With the common adoption of the Internet and Web in the recent years, the WOM has been changed to electronic WOM (e- WOM). E-WOM is the positive or negative statements made about a product, company, or media personality that are made widely available via the Internet. It has become an important source of information for the consumer to make decisions including purchase and more and more people have noticed the importance of its applications. The goal of this research is to investigate ¡§message passing along behavior intention¡¨ (MPBI) by using Social Cognitive Theory and Social Capital Theory from the viewpoints of people and environment. We use survey method to collect the data and use PLS to analyze it. And the results reveal that when people passing message along to others, they care about how close these messages are with them instead of how correct these messages are. It implies that MPBI has the nature of daily life, and therefore, people will be more willing to pass daily life messages. Besides, individuals tend to pass along messages to people who have substantial relationship with him/her. We also found people pass message along to people not for reputation but for expressing their affections to others. In addition, message passing Self-efficacy is also important to MPBI. We also classified MPBI into two types ¡X the one is hedonic and the other is utilitarian. The results indicate that people have different behavioral pattern when they deal with different kind of MPBI. In sum, MPBI is a channel for people to maintain the relationship with others and the findings of this study provides some suggestions for the e-WOM research.

Multi-core architectures are becoming more common and core counts continue to increase. There are six- and eight-core chips currently in production, such as Intel Gulftown, and many-core chips with dozens of cores, such as the Intel Teraflops 80-core chip, are projected in the next five years. However, adding more cores often does not improve the performance of applications. It would be desirable to take advantage of the multi-core environment to speed up parallel discrete event simulation. The current bottleneck for many parallel simulations is time synchronization. This is especially true for simulations of wireless networks and on-chip networks, which have low lookahead. Message passing is also a common simulation bottleneck. In order to address the issue of time synchronization, we have designed hardware at a functional level that performs the time synchronization for parallel discrete event simulation asynchronously and in just a few clock cycles, eliminating the need for global communication with message passing or lock contention for shared memory. This hardware, the Global Synchronization Unit, consists of 3 register files, each the size of the number of cores, and is accessed using 5 new atomic instructions. In order to reduce the simulation overhead from message passing, we have also designed two independent pieces of hardware at a functional level, the Atomic Shared Heap and Atomic Message Passing, which can be used to perform lock-free, zero-copy message passing on a multi-core system. The impact of these specialized hardware units on the performance of parallel discrete event simulation is assessed and compared to traditional shared-memory techniques.

The purpose of this paper is to supply a summary of library subroutines and functions for parallel MIMD computers. The subroutines have been developed and continously extended at the University of Chemnitz since the end of the eighties. In detail, they are concerned with vector operations, inter-processor communication and simple graphic output to workstations. One of the most valuable features is the machine-independence of the communication subroutines proposed in this paper for a hypercube topology of the parallel processors (excepting a kernel of only two primitive system-dependend operations). They were implemented and tested for different hardware and operating systems including PARIX for transputers and PowerPC, nCube, PVM, MPI. The vector subroutines are optimized by the use of C language and unrolled loops (BLAS1-like). Hardware-optimized BLAS1 routines may be integrated. The paper includes hints for programmers how to use the libraries with both Fortran and C programs.

In this thesis, performance of relay-assisted Device-to-device (D2D) communication is investigated where D2D traffic is carried through relay nodes. I develop resource management schemes to maximize end-to-end rate as well as conversing rate requirements for cellular and D2D UEs under total power constraint. I also develop a low-complexity distributed solution using the concept of message passing. Considering the uncertainties in wireless links (e.g., when interference from other relay nodes and the link gains are not exactly known), I extend the formulation using robust resource allocation techniques. In addition, a distributed solution approach using stable matching is developed to allocate radio resources in an efficient and computationally inexpensive way under the bounded channel uncertainties. Numerical results show that, there is a distance threshold beyond which relay-assisted D2D communication significantly improves network performance at the cost of small increase in end-to-end delay when compared to conventional approach.

No description available.

