Beltway: Getting Around Garbage Collection Gridlock

We present the design and implementation of a new garbage collection framework that significantly generalizes existing copying collectors. The Beltway framework exploits and separates object age and incrementality. It groups objects in one or more increments on queues called belts, collects belts independently, and collects increments on a belt in first-in-first-out order. We show that Beltway configurations, selected by command line options, act and perform the same as semi-space, generational, and older-first collectors, and encompass all previous copying collectors of which we are aware. The increasing reliance on garbage collected languages such as Java requires that the collector perform well. We show that the generality of Beltway enables us to design and implement new collectors that are robust to variations in heap size and improve total execution time over the best generational copying collectors of which we are aware by up to 40%, and on average by 5 to 10%, for small to moderate heap sizes. New garbage collection algorithms are rare, and yet we define not just one, but a new family of collectors that subsumes previous work. This generality enables us to explore a larger design space and build better collectors

Pretenuring for Java

Pretenuring is a technique for reducing copying costs in garbage collectors. When pretenuring, the allocator places long-lived objects into regions that the garbage collector will rarely, if ever, collect. We extend previous work on profiling-driven pretenuring as follows. (1) We develop a collector-neutral approach to obtaining object lifetime profile information. We show that our collection of Java programs exhibits a very high degree of homogeneity of object lifetimes at each allocation site. This result is robust with respect to different inputs, and is similar to previous work on ML, but is in contrast to C programs, which require dynamic call chain context information to extract homogeneous lifetimes. Call-site homogeneity considerably simplifies the implementation of pretenuring and makes it more efficient. (2) Our pretenuring advice is neutral with respect to the collector algorithm, and we use it to improve two quite different garbage collectors: a traditional generational collector and an older-first collector. The system is also novel because it classifies and allocates objects into 3 categories: we allocate immortal objects into a permanent region that the collector will never consider, long-lived objects into a region in which the collector placed survivors of the most recent collection, and shortlived objects into the nursery, i.e., the default region. (3) We evaluate pretenuring on Java programs. Our simulation results show that pretenuring significantly reduces collector copying for generational and older-first collectors. 1

An Inquiry into the Competitiveness of Emerging Philippine Cities

This paper attempts to approximate the competitiveness of the country’s ten leading emerging urban centers: Angeles, Baguio, Cagayan de Oro, Davao City, General Santos, Iligan, Iloilo, San Fernando La Union, Tacloban and Zamboanga. The study uses both ranking and scoring methods to rate the cities in eight major drivers: cost competitiveness, human resources endowment, infrastructure, linkages with major urban centers and growth areas, quality of life, responsive of local government units and dynamism of local economy. It best serves as a policy and urban management tool for concerned local officials and leaders of various private sector groups in identifying the cities’ strength and areas of improvement. Insights on overall scores and rankings point to the importance of local leadership, emphasis on improving quality of lives in urban centers and the role of surrounding local and/or international growth formations in enhancing urban competitiveness. Any combination of these factors actually explains the high rankings garnered by General Santos City, Angeles City and Baguio.urban management, urbanization, competitiveness, urban development

Feral objects and acts of domestic piracy: sculpture, secular magic, and strategies of feminist disruption

This practice-­led doctoral project is a material investigation of the potential for sculptural artworks to perform disruptive, dissenting and resistant narratives of women and girls’ intersubjective relationship with the material culture of feminine domesticity. I argue for the entanglement of objects, ideas, bodies and artwork as a material-­led encounter and ask, what might a feminist new materialism look like when the focus is on domestic objects, and how can we draw meaning from these objects when they perform as sculpture? I propose a category of material culture I call ‘feral objects’, the overlooked and undervalued materiality of consumer culture as identified by Attfield (2000), objects that perform in the threshold spaces of society and culture (Crewe and Gregson, 2003). I analyse feral objects in their role as sculpture to argue for a feminist new materialism that disrupts subject/object hierarchies (Boscagli, 2014). Developing Eckstein and Schwarz’s (2014) identification of piracy as a boundary practice, I introduce the term ‘domestic piracy’ to identify material-­led strategies of feminist disruption as activism materialised as sculptural artworks. Drawing upon Bennett’s (2010) vital materialism and Pil and Galia Kollectiv’s (2010) proposition that sculpture and installations made from found objects are performative in and of themselves, I argue that the embodied encounter with sculpture and installation made from found domestic objects materialises the agency of objects to perform an inter-­relationality that is agentic of corporeal feminism (Meskimmon, 2019). I analyse poltergeist phenomena as ‘secular magic’, the sleight-­of-­hand of conjuring (During, 2002), proposing that secular magic materialises feminine domestic disruption as the embodied encounter between (feminine) subject and (domestic) object. I argue that the trickery or sleight-of-­hand required to construct sculptural artworks performs feminist strategies of domestic dissent enacted by women and girls through feminine material culture (Owen, 1989)

