Tending the Vineyard: Maritime Religion on Martha's Vineyard from 1824-1978

The first part of this paper will give a brief introduction to maritime missiology, the second section will trace the beginnings of the Boston Seaman’s Friend Society in the nineteenth century and the third will focus on the Vineyard Haven branch of that work well into the twentieth century. Using source material from the American Seamen’s Friend Society - there is a 5,000 document collection of the ASFS papers in the G.W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport, the Boston Seaman’s Friend Society - whose papers are mostly in the Congregational House on Beacon Hill in Boston, and other secondary works from the nineteenth and twentieth century. I am especially indebted to George Wiseman’s book, They Kept the Lower Lights Burning, Wiseman was the pastor of Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church in Oak Bluff during WWII and the son-in-law of Austin Tower. This presentation will look at the many facets that made up religious work among seafarers.

Framework for risk assessment for maritime transportation systems

Maritime accidents involving ships carrying passengers may pose a high risk with respect to human casualties. For effective risk mitigation, an insight into the process of risk escalation is needed. This requires a proactive approach when it comes to risk modelling for maritime transportation systems. Most of the existing models are based on historical data on maritime accidents, and thus they can be considered reactive instead of proactive. This paper introduces a systematic, transferable and proactive framework estimating the risk for maritime transportation systems, meeting the requirements stemming from the adopted formal definition of risk. The framework focuses on ship-ship collisions in the open sea, with a RoRo/Passenger ship (RoPax) being considered as the struck ship. First, it covers an identification of the events that follow a collision between two ships in the open sea, and, second, it evaluates the probabilities of these events, concluding by determining the severity of a collision. The risk framework is developed with the use of Bayesian Belief Networks and utilizes a set of analytical methods for the estimation of the risk model parameters. The model can be run with the use of GeNIe software package. Finally, a case study is presented, in which the risk framework developed here is applied to a maritime transportation system operating in the Gulf of Finland (GoF). The results obtained are compared to the historical data and available models, in which a RoPax was involved in a collision, and good agreement with the available records is found.

Soil characteristics of cryosols from two sites on King George Island, maritime Antarctica

This study presents soil temperature and moisture regimes from March 2008 to January 2009 for two active layer monitoring (CALM-S) sites at King George Island, Maritime Antarctica. The monitoring sites were installed during the summer of 2008 and consist of thermistors (accuracy of ±0.2 °C), arranged vertically with probes at different depths and one soil moisture probe placed at the bottommost layer at each site (accuracy of ± 2.5%), recording data at hourly intervals in a high capacity datalogger. The active layer thermal regime in the studied period for both soils was typical of periglacial environments, with extreme variation in surface temperature during summer resulting in frequent freeze and thaw cycles. The great majority of the soil temperature readings during the eleven month period was close to 0 °C, resulting in low values of freezing and thawing degree days. Both soils have poor thermal apparent diffusivity but values were higher for the soil from Fildes Peninsula. The different moisture regimes for the studied soils were attributed to soil texture, with the coarser soil presenting much lower water content during all seasons. Differences in water and ice contents may explain the contrasting patterns of freezing of the studied soils, being two-sided for the coarser soil and one-sided for the loamy soil. The temperature profile of the studied soils during the eleven month period indicates that the active layer reached a maximum depth of approximately 92 cm at Potter and 89 cm at Fildes. Longer data sets are needed for more conclusive analysis on active layer behaviour in this part of Antarctica.

Chapter 2 On the usage of the measurements of geographical concentration and specialization with areal data

Measures have been developed to understand tendencies in the distribution of economic activity. The merits of these measures are in the convenience of data collection and processing. In this interim report, investigating the property of such measures to determine the geographical spread of economic activities, we summarize the merits and limitations of measures, and make clear that we must apply caution in their usage. As a first trial to access areal data, this project focus on administrative areas, not on point data and input-output data. Firm level data is not within the scope of this article. The rest of this article is organized as follows. In Section 2, we touch on the the limitations and problems associated with the measures and areal data. Specific measures are introduced in Section 3, and applied in Section 4. The conclusion summarizes the findings and discusses future work.

