Learning Not to Curse: Swearing, Testimony, and Truth in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative

This article addresses swearing and testimony in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789) by reading the work in the context of a broader contemporary discourse concerning profane swearing and cursing. Acts of profane enunciation inform a number of key episodes in Equiano’s life, and bear particular significance for his spiritual development and abolitionist witnessing. Within the Narrative, swearing is cast as a failure of piety, civility, and humanity, and shown to be actively avenged by a retributive deity. In Britain, profane swearing was also thought to undermine the validity of legal testimony; while, in the British West Indies, slaves were denied recourse to such testimony against their oppressors. By disavowing profane swearing and cursing, the essay argues, Equiano sought to assert both the validity of his oath and the truth of his testimony against the iniquities of the British slave trade.

Pristine Early Eocene Wood Buried Deeply in Kimberlite from Northern Canada

We report exceptional preservation of fossil wood buried deeply in a kimberlite pipe that intruded northwestern Canada's Slave Province 53.3±0.6 million years ago (Ma), revealed during excavation of diamond source rock. The wood originated from forest surrounding the eruption zone and collapsed into the diatreme before resettling in volcaniclastic kimberlite to depths >300 m, where it was mummified in a sterile environment. Anatomy of the unpermineralized wood permits conclusive identification to the genus Metasequoia (Cupressaceae). The wood yields genuine cellulose and occluded amber, both of which have been characterized spectroscopically and isotopically. From cellulose d O and d H measurements, we infer that Early Eocene paleoclimates in the western Canadian subarctic were 12-17°C warmer and four times wetter than present. Canadian kimberlites offer Lagerstätte-quality preservation of wood from a region with limited alternate sources of paleobotanical information. © 2012 Wolfe et al.

Dependable wireless real-time communications for open environments

Wireless communication technologies have become widely adopted, appearing in heterogeneous applications ranging from tracking victims, responders and equipments in disaster scenarios to machine health monitoring in networked manufacturing systems. Very often, applications demand a strictly bounded timing response, which, in distributed systems, is generally highly dependent on the performance of the underlying communication technology. These systems are said to have real-time timeliness requirements since data communication must be conducted within predefined temporal bounds, whose unfulfillment may compromise the correct behavior of the system and cause economic losses or endanger human lives. The potential adoption of wireless technologies for an increasingly broad range of application scenarios has made the operational requirements more complex and heterogeneous than before for wired technologies. On par with this trend, there is an increasing demand for the provision of cost-effective distributed systems with improved deployment, maintenance and adaptation features. These systems tend to require operational flexibility, which can only be ensured if the underlying communication technology provides both time and event triggered data transmission services while supporting on-line, on-the-fly parameter modification. Generally, wireless enabled applications have deployment requirements that can only be addressed through the use of batteries and/or energy harvesting mechanisms for power supply. These applications usually have stringent autonomy requirements and demand a small form factor, which hinders the use of large batteries. As the communication support may represent a significant part of the energy requirements of a station, the use of power-hungry technologies is not adequate. Hence, in such applications, low-range technologies have been widely adopted. In fact, although low range technologies provide smaller data rates, they spend just a fraction of the energy of their higher-power counterparts. The timeliness requirements of data communications, in general, can be met by ensuring the availability of the medium for any station initiating a transmission. In controlled (close) environments this can be guaranteed, as there is a strict regulation of which stations are installed in the area and for which purpose. Nevertheless, in open environments, this is hard to control because no a priori abstract knowledge is available of which stations and technologies may contend for the medium at any given instant. Hence, the support of wireless real-time communications in unmanaged scenarios is a highly challenging task. Wireless low-power technologies have been the focus of a large research effort, for example, in the Wireless Sensor Network domain. Although bringing extended autonomy to battery powered stations, such technologies are known to be negatively influenced by similar technologies contending for the medium and, especially, by technologies using higher power transmissions over the same frequency bands. A frequency band that is becoming increasingly crowded with competing technologies is the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical band, encompassing, for example, Bluetooth and ZigBee, two lowpower communication standards which are the base of several real-time protocols. Although these technologies employ mechanisms to improve their coexistence, they are still vulnerable to transmissions from uncoordinated stations with similar technologies or to higher power technologies such as Wi- Fi, which hinders the support of wireless dependable real-time communications in open environments. The Wireless Flexible Time-Triggered Protocol (WFTT) is a master/multi-slave protocol that builds on the flexibility and timeliness provided by the FTT paradigm and on the deterministic medium capture and maintenance provided by the bandjacking technique. This dissertation presents the WFTT protocol and argues that it allows supporting wireless real-time communication services with high dependability requirements in open environments where multiple contention-based technologies may dispute the medium access. Besides, it claims that it is feasible to provide flexible and timely wireless communications at the same time in open environments. The WFTT protocol was inspired on the FTT paradigm, from which higher layer services such as, for example, admission control has been ported. After realizing that bandjacking was an effective technique to ensure the medium access and maintenance in open environments crowded with contention-based communication technologies, it was recognized that the mechanism could be used to devise a wireless medium access protocol that could bring the features offered by the FTT paradigm to the wireless domain. The performance of the WFTT protocol is reported in this dissertation with a description of the implemented devices, the test-bed and a discussion of the obtained results.

