Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Robust and powerful software instrumentation tools are essential for program analysis tasks such as profiling, performance evaluation, and bug detection. To meet this need, we have developed a new instrumentation system called Pin. Our goals are to provide easy-to-use, portable, transparent, and efficient instrumentation. Instrumentation tools (called Pintools) are written in C/C++ using Pin's rich API. Pin follows the model of ATOM, allowing the tool writer to analyze an application at the instruction level without the need for detailed knowledge of the underlying instruction set. The API is designed to be architecture independent whenever possible, making Pintools source compatible across different architectures. However, a Pintool can access architecture-specific details when necessary. Instrumentation with Pin is mostly transparent as the application and Pintool observe the application's original, uninstrumented behavior. Pin uses dynamic compilation to instrument executables while they are running. For efficiency, Pin uses several techniques, including inlining, register re-allocation, liveness analysis, and instruction scheduling to optimize instrumentation. This fully automated approach delivers significantly better instrumentation performance than similar tools. For example, Pin is 3.3x faster than Valgrind and 2x faster than DynamoRIO for basic-block counting. To illustrate Pin's versatility, we describe two Pintools in daily use to analyze production software. Pin is publicly available for Linux platforms on four architectures: IA32 (32-bit x86), EM64T (64-bit x86), Itanium®, and ARM. In the ten months since Pin 2 was released in July 2004, there have been over 3000 downloads from its website.

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Pin: building customized program analysis tools with dynamic instrumentation

Evidence from clinical and experimental studies indicates that macrophages promote solid-tumour progression and metastasis. Macrophages are educated by the tumour microenvironment, so that they adopt a trophic role that facilitates angiogenesis, matrix breakdown and tumour-cell motility — all of which are elements of the metastatic process. During an inflammatory response, macrophages also produce many compounds — ranging from mutagenic oxygen and nitrogen radicals to angiogenic factors — that can contribute to cancer initiation and promotion. Macrophages therefore represent an important drug target for cancer prevention and cure.

Tumour-educated macrophages promote tumour progression and metastasis

National Institute of Standards and Technology における超伝導研究及び生活

Dynamic binary instrumentation (DBI) frameworks make it easy to build dynamic binary analysis (DBA) tools such as checkers and profilers. Much of the focus on DBI frameworks has been on performance; little attention has been paid to their capabilities. As a result, we believe the potential of DBI has not been fully exploited.In this paper we describe Valgrind, a DBI framework designed for building heavyweight DBA tools. We focus on its unique support for shadow values-a powerful but previously little-studied and difficult-to-implement DBA technique, which requires a tool to shadow every register and memory value with another value that describes it. This support accounts for several crucial design features that distinguish Valgrind from other DBI frameworks. Because of these features, lightweight tools built with Valgrind run comparatively slowly, but Valgrind can be used to build more interesting, heavyweight tools that are difficult or impossible to build with other DBI frameworks such as Pin and DynamoRIO.

/pdf/valgrind-a-framework-for-heavyweight-dynamic-binary-83md0bpji5.pdf

Valgrind: a framework for heavyweight dynamic binary instrumentation

Understanding the relationship between the performance of the on-chip processor caches and the overall performance of the processor is critical for both hardware design and software program optimization. While this relationship is well understood for conventional processors, it is not understood for new multithreaded processors that hide a workload's memory latency by executing instructions from several threads in parallel. In this paper we present a model for estimating processor throughput as a function of the cache hierarchy performance. Our model has a closed-form solution, is robust against a range of workloads and input parameters, and gives estimates of processor throughput that are within 13% of measured values for heterogeneous workloads. We demonstrate how this model can be used in an operating system scheduler tailored for multithreaded processor systems.

/pdf/modeling-the-effects-of-memory-hierarchy-performance-on-2osnu3pjaa.pdf

Modeling the Effects of Memory Hierarchy Performance on Throughput of Multithreaded Processors

The Central Niger Delta is made up of a network of rivers and creeks that constitute the inland surface waters. These surface waters have historically influenced settlement patterns and are of diverse use to residents of the Central Niger Delta. Surface water like many ecological system are complex, whose complexity has been associated with seasonal variability. Traditional knowledge (TK), traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and the traditional eco-livelihood knowledge (TELK) of residents of four rural communities in the Central Niger Delta have been explored in developing a river use profile of rural communities of the Central Niger Delta. A questionnaire survey has been carried out in four communities, two each from the Otuoke and Kolo Creeks. The result shows that river use varies across seasons and affected by: physico-chemical water quality and characteristics of surface water; the hydrological characteristics; the biological/ecological characteristics; cultural use and demand; need for development projects; and access to this vital resource. Fishing constitute one of the major livelihood source in the Central Niger Delta and the TELK of fishers in the sample communities have specifically been explored to understanding fishing patterns across seasons. The five seasons identified from this study are: flood season; flood recession season; dry season; early rainy season; and rainy season. Therefore, the thesis of this paper is that there is the need to balance the current usage of surface water in the developing world such as the Central Niger Delta with the demand for development as well as future use if development is to meet the criteria for equitable development. The river use profile could be a promising tool in planning for equitable development.

/pdf/river-use-profile-of-the-central-niger-delta-based-on-5efkktv62a.pdf

River use profile of the Central Niger Delta based on traditional eco-livelihood knowledge (TELK)

There is a sacred relationship between Native Americans and the environment. The importance of those sacred beliefs in water rights in the United States (US) is examined through a series of case studies. A thorough review of available literature displays a trend toward less dependence on the US for representation and a greater recognition of Native American traditions. The increased role of Native Americans in water rights quantification and resource development provides greater appreciation and understanding of their traditions and beliefs.

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The Native American voice in United States water rights

Atmosphere - Surface H2O Exchange to Sustain the Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL) on Mars

A method for ensuring the integrity of a receiving system in a distributed computing environment includes receiving information from a transmitting system. The method also includes testing whether the information is preverified information. If the information is not preverified, the method includes verifying the information or rejecting receipt of the information. If the information is preverified, the method includes testing if the information was received from a trusted transmitting system. If the information was received from a trusted transmitting system, the method includes accepting receipt of the information without reverifying. If the information was not received from a trusted transmitting system, the method includes verifying the information or rejecting receipt of the information.

Michael D. Smith

Papers

Modeling the Effects of Memory Hierarchy Performance on Throughput of Multithreaded Processors

River use profile of the Central Niger Delta based on traditional eco-livelihood knowledge (TELK)

The Native American voice in United States water rights

Atmosphere - Surface H2O Exchange to Sustain the Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL) on Mars

Method and system for accepting preverified information