Elevating commodity storage with the SALSA host translation layer

To satisfy increasing storage demands in both capacity and performance, industry has turned to multiple storage technologies, including Flash SSDs and SMR disks. These devices employ a translation layer that conceals the idiosyncrasies of their mediums and enables random access. Device translation layers are, however, inherently constrained: resources on the drive are scarce, they cannot be adapted to application requirements, and lack visibility across multiple devices. As a result, performance and durability of many storage devices is severely degraded. In this paper, we present SALSA: a translation layer that executes on the host and allows unmodified applications to better utilize commodity storage. SALSA supports a wide range of single- and multi-device optimizations and, because is implemented in software, can adapt to specific workloads. We describe SALSA's design, and demonstrate its significant benefits using microbenchmarks and case studies based on three applications: MySQL, the Swift object store, and a video server.Comment: Presented at 2018 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS

TASTE

Taste usually occupies the bottom of the sensorial hierarchy, as the quintessentially hedonistic sense, too close to the animal, the elemental and the corporeal, and for this reason disciplined and moralised. At the same time, taste is indissolubly tied to knowledge. To taste is to discriminate, emit judgement, enter an unstable domain of synaesthetic normativity where the certainty of metaphysical categories begins to crumble. This second title in the ‘Law and the Senses’ series explores law using taste as a conceptual and ontological category able to unsettle legal certainties, and a promising tool whereby to investigate the materiality of law’s relation to the world. For what else is law’s reduction of the world into legal categories, if not law’s ingesting the world by tasting it, and emitting moral and legal judgements accordingly? Through various topics including coffee, wine, craft cider and Japanese knotweed, this volume explores the normativities that shape the way taste is felt and categorised, within and beyond subjective, phenomenological and human dimensions. The result is an original interdisciplinary volume – complete with seven speculative ‘recipes’ – dedicated to a rarely explored intersection, with contributions from artists, legal academics, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists

Reading the double diaspora: cultural representations of Gujarati East Africans in Britain

This thesis explores representations of culture amongst the prolific twice-displaced Gujarati East African diaspora in Britain. I argue that the paucity of fictional literatures written about, or by, this community demonstrate that the ‘double diaspora’ often favour forms of embodied narrative. Using the literary critical interpretive practices of close reading, I thus analyse a range of cultural ‘texts’. Through this approach of investigating both the written text alongside the nontextual embodied narrative, the thesis broadens the remit of literary studies and subsequently addresses a lacuna in scholarship on cultural representations of the ‘double diaspora’. Whilst the thesis intervenes in contemporary literary postcolonial debate, interdisciplinary connections between diverse disciplines, such as performance, trauma and diaspora studies, are established. Following my introduction, the thesis is divided into three main chapters: each considers a form of embodied cultural representation significant to the migrant who has been displaced from India to Britain, via East Africa. Beginning with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook – one of the few examples of a written representation of twice-migrant culture – I explore culinary practices as a mode of individuated and collective identity articulation. In my third chapter, I develop my argument to read the Gujarati dances of dandiya-raas and garba, played during the Hindu festival of Navratri. Finally, before concluding, the fourth chapter moves to explore visual materials gathered from personal kinship networks. In identifying embodied narratives as significant to the double diaspora, my thesis uncovers the performance of complex and multiple selfhoods and collectivities within this community. Whilst there are instances of a surprising convergence of modern and traditional identities, there is too the emergence of an Indian national identity, which is complicated by regional Gujaratiness. In closing, I propose a Gujarati East African vernacular modernity, which demonstrates how this progressdriven diaspora simultaneously looks in two directions

We, the Max Planck Society: a Study of Hierarchy in Germany

This thesis explores the idiosyncratic internal hierarchy of the Max Planck Society in Germany, through which its natural scientific work is produced. Using the emic notion of a ‘principle’ (Prinzip), it articulates the presence of three hierarchical principles within the Society – the hero principle, the longevity principle, and the precarity principle – which have a range of subjective and intersubjective reality effects. Based on fifteen months of partially itinerant fieldwork at various Max Planck locations across Germany, it mobilizes testimonies, observations, virtual texts, statistics and archival data in the service of this contribution to organisational anthropology. In so doing it also performs a syncretic act which has not yet been made in this field, that is, to bring traditional anthropological studies of hierarchy – most significantly the work of Louis Dumont – to bear on a complex and technologized Western organisation. It argues that the cause of this neglect is in fact a historical product: the last forty years or so being characterized by a generalized repression in the human sciences of full consciousness of societies’ hierarchical aspect, expressed most visibly in the ubiquitous use of tropes like ‘agency’ and ‘action’. In offering a Dumontian interpretation of the Max Planck Society, this thesis thus brings the presence of social hierarchies and their respective value-ideas once more to the fore. ‘We, the Max Planck Society’ – a reference to Raymond Firth's Pacific islanders and betokening collective solidarity and identity – is the historical product of an alternate Teutonic vision of togetherness, which since the eighteenth-century has contradicted and opposed Western Enlightenment individualism. Germany therefore provides a good regional vantage point from which to expose obscured ethnocentrisms, and offer an alternative version of how organisations can work