Does Might Make Right? An Exploration of Policing in the Shanghai French Concession

This thesis examines the use of policing to quell social unrest as a form of state management in the Shanghai\u27s French Concession during the early twentieth century

Will Urbanization in Developing Countries Reduce Carbon Emissions? Panel Data Evidence from Pakistani Household Surveys

Using four rounds of nationwide household survey data from the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey from 2005 to 2014, we provide the first empirical estimates of districts’ carbon emissions and their changes over time based on representative households’ energy consumption. We find that hotspots for carbon emissions in Pakistan tend to cluster around megacities—Islamabad has the highest per capita carbon emissions. This is contradictory to the compact city hypothesis that denser cities are greener, with lower per-capita carbon emissions, than remote cities, and suggest that urbanization in developing countries may not reduce carbon emissions. Our results also show that ignoring household garbage would underestimate the urban carbon footprint by at least 15%. Finally, our results demonstrate the importance of incorporating rural households and their primary energy usage such as firewood, and the fluid nature of carbon emissions and greenness ranking over time in developing countries like Pakistan

The Greenness of Rural and Urban Pakistan Over Time: Household Energy Use and Carbon Emissions

This study provides the first empirical estimates of household energy use and carbon emissions from 2005 to 2014 for all Pakistani rural and urban districts, using four rounds of nationwide household survey data. This is significant, because Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world and has the highest population growth rate and urbanization level of all South Asian countries. Following Glaeser and Kahn (2010), we estimate and predict carbon emissions every 2 years during 2005-2014 for each district in Pakistan using household-level survey data on energy consumption. We then rank all districts based on the predicted carbon emissions for representative median households, rating districts with less per capita carbon emissions as greener, and finally explain the changes in the district’s “greenness” rank over time. We find, first, that Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, has the higher per capita emissions, at 1 ton per year in 2013-14, and emission hotspots tend to cluster around urban centers and remote rural areas with heavy reliance on firewood use. Although Pakistan’s major cities’ household carbon emissions are still drastically lower than in the U.S., they are comparable to, and sometimes even higher than, cities in India and China. Second, our results demonstrate the importance of accounting for carbon emissions over time using multiple rounds of surveys—as opposed to focusing on a single year—because 52% of Pakistani districts experienced changes in their greenness rankings over the past decade. Finally, we show that while electricity, gasoline, and natural gas consumption drive carbon emissions in urban districts in Pakistan, firewood accounts for half of all carbon emissions in rural areas in KP and Balochistan provinces. Ignoring household garbage, therefore, would lead to underestimation of the urban carbon footprint by at least 15% in developing countries such as Pakistan

Toxic ecologies: contamination and transgression in Victorian fiction, 1851-1900

In mid-to-late Victorian fiction, pollution and waste drip, ooze, and seep through the built environment, threatening the boundaries between public and private, rich and poor, healthy and ill. Refuse and dirt held a paradoxical place in nineteenth-century society, as matter that was economically valuable, yet had the capacity to contaminate. My dissertation moves from this tension to ask three questions: What roles did dirt and waste play in critiques of capitalism? How did industrial and organic pollution shape the way that the Victorians imagined the natural world in the latter half of the nineteenth century? And how did changing views of the environment transform what constituted a “natural” social order? The project focuses on four Victorian authors fascinated by pollution and waste – Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and Richard Jefferies – and contextualizes their work in a broader discourse on waste by such figures as John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Henry Mayhew, and Charles Darwin. For the Victorians, questions of nature and pollution were not only environmental or scientific. They also had serious implications for the way that society was structured. I argue that for some nineteenth-century writers, visions of strange, contaminated environments offered novel versions of the “natural” order, which in turn allowed them to depict alternative social orders that emphasized stewardship and care while challenging the logic of industrial capitalism. Scholars of the Victorian period have largely discussed depictions of filth in the context of England’s public health movement of the 1840s, identifying links between the containment of dirt and social boundaries. My dissertation builds on this work by arguing that pollution undermined Victorian efforts to distinguish the natural from the unnatural, enabling writers to portray different “natural” models of social, political, and economic organization. Taken together, the works of Mayhew, Braddon, Dickens, Browning, and Jefferies reflect a strain of Victorian thought that saw dirt and waste as central to the development of a just and compassionate social order. Rather than expressing an unmitigated disgust for contaminated spaces, these writers move beyond the nineteenth-century desire for the containment of filth to inscribe otherwise monstrous spaces with possibility