Caring after death: issues of embodiment and relationality

Death most fundamentally would seem to concern the absence of presence, and the loss of the living embodied other is the apparently hard inescapable truth to be faced. This brings sharply into relief the part that bodies play in our relationships and in caring for others. In this chapter I explore the significance of the absence and presence of material bodies for care practices, and for the understandings of relationality that may underpin caring after death. At the same time I also consider the bodies of the living and the ways in which grief and loss may be experienced as physical pain in one's own body. Drawing on published autobiographical materials, I suggest that the relationality of caring - even in contemporary US and European societies - may incorporate an embodied relational self in which threats to the physical wellbeing of another may be experienced directly as implicating one's own physical wellbeing. Such 'embodied relationality' highlights one of the deep paradoxes in the costs and benefits of care, which arise when we recognise how individual well-being and flourishing may be bound up with that of others

Troubling children's families: who's troubled and why? Approaches to inter-cultural dialogue

This article draws on multi-disciplinary perspectives to consider the need and the possibilities for inter-cultural dialogue concerning families that may be seen by some to be ‘troubling’. Starting from the premise that ‘troubles’ are a ‘normal’ part of children’s family lives, we consider the boundary between ‘normal’ troubles and troubles that are troubling (whether to family members or others). Such troubling families potentially indicate an intervention to prevent harm to less powerful family members (notably children). On what basis can such decisions be made in children’s family lives, how can this question be answered across diverse cultural contexts, and are all answers inevitably subject to uncertainty? Such questions arguably re-frame and broaden existing debates about ‘child maltreatment’ across diverse cultural contexts. Beyond recognizing power dynamics, material inequalities, and historical and contemporary colonialism, we argue that attempts to answer the question on an empirical basis risk a form of neo-colonialism, since values inevitably permeate research and knowledge claims. We briefly exemplify such difficulties, examining psychological studies of childrearing in China, and the application of neuroscience to early childhood interventions in the UK. Turning to issues of values and moral relativism, we also question the possibility of an objective moral standard that avoids cultural imperialism, but ask whether cultural relativism is the only alternative position available. Here we briefly explore other possibilities in the space between ‘facile’ universalism and ‘lazy’ relativism (Jullien, 2008/2014). Such approaches bring into focus core philosophical and cultural questions about the possibilities for ‘happiness’, and for what it means to be a ‘person’, living in the social world. Throughout, we centralize theoretical and conceptual issues, drawing on the work of Jullien (2008/2014) to recognize the immense complexities inter-cultural dialogue entails in terms of language and communication

Key Concepts in Family Studies

Taken from the book to be published by Sage in December 2010, this document provides the Introduction to the book, in which the authors discuss issues in Family Studies as a contemporary field of academic and professional work. Their discussion includes: some of the different positions adopted by researchers towards the use of the language of 'family'; the broad themes generally included in this field of study; and dilemmas in evaluations of, and interventions in, family lives

ReSHAPE: A Framework for Dynamic Resizing and Scheduling of Homogeneous Applications in a Parallel Environment

Applications in science and engineering often require huge computational resources for solving problems within a reasonable time frame. Parallel supercomputers provide the computational infrastructure for solving such problems. A traditional application scheduler running on a parallel cluster only supports static scheduling where the number of processors allocated to an application remains fixed throughout the lifetime of execution of the job. Due to the unpredictability in job arrival times and varying resource requirements, static scheduling can result in idle system resources thereby decreasing the overall system throughput. In this paper we present a prototype framework called ReSHAPE, which supports dynamic resizing of parallel MPI applications executed on distributed memory platforms. The framework includes a scheduler that supports resizing of applications, an API to enable applications to interact with the scheduler, and a library that makes resizing viable. Applications executed using the ReSHAPE scheduler framework can expand to take advantage of additional free processors or can shrink to accommodate a high priority application, without getting suspended. In our research, we have mainly focused on structured applications that have two-dimensional data arrays distributed across a two-dimensional processor grid. The resize library includes algorithms for processor selection and processor mapping. Experimental results show that the ReSHAPE framework can improve individual job turn-around time and overall system throughput.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables Submitted to International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP'07

A Library for Pattern-based Sparse Matrix Vector Multiply

Pattern-based Representation (PBR) is a novel approach to improving the performance of Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiply (SMVM) numerical kernels. Motivated by our observation that many matrices can be divided into blocks that share a small number of distinct patterns, we generate custom multiplication kernels for frequently recurring block patterns. The resulting reduction in index overhead significantly reduces memory bandwidth requirements and improves performance. Unlike existing methods, PBR requires neither detection of dense blocks nor zero filling, making it particularly advantageous for matrices that lack dense nonzero concentrations. SMVM kernels for PBR can benefit from explicit prefetching and vectorization, and are amenable to parallelization. The analysis and format conversion to PBR is implemented as a library, making it suitable for applications that generate matrices dynamically at runtime. We present sequential and parallel performance results for PBR on two current multicore architectures, which show that PBR outperforms available alternatives for the matrices to which it is applicable, and that the analysis and conversion overhead is amortized in realistic application scenarios

The Digital Archiving of Historical Political Cartoons: An Introduction

Political (editorial) cartoons often capture the Zeitgeist of society and convey a message. Increasingly, historians study them to understand commentaries of past events or personalities. Visual culture as an academic subject could be greatly enhanced if this information can be digitally archived. We employ crowdsourcing to obtain valuable metadata by guiding volunteers' feedback using an online survey with 31 targeted questions. We provide intellectual access to a set of about 300 cartoons of a single creator spanning over multiple years in a highly interactive search engine.

