Clean Slate Research Articles

Selecting zones in a marine park: Early systematic planning improves cost-efficiency; combining habitat and biotic data improves effectiveness

Systematic planning, using algorithm tools, can improve biodiversity representation in ‘no-take’ zones in a marine park while reducing costs of meeting conservation targets. The current zoning plan for the 870km2 Solitary Islands Marine Park (SIMP), designed without algorithm tools, provides an example to compare the efficiency of zoning scenarios that include or ignore the existing zoning scheme and to assess the utility of habitat and/or biotic data for planning. Marxan was used to compare representation of habitat categories and a selection of fish species using 3 scenarios for ‘no-take’ sanctuary zones: 1) clean slate; 2) building on the existing sanctuary zones; and 3) current sanctuary zones (2002 zone plan). Three target levels were considered (10%, 20% and 30% representation of habitats and fish species in sanctuary zones). The use of habitat and fish data combined was compared with results obtained using each dataset separately. The clean-slate option was the most cost-efficient. Extending the existing sanctuary zones to achieve equivalent representation required more area and longer boundaries. For both of these scenarios, a large cross-shelf sanctuary zone at the widest part of SIMP was an important requirement for achieving representation. Neither habitat categories nor reef fish assemblages were fully represented in the current zoning plan. Fish and habitat features combined were more effective than habitat alone at selecting areas known to have high conservation values in the SIMP. The fish data in isolation were too spatially constrained for systematic planning at this scale.

Before the Revolution: America's ancient pasts

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation's pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparent--that far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose legacies continue to shape the present. Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoples--Indians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, English--as they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico. By seeing these trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than merely as a prelude to independence, Richter's epic vision reveals the deepest origins of American history.

Compromised decision making and the effects of manipulating physical states on human judgments

Nonmorally based decision making between two equitable objects often involves degrading the unchosen object and promoting the chosen object ("postdecisional dissonance"). One can extinguish these thought processes with the physical act of hand-washing ("clean slate" effects; [Lee & Schwarz (2010). Washing away postdecisional dissonance. Science, 328, 709.]). However, clean slate effects might not characterize all nonmorally based decision making, particularly for people who mentally "get stuck" making decisions (i.e., compromised decision making). We administered a clean slate task to 48 undergraduates (64.6% females; mean = 21.34 years, standard deviation = 4.06 years; 75% Caucasian), and identified individuals reporting relatively high-compromised versus low-compromised decision making (e.g., self-reported repetitive thought processes and generalized anxiety symptoms). Only individuals reporting relatively high-compromised decision making continued to express postdecisional dissonance even after hand-washing. Behavioral markers of clean slate effects might result in identifying phenotypes associated with psychological concerns typified by compromised decision making.

Quintilian on the Child as a Learning Subject

Quintilian communicates definite ideas about the educability of children. From the perspectives of the history of education and childhood, his innovation is a theory of the child as a learning subject. The child (consistently represented as the male, free puer ) has a native mimetic ability lacking judgment but with a natural, almost bodily need for book learning. The teacher (not parent) shapes the child’s developing mind just as if he were writing a book from a clean slate. The maturation of the child is imagined not in biological or social terms but as a correlate to the process of writing.

