Parallel computing is essential for solving very large scientific and engineering problems. An effective parallel computing solution requires an appropriate parallel machine and a well-optimised parallel program, both of which can be selected via performance modelling. This dissertation describes a new performance modelling system, called the Performance Evaluating Virtual Parallel Machine (PEVPM). Unlike previous techniques, the PEVPM system is relatively easy to use, inexpensive to apply and extremely accurate. It uses a novel bottom-up approach, where submodels of individual computation and communication events are dynamically constructed from data-dependencies, current contention levels and the performance distributions of low-level operations, which define performance variability in the face of contention. During model evaluation, the performance distribution attached to each submodel is sampled using Monte Carlo techniques, thus simulating the effects of contention. This allows the PEVPM to accurately simulate a program's execution structure, even if it is non-deterministic, and thus to predict its performance. Obtaining these performance distributions required the development of a new benchmarking tool, called MPIBench. Unlike previous tools, which simply measure average message-passing time over a large number of repeated message transfers, MPIBench uses a highly accurate and globally synchronised clock to measure the performance of individual communication operations. MPIBench was used to benchmark three parallel computers, which encompassed a wide range of network performance capabilities, namely those provided by Fast Ethernet, Myrinet and QsNet. Network contention, a problem ignored by most research in this area, was found to cause extensive performance variation during message-passing operations. For point-to-point communication, this variation was best described by Pearson 5 distributions. Collective communication operations were able to be modelled using their constituent point-to-point operations. In cases of severe contention, extreme outliers were common in the observed performance distributions, which were shown to be the result of lost messages and their subsequent retransmit timeouts. The highly accurate benchmark results provided by MPIBench were coupled with the PEVPM models of a range of parallel programs, and simulated by the PEVPM. These case studies proved that, unlike previous modelling approaches, the PEVPM technique successfully unites generality, flexibility, cost-effectiveness and accuracy in one performance modelling system for parallel programs. This makes it avaluable tool for the development of parallel computing solutions. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Computer Science, 2003.

Celebrity sells. The right of publicity, broadly defined as the inherent right of every individual to control the commercial use of his or her identity, has been well-established in the United States (US) for over fifty years. It protects the associative value that one brings to products and services, and is invoked mainly by celebrities to prevent unauthorised commercial uses of their persona. / There is a wealth of legal literature in the US that discusses a broad range of issues from justifications for the right of publicity to its interaction with freedom of speech under the First Amendment. However, very few contributions have studied the connections between cultural practices and the right of publicity in depth. This dissertation draws on insights pertinent to aspects of right of publicity laws in its evaluation of how the cultural studies literature may contribute to doctrinal development. The usefulness of cultural studies in this inquiry rests in its examination of the roles and meanings of celebrities in contemporary society. / This thesis demonstrates how an appreciation of the production, circulation and consumption of the celebrity personality can be incorporated into an analytical framework. It argues that what we generally call ‘celebrity’ is a collective product of the celebrity individual, the audience and the cultural producers. Two exemplary insights are explored. The first insight on the definition of the contemporary celebrity based on well-knownness provides the impetus for the legal protection of the commercial value of identity. The second insight about the celebrity’s function as a cultural sign representing majoritarian ideals has important implications both for contemporary consumption and identity politics. It will be shown how these insights support the concepts of evocative identification, associative appropriation and political recoding, all contributing to a more nuanced understanding of three key elements of a typical publicity claim. As celebrities in other common law jurisdictions like the United Kingdom and Australia rely on the passing off action to seek redress for unauthorised commercial uses of their identity, the relevance of these concepts to passing off is also examined. / The findings indicate that insights from cultural studies on the celebrity phenomenon can support both an expansive interpretation of identification in a publicity claim and, at the same time, a more restrictive application of the requirement of commercial appropriation. The dissertation also demonstrates how treating ideological codings of the celebrity persona as political speech can influence the articulation of the First Amendment defence. In addition, these cultural insights have similar relevance to passing off laws, supporting a broad interpretation of goodwill and damage, and a standard of impressionistic association based on the notion of affective transfer as sufficient to constitute misleading conduct. / In conclusion, this dissertation establishes that, far from being merely a theoretical discipline concerned with semiotic codings and the politics of power and identity, cultural studies provides a pragmatic framework for judges, scholars and lawyers to further their understanding of the extra-legal issues relating to the laws protecting the commercial value of the celebrity personality.

