5,927 research outputs found

    The place where curses are manufactured : four poets of the Vietnam War

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    The Vietnam War was unique among American wars. To pinpoint its uniqueness, it was necessary to look for a non-American voice that would enable me to articulate its distinctiveness and explore the American character as observed by an Asian. Takeshi Kaiko proved to be most helpful. From his novel, Into a Black Sun, I was able to establish a working pair of 'bookends' from which to approach the poetry of Walter McDonald, Bruce Weigl, Basil T. Paquet and Steve Mason. Chapter One is devoted to those seemingly mismatched 'bookends,' Walt Whitman and General William C. Westmoreland, and their respective anthropocentric and technocentric visions of progress and the peculiarly American concept of the "open road" as they manifest themselves in Vietnam. In Chapter, Two, I analyze the war poems of Walter McDonald. As a pilot, writing primarily about flying, his poetry manifests General Westmoreland's technocentric vision of the 'road' as determined by and manifest through technology. Chapter Three focuses on the poems of Bruce Weigl. The poems analyzed portray the literal and metaphorical descent from the technocentric, 'numbed' distance of aerial warfare to the world of ground warfare, and the initiation of a 'fucking new guy,' who discovers the contours of the self's interior through a set of experiences that lead from from aerial insertion into the jungle to the degradation of burning human feces. Chapter Four, devoted to the thirteen poems of Basil T. Paquet, focuses on the continuation of the descent begun in Chapter Two. In his capacity as a medic, Paquet's entire body of poems details his quotidian tasks which entail tending the maimed, the mortally wounded and the dead. The final chapter deals with Steve Mason's JohnnY's Song, and his depiction of the plight of Vietnam veterans back in "The World" who are still trapped inside the interior landscape of their individual "ghettoes" of the soul created by their war-time experiences

    Embodying entrepreneurship: everyday practices, processes and routines in a technology incubator

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    The growing interest in the processes and practices of entrepreneurship has been dominated by a consideration of temporality. Through a thirty-six-month ethnography of a technology incubator, this thesis contributes to extant understanding by exploring the effect of space. The first paper explores how class structures from the surrounding city have appropriated entrepreneurship within the incubator. The second paper adopts a more explicitly spatial analysis to reveal how the use of space influences a common understanding of entrepreneurship. The final paper looks more closely at the entrepreneurs within the incubator and how they use visual symbols to develop their identity. Taken together, the three papers reject the notion of entrepreneurship as a primarily economic endeavour as articulated through commonly understood language and propose entrepreneuring as an enigmatic attractor that is accessed through the ambiguity of the non-verbal to develop the ‘new’. The thesis therefore contributes to the understanding of entrepreneurship and proposes a distinct role for the non-verbal in that understanding

    The Adirondack Chronology

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    The Adirondack Chronology is intended to be a useful resource for researchers and others interested in the Adirondacks and Adirondack history.https://digitalworks.union.edu/arlpublications/1000/thumbnail.jp

    Material Economies of South Yorkshire. The Organisation of Metal Production in Roman South Yorkshire.

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    This thesis aims to develop a model for the social organisation and production of ferrous and non-ferrous metals in South Yorkshire during the Roman period. This characterisation of the organisation of metallurgical activities is achieved through a combined methodology that will gather data from grey literature, published literature, as well as chemical, visual and microstructural analysis of metallurgical debris. The metallurgical practices in the study area are primarily rural in nature. These results are looked at through the lenses of Agency, Habitus, and the social construction of craft production. The movement of materials and people within the study area and local specialist practices are central in the interpretation of regional metalworking practices. Furthermore, models of craft production are critiqued, and an alternative modelisation process is suggested to characterise and understand the organisation of metal production in Roman South Yorkshire

