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A Sense of Summer
The start of the summer term is always different from the other terms. There is a more relaxed, congenial atmosphere on campus. Students lounge outside; and green and flowering portions of campus signal urban summer. I hope that this term becomes a time for you to complete projects that are still undone and contemplate new and exciting academic, creative, and research initiatives, to enjoy seasonal favorite spots, and to vary your pace. The Provost's Office will be busy working with colleges to prepare for the busy fall term and many new students--more than we originally anticipated. In light of the sluggish job market and the unfortunate cutbacks among so many universities, this is a welcome problem to tackle, and we do so with relish.
Even as we prepare for the coming academic year, we are engaged in two special projects, each of which has the power to transform our university. We are getting to know our new colleagues in the Academy of Natural Sciences, learning about its rich research history and its historically important and vast collections. We are exploring new academic programs our affiliation will spawn, as well as ways of engaging students and faculty with the rich collections, library holdings, and research ongoing at the Academy. (Rebecca Ingalls' feature, focusing on Professor Ken Lacovara in this Newsletter issue, details some of its riches.) To help acquaint Drexel faculty with this storied institution, our office is arranging for late afternoon tours of the Academy, for which we'll provide round-trip transportation, led by its scientists and curators, and culminating in receptions during which Drexel and Academy colleagues may get to know one another. Several trips will be scheduled this summer and several during the fall. We'll be announcing the details shortly.
The second transforming project involves the drafting of our Drexel Strategic Plan, 2012-2017. Some 60 faculty and professional staff were involved in focusing on key questions that, for the first time in our history, have been widely discussed, setting the foundation for the plan. Issues discussed included growth and scale, developing a strategic approach to research, enriching the student experience, improving teaching and learning, and addressing infrastructure issues and master planning. White papers produced by five task forces formed the basis for a two-day retreat, attended by over 50 faculty, professional staff, and administrators. Phase II Task Forces are now forming to take the key ideas and develop specific initiatives designed to implement them. We'll also be putting budget projections and metrics for assessment against these initiatives. We expect to involve an additional 60 or so faculty and professional staff in this effort. The resulting draft strategic plan will then be available for comment and review by our community. Please visit the interactive Strategic Plan website often, as content changes and there's a portal for your comments, which we welcome.
I very much hope you will take advantage of the opportunities to visit and become involved in some way with the Academy and also that you will participate in helping us create a strategic plan that truly represents the aspirations of all in our community for this great university. I hope, too, that your summer is filled with plans fulfilled, joyous times with friends and family, and visits to summer places you love.
In This Issue...
Opening of the Library Learning Terrace
Over 250 students attended festivities held on Friday, June 3, 2011 to mark the opening of the innovative new Library Learning Terrace. To the sounds of Drexel student DJ Mike Mannix, attendees donned glow stick bracelets while waiting for the twilight countdown to enter the much anticipated campus learning environment.
The Library Learning Terrace is located at the base of the Race Street resident hall, in the heart of the campus residential community. The 3,000 square foot space is furnished with seating for 75 and moveable tables and white boards to allow students to create spaces for group or individual learning, as needed. This is a key venue for the Libraries to explore the new concept of its role in creating environments to facilitate the development of independent learning skills, especially in achieving competencies in information literacy, critical thinking and communications. During the summer, librarians will work to develop programs in partnership with tutors from the Writing Center, and other campus experts in technologies and pedagogy that will offer focused coaching for students to develop these learning skills.
The Library Learning Terrace responds to a clear campus need for more library spaces, which was identified in a space assessment report issued in fall 2010. By October, President Fry authorized the design and construction of this space, an idea recommended by Bob Francis, Vice President, University Facilities. In November 2010, the Libraries held two town hall meetings, which were attending by over 200 students, who offered feedback to the idea of library learning spaces and confirmed an enthusiastic interest in the Libraries. Special thanks are extended to Bob and his colleagues in Facilities, especially Kimberly Miller Director, Planning Design and Construction and Gail Holmes Assistant Director, Interiors, Project Administration who worked with architect Erdy McHenry and contractors to quickly create this space. The June 3 event launched one week of round-the-clock student access to this space to prepare for finals. Early observations of an immediately heavily used Library Learning Terrace confirm that Drexel students are serious learners and gratefully welcomed this added environment.
For more information and pictures visit www.library.drexel.edu/about/learning-terrace.
Faculty Features
For the Love and Labor of Science: Lacovara Brings the Past Back to Lifeby Rebecca Ingalls
Dr. Ken Lacovara leads me from the lobby of the Academy of Natural Sciences directly into Dinosaur Hall. Right away, he's delightfully listing the statistics about the fossils on display, and I'm furiously writing in my notebook. I'm mesmerized, surrounded by theropods in mid-action, not the least of which is the massive, majestic skeletal mount of the Tyrannosaurus rex. I apologize for my wide-eyed stare at everything around me. "Oh, that's okay," he says. "If you're not in awe here you're dead." And yet, though we're surrounded by these extraordinary creatures whose existence has long past, the Academy brilliantly brings them back to life so that we can vividly imagine how they might have lived.
Indeed, the Academy itself, soon to be known as the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, is world-renowned. The first natural history museum in North and South America, the Academy houses 17 million specimens, holds 1.5% of the world's type specimens, and contains many of the world's first discovered dinosaur fossils. "In many ways," argues Lacovara, "dinosaur paleontology started here." And Lacovara, Associate Professor of Biology at Drexel, plays a groundbreaking role in continuing to bring the awe-inspiring past before us into the present.
After making several journeys to Patagonia, in southern Argentina, over the last seven years, Lacovara returned to the States with something spectacular: a new species of dinosaur. With an estimated full body weight of sixty tons—he offers perspective: a full-grown bull African elephant is five tons (so is a monster truck)-this creature is characterized in part by the "spatula-shaped" muscle attachments beneath its colossal tail and up to ten other unique features. How new is "new"? Lacovara explains, "There are no referential pieces for some aspects of these fossils. New genus, new species—it's an extraordinary occurrence. Moreover, the specimen will be the southern-most and second-most massive dinosaur skeleton ever found. And it is, by far, the most complete super-massive dinosaur skeleton ever discovered." Lacovara and his team have shipped sixteen tons up to the States, but there are hundreds of bones yet to be excavated back in Patagonia.
What can it possibly be like to unearth something this amazing? Lacovara describes the process: "You just walk to prospect. Usually you find an isolated bit. But this one," he reflects as his face lights up, "you could see the creature lying there. No one's ever seen it, and five years later, we're still finding bones." Five years, five trips to Patagonia for two months at a time, ten airport stops for each round trip, twenty-nine exportation permits that took years to obtain, and five different ports for the fossil container on its journey up to Philadelphia. Lacovara muses, "You can track the container online. I would be up in the middle of the night seeing where my bones were!"
Before their journey to Philadelphia, the fossils are "jacketed," wrapped in plaster and burlap to stabilize the fragments. Back in the lab, the bones take up almost the whole space, and Lacovara—intuitive teacher that he is—reads my face: "Go ahead. You can touch it." I lay my hand on a seven-foot femur bone. "Now," he says, "add to that another four feet for the tibia, a foot for the knee, another three for the toes. And that's just one leg. The whole dinosaur likely stood as tall as 2.5 stories." Working with several graduate students and volunteers, Lacovara's team now has the job of unjacketing the bones and putting the skeleton together back at the Academy lab. "It's painstaking work," he explains, "and volunteers are highly trained." In fact, in addition to training in anatomical awareness, volunteers are asked to reassemble an eggshell broken in a multitude of places.
The challenge of this intricate reassembly doesn't compare, however, to the arduous work of digging up those bones. "It's hard to explain the physical effort and toll," Lacovara says. "Friends don't recognize me when I get home from the field. And yet," he says, "I'm happiest doing the physical work." And as with all labors of love, there is the sheer mystery of it that is unassailably captivating. In this particular labor of excavating and resuscitating the past and of trying to wrap one's mind around how it all happened, there is a humility that draws Lacovara close to the work. Late at night, after the team had thoroughly swept the quarry and everyone had turned in, Lacovara would stay up and "spend a few quiet moments with the dinosaurs." "When you study nature," he says, "it's very hard to be arrogant."
This is the bit that strikes me most about my interview with Ken Lacovara. We have many reasons to celebrate his remarkable discovery in Patagonia, its presence here in Philadelphia for all to see, and the exciting merger between the Academy and Drexel University. In fact, the merger has given us yet another reason to honor Lacovara and his team, who recently uncovered a three-foot fossil (the biggest ever discovered) of a marine turtle on the ancient New Jersey coast. But we also have the privilege of Lacovara's continued wonder, his passion for teaching, and his commitment to passing on that deep respect for the mystery of the past to his colleagues and students. He's also passing it on to his child, Rudyard, who has never known a world without dinosaurs. Lacovara laughs, "Rudyard thinks everybody has dinosaurs. He wonders where everybody's dinosaurs are."
Rebecca Ingalls is Assistant Professor of English.
