Today's society is increasingly software-driven and dependent on powerful computer technology. Therefore it is important that advancements in the low-level processor hardware are made available for exploitation by a growing number of programmers of differing skill level. However, as we are approaching the end of Moore's law, hardware designers are finding new and increasingly complex ways to increase the accessible processor performance. It is getting more and more difficult to effectively target these processing resources without expert knowledge in parallelization, heterogeneous computation, communication, synchronization, and so on. To ensure that the software side can keep up, advanced programming environments and frameworks are needed to bridge the widening gap between hardware and software. One such example is the pattern-centric skeleton programming model and in particular the SkePU project. The work presented in this thesis first redesigns the SkePU framework based on modern C++ variadic template metaprogramming and state-of-the-art compiler technology. It then explores new ways to improve performance: by providing new patterns, improving the data access locality of existing ones, and using both static and dynamic knowledge about program flow. The work combines novel ideas with practical evaluation of the approach on several applications. The advancements also include the first skeleton API that allows variadic skeletons, new data containers, and finally an approach to make skeleton programming more customizable without compromising universal portability. / <p>Ytterligare forskningsfinansiärer: EU H2020 project EXA2PRO (801015); SeRC.</p>

This research approaches archaeological human remains in museum collections from a rhetorical perspective. Instead of joining the body of scholarship in museum studies that focuses on the process of curatorial interpretation, this project applies public memory studies to explore what happens to curatorial interpretation when it goes out into the world and is taken up in public circulated discourse. With a focus on publics, the moment of knowledge construction when visitors approach a display of human remains in a museum is captured and analyzed through the lenses of new materialism, rhetoric in situ, and public memory studies. Each lens represents the chosen approach to each of the three elements that converge at the moment of knowledge construction ? publics, objects, and place ? which are grouped together as a triangle of interrelated dynamics all working in a situationally-contingent rhetorical ecology of other factors and influences. Thus, the dynamic inseparable trio of publics, objects, and place are coined the ?ecotriangle.? For museum studies, rhetoric?s foundational work can provide critical perspective into the nature of communication and meaning-making that happens when publics meet human remains in a museum space. In order to explore the ecotriangular relationship of publics, objects, and place with an interdisciplinary approach, this project begins by interrogating the implicit assumptions within the defitions of terms like ?public? and ?object? then develops collaborative definitions from the scholarship in rhetoric, archaeology, and museum studies. The particular case of human remains challenges most scholarships? definitions of object. Yet as this research reveals, human remains as case study help develop and refine the approach to objects, materiality, interpretation, and museum display when challenged to inclusively frame such a case instead of treat human remains as an exception or outlier to scholarship on objects. Exploring the ecotriangle as a heuristic model for conceptualization of interrelational dynamics in knowledge construction extends current scholarship in rhetoric, especially rhetoric in situ and rhetorical ecology, and also reinforces existing interdisciplinary bridges between the fields of rhetoric, archaeology, and museum studies.

This dissertation presents the results of a two-year ethnographic study among individuals who practice yoga and/or chiropractic care in Victoria, British Columbia, focusing on their experiences of their musculoskeletal systems. Anthropological research has examined the ways in which we live and experience our bodies as part of how we are in the world (cf. Csordas 1994, 1990; Merleau-Ponty 2007). In comparison with fleshed bodies, skeletons, as foundational aspects of living, breathing corporeality, have remained under-theorised and under-examined as essential aspects of how we perceive our everyday lives. I approach the skeleton as a critical space of bodies, a part of the internal material world that shapes not only the body as an object, but how we are in the world as subjects. Observations at two yoga studios and interviews with 21 individuals enable me to explore the skeleton’s space and place in the lived experiences of embodied selves. My analysis of interview narratives draws principally from theories of materiality and material(s) (Sofaer 2012; Ingold 2007), Mol’s “the body multiple” (2002) and Taylor’s notion of “surfacing” (2005). I argue that skeletal embodiment is deeply material, sensory and sensorial, personal, and critical in the formation of what I am calling the “skeletal subjectivity” of an individual. Specifically, I suggest how, skeletally, bodily-ness is experienced by participants as a means to se prendre en main, that is, ‘taking hold’, ‘taking care of one’s self’, ‘taking one’s self in one’s hands.’ I argue that, among these yoga and chiropractic practitioners, skeletal embodiment and subjectivity is navigated through materiality—that bodies “surface” in various ways through participants experiences and stories (Taylor 2005). My analysis contributes to the anthropology of the body by including skeletal lives as part of our embodiment without discounting previous notions of embodiment or of bodies in general. My idea of se prennent en main is a novel addition to conceptualizing embodiment, encouraging researchers to consider closely how individuals may respond to their sensorial and material body in living their lives. / Graduate

