ByteLabs

Please support the reform of English libel law by signing the following petition – even if you are not a UK citizen. English libel laws are designed badly and do more harm than good. Here are just a few arguments why the laws need to be changed:

- English libel laws have been condemned by the UN Human Rights Committee.

- These laws gag scientists, bloggers and journalists who want to discuss matters of genuine public interest (and public health!).

- These laws give rise to libel tourism, whereby the rich and the powerful (Saudi billionaires, Russian oligarchs and overseas corporations) come to London to sue writers because English libel laws are so hostile to responsible journalism. (In fact, it is exactly because English libel laws have this global impact that we welcome signatories to the petition from around the world.)

- Vested interests can use their resources to bully and intimidate those who seek to question them. The cost of a libel trial in England is 100 times more expensive than the European average and typically runs to over £1 million.

- Three separate ongoing libel cases involve myself and two medical researchers raising concerns about three medical treatments. We face losing £1 million each. In future, why would anyone else raise similar concerns? If these health matters are not reported, then the public is put at risk.

Howard Zinn, ranking amongst the top of my personal heroes has passed away this week. This is very sad news indeed – rest in peace Howard!

Mass media report that there are security issues in Haiti. Even the UN says that it first has to guarantee security before they can provide relief efforts in the country. The US military has taken over the airport and redirects flights (i.e. an airplane by doctors without borders) based on some flimsy excuses.

The situation is quite different from what you read and hear in the mass media. People in Haiti are desperate but there is NO violence – there is NO security threat. Don’t rely on our mass media, listen to journalists who are in Haiti and actually speak to Haitians instead of accepting government propaganda as the truth:

• DemocracyNow! News from the 20.01.2010
• US accused of militarizing relief effort
• Amy Goodman reporting from Haiti

It should be noted that among the first countries that provided help was Cuba and the Dominican Republic – NOT the US. In fact the US is more of a hindrance than help – it kind of makes sense – soldiers are not doctors, nor are they relief workers. So how can such a large regiment of soldiers in Haiti be of any help for the people?

We came up with another interesting project that might be of interest to you! The full title of this project is “A LLVM Backend for a Just-In-Time Compilation Engine of a state-of-the-art Instruction Set Simulator” and a detailed project specification can be found here.

If you are interested you can either contact me, Björn or Nigel.

Our PaStA research group offers an exciting new project. It is about extending a state-of-the-art high-speed simulator that already implements a JIT compilation engine with a concurrent and adaptive JIT and AOT engine.

The full title is “Concurrent, Adaptive, Just-In-Time and Ahead-Of-Time Compilation in the context of a state-of-the-art Instruction Set Simulator” and a detailed project specification can be found here.

If you are interested you can either contact me or Björn.

Our paper titled ‘Integrated Instruction Selection and Register Allocation for Compact Code Generation Exploiting Freeform Mixing of 16- and 32-bit Instructions’ has been accepted for publication in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, 2010 (CGO’10). It is a joint paper written together with Tobias Koch and Björn Franke.

The School of Informatics in Edinburgh was hosting this years SICSA DEMOfest'09 where our PASTA research group presented the latest developments sourrounding the next generation EnCore Embedded Microprocessor codenamed Castle.

• More information about DEMOfest'09 event.
• More information about the PASTA Research Group.

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