The ‘Liverpool model(s)’: cultural planning, Liverpool and Capital of Culture 2008

Within the UK, the ‘Liverpool model’ is being celebrated as the new template for Capital of Culture festivals, and culture led urban regeneration in general. This paper will question this celebration and argue that there are, in fact, two ‘Liverpool models’: the first, outlined in its bid and developed within its initial planning strategy, represented the apogee of a New Labour informed ‘cultural planning’ framework for urban development; the second, developed post-2008 within the impact analysis Impacts08, is a more sober and realistic reflection of the role of culture in urban regeneration. This paper will demonstrate how this first model, while politically expedient and rhetorically seductive, was both theoretically unstable and practically unrealizable. Its subsequent abandonment represents an indictment of cultural planning as a nostrum for the complex structural, social and economic problems of the post-industrial city. Keywords: cultural planning; Capital of Culture; Liverpool08; social instrumentalism; economic instrumentalism; New Labour cultural polic

The Search for America\u27s Most Eligible Patent: The Impact of the Bilski Decision on Obtaining Patents for Processes and Business Methods

For one year, the business community, patent lawyers, and the media in the United States speculated as to how the Supreme Court would rule in Bilski v. Kappos. Some forecasted the end of all business method patents, while others advanced the idea that after the case, practically any business method could be patented. When the dust settled, the Court’s holding did neither: it determined that the machine-or-transformation test is not the exclusive test for patent eligibility under Section 101, and left open the possibility for business method patents to withstand future challenges. While this result frustrated many that advocated for a bright-line rule, the Court decided Bilski correctly. Instead of making a sweeping decree, the Court placed the burden back on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) to develop a nuanced body of case law concerning business method patents and the qualities sufficient to pass muster under Section 101. The CAFC is exactly where this type of case law should be made, because it has a level of experience in deciding patent appeals cases and developing patent law that is unmatched. This also leaves the door open for the Supreme Court to take a future case regarding business method patents if an issue arises regarding the case law made by the CAFC. As the nature of technology remains a fluid concept, the laws that govern this field need to be able to adapt with changing circumstances. The Supreme Court’s holding in Bilski facilitates this concept, but further complicates business method analysis

A Programmable Processing-in-Memory Architecture for Memory Intensive Applications

While both processing and memory architectures are rapidly improving in performance, memory architecture is lagging behind. As performance of processing architecture continues to eclipse that of memory, the memory architecture continues to become an increasingly unavoidable bottleneck in computer architecture. There are two drawbacks that are commonly associated with memory accesses: i) large delays causing the processor to remain idle waiting on data to become available and ii) the power consumption required to transfer the data. These performance issues are especially notable in research and enterprise computing applications such as deep learning models. Even when data for an application such as this is transferred to a cache before processing to avoid the delay, the large power cost of the transfer is still incurred. Processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures offer a solution to the issues in modern memory architecture. The inclusion of processing elements within the memory architecture reduces data transfers between the host processor and memory, thus reducing penalties incurred by memory accesses. The programmable-PIM (pPIM) architecture is a novel PIM architecture that delivers the performance enhancements of PIM while delivering a high degree of reprogrammability through the use of look-up tables (LUTs). A novel instruction set architecture (ISA) for the pPIM architecture facilitates the architecture\u27s reprogrammability without large impacts on performance. The ISA takes a microcoded approach to handling the control signals of the pPIM control signals. This approach allows variable-stage instructions at a low additional cost to the overall power and area of the architecture. The versatility of the pPIM architecture enables MAC operations and several common activation functions to be modeled for execution on the architecture. As a measure of performance, post-synthesis models of both the pPIM architecture and the ISA are generated for CNN inference. As a proof-of-concept an FPGA model of the pPIM architecture is developed for representations of a single layer neural network (NN) model for classification of MNIST images

The accommodation of contested identities: The impact of participation in a practice-based Masters Programme on Beginning Teachers’ professional identity and sense of agency.

Abstract Teachers’ professional training and development has been the focus of intense academic and political debate. This paper contributes to this by considering Beginning Teachers’ (BTs’) self-views of their professional identity. The findings are derived from a mixed methods study with questionnaires (n=886) and focus groups and interviews (n= 60) with BTs in Wales. Drawing on a socio-cultural approach, the findings illustrate how BTs’ integration of competing professional identities bolstered their sense of professional agency. These findings have salience within a policy context where both teacher education and professional development are increasingly aligned with the narrow organizational objectives of the school. Keywords: teacher professionalism; sociology of professions; socio-cultural theory; Beginning Teachers; professional development; professional identity; teacher agency