Introduction

Introduction Nicoleta Cinpoȩs and Boika Sokolova Most of the papers published in this issue are the consequence of a "happy wreck," if we are to pun on the name of the performance seminar which met in Weimar in April 2011. It was part of the ESRA (European Shakespeare Research Association) biannual conference, perfectly hosted by the German Shakespeare Gesellschaft along with its regular annual meeting. Joining the two events under the title "Shakespeare's Shipwrecks: Theatre of Maritime Adventure" offered a remarkable forum for scholars working in all fields of European Shakespeare to celebrate the 400th anniversary of The Tempest. The focus of the seminar was on post-1989 stage, film and TV productions of The Tempest, thus considering the play's storm within specific historical, geographical, cultural and linguistic contexts. It invited participants to reflect on how performance engaged with Shakespeare's scripted tempests and wrecks, on how they were created on stage, on the impact they had on their theatrical worlds and the characters caught in them, on how they problematized gender, genre, nation, and media identities. We were interested in the way they grappled with or shunned politics, and how they configured and reconfigured their historical and performative contexts. By the end of the discussion, a few interesting trends in the production history of The Tempest over the last twenty years had emerged. First, there was a notable difference between east and west, in that east-European productions were more abstract in their approach to positioning the events in the play and concerned with the aesthetics of performance. It also transpired that while theatrical performance often reached for cinematic techniques in recreating the storm and the island, film adaptations had been applying theatrical and early-film techniques. The majority of papers in this volume come from three countries of what used to be the political entity of "Eastern Europe," Bulgaria, Poland [End Page 273] and Romania. In an attempt to re-contextualize this assignation, we refer here to "eastern Europe" (lower case e), since the texts grapple with performances created after the fall of communism. At the same time, we are strongly aware that, in the geography of the old continent, "east" does not accurately represent the location of these countries, as a paper discussing an Anglo-Russian performance testifies. The remaining articles discuss filmic and televisual appropriations of The Tempest. An important discovery made in the course of the seminar was that though the play had had a long history of translation across eastern Europe, it had been a rare presence on the stages there, a situation dramatically reversed after 1989 as witnessed by the boom of productions demarcating the swing between hope and disillusionment as the historical processes of those years took their toll. Hence the title of this volume: "'Un/Happy Wrecks:' Post-1989 Tempests," which tries to embrace the complex—and contradictory—nature of that period. Why did political change make Shakespeare's late play emerge so suddenly from the folds of history? What work was it asked to do in the new circumstances and contexts? The essays included here suggest a few tentative answers. There are some obvious relevancies on the level of narrative: old grudges, power struggles, betrayal, an all-controlling—yet ousted—ruler, the re/discovery of Self and Other, and, importantly, an incomplete and problematic reconciliation. Another reason might be that, due to its marginality, The Tempest was not burdened by layers of compromised critical phraseology. It offered a clean slate on which young directors (and old) could write new histories without having to clear away encrusted traditions. Such texts appealed to the theatrical thinking during the turbulent early years of change with their insistence on liberated individualistic creativity. In a statement representative of this spirit, the Bulgarian director Stefan Moskov declared that he did "not serve literature as a corporal taking orders from a major," but responded to the way a text captured his own imagination, which could take him "in a direction exactly opposite to that of the text," or provoke him to add, cut, or amend (Shurbanov & Sokolova 263). In varying degrees, the productions presented here embrace this idea. To give them a...

Enabling direct connectivity between heterogeneous objects in the internet of things through a network-service-oriented architecture

In a future internet of things, an increasing number of everyday objects are connected with each other. These objects can be very diverse in terms of the used network protocols and communication technologies, which leads to a wild growth of co-located networking technologies. Unfortunately, current consumer items are not designed to communicate with co-located devices that use different communication technologies. In addition, commercially available internet of things devices, such as sensor nodes, often use vendor-specific propriety network solutions. As a result, communication between these devices is only possible through the use of gateway nodes, resulting in inefficient use of the wireless medium. To remedy this situation, this paper discusses which features are required to integrate such a diverse number of heterogeneous objects into a single internet of things. In addition, the paper introduces the IDRA architecture, which is designed specifically to enable connectivity between heterogeneous resource-constrained objects. The IDRA architecture has the following advantages. (1) IDRA can connect co-located objects directly, without the need for complex translation gateways. (2) The architecture is clean slate, but supports backward compatibility with existing deployments. (3) Due to its low memory footprint, the architecture can be used in resource-constrained objects. Finally, the paper evaluates the performance of the IDRA architecture and discusses the feasibility of introducing IDRA in existing networks.

CNGI-CERNET2

Research and promotion of next generation Internet have drawn attention of researchers in many countries. In USA, FIND initiative takes a clean-slate approach. In EU, EIFFEL think tank concludes that both clean slate and evolutionary approach are needed. While in China, researchers and the country are enthusiastic on the promotion and immediate deployment of IPv6 due to the imminent problem of IPv4 address exhaustion. Since 2003, China launched a strategic programme called China Next Generation Internet (CNGI). China is expecting that Chinese industry is better positioned on future Internet technologies and services than it was for the first generation. Under the support of CNGI grant, China Education and Research Network (CERNET) started to build an IPv6-only network, i.e. CNGI-CERNET2. Currently it provides IPv6 access service for students and staff in many Chinese universities. In this article, we will introduce the CNGI programme, the architecture of CNGI-CERNET2, and some aspects of CNGI-CERNET2's deployment and operation, such as transition, security, charging and roaming service etc.