New Featured Faculty Publications
Innovations in Transformative Learning: Space, Culture and the Arts
Kathy D. Geller, Ph.D. Assistant Clinical Professor Educational Leadership and Management
Purchase the Book Online
This book addresses the disparity between transformative learning theory as espoused and practiced in the classrooms of the academy and its application beyond. It articulates new models of transformative education that integrate transformative learning theory with other models of change and development. The three editors and 11 contributors draw on both theory and practice to illustrate how transformative learning has been introduced to a variety of settings and cultures, and synergistically integrated with theory of communication, participatory action research, and communities of inquiry and practice. Organized around themes of creating space for learning; looking through the lens of culture, diversity and difference; and animating awareness through the expressive and performative arts, this collection will broaden awareness and aid scholars, students and practitioners in using transformative learning as an approach to adult learning and social and organizational change in a range of settings.
Ethical Challenges in Health Care
Vicki D. Lachman, PhD, APRN, MBE Clinical Professor Nursing
As a health professional or health care leader, have you ever:
Had to address the problem of uninsured patients in your hospital? Had to deliver bad news to patients and families? Wanted to report an unethical colleague?
If so, you need this book on your bookshelf. Health care managers and professionals face serious ethical dilemmas like these every day. This book provides the knowledge, insight, strategies, and encouragement necessary for developing moral courage in health care practice, even in the face of adversity.
Lachman outlines both personal and organizational strategies to help nurses, physicians, physical therapists, and health care leaders develop moral courage, and face difficult ethical challenges in health care practice and management head-on. Lachman presents numerous, real-life case examples to illustrate skills and opportunities for developing moral courage in the workplace. Also included are tips for executives on how to develop their ethical leadership skills.
Effective Business Planning: A Structured Approach
Michele K. Masterfano, DBA Clinical Assisant Professor of Management Department of Management
Oftentimes it makes sense for a firm's leaders to bring in someone from the outside to pull together all the information needed for a business plan. But using outside help can be an expensive proposition. Thus, many more entrepreneurs develop their own business plans.
Effective Business Planning: A Structured Approach helps those entrepreneurs who wish to write their own business plans. This book describes a generally accepted format and the content of a business plan. All plans need to have sections describing their businesses, detailing a marketing plan, and forecasting a set of financials.
Summer Course Design Workshop — Save the Date
Wednesday August 10, 2011 8:30 AM - 4:30 PM SkyView Room, MacAlister Hall
Quality Course Design — Pedagogies, Best Practices, Tools, and Techniques
Co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, Office of Information Resources and Technology, and the Drexel Online Learning Council
This full-day workshop is intended to provide pedagogical guidance to support course development, design, and redesign, regardless of delivery method. Techniques and pedagogies covered throughout the day are applicable to online courses, web supported face-to-face courses, and hybrid courses. This workshop will also provide guidance and support for those faculty preparing digital course material for migration to Blackboard Learn and to anyone looking to redesign courses to insure quality and incorporate effective assessment methods.
This is an opportunity to evaluate, modify, and improve existing courses and course materials in preparation for the new term and a new learning management system and to create high quality, outcome driven courses. This workshop will provide information, pedagogies, best practices, and assessment techniques which can be applied to course design and redesign to ensure the highest quality academic experience for our students. Faculty participating on panels and small groups will share experiences, lessons learned, successful examples, and pedagogical approaches. Techniques and methodologies used to promote engagement, facilitate collaboration, increase accessibility, and improve quality will be the main focus throughout the program. Participants can expect an interactive experience that is both engaging and informative. They will receive many valuable insights as well as useful takeaways like guidelines, lists of best practices, tips and tricks, and details on a variety of resources that they can access well after this workshop."
Look for an email invitation, full agenda, and registration site coming soon.
DCAE Events June 2011
The DCAE had two events in June. On June 7th we had an interested and engaged audience for a presentation by Patricia Davis Austin, Associate Vice President for Corporate and Foundation Relations, Office of Institutional Advancement and Dr. Michele S. Marcolongo, Senior Associate Vice Provost for Translational Research, Office of Research Administration on "Funding Sources-Government, Corporations, Foundations." On June 22nd, Dr. Mike Scheuermann, Associate Vice President, Instructional Technology Support, Information Resources and Technology, and Dr. Frank Kelley, Assistant Teaching Professor of Communication, Department of Culture and Communication, COAS, presented at our summer workshop for adjunct and part-time faculty. Their presentation was on "Learning Management Systems and Instructional Technology." This presentation was multi-faceted in explaining how a Learning Management System (LMS) can be used in various settings and how ancillary technologies can enhance academic offerings.
On June 6th, Dr. Barbara Hornum, DCAE Director, was a guest speaker at the Drexel University School of Public Health's faculty meeting. At the invitation of Dean Marla Gold, Dr. Hornum described the variety of topics and formats available to faculty covering areas of teaching scholarship, research and creative activity and some of the prospective topics for next year.
On June 8th, Dr. Hornum and the DCAE Faculty Fellows met together for a luncheon to thank the fellows for their support of the center and to have some discussion of themes for the next academic years. Two of the DCAE Fellows were recognized for their achievements at the Faculty Recognition Dinner and Awards Ceremony on June 1st. Dr. Ulrike Altenmüller-Lewis, Assistant Professor in the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design received the Allen Rothwarf Award for Teaching Excellence, and Dr. Shivanthi Anandan, Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences received the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching. These are well-deserved awards for faculty who connect their excellent teaching to their scholarship.
Faculty Career Development Awards
The Office of the Provost, through the Office of Faculty Development & Equity, is pleased to announce this year's faculty Career Development Awardees. The program, now in its fourth year, is designed to foster mentoring relationships for pre-tenure faculty with mentors at other institutions whose work complements activities at Drexel. Previous awardees have established sustainable collaboration in academic institutions and industry in nine foreign countries on four continents, including Australia, England, Sweden, Korea, Japan, Switzerland, Greece and Italy. The awards committee for this year included Vice Provost Janet Fleetwood, Vice Provost John DiNardo, Vice Provost Julie Mostov, Senior Associate Vice Provost Michele Marcolongo, Dean Donna Murasko and Professor Robert Palisano. This year the committee received a record-number of extremely strong applications and was pleased to fund the largest number of awards in Drexel's history. Awardees include Professors Brian Daly (Psychology, COAS), Vibha Kalra (Chemical and Biological Engineering, COE), Elizabeth Papish (Chemisty, COAS), Gail Rosen (Electrical & Computer Engineering, COE), Loni Philip Tabb (Epidemiology and Biostatistics, SPH), and Donald Tibbs (Earle Mack School of Law). Topics of exploration and collaboration ranged from Nanotechnology to Hip Hop and the American Constitution. For further information, please visit the Faculty Development & Equity website at www.drexel.edu/fde.
The 21st Annual Co-op Awards
On May 10, 2011, the 21st Annual Drexel University Cooperative Education Awards were held at the Paul Peck Alumni Center. This annual event recognizes outstanding Drexel co-op students, employer partners and faculty for their exceptional efforts in fulfilling the goals and ideals of cooperative education. The students and their families, faculty members, corporate partners, and Steinbright Career Development Center staff members were happy to be part of this special event.
The ceremony began with greetings from Peter J. Franks, Senior Associate Vice Provost for Career Education, Dr. Mark L. Greenberg, Provost, and James B. Dougherty, Jr., Esq., Class of 1978 and 1981. The Faculty of the Year recipient was Dr. Jeffrey Twiss, Professor and Department Head of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. The Employer of the Year awards were given to Bimbo Bakeries, owner of Stroehmann, Entenmann's and more, and PJM Interconnection LLC, the world's largest competitive wholesale electricity market. Student award recipients from each college were nominated by their co-op employers. The student award recipients this year were: Sarah DePre (senior dance major), James Kim (senior construction management student), Michael Liedike (senior information systems major), Elvis McGovern (senior mechanical engineering student), Andrea Roberts (senior nutrition student), Kristopher Ruth (senior history major), Megan Smith (senior business administration major), and Aaron Yu (biomedical engineering student). Two students also achieved special awards: the Dow Achievement Award which was presented to Amanda Love, and the Bentley Systems Award given to Brandon Bohrer.
The Future of Drexel's Libraries: Advancing the University's Strategic Transformation
This summer, over 60 members of the campus community will help shape the future of the Libraries by participating in a groundbreaking Future Search Conference entitled "The Future of Drexel's Libraries: Advancing the University's Strategic Transformation." The conference will span three days in mid-July and will help develop a common vision of the library as a learning enterprise and vital partner to advance the university's research and service agenda.
The University's strategies and ambitions are prime forces for transforming the Libraries into a vital partner in achieving Drexel's unique position among outstanding academic institutions and influencing the role of U.S. higher education within society. The neglected libraries are being reconceived as a learning enterprise with embedded environments around campus and through the Internet. Library staff offer access to information resources as well as an active educational program to assist learners to develop information literacy skills, and researchers in their pursuit of knowledge.
To achieve the outcome of vital strategic partnership within the University and beyond, the Libraries chose the "Future Search" planning format with a proven track record around the world. The method has been used successfully for complex issues where all parties have unique experiences. Participants will include a cross-section of the university community, including faculty, students, administrators, external friends, and experts in academic support services, student life, and library and information science. The results will be formation of a common vision for our Libraries' future and identification of key priorities for actions that key stakeholders will commit to support. Results from the conference will also contribute to the university's strategic planning.
