Troubling children's families: who's troubled and why? Approaches to inter-cultural dialogue

This article draws on multi-disciplinary perspectives to consider the need and the possibilities for inter-cultural dialogue concerning families that may be seen by some to be ‘troubling’. Starting from the premise that ‘troubles’ are a ‘normal’ part of children’s family lives, we consider the boundary between ‘normal’ troubles and troubles that are troubling (whether to family members or others). Such troubling families potentially indicate an intervention to prevent harm to less powerful family members (notably children). On what basis can such decisions be made in children’s family lives, how can this question be answered across diverse cultural contexts, and are all answers inevitably subject to uncertainty? Such questions arguably re-frame and broaden existing debates about ‘child maltreatment’ across diverse cultural contexts. Beyond recognizing power dynamics, material inequalities, and historical and contemporary colonialism, we argue that attempts to answer the question on an empirical basis risk a form of neo-colonialism, since values inevitably permeate research and knowledge claims. We briefly exemplify such difficulties, examining psychological studies of childrearing in China, and the application of neuroscience to early childhood interventions in the UK. Turning to issues of values and moral relativism, we also question the possibility of an objective moral standard that avoids cultural imperialism, but ask whether cultural relativism is the only alternative position available. Here we briefly explore other possibilities in the space between ‘facile’ universalism and ‘lazy’ relativism (Jullien, 2008/2014). Such approaches bring into focus core philosophical and cultural questions about the possibilities for ‘happiness’, and for what it means to be a ‘person’, living in the social world. Throughout, we centralize theoretical and conceptual issues, drawing on the work of Jullien (2008/2014) to recognize the immense complexities inter-cultural dialogue entails in terms of language and communication

ReSHAPE: A Framework for Dynamic Resizing and Scheduling of Homogeneous Applications in a Parallel Environment

Applications in science and engineering often require huge computational resources for solving problems within a reasonable time frame. Parallel supercomputers provide the computational infrastructure for solving such problems. A traditional application scheduler running on a parallel cluster only supports static scheduling where the number of processors allocated to an application remains fixed throughout the lifetime of execution of the job. Due to the unpredictability in job arrival times and varying resource requirements, static scheduling can result in idle system resources thereby decreasing the overall system throughput. In this paper we present a prototype framework called ReSHAPE, which supports dynamic resizing of parallel MPI applications executed on distributed memory platforms. The framework includes a scheduler that supports resizing of applications, an API to enable applications to interact with the scheduler, and a library that makes resizing viable. Applications executed using the ReSHAPE scheduler framework can expand to take advantage of additional free processors or can shrink to accommodate a high priority application, without getting suspended. In our research, we have mainly focused on structured applications that have two-dimensional data arrays distributed across a two-dimensional processor grid. The resize library includes algorithms for processor selection and processor mapping. Experimental results show that the ReSHAPE framework can improve individual job turn-around time and overall system throughput.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables Submitted to International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP'07

The Digital Archiving of Historical Political Cartoons: An Introduction

Political (editorial) cartoons often capture the Zeitgeist of society and convey a message. Increasingly, historians study them to understand commentaries of past events or personalities. Visual culture as an academic subject could be greatly enhanced if this information can be digitally archived. We employ crowdsourcing to obtain valuable metadata by guiding volunteers' feedback using an online survey with 31 targeted questions. We provide intellectual access to a set of about 300 cartoons of a single creator spanning over multiple years in a highly interactive search engine.