Theorising and analysing digital labour: from global value chains to modes of production

This paper considers the following question—where do computers, laptops and mobile phones come from and who produced them? Specific cases of digital labour are examined—the extraction of minerals in African mines under slave-like conditions; ICT manufacturing and assemblage in China (Foxconn); software engineering in India; call centre service work; software engineering at Google within Silicon Valley; and the digital labour of internet prosumers/users. Empirical data and empirical studies concerning these cases are systematically analysed and theoretically interpreted. The theoretical interpretations are grounded in Marxist political economy. The term ‘global value chain’ is criticised in favour of a complex and multidimensional understanding of Marx’s ‘mode of production’ for the purposes of conceptualizing digital labour. This kind of labour is transnational and involves various modes of production, relations of production and organisational forms (in the context of the productive forces). There is a complex global division of digital labour that connects and articulates various forms of productive forces, exploitation, modes of production, and variations within the dominant capitalist mode of production.

Optimal methodology for distribution systems reconfiguration based on OPF and solved by decomposition technique

This paper presents a new and efficient methodology for distribution network reconfiguration integrated with optimal power flow (OPF) based on a Benders decomposition approach. The objective minimizes power losses, balancing load among feeders and subject to constraints: capacity limit of branches, minimum and maximum power limits of substations or distributed generators, minimum deviation of bus voltages and radial optimal operation of networks. The Generalized Benders decomposition algorithm is applied to solve the problem. The formulation can be embedded under two stages; the first one is the Master problem and is formulated as a mixed integer non-linear programming problem. This stage determines the radial topology of the distribution network. The second stage is the Slave problem and is formulated as a non-linear programming problem. This stage is used to determine the feasibility of the Master problem solution by means of an OPF and provides information to formulate the linear Benders cuts that connect both problems. The model is programmed in GAMS. The effectiveness of the proposal is demonstrated through two examples extracted from the literature.

O discurso teológico e a escravatura

Teólogos e juristas defendiam a escravatura, recorrendo todavia a maiores ou menores atenuantes. Tanto Ribeiro Rocha como Azeredo Coutinho, sustentando pontos de vista que muitas vezes mostram um forte contraste, são disto um bom exemplo.

