High Stakes: Oregon Labor Sets Union Agenda for High Skill, High Wage Strategy

[Excerpt] The labor movement of Oregon is responding to the current economic crisis by adopting an agenda to help workers gain control over work and technology. The union agenda emphasizes worker-centered education and urges unions to become advocates for workers to develop their skills

Self-driven oscillation in Coulomb blockaded suspended carbon nanotubes

Suspended carbon nanotubes are known to support self-driven oscillations due to electromechanical feedback under certain conditions, including low temperatures and high mechanical quality factors. Prior reports identified signatures of such oscillations in Kondo or high-bias transport regimes. Here, we observe self-driven oscillations that give rise to significant conduction in normally Coulomb-blockaded low-bias transport. Using a master equation model, the self-driving is shown to result from strongly energy-dependent electron tunneling, and the dependencies of transport features on bias, gate voltage, and temperature are well reproduced.Comment: Main text + Appendices (8 pages, 10 figures

A Lazy Approach for Supporting Nested Transactions

Transactional memory (TM) is a compelling alternative to traditional synchronization, and implementing TM primitives directly in hardware offers a potential performance advantage over software-based methods. In this paper, we demonstrate that many of the actions associated with transaction abort and commit may be performed lazily -- that is, incrementally, and on demand. This technique is ideal for hardware, since it requires little space or work; in addition, it can improve performance by sparing accesses to committing or aborting locations from having to stall until the commit or abort completes. We further show that our lazy abort and commit technique supports open nesting and orElse, two language-level proposals which rely on transactional nesting. We also provide design notes for supporting lazy abort and commit on our own hardware TM system, based on VTM