Multi-level Visualization of Concurrent and Distributed Computation in Erlang

This paper describes a prototype visualization system for concurrent and distributed applications programmed using Erlang, providing two levels of granularity of view. Both visualizations are animated to show the dynamics of aspects of the computation. At the low level, we show the concurrent behaviour of the Erlang schedulers on a single instance of the Erlang virtual machine, which we call an Erlang node. Typically there will be one scheduler per core on a multicore system. Each scheduler maintains a run queue of processes to execute, and we visualize the migration of Erlang concurrent processes from one run queue to another as work is redistributed to fully exploit the hardware. The schedulers are shown as a graph with a circular layout. Next to each scheduler we draw a variable length bar indicating the current size of the run queue for the scheduler. At the high level, we visualize the distributed aspects of the system, showing interactions between Erlang nodes as a dynamic graph drawn with a force model. Speci?cally we show message passing between nodes as edges and lay out nodes according to their current connections. In addition, we also show the grouping of nodes into “s_groups” using an Euler diagram drawn with circles

In Cold Blood as influential creative nonfiction and the applicability of nonfiction in critical writing instruction

The publication in 1965 of Truman Capote\u27s In Cold Blood re-familiarized America with the brutal slayings of a prominent rural Kansas farm family in November 1959. Since 1965, Capote\u27s account of the murder of the Herbert Clutter family, its investigation, and the arrest, trial, conviction, and execution of two ex-convicts for the killings has been the focus of much critical examination. The author\u27s blending of journalistic and novelistic writing styles in the book, along with his claim that it created a new genre, the non-fiction novel, has prompted criticism from the worlds of both fiction and journalistic writing. This examination of In Cold Blood discusses Capote\u27s blending of fiction-writing and journalism and how through its blend of different genres of written discourse, it not only attracted the public\u27s attention--but serves as an effective pedagogical tool to examine rhetorical technique both singly and in comparison with other media formats. Its choice of subject matter, real-life brutal murders made more shocking by their locale and unlikely victims, and Capote\u27s blend of techniques from both fiction-writing and journalism are enough in themselves to hold students\u27 interest, even 50 years after the fact. However, students\u27 subsequent critical examination of this text as well as of the story\u27s recounting in other mediums adds the dimension necessary to transcend its status as just an entertaining literary work. Its applicability in implementing multiple literacies in the teaching of rhetorical analysis in post-secondary composition is demonstrated through an account of actual implementation in a freshman composition course at Iowa State University. The results demonstrate new and exciting pedagogical uses of Capote\u27s nonfiction novel and similar works and that examination of such techniques helps students become more discerning consumers of a variety of discourse

From the Political to the Personal:Interrogation, Imprisonment, and Sanction In the Prison Drama of Seamus Byrne and Brendan Behan

In my dissertation, I examine the multi-leveled metaphor of interrogation, imprisonment, and sanction in the 1950s Irish prison dramas of Seamus Byrne\u27s Design For A Headstone and Brendan Behan\u27s The Quare Fellow and The Hostage. In these plays, I explore the development of that metaphor and how it relates directly to the prison situation in the Republic of Ireland in the 1950s. During that revolutionary, socially, and politically stagnant decade in Ireland, these two playwrights examine the way that the Irish government adopted similar tactics in its treatment of prisoners as had England when it had ruled the island. Not only does a post-colonial subaltern circumstance exist in the legal and carceral realm, but also these plays show a connection of the Church and state and the implications of such a society on its penal system. In Chapter One, I examine Seamus Byrne\u27s Design For A Headstone. I argue that it is in the naturalistic, representational tradition of Ibsen and that through this direct portrayal of prison life, Byrne captures the irony of life and death struggles within a penal system. I argue that this play is important in the Irish canon of drama, even though Byrne is essentially a forgotten playwright. In Chapters Two and Three, I examine Brendan Behan\u27s The Quare Fellow and The Hostage. I explicate Behan\u27s movement away from representationalism to a form more closely resembling theater of the absurd. In The Quare Fellow he makes subtle movement away from realism, and in The Hostage plunges into a fluid and abstract form. In these plays, Behan satirizes the Irish government as well as that I.R.A

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationGeorg Büchner's oeuvre contains an extraordinary number of biblical quotations. Although previous research has traced the origins of various quotations and analyzed the contextualization of select quotations, a comprehensive investigation of the author's employment of biblical quotations is still lacking. In this study biblical quotations throughout Büchner's oeuvre are identified chronologically, classified according to their function (support or introduce an argument, aesthetically enhance the text, or function as self-referential elements) and type (direct, modified, indirect quotation or allusion), and examined in the context of each individual work. As became evident in the earlier stages of research for this study, the utilization of biblical quotations in Der Hessische Landbote, the author's first text and an unintentional collaboration with Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, follows a distinct pattern. First, biblical allusions demonstrate the people's socioeconomic division, then they create both a Christ- and an Anti-Christ figure, and finally, they advocate political change in form of a violent revolution. As this study from there on demonstrates, each of Büchner's subsequent texts utilizes a variation of this general pattern of biblical quotation employment modified to fit its genre, its aesthetics, and its particular strategy. Consequently, the divisions of mankind demonstrated may be - depending upon the text - political, psychological or even physical, there may be a Christ-figure, an Anti-Christ figure or both, and the resulting call for change may be political, social, or economic. It is shown that this tripartite pattern of biblical quotation employment evolved considerably throughout Büchner's oeuvre, mirroring the author's own evolving reception of the contemporary debate between an emerging materialist philosophy and the prevailing idealist discourse in philosophy and in science. This broader study of biblical quotations - demonstrating the repeated division of mankind, the introduction of a Christ-figure, and the call for social change - reveals both the author's consistent adherence to a pattern - despite diverse genres and themes - and his ability to utilize the Bible's versatility to fit each particular genre and theme