A caracterização do trabalho análogo ao escravo na jurisprudência dos tribunais brasileiros

Based on bibliographical research and the analysis of court rulings, this study investigates the characterization of slave-like labor by Brazilian courts. After the alteration of article 149 of the Brazilian Penal Code, introduced by Law nº 10.803/2003, which typifies the practice of contemporary slavery in Brazil, divergent characterizations of this practice remain. The courts currently employ the broadest concept of contemporary slave labor, in which the crime is characterized by the engagement in one of the following conducts established as a criminal offense: labor with the restriction of freedom, submission to exhaustive working conditions, degrading working conditions, and debt bondage. The engagement in one of the above is therefore enough to constitute a crime. Contemporary slave labor in Brazil is not characterized only by the restriction of the worker’s freedom, as in the case of forced labor or debt bondage, but also through the submission of the workers to situations that offend their human dignity. Individual freedom and the dignity of the human person, fundamental tenets of the Brazilian Federal Constitution, are juridical resources safeguarded by law. Contemporary slavery is not limited to the mere infringement of labor laws, but represents a severe violation of the human rights of the workers involved.

Scaling In-Memory databases on multicores

Current computer systems have evolved from featuring only a single processing unit and limited RAM, in the order of kilobytes or few megabytes, to include several multicore processors, o↵ering in the order of several tens of concurrent execution contexts, and have main memory in the order of several tens to hundreds of gigabytes. This allows to keep all data of many applications in the main memory, leading to the development of inmemory databases. Compared to disk-backed databases, in-memory databases (IMDBs) are expected to provide better performance by incurring in less I/O overhead. In this dissertation, we present a scalability study of two general purpose IMDBs on multicore systems. The results show that current general purpose IMDBs do not scale on multicores, due to contention among threads running concurrent transactions. In this work, we explore di↵erent direction to overcome the scalability issues of IMDBs in multicores, while enforcing strong isolation semantics. First, we present a solution that requires no modification to either database systems or to the applications, called MacroDB. MacroDB replicates the database among several engines, using a master-slave replication scheme, where update transactions execute on the master, while read-only transactions execute on slaves. This reduces contention, allowing MacroDB to o↵er scalable performance under read-only workloads, while updateintensive workloads su↵er from performance loss, when compared to the standalone engine. Second, we delve into the database engine and identify the concurrency control mechanism used by the storage sub-component as a scalability bottleneck. We then propose a new locking scheme that allows the removal of such mechanisms from the storage sub-component. This modification o↵ers performance improvement under all workloads, when compared to the standalone engine, while scalability is limited to read-only workloads. Next we addressed the scalability limitations for update-intensive workloads, and propose the reduction of locking granularity from the table level to the attribute level. This further improved performance for intensive and moderate update workloads, at a slight cost for read-only workloads. Scalability is limited to intensive-read and read-only workloads. Finally, we investigate the impact applications have on the performance of database systems, by studying how operation order inside transactions influences the database performance. We then propose a Read before Write (RbW) interaction pattern, under which transaction perform all read operations before executing write operations. The RbW pattern allowed TPC-C to achieve scalable performance on our modified engine for all workloads. Additionally, the RbW pattern allowed our modified engine to achieve scalable performance on multicores, almost up to the total number of cores, while enforcing strong isolation.

Rick Bell Family fonds, 1874-1875, 1879, 1884, 1886, 1888-1889, 1896, 1898, 1909-1910, 1939, 1945, n.d.

