Virtual Machine Support for Many-Core Architectures: Decoupling Abstract from Concrete Concurrency Models

The upcoming many-core architectures require software developers to exploit concurrency to utilize available computational power. Today's high-level language virtual machines (VMs), which are a cornerstone of software development, do not provide sufficient abstraction for concurrency concepts. We analyze concrete and abstract concurrency models and identify the challenges they impose for VMs. To provide sufficient concurrency support in VMs, we propose to integrate concurrency operations into VM instruction sets. Since there will always be VMs optimized for special purposes, our goal is to develop a methodology to design instruction sets with concurrency support. Therefore, we also propose a list of trade-offs that have to be investigated to advise the design of such instruction sets. As a first experiment, we implemented one instruction set extension for shared memory and one for non-shared memory concurrency. From our experimental results, we derived a list of requirements for a full-grown experimental environment for further research

The Dies Irae ( Day of Wrath ) and Totentanz ( Dance of Death ): Medieval Themes Revisited in 19th Century Music and Culture

During the pivotal November 2002 football game of Arkansas vs. Georgia in the SEC conference championship, the Georgia marching band struck up their defensive rallying song. Instead of a typical defense song, the band played an excerpt of the Gregorian Sequence Dies Irae ( Day of Wrath\u27\u27) from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass. Drastically dissociated from its original medieval milieu, this musical Sequence still manages to elicit the same effect of fear and foreboding nearly a thousand years later. Precisely because of its deep musical and cultural roots, the Dies Irae occupies a significant place in history, closely intertwined from early on with the medieval folk motif Totentanz ( Dance of Death ), widely depicted in medieval art, and dramatically revived in 19th century music, art, and literature. This multi-disciplinary study focuses on the history of art and music of these two medieval themes during their development, and then moves on to study them in 19th century culture. Specifically, the manipulation of the original Gregorian chant and the incorporation of the idea of a medieval dance are analyzed in the music of Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and Camille Saint-Saens. Numerous other contextual links are explored as well, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo, Henri Cazalis, William Blake, and Alfred Rethel, all of whom created 19th century artistic or literary masterpieces derived from the thematic seeds of the Dies Irae and the Totentanz. Although neither of these ideas endured in their original form during the Romantic era, the inherently compelling nature of these themes that center on the macabre but inevitable end of life captivated the Romantic geniuses and continue to intrigue us to this day

Language Abstractions for RFID Technology

Developing pervasive and context-aware applications that make use of RFID technology is a daunting task given the high degree of failures inherent to communication with RFID tags. The reason is that current programming models do not incorporate these failures into the very heart of their computational model. AmbientTalk, a research language aimed at pervasive applications running in mobile ad hoc networks, does offer such a programming model, but it is aimed at mobile devices interconnected via peer-to-peer network connections such as WiFi or Bluetooth. In this paper we show how we use this programming model for the communication with RFID tags

The Faculty Notebook, April 2019

The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost

Creating Diversity and Navigating Social Change in Portuguese West Africa

The twin phenomena of the formation of Creole strata and societies and cultural creolization have dominated debates on the uniqueness of Caribbean contexts and universalist notions of cross-cultural interaction at a global level. These analytical threads are integrated into a study of processes of creolization and acculturation in their multiple forms in areas of (former) Portuguese presence in West Africa. Deeply entangled with four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade and the rise and fall of the colonial state, the remarkable diversity of cross-cultural encounters in empire is addressed here for Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Angola.publishersversionpublishe

Making sense of institutional change in China: The cultural dimension of economic growth and modernization

Building on a new model of institutions proposed by Aoki and the systemic approach to economic civilizations outlined by Kuran, this paper attempts an analysis of the cultural foundations of recent Chinese economic development. I argue that the cultural impact needs to be conceived as a creative process that involves linguistic entities and other public social items in order to provide integrative meaning to economic interactions and identities to different agents involved. I focus on three phenomena that stand at the center of economic culture in China, networks, localism and modernism. I eschew the standard dualism of individualism vs. collectivism in favour of a more detailed view on the self in social relationships. The Chinese pattern of social relations, guanxi, is also a constituent of localism, i.e. a peculiar arrangement and resulting dynamics of central-local interactions in governing the economy. Localism is balanced by culturalist controls of the center, which in contemporary China builds on the worldview of modernism. Thus, economic modernization is a cultural phenomenon on its own sake. I summarize these interactions in a process analysis based on Aoki's framework. --Aoki,culture and the economy,emics/etics,guanxi,relational collectivism,central/local government relations,culturalism,population quality,consumerism

Islam Nusantara: A Semantic and Symbolic Analysis

This paper presents a semantic and symbolic analysis of the concept and presentation of the concept of Islam Nusantara and the ways in which it evokes meaning and emotion to counter trans-national violent extremist movements including al-Qaeda and ISIS, based on Salafi-Wahhabi ideologies. It is based on a frame based content analysis of religious and political themes ofIslam Nusantra. I focus primarily on two films produced by Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) to promote this concept: the near feature length (83 minutes)The Blessing of Islam Nusantara (Oceans of Revelation: Islam as a Blessing for All Creation) and the much shorter (8 minutes) Launching the Film The Blessing Islam Nusantara. The first draws on elements of Sufism, Javanese and to a lesser extent other Indonesian cultures to construct a vision of Islam directly countering that of both violent and non-violent Salafi-Wahhabi extremists. The second promotes the film and Ansor’s (the NU youth organization) potential for combatting violent extremism. Theoretically, I rely on insights by Goffman’s observations concerning the ways in which semantic frames, and more specifically reframing, can alter dominance hierarchies in discourse systems and Sperber’s demonstration that symbolization is a cognitive process that evokes as well as communicates meaning and emotion