Ground maritime structure interaction. Recent failures in inner gravity constructions on the Spanish Coastline

A maritime construction is usually a slender line in the ocean.It is usual to see just its narrow surface strip and not analyse the large amount of submerged material the latter is supporting.Without doubt,it is the ground to which a notable load is transmitted in an environment subjected to periodic,alternating stresses,dynamic forces which the sea's media constitute. Both an outer and inner maritime construction works in a complex fashion.A granular solid(breakwater)breathes with the incident wave flow,dissipating part of the wave energy between its gaps.The backflow tries to extract the different items from the solid block,setting a balance between effective and neutral tensions that follow Terzaghui's principle. On some occasions,fluidification of the armour layer has caused the breakwater to collapse(Sines,Portugal,February 1978).On others,siphoning or liquefaction of sand supporting monoliths(vertical breakwaters)lead them to destruction or collapse(New Barcelona Harbour Mouth,Spain,November 2001). This is why the ground-force-structure interaction is a complicated analysis with joint design tools still in an incipient state. The purpose of this article is to describe two singular failures in inner maritime constructions in Spain deriving from ground problems(Malaga,July 2004and Barcelona,January 2007).They occurred recently and the causes are the subject of reflection and analysis.

EuroPineDB: a high-coverage web database for maritime pine transcriptome

Pinus pinaster is an economically and ecologically important species that is becoming a woody gymnosperm model. Its enormous genome size makes whole-genome sequencing approaches are hard to apply. Therefore, the expressed portion of the genome has to be characterised and the results and annotations have to be stored in dedicated databases.

Abstract multiple specialization and its application to program parallelization.

Program specialization optimizes programs for known valúes of the input. It is often the case that the set of possible input valúes is unknown, or this set is infinite. However, a form of specialization can still be performed in such cases by means of abstract interpretation, specialization then being with respect to abstract valúes (substitutions), rather than concrete ones. We study the múltiple specialization of logic programs based on abstract interpretation. This involves in principie, and based on information from global analysis, generating several versions of a program predicate for different uses of such predicate, optimizing these versions, and, finally, producing a new, "multiply specialized" program. While múltiple specialization has received theoretical attention, little previous evidence exists on its practicality. In this paper we report on the incorporation of múltiple specialization in a parallelizing compiler and quantify its effects. A novel approach to the design and implementation of the specialization system is proposed. The resulting implementation techniques result in identical specializations to those of the best previously proposed techniques but require little or no modification of some existing abstract interpreters. Our results show that, using the proposed techniques, the resulting "abstract múltiple specialization" is indeed a relevant technique in practice. In particular, in the parallelizing compiler application, a good number of run-time tests are eliminated and invariants extracted automatically from loops, resulting generally in lower overheads and in several cases in increased speedups.

Removing superfluous versions in polyvariant specialization of prolog programs.

Polyvariant specialization allows generating múltiple versions of a procedure, which can then be separately optimized for different uses. Since allowing a high degree of polyvariance often results in more optimized code, polyvariant specializers, such as most partial evaluators, can genérate a large number of versions. This can produce unnecessarily large residual programs. Also, large programs can be slower due to cache miss effects. A possible solution to this problem is to introduce a minimization step which identifies sets of equivalent versions, and replace all occurrences of such versions by a single one. In this work we present a unifying view of the problem of superfluous polyvariance. It includes both partial deduction and abstract múltiple specialization. As regards partial deduction, we extend existing approaches in several ways. First, previous work has dealt with puré logic programs and a very limited class of builtins. Herein we propose an extensión to traditional characteristic trees which can be used in the presence of calis to external predicates. This includes all builtins, librarles, other user modules, etc. Second, we propose the possibility of collapsing versions which are not strictly equivalent. This allows trading time for space and can be useful in the context of embedded and pervasive systems. This is done by residualizing certain computations for external predicates which would otherwise be performed at specialization time. Third, we provide an experimental evaluation of the potential gains achievable using minimization which leads to interesting conclusions.

