Creating Momentum: The Atlantic Philanthropies' Investments to Repeal the Death Penalty in the United States

The Atlantic Philanthropies invested about $60 million between 2004 and 2016 to support efforts to repeal the death penalty in the United States. To assess the effectiveness of this work and to generate lessons for human rights activists and other funders involved in the repeal movement, the foundation commissioned this evaluation. The findings contained in this report are the result of extensive documentation review as well as interviews with foundation and grantee board and staff

Analyzing the Performance of Lock-Free Data Structures: A Conflict-based Model

This paper considers the modeling and the analysis of the performance of lock-free concurrent data structures. Lock-free designs employ an optimistic conflict control mechanism, allowing several processes to access the shared data object at the same time. They guarantee that at least one concurrent operation finishes in a finite number of its own steps regardless of the state of the operations. Our analysis considers such lock-free data structures that can be represented as linear combinations of fixed size retry loops. Our main contribution is a new way of modeling and analyzing a general class of lock-free algorithms, achieving predictions of throughput that are close to what we observe in practice. We emphasize two kinds of conflicts that shape the performance: (i) hardware conflicts, due to concurrent calls to atomic primitives; (ii) logical conflicts, caused by simultaneous operations on the shared data structure. We show how to deal with these hardware and logical conflicts separately, and how to combine them, so as to calculate the throughput of lock-free algorithms. We propose also a common framework that enables a fair comparison between lock-free implementations by covering the whole contention domain, together with a better understanding of the performance impacting factors. This part of our analysis comes with a method for calculating a good back-off strategy to finely tune the performance of a lock-free algorithm. Our experimental results, based on a set of widely used concurrent data structures and on abstract lock-free designs, show that our analysis follows closely the actual code behavior.Comment: Short version to appear in DISC'1

Heterogeneous hierarchical workflow composition

Workflow systems promise scientists an automated end-to-end path from hypothesis to discovery. However, expecting any single workflow system to deliver such a wide range of capabilities is impractical. A more practical solution is to compose the end-to-end workflow from more than one system. With this goal in mind, the integration of task-based and in situ workflows is explored, where the result is a hierarchical heterogeneous workflow composed of subworkflows, with different levels of the hierarchy using different programming, execution, and data models. Materials science use cases demonstrate the advantages of such heterogeneous hierarchical workflow composition.This work is a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center within the Joint Laboratory for Extreme-Scale Computing. This research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, under contract number DE-AC02- 06CH11357, program manager Laura Biven, and by the Spanish Government (SEV2015-0493), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contract TIN2015-65316-P), by Generalitat de Catalunya (contract 2014-SGR-1051).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Shoggoth: A Formal Foundation for Strategic Rewriting

Rewriting is a versatile and powerful technique used in many domains. Strategic rewriting allows programmers to control the application of rewrite rules by composing individual rewrite rules into complex rewrite strategies. These strategies are semantically complex, as they may be nondeterministic, they may raise errors that trigger backtracking, and they may not terminate.Given such semantic complexity, it is necessary to establish a formal understanding of rewrite strategies and to enable reasoning about them in order to answer questions like: How do we know that a rewrite strategy terminates? How do we know that a rewrite strategy does not fail because we compose two incompatible rewrites? How do we know that a desired property holds after applying a rewrite strategy?In this paper, we introduce Shoggoth: a formal foundation for understanding, analysing and reasoning about strategic rewriting that is capable of answering these questions. We provide a denotational semantics of System S, a core language for strategic rewriting, and prove its equivalence to our big-step operational semantics, which extends existing work by explicitly accounting for divergence. We further define a location-based weakest precondition calculus to enable formal reasoning about rewriting strategies, and we prove this calculus sound with respect to the denotational semantics. We show how this calculus can be used in practice to reason about properties of rewriting strategies, including termination, that they are well-composed, and that desired postconditions hold. The semantics and calculus are formalised in Isabelle/HOL and all proofs are mechanised

