Merging Modest with Complexity

This thesis will enable a retrospective critical examination of aspects of my practice as an artist from 2005 - 2020. The research question addresses the implication of multiple forms of inter-reliance enabled in the practice. This will be enabled by opening a discursive space that retrospectively, integrates and critically examines the role and function of inter-reliance as a structural methodology and how this is implicated in the practice over this period. This thesis will use term inter-reliance to define a play of relations where individual art works when viewed in isolation exist only in partial illumination as a form of penumbra. The art works are inchoate as separate entities only becoming activated or fully realised when engaged with collectively and interdiscursively, as a set of enabled relationships. In each of the chapters inter-reliance is manifested as a set of specific enabled reciprocal relationships between artistic mechanisms and physical, perceptual, associative, sonic, contextual and cinematic space. Rather than make art for art’s sake or art that specifically engages with trends or tendencies within the art world, it will elucidate how the practice is relational and empathetic, facilitating an inter-reliance between artist and viewer and artist and society, the practice engages with and reflects upon broader society where articulations of ideological positions are subtly embedded

Songs and the Soil

Published in conjuction with an exhibition. The exhibition engages with the subjects of landscape and music/sound—exploring each element from historical, social and culturally associative perspectives; where landscape is recognised as a fluid term articulating physical space, idealised space and social space that reflects a convergence of physical processes and cultural meaning, and where song act as a response to, or archive, of personal, historical or socio-political instances. Several works engage landscape and musical sound intersect. The exhibition integrates a broad range of media,positions and responses to these research subjects; including two film works, a six-hour soundtrack for a room, sonic sculptures, a series of sculptural interventions, paintings, analogue photography, screen prints, ceramics and flowers. In most instances, a number of these elements combine to form installations. The selected texts that feature in this publication do not relate to these artworks directly, but either explicitly or obliquely engage with the broader research subject of landscape and music/sound. This collaborative project integrates one existing text and six commissioned texts by Mark Garry, John Graham, Joanne Laws, Sharon Phelan and Suzanne Walsh. The publication also includes a transcription of a radio interview from 1974 with Charles Amirkhanian and the musician Robbie Basho. This interview discusses the broad scope of Basho’s music and the remarkable generosity and fluidity of music as a cultural form. In particular, the dialogue explores music’s openness and potential to continuously evolve and incorporate diverse influences, styles and forms. This collaborative relationship is echoed in the design and the editorial process of the publication. Rather than passively catalogue the exhibition, the selected images act as visual echoes of the artist’s creative motivations. Intended to complement the textual contributions, the images are an amalgam of: private notebook studies; investigations; experiments; observations; and visual archive of completed works—functioning as a platform to extend discourse of themes and topics embedded within the research. The visual hierarchy and typographic treatment elicit direction from the synthesis of topics articulated within the contributors’ texts. This is made visible in the subtle layering of content that builds and recedes across the document to create a composition that considers research commonalities. The layout is also cognisant of indirect interactions of topics that take place within the artist’s work. Facilitated by the substrate, shapes and shadows from previous/subsequent spreads are subtly revealed at various junctures within the publication. The digital pattern represents cuneiform shapes of sound used to visually represent Debussy’s 1905 composition, Clair de Lune, this particular score was chosen for its complex and intriguing origin story. The torn paper that intersects the rugged landscape images expose the surface quality but also contemplates the role of sound in the formation of landscape. The symbols that puncture the cover substrate acknowledge forms/methods of communication/sound that covertly ebb in and out of the artist’s work. These design interventions attempt to capture the explorative nature and the collision of ideas that emerged within the research process

The assessment of benchmarks executed on bare-metal and using para-virtualization

