Garbage Heap Research Articles

Pengolahan Sampah Organik menjadi Eco Enzyme kepada Masyarakat Desa Lambangsari Kabupaten Bekasi

This PKM is the Processing of Organic Waste Into Eco Enzym. The waste processing process that is widely carried out by the people of Lambangsari Village still relies on the final approach. Tha garbage is collected, transported, and the thrown into a landfill. This caoused a large enough garbage heap at the location of the landfill in Lmbangsari Village. Eco enzymes are the result of the fermentation of waste or organic waste such us fruit and vegetable pulp, sugar, and water. The activity of processing organic waste in Lambangsari Village, South Tambun, Bekasi into an eco-enzyme is carried out by holding a socialization to the village comunity. The method used in this PKM activity includes presentations, discussions, and practise for making eco enzyms.The purpose of the socialization activities carried out is expected to be able to be implemented by the village community in a sustainable manner to reduce organic waste production in Lambangsari Village.

Research on the Reinforcement Effect and Bearing Characteristics of High-Pressure Jet-Grouting Piles on Covered Road Composite Ground in Landfill Sites

There is a notable difference between garbage pile foundations and general site foundations; due to their uneven particles, complex structure, and diverse composition, there are relatively few cases that can be used for reference. In this study, with the aim of renovating a landfill in Shenzhen, bearing-layer reinforcements were introduced in the overlying road of a garbage heap dominated by construction waste. The bearing capacity of a single-pile composite foundation was studied through a core-pulling test of high-pressure jet-grouting piles, a static load test of the bearing capacity of the single-pile composite foundation, design estimation, and numerical analysis. The results show that the obtained eigenvalue of the design estimate was 267.8 kPa, and the eigenvalue of the field test was between 182.58 kPa and 196.89 kPa, meeting the design requirement of an eigenvalue of no less than 175 kPa. The bearing capacity of the composite foundation of the single jet-grouting pile was analyzed using the ABAQUS numerical simulation software; the characteristic value of the bearing capacity of the single-pile composite foundation was 186.01 kPa, and the variation trend of its settlement–load curve was the same as that of the field test results, which met the design requirements. High-pressure jet-grouting pile technology has achieved remarkable results in the reinforcement of foundations that are mainly composed of construction waste.

OVarFlow: a resource optimized GATK\xa04 based Open source Variant calling workFlow

BackgroundThe advent of next generation sequencing has opened new avenues for basic and applied research. One application is the discovery of sequence variants causative of a phenotypic trait or a disease pathology. The computational task of detecting and annotating sequence differences of a target dataset between a reference genome is known as "variant calling". Typically, this task is computationally involved, often combining a complex chain of linked software tools. A major player in this field is the Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK). The "GATK Best Practices" is a commonly referred recipe for variant calling. However, current computational recommendations on variant calling predominantly focus on human sequencing data and ignore ever-changing demands of high-throughput sequencing developments. Furthermore, frequent updates to such recommendations are counterintuitive to the goal of offering a standard workflow and hamper reproducibility over time.ResultsA workflow for automated detection of single nucleotide polymorphisms and insertion-deletions offers a wide range of applications in sequence annotation of model and non-model organisms. The introduced workflow builds on the GATK Best Practices, while enabling reproducibility over time and offering an open, generalized computational architecture. The workflow achieves parallelized data evaluation and maximizes performance of individual computational tasks. Optimized Java garbage collection and heap size settings for the GATK applications SortSam, MarkDuplicates, HaplotypeCaller, and GatherVcfs effectively cut the overall analysis time in half.ConclusionsThe demand for variant calling, efficient computational processing, and standardized workflows is growing. The Open source Variant calling workFlow (OVarFlow) offers automation and reproducibility for a computationally optimized variant calling task. By reducing usage of computational resources, the workflow removes prior existing entry barriers to the variant calling field and enables standardized variant calling.

The Diasporic Narrative: Identity Crisis in Ghasan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun

This study examines Ghasan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun as a representative novella of the Palestinian identity crisis among the Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the Nakba in 1948. Kanafani’s emplotment of this identity crisis is couched in a diasporic narrative that lays bare a double plot, one before 1948 and another following it. The narrative split reveals a sharp contrast between the present state of the characters on their journey to Kuwait, the promised land, and the past as revealed in their reminiscences of homeland. The paradisaic images of homeland are woven with images of Hellish existence under the scorching sun of the desert. This double narrative is indicative of the split psyche of the characters which is symptomatic of an identity crisis. Their pursuit of a way out of this conflicting state ends with a collective, tragic disillusionment; they end up dead and thrown on a garbage heap without even a proper burial place. Kanafani weaves the different mini narrative threads into one tragic denouement since his novella is not about the fate of individual characters but that of a nation. The silence of the characters prior to their death is a Kanafanian prophecy of the future of the Palestinian Cause after it has lost its power of speech and ended, like the characters, dead on the garbage heap of history.