Childhood, children and family lives in China

In this chapter we bring into focus those aspects of family lives in China that are concerned with children’s family relationships, and the ways in which such issues are part and parcel of the broader institutionalisation of childhood. We draw on theoretical frameworks in the sociology of childhood and childhood studies (e.g., Prout, 2004; Qvortrup, 2000; Smith and Greene, 2014). Since these theoretical perspectives have developed predominantly in Anglophone literature, some researchers have considered their relevance to, and utility for, China and Chinese childhoods (Goh, 2011; Miao, 2013; Wang YY, 2011, 2014a, 2014b; Zheng, 2012a, 2012b; Ribbens McCarthy et al., 2017). In engaging with existing theories, and applying them to, Chinese children’s family lives, we seek to go beyond any tendency to just ‘add in the missing children’ to existing discussions (Kesby et al., 2006: 186), and give consideration to a variety of cultural and local contexts that characterise China and illuminate why it is necessary to decentre universalist thinking (Jullien, 2008/2014

ScALPEL: A Scalable Adaptive Lightweight Performance Evaluation Library for application performance monitoring

As supercomputers continue to grow in scale and capabilities, it is becoming increasingly difficult to isolate processor and system level causes of performance degradation. Over the last several years, a significant number of performance analysis and monitoring tools have been built/proposed. However, these tools suffer from several important shortcomings, particularly in distributed environments. In this paper we present ScALPEL, a Scalable Adaptive Lightweight Performance Evaluation Library for application performance monitoring at the functional level. Our approach provides several distinct advantages. First, ScALPEL is portable across a wide variety of architectures, and its ability to selectively monitor functions presents low run-time overhead, enabling its use for large-scale production applications. Second, it is run-time configurable, enabling both dynamic selection of functions to profile as well as events of interest on a per function basis. Third, our approach is transparent in that it requires no source code modifications. Finally, ScALPEL is implemented as a pluggable unit by reusing existing performance monitoring frameworks such as Perfmon and PAPI and extending them to support both sequential and MPI applications.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

De vaderlandse canon voorbij? Een multiculturele historische cultuur in wording.

In recente Nederlandse debatten over de multiculturele samenleving wordt meer dan eens het belang van historische kennis benadrukt. Maar de traditionele geschiedenis die geacht wordt de Nederlandse identiteit te vormen en over te dragen, gaat veelal voorbij aan de herinneringen van het groeiend aantal allochtonen. In relatieve stilte ontwikkelt zich evenwel een multiculturele historische cultuur. Biedt de vertrouwde canon van de Nederlandse geschiedenis wel ruimte voor de geschiedenis van zowel nieuwkomers als gevestigde ingezetenen

Strijdtonelen. De Tweede Wereldoorlog in de populaire historische cultuur

__Inleiding __ De Tweede Wereldoorlog kent vele gedaanten. Er bestaat een oorlog die we in Nederland gezamenlijk herdenken op 4 en 5 mei. Er bestaat een oorlog die versteend is in monumenten. Er bestaat een oorlog waarvan we kennis kunnen nemen via boeken, artikelen en debatten in de geschiedwetenschap. Er bestaat een oorlog die gestalte krijgt in het onderwijs en een oorlog in exposities en musea. Het zijn de verschijningsvormen van de oorlog van geëngageerde betrokkenen en herdenkingscomité’s, van historici en publicisten, van educatieve deskundigen en tentoonstellingsmakers. Deze verschillende representaties en herinneringspraktijken komen met elkaar in aanraking, zijn zich doorgaans bewust van elkaar en ook, tot op zekere hoogte, van het onderscheid in wat zij doen en beogen. Alle vormen dragen er toe bij dat de herinnering aan de oorlog levend blijft en streven ernaar die herinnering te delen en over te dragen. Zij geven de oorlog voor en vanuit de Nederlandse samenleving weer. Daarbij doen ze een beroep op historische feiten en ijkpunten zoals 10 mei 1940 en Dolle Dinsdag, koningin Wilhelmina en Anton Mussert, Kamp Westerbork en de razzia van Rotterdam. Maar er is ook een ander gezicht van de Tweede Wereldoorlog. En het is dit gezicht dat hier vanmiddag centraal staat. Als een oorlog die dag in dag uit alom aanwezig is, die door velen – zo niet door allen – wordt waargenomen, maar die los lijkt te staan van de zojuist genoemde verschijningsvormen. Het is een oorlog die gestalte krijgt in bioscopen en in de huiskamer, in het musicaltheater van Soldaat van Oranje, op toeristische bestemmingen in binnen- en buitenland, als individuele bezigheid en in verenigingsverband. Het is de oorlog van avonturenromans en stripverhalen, van computergames en websites, van films en re-enactment, kortom de oorlogsverbeeldingen van en voor doorsnee burgers, dagjesmensen en hobbyisten. ..