Lewis Tyrell married Jane Gains on August 31, 1849 in Culpeper Court House, Virginia. Jane Gains was a spinster. Lewis Tyrell died September 25, 1908 at his late residence, Vine St. and Welland Ave., St. Catharines, Ont. at the age of 81 years, 5 months. Jane Tyrell died March 1, 1886, age 64 years. Their son? William C. Tyrell died January 15, 1898, by accident in Albany, NY, age 33 years, 3 months. John William Taylor married Susan Jones were married in St. Catharines, Ont. on August 10, 1851 by William Wilkinson, a Baptist minister. On August 9, 1894 Charles Henry Bell (1871-1916), son of Stephen (1835?-1876) and Susan Bell, married Mary E. Tyrell (b. 1869?) daughter of Lewis and Alice Tyrell, in St. Catharines Ontario. By 1895 the Bell’s were living in Erie, Pennsylvania where children Delbert Otto (b. 1895) and Edna Beatrice (b. 1897) were born. By 1897 the family was back in St. Catharines where children Lewis Tyrell (b. 1899), Gertrude Cora (b. 1901), Bessie Jane (b. 1902), Charles Henry (b. 1906), Richard Nelson (b. 1911) and William Willoughby (b. 1912) were born. Charles Henry Bell operated a coal and ice business on Geneva Street. In the 1901 Census for St. Catharines, the Bell family includes the lodger Charles Henry Hall. Charles Henry Hall was born ca. 1824 in Maryland, he died in St. Catharines on November 11, 1916 at the age of 92. On October 24, 1889 Charles Hall married Susan Bell (1829-1898). The 1911 Census of Canada records Charles Henry Hall residing in the same household as Charles Henry and Mary Bell. The relationship to the householder is step-father. It is likely that after Stephen Bell’s death in 1876, his widow, Susan Bell married Hall. In 1939, Richard Nelson Bell, son of Charles Henry and Mary Tyrell Bell, married Iris Sloman. Iris (b. 22 May 1912 in Biddulph Township, Middlesex, Ontario) was the daughter of Albert (son of Joseph b. 1870 and Elizabeth Sloman, b. 1872) and Josie (Josephine Ellen) Butler Sloman of London, Ont. Josie (b. 1891) was the daughter of Everett Richard and Elizabeth McCarthy (or McCarty) Butler, of Lucan Village, Middlesex North. According to the 1911 Census of Canada, Albert, a Methodist, was a porter on the railroad. His wife, Josephine, was a Roman Catholic. Residing with Albert and Josie were Sanford and Sadie Butler and Sidney Sloman, likely siblings of Albert and Josephine. The Butler family is descended from Peter Butler, a former slave, who had settled in the Wilberforce Colony in the 1830s. Rick Bell b. 1949 in Niagara Falls, Ont. is the son of Richard Nelson Bell. In 1979, after working seven years as an orderly at the St. Catharines General Hospital while also attending night school at Niagara College, Rick Bell was hired by the Thorold Fire Dept. He became the first Black professional firefighter in Niagara. He is a founding member of the St. Catharines Junior Symphony; attended the Banff School of Fine Arts in 1966 and also performed with the Lincoln & Welland Regimental Band and several other popular local groups. Upon the discovery of this rich archive in his mothers’ attic he became passionate about sharing his Black ancestry and the contributions of fugitive slaves to the heritage Niagara with local school children. He currently resides in London, Ont.

L’un contre l’autre : la dialectique de l’auteur et de la lectrice chez Serge Doubrovsky

Depuis qu’en 1977, en quatrième de couverture de Fils, Serge Doubrovsky employa le mot « autofiction » pour décrire son roman, les études doubrovskiennes ont eu tendance à se focaliser sur les questions génériques que sous-tendait ce néologisme. Ainsi on a écarté un autre aspect, tout aussi important, de l’œuvre de l’auteur : celui du lien avec le lecteur qui, en plus d’être mis en scène dans chacune des autofictions doubrovskiennes, est associé dès Fils au rapport complexe, inextricable et conflictuel entre les sexes. « J’écris mâle, me lis femelle », dit le narrateur-écrivain ‘Serge Doubrovsky’ – lui qui vivra sous nos yeux une série d’histoires passionnelles avec des compagnes qui sont également ses lectrices. Repris d’épisode en épisode, le rapport entre le héros doubrovskien et sa compagne du moment rappelle les hypothèses de Doubrovsky dans Corneille ou la dialectique du héros (1963), inspirées de la dialectique hégélienne du Maître et de l’Esclave. Cette thèse s’attache donc à analyser la relation dialectique auteur-lectrice telle que mise en scène et approfondie dans l’ensemble de l’édifice autofictionnel. Après présentation et étude des mécanismes dont se sert l’auteur pour construire son Lecteur Modèle (Première partie), les trois autres sections principales de la thèse sont consacrées à l’analyse de Fils et Un amour de soi (1977 et 1982 ; Deuxième partie) ; du Livre brisé et de l’Après-vivre (1989 et 1994 ; Troisième partie) ; et enfin de Laissé pour conte (1999 ; Quatrième partie). Il s’agira enfin de montrer la portée non seulement littéraire, mais également sociale (la réflexion s’élargit à chaque épisode pour aborder les questions de la réception contemporaine de l’œuvre littéraire) et historique (le motif Maître-Esclave s’inscrit dans l’Histoire de l’Europe du XXe siècle, plus précisément la Seconde Guerre mondiale et la Shoah) du thème dialectique doubrovskien.