<p>This Bachelor thesis deals with the sexual identity of Egyptian women who love and have relationships with other women. I theoretically study the state of existing literature on homosexuality in the Middle East, and I do this from a gender perspective. By looking closer at four recent books on this topic I derive two main, and contradictory, theories. The first is put forth by Joseph A Massad in his book Desiring Arabs, where he rejects the existence of homosexuality in the Middle East, declaring that same sex acts in this region don’t constitute identities, as in the West. The second theory, best represented in Samar Habib’s work Female homosexuality in the Middle East, sees past and present histories of same sex love as representations of homosexuality. The empirical basis for my analysis is five in-depth interviews with Egyptian women having sexual relationships with women. Examining my material I find a negation of Massad’s theory and a confirmation of Habib’s, the women indeed describe sexual identities. I look into these descriptions and see how the women have reached this point of realizing – or coming to terms. I also study their narratives of passing, as heterosexual women, in order to avoid repression. The women’s knowledge of society’s prejudice gives the explanation for their choices of passing, but at the same time the women’s stories show a will to challenge the view on lesbian women and resist the compulsory heterosexuality.</p>

The object oriented programming style used in the Smalltalk and Actor languages is available in Lisp Machine Lisp, and used by the Lisp Machine software system. It is used to perform generic operations on objects. Part of its implementation is simply a convention in procedure calling style; part is a powerful language feature, called Flavors, for defining abstract objects. This chapter attempts to explain what programming with objects and with message passing means, the various means of implementing these in Lisp Machine Lisp, and when you should use them. It assumes no prior knowledge of any other languages.

This Bachelor thesis deals with the sexual identity of Egyptian women who love and have relationships with other women. I theoretically study the state of existing literature on homosexuality in the Middle East, and I do this from a gender perspective. By looking closer at four recent books on this topic I derive two main, and contradictory, theories. The first is put forth by Joseph A Massad in his book Desiring Arabs, where he rejects the existence of homosexuality in the Middle East, declaring that same sex acts in this region don’t constitute identities, as in the West. The second theory, best represented in Samar Habib’s work Female homosexuality in the Middle East, sees past and present histories of same sex love as representations of homosexuality. The empirical basis for my analysis is five in-depth interviews with Egyptian women having sexual relationships with women. Examining my material I find a negation of Massad’s theory and a confirmation of Habib’s, the women indeed describe sexual identities. I look into these descriptions and see how the women have reached this point of realizing – or coming to terms. I also study their narratives of passing, as heterosexual women, in order to avoid repression. The women’s knowledge of society’s prejudice gives the explanation for their choices of passing, but at the same time the women’s stories show a will to challenge the view on lesbian women and resist the compulsory heterosexuality.