Recording Studios on Tour: The Expeditions of the Victor Talking Machine Company through Latin America, 1903-1926

During the early twentieth century, recording technicians travelled around the world on behalf of the multinational recording companies. Producing recordings with vernacular repertoires not only became an effective way to open local markets for the talking machines that these same companies were manufacturing. It also allowed for an unprecedented global circulation of local musics. This dissertation focuses on the recording expeditions lead by the Victor Talking Machine Company through several cities in Latin America during the acoustic era. Drawing from untapped archival material, including the daily ledgers of the expeditions, the following pages offer the first comprehensive history of these expeditions while focusing on five areas of analysis: the globalization of recorded sound, the imperial and transcultural dynamics in the itinerant recording ventures of the industry, the interventions of “recording scouts” for the production of acoustic records, the sounding events recorded during the expeditions, and the transnational circulation of these recordings. I argue that rather than a marginal side of the music industry or a rudimentary operation, as it has been usually presented hitherto in many histories of the phonograph, sound recording during the acoustic era was a central and intricate area in the business; and that the international ventures of recording companies before 1925 set the conditions of possibility for the consolidation of media entertainment as a defining aspect of consumer culture worldwide through the twentieth century. Furthermore, by focusing on the interactions between Victor’s traveling recording agents and multiple performers and intermediaries in Latin America, I question top-down narratives of the international dimension of recording companies and offer, instead, a complicated picture of improvisation, untidy imperialism, intercultural misunderstandings, colonial desire, sundry sound recordings, and multimedia entanglements

Landscape Strategies in Architecture

The central question and purpose of the thesis is to understand how landscape as a design concept is changing our understanding of architecture. It explores the ways in which landscape is relevant for design strategies in architecture. Buildings that have been designed like landscapes have become a topic in contemporary architecture and in the recent literature about it. The apparent distinction between architecture and landscape is questioned in exemplary theoretical works and building designs with increasing interest in landscape as a phenomenon of contemporary architecture. To understand this phenomenon this thesis first explores the term of landscape and its design. The introduction focuses on the exploration of the idea of landscape and how it is applicable in architectural design. Strategies of landscape design as they are discussed in contemporary landscape architecture are defined and illustrated with specific examples. This view is contrasted with the idea of nature in architecture. Architecture's concepts of nature reveal some crucial problems that lead to the polarity of 'wild' nature and 'human' architecture. With a critique of these common architectural theories and within the methodological differentiation the thesis reveals the necessity of research through analysis of landscape spatial composition in architecture. The core of this thesis is three case studies of architectural designs that approach a building like a landscape. A selection of analytical techniques is applied to key cases in three central chapters. The main analytical model for landscape architectural composition that Steenbergen and Reh (2003) developed for the European Gardens of the Renaissance, Baroque and Enlightenment is applied as a drawing analysis of the formal composition of three selected contemporary architectural projects in a period from 1992 to 2015. Each of the three building designs is studied with the same four-layer method of design analysis. In conjunction with this comparative analysis, a project specific method that reveals unique aspects of each design has been developed. The first case is OMA's unbuilt Jussieu design for two university libraries in Paris. In 1992 Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his collaborators at OMA proposed the Jussieu project at a turning point of the discipline, where new forms of architecture with landscape design strategies were being explored. Though this project has not been realised, this thesis makes it possible to describe the building in a guided walk-through. This visualisation of the design as it could have looked if built is also the specific analytical method chosen for this example. The second case, the Rolex Learning Centre at EPF Lausanne, has been clearly declared 'landscape' as architecture by its designers. This competition winning design from 2004 and opened in 2010 is the largest scale international building of Japanese Architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA). The specific analytical method used for this case is a visual space analysis of the project using 3D-isovists. The third case is the City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela by American architect Peter Eisenman. This project was initially designed in 1999 in a process of layering - in principle, similar to the layer model analysis of this thesis. However, the four tenets of the thesis layer model - ground form, spatial form, metaphorical form and programmatic form - will alter the reading of this project. This execution of the giant public project of "City of Culture" was interrupted half-way in 2015, with great political difficulties fo Galicia. The specific analytical method used for this case is an experiment that uses the ruins of unbuilt architecture as the base for a landscape architectural design. This design of a temporary garden mimics the design principles of architect Peter Eisenman. This experiment shows that landscape strategies developed for the design of a building can be applied in reverse for designed landscapes. In conclusion, this thesis will compare the three case studies of architectural designs with each other. While some design instruments, strategies and methods are specific, others are commonly applied in several or all of the projects. In a broader scope, the analysis is transposed into the greater societal and theoretical realm to explore whether landscape design strategies change architecture. For the discipline of architecture in general, the thesis explores how far landscape could lead the profession further as a new concept to build a sustainable human environment. Evoking potential applications and the reach of landscape in architecture in the perspective of future development, the thesis ultimately discusses unexplored potentials for landscape design strategies in the architectural discipline

