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Forests provide immense goods and services to both local and regional communities. The USDA Forest Service’s, State and Private Forestry program administer multiple landowner assistance programs aimed at helping private forest owners while supporting the continued supply of ecosystem services (e.g., timber harvesting, recreation, carbon sequestration and storage). The two landowner assistance programs assessed in this study are the Forest Legacy Program (FLP) and the Forest Stewardship Program (FSP). A majority of the nation’s forests are privately owned, many of which are facing deleterious impacts like wildfires, invasive species, development pressures, and other adverse effects from climate change. The goal of this project is to (1) quantify the economic contributions emanating from lands participating in FLP and FSP in the conterminous US and (2) quantify and value the carbon sequestration on lands participating in FLP and FSP in New England. IMPLAN is an input-output modeling system, used in Chapter 1, that estimates how money flows through a regional economy. The results from the IMPLAN analysis suggest that FLP lands in the conterminous US contribute an estimated 4,560 jobs and $306.8 million in value-added from timber harvesting and recreation. Further, FSP lands contribute an estimated 27,700 jobs and $1.8 billion in value added from timber harvesting and recreation. Using Forest Inventory and Analysis carbon sequestration data and the social cost of carbon, the results of chapter 2 suggest that, in New England, FLP lands sequester 147,000 metric tons of CO2, or $7.5 million in aboveground CO2, per year. FSP lands in New England are estimated to sequester 82,000 metric tons of CO2, or $4.1 million in CO2, per year. Quantifying and estimating the economic and ecosystem service contributions emanating from lands participating in FLP and FSP provide a framework for understanding the total benefits associated with these programs (e.g., supporting rural economies, impacting climate change and the global carbon network, etc.).

Arts and Humanities Research Council, through a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentship / The full text will be available at the end of the embargo period

Increasing the number of processors has become the mainstream for the modern chip design approaches. However, most applications are designed or written for single core processors; so they do not benefit from the numerous underlying computation resources. Moreover, there exists a large base of legacy software which requires an immense effort and cost of rewriting and re-engineering to be made parallel. In the past decades, there has been a growing interest in automatic parallelization. This is to relieve programmers from the painful and error-prone manual parallelization process, and to cope with new architecture trend of multi-core and many-core CPUs. Automatic parallelization techniques vary in properties such as: the level of paraellism (e.g., instructions, loops, traces, tasks); the need for custom hardware support; using optimistic execution or relying on conservative decisions; online, offline or both; and the level of source code exposure. Transactional Memory (TM) has emerged as a powerful concurrency control abstraction. TM simplifies parallel programming to the level of coarse-grained locking while achieving fine-grained locking performance. This dissertation exploits TM as an optimistic execution approach for transforming a sequential application into parallel. The design and the implementation of two frameworks that support automatic parallelization: Lerna and HydraVM, are proposed, along with a number of algorithmic optimizations to make the parallelization effective. HydraVM is a virtual machine that automatically extracts parallelism from legacy sequential code (at the bytecode level) through a set of techniques including code profiling, data dependency analysis, and execution analysis. HydraVM is built by extending the Jikes RVM and modifying its baseline compiler. Correctness of the program is preserved through exploiting Software Transactional Memory (STM) to manage concurrent and out-of-order memory accesses. Our experiments show that HydraVM achieves speedup between 2×-5× on a set of benchmark applications. Lerna is a compiler framework that automatically and transparently detects and extracts parallelism from sequential code through a set of techniques including code profiling, instrumentation, and adaptive execution. Lerna is cross-platform and independent of the programming language. The parallel execution exploits memory transactions to manage concurrent and out-of-order memory accesses. This scheme makes Lerna very effective for sequential applications with data sharing. This thesis introduces the general conditions for embedding any transactional memory algorithm into Lerna. In addition, the ordered version of four state-of-art algorithms have been integrated and evaluated using multiple benchmarks including RSTM micro benchmarks, STAMP and PARSEC. Lerna showed great results with average 2.7× (and up to 18×) speedup over the original (sequential) code. While prior research shows that transactions must commit in order to preserve program semantics, placing the ordering enforces scalability constraints at large number of cores. In this dissertation, we eliminates the need for commit transactions sequentially without affecting program consistency. This is achieved by building a cooperation mechanism in which transactions can forward some changes safely. This approach eliminates some of the false conflicts and increases the concurrency level of the parallel application. This thesis proposes a set of commit order algorithms that follow the aforementioned approach. Interestingly, using the proposed commit-order algorithms the peak gain over the sequential non-instrumented execution in RSTM micro benchmarks is 10× and 16.5× in STAMP. Another main contribution is to enhance the concurrency and the performance of TM in general, and its usage for parallelization in particular, by extending TM primitives. The extended TM primitives extracts the embedded low level application semantics without affecting TM abstraction. Furthermore, as the proposed extensions capture common code patterns, it is possible to be handled automatically through the compilation process. In this work, that was done through modifying the GCC compiler to support our TM extensions. Results showed speedups of up to 4× on different applications including micro benchmarks and STAMP. Our final contribution is supporting the commit-order through Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM). HTM contention manager cannot be modified because it is implemented inside the hardware. Given such constraint, we exploit HTM to reduce the transactional execution overhead by proposing two novel commit order algorithms, and a hybrid reduced hardware algorithm. The use of HTM improves the performance by up to 20% speedup. / Ph. D.