A full assessment of para-­virtualization is important, because without knowledge about the various overheads, users can not understand whether using virtualization is a good idea or not. In this paper we are very interested in assessing the overheads of running various benchmarks on bare-­‐metal, as well as on para-­‐virtualization. The idea is to see what the overheads of para-­‐ virtualization are, as well as looking at the overheads of turning on monitoring and logging. The knowledge from assessing various benchmarks on these different systems will help a range of users understand the use of virtualization systems. In this paper we assess the overheads of using Xen, VMware, KVM and Citrix, see Table 1. These different virtualization systems are used extensively by cloud-­‐users. We are using various Netlib1 benchmarks, which have been developed by the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UTK), and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). In order to assess these virtualization systems, we run the benchmarks on bare-­‐metal, then on the para-­‐virtualization, and finally we turn on monitoring and logging. The later is important as users are interested in Service Level Agreements (SLAs) used by the Cloud providers, and the use of logging is a means of assessing the services bought and used from commercial providers. In this paper we assess the virtualization systems on three different systems. We use the Thamesblue supercomputer, the Hactar cluster and IBM JS20 blade server (see Table 2), which are all servers available at the University of Reading. A functional virtualization system is multi-­‐layered and is driven by the privileged components. Virtualization systems can host multiple guest operating systems, which run on its own domain, and the system schedules virtual CPUs and memory within each Virtual Machines (VM) to make the best use of the available resources. The guest-­‐operating system schedules each application accordingly. You can deploy virtualization as full virtualization or para-­‐virtualization. Full virtualization provides a total abstraction of the underlying physical system and creates a new virtual system, where the guest operating systems can run. No modifications are needed in the guest OS or application, e.g. the guest OS or application is not aware of the virtualized environment and runs normally. Para-­‐virualization requires user modification of the guest operating systems, which runs on the virtual machines, e.g. these guest operating systems are aware that they are running on a virtual machine, and provide near-­‐native performance. You can deploy both para-­‐virtualization and full virtualization across various virtualized systems. Para-­‐virtualization is an OS-­‐assisted virtualization; where some modifications are made in the guest operating system to enable better performance. In this kind of virtualization, the guest operating system is aware of the fact that it is running on the virtualized hardware and not on the bare hardware. In para-­‐virtualization, the device drivers in the guest operating system coordinate the device drivers of host operating system and reduce the performance overheads. The use of para-­‐virtualization [0] is intended to avoid the bottleneck associated with slow hardware interrupts that exist when full virtualization is employed. It has revealed [0] that para-­‐ virtualization does not impose significant performance overhead in high performance computing, and this in turn this has implications for the use of cloud computing for hosting HPC applications. The “apparent” improvement in virtualization has led us to formulate the hypothesis that certain classes of HPC applications should be able to execute in a cloud environment, with minimal performance degradation. In order to support this hypothesis, first it is necessary to define exactly what is meant by a “class” of application, and secondly it will be necessary to observe application performance, both within a virtual machine and when executing on bare hardware. A further potential complication is associated with the need for Cloud service providers to support Service Level Agreements (SLA), so that system utilisation can be audited

Utjecaj prethodne obrade namakanjem na fermentaciju maslina Kalamata

Traditional methods of naturally black olive production employ a series of static washings prior to fermentation. This work investigates the static washings and the effects they have on the subsequent spontaneous fermentation of Kalamata olives. Significant quantities of organic carbonaceous material, including phenolic compounds, were removed during the static washings. The rate of removal peaked after four static washings, and then declined. Bacteria (including lactic acid bacteria) and yeast were found to be present in high numbers throughout the static washings. An increase in the number of static washings resulted in the removal of inhibitory phenolic compounds. This led to a reduction in the lag phase and an increase in the specific growth rate for both the yeast and lactic acid bacteria during the subsequent spontaneous fermentations. However, an increased incidence of spoilage moulds was observed in the fermentations when the olives underwent thirteen static washings.Tradicionalne metode obrade crnih maslina obuhvaćaju niz postupaka namakanja prije fermentacije. U ovom je radu istražen utjecaj takve prethodne obrade na spontanu fermentaciju maslina Kalamata. Utvrđeno je da je njihovim namakanjem uklonjena značajna količina i organskih spojeva ugljika i fenolnih spojeva. Najviše ih je pronađeno u vodi nakon četiri namakanja, a daljnjim namakanjem nije se povećala količina ispranih tvari. Mikrobiološkom analizom vode nakon namakanja utvrđen je veliki broj bakterija (uključujući i mliječno-kisele bakterije) i kvasaca. Ponovljenim namakanjem uklonjeni su inhibitorni fenolni spojevi, što dovodi do smanjenja lag faze i porasta specifične brzine rasta kvasaca i mliječno-kiselih bakterija tijekom naknadne spontane fermentacije maslina. Međutim, nakon 13 uzastopnih namakanja pojačao se rast plijesni što uzrokuju kvarenje tijekom fermentacije