Borges and the art of forgetting

IntroductionIn 2005 Elizabeth Parker and fellow researchers described the first case of Hyperthymestic Syndrome, a woman going by initials AJ. Thereafter, a handful more of such cases have emerged. Older descriptions of extraordinary memory in medical literature mainly considered semantic and working memories. Jorge Luis Borges in his 1930s short story ‘Funes, his Memory’ writes about his, presumably fictitious, encounter with a man named Ireno Funes who possessed an extraordinary memory and a knack for keeping track of briefest of passing moment. Among many qualities that Funes and AJ share are their extraordinary memories, obsession for keeping track of time, and their problems with abstraction. After describing his extraordinary memory, Borges says of Funes, ‘I suspect nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract.’ Similarly, AJ has been described to have impaired abstraction, hypothesis formation and conceptual shifting. Moreover, both Funes and AJ see their capability as a burden rather than a gift. “My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.” Says Funes.ObjectivesA brief exploration of Jorge Luis Borges’ works in the context of autobiographical memory.MethodsThe comparisons between Borges’ description of his character’s autobiographical memory and findings of modern research techniques will be done qualitatively.ResultsEffort is made to undersatnd Borges philosophy in context of mordern memory research.ConclusionsAn in depth look into Borges’ philosohies linking perception of time, coding of memory, abstration and language can inform further line of research regarding autobiographical memory.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

OPTIMALISASI PENGOLAHAN SAMPAH ORGANIK DENGAN TEKNOLOGI BIODIGESTER SEBAGAI UPAYA KONSERVASI LINGKUNGAN

Garbage is one of important issues in the life community, particularly in Indonesia. The volume of garbage heap is increasing along with the increase of public consumption every day, which affects garbage accumulation especially in GEMPEL - BEHI TPST. Therefore, an alternative waste treatment is needed to reduce the volume of waste to be transported to the landfill by utilizing organic waste with anaerobic-digester technology. This condition encourages researchers to design biodigester type fixed dome to optimize waste processing. Based on the research that has been done, Designed anaerobic-digester that had been made can be known the total volume of reactor used is 196,8 m3 to process waste 32,8m3/day. From utilization the anaerobic-digester technology, it provides benefits for the community such as income from the sale of economic value of waste are Rp. 58.795.750,- per month and value of expenses are Rp 52.320.000,- per month with pay back period are 6 month. So with the design, it occurs environmental conservation efforts as one step to improve human welfare and realize the sustainability of natural resources.

Unsafe disposal of feces of children

BackgroundYoung children frequently defecate in the living environment in low-income countries. Unsafe child feces disposal has been associated with risk of diarrhea. Additionally, reported practices can underestimate socially undesirable unhygienic behaviors. This analysis aimed to assess (1) the sensitivity of reported child feces disposal practices as an indicator for observed presence of human feces in the domestic environment, (2) household characteristics associated with reported unsafe feces disposal and (3) whether unsafe feces disposal is associated with fly presence and diarrhea among children <3 years.MethodsWe recorded caregiver-reported feces disposal practices for children <3 years; unsafe disposal was defined as feces put/rinsed into a drain, ditch, bush or garbage heap or left on the ground and safe disposal as feces put/rinsed into latrine or specific pit or buried. We conducted spot checks for human feces, counted flies in the compound and recorded caregiver-reported child diarrhea prevalence among 803 rural Bangladeshi households. We assessed associations using generalized estimating equations (GEE) and generalized linear models (GLM) with robust standard errors.ResultsUnsafe disposal of child feces was reported by 80% of households. Reported disposal practices had high sensitivity (91%) but low positive predictive value (15%) as an indicator of observed feces in the compound. Unsafe disposal was more common among households that reported daily adult open defecation (PR: 1.13, 1.02–1.24) and had children defecating in a nappy or on the ground versus in a potty (PR: 2.92, 1.98–4.32), and less common in households where adults reported always defecating in latrines (PR: 0.91, 0.84–0.98). The presence of observed human feces was similarly associated with these household characteristics. Reported unsafe feces disposal or observed human feces were not associated with fly detection or child diarrhea.ConclusionDespite access to on-site sanitation, unsafe child feces disposal was reported by the majority of households. However, this practices was not associated with diarrhea; suggesting that child feces may not be the most important fecal exposure. Before resources are invested to improve child feces management practices, studies should explore whether these contribute meaningfully to risk of enteric disease.

