In the previous chapter, I surveyed the relative rank of children over time and across cultures. Children may occupy the apex of society (neontocracy) or the basement (gerontocracy) or points in between. In this chapter my intent is to view the beginnings of life in the more common gerontocracy. In a gerontocracy, Imperial China for example, “‘child,’ or tzû, is understood … as a social status relative to his or her elders. It denotes the subordinate, humble, and inferior status of a child in a subservient role to that of his or her elders, ancestors, and others in a hierarchically superior position” (Hsiung 2005:21).

Figure 8 depicts a specific case from Pamela Reynolds’ study of the Tonga of Zambia. Note that the lowest level is the earth and a stillborn is returned directly to the wild, without ceremony. As the individual survives, she or he ascends a ladder of value reflected in the place and manner of burial – which progresses from fully wild to domestic.

Much of the contemporary literature on children identifies the parent–child relationship as central to the functioning of society. Furthermore, this relationship is seen as largely unidirectional. That is, the parent has manifold obligations to his/her child, while the child has few, if any, to his/her parent. However, as we review literature on children in other societies, a very different picture emerges. For example, West African “Ijo perceive of inheritance as flowing from sons to fathers as readily as the reverse” (Hollos and Leis 1989: 29). This contrast is captured in the two “value pyramids” labeled gerontocracy and neontocracy (Figure 1) in the first chapter.

Usually, the constituent treaties of international organizations control who can join the organization, under what conditions, and following which procedure. This makes, in principle, perfect functionalist sense: this way, organizations and their member states may screen applicants in terms of whether or not they are able to contribute to the organization’s functions. In practice, needless to say, decisions on membership do not always follow a functionalist logic: as it turns out, such decisions are often influenced by, for example, human rights considerations, or considerations relating more generally to the politics of the state concerned.1

In the previous chapter we looked at childhood through the lens of dependency. Infants and children can be distinguished from the young of mammals, generally, because, while their brains are large and growing rapidly, representing over half of their metabolism, they remain virtually helpless and in an immature state for a very long time. Others must care for them. In this chapter, we will examine the flip side of that coin and look at how “brainy” but incompetent children set about acquiring their culture and becoming competent members, ultimately supporting their erstwhile caregivers. This process we might characterize as “making sense,” which incorporates two ideas. One is that the child must strive to understand or make sense of all that’s going on around him or her, and this begins in infancy. And two, the child strives to be accepted, to fit in.

Whatever activity one wishes to engage in, be it the sending of a postcard to a friend abroad or the purchase of a television set produced in a foreign country, it is more than likely that the activity is in one way or another regulated by the activities of an international organization. Indeed, there are few, if any, activities these days which have an international element but which are not the subject of activities of at least one, and quite often more than one, international organization.1 International organizations have developed into a pervasive phenomenon, and, according to most calculations, they even outnumber states.2

Judicial settlement involves the reference of disputes to permanent tribunals for a legally binding decision. It developed from arbitration, which accounts for the close similarity between the two, and in various forms is now available through a number of courts of general or specialised jurisdiction. Examples of the latter will be considered when we examine the Law of the Sea Convention in a later chapter, but the advantages and limitations of tribunals of specialised jurisdiction will be more readily appreciated if we first consider the International Court.

The means available for the settlement of international disputes are commonly divided into two groups. Those considered so far, namely, negotiation, mediation, inquiry and conciliation, are termed diplomatic means because the parties retain control of the dispute and may accept or reject a proposed settlement as they see fit. Arbitration and judicial settlement, on the other hand, are employed when what is wanted is a binding decision, usually on the basis of international law, and hence these are known as legal means of settlement.

In the fall of 1973, I took up residence in the polygynous household of Chief Wolliekollie in the Liberian village of Gbarngasuakwelle (Lancy 1996). While the chief was very gracious in welcoming me, in facilitating my research on the children of the village, and in providing me with accommodation in his sprawling house, he failed to introduce me to other members of his household. Strangers rarely visited Gbarngasuakwelle and, when they did, the chief knew they usually meant trouble and expense, so he did his best to ensure their stay was short and unobtrusive. There was no protocol for dealing with a resident ethnographer.

The household consisted of three of the chief’s four wives, an unmarried sister of one of them, their children, and a steady stream of temporary residents related to the chief or his wives.

A computer instruction set defines the correct execution of a program as the instructions processed one after another – that is, sequentially (see Chapter 2). This sequential abstraction enables composition of arithmetic operations (add, xor), operations on memory (state), and also grants extraordinary power to branch instructions that compose blocks of instructions conditionally. In this chapter, we explore the central importance of the sequential abstraction for managing the complexity of large-scale software and hardware systems. Subsequently, we consider creative techniques that both preserve the illusion of sequence and allow the processor implementation to increase the speed of program progress. These techniques are known as instruction-level parallelism (ILP), and accelerate program execution by executing instructions in a program in pipelined (overlapped), out-of-order, and even speculative fashion. Understanding ILP provides a perspective on how commercial processors really execute programs – far different from the step-by-step recipe of the sequential abstraction.

The topics discussed in the previous chapter have in common that they all relate to the relationship between the organization and its member states, and therefore come within the purview of functionalist theory. This makes eminent sense: the law of international organizations has always been conceived (if conceived in theoretical terms to begin with) as having something to do with the links between the organization and its member states: those members set up their organizations for certain purposes, and create the legal environment to help the organization realize its functions: they provide them with powers, grant privileges and immunities, and often pay a membership contribution.

Article 33(1) of the UN Charter lists the various methods of peaceful settlement. The methods listed are not set out in any order of priority, but the first mentioned, negotiation, is the principal means of handling all international disputes.1 In fact in practice, negotiation is employed more frequently than all the other methods put together. Often, indeed, negotiation is the only means employed, not just because it is always the first to be tried and is often successful, but also because states may believe its advantages to be so great as to rule out the use of other methods, even in situations where the chances of a negotiated settlement are slight.

This book is for the growing community of scientists and even engineers who use computing and need a scientific understanding of computer architecture – those who view computation as an intellectual multiplier, and consequently are interested in capabilities, scaling, and limits, not mechanisms. That is, the scientific principles behind computer architecture, and how to reason about hardware performance for higher-level ends. With the dramatic rise of both data analytics and artificial intelligence, there has been a rapid growth in interest and progress in data science. There has also been a shift in the center of mass of computer science upward and outward, into a wide variety of sciences (physical, biological, and social), as well as nearly every aspect of society.

The end of Dennard scaling forced a shift to explicit parallelism, and the adoption of multicore parallelism as a vehicle for performance scaling (see Chapter 3, specifically Section 3.3.4). Even with multicore, the continued demand for both higher performance and energy efficiency has driven a growing interest in accelerators. In fact, their use has become so widespread that in many applications effective use of accelerators is a requirement. We discuss why accelerators are attractive, and when they can deliver large performance benefits. Specifically, we discuss both graphics processing units (GPUs) that aspire to be general parallel accelerators, and other emerging focused opportunities, such as machine learning accelerators. We close with broader discussion of where acceleration is most effective, and where it is not. Software architects designing applications will find this perspective on benefits and challenges of acceleration essential. These criteria will shape both design and evolution, as well as use of customized accelerator architectures in the future.