<p> An assemblage of coral skeletons of the species Desmophyllum cristagalli were obtained from the top of Orphan Knoll, 550 km northeast of Newfoundland, from depths of approximately 1600 and 1800 m. The corals were observed for their macro- and micro-boring assemblages, and the boring morphologies documented, using binocular and scanning electron microscopy. Samples of coral were embedded with resin and etched for examination of the micro-boring assemblages.</p> <p> The largest volumetric amount of skeletal material removed was by sponges forming Entobia. This further corroborates the assumption that various species of boring sponges are distributed ubiquitously throughout a wide bathymetric range.</p> <p> Four distinct fungal forms were found, two tubular forms interpreted to be hyphal filaments and two bulbous forms interpreted to be sporangia. These forms were described on the basis of their shape, size, mode of branching, association with other structures and texture. They were then compared to other micro-boring assemblages found in previous studies from various bathymetric ranges. Some forms described in this study were found to be similar to forms described in other studies. Other forms in this study were not found to be documented. It is suggested, therefore, that certain forms, as well as low ichnodiversity, may indicate deeper water environments.</p> <p> Destructive micritization structures were also found in resin casts as well as in thin section. The extent of micritization may indicate the intensity of the parameters at the substrate that affect carbonate dissolution, such as CaCO3 and CO2 concentrations, pH, temperature, and salinity. It would therefore indicate the ambient water conditions at the substrate. If a sufficiently large database could be obtained, as well as distinct separation of the parameters responsible for carbonate dissolution, micritization may be used in a mapping of the carbonate compensation depth through time and depth ranges.</p> / Thesis / Bachelor of Science (BSc)

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No / I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of this book since 2000, when, as a PhD student, I was lucky enough to be able to visit the St Mary Spital excavations where I knew quite a few of the excavators and osteologists. It was apparent at that early stage in the research of St Mary Spital that this was a very exciting and important excavation and skeletal assemblage. This book does not disappoint.

Yes / Identifying people of exotic origins with isotopes depends upon finding isotopic attributes that are inconsistent with the indigenous population. This task is seldom straightforward and may vary with physical geography, through time, and with cultural practices. Isotopes and trace elements were measured in four Viking Age (8th to 10th centuries A.D.) skeletons from Dublin, Ireland, and three from Westness, Orkney. These were compared with other data from these locations and contemporaneous skeletons from Britain. We conclude that the male skeletons from Dublin have disparate origins, two originating beyond the shores of Ireland, and that the female and two male skeletons from Westness are not indigenous to Orkney. However, the homeland of the female, in contrast to the males, is unlikely to be in Scandinavia.

No / Excavations in 1988 revealed a stratigraphic sequence extending from the later Roman period to the twelfth century. Of particular interest and importance is a collection of Viking-Age metalwork which, with other material, sheds light on settlement in Carlisle before the arrival of the Normans in 1092.