IbM Daur Ulang Sampah di Palebon

Garbage is defined as a material/ remnant of unwanted things after a final use process. A large number of the garbage heaps which cannot be overcome will cause many problems both directly and indirectly to inhabitants and surroundings. According to the survey, there is a garbage dump near people's settlement. It makes an unhealthy environment and disturbs people's health surroundings because of the inappropriate garbage heap, so that the existence of garbage is very fidgety to people. Such a condition causes garbage disposal to become the most difficult problem in Palebon district, Pedurungan subdistrict which should be handled soon. Solutions which are offered focus on the additional infrastructure especially sets of production equipment (compost cultivation container), organic compost production and non-organic garbage utilization into people's work RW I and RW II which can be implemented well, effective and efficient marketing process, and PKK (home economic) that will be founded to manage non-organic garbage into beneficial handicrafts. Based on the garbage-recycling activity devoted to people, the team has successfully made a compost cultivation container, work of non-organic garbage, as well as garbage cultivation marketing training.

The Norman Chronicles

poetry The Norman Chronicles by Chantal Bizzini At the Dump Before the road bends, at the end of a wide path soaked by melted snow, you could hear the blasts. There, late at night, a man whose mind is not all there had climbed atop a garbage heap and stood, wild and overjoyed, facing a fire, tossing into it aerosol cans that exploded splendidly – alone, on this final night of the year. His boss was a good guy: every day, he picked him up and took him there. The Wall of the Barn That barn – I don’t remember it. Made of millstone, vast and rectangular, two symmetrical windows framed in brick; and now, it’s like a dream, a dream told about a morning, a dawn when the Fates lean over, and, in a sort of warning, announce the imminent death of an entire family, or village; when the fire started, everyone in the house was asleep, and maybe it was then the villagers saw from a distance the hungry flames seize the hay, the woods, and the whole blackening structure; heard the devouring, the screams, the chaotic footsteps; and, in the night, saw the false dawn of that unbearable heat that doesn’t mean morning but hell. Translations from the French By Zack Rogow Visit the WLT website to listen to a bilingual recording of these poems. Zack Rogow is author, editor, or translator of twenty books or plays. His translations include André Breton’s Earthlight and Colette’s Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island. Chantal Bizzini, poet, photographer, and translator, lives in Paris. Her poems have been translated into English, Spanish, Italian, and modern Greek. A selected poems was published as Disenchanted City (La ville désenchantée) in a bilingual edition by Black Widow Press. The cemetery as seen en route to Landes, Canappeville, Eure, France. Photo by Chantal Bizzini. WORLDLIT.ORG 13 ...

Trash collection. O kolekcjonerstwie Andy’ego Warhola (1928–1987)

Brak streszczenia w języku polskim.