A synaptic organizing principle for cortical neuronal groups

Neuronal circuitry is often considered a clean slate that can be dynamically and arbitrarily molded by experience. However, when we investigated synaptic connectivity in groups of pyramidal neurons in the neocortex, we found that both connectivity and synaptic weights were surprisingly predictable. Synaptic weights follow very closely the number of connections in a group of neurons, saturating after only 20% of possible connections are formed between neurons in a group. When we examined the network topology of connectivity between neurons, we found that the neurons cluster into small world networks that are not scale-free, with less than 2 degrees of separation. We found a simple clustering rule where connectivity is directly proportional to the number of common neighbors, which accounts for these small world networks and accurately predicts the connection probability between any two neurons. This pyramidal neuron network clusters into multiple groups of a few dozen neurons each. The neurons composing each group are surprisingly distributed, typically more than 100 μm apart, allowing for multiple groups to be interlaced in the same space. In summary, we discovered a synaptic organizing principle that groups neurons in a manner that is common across animals and hence, independent of individual experiences. We speculate that these elementary neuronal groups are prescribed Lego-like building blocks of perception and that acquired memory relies more on combining these elementary assemblies into higher-order constructs.

Energy- and cost-efficient ultra-high-capacity wireless access

Mobile communication networks alone today consume 0.5 percent of the global energy supply. Meeting the rapidly increasing demand for more capacity in wireless broadband access will further increase the energy consumption. Operators are now facing both investing in denser and denser networks as well as increased energy cost. Traditional design paradigms, based on assumptions of spectrum shortage and high cost base station sites, have produced current cellular systems based on 3G and 4G (LTE) standards. The latter ones are characterized by very high spectrum efficiency, but low energy efficiency. Deployment has favored strategies with few high-power bases stations with complex antenna systems. The key method for indoor coverage has so far been to literally "blast signals through walls" - a solution that is neither energy-efficient nor very sound from a radiation perspective. As environmental aspects may be perceived as important from a societal perspective, the cost remains the short- to medium-term concern for operators of future mobile broadband systems. What becomes evident now is that the so far mostly neglected energy cost will be a major concern. Future system deployment has to balance infrastructure deployment, spectrum, and energy cost components. Ongoing incremental improvements in electronics and signal processing are bringing down the power consumption in the base station. However, these improvements are not enough to match the orders-of-magnitude increase in energy consumption cause by demands for more capacity. It is clear that solutions to this problem have to be found at the architectural level, not just by increasing the efficiency of individual components. In this article we propose a framework for a total cost analysis and survey some recent, more radical, "clean slate" approaches exploiting combinations of new spectrum opportunities, energy-efficient PHY layers, and novel deployment and backhauling strategies that target minimizing overall system cost. The latter involve network deployment tightly tailored to traffic requirements, using low-power micro base stations tailored specifically to decrease the power consumption compared to today's highpower macro base station schemes. To illustrate our findings, a power consumption model for mobile broadband access networks taking backhaul into account is presented, and the main trade-offs between infrastructure, energy, and spectrum costs are analyzed. We demonstrate optimal deployment strategies in some simple scenarios where a certain capacity has to be provided in a dense interference-limited scenario.

Economics of Software Reuse and Market Positioning for Customized Software Solutions

Most of the software companies can neither be typical software product based company like Microsoft nor afford to develop each customized application for individual customer from clean slate without taking into consideration of reuse. Software companies are under increasing competitive pressure for improving delivery parameters such as cost, quality, and time. Systematic reuse is an opportunity of continued cost reduction, quality improvement and lead time reduction in software delivery. Systematic reuse largely depends on the scope of delivering customized software applications in the same market segment repeatedly to multiple customers. Thorough market analysis provides basic inputs for defining generic product concept for delivering mass customized solutions. The problem of establishing a successful new business around a generic software product concept is not challenging because of shortage of ideas, but rather problems exist in proper analysis of the market and adoption of reuse capability for continued price reduction and quality improvement to deal with evolving market forces for delivering mass customized solutions. This paper, therefore, suggests the application of market positioning strategy to benefit from software reuse for delivering customized software solutions. In this paper, economics of software reuse has been integrated with market positioning for delivering customized software solution. It is believed that such integration will improve the decision making ability of software professionals for strengthening the capability of software companies in delivering customized solutions to target market segment by taking the advantage of software reuse economics.

Future Multimedia System

In future multimedia systems, seamless access to application services on different devices available to users in their vicinity, will be commonplace. The availability of these services will change as the mobile user moves. Current 3G multimedia systems do not support access to multiple applications operating on multiple different devices in context of a session or indeed seamless device session handover. Considering these requirements, the authors outline two multimedia communication platforms which potentially solve this problem. This paper describes a backward compatible architecture based on the widely adopted Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and also outlines a clean slate approach from ITU-T SG 16 called the Advanced Multimedia System (AMS). For each of these solutions the paper describes in terms of architecture, signalling, and capability negotiation, what are viewed as the most critical functions in future multimedia systems design. The result of this comparison displays the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and outlines solutions to satisfy challenges of current and future multimedia systems based on the service access requirement in ubiquitous environments. Furthermore, this comparison is used to suggest approaches that are best suited for future multimedia system design.

