Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s "Garbage, The City, and Death". A Four Act Scandal in Post-war Germany

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Garbage, The City, and Death. A Four Act Scandal in Post-war Germany The paper explores the dramaturgy of the scandals around the play Garbage, The City and Death (Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod) by German playwright, theatre and film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Published in 1976, the play immediately caused a scandal in West Germany, because it was accused of reproducing anti-Semitic stereotypes. The presentation sheds light on the different phases of the scandal and their historical and cultural contexts in post-war Germany – starting as a literary scandal in 1976, being transformed into a theatre scandal in the 1980ies and finally being dissolved by the German premiere in 2009. The paper is structured as follows: Act One: The Literary Scandal. Destroying Fassbinder’s Garbage, Act Two: Preventing the Staging of the Play, Act Three: Blocking the Opening Night, Act Four: Performing the Play in Germany. By analysing the dramaturgical structure of this specific scandal, the paper discusses the following hypotheses: 1. Scandals arise through the circulation of decontextualised information in public. This is due to either a lack of information about the actual object or incident being scandalised or a lack of information about the context of the object or incident. This lack is caused by the logic of the scandal itself: Because the play or the performance is prohibited, it has been withdrawn from the public, making it impossible to form a well-founded opinion on the controversy. 2. The scandal is driven forward by an emotionalising rhetoric built around the decontextualised information. 3. Once the gap of information is filled, the scandalising rhetoric turns into a rhetoric of irrelevance: Reviews of the first performance of Garbage, The City and Death in Germany considered the play hardly a matter of public concern.

Diagnosing synaesthesia with online colour pickers: Maximising sensitivity and specificity

The most commonly used method for formally assessing grapheme-colour synaesthesia (i.e., experiencing colours in response to letter and/or number stimuli) involves selecting colours from a large colour palette on several occasions and measuring consistency of the colours selected. However, the ability to diagnose synaesthesia using this method depends on several factors that have not been directly contrasted. These include the type of colour space used (e.g., RGB, HSV, CIELUV, CIELAB) and different measures of consistency (e.g., city block and Euclidean distance in colour space). This study aims to find the most reliable way of diagnosing grapheme-colour synaesthesia based on maximising sensitivity (i.e., ability of a test to identify true synaesthetes) and specificity (i.e., ability of a test to identify true non-synaesthetes). We show, applying ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristics) to binary classification of a large sample of self-declared synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes, that the consistency criterion (i.e., cut-off value) for diagnosing synaesthesia is considerably higher than the current standard in the field. We also show that methods based on perceptual CIELUV and CIELAB colour models (rather than RGB and HSV colour representations) and Euclidean distances offer an even greater sensitivity and specificity than most currently used measures. Together, these findings offer improved heuristics for the behavioural assessment of grapheme-colour synaesthesia.

Illinois Feeding of Garbage to Animals Act /

Cover title.

Volume-based garbage collection fees : the Illinois experience /

"Presented at the ASTSWMO 1992 National Solid Waste Forum July 20-22, 1992, Portland, OR."

Garbage collection optimization for non uniform memory access architectures

Cache-coherent non uniform memory access (ccNUMA) architecture is a standard design pattern for contemporary multicore processors, and future generations of architectures are likely to be NUMA. NUMA architectures create new challenges for managed runtime systems. Memory-intensive applications use the system’s distributed memory banks to allocate data, and the automatic memory manager collects garbage left in these memory banks. The garbage collector may need to access remote memory banks, which entails access latency overhead and potential bandwidth saturation for the interconnection between memory banks. This dissertation makes five significant contributions to garbage collection on NUMA systems, with a case study implementation using the Hotspot Java Virtual Machine. It empirically studies data locality for a Stop-The-World garbage collector when tracing connected objects in NUMA heaps. First, it identifies a locality richness which exists naturally in connected objects that contain a root object and its reachable set— ‘rooted sub-graphs’. Second, this dissertation leverages the locality characteristic of rooted sub-graphs to develop a new NUMA-aware garbage collection mechanism. A garbage collector thread processes a local root and its reachable set, which is likely to have a large number of objects in the same NUMA node. Third, a garbage collector thread steals references from sibling threads that run on the same NUMA node to improve data locality. This research evaluates the new NUMA-aware garbage collector using seven benchmarks of an established real-world DaCapo benchmark suite. In addition, evaluation involves a widely used SPECjbb benchmark and Neo4J graph database Java benchmark, as well as an artificial benchmark. The results of the NUMA-aware garbage collector on a multi-hop NUMA architecture show an average of 15% performance improvement. Furthermore, this performance gain is shown to be as a result of an improved NUMA memory access in a ccNUMA system. Fourth, the existing Hotspot JVM adaptive policy for configuring the number of garbage collection threads is shown to be suboptimal for current NUMA machines. The policy uses outdated assumptions and it generates a constant thread count. In fact, the Hotspot JVM still uses this policy in the production version. This research shows that the optimal number of garbage collection threads is application-specific and configuring the optimal number of garbage collection threads yields better collection throughput than the default policy. Fifth, this dissertation designs and implements a runtime technique, which involves heuristics from dynamic collection behavior to calculate an optimal number of garbage collector threads for each collection cycle. The results show an average of 21% improvements to the garbage collection performance for DaCapo benchmarks.