No Address, No Name

No Address, No Name Iwan Simatupang (bio) Translated by John H. McGlynn (bio) Dedicated to Sri, Maiden of the Beggars For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life. There is a determined though unseen bravery, which defends itself foot to foot in the darkness against the fatal invasions of necessity and of baseness. Noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees, which no renown rewards, which no flourish of triumph salutes. Life’s misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables Cast of Characters Gramps, man of about sixty Pocky, man of about thirty-five Gimp, man of about thirty Ani, woman of about twenty-five Ina, woman of about twenty Ati, woman of about seventeen Scene One The play is set in a large city beneath a bridge, the home of people considered “of no consequence”: vagrants, poor and jobless people, pedicab drivers, and prostitutes. It is late evening. Torn mats, old boards, broken furniture, empty butter and milk tins litter the site. Small kerosene lamps hang from makeshift huts. Two small cooking fires glow. Steam rises from the butter tins, used as cooking pots, that are perched on top of the flames. Beside one fire a man, Gimp, rests on his haunches; an older man, Gramps, squats beside the other fire. Two young women, Ani and Ina, dressed in faded lengths of batik cloth and colored brassieres, are busy putting on makeup. Each woman holds a cracked mirror in her hand. Trailer-trucks driving across the bridge make a thunderous noise. There is also a roll of thunder. [End Page 25] Click for larger view View full resolution Slum dwellers, Jakarta, Java, 2007. Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum [End Page 26] gramps Sounds like it’s gonna rain hard. gimp [Laughing.] That’s a truck, Gramps! gramps What? gimp A truck! That’s a trailer-truck going by. gramps [Shaking his head while stirring the contents of the butter tin on top of his fire.] Another one! This bridge is going to fall down one of these days. I thought those things were banned. ani So? gramps So it’s against the law. [Ani laughs loudly.] Well, what’s the law for then? ani To be broken. gramps And if it’s broken? ani That’s the State’s business. Gramps stirs his food and shakes his head again. A roll of thunder. gimp Now that was thunder. ani [Suddenly concerned.] What?! gimp [Laughing.] Thunder, sweets. Thunder! You know, varrrooom!—which usually means it’s going to rain. Ani frowns, then walks to the edge of the shelter offered by the bridge and peers upward at the sky. She raises her arm and shakes her fist at the sky. Another roll of thunderv ani [Angrily.] Oh, shit! Ina! ina What? ani You can stop getting ready. ina Never know, it might not rain. [Another roll of thunder.] ani [Irritated.] What do you mean “might not rain”? What are you, a rain doctor? Clean the shit from your ears. The only thing that’s not sure is how we’re going to get something to eat tonight if it does rain. gimp [Stirring his food.] If it’s your stomach you’re looking to fill, this is almost done. ani [Putting her hands on her hips, turns to Gimp.] Thanks, but no thanks! I’ve had my fill of that squash you pick out of the [End Page 27] garbage heap over by the market. Half-rotten squash mixed with half-rotten leeks, moldy cassava and corn. Bleck! I’m sick of it! No, not tonight. Tonight I want something good to eat: hot rice, spiced beef, an egg swimming in chili sauce, and a tall glass of sweet tea. And to finish it off, a large and golden-ripe … As Ani speaks of her favorite foods, the others listen wistfully, repeatedly swallowing their saliva. When there is another roll of thunder, everyone looks sadly at Ani. [Hysterically.] Oh no! It can’t rain tonight. It just can’t! ina [Approaching Ani.] Take it easy. Rain or not, we’re...

Recycling History

Review Article RECYCLING HISTORY CARLA NAPPI University of British Columbia, Canada VALERIE HANSEN, The Silk Road: A New History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xi z 304 pp. We historians of China talk a lot about the importance of material culture. Bowls, shoes, objects made of iron or porcelain or cloisonné: these increasingly figure in the stories we tell ourselves, our readers, and our students. These objects, either in their own physical reality or in our historical reconstructions, are often whole: plates, bowls, robes, incense burners. As actors in many of our stories, they are (or are reconstructed to be) intact and functional tools. What we do not often narrativize in explicit terms is what makes up the bulk of the material historical record: broken things, fragments, dust. History is mostly made out of garbage. Of course we know this already, and it will not come as a surprise to any readers of this article. But how often do we celebrate it as a scatter of broken things, as garbage, rather than briefly holding it in place while we try to glue it back together and set it in narrative motion? In Silk Road studies, we have a model for charting a path into a new kind of material historiography. Not: Here is a book that sat on that shelf of this scholar’s library. Instead: Here is a rotting, ripped scrap of paper, let us engage with it as scrap, and in doing so embrace the garbage heap as writing surface and storybook, the scatter of broken bits as historical archive, without immediately narrating them back into pristine wholeness. The history of the Silk Road, as Valerie Hansen tells us in her recent The Silk Road: A New History, was ‘‘most commonly written on recycled paper.’’1 It is richer and more self-reflexive than many other historical fields because of this, and is well worth a serious look by historians of other regions and periods for its thoughtful and innovative consideration of the historical craft of turning the raw materials of many media into a compelling historical account. There are some consistent approaches to writing histories built on archives of the discarded. A study of recycled objects is a study of objects in motion. It necessarily pays attention to the media through which this movement happens (time, space) and the sort of movement happening (circulation, translation, preservation) at any given point in the object’s life. The main themes and approaches in Silk Road studies tend to coalesce around points of concern with these media and forms of motion. They consequently function as useful landmarks when mapping any kind of a journey 1 Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History, 24. REVIEW ARTICLE Tang Studies, 31. 75–90, 2013 # T’ang Studies Society 2013 DOI: 10.1179/0737503413Z.0000000009 through this enormous and diverse field of inquiry, and we will use them as touchstones as we attempt to chart such a path in the following pages. First, a word of caution: fragmentariness does not just characterize the raw material of Silk Road historiography; it also describes the kind of knowledge grasped by anyone attempting to produce something like a comprehensive picture of Silk Road studies as a field. It is a daunting task, as important work on the region and its histories is spread across books, essays, and journals published in many different countries and languages. Many scholars working on Silk Road history come to it as experts in one or more of the linguistic, geographic, or cultural specialties that collectively compose it: they might begin and primarily identify as scholars of Chinese or Tibetan studies, for example. This trans-disciplinarity dramatically expands the body of literature that is significant to Silk Road studies and written by contributors to the field. The body of relevant work is so expansive, in fact, that at times it may not seem to cohere as a ‘‘field’’ at all. In addition to the complication mentioned above, the practical challenges of communication across the vast geographic, temporal, disciplinary, and linguistic spaces of Silk Road studies undermines a sense of the field as a coherent body of historiographical work. A...

