145 research outputs found
The Sixth Sphere
No full textAuthor Note: Brittany Utting is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Rice University in Houston, TX, and co-founder of the research and design collaborative HOME-OFFICE. Her work examines the relationship between architecture and planetary practices of environmental care. She is the editor of the book Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common (Routledge, 2023), co-editor of Log 60: The Sixth Sphere (Winter/Summer 2024), and co-editor of the forthcoming Journal for Architectural Education 79:1: Architecture Beyond Extraction (Spring 2025). Utting has been a MacDowell Fellow in Architecture, the Willard A. Oberdick Fellow at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation and the Buell Center. She holds a Master of Architecture from Yale University and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Utting is a registered architect in New York, and prior to co-founding HOME-OFFICE she practiced at Thomas Phifer and Partners as project designer for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.Entangled within the Earth's five natural spheres-the atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere-is a sixth: the technosphere. Identified by geologist Peter K. Haff as an emerging paradigm of the Anthropocene, the technosphere includes the sites, institutions, and infrastructures of industrial production and extraction. Architecture is part of the technosphere, hardening its systems and proliferating its forms. Encompassing factories and farmlands, ports and telecommunication networks, mines and landfills, highways and suburbs, the technosphere is more than just the accumulated material of the built environment. It is a planetary enmeshment of physical infrastructures, geopolitical relations, and digital networks, enabling the continuous movement of matter, energy, and information. While many aspects of everyday life depend on the technosphere—such as clean water, waste systems, and electrical grids—the technosphere's exponential growth is actively destabilizing the Earth system. Its logic of extraction and expansion produces runaway planetary effects that exceed our capacity to control or alleviate, threatening not only our species but also the possibility of all forms of life to flourish. Despite its accelerating momentum, significant rifts exist within the technosphere. A system that cannot sustain its own processes without destroying the worlds upon which it depends demonstrates an underlying fragility. When we reconceptualize the technosphere as one of several entangled and coexisting worlds-rather than a global hegemonic order-new forms of spatial and environmental agency arise. The Sixth Sphere exhibition and accompanying catalog, curated by Brittany Utting, explores how design can participate in systems of planetary interdependence and reciprocity. Gathering the contributions of eighteen practices from around the world, The Sixth Sphere positions the technosphere as a collective site to reconstruct our social, technical, and climate futures
Palynology of the Permian and Triassic of the Tesero and Bulla sections (Western Dolomites, Italy) and consideration about the enigmatic species Reduviasporonites chalastus.
No full textA palynological study of two Permian-–Triassic sections of the Southern Alps (Tesero and Bulla sections) was carried out in order to correlate the palynological data with the available conodont zones. Both the sections crop out in the Western Dolomites, the Tesero section in Fiemme Valley and the Bulla section in Badia valley.
The two sections include the uppermost Bellerophon Formation and the overlying Werfen Formation. In the latter the Permian/Triassic boundary (Farabegoli et al., 2007) has been defined by conodonts. The palynological assemblages collected in both sections throughout the Bellerophon up to the Werfen formations show compositional variation marked by: a) a dominance of taeniate and non -taeniate bisaccates in the Bellerophon Formation dated as Late Permian; b) a bloom of the organic microfossil incertae sedis Reduviasporonites chalastus in the lower Tesero Member (Werfen Formation), found only in the Tesero section. This interval should stratigraphically lie below the Permian/Triassic boundary, as defined by conodonts recorded in the Bulla section; c) poorly preserved acavate and bisaccate taxa in the upper Tesero Member, above the Permian/Triassic boundary, and in the overlying Mazzin Member of the Tesero section. The origin and the ecological preferences of Reduviasporonites chalastus and the implications of its worldwide distribution across the Permian/Triassic boundary are also discussed
Datalog as a parallel general purpose programming language
No full textThe increasing available parallelism of computers demands new programming languages that make parallel programming dramatically easier and less error prone. It is proposed that datalog with negation and timestamps is a suitable basis for a general purpose programming language for sequential, parallel and distributed computers.
This paper develops a fully incremental bottom-up interpreter for datalog that supports a wide range of execution strategies, with trade-offs affecting efficiency, parallelism and control of resource usage. Examples show how the language can accept real-time external inputs and outputs, and mimic assignment, all without departing from its pure logical semantics
A Parallel semantics for normal logic programs plus time
No full textIt is proposed that Normal Logic Programs with an explicit time ordering are a suitable basis for a general purpose parallel programming language. Examples show that such a language can accept real-time external inputs and outputs, and mimic assignment, all without departing from its pure logical semantics. This paper describes a fully incremental bottom-up interpreter that supports a wide range of parallel execution strategies and can extract significant potential parallelism from programs with complex dependencies
A semantics and implementation of a causal logic programming language
No full textThe increasingly widespread availability of multicore and manycore computers demands new programming languages that make parallel programming dramatically easier and less error prone. This paper describes a semantics for a new class of declarative programming languages that support massive amounts of implicit parallelism
Automatic Parallelization of Data-Driven JStar Programs
No full textData-driven problems have common characteristics: a large number of small objects with complex dependencies. This makes the traditional parallel programming approaches more difficult to apply as pipe-lining the task dependencies may require to rewrite or recompile the program into efficient parallel implementations. This thesis focuses on data-driven JStar programs that have rules triggered by the tuples from a bulky CSV file or from other sources of complex data, and making those programs run fast in parallel. JStar is a new declarative language for parallel programming that encourages programmers to write their applications with implicit parallelism.
The thesis briefly introduces the JStar language and the implicit default parallelism of the JStar compiler. It describes the root causes of the poor performance of the naive parallel JStar programs and defines a performance tuning process to increase the speed of JStar programs as the number of cores increases and to minimize the memory usage in the Java Heap. Several graphic analysis tools were developed to allow easier analysis of bottlenecks in parallel programs. The JStar compiler and runtime were extended so that it is easy to apply a variety of optimisations to a JStar program without changing the JStar source code. This process was applied to four case studies which were benchmarked on different multi-core machines to measure the performance and scalability of JStar programs
Basalt cobbles recovered from sampling location 2, Pù Luông Nature Reserve (photo by author).
No full textBasalt cobbles recovered from sampling location 2, Pù Luông Nature Reserve (photo by author).</p
Lithics from Hang Trong (clockwise from upper left): Core tool, flake tools (photo by author).
No full textLithics from Hang Trong (clockwise from upper left): Core tool, flake tools (photo by author).</p
Lithics from Thung Binh 1 (clockwise from upper left): Short axe, flake tools (photo by author).
No full textLithics from Thung Binh 1 (clockwise from upper left): Short axe, flake tools (photo by author).</p
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