1,572 research outputs found
An Interview with Matthew Kaiser on Competition and Play
No full textAn Interview with Matthew Kaiser on Competition and Play, by Sean Scanlan. Matthew Kaiser, the author of The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept (Stanford UP, 2012) says that “[c]ompetition is the disease from which modern life suffers,” and that “[c]ompetition is the only cure” for this suffering. This contradictory pairing seems to get at the heart of his thesis: play, as a totalizing, umbrella-like concept, emanates from a host of philosophical, political, and scientific work produced by Victorians who posed many of their ideas of play in sports metaphors, competitive logics, and narratives of struggle. Kaiser goes beyond the dichotomy of competition and play/competition or play, by stating “I’m interested in the totalizing potential of both concepts, the way that play, or competition for that matter, swallows the world whole, becomes in the minds of so many people, the organizing principle of reality, whether of culture or nature or consciousness, or of all three.
Localization of mechanisms involved in hydropassive and hydroactive stomatal responses of Sambucus nigra to dry air
No full textThe response of stomata to a reduction of air humidity is composed of a hydropassive opening followed by active closure. Whereas the mechanisms behind the hydropassive opening are largely understood, the location and physiological basis of the sensing mechanisms leading to active closure are not yet known. This study attempts to evaluate the importance of a single pore's transpiration on its own response and that of adjacent pores. Selected stomata on attached intact leaves of Sambucus nigra were sealed with mineral oil and the response to a reduction of humidity was continuously observed in situ. Blocking a pore's transpiration had no appreciable effect on hydropassive opening and subsequent stomatal closure. If the adjacent stomata were additionally sealed, the closing response was reduced, but not the hydropassive opening. On the other hand, sealing the entire leaf surface, except a small area including the observed stomata, also reduced stomatal closure. These results indicate that strictly local processes triggered by a pore's own transpiration are not required to induce stomatal closure. To describe the effect of one pore's transpiration on the hydropassive and hydroactive responses of neighboring stomata, a simple spatial model was constructed. It suggests that 90% of the closing effect covers an area of approximately 0.5 mm2, whereas the effect on hydropassive opening affects an area of approximately 1 mm2. This divergence may suggest mechanisms other than or in addition to those involving changes of local leaf water potential
Recommended from our members
Streetstyle: an Interview with Susan B. Kaiser
No full text Susan B. Kaiser discusses fashion and the city, including its geography of consumption and production, the relation between street style and the fashion industry, and how sartorial experimentation relates to social change. Susan B. Kaiser is Professor of Women and Gender Studies, Textiles and Clothing, and the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, at the University of California at Davis. Her research and teaching interface between the fields of fashion studies and feminist cultural studies. Recent and current research addresses shifting articulations of masculinities; issues of space/place (i.e., rural, urban, suburban); and possibilities for critical fashion studies through popular and political cultural discourses. She is the author of
The Social Psychology of Clothing
(1997) and
Fashion and Cultural Studies
(forthcoming), and over 90 articles and book chapters in the fields of textile/fashion studies, sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, popular culture, and consumer behavior. She is a Fellow and Past President of the International Textile and Apparel Association, and was the first Nixon Distinguished Professor/Lecturer at Cornell University. She is currently organizing a critical fashion studies working group in the University of California system
Parallelization in Modern C++
No full textThe traditionally used and well established parallel programming models OpenMP and MPI are both targeting lower level parallelism and are meant to be as language agnostic as possible. For a long time, those models were the only widely available portable options for developing parallel C++ applications beyond using plain threads. This has strongly limited the optimization capabilities of compilers, has inhibited extensibility and genericity, and has restricted the use of those models together with other, modern higher level abstractions introduced by the C++11 and C++14 standards.
The recent revival of interest in the industry and wider community for the C++ language has also spurred a remarkable amount of standardization proposals and technical specifications being developed. Those efforts however have so far failed to build a vision on how to seamlessly integrate various types of parallelism, such as iterative parallel execution, task-based parallelism, asynchronous many-task execution flows, continuation style computation, or explicit fork-join control flow of independent and non-homogeneous code paths.
In this talk we present the results of developing higher level parallelization facilities in HPX, a general purpose C++ runtime system for applications of any scale. The developed higher-level parallelization APIs have been designed aiming at overcoming the limitations of today's prevalently used programming models in C++ codes. HPX exposes a uniform higher-level API which gives the application programmer syntactic and semantic equivalence of various types of on-node and off-node parallelism, all of which are well integrated into the C++ type system. We show that these higher level facilities are fully aligned with modern C++ programming concepts, they are easily extensible, fully generic, and enable highly efficient parallelization on par with or better than what existing equivalent applications based on OpenMP and/or MPI can achieve.
About the speakers
Dr. Hartmut Kaiser is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University. At the same time, he holds the position of a senior scientist at the Center for Computation and Technology (LSU). He received his doctorate from the Technical University of Chemnitz (Germany) in 1988. He is probably best known through his involvement in open source software projects, mainly as the author of several C++ libraries he has contributed to Boost, which are in use by thousands of developers worldwide. He is a voting member of ISO C++ Standards Committee. His current research is focused on leading the STE||AR group at CCT working on the practical design and implementation of the ParalleX execution model and related programming methods.
Thomas Heller is a member of the research staff at the institute for computer architectures at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen Nuremberg (FAU). His interests are in High Performance Computing, more specifically in how to exploit parallelism of current and new architectures, mainly by incorporating novel ideas through the implementation of parallel runtime systems. He is one of the main developers of the HPX C++ parallel runtime system within the STE||AR group at FAU.
Organised by: Axel Naumann/EP and Miguel Angel Marquina - IT Department
CERN Computing Seminars and Colloquia</p
Ein gescheiterter Visionär. Hartmut Leppin über Kaiser Justinian und seine Welt der Katastrophen
No full text- …
