Resistance in dystopian fiction

This thesis attempts to answer the fundamental question, "How does resistance function in dystopian fiction?" and considers the value of memory and technology within this context. It also articulates the themes of the research within a creative work, a dystopian novel titled The Department of Retribution. With the rising popularity of dystopian fiction, the findings of this project attempt to provide timely insight into why resistance is essential to the genre and how it can be employed via memory and technology. Within the scope of authoritarian structures and their ideological origins, this thesis examines the methods protagonists of dystopian fiction use to push back against oppressive means of control. It discusses memory and its value to characters who resist the state's official narrative of the past, and it examines the ways in which the pitfalls of humanity's reliance on technology are portrayed in dystopian works. The Department of Retribution takes place in a future United States where hard drugs such as methamphetamine have been legalized, fatal combat sports dominate television, and a fourth branch of government, the Corporate Council, wields dominant power. Seventeen-year-old Emile Winkler longs to avenge his little sister's death at the hands of a meth user, and when he turns eighteen he applies for a murder permit from the Department of Retribution that will allow him to achieve this. Legalized murder, however, has life-altering repercussions, and Emile sets out to discover the motivation behind the system that allows it. The exegetical discourse of technological hope and pessimism re-emerges in the novel as I explore the challenge of integrating androids into society as friends and companions, and the issues of equality that might arise. I also consider future psychological developments such as intra-cranial serotonin implants and a programmable re-prioritisation of thoughts and memories called amelioration that may help sufferers of trauma move on from painful, dominating thought patterns

Casco Bay Weekly : 19 November 1998

https://digitalcommons.portlandlibrary.com/cbw_1998/1048/thumbnail.jp

Performance analysis of redundancy and mobility in multi-server systems

In this thesis, we studied how both redundancy and mobility impact the performance of computer systems and cellular networks, respectively. The general notion of redundancy is that upon arrival each job dispatches copies into multiple servers. This allows exploiting the variability of the queue lengths and server capacities in the system. We consider redundancy models with both identical and i.i.d. copies. When copies are i.i.d., we show that with PS and ROS, redundancy does not reduce the stability region. When copies are identical, we characterize the stability condition for systems where either FCFS, PS, or ROS is implemented in the servers. We observe that this condition strongly depends on the scheduling policy implemented in the system. We then investigate how redundancy impacts the performance by comparing it to a non-redundant system. We observe that both the stability and performance improve considerably under redundancy as the heterogeneity of the server capacities increases. Furthermore, for both i.i.d. and identical copies, we characterize redundancy-aware scheduling policies that improve both the stability and performance. Finally, we identify several open problems that might be of interest to the community. User mobility in wireless networks addresses the fact that users in a cellular network switch from cell to cell when geographically moving in the system. We control the mobility speed of the users among the servers and analyze how mobility impacts the performance at a user level. We observe that the performance of the system under fixed mobility speed strongly depends on the inherent parameters of the system

Yale Medicine : Alumni Bulletin of the School of Medicine, Fall 1990- Summer 1992

This volume contains Yale medicine: alumni bulletin of the School of Medicine, v.25 (Fall 1990) through v.26 (Summer 1992). Prepared in cooperation with the alumni and development offices at the School of Medicine. Earlier volumes are called Yale School of Medicine alumni bulletins, dating from v.1 (1953) through v.13 (1965). Digitized with funding from the Arcadia fund, 2017.https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yale_med_alumni_newsletters/1010/thumbnail.jp

Yale Medicine : Alumni Bulletin of the School of Medicine, Fall 1996- Fall 1998

This volume contains Yale medicine: alumni bulletin of the School of Medicine, v.31 (Fall 1996) through v.32 (Fall 1998). Prepared in cooperation with the alumni and development offices at the School of Medicine. Earlier volumes are called Yale School of Medicine alumni bulletins, dating from v.1 (1953) through v.13 (1965). Digitized with funding from the Arcadia fund, 2017.https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yale_med_alumni_newsletters/1013/thumbnail.jp

Between Technophilia, Cold War and Rationality: A Social and Cultural History of Digital Art

Evoking his early personal experiences, computer art pioneer Paul Brown wrote in the mid-1990s that to work with computers was akin to a ‘kiss of death’. According to him, as a result of sheer prejudice, the majority of people in the art world did not acknowledge such artworks as interesting, valid or important. Although recurrent in the literature concerned with such art, Brown’s claims must be confronted with the relative success of artistic practices interchangeably labelled as computer, new media, cybernetic, electronic or simply digital art. However, as attested by this proliferation of labels as well as by the development of numerous dedicated awards, degrees, galleries, museums, awards and publications, the success of such practices cannot be explained by artistic merit alone. Since many in the art world do not accept these artworks, as Brown and others suggest, how can we explain the works’ success in securing and developing their own space over the course of fifty years? This thesis investigates the emergence, development and institutionalisation of the field termed here as ‘art, science and technology’ (AST) between 1965 and the mid-1970s in Europe and North America. Also recognised by the aforementioned labels (among others), AST is an umbrella term that arguably designates the artistic practices interested in the adoption, theorisation and dissemination of post-war technologies and, particularly, information technology. Yet, despite this shared interest, here I argue that it is the particular institutional arrangement of AST that best distinguishes it from other artistic practices. A direct consequence of its rejection, AST’s emergence as a separate field is here explained via a revision of its initial social and cultural contexts. Arising from the technophile cultural climate of the long 1950s, and alongside the massive investments in technology made by Western governments in the same period, early AST developed not within traditional artistic spaces but within industries and universities. In the late 1960s, however, with the rise of economic, political and social uncertainties alongside escalating international conflicts, it became increasingly difficult to justify an art produced with the tools and support of the military– industrial complex. If on the one hand artists such as Brown understood these new artworks as central to art and its history, a normative development of a new technological era, on the other hand opponents located at the centre of contemporary art lambasted these new artworks for their supposedly scientific, commercial and aesthetic pretensions. Differently from previous attempts aimed at justifying the artistic worthiness of art produced with post-war technology, this thesis presents the history of such practices from the point of view of its own struggle – that is, its fight for survival. Ultimately, here I explain and describe how AST became detached from art while claiming its status. This is an effort not interested in the merits of these practices per se but, instead, concerned with AST’s development as an autonomous and prosperous field