Statistical Analysis of Biomarkers for Personalized Medicine

Recently there has been enhanced and advanced biomedical technology such as high-throughput microarrays and molecular imaging to monitor SNPs, gene and protein expressions, and so forth, to provide exhaustive situations for individuals. In principle we could get much more information to know the biological and medical status from such data sets, which are viewed as biomarkers in a wide sense to help to do identification, association, and prediction studies for phenotypes such as cancer subtypes, prognosis, treatment responsiveness, and adverse reactions for personalized medicine. However, it is frequently difficult to extract only an informative part in the hull of data sets which include a garbage heap of uninformative observations. In particular, we cannot confirm statistical evidence because of the small sample size relative to the dimension of the data when we achieve the practical use of such statistical applications. For example, if we implement machine learning methods for the prediction of the treatment effects, then we typically face difficulties to confirm the reproducibility and robustness for the performance. In the meanwhile, effective study design is crucial for developing and validating biomarkers. In effect we present eight papers challenging this difficult situation of statistical analysis for biomarkers including statistical estimation, prediction, and testing hypothesis. The paper, “The number of candidate variants in exome sequencing for Mendelian Disease under no genetic heterogeneity,” by J. Nishino and S. Mano studies the expected number of candidate single nucleotide variants (SNVs) in exome data for autosomal dominant or recessive Mendelian disorders so that the filtering method is useful with an assumption of “no genetic heterogeneity.” The paper, “Radial basis function-sparse partial least squares for application to brain imaging data,” by H. Yoshida et al. proposes a novel statistical method, called radial basis function sparse partial least squares (RBF-sPLS), for investigating the relationship between clinical characteristics and brain morphology based on three-dimensional MRI data. The paper, “Power analysis of C-TDT for small sample size genome-wide association studies by the joint use of case-parent trios and pairs,” by F. Rajabli et al. addresses family-based genetic association studies with missing genotype information for one of the parents. The paper provides a simulation study for the disequilibrium test statistic across different sample sizes for a family-based genome-wide association study. The paper, “Genomic biomarkers for personalized medicine: development and validation in clinical studies” by S. Matsui addresses the two critical statistical analyses of high-dimensional genomic data, gene screening and prediction, in the framework of development and validation of genomic biomarkers or signatures with biomarker-based clinical trial designs to assess clinical utility of a biomarker or a new treatment with a companion biomarker. The paper, “Multiple suboptimal solutions for prediction rules in gene expression data,” by O. Komori et al. reanalyzes the gene expression data for pattern recognition of phenotypes to extract informative features embedded in the data. The paper concludes that it is not possible to extract only informative genes with high performance in the all observed genes and points out that the mutual coherence among genes is too high to find the solution of informative genes. The paper, “An empirical Bayes optimal discovery procedure based on semiparametric hierarchical mixture models,” by H. Noma and S. Matsui proposes an empirical Bayes optimal discovery procedure with the smoothing-by-roughening approach in semiparametric hierarchical mixture models. This approach provides analytically a tractable posterior distribution with the flexible prior section in genome-wide studies. The paper, “Cancer outlier analysis based on mixture modeling of gene expression data,” by K. Mori et al. proposes a gene-based statistic for gene selection on the basis of a posterior probability of cancer outlier for each cancer sample with an application to real data from hematologic malignancies. The paper, “A robust rerank approach for feature selection and its application to pooling-based GWA studies,” by J. Liu et al. proposes a method based on the concept of rank-over-variable which is shown to be insensitive to the selection of tuning parameters compared with t-statistics, AUC statistics, and SAM with simulation studies and real data analysis of pooling-based genome-wide association (GWA) study to demonstrate the usefulness of their method. Shinto Eguchi Shigeyuki Matsui Su-Yun Huang Chuhsing Kate Hsiao

The Marx of Anti-Oedipus

The meeting of Deleuze and Guattari in 1969 is generally used to explain how the former's thought became politicised under the influence of the latter. This narrative, however useful it might be in explaining Deleuze's move away from the domain of academic philosophy following the upheavals of May 1968, has had the effect of de-emphasising the conceptual development which occurred between Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus. Worst of all, it has had the effect of reducing the role of Marx's philosophy to the superficial level of political alibi, impoverishing our understanding of its importance with respect to the conceptual assemblage of Anti-Oedipus. This paper attempts to restore Marx's relevance to Deleuze and Guattari's project by understanding Anti-Oedipus through the Marxian categories of production, distribution, surplus-value and consumption, and argues for a conception of schizoanalysis which does not relegate the name of Marx to the garbage heap of poststructuralist intellectual strategy.