For more information, please contact Danuta A. Nitecki, Dean of Libraries at 215-895- 2750 or firstname.lastname@example.com.
Members of the Steering Committee for this Future Search conference are:
Online Learning Council Activities
The Online Learning Council has had an active and productive year. Established by the Provost in January 2009, the Council membership has grown to over 80 members and continues to address issues of Quality, Retention, Scalability, Student Services for online students, and this year it has added Accessibility to its priorities. The Council works with Quality Matters to adapt rubrics they have established to the Drexel academic experience and to learn how their course review process can help us. Over 30 faculty and instructional support staff have been trained to review online courses to determine if courses are constructed and organized effectively. Ten faculty have been trained as master reviewers and have reviewed several courses from other institutions for quality organization and existence of key elements. Additional faculty and instructional support staff will be completing the Quality Matters peer and master reviewer training in the fall. Over 130 faculty and instructional support staff have been surveyed to develop a Core Elements Checklist to be used in course design at Drexel, and the results of that survey will be published this fall.
The Student Support Services subcommittee has created a one-stop-shop site for online students to find answers to all their questions and help with all of their needs. It is a link from the Provost's site or can be reached directly at http://www.drexel.edu/provost/drexelexpress. The site gives online students one place to find help with tutoring, billing, or anything they may need from one convenient site. Initial online student response has been very positive, and the site will grow and evolve over time.
Accessibility has become an important focus for the Council as higher education is increasingly expected to meet the needs of all students. The committee will sponsor several workshops this summer showing faculty how to design web based materials which are in compliance with ADA standards and improve the student experience for all students. Tips and tricks will be posted on line helping us all to implement Universal Design in the creation of quality digital materials for students.
Global Drexel Visits China
The end of spring term culminated with many exciting developments for Global Drexel, particularly, the building of international partnerships with leading institutions in China. Three delegations traveled to China with the aim of building new and strengthening existing collaborative relationships. In April, Dr. Charles Haas (Department Head of CAEE), Dr. Jonathan Cheng (CAEE) and Dr. Julie Mostov, Vice Provost for International Programs visited the School of Energy & Environment at Peking University's Graduate School in Shenzhen (PKUSZ) to work out the final details of a Dual MS degree program in environmental engineering. The delegation also participated in the Shenzhen 2011 Low-Carbon Business Development Forum, meeting a number of potential collaborators from local industry as well as Chinese and US research institutions, such as UC Davis and Cornell. From May 5 — 14, Dean Allen Sabinson led a Westphal College delegation, including, Sandy Stewart (Associate Dean), Joseph Gregory (Art and Art History), Roberta Gruber (Fashion Design and Merchandizing), and Julie Mostov. They visited three of the top academies of art in China: The Central Academy of Fine Art — Beijing, The China Academy of Art — Hangzhou, and The Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, setting the groundwork for significant partnerships, student and faculty exchanges, and research collaboration. In the picture, the delegation is celebrating the signing of an MOU and Exchange Agreement in Hangzhou.
Later in May, President John A. Fry led a delegation, including Wei Sun (MEM), Peter Lelkes (Biomed), Kevin Scoles (ECE), and Julie Mostov to Shanghai and Beijing. At Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the delegation met with partners from different colleges and schools and enjoyed a luncheon hosted by Chairwoman of the University Council, Professor Ma Dexiu. The delegation celebrated the launching of a new dual PhD program in Translational Research with MED-X Institute, in the School of Biomedical Engineering and discussed the start of a Joint Center for Research, Education, and Commercialization (REC). The delegation visited a number of institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Shanghai hosted by prominent Drexel Alum, Dr. Jiang Mian Heng, Vice President of CAS and began discussions about establishing a Drexel presence on the CAS science and technology campus in Pudong. In Beijing, the delegation visited Tsinghua University, where Drexel has a number of alumni and faculty linkages and signed an MOU and Exchange Agreement. As Drexel continues to grow our global network, we welcome and invite participation from all members of the university community. For information on how to get involved, please visit the Office of International Programs website.
Westphal delegation at Hangzhou after signing agreement and exchanging books - Sandra Stewart, Roberta Gruber, Joseph Gregory, Allen Sabinson, Julie Mostov meeting with colleagues at the China Academy of Art Hangzhou
Drexel meeting with Tsinghua University - Peter Lelkes, Wei Sun, President Fry, Julie Mostov, Kevin Scoles
Shanghai Jiao Tong University - President Fry and Dr. Xu Lisa
President Fry with Dr. Jiang Mian Heng at the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Drexel's Dr. Haas, Dr. Mostov, Dr. Cheng were hosted at PKUSZ by Dean Xu Gang
This message to Faculty and Staff via Drexel Announcement Mail was approved by Dr. Mark Greenberg, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs


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The Livermore School District welcomes the involvement of families and community members in its schools.
When parents and families get personally involved in education, their children do better in school and grow up to be more successful in life.
Interested in giving back and supporting our schools, with your time, talents, or expertise?
Click HERE for the Volunteer Handbook.
The Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District has worked cooperatively with the Livermore Police Department to develop a process to screen all of our volunteers. The purpose of this screening is to ensure that no one working with our students has a record of criminal activity, thus providing a safe and positive environment for our students.
In order to complete the process, it is mandatory that you complete the information on the Volunteer Application Request Form and return it to the school secretary. The information is considered confidential and the Livermore Police Department will respond directly to the Human Resources Department.
Thank you for volunteering your time and joining with us to ensure a safe environment for our students.
Opportunities to Get Involved and Volunteer
Parent Teacher Associations & Parent Teacher Organizations
Each school in the district has a Parent Teacher Association (PTA), Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) or Booster Organization. The primary purpose of a school's Parent Club is to assist teachers and staff in providing a quality educational experience for all students by sponsoring student/parent fundraising events. Click HERE to connect with individual school websites.
Do you want to volunteer your time to a school? JustServe.org is a website that matches those who need help with those who are willing to give help. To see what projects at Livermore Schools need your help click HERE .
School Site Council (SSC)
All schools receiving School Improvement Program funds or implementing a School Based Coordinated Plan are required to form a School Site Council which is composed of parents and school personnel. The School Site Council is responsible for developing, implementing and evaluating the School Site Plan. Members serve for two years and are elected by their peers annually at the beginning of the school year.
District English Learner Advisory Committee (DELAC)
This is an organization of school personnel and parents. Parents of all students who are studying English as a second language are urged to attend and are welcome to voice their questions and concerns about the educational program. Contact the individual schools for information.
Livermore Valley Education Foundation
The Livermore Valley Education Foundation (LVEF) a non-profit, tax-exempt public all-volunteer foundation whose mission is to restore and enhance academic and extra-curricular programs in the Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District. LVEF co-ordinates different fundraising events during the year including Reach for the Stars! Click HERE for the LVEF website.

subset: commoncrawl


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Help! I have a new home (6 months) with stone and stained cedar bay windows. Something (bees? borers?) are eating quarter-sized or irregular shaped divots in my cedar! Does anyone know the cause and solution. I live in North Carolina. |
Follow-Up Postings:
Perhaps the Cedar harvested to make your trim has been infected with the Japanese Cedar Longhorned Beetle. These beetles have been well established in North Carolina for close to 10 years now. While they are known to infest living trees, quite possibly they were already in the wood when it was harvested. "The adults, which live about 20 days, are active between late March and early June. The adult beetles are about 1/2-inch in length. Have you seen any bugs that look like this? |
- Posted by mollys_mom (My Page) on Sun, Sep 23, 07 at 12:45
gourmet81, have you found an answer to your insect problem? Can you post a picture of the damage? I'm sure that with a little bit of feedback from YOU someone would be able to help you find the source of your cedar problem. |
I think i know what you're talking about, they're called carpenter bees. They look like bumble bees but eat perfectly round holes through wood just like if you used a drill. My uncle just replaced a section of facia trim on his house they had bored into, these things actually went in and bored left and right down the length of the board. |
Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.ca.uky.edu/entomology/entfacts/ef611.asp
Yeah, sounds like the carpenter bees we've had in the DC area. You should be able to get them treated by a termite company. |
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"The thing about hunger, it makes one irascible," is how Patricia Alice Albrecht began her acting career. She is best known for her voice-over work on JEM and THE HOLOGRAMS as PIZZAZZ, Jem's arch enemy and band leader of the Misfits. Ms. Albrecht admits the role of PIZZAZZ! came naturally. "I was so hungry, thirsty continue reading →


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If you work in the database world, you already know Phil Bernstein. He's the author of Principles of Transaction Processing and has a long track record as a successful and prolific database researcher. Past readers of this blog may remember Phil's guest blog posting on Google Megastore. Over the past few years, Phil has been working on an innovative NoSQL system based upon flash storage. I like the work because it pushes the limit of what can be done on a single server with transaction rates approaching 400,000, leverages the characteristics of flash storage in a thought provoking way, and employs interesting techniques such as log-only storage.
Phil presented Hyder at the Amazon ECS series a couple of weeks back (a past ECS presentation at: High Availability for Cloud Computing Database Systems.
