The challenges associated with economic insecurity demand fortitude, coping skills, creativity, and resilience. The mother shown in Figure 4.1 will require great strength to keep going and to care for her family after eviction from their home. Both she and her child will need to adapt to new and difficult circumstances. What examples do you have from your own experience or observation of the resilience of low-income individuals and families in the face of great economic challenges?

In the 1896 landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially separate facilities, if equal, did not violate the Constitution. The case centered on Homer Plessy, a Louisianan who self-identified as “seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood” and was considered “colored” under the racial policies of the time. In a deliberate attempt to challenge segregation policies, Plessy violated the Separate Car Act when he sat in a “Whites only” train car and refused to move to the “Colored” section. The Supreme Court rejected Plessy’s claim that the Separate Car Act was unconstitutional, determining that segregation was not discrimination. As a consequence, “separate but equal” became the law of the land.

Interaction between concurrently executing fragments is an essential characteristic of parallel programs and the major source of difference between sequential programming and parallel programming. Synchronization and communication are the two ways in which fragments directly interact, and these are the subjects of this chapter. We begin with a brief review of basic operating system concepts, particularly in the context of parallel and concurrent execution. If you already have a good knowledge of operating systems concepts, browse lightly or skip ahead.

Threads and Processes

Computing systems are managed by a program: an operating system. Process is the mechanism that operating systems use to start and control the execution of other programs. A process provides one or more ranges of addresses for the executing program to use. Each address has a value (which remains undefined until it is initialized). Each range is mapped to a block of memory (which may reside on one or more attached devices). These blocks of memory are under management of the operating system. A range of addresses and the data that they map to are collectively called an address space. An address space is divided into fixed-size units called pages. Address space and pages provide a logical or a virtual view of the memory. This view is also called virtual memory. The operating system maintains a mapping between pages and their locations on the device. One advantage of virtual memory is that not all pages need to be resident in the physical memory device – some may be relegated to slower storage (not unlike the cache strategy), while others that remain undefined need not be mapped to any storage at all.

Being an executing program, the operating system comprises a set of processes, which start and schedule other processes. For example, an application starts with some running process launching a new process to execute that application's code. These processes may execute concurrently, sharing the available hardware by turn. An executing process may be forced to turn over to a waiting process via a mechanism of hardware interrupts.

Introduction

In mathematics, an algebraic expression is a combination of integers, variables, and algebraic operations such as summation, subtraction, product, division, and exponentiation. Equating two such algebraic expressions gives rise to an algebraic equation. For example, Eqns. 8.1–8.2 are algebraic expressions, whereas Eqns. 8.3–8.4 are algebraic equations.

There are different kinds of algebraic equations, such as, linear equations, non-linear equations (quadratic, cubic, and higher order polynomial equations) and exponential equations. The aim of this chapter is to find solutions for these equations by making use of various numerical techniques and to determine a set of values of the unknown variables contained in these equations. In this chapter, the Gauss–Seidel and the Gaussian elimination methods have been used for solving systems of linear equations, which involve ‘n’ equations and an equal number of unknown variables.

Transcendental equations are encountered ubiquitously in theoretical physics. They consist of transcendental functions that cannot be expressed in the form of finite sequences of algebraic operations. Elementary transcendental functions are logarithmic, trigonometric, exponential, and hyperbolic functions. These equations commonly occur while solving heat transfer problems and studying diffraction patterns. This chapter focuses on Scilab programs for determining the approximate numerical solution of non-linear and transcendental equations using the following iterative numerical techniques,

This chapter is arranged such that Section 8.2 recapitulates the built-in functions of Scilab that are often used for solving linear, quadratic, and polynomial equations. The reader is advised to revise the chapter on matrices before attempting to go through this section. In Section 8.3, the Gauss–Seidel method has been discussed along with its pitfalls. In Section 8.4, a brief overview of the Gaussian elimination method for solving system of linear equations has been provided. It is followed by an explicit explanation of the Scilab program based on this numerical technique. Section 8.5 discusses a variant of the Gaussian elimination method. This version re-orients the pivot elements of the Gaussian elimination method. The technique of bisection method has been explained in Section 8.6. The other techniques for solving non-linear and transcendental equations, such as the Regula Falsi method, the Secant method, and the Newton–Raphson method have been explained in Sections 8.7–8.9 respectively.