Intelligent Pilot Aids for Flight Re-Planning in Emergencies

Effective and safe control of an aircraft may be difficult or nearly impossible for a pilot following an unexpected system failure. Without prior training, the pilot must ascertain on the fly those changes in both manual control technique and procedures that will lead to a safe landing of the aircraft. Sophisticated techniques for determining the required control techniques are now available. Likewise, a body of literature on pilot decision making provides formalisms for examining how pilots approach discrete decisions framed as the selection between options. However, other aspects of behavior, such as the task of route planning and guidance, are not as well studied. Not only is the pilot faced with possible performance changes to the aircraft dynamics, but he or she is also tasked to create a plan of actions that will effectively take the aircraft down to a safe landing. In this plan, the many actions that the pilot can perform are closely intertwined with the trajectory of the aircraft, making it difficult to accurately predict the final outcome. Coupled with the vast number of potential actions to be taken, this problem may seem intractable. This is reflected in the lack of a pre-specified procedure capable of giving pilots the ability to find a resolution for this task. This report summarizes a multi-year effort to examine methods to aid pilots in planning an approach and arrival to an airport following an aircraft systems failure. Ultimately, we hypothesize that automatic assistance to pilots can be provided in real-time in the form of improving pilot control of a damaged aircraft and providing pilots with procedural directives suitable for critical flight conditions; such systems may also benefit pilot training and procedure design. To achieve this result, a systematic, comprehensive research program was followed, building on prior research. This approach included a pencil-and-paper study with airline pilots examining methods of representing a flight route in an immediately understandable manner, and in a manner that would allow the pilot to modify an automatically-generated route and/or detect any inappropriate elements in an automatically-generated route. Likewise, a flight simulator study examined different cockpit systems for the relative merits of providing pilots with any of a variety of automated functions for emergency flight planning. The results provide specific guidance for the design of such systems

Catholic and Protestant martyrdom in Tudor England

None provided

Interactive problem solving via algorithm visualization

COMIND is a tool for conceptual design of industrial products. It helps designers define and evaluate the initial design space by using search algorithms to generate sets of feasible solutions. Two algorithm visualization techniques, Kaleidoscope and Lattice, and one visualization of n-dimensional data, MAP, are used to externalize the machine's problem solving strategies and the tradeoffs as a result of using these strategies. After a short training period, users are able to discover tactics to explore design space effectively, evaluate new design solutions, and learn important relationships among design criteria, search speed, and solution quality. We thus propose that visualization can serve as a tool for interactive intelligence, i.e., human-machine collaboration for solving complex problems

Savage and Bloody Footsteps Through the Valley : The Wyoming Massacre in the American Imagination

Along the banks of the Susquehanna River in early July 1778, a force of about 600 Loyalist and Native American raiders won a lopsided victory against 400 overwhelmed Patriot militiamen and regulars in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. While not well-known today, this battle—the Battle of Wyoming—had profound effects on the Revolutionary War and American culture and politics. Quite familiar to early Americans, this battle’s remembrance influenced the formation of national identity and informed Americans’ perceptions of their past and present over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the beginning, however, Americans’ understanding of what occurred in the Wyoming Valley in July 1778 was strongly influenced by reports from partisans not present at the battle, reports which wildly differed from eyewitness accounts. In the aftermath of the battle, a fabricated myth about Loyalists and Native Americans massacring women, children, and wounded soldiers quickly took root in the public imagination and influenced the Patriot war effort. Despite having no evidence backing it up, the myth eventually outlasted its Revolutionary context, coming back to shape political dialogue and popular culture in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, this Revolutionary fabrication was only the beginning of the historical distortion related to the Battle of Wyoming. By mid-century, a whole new myth about the battle arose, featuring a Native American woman known as Queen Esther who murdered prisoners around a rock. Made possible by the cultural atmosphere of the period, this myth proved equally sensational. This thesis explores how these myths about the battle formed, spread, and influenced American society on national and local levels from 1778 to around 1878. Tracing and analyzing how Americans have remembered and misremembered the Battle of Wyoming, more popularly known as the Wyoming Massacre, its primary focus is to look at the meaning behind the narratives that formed around this event and what those meanings say about the individuals and cultures that created them. It also scrutinizes some of the ways Americans have tailored their remembrances of Wyoming to speak to their present. Ultimately, this thesis points to how historical distortions can easily enmesh themselves into popular memory and how they can influence national and local identities