Smashed Pots

On Being a Doctor5 May 2009Smashed PotsJack Coulehan, MD, MPHJack Coulehan, MD, MPHFrom the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-8036.Search for more papers by this authorAuthor, Article, and Disclosure Informationhttps://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-150-9-200905050-00015 SectionsAboutFull TextPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail This is a tale about restitution. From a moral perspective, I think most of us would agree that we ought to return things that we'e stolen to their rightful owner. But what if the objects at issue have no aesthetic or economic value, and the people you took them from have been dead for several hundred years? Let me pose the question more precisely: Is it morally required to return pottery fragments that you'e taken from an ancient garbage heap? And if, in fact, such a duty exists, just how much effort does a good conscience require of us?For ... Author, Article, and Disclosure InformationAffiliations: From the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-8036.Corresponding Author: Jack Coulehan, MD, MPH, Department of Preventive Medicine, HSC L3-086, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-8036; e-mail, [email protected]cc.sunysb.edu. PreviousarticleNextarticle Advertisement FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Metrics 5 May 2009Volume 150, Issue 9Page: 650-651KeywordsConsciousnessCrimeCyclic adenosine monophosphateEmotionsHealth care facilitiesHospitalsMeatMedical servicesPreventive medicineRivers ePublished: 5 May 2009 Issue Published: 5 May 2009 Copyright & PermissionsCopyright © 2009 by American College of Physicians. All Rights Reserved.PDF downloadLoading ...

Controlling garbage collection and heap growth to reduce the execution time of Java applications

In systems that support garbage collection, a tension exists between collecting garbage too frequently and not collecting it frequently enough. Garbage collection that occurs too frequently may introduce unnecessary overheads at the risk of not collecting much garbage during each cycle. On the other hand, collecting garbage too infrequently can result in applications that execute with a large amount of virtual memory (i.e., with a large footprint) and suffer from increased execution times due to paging.In this article, we use a large set of Java applications and the highly tuned and widely used Boehm-Demers-Weiser (BDW) conservative mark-and-sweep garbage collector to experimentally examine the extent to which the frequency of garbage collection impacts an application's execution time, footprint, and pause times. We use these results to devise some guidelines for controlling garbage collection and heap growth in a conservative garbage collector in order to minimize application execution times. Then we describe new strategies for controlling garbage collection and heap growth that impact not only the frequency with which garbage collection occurs but also the points at which it occurs. Experimental results demonstrate that when compared with the existing approach used in the standard BDW collector, our new strategy can significantly reduce application execution times.Our goal is to obtain a better understanding of how to control garbage collection and heap growth for an individual application executing in isolation. These results can be applied in a number of high-performance computing and server environments, in addition to some single-user environments. This work should also provide insights into how to make better decisions that impact garbage collection in multiprogrammed environments.