In the Hyder system, all cores operate on a single shared transaction log. Each core (or thread) processes Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) database transactions one at a time. Each transaction posts its after-image to the shared log. One core does OCC and rolls forward the log. The database is a binary search tree serialized into the log (A B-tree would work equally well in this application). Because the log is effectively a no-overwrite, log-only datastore, a changed node require that the parent must now point to this new node which forces the parent to be updated as well. Now its parent needs updating and this cascading set of changes proceeds to the root on each update.
The tree is maintained via copy-on-write semantics where updates are written to the front of the log with references to unchanged tree nodes pointing back to the appropriate locations in the log. Whenever a node changes, the changed node is written to the front of the log. Consequently all database changes result in changes to all nodes to the top of the search tree.
This has the downside of requiring many tree nodes to be updated on each database update but has the upside of the writes all being sequential at the front of the log. Since it is a no-overwrite store, when an update is made, the old nodes remain so transactional time travel is easy. The old search tree root still point to a complete tree that was current as of the point in time when that root was the current root of the search tree. As new nodes are written, some old nodes are no longer part of the current search tree and can be garbage collected over time.
Transactions are implemented by writing an intention log record to the front of the log with all changes required by this transaction and these tree nodes point either to other nodes within the intention record or to unchanged nodes further back in the log. This can be done quickly and all updates can proceed in parallel without need for locking or synchronization.
Before the transaction can be completed, it must now be checked for conflict using Optimistic Concurrency Control. If there are no conflicts, the root of the search tree is atomically moved to point to the new root and the transaction is acknowledged as successful. If the transaction is in conflict, it is failed and the tree root is not advanced and the intention record becomes garbage.
Most of the transactional update work can be done concurrently without locks but two issues come to mind quickly:
1) Garbage collection: because the systems is constantly rewriting large portions of the search tree, old versions of the tree a spread throughout the log and need to be recovered.
2) Transaction Rate: The transaction rate is limited by the rate at which conflicts can be checked and the tree root advanced.
The latter is the biggest concern and the rest of the presentation focuses on the rate with which this bottleneck can be processed. The presenter showed that rates in 400,000 transaction per second where obtained in performance testing so this is a hard limit but it is a fairly high hard limit. This design can go a long way before partitioning is required.
If you want to dig deeper, the Hyder presentation is at:
More detailed papers can be found at:
Philip A. Bernstein, Colin W. Reid, Sudipto Das: Hyder - A Transactional Record Manager for Shared Flash. CIDR 2011: 9-20
Philip A. Bernstein, Colin W. Reid, Ming Wu, Xinhao Yuan: Optimistic Concurrency Control by Melding Trees. PVLDB 4(11): 944-955 (2011)
Colin W. Reid, Philip A. Bernstein: Implementing an Append-Only Interface for Semiconductor Storage. IEEE Data Eng. Bull. 33(4): 14-20 (2010)
Mahesh Balakrishnan, Philip A. Bernstein, Dahlia Malkhi, Vijayan Prabhakaran, Colin W. Reid: Brief Announcement: Flash-Log - A High Throughput Log. DISC 2010: 401-403
James Hamilton
e: email@example.com
w: http://www.mvdirona.com
b: http://blog.mvdirona.com / http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
While at Microsoft I hosted a weekly talk series called the Enterprise Computing Series (ECS) where I mostly scheduled technical talks on server and high-scale service topics. I said "mostly" because the series occasionally roamed as far afield as having an ex-member of the Ferrari Formula 1 team present. Client-side topics are also occasionally on the list either because I particularly liked the work or technology behind it or thought it was a broadly relevant topic.
The Enterprise Computing Series has an interesting history. It was started by Jim Gray at Tandem. Pat Helland picked up the mantle from Jim and ran it for years before Pat moved to Andy Heller's Hal Computer Systems. He continued the ECS at HAL and then brought it with him when he joined Microsoft where he continued to run it for years. Pat eventually passed it to me and I hosted the ECS series for 8 or 9 years myself before moving to Amazon Web Services. Ironically when I arrived at Amazon, I found that Pat Helland had again created a series in the same vein as the ECS called the Principals of Amazon (PoA) series.
The PoA series is excellent but it doesn't include external speakers and is hosted on a fixed day of the week so I occasionally come across a talk that I would like to host at Amazon that doesn't fit the PoA. For those occasions, the Enterprise Computing Series lives on!
In this ECS talk Ashraf Aboulnaga of the University of Waterloo presented High Availability for Database Systems in Cloud Computing Environments. Ashraf presented two topics, 1) RemusDB: Database high availability using virtualization, and 2) DBECS: Database high availability and availability using eventually consistent cloud storage. The first topic was based upon the VLDB 2011 Best Paper Award "RemusDB: Transparent HighAvailability for Database Systems" by Umar Farooq Minha, Shriram Rajagopalan, Brendan Cully, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Ken Salem, and Andrew Warfield. The second topic is work that is not yet published nor as fully developed.
Focusing on the first paper, they built an active/standby database system using Remus. Remus implements transparent high availability for Xen VMs. It does this by reflecting all writes to memory in the active virtual machine to the non-active, backup VM. Remus keeps the backup VM ready to take over with exactly the same memory state as the primary server. On failover, it can take over with the same memory contents including an already warm cache.
Remus is a simple and easy to understand approach to getting very fast takeover from a primary VM. The challenge is that memory write latencies are a fraction of network latencies so any solution that turns memory write latencies into network write latencies simply will not perform adequately for most workloads. Remus tackles this problem using the expected solution: batching many requests in a single network transfer. By default, every 25msec Remus suspends the primary VM, copies all changed pages to a Dom0 (hypervisor) buffer and the allows the VM to continue. The Dom0 buffer is used to minimized the length of time that the guest VM needs to be suspended but comes at the expense of requiring sufficient Dom0 memory for the largest group of changed pages in 25msec.
Once the guest machine changed pages are copied to Dom0, the primary VM is released from suspend state and the changes just copied to dom0 are then transferred to the secondary system and applied to the ready to run backup VM.
The downsides to the Remus approach are 1) a potentially large dom0 buffer is required and 2) up to 25msec of forward progress can be lost on failover, 3) the checkpoint work consumes considerable resources including time. The time to copy the changed pages may be acceptable but the other overheads are sufficiently high that it is very difficult to host demanding workloads like database workloads on Remus.
The authors tackle this problem but noting that Remus actually does more than is needed for database workloads. Or, worded differently, a Remus optimized for database workloads can dramatically reduce the implementation overhead. They introduced the following optimizations:
· Asynchronous checkpoint compression: Maintain an LRU buffer of recent pages and only ship a delta of these pages. This optimization is based upon the assumption that DB systems modify some pages frequently and typically only change a small part of these pages between checkpoints.
· Disk read tracking: don't mark pages read from disk as dirty since they are already available to the backup server via an I/O
· Memory deprotection: allows DB to declare regions of memory that don't need to be replicated. This turned out not to be as powerful an optimization as the others and had the further downside of requiring database engine changes
· Network optimization/Commit protection: Remus buffers every outgoing network packet to ensure clients never see the results of unsafe execution but this increases latency by not allowing any response back to the client until the next Remus checkpoint. Because DBs can fail and transactions can be aborted, they DB optimization is to send all packets back to client in real time except for commit, abort, or other database transaction state changing operations. On failover, any client in an unprotected network state (changes have been sent since the last checkpoint) has the transaction failed. A correct client will re-run the transaction and proceed without issue.
What was achieved is Remus, fast-failover protection for database workloads and far lower replication overhead. The authors used the database transaction benchmark TPC-C to show that Remus with DB optimizations has all the protection of Remus but with roughly 1/10th the overhead.
Slides: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/TalksAndPapers/AshrafAboulnaga20111114.pdf
VLDB Paper: http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~ashraf/pubs/pvldb11remusdb.pdf
I'm not 100% convinced Remus is the best solution to the database high availability problem but I like the solution, learned from the proposed optimizations, and enjoyed the talk. Thanks to Pradeep Madhavarapu, who leads part of the Amazon database kernel engineering team (and is hiring :-)), for organizing this talk and to Ashraf Aboulnaga for doing it.
From the Last Bastion of Mainframe Computing Perspectives post:
The networking equipment world looks just like mainframe computing ecosystem did 40 years ago. A small number of players produce vertically integrated solutions where the ASICs (the central processing unit responsible for high speed data packet switching), the hardware design, the hardware manufacture, and the entire software stack are stack are single sourced and vertically integrated. Just as you couldn't run IBM MVS on a Burrows computer, you can't run Cisco IOS on Juniper equipment. When networking gear is purchased, it's packaged as a single sourced, vertically integrated stack. In contrast, in the commodity server world, starting at the most basic component, CPUs are multi-sourced. We can get CPUs from AMD and Intel. Compatible servers built from either Intel or AMD CPUs are available from HP, Dell, IBM, SGI, ZT Systems, Silicon Mechanics, and many others. Any of these servers can support both proprietary and open source operating systems. The commodity server world is open and multi-sourced at every layer in the stack.
Last week the Open Network Summit was hosted at Stanford University. This conference focused on Software Defined Networks in general and Openflow specifically. Software defined networking separates out the router control plane responsible for what is in the routing table from the data plane that makes network packet routing decisions on the basis of what is actually in the routing table. Historically, both operations have been implemented monolithically in each router. SDN, separates these functions allowing networking equipment to compete in how efficiently they route packets on the basis of instructions from a separate SDN control plane.
