Data Systems Dynamic Simulator

The Data System Dynamic Simulator (DSDS) is a discrete event simulation tool. It was developed for NASA for the specific purpose of evaluating candidate architectures for data systems of the Space Station era. DSDS provides three methods for meeting this requirement. First, the user has access to a library of standard pre-programmed elements. These elements represent tailorable components of NASA data systems and can be connected in any logical manner. Secondly, DSDS supports the development of additional elements. This allows the more sophisticated DSDS user the option of extending the standard element set. Thirdly, DSDS supports the use of data streams simulation. Data streams is the name given to a technique that ignores packet boundaries, but is sensitive to rate changes. Because rate changes are rare compared to packet arrivals in a typical NASA data system, data stream simulations require a fraction of the CPU run time. Additionally, the data stream technique is considerably more accurate than another commonly-used optimization technique

Science on social media

by Reuben Message, PhD candidate at LSE Sociology I’m often intrigued and frustrated, in equal measure, by the way people react to scientific research findings in my social networks. While it is not surprising, it is especially remarkable to observe how often people choose to share stories in which findings are reported that seem to confirm their prejudices

Animal welfare chauvinism in Brexit Britain:A genealogy of care and control

This paper uses the deployment of animal welfare as an issue during the ‘Brexit’ referendum as a lens through which to explore the mutual shaping of discourses about care for animals in Britain and the British nation, or the nationalism of animal welfare. Adopting a genealogical outlook, it uses one political advertisement in particular—paid for by the official Vote Leave campaign—as a focalising image and means of opening up the issues, leading to an empirical emphasis on the issue of live animal export as it has mediated ideas about Europe and British identity. Introducing the idea of ‘animal welfare chauvinism’, the paper suggests that animal welfare messages in the context of this constitutional debate were products of chauvinistic and caring impulses which are mutually constitutive and crystallised through discourses formed in relation to contingent historical struggles. Analytically, stress is placed on the constructive role of situated and repeated discursive exchanges, occurring between animal advocates and other national political elites, within which ‘care for animals’ as a national ideal is forged. In this light, the article concludes with reflections on the stakes of entering into an already existing conversation on the ‘national culture of care’ for animals in Britain

The shock of the re-newed modern: MoMA 2004

This essay presents a case study of the recently renovated and reopened MoMA. In addition to representing itself as a rhetorically new, post-modern and non-linear institution, the new museum is a generic model that is increasingly being implemented globally, and discussion of the renewal of MoMA offers the opportunity to encourage critical analysis of the models of discourse and architecture that are employed in the production of this effect of newness. As such, this essay explores the paradoxical image of a highly theoretical newness that has been embraced by MoMA – as a comforting modernist stalwart on the one hand, but also as a contemporary, postmodern museum space that is required to confirm with certain characteristics now generally accepted to signify the ‘new museum’