Aspects of comparative growth, morphology and anatomy of long and short shoots of Betula papyrifera Marsh

The primary objectives of this research were: 1) To compare long and short shoot growth utilizing growth analysis techniques. 2) To describe the general morphology of long and short shoots and to compare them using morphometric analysis. 3) To compare vegetative and reproductive shoot growth and to assess the cost of reproduction. 4) To study the inception and apical organization of potential long and short shoot buds at selected stages of development and ascertain any differences. 5) To compare the anatomy of long and short shoots, with emphasis on stem anatomy. 6) To correlate these data in order to develop an understanding of how long and short shoot growth in paper birch relates to other studies of long and short shoots. The results/observations and discussion, with appropriate introductory paragraphs pertaining to specific portions of this study are presented as separate chapters. A general summary chapter will collate and discuss the pertinent findings. This format is adopted to enhance convenience of presentation and readability since some of the chapters have been submitted for publication

Social mobility among Christian Africans: evidence from Anglican marriage registers in Uganda, 1895-2011

This article uses Anglican marriage registers from colonial and post-colonial Uganda to investigate long-term trends and determinants of intergenerational social mobility and colonial elite formation among Christian African men. It shows that the colonial era opened up new labour opportunities for these African converts, enabling them to take large steps up the social ladder regardless of their social origin. Contrary to the widespread belief that British indirect rule perpetuated the power of African political elites (chiefs), this article shows that a remarkably fluid colonial labour economy actually undermined their social advantages. Sons of chiefs gradually lost their high social-status monopoly to a new, commercially orientated, and well-educated class of Anglican Ugandans, who mostly came from non-elite and sometimes even lower-class backgrounds. The study also documents that the colonial administration and the Anglican mission functioned as key steps on the ladder to upward mobility. Mission education helped provide the skills and social reference needed to climb the ladder in exchange for compliance with the laws of the Anglican Church. These social mobility patterns persisted throughout the post-colonial era, despite rising levels of informal labour during Idi Amin’s dictatorship

Domain-specific languages for massively parallel processors

Massively Parallel Processors provide significantly higher peak performance figures than other forms of general purpose processors. However, this comes at a cost to the developer, who needs to deal with an increasingly complicated piece of hardware, for which applications need to be tweaked and optimised to achieve high performance. Domain-specific languages have been proposed as a potential solution to this complexity problem: generating GPU applications from high-level, declarative specifications. This thesis explores two related ideas: firstly, is it practical to synthesise DSLs from high-level languages, and secondly, how can we simplify the creation of such DSLs? This thesis proposes a novel approach whereby rather than considering single domains, we consider collections of collaborative domains in order to share common features and thus reduce the cost of development. We achieve this using a DSLs-within-a-DSL approach: a custom designed host language, into which extensions may be embedded. In order to ground our approach in a real case-study, we propose, design and develop a DSLs-within-a-DSL framework for bioinformatics. We use a restricted recursive functional language as the host language, and embed new DSLs into this language. Importantly, we describe how we can use a combination of novel and adopted automatic parallelisation techniques to synthesise a massively-parallel program for a GPU. This automatic parallelisation, achieved through the discovery of a schedule, and program synthesis techniques using the polyhedral model, interacts productively with our embedded extensions. To further simplify development, we provide a series of customisable heuristics for defining GPU parameters such as the block size (number of threads), grid size and location in the memory hierarchy of data-structures. This encapsulates GPU expertise within the compiler itself. We finally demonstrate that the total combination of these techniques results in applications with competitive performance, at much lower development cost and greater flexibility than comparable hand-coded applications

Science, Technology and Innovation in the Climate Change Era: Guyana’s Avoided Deforestation Blueprint and Human Well-Being

Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2011University of Guyan

Domain-specific languages for massively parallel processors

Massively Parallel Processors provide significantly higher peak performance figures than other forms of general purpose processors. However, this comes at a cost to the developer, who needs to deal with an increasingly complicated piece of hardware, for which applications need to be tweaked and optimised to achieve high performance. Domain-specific languages have been proposed as a potential solution to this complexity problem: generating GPU applications from high-level, declarative specifications. This thesis explores two related ideas: firstly, is it practical to synthesise DSLs from high-level languages, and secondly, how can we simplify the creation of such DSLs? This thesis proposes a novel approach whereby rather than considering single domains, we consider collections of collaborative domains in order to share common features and thus reduce the cost of development. We achieve this using a DSLs-within-a-DSL approach: a custom designed host language, into which extensions may be embedded. In order to ground our approach in a real case-study, we propose, design and develop a DSLs-within-a-DSL framework for bioinformatics. We use a restricted recursive functional language as the host language, and embed new DSLs into this language. Importantly, we describe how we can use a combination of novel and adopted automatic parallelisation techniques to synthesise a massively-parallel program for a GPU. This automatic parallelisation, achieved through the discovery of a schedule, and program synthesis techniques using the polyhedral model, interacts productively with our embedded extensions. To further simplify development, we provide a series of customisable heuristics for defining GPU parameters such as the block size (number of threads), grid size and location in the memory hierarchy of data-structures. This encapsulates GPU expertise within the compiler itself. We finally demonstrate that the total combination of these techniques results in applications with competitive performance, at much lower development cost and greater flexibility than comparable hand-coded applications.</p

Young Love

Photograph of Sonny Jameshttps://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/cht-sheet-music/7114/thumbnail.jp