Experiences with an Object-Oriented, Multi-Stage Language

Metaphor is a multi-stage programming language extension to an imperative, object-oriented language in the style of C# or Java. This paper discusses some issues we faced when applying multi-stage language design concepts to an imperative base language and run-time environment. The issues range from dealing with pervasive references and open code to garbage collection and implementing cross-stage persistence.

Darjeeling, a feature-rich VM for the resource poor

The programming and retasking of sensor nodes could benefit greatly from the use of a virtual machine (VM) since byte code is compact, can be loaded on demand, and interpreted on a heterogeneous set of devices. The challenge is to ensure good programming tools and a small footprint for the virtual machine to meet the memory constraints of typical WSN platforms. To this end we propose Darjeeling, a virtual machine modelled after the Java VM and capable of executing a substantial subset of the Java language, but designed specifically to run on 8- and 16-bit microcontrollers with 2 - 10 KB of RAM. The Darjeeling VM uses a 16- rather than a 32-bit architecture, which is more efficient on the targeted platforms. Darjeeling features a novel memory organisation with strict separation of reference from non-reference types which eliminates the need for run-time type inspection in the underlying compacting garbage collector. Darjeeling uses a linked stack model that provides light-weight threads, and supports synchronisation. The VM has been implemented on three different platforms and was evaluated with micro benchmarks and a real-world application. The latter includes a pure Java implementation of the collection tree routing protocol conveniently programmed as a set of cooperating threads, and a reimplementation of an existing environmental monitoring application. The results show that Darjeeling is a viable solution for deploying large-scale heterogeneous sensor networks. Copyright 2009 ACM.

Health protection

Our understanding of how the environment can impact human health has evolved and expanded over the centuries, with concern and interest dating back to ancient times. For example, over 4000 years ago, a civilisation in northern India tried to protect the health of its citizens by constructing and positioning buildings according to strict building laws, by having bathrooms and drains, and by having paved streets with a sewerage system (Rosen 1993). In more recent times, the ‘industrial revolution’ played a dominant role in shaping the modern world, and with it the modern public health system. This era was signified by rapid progress in technology, the growth of transportation and the expansion of the market economy, which lead to the organisation of industry into a factory system. This meant that labour had to be brought to the factories and by the 1820s, poverty and social distress (including overcrowding and infrequent sewage and garbage disposal) was more widespread than ever. These circumstances, therefore, lead to the rise of the ‘sanitary revolution’ and the birth of modern public health (Rosen 1993). The sanitary revolution has also been described as constituting the beginning of the first wave of environmental concern, which continued until after World War 2 when major advances in engineering and chemistry substantially changed the face of industry, particularly the chemical sector. The second wave of environmental concern came in the mid to late 20th century and was dominated by the environmental or ecology movement. A landmark in this era was the 1962 publication of the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. This identified for the first time the dramatic effects on the ecosystem of the widespread use of the organochlorine pesticide, DDT. The third wave of environmental concern commenced in the 1980s and continues today. The accelerated rate of economic development, the substantial increase in the world population and the globalisation of trade have dramatically changed the production methods and demand for goods in both developed and developing countries. This has lead to the rise of ‘sustainable development’ as a key driver in environmental planning and economic development (Yassi et al 2001). The protection of health has, therefore, been a hallmark of human history and is the cornerstone of public health practice. This chapter introduces environmental health and how it is managed in Australia, including a discussion of the key generic management tools. A number of significant environmental health issues and how they are specifically managed are then discussed, and the chapter concludes by discussing sustainable development and its links with environmental health.

Demo Abstract: A Java compatible virtual machine for wireless sensor nodes

The Java programming language has potentially significant advantages for wireless sensor nodes but there is currently no feature-rich, open source virtual machine available. In this paper we present Darjeeling, a system comprising offline tools and a memory efficient run-time. The offline post-compiler tool analyzes, links and consolidates Java class files into loadable modules. The runtime implements a modified Java VM that supports multithreading and is designed specifically to operate in constrained execution environments such as wireless sensor network nodes and supports inheritance, threads, garbage collection, and loadable modules. We have demonstrated Java running on AVR128 and MSP430 microcontrollers at speeds of up to 70,000 JVM instructions per second.

Darjeeling, a Java compatible virtual machine for microcontrollers

The Java programming language enjoys widespread popularity on platforms ranging from servers to mobile phones. While efforts have been made to run Java on microcontroller platforms, there is currently no feature-rich, open source virtual machine available. In this paper we present Darjeeling, a system comprising offline tools and a memory efficient runtime. The offline post-compiler tool analyzes, links and consolidates Java class files into loadable modules. The runtime implements a modified Java VM that supports multithreading and is designed specifically to operate in constrained execution environments such as wireless sensor network nodes. Darjeeling improves upon existing work by supporting inheritance, threads, garbage collection, and loadable modules while keeping memory usage to a minimum. We have demonstrated Java running on AVR128 and MSP430 micro-controllers at speeds of up to 70,000 JVM instructions per second.

Green criminology and dirty collar crime

As a contribution to literature drawing together green criminology and studies of organised and corporate crime, this paper provides a case study of crimes and public health harms linked to the Naples garbage disposal crisis. The context is the inability of modern consumer society to cope with the problem of mass production of waste. In turn this leads to opportunities for both legal and criminal entrepreneurs to offer services that promise but fail to ‘dispose’ of the problem. The analysis draws upon environmental law and classic studies of organised crime.