A Comparative Analysis of STM Approaches to Reduction Operations in Irregular Applications

As a recently consolidated paradigm for optimistic concurrency in modern multicore architectures, Transactional Memory (TM) can help to the exploitation of parallelism in irregular applications when data dependence information is not available up to run- time. This paper presents and discusses how to leverage TM to exploit parallelism in an important class of irregular applications, the class that exhibits irregular reduction patterns. In order to test and compare our techniques with other solutions, they were implemented in a software TM system called ReduxSTM, that acts as a proof of concept. Basically, ReduxSTM combines two major ideas: a sequential-equivalent ordering of transaction commits that assures the correct result, and an extension of the underlying TM privatization mechanism to reduce unnecessary overhead due to reduction memory updates as well as unnecesary aborts and rollbacks. A comparative study of STM solutions, including ReduxSTM, and other more classical approaches to the parallelization of reduction operations is presented in terms of time, memory and overhead.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

In the Flesh and the Gothic Pharmacology of Everyday Life; or Into and Out of the Gothic

One of the key questions facing Gothic Studies today is that of its migration into and out of its once familiar generic or symbolic modes of representation. The BBC series In the Flesh addresses these concerns against the background of a neoliberal medical culture in which pharmaceutical treatments have become powerful tools of socio-economic normalization, either through inducing passivity or in heightening productivity, generating chemically adapted biomachines tuned to think and produce. But the pharmakon has always been a risky form of normalization, its poisonous mechanisms threatening to undo its helpful patterns by stealth. This essay discusses the pharmacological and medical contexts of the series in which zombies are subjected to medical management and normalized as “PDS sufferers,” thereby locating In the Flesh in terms of an already gothicized neoliberal pharmacology of everyday life. It also enquires how the proximity of the symbolic pharmacology of the series to neoliberal medical discourses and practices actually challenges traditional representational patterns of the Gothic and whether the Gothic can still have a role as an alternative cure to society’s ills

Thirteen Plus One: A Comparison of Global Climate Policy Architectures

We critically review the Kyoto Protocol and thirteen alternative policy architectures for addressing the threat of global climate change. We employ six criteria to evaluate the policy proposals: environmental outcome, dynamic efficiency, cost effectiveness, equity, flexibility in the presence of new information, and incentives for participation and compliance. The Kyoto Protocol does not fare well on a number of criteria, but none of the alternative proposals fare well along all six dimensions. We identify several major themes among the alternative proposals: Kyoto is “too little, too fast”; developing countries should play a more substantial role and receive incentives to participate; implementation should focus on market-based approaches, especially those with price mechanisms; and participation and compliance incentives are inadequately addressed by most proposals. Our investigation reveals tensions among several of the evaluative criteria, such as between environmental outcome and efficiency, and between cost-effectiveness and incentives for participation and compliance.Policy architecture, Kyoto Protocol, Efficiency, Cost effectiveness, Equity, Participation, Compliance

Chinese Township Village Enterprises as Vaguely Defined Cooperations

This paper concerns the paradoxes and dilemmas that the very successful "Chinese model" presents for transition theory. The "Chinese model" is centered on the development of township-village enterprises. The main purpose of this paper is to make the case that TVE's are not just some form of disguised capitalist institution; they are much better described as "vaguely defined cooperatives" - meaning an essentially communal organization extremely far removed from having well defined ownership structure. That a transition strategy based on vaguely defined cooperatives should be so successful presents a severe challenge for traditional property theory. We speculate that to address this challenge properly, traditional property rights should be extended by including a dimension corresponding to the degree of individualism/cooperation existing in a society. A model of the required extension is described. Implications and application are discussed.

Privatization: Selling America To the Lowest Bidder

[Excerpt] Elected officials and citizens are now learning in hundreds of communities that privatization is not the way to improve the quality and efficiency of public services. Cities such as New York and Phoenix, where privatization proliferated in the early 1980s, are now bringing work back in-house. And in the federal government, despite a massive privatization campaign waged by the Reagan Administration, resistance by agency directors has resulted in a job loss of only 0.7% of all nondefense federal jobs. (The job loss rises to 2.1% if civilian defease department jobs are included.) A recent report by the U.S. Government Accounting Office concludes that privatization of federal employees\u27 jobs is neither cheaper nor better

Legislative Alert: OMB Circular A-76 in the FY2012 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill

[Excerpt] On behalf of the AFL-CIO, I am writing to urge conferees to retain the safeguard against the controversial OMB Circular A-76 privatization process in the Corps of Engineers (CoE) in the FY 2012 Energy and Water Development appropriations bill, which has been included as a bipartisan general provision since the FY 2008 version of this funding measure

Ten Years After . . . Transition and Economics

This paper attempts to portray a synthesis of what has been learned in the past 10 years with regard to the transition process. It contrasts the mainstream "Washington consensus" view of transition with the "evolutionary institutionalist" perspective. It argues that the latter gives a more adequate and complete picture both of the transition processes and of economic systems and is of better help to prevent serious transition failures. Copyright 2002, International Monetary Fund