    Graphical scaffolding for the learning of data wrangling APIs

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    In order for students across the sciences to avail themselves of modern data streams, they must first know how to wrangle data: how to reshape ill-organised, tabular data into another format, and how to do this programmatically, in languages such as Python and R. Despite the cross-departmental demand and the ubiquity of data wrangling in analytical workflows, the research on how to optimise the instruction of it has been minimal. Although data wrangling as a programming domain presents distinctive challenges - characterised by on-the-fly syntax lookup and code example integration - it also presents opportunities. One such opportunity is how tabular data structures are easily visualised. To leverage the inherent visualisability of data wrangling, this dissertation evaluates three types of graphics that could be employed as scaffolding for novices: subgoal graphics, thumbnail graphics, and parameter graphics. Using a specially built e-learning platform, this dissertation documents a multi-institutional, randomised, and controlled experiment that investigates the pedagogical effects of these. Our results indicate that the graphics are well-received, that subgoal graphics boost the completion rate, and that thumbnail graphics improve navigability within a command menu. We also obtained several non-significant results, and indications that parameter graphics are counter-productive. We will discuss these findings in the context of general scaffolding dilemmas, and how they fit into a wider research programme on data wrangling instruction

    Computational analysis of single-cell dynamics: protein localisation, cell cycle, and metabolic adaptation

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    Cells need to be able to adapt quickly to changes in nutrient availability in their environment in order to survive. Budding yeasts constitute a convenient model to study how eukaryotic cells respond to sudden environmental change because of their fast growth and relative simplicity. Many of the intracellular changes needed for adaptation are spatial and transient; they can be captured experimentally using fluorescence time-lapse microscopy. These data are limited when only used for observation, and become most powerful when they can be used to extract quantitative, dynamic, single-cell information. In this thesis we describe an analysis framework heavily based on deep learning methods that allows us to quantitatively describe different aspects of cells’ response to a new environment from microscopy data. chapter 2 describes a start-to-finish pipeline for data access and preprocessing, cell segmentation, volume and growth rate estimation, and lineage extraction. We provide benchmarks of run time and describe how to speed up analysis using parallelisation. We then show how this pipeline can be extended with custom processing functions, and how it can be used for real-time analysis of microscopy experiments. In chapter 3 we develop a method for predicting the location of the vacuole and nucleus from bright field images. We combine this method with cell segmentation to quantify the timing of three aspects of the cells’ response to a sudden nutrient shift: a transient change in transcription factor nuclear localisation, a change in instantaneous growth rate, and the reorganisation of the plasma membrane through the endocytosis of certain membrane proteins. In particular, we quantify the relative timing of these processes and show that there is a consistent lag between the perception of the stress at the level of gene expression and the reorganisation of the cell membrane. In chapter 4 we evaluate several methods to obtain cell cycle phase information in a label-free manner. We begin by using the outputs of cell segmentation to predict cytokinesis with high accuracy. We then predict cell cycle phase at a higher granularity directly from bright field images. We show that bright field images contain information about the cell cycle which is not visible by eye. We use these methods to quantify the relationship between cell cycle phase length and growth rate. Finally, in chapter 5 we look beyond microscopy to the bigger picture. We sketch an abstract description of how, at a genome-scale, cells might choose a strategy for adapting to a nutrient shift based on limited, noisy, and local information. Starting from a constraint-based model of metabolism, we propose an algorithm to navigate through metabolic space using only a lossy encoding of the full metabolic network. We show how this navigation can be used to adapt to a changing environment, and how its results differ from the global optimisation usually applied to metabolic models

    ‘Ramsay’s women’: Gender and genre in the works of Allan Ramsay

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    This dissertation examines the representation of the female character across all genres in the work of Allan Ramsay. In the genres of poetry, drama, and song, the role of the Scottish female is examined in relation to the preservation and dissemination of Scottish cultural modes and traditions. This is explored within the context of the progression of Scotland as a nation in the early eighteenth century. This thesis argues that Ramsay presents the Scottish female as playing a vital role in the development of Scotland as a polite nation through her use of Scottish cultural modes, and that he champions his female characters as worthy and competent in performing this function

    Optimización del rendimiento y la eficiencia energética en sistemas masivamente paralelos