Have you ever boarded an airplane and walked through the first-class cabin to get to your own economy class seat? Such an experience forces us to look at people with presumably greater economic resources, who are enjoying more spacious seating and better service than we will receive, making economic inequality painfully visible. Or have you ever sat in the first-class cabin while passengers heading toward their economy class seats filed by in the aisle near to you? As each person passes by, you are aware that they are having a flying experience that is less comfortable, less enjoyable, and less prestigious.

What do you imagine the women who are embracing in Figure 12.1 are feeling? This photograph was taken at a homeless shelter in Los Angeles, California during an annual Mother’s Day event before the COVID-19 pandemic at which volunteer hairstylists, manicurists, and facialists offered free makeovers to shelter residents. The woman whose face we see gave the other woman, a resident of the shelter, a manicure as part of this event. What do you think the woman living in the shelter might be feeling during this encounter with her former high school classmate? Being unhoused is a highly stressful experience. What might someone need and want from other people at this difficult time? What could other people provide? How important do you think other people can be to someone who is coping with poverty, economic stress, and even homelessness?

In this chapter, we introduce the main ideas behind relevance theory. We begin by considering how it developed out of the Gricean approach to pragmatics, and we look at how it differs from that approach. Relevance theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory of how we process utterances (and information) in context. The chapter begins with a discussion of relevance and cognition, and we outline the relevance-theoretic characterisation of context. This then leads us to a definition of what it means for something to be relevant, and we introduce the two principles which drive the relevance-theoretic approach to utterance interpretation. When information is intentionally communicated (both in utterances and in other forms of communication), we say it is ostensive. Ostensive communication is, according to relevance theory, special. It raises expectations of how relevant it will be for the addressee, and this has important consequences for how we process information and how we understand utterance interpretation. We will see that this leads us to the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure which describes how we go about processing intentionally communicated information.

This chapter answers questions such as: How are digital media and digitalization transforming public communication? What is the working framework in which journalism and PR operate? What is journalists’ and communications professionals’ daily work? The first part of the chapter covers the impact of digitization on journalism and PR, and how this affects their relationship. It introduces the concept of attention economy to elucidate the consequences that the digital financing model has on public communication. It then provides an insight into the recent developments in journalism and PR by presenting novel forms and formats of digital communication, which are at the heart of media linguistics research. The second part of the chapter focuses on the concepts of media literacy, digital literacy, visual and visualization literacy and data literacy, and how these skills translate into journalists’ and communication experts’ daily job, particularly when faced with the new ethical challenges posed by new digital technologies and tools. The chapter closes by presenting the discipline of ethics in general and with a special focus on media ethics in journalism and PR and digital media ethics.

In this chapter we take a closer look at figurative language from a pragmatic perspective. Figurative language is also often associated with literary language. However, as we shall see, from a pragmatic perspective, non-literal use of language extends far beyond the devices and tropes traditionally associated with rhetoric and poetry. The inferential processes that we employ to interpret metaphors, irony, and other figuratively used language, are part of a more general pragmatic system. Non-literal use of language is pervasive, and the processing of non-literal language plays a central role in utterance interpretation. We focus on metaphor, hyperbole, and irony, outlining several of the most influential pragmatic approaches to the analyses of these and starting with the Gricean account. The field of lexical pragmatics is introduced, and a range of examples are discussed to illustrate just how often we use language ‘loosely’. This approach is then applied to approximations, hyperbole, and metaphor. In the second half of the chapter, attention turns to irony, and two leading analyses are introduced and then compared: irony as pretence and irony as echoic use.

In this chapter we turn our attention to the role that pragmatics plays in the study of social interaction. When we communicate, we do not simply exchange information. We also manage relationships. As speakers, we can choose to be more or less direct, more or less formal, and more or less attentive to our hearers. The decisions that speakers make are often motivated by concern for how their hearers will react to the utterance, and by the effect that this might then have on the relationship. Perhaps the most influential work in this area of pragmatics is Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness. The first half of this chapter provides an overview of their framework and the politeness strategies that they propose. In the second half of the chapter, we discuss some recent developments that have arisen in response to Brown and Levinson’s work. These include analyses of impoliteness, consideration of how cultural variation might be incorporated into the pragmatics of interaction, and a shift to focus less on politeness and more on a broader notion of the relational work that speakers perform.

Yet to Recieve

Yet to Recieve