Policy Coordination in an Ecology of Water Management Games

Policy outcomes in all but the simplest policy systems emerge from a complex of ecology of games featuring multiple actors, policy institutions, and issues, and not just single policies operating in isolation. This paper updates Long\u27s (1958) ecology of games framework with Scharpf\u27s (1997) actor-centered institutionalism to analyze the coordinating roles of actors and institutions on the context of the ecology of water management games in the San Francisco Bay. Actors participating in multiple institutions are analyzed using exponential random graph models for bipartite networks representing different assumptions about policy behavior, including geographic constraints. We find that policy coordination is facilitated mostly by Federal and state agencies, and collaborative institutions that span across geographic boundaries. Network configurations associated with closure show the most significant departures from the predicted model values, consistent with the Berardo and Scholz (2010) risk hypothesis that closure is important for solving cooperation problems

A training-model scale's validity and reliability coefficients: expert evaluation in Indonesian professional psychology programs

Very little information has been available on training models in professional psychology programs in Indonesia, despite the Indonesian National Accreditation Body recommending that scientist-practitioner models be applied in the education of psychologists. By contrast, research abounds on such training models in Western countries. This discrepancy raises the importance of developing a measurement tool appropriate for assessing training models in Indonesian professional psychology programs. This article describes the process of testing the validity and reliability of such a training model measuring tool in the Indonesian context. The authors used the expert evaluation method and the Aiken formula to calculate a coefficient of content validity and item’s internal consistency reliability. This process formed a training model scale comprising 77 items with satisfactory validity and reliability indexes for measuring Indonesian professional psychology program training models

Testing Policy Theory with Statistical Models of Networks

Abstract This paper presents a conceptual framework for clarifying the network hypotheses embedded in policy theories and how they relate to macro-level political outcomes and micro-level political behavior. We then describe the role of statistical models of networks for testing these hypotheses, including the problem of operationalizing theoretical concepts with the parameters of statistical models. Examples from existing policy research are provided and potential extensions are discussed. This paper is forthcoming as the introduction to a special issue of the Policy Studies Journal on statistical models of policy networks

Reconstruction of the Genesis Entry

An overview of the reconstruction analyses performed for the Genesis capsule entry is described. The results indicate that the actual entry prior to the drogue deployment failure was very close to the pre-entry predictions. The capsule landed 8.3 km south of the desired target at Utah Test and Training Range. Analysis on infrared video footage (obtained from the tracking stations) during the descent estimated the onset of the capsule tumble at Mach 0.9. Frequency analysis on the infrared video data indicates that the aerodynamics generated for the Genesis capsule reasonably predicted the drag and static stability. Observations of the heatshield support the pre-entry simulation estimates of a small hypersonic angles-of-attack, since there is very little, if any, charring of the shoulder region or the aftbody. Through this investigation, an overall assertion can be made that all the data gathered from the Genesis entry is consistent with flight performance that was close to the nominal preentry prediction. Consequently, the design principles and methodologies utilized for the flight dynamics, aerodynamics, and aerothermodynamics analyses have been corroborated