In the words of OpenFlow founder Nick Mckeown, Software Defined Networks (SDN), will: 1) empower network owners/operators, 2) increase the pace of network innovation, 3) diversify the supply chain, and 4) build a robust foundation for future networking innovation.
This conference was a bit of a coming of age for software defined networking for a couple of reasons. First, an excellent measure of relevance is who showed up to speak at the conference. From academia, attendees included Scott Shenker (Berkeley), Nick McKeown (Stanford), and Jennifer Rexford (Princeton). From industry most major networking companies were represented by senior attendees including Dave Ward (Juniper), Dave Meyer (Cisco), Ken Duda (Arista), Mallik Tatipamula (Ericsson), Geng Lin (Dell), Samrat Ganguly (NEC), and Charles Clark (HP). And some of the speakers from major networking user companies included: Stephen Stuart (Google), Albert Greenberg (Microsoft), Stuart Elby (Verizon), Rainer Weidmann (Deutsche Telekom), and Igor Gashinsky (Yahoo!). The full speaker list is up at: http://opennetsummit.org/speakers.html.
The second data point in support of SDN really coming of age was Dave Meyer, Cisco Distinguished Engineer, saying during his talk that Cisco was "doing Openflow". I've always joked that Cisco would rather go bankrupt than support Openflow so this one definitely caught my interest. Since I wasn't in attendance myself during Dave's talk I checked in with him personally. He corrected that it wasn't a product announcement. They have Openflow running on Cisco gear but "no product plans have been announced at this time". Still exciting progress and hat's off for Cisco for taking the first step. Good to see.
If you want a good summary of what is Software Defined Networking, perhaps the best description were the slides that Nick presented at the conference: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/TalksAndPapers/NickMckeown_ON%20Summit%20NickM%2010%202011.pdf.
If you are interested in what Cisco's Dave Meyer presented at the summit, I've posted his slides here: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/TalksAndPapers/DavidMeyer_openflow_and_sdn_for_enterprises.pdf.
Other related postings I've made:
· Datacenter Networks are in my Way
· Stanford Clean Slate CTO Summit
· Changes in Networking Systems
· Software Load Balancing Using Software Defined Networking
Congratulations to the Stanford team for hosting a great conference and in helping to drive software defined networking from a great academic idea to what is rapidly becoming a supported option industry-wide.
I got a chance to chat with Eric Baldeschwieler while he was visiting Seattle a couple of weeks back and catch up on what's happening in the Hadoop world at Yahoo and beyond. Eric recently started Hortonworks whose tag line is "architecting the future of big data." I've known Eric for years when he led the Hadoop team at Yahoo! most recently as VP of Hadoop Engineering. It was Eric's team at Yahoo that contributed much of the code in Hadoop, Pig, and ZooKeeper.
Many of that same group form the core of Hortonworks whose mission is revolutionize and commoditize the storage and processing of big data via open source. Hortonworks continues to supply Hadoop engineering to Yahoo! And Yahoo! Is a key investor in Hortonworks along with Benchmark Capital. Hortonworks intends to continue to leverage the large Yahoo! development, test, and operations team. Yahoo! has over 1,000 Hadoop users and are running Hadoop over many clusters the largest of which was 4,000 nodes back in 2010. Hortonworks will be providing level 3 support for Yahoo! Engineering.
From Eric slides at the 2011 Hadoop summit, Hortonworks objectives:
• Make Apache Hadoop projects easier to install, manage & use
− Regular sustaining releases
− Compiled code for each project (e.g. RPMs)
− Testing at scale
• Make Apache Hadoop more robust
− Performance gains
− High availability
− Administration & monitoring
• Make Apache Hadoop easier to integrate & extend
− Open APIs for extension & experimentation
Hortonworks Technology Roadmap:
· Phase 1: Making Hadoop Accessible (2011)
o Release the most stable Hadoop version ever
o Release directly usable code via Apache (RPMs, debs,…)
o Frequent sustaining releases off of the stable branches
· Phase 2: Next Generation Apache Hadoop (2012)
o Address key product gaps (Hbase support, HA, Management, …)
o Enable community and partner innovation via modular architecture & open APIs
o Work with community to define integrated stack
Next generation Apache Hadoop:
· Core
o HDFS Federation
o Next Gen MapReduce
o New Write Pipeline (HBase support)
o HA (no SPOF) and Wire compatibility
· Data - HCatalog 0.3
o Pig, Hive, MapReduce and Streaming as clients
o HDFS and HBase as storage systems
o Performance and storage improvements
· Management & Ease of use
o All components fully tested and deployable as a stack
o Stack installation and centralized config management
o REST and GUI for user tasks
Eric's presentation from Hadoop Summit 2011 where he gave the keynote: Hortonworks: Architecting the Future of Big Data
It's a clear sign that the Cloud Computing market is growing fast and the number of cloud providers is expanding quickly when startups begin to target cloud providers as their primary market. It's not unusual for enterprise software companies to target cloud providers as well as their conventional enterprise customers but I'm now starting to see startups building products aimed exclusively at cloud providers. Years ago when there were only a handful of cloud services, targeting this market made no sense. There just weren't enough buyers to make it an interesting market. And, many of the larger cloud providers are heavily biased to internal development further reducing the addressable market size.
A sign of the maturing of the cloud computing market is there now many companies interested in offering a cloud computing platform not all of which have substantial systems software teams. There is now a much larger number of companies to sell to and many are eager to purchase off the shelf products. Cloud providers have actually become a viable market to target in that there are many providers of all sizes and the overall market continues to expand faster than any I have seen any I've seen over the last 25 years.
An excellent example of this new trend of startups aiming to sell to the Cloud Computing market is SolidFire which targets the high performance block storage market with what can be loosely described as a distributed Storage Area Network. Enterprise SANs are typically expensive, single-box, proprietary hardware. Enterprise SANs are mostly uninteresting to cloud providers due to high cost and the hard scaling limits that come from scale-up solutions. SolidFire implements a virtual SAN over a cluster of up to 100 nodes. Each node is a commodity 1RU, 10 drive storage server. They are focused on the most demanding random IOPS workloads such as database and all 10 drives in the SolidFire node are Solid State Storage devices. The nodes are interconnected by up 2x 1GigE and 2x10GigE networking ports.
In aggregate, each node can deliver a booming 50,000 IOPS and the largest supported cluster with 100 nodes can support 5m IOPS in aggregate. The 100 node cluster scaling limit may sound like a hard service scaling limit but multiple storage clusters can be used to scale to any level. Needing multiple clusters has the disadvantage of possibly fragmenting the storage but the advantage of dividing the fleet up into sub-clusters with rigid fault containment between them limiting the negative impact of software problems. Reducing the "blast radius" of a failure makes moderate sized sub-clusters a very good design point.
Offering distributed storage solution isn't that rare – there are many out there. What caught my interest at SolidFire was 1) their exclusive use of SSDs, and 2) an unusually nice quality of service (QoS) approach. Going exclusively with SSD makes sense for block storage systems aimed exclusively at high random IOPS workload but they are not a great solution for storage bound workloads. The storage for these workloads is normally more cost-effectively hosted on hard disk drives. For more detail on where SSDs are win an where they are not:
· When SSDs Make Sense in Server Applications
· When SSDs Don't Make Sense in Server Applications
· When SSDs make sense in Client Applications (just about always)
The usual solution to this approach is do both but SolidFire wanted a single SSD optimized solution that would be cost effective across all workloads. For many cloud providers, especially the smaller ones, a single versatile solution has significant appeal.
The SolidFire approach is pretty cool. They exploit the fact that SSDs have abundant IOPS but are capacity constrained and trade off IOPS to get capacity. Dave Wright the SolidFire CEO describes the design goal as SSD performance at a spinning media price point. The key tricks employed:
· Multi-Layer Cell Flash: They use MLC Flash Memory storage since it is far cheaper than Single Level Cell, the slightly lower IOPS rate supported by MLC is still more than all but a handful of workloads require and they can solve the accelerated wear issues with MLC in the software layers above
· Compression: Aggregate workload dependent gains estimated to be 30 to 70%
· Data Deduplication: Aggregate workload dependent gains estimated to be 30 to 70%
· Thin Provisioning: Only allocate blocks to a logical volume as they are actually written to. Many logical volumes never get close to the actual allocated size.
· Performance Virtualization: Spread all volumes over many servers. Spreading the workload at a sub-volume level allows more control of meeting the individual volume performance SLA with good utilization and without negatively impacting other users
The combination of the capacity gains of thin provisioning, duplication, and compression bring the dollars per GB of the SolidFire solution very near to some hard disk based solutions at nearly 10x the IOPS performance.
The QoS solution is elegant in that they have three settings that allow multiple classes of storage to be sold. Each logical volume has 2 QoS settings: 1) Bandwidth, and 2) IOPS. Each setting has a min, max, and burst capacity setting. The min setting sets a hard floor where capacity is reserved to ensure this resource is always available. The burst is the hard ceiling that prevents a single user for consuming excess resource. The max is the essentially the target. If you run below the max you build up credits that allow a certain time over the max. The Burst limits the potential negative impact of excursions above max on other users.
