Flat Tire

Flattened, the tire was. Pedalling with great strength, I push myself forward in the country road illuminated by lonely street lamps, leading the front tire—headstrong—advancing. Trailing behind, the synthetic black rubber greets the asphalt paved road with a kiss from a frail body. In turn, a bathetic road rash of a romance cut short by the jealous effort of the front wheel..

1942 War on the Home Front Poison Gas, Bombs, & Incendiaries Preparedness Booklet

A 1942 guide detailing basic facts surrounding poison gas, bombs, and incendiary weapons, as well as principles of actions that every civilian should take to ensure they are safe as possible in the event of an attack. Sent to Rocky Mountain National Park at the request of the Department of War during World War 2. Housed in National Archives at Denver; Record Group 79, Records of the National Park Service; Rocky Mountain National Park, General Correspondence 1918-1954; Box 5, Folder: 801 Protection (General) 1941-194

Why honey is effective as a medicine. 1. Its use in modern medicine

Honey has been used as a medicine for thousands of years and its curative properties are well documented. However, modern medicine turned its back on honey and it is only now, with the advent of multi-resistant bacteria, that the antibiotic properties of honey are being rediscovered

Teaching English as a Global Language for Intercultural Communication in Higher Education

With the development of globalization and internationalization, teaching English language, as lingua franca has been shifted from developing communicative competence to intercultural communicative competence. In this aspect, this research paper aims to study the perceptions of students and teachers concerning using English language as a global language for intercultural communication. It bridges the gap between student's perceptions and teachers' practices to help them design activities that prepare EFL learners to communicate with English as a global language for intercultural communication. 60 high and university students shared in a survey that evaluates students' motives for learning English as a global Language. Moreover, 30 high school and university English teachers shared also in another survey that evaluates their practices in teaching English for Intercultural education. Then a comparative analysis between both views was done. The results of the research paper revealed that students mostly learn English to get better job, and they need to learn the basic words and expressions to communicate. Students also are equipped with intercultural skills as most of them affirm that learning another language is related to learning its culture. On the other hand, the perceptions of English language teachers revealed that their main aim is to help the students communicate effectively. They also asserted the role of intercultural communication is to help learners have good conversation with nonnative speakers. Therefore, this research paper affirmed the differences in attitudes between the students and teachers' perception which creates a problem in real practice of teaching English. Accordingly, the results of this research raise awareness of EFL teachers and curriculum designers to design intercommunicative tasks that help EFL learners achieve appropriate communication in the intercultural context

Intelligent Joystick Sensing the User's Emotion and Providing Biofeedback

Development of an intelligent joystick is proposed which senses the user’s bio-signals and recognises the user’s emotion. It provides biofeedback to the user as well as the user’s emotional state information to the computer allowing human-computer interaction over sensitive environment. While the user is interacting with a computer via a joystick the bio-signals can be collected through the user’s fingers touching it. The collected bio-signals information is mapped on a two-dimensional space to find out the quality and intensity of emotion continuously and in a real-time manner. The intelligent joystick has application within several fields such as healthcare, sport and game industries. In such cases, the user can be influenced, or suffer from medical problems while under stress during interaction with the machines. The intelligent joystick will provide feedback to the user and alert alarm about unhealthy conditions through the embedded actuators and allow the machine to adapt with the users’ emotional state

Climate change adaptation, flood risks and policy coherence in integrated water resources management in England

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) assumes coherence between cognate aspects of water governance at the river basin scale, for example water quality, energy production and agriculture objectives. But critics argue that IWRM is often less ‘integrated’ in practice, raising concerns over inter-sectoral coherence between implementing institutions. One increasingly significant aspect of IWRM is adaptation to climate change-related risks, including threats from flooding, which are particularly salient in England. Although multiple institutional mechanisms exist for flood risk management (FRM), their coherence remains a critical question for national adaptation. This paper therefore (1) maps the multi-level institutional frameworks determining both IWRM and FRM in England; (2) examines their interaction via various inter-institutional coordinating mechanisms; and (3) assesses the degree of coherence. The analysis suggests that cognate EU strategic objectives for flood risk assessment demonstrate relatively high vertical and horizontal coherence with river basin planning. However, there is less coherence with flood risk requirements for land-use planning and national flood protection objectives. Overall, this complex governance arrangement actually demonstrates de-coherence over time due to ongoing institutional fragmentation. Recommendations for increasing IWRM coherence in England or re-coherence based on greater spatial planning and coordination of water-use and land-use strategies are proposed

