Preaching the presence of God: a homiletic from an Asian American perspective

Kim, Eunjoo Mary. Preaching the presence of God: a homiletic from an Asian American perspective. Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1999

Sarah Turner - eco-artist and designer through craft-based upcycling

Sarah Turner is an eco-artist and designer who practices craft-based upcycling with waste plastic bottles and cans to create lighting, sculpture and decorative home interior products. Since 1998, her enthusiasm, creativity and good will have allowed her to gain several high-profile client commissions and to win awards from design, innovation and business competitions. The aim of this portrait is to introduce Sarah’s work and shed light on the resources, knowledge and skills involved in her practice and on the barriers to and drivers for her craft-based upcycling. We consider that Sarah’s work could be one of the stepping stones for a shift towards more sustainable craft practice, both in the United Kingdom and beyond. By exploring the right ingredients for craft-based upcycling, barriers liable to be faced and key drivers that stimulate motivation, we hope that this portrait will inspire and attract more designers and makers to embed upcycling in their future practice

An exploratory study on the links between individual upcycling, product attachment and product longevity

Product attachment, the emotional bond experienced with a product, is an emerging concept for sustainable production and consumption. The logic behind it is that when people are attached to any product, they are more likely to handle the product with care and to postpone its replacement or disposal. Some types of product have been studied regarding product attachment in past research but the focus has been on the perspectives of professional designers and manufacturers rather than on consumers’ ‘everyday creativity’ activities such as ‘individual upcycling’. Individual upcycling, creation out of used materials resulting in a higher quality or value product than the compositional elements, is particularly relevant to product attachment. This is because upcycling, as a creative, participatory user activity, may offer the experiences of self-expression, group affiliation, special memories and pleasure, all of which are possible product attachment determinants

Individual upcycling practice: exploring the possible determinants of upcycling based on a literature review

Individual upcycling – the creation or creative modification of any product out of used materials in an attempt to generate a product of higher quality or value than the compositional elements – has recently been advocated by many as a means to reduce waste, yet is still marginal. Considering the implied benefit to sustainable production and consumption, the most relevant question at this point may be how to scale up this marginal practice into mainstream practice to make a bigger impact in society and environment. In order to generate effective scaling-up strategies for change, it is essential to understand the determinants of upcycling (i.e. what drives and facilitates it). This paper reviews relevant contemporary literature and identifies a set of determinants. The synthesized result, despite its partiality, shows possible examples of design and policy implications for scaling-up, and leads to future research suggestions

Modularizing and Specifying Protocols among Threads

We identify three problems with current techniques for implementing protocols among threads, which complicate and impair the scalability of multicore software development: implementing synchronization, implementing coordination, and modularizing protocols. To mend these deficiencies, we argue for the use of domain-specific languages (DSL) based on existing models of concurrency. To demonstrate the feasibility of this proposal, we explain how to use the model of concurrency Reo as a high-level protocol DSL, which offers appropriate abstractions and a natural separation of protocols and computations. We describe a Reo-to-Java compiler and illustrate its use through examples.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2012, arXiv:1302.579

Toward Sequentializing Overparallelized Protocol Code

In our ongoing work, we use constraint automata to compile protocol specifications expressed as Reo connectors into efficient executable code, e.g., in C. We have by now studied this automata based compilation approach rather well, and have devised effective solutions to some of its problems. Because our approach is based on constraint automata, the approach, its problems, and our solutions are in fact useful and relevant well beyond the specific case of compiling Reo. In this short paper, we identify and analyze two such rather unexpected problems.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2014, arXiv:1410.701

Data optimizations for constraint automata

Constraint automata (CA) constitute a coordination model based on finite automata on infinite words. Originally introduced for modeling of coordinators, an interesting new application of CAs is implementing coordinators (i.e., compiling CAs into executable code). Such an approach guarantees correctness-by-construction and can even yield code that outperforms hand-crafted code. The extent to which these two potential advantages materialize depends on the smartness of CA-compilers and the existence of proofs of their correctness. Every transition in a CA is labeled by a "data constraint" that specifies an atomic data-flow between coordinated processes as a first-order formula. At run-time, compiler-generated code must handle data constraints as efficiently as possible. In this paper, we present, and prove the correctness of two optimization techniques for CA-compilers related to handling of data constraints: a reduction to eliminate redundant variables and a translation from (declarative) data constraints to (imperative) data commands expressed in a small sequential language. Through experiments, we show that these optimization techniques can have a positive impact on performance of generated executable code

Revival of the Thermal Sneutrino Dark Matter

The left-handed sneutrino in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) has been ruled out as a viable thermal dark matter candidate, due to conflicting constraints from direct detection experiments and from the measurement of the dark matter relic density. The intrinsic fine-tuning problem of the MSSM, however, motivates an extension with a new U(1)' gauge symmetry. We show that in the U(1)'-extended MSSM the right-handed sneutrino becomes a good thermal dark matter candidate. We identify two generic parameter space regions where the combined constraints from relic density determinations, direct detection and collider searches are all satisfied.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Version to appear in Phys. Rev.