Making Sense of Family Deaths in Urban Senegal: Diversities, Contexts, and Comparisons

Despite calls for cross-cultural research, Minority world perspectives still dominate death and bereavement studies, emphasizing individualized emotions and neglecting contextual diversities. In research concerned with contemporary African societies, on the other hand, death and loss are generally subsumed within concerns about AIDS or poverty, with little attention paid to the emotional and personal significance of a death. Here, we draw on interactionist sociology to present major themes from a qualitative study of family deaths in urban Senegal, theoretically framed through the duality of meanings-in-context. Such themes included family and community as support and motivation; religious beliefs and practices as frameworks for solace and (regulatory) meaning; and material circumstances as these are intrinsically bound up with emotions. Although we identify the experience of (embodied, emotional) pain as a common response across Minority and Majority worlds, we also explore significant divergencies, varying according to localized contexts and broader power dynamics

ScALPEL: A Scalable Adaptive Lightweight Performance Evaluation Library for application performance monitoring

As supercomputers continue to grow in scale and capabilities, it is becoming increasingly difficult to isolate processor and system level causes of performance degradation. Over the last several years, a significant number of performance analysis and monitoring tools have been built/proposed. However, these tools suffer from several important shortcomings, particularly in distributed environments. In this paper we present ScALPEL, a Scalable Adaptive Lightweight Performance Evaluation Library for application performance monitoring at the functional level. Our approach provides several distinct advantages. First, ScALPEL is portable across a wide variety of architectures, and its ability to selectively monitor functions presents low run-time overhead, enabling its use for large-scale production applications. Second, it is run-time configurable, enabling both dynamic selection of functions to profile as well as events of interest on a per function basis. Third, our approach is transparent in that it requires no source code modifications. Finally, ScALPEL is implemented as a pluggable unit by reusing existing performance monitoring frameworks such as Perfmon and PAPI and extending them to support both sequential and MPI applications.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

Parental death as a vital conjuncture? Intergenerational care and responsibility following bereavement in Senegal

This article explores the ways that parental death represents a 'vital conjuncture' for Serer young people that reconfigures and potentially transforms intergenerational caring responsibilities in different spatial and temporal contexts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with young people (aged 15-27), family members, religious and community leaders and professionals in rural and urban Senegal, I explore young people's responses to parental death. 'Continuing bonds' with the deceased were expressed through memories evoked in homespace, shared family practices and gendered responsibilities to 'take care of' bereaved family members, to cultivate inherited farmland and to fulfil the wishes of the deceased. Parental death could reconfigure intergenerational care and lead to shifts in power dynamics, as eldest sons asserted their position of authority. While care-giving roles were associated with agency, the low social status accorded to young women's paid and unpaid domestic work undermined their efforts. The research contributes to understandings of gendered nuances in the experience of bereavement and continuing bonds and provides insight into intra-household decision-making processes, ownership and control of assets. Analysis of the culturally specific meanings of relationships and a young person's social location within hierarchies of gender, age, sibling birth order and wider socio-cultural norms and practices is needed

Explicit Parallel Programming: System Description

The implementation of the Explicit Parallel Programming (EPP) system is described. EPP is a prototype implementation of a language for writing parallel programs for shared memory multiprocessors. EPP may be viewed as a coordination language, since it is used to define the sequencing or ordering of various tasks, while the tasks themselves are defined in some other compilable language. The two main components of the EPP system---a compiler and an executive---are described in this report. An appendix is included which contains the grammar defining the EPP language as well as templates used by the compiler in code generation

Optimization by nonhierarchical asynchronous decomposition

Large scale optimization problems are tractable only if they are somehow decomposed. Hierarchical decompositions are inappropriate for some types of problems and do not parallelize well. Sobieszczanski-Sobieski has proposed a nonhierarchical decomposition strategy for nonlinear constrained optimization that is naturally parallel. Despite some successes on engineering problems, the algorithm as originally proposed fails on simple two dimensional quadratic programs. The algorithm is carefully analyzed for quadratic programs, and a number of modifications are suggested to improve its robustness

Data and Activity Representation for Grid Computing

Computational grids are becoming increasingly popular as an infrastructure for computa- tional science research. The demand for high-level tools and problem solving environments has prompted active research in Grid Computing Environments (GCEs). Many GCEs have been one-o development eorts. More recently, there have been many eorts to dene component ar- chitectures for constructing important pieces of a GCE. This paper examines another approach, based on a `data-centric' framework for building powerful, context-aware GCEs spanning mul- tiple layers of abstraction. We describe a scheme for representing data and activities in a GCE and outline various tools under development which use this representation