The commercial and technical evolution of the ferry industry 1948-1987

The thesis sets out the political, economic and social forces and the parallel institutional and technical factors that shaped the development of the ferry sector between 1948 and 1987. It provides as full an account as the available record permits of an important shipping industry sector that previously has received little serious historical consideration. Most of the ferry industry, dominated by its railway industry parent and ravaged by war losses, came into public ownership in 1948 as a consequence of railway nationalisation followed by a decade of under-investment. The period ended with a loss of supremacy for the railway-owned shipping sector, privatisation, increased competition, the 1987 Herald of Free Enterprise disaster – in no small part exacerbated by the drive through vehicle deck which had done so much to facilitate the ease of passenger car and freight movement - and the certainty of the Channel Tunnel, which spelt the end of sea transport primacy on its most important routes. The era saw ferries transformed in terms of design and capability from being largely tied to rail-connected passenger traffic, there came the innovation of roll-on, roll-off and the hovercraft, with ports undergoing change scarcely less extensive. The thesis examines the basic structural changes that affected the industry, specifically the process that resulted in the establishment of privately-owned firms in situ, the bureaucratic problems that beset British Railways and which hampered its formulation of a coherent response to the varied challenges it faced in the Fifties and Sixties. It shows how the growth in private motor car ownership proved a catalyst for change in a conservative industry and explores the way in which the introduction of newcomers and the hovercraft drove the development of competition, transforming the ferry business but ultimately leading to the government decision to construct a fixed link between the United Kingdom and France. The thesis concludes that the drive and entrepreneurial flair of three private ferry operators, Townsend, Bustard and Thoresen, was largely responsible for the transformation of the industry and argues that the new and growing market created by motor transport would not have been exploited at such a rate or with the same degree of forethought and innovation without their involvement

Achieving Dilution without Knowledge of Coordinates in the SINR Model

Considerable literature has been developed for various fundamental distributed problems in the SINR (Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio) model for radio transmission. A setting typically studied is when all nodes transmit a signal of the same strength, and each device only has access to knowledge about the total number of nodes in the network $n$, the range from which each node's label is taken $[1,\dots,N]$, and the label of the device itself. In addition, an assumption is made that each node also knows its coordinates in the Euclidean plane. In this paper, we create a technique which allows algorithm designers to remove that last assumption. The assumption about the unavailability of the knowledge of the physical coordinates of the nodes truly captures the `ad-hoc' nature of wireless networks. Previous work in this area uses a flavor of a technique called dilution, in which nodes transmit in a (predetermined) round-robin fashion, and are able to reach all their neighbors. However, without knowing the physical coordinates, it's not possible to know the coordinates of their containing (pivotal) grid box and seemingly not possible to use dilution (to coordinate their transmissions). We propose a new technique to achieve dilution without using the knowledge of physical coordinates. This technique exploits the understanding that the transmitting nodes lie in 2-D space, segmented by an appropriate pivotal grid, without explicitly referring to the actual physical coordinates of these nodes. Using this technique, it is possible for every weak device to successfully transmit its message to all of its neighbors in $\Theta(\lg N)$ rounds, as long as the density of transmitting nodes in any physical grid box is bounded by a known constant. This technique, we feel, is an important generic tool for devising practical protocols when physical coordinates of the nodes are not known.Comment: 10 page

Pancasila: Cinta Kasih Yang Mempersatukan

Recent cases of discrimination and intolerance have threatened the unity of Indonesia. We may forget that the unity in diversity (Bhineka Tunggal Ika) is a ‘given’ thing for the inhabitants of Indonesia. This article is a descriptive-critical reflection to this given-unity-in-diversity in the light of Pancasila as the practical-philosophy of Indonesian people. In the face of Indonesian people’s ethnicity, race, and religion diversities, a unifying love is needed, which is none other than the Pancasila itself

The Attitudes We Live By: The Impact of Symbols of Authority and the Questionable Nature of their Rejection

Society is structured based on the symbol systems that facilitate communication. Humans are narrative beings who find their morals and attitudes through interactions with stories that describe experience and substance. Symbols used to communicate are the representations of narratives attempting to share some meaning. These narratives are open to a plethora of interpretations but in order to create a cohesive community leading institutions will push certain definitions. By the nature of their hegemony dominant societal classes will control narrative and moral understanding to protect their position. The narratological control of these groups props up symbols of authority and limits potential attitudes. Kenneth Burke studies this process in his Attitudes Toward History and comes to find that people either exist in an attitude of acceptance or rejection towards symbols of authority. This paper looks at how institutions seek to control and limit discourse, and the findings bring Burke’s theory into question. The power granted to dominant groups by the nature of their hegemony and the central role played by institutions in ideological dissemination erases the possibility of a true rejection. As such the attitudes presented by Burke as existing in a frame of rejection are more aligned with those that appear during transitional periods. Burke’s attitudes of rejection do not actually seek to reject a frame but seek to expand it in order to protect against a potential collapse

Measurement of thermal conductivity of PAN based carbon fiber

M.S.W. Z. Blac

Instead of Rewriting Foreign Code for Machine Learning, Automatically Synthesize Fast Gradients

Applying differentiable programming techniques and machine learning algorithms to foreign programs requires developers to either rewrite their code in a machine learning framework, or otherwise provide derivatives of the foreign code. This paper presents Enzyme, a high-performance automatic differentiation (AD) compiler plugin for the LLVM compiler framework capable of synthesizing gradients of statically analyzable programs expressed in the LLVM intermediate representation (IR). Enzyme synthesizes gradients for programs written in any language whose compiler targets LLVM IR including C, C++, Fortran, Julia, Rust, Swift, MLIR, etc., thereby providing native AD capabilities in these languages. Unlike traditional source-to-source and operator-overloading tools, Enzyme performs AD on optimized IR. On a machine-learning focused benchmark suite including Microsoft's ADBench, AD on optimized IR achieves a geometric mean speedup of 4.5x over AD on IR before optimization allowing Enzyme to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Packaging Enzyme for PyTorch and TensorFlow provides convenient access to gradients of foreign code with state-of-the art performance, enabling foreign code to be directly incorporated into existing machine learning workflows.Comment: To be published in NeurIPS 202

Dispersion, Capacitated Nodes, and the Power of a Trusted Shepherd

In this paper, we look at and expand the problems of dispersion and Byzantine dispersion of mobile robots on a graph, introduced by Augustine and Moses~Jr.~[ICDCN~2018] and by Molla, Mondal, and Moses~Jr.~[ALGOSENSORS~2020], respectively, to graphs where nodes have variable capacities. We use the idea of a single shepherd, a more powerful robot that will never act in a Byzantine manner, to achieve fast Byzantine dispersion, even when other robots may be strong Byzantine in nature. We also show the benefit of a shepherd for dispersion on capacitated graphs when no Byzantine robots are present