A new degree of freedom for memory allocation in clusters

Improvements in parallel computing hardware usually involve increments in the number of available resources for a given application such as the number of computing cores and the amount of memory. In the case of shared-memory computers, the increase in computing resources and available memory is usually constrained by the coherency protocol, whose overhead rises with system size, limiting the scalability of the final system. In this paper we propose an efficient and cost-effective way to increase the memory available for a given application by leveraging free memory in other computers in the cluster. Our proposal is based on the observation that many applications benefit from having more memory resources but do not require more computing cores, thus reducing the requirements for cache coherency and allowing a simpler implementation and better scalability. Simulation results show that, when additional mechanisms intended to hide remote memory latency are used, execution time of applications that use our proposal is similar to the time required to execute them in a computer populated with enough local memory, thus validating the feasibility of our proposal. We are currently building a prototype that implements our ideas. The first results from real executions in this prototype demonstrate not only that our proposal works but also that it can efficiently execute applications that make use of remote memory resources. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.This work has been supported by PROMETEO from Generalitat Valenciana (GVA) under Grant PROMETEO/2008/060.Montaner Mas, H.; Silla Jiménez, F.; Fröning, H.; Duato Marín, JF. (2012). A new degree of freedom for memory allocation in clusters. 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(2009)Charles, P., Grothoff, C., Saraswat, V., et al.: X10: an object-oriented approach to non-uniform cluster computing. ACM SIGPLAN Not. 40(10), 519–538 (2005)Consortium, H.: HyperTransport High Node Count, Slides. http://www.hypertransport.org/default.cfm?page=HighNodeCountSpecificationConway, P., Hughes, B.: The AMD opteron northbridge architecture. IEEE MICRO 27(2), 10–21 (2007). doi: 10.1109/MM.2007.43Conway, P., Kalyanasundharam, N., Donley, G., et al.: Blade computing with the AMD Opteron processor (Magny-Cours). Hot chips 21 (2009)Duato, J., Silla, F., Yalamanchili, S., et al.: Extending HyperTransport protocol for improved scalability. First International Workshop on HyperTransport Research and Applications (2009)Feeley, M.J., Morgan, W.E., Pighin, E.P., Karlin, A.R., Levy, H.M., Thekkath, C.A.: Implementing global memory management in a workstation cluster. In: SOSP ’95: Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 201–212. 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In: 37th International Conference on Parallel Processing, 2008. ICPP ’08, pp. 238–245 (2008). doi: 10.1109/ICPP.2008.85Magnusson, P., Christensson, M., Eskilson, J., et al.: Simics: a full system simulation platform. Computer 35(2), 50–58 (2002). doi: 10.1109/2.982916Martin, M., Sorin, D., Beckmann, B., et al.: Multifacet’s general execution-driven multiprocessor simulator (GEMS) toolset. ACM SIGARCH Comput. Archit. News 33(4), 92–99 (2005) doi: 10.1145/1105734.1105747MBA3 NC Series Catalog: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/computing/storage/hdd/ehdd/mba3073nc-mba3300nc.htmlMcCalpin, J.D.: Memory bandwidth and machine balance in current high performance computers. In: IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA) Newsletter, pp. 19–25 (1995)NUMAChip: http://www.numachip.com/Oguchi, M., Kitsuregawa, M.: Using available remote memory dynamically for parallel data mining application on ATM-connected PC cluster. In: IPDPS 2000. 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Internet fragmentation, political structuring, and organizational concentration in transnational engineering networks

Is the internet at risk of fragmentation? Whereas the literature has examined this question with a focus on domestic policies, communication standards, and internet governance institutions, we analyze fragmentation and alternative outcomes in transnational engineering networks. These networks constitute the social foundations of the unified or ‘global’internet. Our contributions include (1) broadening the debate beyond fragmentation-related network outcomes to include political structuring and organizational concentration, and (2) new evidence from an important engineering network around the Internet Engineering Task Force comprising thousands of participants and over four decades. Our analyses reveal fast and continuous network growth as well as clear signs of growing concentration of the network around a few major companies. A key implication is that, at the level of engineering networks, concerns about internet fragmentation might be unfounded and might distract from more salient developments such as organizational concentration