Landscape Strategies in Architecture

The central question and purpose of the thesis is to understand how landscape as a design concept is changing our understanding of architecture. It explores the ways in which landscape is relevant for design strategies in architecture. Buildings that have been designed like landscapes have become a topic in contemporary architecture and in the recent literature about it. The apparent distinction between architecture and landscape is questioned in exemplary theoretical works and building designs with increasing interest in landscape as a phenomenon of contemporary architecture. To understand this phenomenon this thesis first explores the term of landscape and its design. The introduction focuses on the exploration of the idea of landscape and how it is applicable in architectural design. Strategies of landscape design as they are discussed in contemporary landscape architecture are defined and illustrated with specific examples. This view is contrasted with the idea of nature in architecture. Architecture's concepts of nature reveal some crucial problems that lead to the polarity of 'wild' nature and 'human' architecture. With a critique of these common architectural theories and within the methodological differentiation the thesis reveals the necessity of research through analysis of landscape spatial composition in architecture. The core of this thesis is three case studies of architectural designs that approach a building like a landscape. A selection of analytical techniques is applied to key cases in three central chapters. The main analytical model for landscape architectural composition that Steenbergen and Reh (2003) developed for the European Gardens of the Renaissance, Baroque and Enlightenment is applied as a drawing analysis of the formal composition of three selected contemporary architectural projects in a period from 1992 to 2015. Each of the three building designs is studied with the same four-layer method of design analysis. In conjunction with this comparative analysis, a project specific method that reveals unique aspects of each design has been developed. The first case is OMA's unbuilt Jussieu design for two university libraries in Paris. In 1992 Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his collaborators at OMA proposed the Jussieu project at a turning point of the discipline, where new forms of architecture with landscape design strategies were being explored. Though this project has not been realised, this thesis makes it possible to describe the building in a guided walk-through. This visualisation of the design as it could have looked if built is also the specific analytical method chosen for this example. The second case, the Rolex Learning Centre at EPF Lausanne, has been clearly declared 'landscape' as architecture by its designers. This competition winning design from 2004 and opened in 2010 is the largest scale international building of Japanese Architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA). The specific analytical method used for this case is a visual space analysis of the project using 3D-isovists. The third case is the City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela by American architect Peter Eisenman. This project was initially designed in 1999 in a process of layering - in principle, similar to the layer model analysis of this thesis. However, the four tenets of the thesis layer model - ground form, spatial form, metaphorical form and programmatic form - will alter the reading of this project. This execution of the giant public project of "City of Culture" was interrupted half-way in 2015, with great political difficulties fo Galicia. The specific analytical method used for this case is an experiment that uses the ruins of unbuilt architecture as the base for a landscape architectural design. This design of a temporary garden mimics the design principles of architect Peter Eisenman. This experiment shows that landscape strategies developed for the design of a building can be applied in reverse for designed landscapes. In conclusion, this thesis will compare the three case studies of architectural designs with each other. While some design instruments, strategies and methods are specific, others are commonly applied in several or all of the projects. In a broader scope, the analysis is transposed into the greater societal and theoretical realm to explore whether landscape design strategies change architecture. For the discipline of architecture in general, the thesis explores how far landscape could lead the profession further as a new concept to build a sustainable human environment. Evoking potential applications and the reach of landscape in architecture in the perspective of future development, the thesis ultimately discusses unexplored potentials for landscape design strategies in the architectural discipline

2008 UMaine News Press Releases

This is a catalog of press releases put out by the University of Maine Division of Marketing and Communications between January 7, 2008 and December 29, 2008