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    RESUMEN Los sistemas heterogéneos son cada vez más relevantes, debido a sus capacidades de rendimiento y eficiencia energética, estando presentes en todo tipo de plataformas de cómputo, desde dispositivos embebidos y servidores, hasta nodos HPC de grandes centros de datos. Su complejidad hace que sean habitualmente usados bajo el paradigma de tareas y el modelo de programación host-device. Esto penaliza fuertemente el aprovechamiento de los aceleradores y el consumo energético del sistema, además de dificultar la adaptación de las aplicaciones. La co-ejecución permite que todos los dispositivos cooperen para computar el mismo problema, consumiendo menos tiempo y energía. No obstante, los programadores deben encargarse de toda la gestión de los dispositivos, la distribución de la carga y la portabilidad del código entre sistemas, complicando notablemente su programación. Esta tesis ofrece contribuciones para mejorar el rendimiento y la eficiencia energética en estos sistemas masivamente paralelos. Se realizan propuestas que abordan objetivos generalmente contrapuestos: se mejora la usabilidad y la programabilidad, a la vez que se garantiza una mayor abstracción y extensibilidad del sistema, y al mismo tiempo se aumenta el rendimiento, la escalabilidad y la eficiencia energética. Para ello, se proponen dos motores de ejecución con enfoques completamente distintos. EngineCL, centrado en OpenCL y con una API de alto nivel, favorece la máxima compatibilidad entre todo tipo de dispositivos y proporciona un sistema modular extensible. Su versatilidad permite adaptarlo a entornos para los que no fue concebido, como aplicaciones con ejecuciones restringidas por tiempo o simuladores HPC de dinámica molecular, como el utilizado en un centro de investigación internacional. Considerando las tendencias industriales y enfatizando la aplicabilidad profesional, CoexecutorRuntime proporciona un sistema flexible centrado en C++/SYCL que dota de soporte a la co-ejecución a la tecnología oneAPI. Este runtime acerca a los programadores al dominio del problema, posibilitando la explotación de estrategias dinámicas adaptativas que mejoran la eficiencia en todo tipo de aplicaciones.ABSTRACT Heterogeneous systems are becoming increasingly relevant, due to their performance and energy efficiency capabilities, being present in all types of computing platforms, from embedded devices and servers to HPC nodes in large data centers. Their complexity implies that they are usually used under the task paradigm and the host-device programming model. This strongly penalizes accelerator utilization and system energy consumption, as well as making it difficult to adapt applications. Co-execution allows all devices to simultaneously compute the same problem, cooperating to consume less time and energy. However, programmers must handle all device management, workload distribution and code portability between systems, significantly complicating their programming. This thesis offers contributions to improve performance and energy efficiency in these massively parallel systems. The proposals address the following generally conflicting objectives: usability and programmability are improved, while ensuring enhanced system abstraction and extensibility, and at the same time performance, scalability and energy efficiency are increased. To achieve this, two runtime systems with completely different approaches are proposed. EngineCL, focused on OpenCL and with a high-level API, provides an extensible modular system and favors maximum compatibility between all types of devices. Its versatility allows it to be adapted to environments for which it was not originally designed, including applications with time-constrained executions or molecular dynamics HPC simulators, such as the one used in an international research center. Considering industrial trends and emphasizing professional applicability, CoexecutorRuntime provides a flexible C++/SYCL-based system that provides co-execution support for oneAPI technology. This runtime brings programmers closer to the problem domain, enabling the exploitation of dynamic adaptive strategies that improve efficiency in all types of applications.Funding: This PhD has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPU16/03299 grant), the Spanish Science and Technology Commission under contracts TIN2016-76635-C2-2-R and PID2019-105660RB-C22. This work has also been partially supported by the Mont-Blanc 3: European Scalable and Power Efficient HPC Platform based on Low-Power Embedded Technology project (G.A. No. 671697) from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (H2020 Programme). Some activities have also been funded by the Spanish Science and Technology Commission under contract TIN2016-81840-REDT (CAPAP-H6 network). The Integration II: Hybrid programming models of Chapter 4 has been partially performed under the Project HPC-EUROPA3 (INFRAIA-2016-1-730897), with the support of the EC Research Innovation Action under the H2020 Programme. In particular, the author gratefully acknowledges the support of the SPMT Department of the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS)
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