Evolving the Internet Architecture Through Naming

Challenges face the Internet Architecture in order to scale to a greater number of users while providing a suite of increasingly essential functionality, such as multi-homing, traffic engineering, mobility, localised addressing and end-to-end packet-level security. Such functions have been designed and implemented mainly in isolation and retrofitted to the original Internet architecture. The resulting engineering complexity has caused some to think of 'clean slate' designs for the long-term future. Meanwhile, we take the position that an evolutionary approach is possible for a practical and scaleable interim solution, giving much of the functionality required, being backwards compatible with the currently deployed architecture, with incremental deployment capability, and which can reduce the current routing state overhead for the core network. By enhancing the way we use naming in the Internet Architecture, it is possible to provide a harmonised approach to multi-homing, traffic engineering, mobility, localised addressing and end-to-end packet-level security, including specific improvement to the scalability of inter-domain routing, and have these functions co-exist harmoniously with reduced engineering complexity. A set of proposed enhancements to the current Internet Architecture, based on naming, are described and analysed, both in terms of architectural changes and engineering practicalities.

A transactional model for automatic exception handling

Software reliability and error handling are concepts that any programmer knows and deals with on a daily basis. Even so, studies suggest that the current approach to exception handling raises fundamental incompatibilities with object-oriented concepts, being a major cause for the lack of quality on error handling code. In this paper, we propose an exception handling model that makes the runtime environment responsible for automatically dealing with abnormal situations. The platform provides a number of benign recovery actions that are able to deal automatically with most common exception types. Whenever an exception is raised, and a benign recovery method can be found, code is re-executed from a clean transactional state. In this approach try blocks not only represent a nesting level where a fault can occur but also a block that can be re-executed transactionally as a clean slate. For validating the approach two case studies were performed. One involved providing automatic exception handling for Glassfish's Java Messaging System implementation and the other for the Hipergate CRM application. Both showed that increased robustness is possible while freeing the programmer from manually writing extensive error-handling code.

Debt-for-Equity Swap and Reorganisation Law in the People’s Republic of China

The importance of debt-for-equity swaps has come to the fore once again when a lethal combination of a lack of liquidity and a lack of new bank finance and capital injection on a perceived deterioration in covenant strength, associated with the vagaries of the most recent global economic crisis and the credit crunch suffered by financial markets has hit most companies throughout the world, as a result of which they have struggled to service a high level of debt and, consequently, lapsed into the brink of insolvency. Since, using their respective countries’ reorganisation mechanisms, a plethora of financially distressed businesses have successfully salvaged themselves from a potential insolvency with a clean slate, reorganisation law has proven to be an ideal area for observing the legal process of restructurings involving debt-for-equity swaps in a legal system within which it operates. The key contribution of this Article is two-fold. This Article provides insights into debt-for-equity swaps through the prism of the reorganisation law of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and also uncovers some important differences between the “law on the books” and the “law in action.” Criticising the weaknesses of the reorganisation procedures or judicial weaknesses of the PRC in addressing the problems of businesses in financial difficulty, however, falls outside the scope of this Article.

A CLEAN SLATE

START-UP COMPANIES meet various fates. Some get acquired, some grow up, some fail, and some change their business model. Laboratory software and high-throughput- experimentation equipment provider ...

Out of the Rubble and Towards a Sustainable Future: The “Greening” of Greensburg, Kansas

Following a devastating tornado there in 2007, the tiny city of Greensburg, Kansas has engaged in a sustainability-oriented recovery process through which it hopes to serve as a model for other communities planning for a sustainable future. This article uses innovation theory to consider how and why the sustainability focus emerged in Greensburg and to explore the potential transferability of those factors to other contexts. An analysis of 535 newspaper articles reveals key factors as: the shared vision of persistent local leaders, the framing of sustainability as an “opportunity” with an energy efficiency focus, community pride and resilience, and a “clean slate” rebuilding effort with substantial available funding. While Greensburg’s future is intimately connected to the specifics of its recent past, the analysis does reveal lessons that other communities can draw from in crafting sustainability plans of their own.

