Optimistic Tragedy

Distributed Optimistic Concurrency Considered Optimistic

Optimistic concurrency relies on speculative execution, read-write conflict detection, and checkpointrollback techniques to provide a programming model that replaces locks with the abstraction of atomic, isolated execution of critical sections. Previous research has shown that on chip multi-processors, a class of workloads featuring irregular parallelism and rare read-write conflicts can reap s...

Pediatric Tragedy

Recurrent Human Tragedy During Hajj

Hajj, a unique yearly mass gathering pilgrimage of more than 2 million Muslims from around the world, presents enormous challenges to the Saudian Arabia government.1 The potential for deadly epidemic outbreaks of bacterial and viral diseases leading to upper respiratory infection and meningitis and human stampedes call for prompt attention from both pilgrims and the ministry of healt...

Aristophanes on Tragedy

Fifty years before Aristotle wrote his Poetics, Aristophanes had devoted two comedies, Thesmophoriazusae (411) and Frogs (405), to the subject of tragedy. In both plays the plot shows the education of the main character in the nature of tragedy. Euripides learns in Thesmophoriazusae that he must present noble and not base women in his dramas. His depiction of perverse women in the theatre had m...

A Greek summer tragedy

Fires have raged across southern Europe during the exceptional heat of this summer but in Greece, where they have been particularly severe and widespread, they caught the authorities by surprise. They have been occurring over weeks from late June in the forests of the north to Crete in the south. They are doubly troubling because of Greece's dramatic biodiversity — more than 25 per cent of an e...