This thesis primarily addresses the problem of automatic measurement of ore textures by image analysis in a way that is relevant to mineral processing. Specifically, it addresses the following major hypotheses: • Automatic logging of drill core by image analysis provides a feasible alternative to manual logging by geologists. • Image analysis can quantify process mineralogy by physically meaningful parameters. • Multi-scale image analysis, over a wide range of size scales, provides potential benefits to process mineralogy that are additional to those available from small-scale analysis alone, and also better retains the information content of manual logging. • Image analysis can provide physically meaningful, ore-texture-related, additive regionalised variables that can be input to geostatistical models and the definition of domains. The central focus of the thesis is the development of an automatic, multi-scale method to identify and measure objects in an image, using a specially-developed skeleton termed the morphological CWT skeleton. This skeleton is a multi-scale extension of the morphological skeleton commonly used in image analysis, and is derived from the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). Objects take the form of hierarchical segments from image segmentation based on the CWT. Only the Mexican hat, also known as the Laplacian-of-Gaussian, wavelet is used, although other wavelet shapes are possible. The natural scale of each object is defined to be the size scale at which its CWT signal (the contrast between the interior and exterior of the object) is strongest. In addition to the natural scale, the analysis automatically records the mineral composition of both the interior and exterior of each object, and shape descriptors of the object. The measurements of natural scale, mineral composition and shape are designed to relate to: • The size to which ore must be broken in order to liberate objects. • Minerals that need to be separated by physical or chemical means once objects have been liberated. • Capability to distinguish qualitatively different ore-texture types that may have different geological origins and for which different processing regimes may provide an economic benefit. Measurements are taken over size scales from three pixels to hundreds of pixels. For the major case study the pixel size is about 50 µm, but the methodology is equally applicable to photomicrographs in which the pixel size is about 4 µm. The methodology for identifying objects in images contributes to the field of scale-space image segmentation, and has advantages in performing the following actions automatically: • Finding optimal size scales in hierarchical image segmentation (natural scale). • Merging segments that are similar and spatially close together (although not necessarily touching), using the structure of the morphological CWT skeleton, thus aiding recognition of complex structures in an image. • Defining the contrast between each segment and its surrounding segments appropriately for the size scale of the segment, in a way that extends well beyond the segment boundary. For process mineralogy this contrast quantifies mineral associations at different size scales. The notion of natural scale defined in this thesis may have applications to other fields of image processing, such as mammography and cell measurements in biological microscopy. The objects identified in images are input to cluster analysis, using a finite mixture model to group the objects into object populations according to their size, composition and shape descriptors. Each image is then characterised by the abundances of different object populations that occur in it. These abundances form additive, regionalised variables that can be input into geostatistical block models. The images are themselves input to higher-level cluster analysis based on a hidden Markov model. A collection of images is divided into different ore texture types, based on differences in the abundances of the textural object populations. The ore texture types help to define geostatistical domains in an ore body. Input images for the methodology take the form of mineral maps, in which a particular mineral has been assigned to each pixel in the image prior to analysis. A method of analysing unmapped, raw colour images of ore is also outlined, as is a new model for fracture of ore. The major case study in the thesis is an analysis of approximately 1000 metres of continuously-imaged drill core from four drill holes in the Ernest Henry iron-oxide-copper-gold ore deposit (Queensland, Australia). Thirty-one texture-related variables are used to summarise the individual half-metres of drill core, and ten major ore texture types are identified. Good agreement is obtained between locations of major changes in ore type found by automatic image analysis, and those identified from manual core logging carried out by geologists. The texture-related variables are found to explain a significant amount of the variation in comminution hardness of ore within the deposit, over and above that explained by changes in abundances of the component minerals. The thesis also contributes new algorithms with wide applicability in image processing: • A fast algorithm for computing the continuous wavelet transform of a signal or image: The new algorithm is simpler in form and several times faster than the best previously-published algorithms. It consists of a single finite impulse response (FIR) filter. • A fast algorithm for computing Euclidean geodesic distance. This algorithm runs in O(1) arithmetic operations per pixel processed, which has not been achieved by any previously published algorithm. Geodesic distance is widely used in image processing, for segmentation and shape characterisation.