Program Planning in War-Torn Palestine

Planning continuing education programs for professionals was a fairly straight-forward task for me--one that I had done for 20 years. It was not until I was confronted with road closures, military clashes, and guns pointed in my face and those of my [U.S.] consultants that I questioned my role and responsibilities as a program planner and how they changed when situated within a global context. The purpose of this article is to summarize my experiences providing continuing professional education for law professors in West Bank and Gaza as Second Intifada raged. The Second Intifada, an armed conflict between Israel and Palestine, spread throughout West Bank and Gaza, severely limiting our project activities. Security and road closures prohibited travel for professors and students, so solution was to bring U.S. consultants to campuses to teach research skills to professors and their students. My greatest challenges were finding alternate ways to transport consultants to campuses in middle of conflict, adjusting schedules, and keeping consultants safe. This meant I had to reach outside my realm as an experienced Mid-Western program planner to make sure that the show must go and to keep consultants alive. As a result, not only did everyone survive, but show did go on, students learned how to conduct research, and I learned how to be a flexible program planner. The Role and Responsibility of a Program Planner in Palestine Program planning has always come easy for me since I am a details kind of person. My role and responsibilities as a program planner in Chicago were always clear to me: to plan and present a program with adult learner in mind and involved. I made sure that speakers used adult education principles when delivering curricula and evaluating program, and made adjustments based on evaluation. By time I was in Palestine in 2000 and 2001, I had reviewed about 20 program planning models over years and had embraced Caffarella's (1994) program planning ideas, Sork and Caffarella's (1989) program planning model, and studied Cervero's (1985) work on continuing professional education. As a program planner, I agreed to take in context of organization and to understand center of power structure. Andragogy was a word I often used, and I thought Knowles (1980) had a good working program planning model. But planning programs in Chicago was one thing. I thought about my studies and experience in May 2001 while parked at top of a garbage heap that was being used as a road bypass outside Biet El (an Israeli settlement) in West Bank, and looking at my apartment in Ramallah in near distance, about one--quarter of a mile away. I was in trouble. I knew I needed to get my U.S. consultant, Ralph Ruebner, a law professor from John Marshall School of Law, Chicago, back to Ramallah safely. Ralph had just delivered a workshop on legal research to law students in Bit Zeit University. The only problem was that we couldn't use main road, because members of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were shooting at student demonstrators on main road and all other roads were dosed. Our only way home was to drive over garbage heap, across a boulder that had been moved into a ditch, through an olive grove, and around an unpaved mountain road. I wondered what a good program planner would do now. My Experience For situation in West Bank in 2001 during Intifada, I had to be flexible in my program plan--really flexible! I was forced to take a shortcut across Judean Desert in our Chew with Ralph, All Abu Ali--my Palestinian assistant--and find yet another alternative way home. As we waited for taxis and trucks to cross in front of us, I wondered, what would Sork and Caffarella (1989) recommend now? Did Knowles (1980) have a good solution? I was considering my awesome responsibility to keep Ralph alive when IDF drove up in their Jeep and tore out our only passage to get back to Ramallah. …

City Renaissance on a Garbage Heap: Newark, New Jersey, and Solid Waste Planning

This article examines the efforts over the past thirty years at producing an urban landscape based on reusing waste for input into production. The article is a case study of Newark, New Jersey's, efforts to construct a resource recovery facility as the cornerstone of their industrial development policy. This innovative approach to economic development was replete with the rhetoric of “closed-loop” systems similar to the current proposals for developing a sustainable employment and economic base for cities. Despite the emphasis on environmentally sound economic development, the resource recovery experiment was both an economic and environmental debacle. Several of the assumptions that guided resource recovery as a mechanism for revitalization continue to inform planning.

Deadly Giveaway

A protein that snatches life from neurons does so by what it gives, not by what it takes away, according to new research. It wastes a molecule intended to destroy a toxic protein and ultimately promotes Parkinson's disease (PD), according to new research. The discovery could solve the mystery of why a mutation linked to PD doesn't always trigger disease and presents a new candidate target for brain-saving drugs. PD kills neurons that control muscle movement, perhaps because clumps of a protein called α-synuclein accumulate in doomed cells. A protein called Parkin normally labels α-synuclein with ubiquitin, a tag that sends molecules to the cellular garbage heap. Individuals who carry defects in the Parkin gene have an increased risk of developing PD. A mutation in another gene-- UCH-L1 --also promotes PD, according to genetic studies of one family. The UCH-L1 protein normally removes ubiquitin from peptides for recycling, thus making it available to condemn misbehaving proteins. Glitches in that process could allow α-synuclein to persist. Not all perturbations in UCH-L1 , however, cause trouble; a different mutation confers resistance to PD, although no one knows why. In the new work, Liu and colleagues compared how the two mutations alter UCH-L1's function. Cultured cells that produce normal or PD-promoting UCH-L1 amassed large amounts of α-synuclein, whereas cells with the PD-preventing version did not. But the normal and PD-preventing UCH-L1 clipped ubiquitin from peptides with similar efficiencies, suggesting that UCH-L1 possesses other capabilities responsible for α-synuclein buildup. Further tests revealed that normal UCH-L1 also tacks ubiquitin molecules onto α-synuclein. The PD-preventing mutation--but not the PD-promoting one--thwarts this capability. The extra ubiquitin, however, doesn't stimulate α-synuclein's destruction. As a result, UCH-L1 could deplete ubiquitin from the available pool and ultimately reduce α-synuclein demolition--but by sticking ubiquitin onto α-synuclein, instead of by leaving it on protein fragments as previously thought. Additional experiments suggest that the ubiquitin-adding activity depends on UCH-L1's ability to pair up and that the PD-preventing alteration keeps UCH-L1 molecules apart. The PD-preventing mutation offsets the PD-promoting one, at least in a test tube. An equal mixture of PD-promoting and -preventing UCH-L1 was considerably poorer at attaching ubiquitin to α-synuclein than was a mixture of the PD-promoting UCH-L1 and the normal protein. In the single family whose members carry the harmful UCH-L1 mutation, a father of two affected individuals carries the mutation and does not have PD. The authors propose that the PD-preventing UCH-L1 mutation--which occurs commonly--could protect him and others from the disease, although human data aren't yet available to support the idea. "It's an exciting new paper," says biochemist Keith Wilkinson of Emory University in Atlanta. The work suggests that small molecules that disrupt ubiquitin tagging by UCH-L1 could reduce the risk of developing PD, he says. Neuroscientist Ted Dawson of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore says that researchers will need to prove that UCH-L1 can add ubiquitin in intact animals. But if the finding pans out, it could have implications beyond PD, Wilkinson adds: The PD-preventing mutation also seems to delay the onset of Huntington's disease. Mimicking the alteration could foil multiple degenerative diseases that involve buildup of sticky proteins, a gift anyone would welcome. --R. John Davenport Y. Liu, L. Fallon, H. A. Lashuel, Z. Liu, P. T. Lansbury, The UCH-L1 gene encodes two opposing enzymatic activities that affect α-synuclein degradation and Parkinson's disease susceptibility. Cell 111 , 209-218 (2002). [Abstract] [Full Text]