This work endeavours to achieve technology transfer between established best-practice in academic high-performance computing and current techniques in commercial high-productivity computing. It shows that a credible high-performance message-passing communication library, with semantics and syntax following the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) Standard, can be built in pure C# (one of the .Net suite of computer languages). Message-passing has been the dominant paradigm in high-performance parallel programming of distributed-memory computer architectures for three decades. The MPI Standard originally distilled architecture-independent and language-agnostic ideas from existing specialised communication libraries and has since been enhanced and extended. Object-oriented languages can increase programmer productivity, for example by allowing complexity to be managed through encapsulation. Both the C# computer language and the .Net common language runtime (CLR) were originally developed by Microsoft Corporation but have since been standardised by the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) and the International Standards Organisation (ISO), which facilitates portability of source-code and compiled binary programs to a variety of operating systems and hardware. Combining these two open and mature technologies enables mainstream programmers to write tightly-coupled parallel programs in a popular standardised object-oriented language that is portable to most modern operating systems and hardware architectures. This work also establishes that a thread-to-thread delivery option increases shared-memory communication performance between MPI ranks on the same node. This suggests that the thread-as-rank threading model should be explicitly specified in future versions of the MPI Standard and then added to existing MPI libraries for use by thread-safe parallel codes. This work also ascertains that the C# socket object suffers from undesirable characteristics that are critical to communication performance and proposes ways of improving the implementation of this object.

GPUs offer high-performance floating-point computation at commodity prices, but their usage is hindered by programming models which expose the user to irregularities in the current shared-memory environments and require learning new interfaces and semantics. This thesis will demonstrate that the message-passing paradigm can be conceptually cleaner than the current data-parallel models for programming GPUs because it can hide the quirks of current GPU shared-memory environments, as well as GPU-specific features, behind a well-established and well-understood interface. This will be shown by demonstrating a proof-of-concept MPI implementation which provides cleaner, simpler code with a reasonable performance cost. This thesis will also demonstrate that, although there is a virtualization constraint imposed by MPI, this constraint is harmless as long as the virtualization was already chosen to be optimal in terms of a strong execution model and nearly-optimal execution time. This will be demonstrated by examining execution times with varying virtualization using a computationally-expensive micro-kernel.

A key aim of this study is to shed light on the representation of coloured women with reference to racial passing, using fictive characters depicted in Sarah Gertrude Millin’s (1924) God’s Stepchildren,Zoë Wicomb’s (2006) Playing in the Light, and Pat Stamatélos’s (2005) Kroes, as presented by these three racially distinct female South African authors.Since I propose that literature provides a link between a subjective history and the under-represented narratives from the margins, I use literature to reimagine these. I analyse the ways in which the authors present ‘hybrid’ identities within their characters in different ways, and provide an explanation and contextual basis for the exploration of the theme of ‘passing for and as white’ within South Africa’s complex history. I provide a sociological explanation of the act of racial passing in South Africa with reference to the United States by incorporating Nella Larsen’s (1929) Passing. Since the analyses will concentrate on coloured females within the texts, gendered identity and female sexuality and stereotypes will be the focus. I look at the act and agent of passing, the role of raced and gendered performance in giving meaning to social identities, and the way in which the female body is constructed in racial terms in order to confer identity. Tracing the historical origins of coloured identity and coloured female identity, I interrogate this colonial, post-colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid history by employing a feminist lens. A combination of postcolonial feminist discourse analysis, sociological inquiry and feminist narrative analysis are therefore the methods I use to achieve my research aims. / Magister Artium - MA

The workshop ¨Portierbare numerische Simulationen auf parallelen Architekturen¨ (¨Portable numerical simulations on parallel architectures¨) was organized by the Fac- ulty of Informatics/Professorship Computer Architecture at 18 April 1996 and held in the framework of the Sonderforschungsbereich (Joint Research Initiative) ¨Numerische Simulationen auf massiv parallelen Rechnern¨ (SFB 393) (¨Numerical simulations on massiv parallel computers¨) ( http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~pester/sfb/sfb393.html ) The SFB 393 is funded by the German National Science Foundation (DFG). The purpose of the workshop was to bring together scientists using parallel computing to provide integrated discussions on portability issues, requirements and future devel- opments in implementing parallel software efficiently as well as portable on Clusters of Symmetric Multiprocessorsystems. I hope that the present paper gives the reader some helpful hints for further discussions in this field.

This study was designed to examine the effects of identifying as a butch, androgynous, or femme lesbian on self-esteem, internalized homophobia, and passing behaviors. It was hypothesized that butch lesbians would have higher self-esteem, lower internalized homophobia, and fewer passing behaviors than femme lesbians, with androgynous lesbians falling between the butch and femme groups. Self-esteem was measuring using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Internalized homophobia was assessed by the Lesbian Internalized Homophobia Scale. Passing behaviors were addressed through questions in the demographic questionnaire. Data were analyzed by conducting an ANOVA analysis. Results indicated that butch lesbians have the lowest internalized homophobia and the lowest amount of passing behaviors; androgynous lesbians have a highest self esteem. Implications of this study for research and practice are discussed.Ball State UniversityMuncie, IN 47306 / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services