Grounds for Argument: Local Understandings, Science, and Global Processes in Special Forest Products Harvesting

In posing the question Where are the pickers? , Love and Jones suggest that the shifting paradigm in forestry is real and that academia is not leading the shift. Love and Jones illustrate the emergence of special forest products\u27 legitimacy in competing uses of forests with their experience and research in mushroom harvesting in the Pacific Northwest

Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America

The Illicit Slave Trade The last Africans brought to the United States as slaves, Sylviane Diouf tells us, arrived in July 1860, on the eve of the Civil War and fifty-two years after the United States Congress prohibited their legal importation. This mission was the brainchild of Timothy M...

Compiling Communication-Minimizing Query Plans

Because of the low arithmetic intensity of relational database operators, the performance of in-memory column stores ought to be bound by main-memory bandwidth, and in practice, highly-optimized operator implementations already achieve close to their peak theoretical performance. By itself, this would imply that hardware acceleration for analytics would be of limited utility, but I show that the emergence of full-query compilation presents new opportunities to reduce memory traffic and trade computation for communication, meaning that database-oriented processors may yet be worth designing.Moreover, the communication costs of queries on a given processor and memory hierarchy are determined by factors below the level of abstraction expressed in traditional query plans, such as how operators are (or are not) fused together, how execution is parallelized and cache-blocked, and how intermediate results are arranged in memory. I present a Scala- embedded programming language called Ressort that exposes these machine-level aspects of query compilation, and which emits parallel C++/OpenMP code as its target to express a greater range of algorithmic variants for each query than would be easy to study by hand

Stories Mediators Tell: The Editors\u27 Reflections

One year after publication of Stories Mediators Tell, the editors comment in their reflections of the Symposium on the importance of stories generally, on the Symposium articles, and on the state of the modern mediation movement

Relativistic theory of tidal Love numbers

In Newtonian gravitational theory, a tidal Love number relates the mass multipole moment created by tidal forces on a spherical body to the applied tidal field. The Love number is dimensionless, and it encodes information about the body's internal structure. We present a relativistic theory of Love numbers, which applies to compact bodies with strong internal gravities; the theory extends and completes a recent work by Flanagan and Hinderer, which revealed that the tidal Love number of a neutron star can be measured by Earth-based gravitational-wave detectors. We consider a spherical body deformed by an external tidal field, and provide precise and meaningful definitions for electric-type and magnetic-type Love numbers; and these are computed for polytropic equations of state. The theory applies to black holes as well, and we find that the relativistic Love numbers of a nonrotating black hole are all zero.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, many tables; final version to be published in Physical Review

Industrial policy and the Indian electronics industry

Thesis (S.M. in Technology and Policy)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-100).Recently, production within India's Electronics sector amounted to a low $12 billion when compared to the global output of$1400 billion. The slow growth in the local industry is often judged to be the result of late economic liberalization within India. This thesis argues that the lagging growth is more a result of premature liberalization, and policies geared toward promoting the wrong types of firms. This thesis seeks to move past the sole focus of much research on the burgeoning software and services sector and evaluate the growth of electronics, software, and design services as closely linked sub-sectors. The analysis is therefore performed with direct considerations of the most successful types of firms, who very often are involved in multiple sub-sectors. The variations in firm size, national ownership, and orientation toward the domestic or international markets are all key considerations within this thesis, concerning the effect these characteristics have on the performance of firms and the industry as a whole. Additionally, this thesis addresses issues of great concern within the industry and India as a whole, such as preserving employment opportunities. India has followed a non-traditional approach to economic development, and it is the goal of this thesis to clarify that approach and assess its sustainability. Thus, the focus of the research is two-tiered: to provide an overall appraisal of current policy in India's Electronics Sector, considering capabilities in core industries (i.e. machinery) and the software industry; and to provide recommendations - as needed - for decreasing the import reliance on the high value-added electronic components such as LCDs, integrated circuits, and other complex assemblies.by Robert Love.S.M

Building Statistics and Data Science Capacity for Development

Data-driven decision making for sustainable development requires domain expertise to ask the right questions; high-quality, relevant data; appropriate, nuanced statistical analyses; and the power to make and implement a decision. Statistics enables and accelerates all of these aspects. We propose a new model for building statistics and data science capacity to engage in data-driven development. Statisticians and data scientists must be able to understand the data and projects they are working with on both a deep and broad level and be able to communicate the results of statistical methods and analytical work in ways that provide actionable evidence to those who can use it to positively impact society. Our model for building statistics and data science capacity is to create statistics and data science collaboration laboratories (&ldquo;stat labs&rdquo;) that work in the intersections of data-driven development by collaborating with data producers and data decision makers to transform evidence into action. We present lessons learned from the LISA 2020 Network, which has leveraged the collective experiences of more than 30 newly created stat labs in developing countries to build such statistics and data science capacity by focusing on the intersections of data-driven development. &nbsp;</p

Derandomizing Codes for the Binary Adversarial Wiretap Channel of Type II

We revisit the binary adversarial wiretap channel (AWTC) of type II in which an active adversary can read a fraction $r$ and flip a fraction $p$ of codeword bits. The semantic-secrecy capacity of the AWTC II is partially known, where the best-known lower bound is non-constructive, proven via a random coding argument that uses a large number (that is exponential in blocklength $n$) of random bits to seed the random code. In this paper, we establish a new derandomization result in which we match the best-known lower bound of $1-H_2(p)-r$ where $H_2(\cdot)$ is the binary entropy function via a random code that uses a small seed of only $O(n^2)$ bits. Our random code construction is a novel application of pseudolinear codes -- a class of non-linear codes that have $k$-wise independent codewords when picked at random where $k$ is a design parameter. As the key technical tool in our analysis, we provide a soft-covering lemma in the flavor of Goldfeld, Cuff and Permuter (Trans. Inf. Theory 2016) that holds for random codes with $k$-wise independent codewords

A Look at the Generalized Heron Problem through the Lens of Majorization-Minimization

In a recent issue of this journal, Mordukhovich et al.\ pose and solve an interesting non-differentiable generalization of the Heron problem in the framework of modern convex analysis. In the generalized Heron problem one is given $k+1$ closed convex sets in \Real^d equipped with its Euclidean norm and asked to find the point in the last set such that the sum of the distances to the first $k$ sets is minimal. In later work the authors generalize the Heron problem even further, relax its convexity assumptions, study its theoretical properties, and pursue subgradient algorithms for solving the convex case. Here, we revisit the original problem solely from the numerical perspective. By exploiting the majorization-minimization (MM) principle of computational statistics and rudimentary techniques from differential calculus, we are able to construct a very fast algorithm for solving the Euclidean version of the generalized Heron problem.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure