intangibles/control for advanced technology, and categorisation/analysis for systems thinking bear dangerous simplifications regarding the nature of war. These characterictics are in sharp contrast with war__s frictional nature as outlined by Clausewitz, who stated that effects in war cannot be traced back to single causes, as several concurrent causes are normally at work. Novelty must always be expected in war as friction dims expectations in terms of causality and the ability to achieve desired effects. The author suggests an organic approach to address the challenge posed by war. According to him the emphasis must shift towards learning and adaptation, instead of planning for desired effects. Friction indicates that often it is more important in war how we do things than what things we do, which has a clear practical limitation for the concept of effects-based operations.LEI Universiteit LeidenPolitieke Instituties: Ontwerp, functioneren, effecte

Early Christians Adapting to the Roman Empire : Mutual Recognition

Open Access brought to you by University of HelsinkiIn Early Christians Adapting to the Roman Empire: Mutual Recognition Niko Huttunen challenges the interpretation of early Christian texts as anti-imperial documents. He presents examples of the positive relationship between early Christians and the Roman society. With the concept of “recognition” Huttunen describes a situation in which the parties can come to terms with each other without full agreement. Huttunen provides examples of non-Christian philosophers recognizing early Christians. He claims that recognition was a response to Christians who presented themselves as philosophers. Huttunen reads Romans 13 as a part of the ancient tradition of the law of the stronger. His pioneering study on early Christian soldiers uncovers the practical dimension of recognizing the empire

Smart cinema as trans-generic mode: a study of industrial transgression and assimilation 1990-2005

Abstract Following from Sconce’s “Irony, nihilism, and the new American ‘smart’ film”, describing an American school of filmmaking that “survives (and at times thrives) at the symbolic and material intersection of ‘Hollywood’, the ‘indie’ scene and the vestiges of what cinephiles used to call ‘art films’” (Sconce, 2002, 351), I seek to link industrial and textual studies in order to explore Smart cinema as a transgeneric mode. I categorise it as a grouping of films which may have different formal characteristics, but are linked by industrial origins and production contexts, and through their use of genre, as Smart cinema embeds more challenging arthouse or cult tendencies in a framework of variable generic familiarity or accessibility. Individual texts contain thematic, stylistic and structural elements which can be positioned at, and interpreted along, loci on a continuum from mainstream to independent. This is achieved through a process of “double coding” (King, 2009), which King relates to Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and distinction, but which I expand to include utilising textual attributes to create simultaneous calls to action to multiple audiences, along a continuum from ‘indie’ to ‘mainstream’, often in a manner that obscures their industrial positioning. Double coding works to simultaneously cultivate mainstream-resistant audiences, actively positioning texts as distanced from the industrial circumstances which produced them, and to accrue cultural capital for producers. Crucially, Smart attempts to combine the potentially transgressive, ‘cool’ underground appeal of cult cinema with echoes of high culture and artistic status which comes more directly from the arthouse tradition, and is therefore embedded within what James English calls ‘the economy of prestige’. (English, 2009) Rather than a generational outcropping, or intrusion of independent cinema into the mainstream, Smart cinema demonstrates product differentiation within the context of horizontal integration: studios making strategic interventions into what would previously have been seen as ‘indie cinema territory’. While encouraging framing within an auterist model, and by utilising – or fetishizing – what we might casually consider ‘indie style,’ Hollywood studios extended their reach beyond the mass market by co-opting notions such as ‘independence’, ‘cult’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘prestige’

Early Christians Adapting to the Roman Empire

In Early Christians Adapting to the Roman Empire Niko Huttunen presents the positive relationship between early Christians and the Roman society. Non-Christian philosophers responded positively to Christians, Romans 13 belongs to the ancient political tradition, and Christian soldiers recognized the empire. Readership: All interested in the history of early Christianity, and anyone concerned with the relationship between Christianity, politics, and state