Figures de l'esprit : le soi et l'autre dans l'écriture de la séduction

Cette thèse pense la place des figures littéraires (le Cantique des cantiques, Kierkegaard, Hofmannsthal) et cinématographiques (Matador d'Almodóvar) de la séduction dans la relation entre le soi et l'autre. Elle interroge le rapport au sacré et à la transcendance que pose l'écriture de la séduction. Dans le premier chapitre, les frontières établies entre littérature et philosophie (personnage conceptuel, figure esthétique) sont interrogées à travers les figures de la séduction. À ces figures sont associées les figures de matadors, qui permettent de penser la violence extrême de la séduction et l'instant au cours duquel la conscience ne peut plus se dédoubler. Le deuxième chapitre est une réflexion, à partir des figures du maître et de l'esclave, sur le désir et la conscience de soi et de l'autre dans la séduction. Les figures tauromachiques exposent le sacrifice à l'œuvre dans la séduction. Le dialogue est ici pensé au sein de la séduction, pour saisir la place de celle-ci dans la formation de la pensée. Le troisième chapitre développe le rapport entre le soi, l'autre et le monde qu'établit la séduction. Le dandysme permet d'approcher la tension entre la matière et l'esprit que posent la séduction et son écriture. Le dialogue à l'œuvre dans la séduction est présenté comme un espace de formation. La séduction est envisagée comme séduction éthique, quête de la bonne distance, exercice spirituel. La syncope, le duende, l'extase sont décrits comme des états de conscience où la distance entre le soi et le monde, le soi et l'autre, l'esprit et la matière s'abolit. À partir de ces états, l'ouverture vers l'infini et vers la transcendance que peut poser la séduction est exposée. Dans le quatrième chapitre, la séduction est pensée comme le parfum du sacré, à travers une lecture du Cantique des cantiques. Par la séduction, l'importance du corps dans le sacré est soulignée. La place du secret et de la foi dans la séduction, dans le sacré et dans le littéraire est étudiée. La séduction permet une plongée érotique dans le monde et dans le réel, par les figures et par les images qu'elle déploie. Le savoir de la séduction est un parcours, savoir du corps et de l'esprit.

Du non-lieu au lieu : pratique spatiale et construction identitaire dans Texaco, de Patrick Chamoiseau

Le présent ouvrage propose une lecture spatiale du roman Texaco, de l’auteur martiniquais Patrick Chamoiseau. Texaco retrace l’histoire de la Martinique, principalement celle de sa population noire créolophone, depuis le XIXe siècle – époque de la traite et de l’esclavage – jusqu’à la fin du XXe siècle. Considérant que l’identité d’un individu (ou d’une communauté) est étroitement corrélée au rapport qu’entretient celui-ci avec son espace de vie, notre travail vise à mettre au jour les particularités identitaires des personnages du roman au travers d’une analyse des espaces qu’ils occupent et façonnent dans le récit. En nous appuyant sur des concepts spatiaux empruntés à Henri Lefebvre (l’espace tripartite), à Michel de Certeau (le lieu, l’espace et la pratique spatiale) et à Marc Augé (le lieu et le non-lieu), nous souhaitons montrer de quelle manière et dans quelle mesure ces différentes entités spatiales expriment, consolident ou oblitèrent l’identité singulière des personnages chamoisiens, c’est-à-dire leur « créolité ».