Fifth Generation Networking Principles for a Service Driven Future Internet Architecture

The vision of all-IP networks where IP forms the simple common layer understandable across the whole network has undeniable advantages. However, such simplicity comes as a major hurdle to flexibility and functionality to the architecture. This is evident from the increasingly numerous and complex engineering solutions and optimizations required to accommodate essential qualities like mobility, security, realtime communication support etc or to mitigate the shortcomings inherent in the `traditional Internet' architecture. While a clean slate approach to address these shortcomings is not an option in a realistic scenario, it is important to examine the architecture as a whole to address emerging network requirements and overcome existing shortcomings at the architecture level rather than engineering solutions to an existing inefficient one. This architectural re-examination should also facilitate discussion into what design principles for future generations of Network Architectures which will eventually replace the design tenets for the current Internet. While 3G and 4G systems were more focussed on convergence towards an All-IP network and some improvements in the core network, the architectural design remains stagnant with layered paradigms and inherent inefficiencies. A departure from this shackled approach could be the distinguishing feature of 5G systems and beyond. We claim that there is a pressing need to move towards a Next Generation Network architecture built to natively support requirements such as network resource abstraction, mobility, security, enhanced routing, privacy, context communications, QoS, parallel processing, heterogeneous networking etc. Instead of treating the network as just providing connectivity specified by endpoints, it is of great advantage to applications to recognise it as a service characterized by attributes, abstracted to a higher level to represent a collection of capabilities that the network offers. This uniform high level abstraction can effectively mask the heterogeneity and implementation discrepancies in the underlying infrastructure. Besides, in a network environment where an connectivity instance might transverse diverse business/ownership/capability domains, the approach proposed in this article can provide a transparent abstraction for resource negotiations across the domain to be available for end-to-end setup. This architectural change should also be manifested according to the principles of SOA to ensure interoperability, backwards compatibility and migration. In this article, we introduce a Service Oriented framework and network architecture aimed at tackling the heterogeneity of emerging requirements and proposed solutions into a coherent interoperable architecture using Web Services specifications as the basic standards. We propose to model the new architecture on relationships between entities and discuss the motivation this new architecture in the form of a new framework called ROSA.

Washing Away Postdecisional Dissonance

After choosing between two alternatives, people perceive the chosen alternative as more attractive and the rejected alternative as less attractive. This postdecisional dissonance effect was eliminated by cleaning one's hands. Going beyond prior purification effects in the moral domain, physical cleansing seems to more generally remove past concerns, resulting in a metaphorical "clean slate" effect.

Designing a First Year Integrated Course to Meet the Mission & Values of a New Medical School

It is exciting to design a new medical school curriculum because you have a table rasa or clean slate with which to work. The design of the curriculum has to fit within the culture that is being built in the medical school. In constructing the curriculum, it is important to evaluate the mission and values that will be the guiding principles. The Commonwealth Medical College's (TCMC) mission involves serving “society using a community‐based, patient‐centered, interprofessional and evidenced‐based model of education” and “utilizes innovative techniques.” Two of the three major first year courses integrate the basic sciences and particularly the anatomical sciences within the spiral curriculum. Gross anatomy, histology, embryology, radiological anatomy, clinical anatomy and physiology are components of the Human Structure and Function (HSF) course that runs 17 weeks. Pathology, microbiology and pharmacology play a role in HSF but are not studied to the same depth as in the second year. The other first year course is Brain, Mind and Behaviour (BMB), which follows a patient presentation approach, used by the University of Calgary. BMB will initiate students to applying clinical reasoning to their learning and integrating all basic sciences. Much enthusiasm and support for our curriculum comes from our community clinical faculty, who have volunteered to participate in the teaching and learning program at TCMC.

The autonomic network architecture (ANA)

The objective of autonomic networking is to enable the autonomous formation and parametrization of nodes and networks by letting protocols sense and adapt to the networking environment at run time. Besides its dynamic aspects, a core requirement of autonomic networking is to define a structured framework and execution environment that enables algorithms to operate in a continously changing environment. This paper presents the major design principles of the Autonomic Network Architecture (ANA) and reports on a first implementation. The guiding principle of ANA is to strive for flexibility and genericity at all levels of the architecture. In our approach we explicitly avoid to impose a one-size-fits-all architecture (where communication protocols and paradigms are fixed by the architecture). To this end, ANA introduces generic abstractions, for example information dispatch points instead of addressable endpoints, as well as communication primitives that support network heterogeneity, adaptability, and evolution. These core abstractions allow for the coexistance of multiple and diverse networking styles and protocols. With the public release of the ANA prototype, we aim at federating autonomics related networking projects, enabling different actors to share, compare, and build upon each other?s work. The ANA runtime can host clean slate network designs as well as legacy Internet technology and serves as a platform for demonstrating autonomic communication principles.