The thesis investigates how Swedish archives and special collections manage digital information stored on legacy media. The purpose is to understand what strategies and practices archives use when extracting digital information from legacy media. The strategies used to extract and preserve data from legacy media preludes how archives should preserve other born digital information and provides a micro perspective for comprehensive further investigations. The research will increase our understanding of archival practices by looking at the Swedish archives. The thesis uses philosophy of information as a metatheory to frame the investigation, and proceeds to use principles found either in archival litterature or established in previous international research to analyze and compare strategies used by the Swedish archives when extracting data from legacy media. The thesis uses a quantitative method to analyze collected statistical data and a qualitative method to interpret and compare archival strategies. The quantitative results show that while most Swedish archives still have legacy media in their collections, the administrative archives have either prohibited legacy media in new accessions, never really received them in the first place or already migrated the data to electronic archives. However, conversely the results also show that archives with special collections still receive legacy media in their accessions and also experience a small but significant increase in the accession frequency. The difference in accession frequency between the archives is explained in part by the rules governing the accessions, but also by the fact that administrative archives manage records whereas special collections tend to manage documents. The qualitative results show that archives who still manage legacy media, either in their accessions or collections, are still mostly in the process of deciding what strategies and methods to use when extracting data from legacy media.

In this thesis, I analyze the differing perceptions regarding transitional justice and reparations in the postcolonial context of Tanzania and Germany of involved actors. Causes for these diverse perceptions and conceptualizations along with implications for responsibility and power relations were focused upon. These perceptions influence the lately growing momentum of discussions and demands for transitional justice and reparations between former colonizers and formerly colonized countries. By analyzing political statements, two speeches, newspaper articles, and partly self-conducted interviews of political as well as civil society actors and scholars, the research contributes insights into causes for differences and intentions of the various actors involved. The analysis is conducted, employing discourse analysis following Winther Jørgensen and Phillips and the postcolonial concepts of colonial Legacy, Power, and Subaltern Voices along the constructivist concepts: Norms & Identity and Agency & Contestation. To analyze the political apology of the German President I used Zoodsma et al.’s coding families (2021) for a holistic apology. I demonstrate the interconnectedness of the applied concepts and the states’ focus on reconciliation instead of holistic transitional justice mechanisms, promoting the countries’ political and economic cooperation. Moreover, I argue that subaltern voices, descendants of victims are mostly marginalized in the political discussions of both the Tanzanian and German state.

Every day, we use technology. Online interactions leave traces and traces serves as portals into different aspects of our personalities, or how we want to be perceived by others. We are encouraged to record and express everything, from our most important moments to the least. However, the digital tools we use privilege only the moment, not the long term. They also tend to make everything feel equally important, thus giving us no incentive to go through our digital traces and decide what has lasting meaning and should be preserved and what we would like to be forgotten.The fabric of our lives is intertwined with our digital traces. What happens to them after the end of our lives? Just as our physical things live on past us, sometimes becoming a part of the lives of our family and friends this will surely be true for our data.How might we curate our digital legacy?

The research is conducted in the area of software methodologies with the emphasis on the integration of legacy systems with the client/server environment. The investigation starts with identifying the characteristics of legacy systems in order to determine the features and technical characteristics required of an integration methodology. A number of existing methodologies are evaluated with respect to their features and technical characteristics in order to derive a synthesis for a generic methodology. This evaluation yields the meta primitives of a generic methodology. The revised spiral model (Boehm,1986; DuPlessis & Vander Wah,1992) is customised to arrive at a software process model which provides a framework for the integration of legacy systems with the client/server environment. The integration methodology is based on this process model. / Computing / M. Sc. (Information Systems)