La tolerancia a fallos se ha convertido en un requerimiento importante para los ingenieros informáticos y los desarrolladores de software, debido a que la ocurrencia de fallos aumenta el coste de explotación de un computador paralelo. Por otro lado, las actividades realizadas por el mecanismo de tolerancia de fallo reducen las prestaciones del sistema desde el punto de vista del usuario. Esta tesis presenta una arquitectura tolerante a fallos para computadores paralelos, denominada RADIC (Redundant Array of Distributed Fault Tolerance Controllers,), que es simultáneamente transparente, descentralizada, flexible y escalable. RADIC es una arquitectura tolerante a fallos que se basa un controlador distribuido para manejar los fallos. Dicho controlador se basa en procesos dedicados, que comparten los recursos del usuario en el computador paralelo. Para validar el funcionamiento de la arquitectura RADIC, se realizó una implementación que sigue el estándar MPI-1 y que contiene los elementos de la arquitectura. Dicha implementación, denominada RADICMPI, permite verificar la funcionalidad de RADIC en situaciones sin fallo o bajo condiciones de fallo. Las pruebas se han realizado utilizando un inyector de fallos, involucrado en el código de RADICMPI, de manera que permite todas las condiciones necesarias para validar la operación del controlador distribuido de RADIC. También se utilizó la misma implementación para estudiar las consecuencias de usar RADIC en un ambiente real. Esto permitió evaluar la operación de la arquitectura en situaciones prácticas, y estudiar la influencia de los parámetros de RADIC sobre el funcionamiento del sistema. Los resultados probaron que la arquitectura de RADIC funciona correctamente y que es flexible, escalable, transparente y descentralizada. Además, RADIC estableció una arquitectura de tolerancia a fallos para sistemas basados en paso de mensajes. / Fault tolerance has become a major issue for computer engineers and software developers because the occurrence of faults increases the cost of using a parallel computer. On the other hand, the activities performed by the fault tolerance mechanism reduce the performance of the system from the user point of view. This thesis presents RADIC (Redundant Array of Distributed Independent Fault Tolerance Controllers,) a fault-tolerant architecture to parallel computers, which is simultaneously transparent, decentralized, flexible and scalable. RADIC is a fault-tolerant architecture that implements a fully distributed controller to manage faults. Such controller rests on dedicated processes, which share the user's resources in the parallel computer. In order to validate the operation of RADIC, we created RADICMPI, a message-passing implementation that includes the elements of the RADIC architecture and complies with the MPI-1 standard. RADICMPI served for to verifying the functionality of RADIC in scenarios with and without failures in the parallel computer. For the tests, we implemented a fault injector in RADICMPI in order to create the scenarios required to validate the operation of the RADIC distributed controller. We also used RADICMPI to study the practical aspects of using RADIC in a real environment. This allowed us to evaluate the operation of our architecture in practical situations, and to study the influence of the RADIC parameters over the system performance. The results proved that the RADIC architecture operated correctly and that it is flexible, scalable, transparent and decentralized. Furthermore, RADIC established a powerful fault-tolerant architecture model for message-passing systems.

Passing on two-lane roadways is one of the most difficult movements a driver may perform and guidance on where passing maneuvers are prohibited is given by the location of no-passing zones. Currently the processes for identifying no-passing zone locations can be daunting and many practices require work crews to operate in the roadway creating potentially hazardous situations. Due to these challenges new alternatives need to be developed for the safe, accurate, and efficient location of nopassing zones on two-lane roadways. This thesis addresses the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates to evaluate sight distance along the vertical profile of roadways to provide an alternative for an automated no-passing zone location system. A system was developed that processes GPS coordinates and converts them into easting and northing values, smoothes inaccurate vertical elevation data, and evaluates roadway profiles for possible sight restrictions which indicate where no-passing zones should be located. The developed automated no-passing zone program shows potential in that it identifies the general location of no-passing zones as compared to existing roadway markings.; however, as concluded by the researcher, further evaluation and refinement is needed before the program can be used effectively in the field for the safe, accurate, and efficient location of no-passing zones.

By examining the range of stances that white characters in Hollywood films are represented as taking in relation to blackness, this dissertation considers the question of how language becomes ideologically linked to categories of race through linguistic representations. Through an analysis of 59 films (1979-2008) from multiple genres, this study focuses on the linguistic practices of the characters that contribute to larger semiotic practices performed by discernible social types. The first linguistic practice, crossing, plays on the stereotype of the inauthentic, white male, who tries to gain coolness through linguistic representations of African Americans. The second practice, passing, conjures images of blackface because in addition to using linguistic representations of African Americans, the passing characters darken their skin. By demonstrating complex links between language and social meanings such as ideologies about authenticity, identity and racial and gendered stereotypes, these films use linguistic features along with other visual and physical semiotic displays to both construct and comment on black and white authenticity. Specifically, crossing was found to comment on disseminated images of the young, white male as lacking a particular type of masculinity and sexuality and overcompensating for them by imitating widely circulating images of the hypermasculine, hypersexual and hyperphysical black male. In addition, it commented on the tendency to read this linguistic practice as inauthentic. Therefore, the social meaning of the white linguistic representations of African Americans used when crossing was found to be related to authenticity or who had the right to use ethnically-marked linguistic features. On the other hand, passing was argued to communicate the ideologies that some whites may have of African Americans, particularly African American men. The linguistic resources utilized in these performances are not used to form identity, but for humor and to distance the character from being read as traditional minstrelsy. By highlighting some of the linguistic strategies that speakers in Hollywood use to (re)produce not only indexical links between linguistic forms and racialized stereotypes but also ideologies about racial authenticity, this dissertation provides an empirical study of some of the semiotic practices that involve the re-indexicalization of minority vernacular resources by members of the majority. / text

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in History. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 435-456). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR19837

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Rose Folson.