Ambiguous Bleeding: Purity and Sacrifice in Bali

Menstrual beliefs and practices in Bali defy simple classification. Menstruation may be relegated to dump, as when a woman had to undergo a rite on a street midden when her monthly period coincided with ritual time for a purification ceremony. But menstruation is also viewed as conferring raja status, and women do exhibit agency in this supposedly passive process. Experiences of menstruation, furthermore, may vary according to caste status. (Bali, classifications of pollution, restriction, agency, ambiguity) ********** As many tourists to Bali can confirm from personal experience, menstrual taboos remain in effect there. At entrance to temples, female tourists find that taboos pertain to them, too, a fact they almost invariably experience as an affront to their sex. Visitors stop short with some incredulity at signs in English that forthrightly prohibit entry to menstruating women. Although they have had surprisingly little to say on issue of menstruation, reaction of scholarly observers of Balinese culture has been similar. If mentioned at all, complex of taboos and regulations surrounding it has tended to be viewed as somewhat of a jolting exception to otherwise relatively egalitarian gender relations (Covarrubias 1986). More recently, scholars have treated issue of gender relations in Bali in more depth (Wikan 1990), but remain almost silent on circumstances of menstruating woman. Balinese women, meanwhile, generally adhere to certain menstrual taboos as a regular and accepted part of their lives. In 1998, in a noble house in eastern Bali, I observed a ceremony performed for a woman whose period coincided with a family temple purification marking onset of preparatory sacred work for a major ancestral ritual. Reminding her that she must heed her elders, woman's paternal aunt summoned her to garbage heap outside palace walls. Placed at top of heap, she was sprinkled with holy water in a brief rite performed by her aunt. At first glance, such a practice of sending menstruating woman to garbage heap--expressly, as women envisioned it, because her condition belongs with filth there--seems to resonate with conclusions such as Covarrubias's, that although in Bali the woman is by no means proverbial slave of Oriental countries ... once a month, during menstrual time, a wife's life is not a happy one (Covarrubias 1986:156). There is no more graphic expression of menstruation as pollution than image of woman on garbage. Other evidence, however, complicates any easy assumption that such practice necessarily reflects female oppression. This same woman stepped down from garbage to talk at length about how menstruating woman in Bali is said to become a raja. These positive and negative images of menstruation appear to coexist without contradiction to Balinese actors involved. After introducing complex of menstrual taboos found in Bali, this article clarifies classification of menstrual pollution that emerges from contemporary commentary of variously positioned men and women in eastern part of island. It revolves around cycles paralleling those of life and death and a view of women as both vulnerable and powerful. For example, taboos surrounding a woman's menstruation also open for her certain avenues of agency. But such power is hedged by differences in experience between high- and low-caste women in Bali. While high-caste women are more likely to appeal to raja image, being a woman in a princely household entails not only higher status but also a higher degree of constraint. Similarly, being treated like a raja might restrict as well as empower menstruating woman. Even studies that otherwise take into account many complexities surrounding menstrual taboos and related practices, such as those compiled by Buckley and Gottlieb (1988), still tend to characterize societies as having either positive, negative, or neutral views of menstruation, or as having taboos that either limit or enhance powers of women. …