The Memory Palace:Telling the Story of the Interior

This book chapter originated as an invited keynote paper at the Interior Educators 'Interior Futures 'conference at Northumbria University in 2011. The paper was blind peer revwied for publication. The content of the paper represents a process of reflection on my practice as a writer and the designer of narrative structures and building stories, and in it, for the first time, I was able to articulate the relationship between the narrative structures of my first book 'The Secret Lives of Buildings' and my second 'The Memory Palace', explsoring how literary and spatial form can model one another. My invitation to speak at Interior Futures, the inaugural research conference of Interior Edcators, the UK wide interiors academic forum, is also the result of my role in the foundation of the Interiors Forum Scotland, which predated its UK wide successor by several years, and provided a model for this conference

Overview of Swallow --- A Scalable 480-core System for Investigating the Performance and Energy Efficiency of Many-core Applications and Operating Systems

We present Swallow, a scalable many-core architecture, with a current configuration of 480 x 32-bit processors. Swallow is an open-source architecture, designed from the ground up to deliver scalable increases in usable computational power to allow experimentation with many-core applications and the operating systems that support them. Scalability is enabled by the creation of a tile-able system with a low-latency interconnect, featuring an attractive communication-to-computation ratio and the use of a distributed memory configuration. We analyse the energy and computational and communication performances of Swallow. The system provides 240GIPS with each core consuming 71--193mW, dependent on workload. Power consumption per instruction is lower than almost all systems of comparable scale. We also show how the use of a distributed operating system (nOS) allows the easy creation of scalable software to exploit Swallow's potential. Finally, we show two use case studies: modelling neurons and the overlay of shared memory on a distributed memory system.Comment: An open source release of the Swallow system design and code will follow and references to these will be added at a later dat

Joy2Learn User Feedback: Summary of Findings

This report is based on user research on the Joy2Learn website. This effort includes surveys and interviews with teachers in New York City and Los Angeles and LA-based teaching artists. This report provides a summary of their responses

Detection of the simplest sugar, glycolaldehyde, in a solar-type protostar with ALMA

Glycolaldehyde (HCOCH2OH) is the simplest sugar and an important intermediate in the path toward forming more complex biologically relevant molecules. In this paper we present the first detection of 13 transitions of glycolaldehyde around a solar-type young star, through Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) observations of the Class 0 protostellar binary IRAS 16293-2422 at 220 GHz (6 transitions) and 690 GHz (7 transitions). The glycolaldehyde lines have their origin in warm (200-300 K) gas close to the individual components of the binary. Glycolaldehyde co-exists with its isomer, methyl formate (HCOOCH3), which is a factor 10-15 more abundant toward the two sources. The data also show a tentative detection of ethylene glycol, the reduced alcohol of glycolaldehyde. In the 690 GHz data, the seven transitions predicted to have the highest optical depths based on modeling of the 220 GHz lines all show red-shifted absorption profiles toward one of the components in the binary (IRAS16293B) indicative of infall and emission at the systemic velocity offset from this by about 0.2" (25 AU). We discuss the constraints on the chemical formation of glycolaldehyde and other organic species - in particular, in the context of laboratory experiments of photochemistry of methanol-containing ices. The relative abundances appear to be consistent with UV photochemistry of a CH3OH-CO mixed ice that has undergone mild heating. The order of magnitude increase in line density in these early ALMA data illustrate its huge potential to reveal the full chemical complexity associated with the formation of solar system analogs.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

Compressed Sensing for Tactile Skins

Whole body tactile perception via tactile skins offers large benefits for robots in unstructured environments. To fully realize this benefit, tactile systems must support real-time data acquisition over a massive number of tactile sensor elements. We present a novel approach for scalable tactile data acquisition using compressed sensing. We first demonstrate that the tactile data is amenable to compressed sensing techniques. We then develop a solution for fast data sampling, compression, and reconstruction that is suited for tactile system hardware and has potential for reducing the wiring complexity. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our technique on simulated tactile sensor networks. Our evaluations show that compressed sensing, with a compression ratio of 3 to 1, can achieve higher signal acquisition accuracy than full data acquisition of noisy sensor data.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, submitted to ICRA1

Making American Foundations Relevant

The work and impact of foundations is not registering with critical audiences, according to philanthropy leaders and observers interviewed for this Philanthropy Awareness Initiative report. To find the solution, foundations need to look in the mirror, they argue, and make changes to their communications culture and practice

Income Taxation of Farmer Cooperatives

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Philanthropy in the News

Over the last two decades, the quantity of news coverage of foundations has gradually risen, but its quality remains highly superficial, according to this report by Philanthropy Awareness Initiative and University of Minnesota professor David Fan. In fact, nearly 99% of more than 40,000 stories since 1990 have been transactional in their content -- focused on grants made and dollars out the door, not on benefits achieved