This system can support workloads that need dead reliable, never changing I/O requirements. It can also support dead reliable average case with rare excursions above (e.g. during a database checkpoint). Its also easy to support workloads that soak up resources left over after satisfying the most demanding workloads without impacting other users. Overall, a nice simple and very flexible solution to a very difficult problem.
Earlier this week, I was in Athens Greece attending annual conference of the ACM Machinery Special Interest Group on Management of Data. SIGMOD is one of the top two database events held each year attracting academic researchers and leading practitioners from industry.
I kicked off the conference with the Plenary keynote. In this talk I started with a short retrospection on the industry over the last 20 years. In my early days as a database developer, things were moving incredibly quickly. Customers were loving our products, the industry was growing fast and yet the products really weren't all that good. You know you are working on important technology when customers are buying like crazy and the products aren't anywhere close to where they should be.
In my first release as lead architect on DB2 20 years ago, we completely rewrote the DB2 database engine process model moving from a process-per-connected-user model to a single process where each connection only consumes a single thread supporting many more concurrent connections. It was a fairly fundamental architectural change completed in a single release. And in that same release, we improved TPC-A performance a booming factor of 10 and then did 4x more in the next release. It was a fun time and things were moving quickly.
From the mid-90s through to around 2005, the database world went through what I refer to as the dark ages. DBMS code bases had grown to the point where the smallest was more than 4 million lines of code, the commercial system engineering teams would no longer fit in a single building, and the number of database companies shrunk throughout the entire period down to only 3 major players. The pace of innovation was glacial and much of the research during the period was, in the words of Bruce Lindsay, "polishing the round ball". The problem was that the products were actually passably good, customers didn't have a lot of alternatives, and nothing slows innovation like large teams with huge code bases.
In the last 5 years, the database world has become exciting again. I'm seeing more opportunity in the database world now than any other time in the last 20 years. It's now easy to get venture funding to do database products and the number of and diversity of viable products is exploding. My talk focused on what changed, why it happened, and some of the technical backdrop influencing.
A background thesis of the talk is that cloud computing solves two of the primary reasons why customers used to be stuck standardizing on a single database engine even though some of their workloads may have run poorly. The first is cost. Cloud computing reduces costs dramatically (some of the cloud economics argument: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/04/21/McKinseySpeculatesThatCloudComputingMayBeMoreExpensiveThanInternalIT.aspx) and charges by usage rather than via annual enterprise license. One of the favorite lock-ins of the enterprise software world is the enterprise license. Once you've signed one, you are completely owned and it's hard to afford to run another product. My fundamental rule of enterprise software is that any company that can afford to give you 50% to 80% reduction from "list price" is pretty clearly not a low margin operator. That is the way much of the enterprise computing world continues to work: start with a crazy price, negotiate down to a ½ crazy price, and then feel like a hero while you contribute to incredibly high profit margins.
Cloud computing charges by the use in small increments and any of the major database or open source offerings can be used at low cost. That is certainly a relevant reason but the really significant factor is the offloading of administrative complexity to the cloud provider. One of the primary reasons to standardize on a single database is that each is so complex to administer, that it's hard to have sufficient skill on staff to manage more than one. Cloud offerings like AWS Relational Database Service transfer much of the administrative work to the cloud provider making it easy to chose the database that best fits the application and to have many specialized engines in use across a given company.
As costs fall, more workloads become practical and existing workloads get larger. For example, If analyzing three months of customer usage data has value to the business and it becomes affordable to analyze two years instead, customers correctly want to do it. The plunging cost of computing is fueling database size growth at a super-Moore pace requiring either partitioned (sharded) or parallel DB engines.
Customers now have larger and more complex data problems, they need the products always online, and they are now willing to use a wide variety of specialized solutions if needed. Data intensive workloads are growing quickly and never have there been so many opportunities and so many unsolved or incompletely solved problems. It's a great time to be working on database systems.
· The slides from the talk: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesHamilton_Sigmod2011Keynote.pdf
· Proceedings extended abstract: http://www.sigmod2011.org/keynote_1.shtml
· Video of talk: https://services.choruscall.eu/links/sigmod1106.html# (select June 14th to get to the video)
The talk video is available but, unfortunately, only to ACM digital library subscribers (thanks to Simon Leinen for pointing out the availability of the video link above).
Guido van Rossum was at Amazon a week back doing a talk. Guido presented 21 Years of Python: From Pet Project to Programming Language of the Year.
The slides are linked below and my rough notes follow:
· Significant Python influencers:
o Algol 60, Pascal, C
o ABC
o Modula0-2+ and 3
o Lisp and Icon
· ABC was the strongest language influencer of this set
· ABC design goals:
o Professionals but not professional programmers (lab personal, scientists, etc.)
o Easy to teach, easy to learn, easy to use
· Parts of ABC most liked by Guido:
o Design iterations based on user testing
§ E.g. colon before indented blocks
o Simple design: IF, WHILE, FOR, …
o Indentation for grouping (Knuth, occam)
o Tuples, lists, dictionaries (though changed)
o Immutable data types
o No limits
o The >>> prompt
· Parts of ABC that most needed improvement:
o Monolithic design – not extensible
§ E.g. no graphics, not easily added
o Invented non-standard terminology
§ E.g. "how-to" instead of "procedure"
o ALL'CAPS keywords
o No integration with rest of system
§ No file-based I/O (persistent variables instead)
· The beginnings of Python:
o Amoeba project at CWI
§ Writing apps in C and sh and wanting something in between
· Python design philosophy:
o Borrow ideas whenever it makes sense
o As simple as possible, no simpler (Einstein)
o Do one thing well (UNIX)
o Don't fret about performance (fix it later)
o Go with the flow (don't fight environment)
o Perfection is the enemy of the good
o Cutting corners is okay (get back to it later)
· User Centric Design Philosophy:
o Avoid platform ties, but not religiously
o Don't bother the user with details
o Discourage but allow coding to the platform
o Offer multiple levels of extensibility
o Errors should not be fatal, if possible
o Errors should never pass silently
o Don't blame the user for bugs in Python
· Core language stabilized quickly in the 1990 to 1991 timeframe
· Early days of active Python community:
o 1990 – internal at CWI
§ More internal use than ABC ever had
§ Internal contributors
o 1991 – first release; firstname.lastname@example.com
o 1994 – USENET group comp.lang.python
o 1994 – first workshop (NIST)
o 1995-1999 – from workshops to conferences
o 1995 – Python Software Association
o 1997 – www.python.org goes online
o 1999 – Python Consortium
§ Modeled after X Consortium
o 2001 – Python Software Foundation
§ Modeled after Apache Software Foundation
· Present day Python community:
o PSF runs largest annual Python conference
§ PyCon Atlanta in 2011: 1500 attendees
§ 2012-2013: Toronto; 2014-2015: Bay area
§ Also sponsors regional PyCons world-wide
o EuroPython since 2002
o Many local events, user groups
o python.org
o docs.python.org, mail.python.org, bugs.python.org, hg.python.org,planet.python.org, wiki.python.org
o Stackoverflow etc.
· Python 2 vs Python 3
o Fixing deep bugs intrinsic in the design
o Avoid two extremes:
§ perpetual backwards compatibility (C++)
§ rewrite from scratch (Perl 6)
o Our approach:
§ evolve the implementation gradually
§ some backwards incompatibilities
§ separate tools to help users cope
Thanks to Guido for doing the well received Python presentation.
Guido's slides and blog URLS:
· Slides: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/TalksAndPapers/GuidoVanRossum_21_years_of_python.pdf
· Blog: http://python-history.blogspot.com
Ben Black always has interesting things on the go. He's now down in San Francisco working on his startup Fastip which he describes as "an incredible platform for operating, exploring, and optimizing data networks." A couple of days ago Deepak Singh sent me to a recent presentation of Ben's I found interesting: Challenges and Trade-offs in Building a Web-scale Real-time Analytics System.
The problem described in this talk was "Collect, index, and query trillions of high dimensionality
records with seconds of latency for ingestion and response." What Ben is doing is collecting per flow networking data with tcp/ip 11-tuples (src_mac, dst_mac, src_IP, dest_IP, …) as the dimension data and, as metrics, he is tracking start usecs, end usecs, packets, octets, and UID. This data is interesting for two reasons: 1) networks are huge, massively shared resources and most companies haven't really a clue on the details of what traffic is clogging it and have only weak tools to understand what traffic is flowing – the data sets are so huge, the only hope is to sample it with solutions like Cisco's NetFlow. The second reason I find this data interesting is closely related: 2) it is simply vast and I love big data problems. Even on small networks, this form of flow tracking produces a monstrous data set very quickly. So, it's an interesting problem in that it's both hard and very useful to solve.
Ben presented 3 possible solutions and why they don't work before offering a solution. The failed approaches that couldn't cope with high dimensionality and the sheer volume of the dataset:
1. HBase: Insert into HBase then retrieve all records in a time range and filter, aggregate, and sort
2. Cassandra: Insert all records into Cassandra partitioned over a large cluster with each dimension indexed independently. Select qualifying records on each dimension, aggregate, and sort.