L'alimentation des esclaves d'origine africaine de la Basse-Louisiane française (1724-1751) : une fenêtre sur les rapports de pouvoir dans une société de frontière esclavagiste

Les pratiques reliées à l'alimentation des esclaves de la Louisiane française nous renseignent sur les conflits et les solidarités entre les groupes sociaux, et à l'intérieur de ces groupes dans une société de frontière esclavagiste. Le premier chapitre traite des deux stratégies principales des Blancs par rapport à l'alimentation des esclaves : préserver leurs esclaves et limiter leur rôle dans l'économie. Le deuxième chapitre traite du rôle des esclaves dans l'économie alimentaire comme travailleurs spécialisés et comme producteurs et distributeurs de ressources alimentaires; ces rôles leur permettent d'obtenir davantage d'autonomie dans la société coloniale. Les différentes stratégies des esclaves pour obtenir davantage d'autonomie sont à l'origine de conflits et de solidarité au sein de la population servile.

Une architecture parallèle distribuée et tolérante aux pannes pour le protocole interdomaine BGP au cœur de l’Internet

L’augmentation du nombre d’usagers de l’Internet a entraîné une croissance exponentielle dans les tables de routage. Cette taille prévoit l’atteinte d’un million de préfixes dans les prochaines années. De même, les routeurs au cœur de l’Internet peuvent facilement atteindre plusieurs centaines de connexions BGP simultanées avec des routeurs voisins. Dans une architecture classique des routeurs, le protocole BGP s’exécute comme une entité unique au sein du routeur. Cette architecture comporte deux inconvénients majeurs : l’extensibilité (scalabilité) et la fiabilité. D’un côté, la scalabilité de BGP est mesurable en termes de nombre de connexions et aussi par la taille maximale de la table de routage que l’interface de contrôle puisse supporter. De l’autre côté, la fiabilité est un sujet critique dans les routeurs au cœur de l’Internet. Si l’instance BGP s’arrête, toutes les connexions seront perdues et le nouvel état de la table de routage sera propagé tout au long de l’Internet dans un délai de convergence non trivial. Malgré la haute fiabilité des routeurs au cœur de l’Internet, leur résilience aux pannes est augmentée considérablement et celle-ci est implantée dans la majorité des cas via une redondance passive qui peut limiter la scalabilité du routeur. Dans cette thèse, on traite les deux inconvénients en proposant une nouvelle approche distribuée de BGP pour augmenter sa scalabilité ainsi que sa fiabilité sans changer la sémantique du protocole. L’architecture distribuée de BGP proposée dans la première contribution est faite pour satisfaire les deux contraintes : scalabilité et fiabilité. Ceci est accompli en exploitant adéquatement le parallélisme et la distribution des modules de BGP sur plusieurs cartes de contrôle. Dans cette contribution, les fonctionnalités de BGP sont divisées selon le paradigme « maître-esclave » et le RIB (Routing Information Base) est dupliqué sur plusieurs cartes de contrôle. Dans la deuxième contribution, on traite la tolérance aux pannes dans l’architecture élaborée dans la première contribution en proposant un mécanisme qui augmente la fiabilité. De plus, nous prouvons analytiquement dans cette contribution qu’en adoptant une telle architecture distribuée, la disponibilité de BGP sera augmentée considérablement versus une architecture monolithique. Dans la troisième contribution, on propose une méthode de partitionnement de la table de routage que nous avons appelé DRTP pour diviser la table de BGP sur plusieurs cartes de contrôle. Cette contribution vise à augmenter la scalabilité de la table de routage et la parallélisation de l’algorithme de recherche (Best Match Prefix) en partitionnant la table de routage sur plusieurs nœuds physiquement distribués.