Taking roles in interdisciplinary collaborations: Reflections on working in post-ELSI spaces in the UK synthetic biology community

Based on criticism of the “ethical, legal and social implications” (ELSI) paradigm, researchers in science and technology studies (STS) have begun to create and move into “post-ELSI” spaces. In this paper, we pool our experiences of working towards collaborative practices with colleagues in engineering and science disciplines in the f eld of synthetic biology. We identify a number of dif erent roles that we have taken, been assumed to take, or have had foisted upon us as we have sought to develop postELSI practices. We argue that the post-ELSI situation is characterised by the demands placed on STS researchers and other social scientists to f uctuate between roles as contexts shift in terms of power relations, af ective tenor, and across space and over time. This leads us to posit four orientations for post-ELSI collaborative practices that could help establish more fruitful negotiations around these roles

Five rules of thumb for post-ELSI interdisciplinary collaborations

In this paper we identify five rules of thumb for interdisciplinary collaboration across the natural and social sciences. We link these to efforts to move away from the ‘ethical, legal and social issues’ framework of interdisciplinarity and towards a post-ELSI collaborative space. It is in trying to open up such a space that we identify the need for: collaborative experimentation, taking risks, collaborative reflexivity, opening-up discussions of unshared goals and neighbourliness

Balancing Power Consumption in Multiprocessor Systems

Actions usually taken to prevent processors from overheating, such as decreasing the frequency or stopping the execution flow, also degrade performance. Multiprocessor systems, however, offer the possibility of moving the task that caused a CPU to overheat away to some other, cooler CPU, so throttling becomes only a last resort taken if all of a system\u27s processors are hot. Additionally, the scheduler can take advantage of the energy characteristics of individual tasks, and distribute hot tasks as well as cool tasks evenly among all CPUs. This work presents a mechanism for determining the energy characteristics of tasks by means of event monitoring counters, and an energy-aware scheduling policy that strives to assign tasks to CPUs in a way that avoids overheating individual CPUs. Our evaluations show that the benefit of avoiding throttling outweighs the overhead of additional task migrations, and that energy-aware scheduling in many cases increases the system\u27s throughput

Probabilistic job symbiosis modeling for SMT processor scheduling

Symbiotic job scheduling boosts simultaneous multithreading (SMT) processor performance by co-scheduling jobs that have 'compatible' demands on the processor's shared resources. Existing approaches however require a sampling phase, evaluate a limited number of possible co-schedules, use heuristics to gauge symbiosis, are rigid in their optimization target, and do not preserve system-level priorities/shares. This paper proposes probabilistic job symbiosis modeling, which predicts whether jobs will create positive or negative symbiosis when co-scheduled without requiring the co-schedule to be evaluated. The model, which uses per-thread cycle stacks computed through a previously proposed cycle accounting architecture, is simple enough to be used in system software. Probabilistic job symbiosis modeling provides six key innovations over prior work in symbiotic job scheduling: (i) it does not require a sampling phase, (ii) it readjusts the job co-schedule continuously, (iii) it evaluates a large number of possible co-schedules at very low overhead, (iv) it is not driven by heuristics, (v) it can optimize a performance target of interest (e.g., system throughput or job turnaround time), and (vi) it preserves system-level priorities/shares. These innovations make symbiotic job scheduling both practical and effective. Our experimental evaluation, which assumes a realistic scenario in which jobs come and go, reports an average 16% (and up to 35%) reduction in job turnaround time compared to the previously proposed SOS (sample, optimize, symbios) approach for a two-thread SMT processor, and an average 19% (and up to 45%) reduction in job turnaround time for a four-thread SMT processor

Accessing limnological change and variability using fossil diatom assemblages, south-east Australia

Floodplain wetlands accumulate river-borne sediments that include mixed assemblages of allochthonous and autochthonous diatoms as fossils. These assemblages have been used in river floodplain wetlands and reservoirs to quantitatively reconstruct salinity, pH and nutrients and to qualitatively infer connectivity and turbidity over periods spanning decades to millennia. High sedimentation rates in some sites have permitted sub-annual temporal resolution; however, annual to decadal resolution is more usual. The establishment of chronologies for these sequences is often difficult owing to the substantial input of fluvially borne ²¹ᴼPb, the high spatial variability in the earliest detection of exotic pollen markers and the inaccuracy of radiocarbon approaches in dating sediments younger than 500 years. Other complexities arise from the difficulty of differentiating the influence of co-variables in accord with the river continuum concept and identifying shifts driven by hydroseral influences independent of changes to the fluvial system. Caution is also needed in inferring lotic change from a record accumulating in lentic systems. Nevertheless, substantial increases in salinity (lower Snowy, lower and middle Murray), pH (mid-Goulburn), turbidity (upper and lower Murray and Yarra), nutrients (lower Murray and Yarra), and sedimentation rate (widespread), as well as clear shifts in trophic structure (upper Murray), have been documented for the post-European period from regulated river wetlands across southeast Australia. A site in the lower Murray records river connectivity and water quality changes consistent with the regional Holocene climate record. Reductions in effective precipitation documented in closed lake systems are not evident in riverine plain wetlands, possibly owing to their relative complexity. The refinement of chronologies and data-bases will allow the determination of the pre-impact nature and variability of sites, the rates of limnological change and biological responses and the feasibility of rehabilitation targets