3. Statistical Cassandra: Run a statistical sample over the data stored in Cassandra in the previous attempt.
The end solution proposed by the presenter is to treat it as an Online Analytic Processing (OLAP) problem. He describes OLAP as "A business intelligence (BI) approach to swiftly answer multi-dimensional analytics queries by structuring the data specifically eliminate expensive processing at query time, even at a cost of enormous storage consumption." OLAP is essentially a mechanism to support fast query over high-dimensional data by pre-computing all interesting aggregations and storing the pre-computed results in a highly compressed form that is often kept memory resident. However, in this case, the data set is far too large to be practical for an in-memory approach.
Ben draws from two papers to implement an OLAP based solution at this scale:
· High-Dimensional OLAP: A Minimal Cubing Approach by Li, Han, and Gonzalez
· Sorting improves word-aligned bitmap indexes by Lemire, Kaser, and Aouiche
The end solution is:
· Insert records into Cassandra.
· Materialize lower-dimensional cuboids using bitsets and then join as needed.
· Perform all query steps directly in the database
Ben's concluding advice:
· Read the literature
· Generic software is 90% wrong at scale, you just don't know which 90%.
· Iterate to discover and be prepared to start over
If you want to read more, the presentation is at: Challenges and Trade-offs in Building a Web-scale Real-time Analytics System.
Last week, Sudipta Sengupta of Microsoft Research dropped by the Amazon Lake Union campus to give a talk on the flash memory work that he and the team at Microsoft Research have been doing over the past year. Its super interesting work. You may recall Sudipta as one of the co-authors on the VL2 Paper (VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network) I mentioned last October.
Sudipta's slides for the flash memory talk are posted at Speeding Up Cloud/Server Applications With Flash Memory and my rough notes follow:
· Technology has been used in client devices for more than a decade
· Server side usage more recent and the difference between hard disk drive and flash characterizes brings some challenges that need to be managed in the on-device Flash Translation Layer (FTL) or in the operating systems or Application layers.
· Server requirements are more aggressive across several dimensions including required random I/O rates and higher reliability and durability (data life) requirements.
· Key flash characteristics:
· 10x more expensive than HDD
· 10x cheaper than RAM
· Multi Level Cell (MLC): ~$1/GB
· Single Level Cell (SLC): ~$3/GB
· Laid out as an linear array of flash blocks where a block is often 128k and a page is 2k
· Unfortunately the unit of erasure is a full block but the unit of read or write is 2k and this makes the write in place technique used in disk drives not workable.
· Block erase is a fairly slow operation at 1500 usec whereas read or write is 10 to 100 usec.
· Wear is an issue with SLC supporting O(100k) erases and MLC O(10k)
· The FTL is responsible for managing the mapping between logical pages and physical pages such that logical pages can be overwritten and hot page wear is spread relatively evenly over the device.
· Roughly 1/3 the power consumption of a commodity disk and 1/6 the power of an enterprise disk
· 100x the ruggedness over disk drives when active
· Research Project: FlashStore
· Use flash memory as a cache between RAM and HDD
· Essentially a flash aware store where they implement a log structured block store (this is essentially what the FTLs do in the device implemented at the application layer.
· Changed pages are written through to flash sequentially and an in-memory index of pages is maintained so that pages can be found quickly on the flash device.
· On failure the index structure can be recovered by reading the flash device
· Recently unused pages are destaged asynchronously to disk
· A key contribution of this work is a very compact form for the index into the flash cache
· Performance results excellent and you can find them in the slides and the papers referenced below
· Research Project: ChunkStash
· A very high performance, high throughput key-value store
· Tested on two production workloads:
· Xbox Live Primetime online gaming
· Storage deduplication
· The storage dedeuplication test is a good one in that dedupe is most effective with a large universe of objects to run deduplication over. But a large universe requires a large index. The most interesting challenge of deduplication is to keep the index size small through aggressive compaction
· The slides include a summary of dedupe works and shows the performance and compression ratios they have achieved with ChunkStash
For those interested in digging deeper, the VLDB and USENIX papers are the right next stops:
· http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=141508 (FlashStore paper, VLDB 2010)
· http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=131571 (ChunkStash paper, USENIX ATC 2010)
· Slides: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/flash-amazon-sudipta-sengupta.pdf
If you have experience in database core engine development either professionally, on open source, or at university send me your resume. When I joined the DB world 20 years ago, the industry was young and the improvements were coming ridiculously fast. In a single release we improved DB2 TPC-A performance by a factor of 10x. Things were changing quickly industry-wide. These days single-server DBs are respectably good. It's a fairly well understood space. Each year more features are added and a few percent performance improvement may happen but the code bases are monumentally large, many of the development teams are over 1,000 engineers, and things are happening anything but quickly.
If you are an excellent engineer, have done systems or DB work in the past, and are interested in working on the next decade's problems in database, drop me a note (email@example.com).
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of current or past employers.


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Steal Trendy Outfit Ideas From 7 Bollywood Divas For Your Sister's Wedding
Shilpa Shetty is a woman of substance in its true sense. The lassy 'UP-Bihar' girl never had an easy life. But she managed to raise above all this and created a perfect fairy-tale for herself. She is a source of inspiration to many women and there are a few life lessons which you can learn from her. Let us have a look at them.
Recommended Read:
How to Grow Taller Naturally by Yoga
7 Bollywood Celebs and their Honeymoon Destinations
4 Things New Moms Can Learn from Aishwarya Rai
Shilpa's heart was broken by the Khiladi of Bollywood, Akshay Kumar but she never gave up on love. The rumour mills were abuzz about her 'relationship' with director Anubhav Sinha, but she firmly denied them. After winning Big Brother, Shilpa went to launch her signature perfume S2 and met Raj occasionally for the launch preparations. On their first media appearance, Shilpa called Raj, her 'business friend' but their frequent meetings soon took a personal turn.
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Thank you for visiting the Mazda Booth at the 41st Tokyo Motor Show.
Mazda first introduced the "Zoom-Zoom" brand message at the 35th Tokyo Motor Show in 2001. Since then we have launched a new-generation line-up brimming with the "Zoom-Zoom" spirit, including cars such as the Mazda Atenza, Mazda Axela and Mazda Demio. These cars have received worldwide acclaim for their dynamic and stylish designs, exciting ride and well-thought-out functionality. They are also targeted as eco-cars, receiving a highly favorable reputation. Currently, over 90 percent of Mazda vehicles sold in Japan qualify for the government's eco-car tax reductions.
Last year, the world entered an unparalleled economic crisis and the knock-on effects of this global recession have severely impacted the automobile industry. In the face of this drastic change in the business climate, Mazda has also had to implement a range of emergency measures. But at the same time, we are looking beyond the current crisis to the motorized society of the future, and investing even greater effort into enhancing the value and appeal that only Mazda can offer.
The foundation for this initiative is our "Sustainable Zoom-Zoom" long-term vision, a plan we announced in March 2007 for technology development. According to this plan, we aim to offer all Mazda customers high levels of driving pleasure as well as excellent environmental and safety performance.
Our theme for the 2009 Tokyo Motor Show is "The Mazda SKY concept-Providing driving pleasure and environmental and safety performance for all our customers!" The concept reflects "The sky's the limit" aspirations of our engineers as they pursue optimal efficiency through unconventional thinking free from orthodox restrictions and limitations. We also chose the name SKY for our next-generation powertrain development concept to express our desire to ensure an "everlasting blue sky" under which everyone will be able to enjoy the fun-to-drive pleasure provided by Mazda.
At this year's Tokyo Motor Show, under the headings of "Today," "Tomorrow" and "The Future," we invite you to view our technologies aimed at achieving a 30 percent improvement in average fuel economy for all Mazda vehicles sold globally by 2015 compared to 2008 levels.
In "Today's Technologies" we are presenting our unique "i-stop" idling stop system that is already available in the new Axela and Biante.
"Tomorrow's Technologies" features the next-generation gasoline engine "Mazda SKY-G,"* clean diesel engine "Mazda SKY-D"* and automatic transmission "Mazda SKY-Drive."* Gradual introduction of these technologies will begin in the Japanese market starting in 2011. Mazda also plans to progressively introduce electrical devices including hybrid technology.
The compact concept car "Mazda Kiyora" demonstrates our "Tomorrow's Technologies," incorporating a "Mazda SKY-G"* engine and "Mazda SKY-Drive"* automatic transmission. A regenerative braking system and lightweight design also contribute to "Mazda Kiyora"'s remarkable 32km per liter fuel economy under Japan's 10 -15 mode fuel consumption that is achieved without assistance from an electric motor.
"Future Technologies" showcases the Mazda Premacy Hydrogen RE Hybrid. Mazda hydrogen rotary engine vehicles were initially leased in Japan and now we have also begun leasing them in Norway as part of our steady drive to promote their use.
In addition, to highlight developments in the safety performance part of our "Sustainable Zoom-Zoom" long-term vision, we are exhibiting technologies developed to prevent traffic accidents.
The challenge we set for ourselves is to offer all our customers driving pleasure and excellent environmental and safety performance. Look to Mazda for exciting developments as we work toward a sustainable future for people and the automobile.