A generic framework for the analysis and specialization of kogic programs

The relationship between abstract interpretation [2] and partial evaluation [5] has received considerable attention and (partial) integrations have been proposed starting from both the partial deduction (see e.g. [6] and its references) and abstract interpretation perspectives. Abstract interpretation-based analyzers (such as the CiaoPP analyzer [9,4]) generally compute a program analysis graph [1] in order to propagate (abstract) call and success information by performing fixpoint computations when needed. On the other hand, partial deduction methods [7] incorporate powerful techniques for on-line specialization including (concrete) call propagation and unfolding.

Abstract specialization and its application to program parallelization

Program specialization optimizes programs for known valúes of the input. It is often the case that the set of possible input valúes is unknown, or this set is infinite. However, a form of specialization can still be performed in such cases by means of abstract interpretation, specialization then being with respect to abstract valúes (substitutions), rather than concrete ones. This paper reports on the application of abstract múltiple specialization to automatic program parallelization in the &-Prolog compiler. Abstract executability, the main concept underlying abstract specialization, is formalized, the design of the specialization system presented, and a non-trivial example of specialization in automatic parallelization is given.

Implementation of multiple specialization in logic programs

We study the múltiple specialization of logic programs based on abstract interpretation. This involves in general generating several versions of a program predícate for different uses of such predícate, making use of information obtained from global analysis performed by an abstract interpreter, and finally producing a new, "multiply specialized" program. While the topic of múltiple specialization of logic programs has received considerable theoretical attention, it has never been actually incorporated in a compiler and its effects quantified. We perform such a study in the context of a parallelizing compiler and show that it is indeed a relevant technique in practice. Also, we propose an implementation technique which has the same power as the strongest of the previously proposed techniques but requires little or no modification of an existing abstract interpreter.

A technique for recursive invariance detection and selective program specialization

This paper presents a technique for achieving a class of optimizations related to the reduction of checks within cycles. The technique uses both Program Transformation and Abstract Interpretation. After a ñrst pass of an abstract interpreter which detects simple invariants, program transformation is used to build a hypothetical situation that simpliñes some predicates that should be executed within the cycle. This transformation implements the heuristic hypothesis that once conditional tests hold they may continué doing so recursively. Specialized versions of predicates are generated to detect and exploit those cases in which the invariance may hold. Abstract interpretation is then used again to verify the truth of such hypotheses and conñrm the proposed simpliñcation. This allows optimizations that go beyond those possible with only one pass of the abstract interpreter over the original program, as is normally the case. It also allows selective program specialization using a standard abstract interpreter not speciñcally designed for this purpose, thus simplifying the design of this already complex module of the compiler. In the paper, a class of programs amenable to such optimization is presented, along with some examples and an evaluation of the proposed techniques in some application áreas such as floundering detection and reducing run-time tests in automatic logic program parallelization. The analysis of the examples presented has been performed automatically by an implementation of the technique using existing abstract interpretation and program transformation tools.

Abstract specialization and its applications

The aim of program specialization is to optimize programs by exploiting certain knowledge about the context in which the program will execute. There exist many program manipulation techniques which allow specializing the program in different ways. Among them, one of the best known techniques is partial evaluation, often referred to simply as program specialization, which optimizes programs by specializing them for (partially) known input data. In this work we describe abstract specialization, a technique whose main features are: (1) specialization is performed with respect to "abstract" valúes rather than "concrete" ones, and (2) abstract interpretation rather than standard interpretation of the program is used in order to propágate information about execution states. The concept of abstract specialization is at the heart of the specialization system in CiaoPP, the Ciao system preprocessor. In this paper we present a unifying view of the different specialization techniques used in CiaoPP and discuss their potential applications by means of examples. The applications discussed include program parallelization, optimization of dynamic scheduling (concurreney), and integration of partial evaluation techniques.