The Inherent Cost of Remembering Consistently

Non-volatile memory (NVM) promises fast, byte-addressable and durable storage, with raw access latencies in the same order of magnitude as DRAM. But in order to take advantage of the durability of NVM, programmers need to design persistent objects which maintain consistent state across system crashes and restarts. Concurrent implementations of persistent objects typically make heavy use of expensive persistent fence instructions to order NVM accesses, thus negating some of the performance benefits of NVM. This raises the question of the minimal number of persistent fence instructions required to implement a persistent object. We answer this question in the deterministic lock-free case by providing lower and upper bounds on the required number of fence instructions. We obtain our upper bound by presenting a new universal construction that implements durably any object using at most one persistent fence per update operation invoked. Our lower bound states that in the worst case, each process needs to issue at least one persistent fence per update operation invoked

Mental tactility: the ascendance of writing in online management education

A qualitative study of online management education and the role of writing as an indicative measure of thinking and learning. Established educational models, such as Dale\u27s Cone of Experience, are expanded and redeveloped to illustrate the central role of writing as a critical thinking process which appears to be increasing, rather than decreasing, with the advent of online multimedia technology. In an environment of increasing reliance on audiovisual stimulus in online education, the authors contend that tertiary educators may witness an ascendance or re-emergence of writing as central to the academic experience. This may be both supply and demand driven. Drawing on a study of two undergraduate units in the Bachelor of Commerce and applying hermeneutics to develop challenging insights, the authors present a case for educators to remain conversant with the art of teaching writing, and to promote writing to improve educational outcomes. <br /

Narrative Self-Constitution and Recovery from Addiction

Why do some addicted people chronically fail in their goal to recover, while others succeed? On one established view, recovery depends, in part, on efforts of intentional planning agency. This seems right, however, firsthand accounts of addiction suggest that the agent’s self-narrative also has an influence. This paper presents arguments for the view that self-narratives have independent, self-fulfilling momentum that can support or undermine self-governance. The self-narrative structures of addicted persons can entrench addiction and alienate the agent from practically feasible recovery plans. Strategic re-narration can redirect narrative momentum and therefore support recovery in ways that intentional planning alone cannot

Retelling racialized violence, remaking white innocence: the politics of interlocking oppressions in transgender day of remembrance

Transgender Day of Remembrance has become a significant political event among those resisting violence against gender-variant persons. Commemorated in more than 250 locations worldwide, this day honors individuals who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. However, by focusing on transphobia as the definitive cause of violence, this ritual potentially obscures the ways in which hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality constitute such acts. Taking the Transgender Day of Remembrance/Remembering Our Dead project as a case study for considering the politics of memorialization, as well as tracing the narrative history of the Fred F. C. Martinez murder case in Colorado, the author argues that deracialized accounts of violence produce seemingly innocent White witnesses who can consume these spectacles of domination without confronting their own complicity in such acts. The author suggests that remembrance practices require critical rethinking if we are to confront violence in more effective ways. Description from publisher's site: http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/srsp.2008.5.1.2

Go in Peace. But Go!

(Excerpt) Early in my episcopacy, I was having a dinner conversation with a number of bishops including then Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, George Anderson. It was a rough time for me, as it often is early in a first term. I had been struggling with a few congregations with a number of issues, principally that the ELCA was not their parents\u27 church anymore. Anyway, while we were talking. Bishop Anderson summarized my feelings precisely: Sometimes you just want to say, \u27Go in peace. But go! \u2

A review of self-processing biases in cognition

When cues in the environment are associated with self (e.g., one’s own name, face, or coffee cup), these items trigger processing biases such as increased attentional focus, perceptual prioritization and memorial support. This paper reviews the existing literature on self-processing biases before introducing a series of studies that provide new insight into the influence of the self on cognition. In particular, the studies examine affective and memorial biases for self-relevant stimuli, and their flexible application in response to different task demands. We conclude that self-processing biases function to ensure that self-relevant information is attended to and preferentially processed because this is a perpetual goal of the self-system. However, contrary task-demands or priming can have an attenuating effect on their influence, speaking to the complexity and dynamism of the self-processing system in cognition

The Trade-off Between Static and Dynamic Efficiency in Electricity Markets - A Cross Country Study

This paper is the first to explicitly test for the presence of a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency in a regulated industry, the electricity industry. We show for 16 European countries over the period 1998-2007 that higher electricity end-user prices in a country subsequently lead to higher investments in the capital stock, i.e. in generation, distribution and transmission assets. Moreover, there is a trade-off between vertical economies and competition. Ownership unbundling and forced access to the incumbent transmission grid increase competition but come at the cost of lost vertical economies. Generally, we find that regulation that affect only the market like the establishment of a wholesale market or free choice of suppliers increase investment activity via spurring competition. Regulation, however, that adversely affects the incumbent directly, like ownership unbundling, decreases aggregate investment spending. (author's abstract)Series: Working Papers / Research Institute for Regulatory Economic

Exact models for hall current reconnection with axial guide fields

This paper employs an analytic reconnection model to investigate the conditions under which Hall currents can influence reconnection and Ohmic dissipation rates. It is first noted that time dependent magnetohydrodynamic systems can be analyzed by decomposing the magnetic and velocity fields into guide field and reconnecting field components. A formally exact solution shows that Hall currents can speed up or slow down the reconnection rate depending on the strength and orientation of the axial guide field. In particular, merging solutions are developed in which the axial guide field is the dominant driver of the reconnection. The extent to which Hall currents can alleviate the buildup of back pressures in flux pile-up reconnection models is also examined. The analysis shows that, although enhancements of the merging rate can be expected under certain conditions, it is unlikely that Hall currents can completely undo the fundamental pressure limitations associated with flux pile-up reconnection