*Concepts for engines and transmissions planned for introduction from 2011.


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Indiana's Colonial Hills Baptist Church is mourning after a devastating bus crash over the weekend.
Thirty-seven people were returning from a Michigan camp when the brakes failed on their bus only a mile away from home. It slammed into a barrier and flipped onto its side.
Colonial Hills Youth Pastor Chad Phelps, his pregnant wife, Courtney Phelps, and a member of the congregation were killed. The Phelps' 2-year-old son was injured in the crash.
"We're going to have a long road, but God is good," Deacon Jeff Leffew said at a Sunday news conference.
Seven teens remain hospitalized, with one in critical condition.
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Fire Station Tours And Public Education Programs
Fire Station Tours
The public is invited to visit any one of the nine fire stations for the purpose of learning more about our firefighter duties and to learn about Fire Safety and Prevention. However, due to training and other scheduled needs, please call 619-691-5055 to make arrangements for fire station tours. Residents and groups should have the desired date and time selected for a tour before contacting the Fire Department.
Public Education Presentations The Chula Vista Fire Department makes special presentations to groups of citizens on topics such as fire safety, earthquake and disaster preparedness. In addition, the department provides training in the use of fire extinguishers. For further information please call 619-691-5055.
School Programs The Fire Department provides public education in the school system, based on grade level, in the following formats:
Please call 619-691-5055 for additional information and scheduling.
Special Events An Open House during Fire Prevention Week is conducted in October. The Open House event, which is always a great success, includes:
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About Necklaces at Ice.com
Necklaces are extremely popular because they show off your beautiful facial features, enhance your eyes and draw attention to your skin tone. Necklaces also add style to any outfit, no matter the occasion. And guys, what girl doesn't like having a diamond or gemstone necklace put around her neck for the first time?
Necklace styles range from subtle gold and silver chains to fabulous gemstone statement pieces to an elegant diamond heart pendant. Whatever necklace style you choose, know that Ice.com carries only the highest quality jewelry and our experts are happy to help make your decision as easy and fun as possible.
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Motors and Air-Moving Devices It Doesn't Take a DSP
Figure 1.
A few years ago an ARM-powered refrigerator or washing machine would have seemed unrealistic—this processor architecture was mostly used in cell phones and PDAs, where its computational performance and lower power consumption were highly appreciated. But things have changed, and 32-bit ARM-based devices may soon pervade household appliances, motivated by two main factors. First, appliance requirements continue to evolve. New display options such as dot matrix LCDs demand more memory, particularly when several languages must be supported. A higher-performance MCU with more memory is needed for the options expected in today's, and tomorrow's, appliances. The second factor is the emergence of ARM processors as a standard for embedded applications, such as those now seen in appliances. The controllers are designed to have a simple and effective architecture and are being built with large peripheral sets and proposed with wide memory and pin-count portfolios, while prices can be competitive. A range of tools, a growing developers' community, and the ARM7 direct migration path to ARM9 products add to its versatility for medium/high-end home appliance platforms. But how well does the ARM core fulfill motor control requirements such as vector control algorithms? Isn't a proprietary, dedicated DSP typically used for those functions? Widely used in high-performance drives, vector or field-oriented control algorithms are designed to provide precise and responsive speed control and guarantee optimized efficiency during transient operations. They also have the advantage of using the same framework to control either an asynchronous or synchronous motor, making it easier for development teams that must deal with various motor types and applications. Additionally, most sensorless algorithms are based on field-oriented methodology, which is also of interest when trying to increase cost-effectiveness of the drive. Vector control relies on the fact that by changing reference coordinates from fixed stator coils to the moving rotor frame, the equations describing the motor are drastically simplified. "Clark" and "Park" transformations convert variables with fixed 3-axis, 120-degree shifted coordinates into 2-axis orthogonal rotating coordinates. These last variables are DC, or slowly varying values, which can be regulated by means of simple PID controllers and are then transformed back to the fixed stator windings frame using reverse transforms, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 2.
The inner control loop, in charge of current components regulation, is typically executed every 100 µs, while the speed control loop is in the milliseconds range. The control flow requires intensive math computations (trigonometric functions, multiple PID regulators, speed calculation). The minimum resolution required for the main control variables is 16-bit, with a need for 32-bit intermediate results, such as integral terms. Finally, some free CPU load must be kept for the remaining applicative tasks, such as communication and user interface. This explains why fast and powerful processors are mandatory for vector drives, and the usual market offerings are 16/32-bit MCUs, or DSPs. These last are usually associated with advanced motor control, but a standard 32-bit ARM7-based MCU could perform just as well. An embedded ARM7TDMI core running from on-board flash at 60 MHz can execute a tachogenerator-based field-oriented control loop within 30 µs, which gives a 30-percent CPU load with 10 kHz sampling rate. The ARM architecture is mostly responsible for those results. The barrel shifter, for example, provides an optimized variable resolution all along the processing flow and can change format within a single clock cycle. Some multiplication is also sped up; r0= (r1<<4)-r1 can be executed in one instruction while r1=15*r0 requires several. In general, low-cost DSPs have 16-bit fixed-point cores that are stalled by multiple 16-bit loads, whereas the ARM7's 32-bit data path avoids multiple loads when dealing with the integral terms of the PID regulators or when extended precision is needed. Moreover, hardware looping and double-addressing modes, common features in DSP architectures, are irrelevant for motor control. The ARM7 core, equipped with peripherals dedicated to motor control, can well serve the appliance motor control market. Illustrated in Figure 2, such an ARM7TDMI core-based device providing motor control peripherals minimizes the overall system cost, while fulfilling the necessary high-performance requirements. A device such as the STR750 from STMicroelectronics, supplies the following benefits: • a 60 MHz clocked PWM generator, with dead time insertion, asymmetric PWM generation capabilities • a 4µs 10-bit ADC, with channels scan and sophisticated PWM triggered sampling • safety features such as emergency stop input or protected critical registers • peripherals to implement connectivity, power factor correction, etc. This information provided by Vincent Onde, applications engineer for STMicroelectronics.
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Dec 22, 2014: Whirlpool headquarters improvements start a new phase Dec 22, 2014: DOE's Building Technologies Office releases Roadmap for Emerging HVAC Technologies Dec 22, 2014: Variable-speed circulation pump enables new Miele lab washers Dec 22, 2014: The latest retail data breach: Staples Dec 22, 2014: Consumer Spending Index is at its highest point of the year
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November 2014: Appliance Magazine Market Insight Annual Subscriptions November 2014: U.S. Appliance Industry: Market Value, Life Expectancy & Replacement Picture 2014 October 2014: Portrait of the European Appliance Industry September 2014: Appliance Industry Focus: HVAC


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This is a syndicated post from The American Catholic. [Read the original article...]
(Cross-posted at Acts of the Apostasy) (AoftheAP) A source out of Rome tells AoftheA News that during Thursday's pre-conclave meeting, the Church's cardinals voted down a proposal to authorize the use of drones to identify and eliminate known liturgical abuses. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, was able to provide few details of the [...]
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- Conference date: 1–2 August 2012
- Location: Philadelphia, PA, USA
Video games can be very powerful teaching systems, and game designers have become adept at optimizing player engagement while scaffolding development of complex skills and situated knowledge. One implication is that we might create games to teach physics. Another, which I explore here, is that we might learn to improve classroom physics instruction by studying effective games. James Gee, in his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2007), articulates 36 principles that make good video games highly effective as learning environments. In this theoretical work, I identify 16 themes running through Gee's principles, and explore how these themes and Gee's principles could be applied to the design of an on-campus physics course. I argue that the process pushes us to confront aspects of learning that physics instructors and even physics education researchers generally neglect, and suggest some novel ideas for course design.
Key Topics
- Learning
- 3.0
- Physics education
- 2.0
- Educational courses
- 1.0
- Learning theory and science teaching
- 1.0
- Physics education research
- 1.0
A New Method For A Sensitive Deuteron EDM Experiment
Y. K. Semertzidis, M. Aoki, M. Auzinsh, V. Balakin, A. Bazhan, G. W. Bennett, R. M. Carey, P. Cushman, P. T. Debevec, A. Dudnikov, F. J. M. Farley, D. W. Hertzog, M. Iwasaki, K. Jungmann, D. Kawall, B. Khazin, I. B. Khriplovich, B. Kirk, Y. Kuno, D. M. Lazarus, L. B. Leipuner, V. Logashenko, K. R. Lynch, W. J. Marciano, R. McNabb, W. Meng, J. P. Miller, W. M. Morse, C. J. G. Onderwater, Y. F. Orlov, C. S. Ozben, R. Prigl, S. Rescia, B. L. Roberts, N. Shafer‐Ray, A. Silenko, E. J. Stephenson, K. Yoshimura and EDM Collaboration
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If you want a Long Island rental with snow removal
Check out this week's look at Long Island homes with a notable feature. If you want to sell or rent a unique, historic or famous home, or one with a special feature, call Lisa Doll Bruno phone: (631) 843-2793, fax: (631) 843-5459, email: firstname.lastname@example.com.
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See 12 famous LIers' '80s yearbook photos
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18 things only Long Islanders would understand