Failure Factors of Adopting SAP in Pakistan

The aim of this study is to explore System Applications Products (SAP) systems a programming bundles that permit organizations to have all the more continuous perceivability and control over their operations. This paper intends to research and break down regular conditions that happen inside most SAP tasks, and decides the territories that are vital to achievement versus those that add to disappointment in Pakistan. Outline/procedure/approach – The study depends on a substance examination of viable encounters of organizations SAP usage in 15 organizations. Discoveries Identifies seven regular variables that are characteristic of disappointment SAP usage in Pakistan. It has been found that the absence of fitting society and authoritative (interior) status as the most essential component adding to disappointment of SAP usage in 15 organizations. Inquire about impediments/suggestions – The information investigated is from optional sources distributed in the press. Auxiliary reporting could build objectivity; in any case, the shortcoming is that not every one of the variables may have been accounted for. Innovation/esteem – Identifies elements basic to the disappointment of SAP execution in Pakistan. Keywords: Manufacturing resource planning, serious failure factors SAP

Change Management as a Critical Success Factor in e-Government Implementation

Change management in e-government implementation is a very complex issue. E-government services are frequently distributed over different IT systems and organizations. There are also events from outside the public administration that cause changes such as government policies and legislation, public-private partnership, etc., and finally a huge resistance to change exists in public administration proverbial. Another problem is that the e-government is predominantly seen only as a technology mission and not as an organizational transformation issue. Those are probably the main reasons that the existing literature about change management in e-government is still missing at large. There are articles dealing with some aspects of changes affected by the new technology implementation, however, there is no comprehensive framework that would identify changes that have to be managed in e-government implementation. Therefore, the main aim of the paper is to identify a comprehensive set of changes that have to be considered in e-government implementation and the role of leadership in such processes. Finally, the paper proposes a conceptual model of change management in e-government implementation.change management; e-government; new leadership style; change management model of e-government implementation

The political economy of fiscal policy and inflation in developing countries : an empirical analysis

Most economists treat fiscal policy as exogenous and consider policymakers as machines to be programmed. Rarely do they seek to determine why, for instance, some countries rely on the inflation tax while others use direct taxation, let alone what political factors affect such decisions. Yet without a theory of how fiscal policymakers behave, at both the revenue and the expenditure levels, there is no guarantee that policy advice will turn out to be sound. The authors present the results of an empirical analysis of the political economy of fiscal policy for a group of developing countries. They look at alternative ways of incorporating political variables into the explanation of government policy actions. Dividing their results into three sections, one each for inflation, budget deficits, and devaluations, they find that: (a) the equilibrium inflation rate is higher the more citizens disagree about which party should hold office, and the more unlikely it is that the government currently in office will be reappointed; (b) political instability and polarization lead to a collective myopia that sometimes tempts policymakers to borrow too heavily and to leave the bills to their successors; and (c) governments tend to implement adjustment policies early in their tenure when they command political authority, but if political conflict arises, they may lack the strength to change the macroeconomic status quo and will resort instead to inflation and deficits.Economic Theory&Research,Economic Stabilization,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,National Governance

Asymmetry of values, indigenous forces, and incumbent success in counterinsurgency: evidence from Chechnya

This article fills the gap in existing scholarship on asymmetric conflict, indigenous forces, and how socio-cultural codes shape the dynamics and outcomes of conflict transformation. Specifically, it identifies three key socio-cultural values commonplace in honorific societies: retaliation, hospitality, and silence. As sources of effective pro-insurgent violent mobilisation and support from among the local population, these values provide insurgents with an asymmetric advantage over much stronger incumbents. Using the case studies of the two Russian counterinsurgencies in Chechnya, the article shows the mechanisms on the ground through which Moscow’s deployment of indigenous forces against insurgents helped to stem the tide of conflict, reversing the insurgents’ initial advantage in terms of asymmetry of values

The Effect of TGfU (Teaching Game for Understanding) on Futsal Games for Junior High School

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the teaching game for understanding (TGfU) method in improving futsal game skills. The method used in this research is experimental. The technique in sampling is using purposive sampling with the category of students who have basic skills of futsal games. The participants involved totaled 25 students (20 boys and 5 girls) and were divided into 5 teams. Each team received the same treatment with the TGfU learning method. The instruments used in the study used observations and interviews. Observation includes decision-making, skill execution, Successful Game performance, player participation, and Enjoyment. Data collection used a 1-4 Likert scale with statements 1 (very poor), 2 (poor), 3 (good) and 4 (very good). The research findings show that during the intervention, participants can show their performance in a futsal game. The form of skills that students learn and master can also provide their enjoyment during learning. Therefore, TGfU can be a pedagogical approach to physical education learning in terms of technique, and students' enjoyment in the game, and useful for organized futsal teaching-learning activitie