Democracy, Markets and the Commons

How can we overcome the existing political, economic, and ecological crises that humanity faces? With the notion of the commons, Lukas Peter argues that this form of social organization can provide answers to the shortcomings of centralized states and open and competitive markets. By building on and going beyond the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, he develops an ecological understanding of the commons and human freedom, more generally, thereby reinterpreting classical thinkers such as John Locke and John Rawls. Importantly, he does not suggest an end to property, states or markets, but rather a radical democratization thereof, ultimately providing a real alternative for the 21st century

Security in Distributed, Grid, Mobile, and Pervasive Computing

This book addresses the increasing demand to guarantee privacy, integrity, and availability of resources in networks and distributed systems. It first reviews security issues and challenges in content distribution networks, describes key agreement protocols based on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange and key management protocols for complex distributed systems like the Internet, and discusses securing design patterns for distributed systems. The next section focuses on security in mobile computing and wireless networks. After a section on grid computing security, the book presents an overview of security solutions for pervasive healthcare systems and surveys wireless sensor network security

High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1406 “High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet)“ project. Long considered important pillars of the scientific method, Modelling and Simulation have evolved from traditional discrete numerical methods to complex data-intensive continuous analytical optimisations. Resolution, scale, and accuracy have become essential to predict and analyse natural and complex systems in science and engineering. When their level of abstraction raises to have a better discernment of the domain at hand, their representation gets increasingly demanding for computational and data resources. On the other hand, High Performance Computing typically entails the effective use of parallel and distributed processing units coupled with efficient storage, communication and visualisation systems to underpin complex data-intensive applications in distinct scientific and technical domains. It is then arguably required to have a seamless interaction of High Performance Computing with Modelling and Simulation in order to store, compute, analyse, and visualise large data sets in science and engineering. Funded by the European Commission, cHiPSet has provided a dynamic trans-European forum for their members and distinguished guests to openly discuss novel perspectives and topics of interests for these two communities. This cHiPSet compendium presents a set of selected case studies related to healthcare, biological data, computational advertising, multimedia, finance, bioinformatics, and telecommunications

High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1406 “High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet)“ project. Long considered important pillars of the scientific method, Modelling and Simulation have evolved from traditional discrete numerical methods to complex data-intensive continuous analytical optimisations. Resolution, scale, and accuracy have become essential to predict and analyse natural and complex systems in science and engineering. When their level of abstraction raises to have a better discernment of the domain at hand, their representation gets increasingly demanding for computational and data resources. On the other hand, High Performance Computing typically entails the effective use of parallel and distributed processing units coupled with efficient storage, communication and visualisation systems to underpin complex data-intensive applications in distinct scientific and technical domains. It is then arguably required to have a seamless interaction of High Performance Computing with Modelling and Simulation in order to store, compute, analyse, and visualise large data sets in science and engineering. Funded by the European Commission, cHiPSet has provided a dynamic trans-European forum for their members and distinguished guests to openly discuss novel perspectives and topics of interests for these two communities. This cHiPSet compendium presents a set of selected case studies related to healthcare, biological data, computational advertising, multimedia, finance, bioinformatics, and telecommunications

At the Crossroads of TANF and Early Childhood Policy: The Impact of Devolution and Health Advocacy Networks on Progressive Policy Choices

Despite the conventional wisdom that U.S. social policies represent the emergence of a monolithic, racialized system of poverty governance that is purely punitive, there is increasing evidence that many states are repealing disciplinary social policy measures. In fact, several states are increasingly adopting enabling policies that are aimed at increasing public benefits to restore social equity among low-income families. These developments challenge current depictions of the landscape of the U.S. welfare state and they suggest that social and early childhood health policy choices may not simply emanate from a unified conservative social movement and racialized social structures. This dissertation fills a critical gap in the literature by examining the development of social welfare policies over time and it widens the scope of analysis to include early childhood health policies that are targeted towards low-income families. Challenging structural explanations of reform, the dissertation re-focuses our attention to the politics of social and health policy outcomes. Using a mixed methods design, this dissertation finds that conservative social movements have influenced both the development and repeal of stringent social policy measures such as family caps. I also find that evidenced based policymaking and the rise of the infant mental health movement played a key role in the development of the early childhood policy strategies adopted throughout the two-thousands. At the service delivery level, this logic has bred the adoption of multiple instrumental strategies in which health policy interventions are selectively invoked to accomplish predetermined goals. One key consequence has been that marginalized families are subjected to participating in vast surveillance systems that document their childrens development, their emotional health, domestic violence and many other \u27risk\u27 factors

Proceedings of the 2004 ONR Decision-Support Workshop Series: Interoperability

In August of 1998 the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center (CADRC) of the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), approached Dr. Phillip Abraham of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) with the proposal for an annual workshop focusing on emerging concepts in decision-support systems for military applications. The proposal was considered timely by the ONR Logistics Program Office for at least two reasons. First, rapid advances in information systems technology over the past decade had produced distributed collaborative computer-assistance capabilities with profound potential for providing meaningful support to military decision makers. Indeed, some systems based on these new capabilities such as the Integrated Marine Multi-Agent Command and Control System (IMMACCS) and the Integrated Computerized Deployment System (ICODES) had already reached the field-testing and final product stages, respectively. Second, over the past two decades the US Navy and Marine Corps had been increasingly challenged by missions demanding the rapid deployment of forces into hostile or devastate dterritories with minimum or non-existent indigenous support capabilities. Under these conditions Marine Corps forces had to rely mostly, if not entirely, on sea-based support and sustainment operations. Particularly today, operational strategies such as Operational Maneuver From The Sea (OMFTS) and Sea To Objective Maneuver (STOM) are very much in need of intelligent, near real-time and adaptive decision-support tools to assist military commanders and their staff under conditions of rapid change and overwhelming data loads. In the light of these developments the Logistics Program Office of ONR considered it timely to provide an annual forum for the interchange of ideas, needs and concepts that would address the decision-support requirements and opportunities in combined Navy and Marine Corps sea-based warfare and humanitarian relief operations. The first ONR Workshop was held April 20-22, 1999 at the Embassy Suites Hotel in San Luis Obispo, California. It focused on advances in technology with particular emphasis on an emerging family of powerful computer-based tools, and concluded that the most able members of this family of tools appear to be computer-based agents that are capable of communicating within a virtual environment of the real world. From 2001 onward the venue of the Workshop moved from the West Coast to Washington, and in 2003 the sponsorship was taken over by ONR’s Littoral Combat/Power Projection (FNC) Program Office (Program Manager: Mr. Barry Blumenthal). Themes and keynote speakers of past Workshops have included: 1999: ‘Collaborative Decision Making Tools’ Vadm Jerry Tuttle (USN Ret.); LtGen Paul Van Riper (USMC Ret.);Radm Leland Kollmorgen (USN Ret.); and, Dr. Gary Klein (KleinAssociates) 2000: ‘The Human-Computer Partnership in Decision-Support’ Dr. Ronald DeMarco (Associate Technical Director, ONR); Radm CharlesMunns; Col Robert Schmidle; and, Col Ray Cole (USMC Ret.) 2001: ‘Continuing the Revolution in Military Affairs’ Mr. Andrew Marshall (Director, Office of Net Assessment, OSD); and,Radm Jay M. Cohen (Chief of Naval Research, ONR) 2002: ‘Transformation ... ’ Vadm Jerry Tuttle (USN Ret.); and, Steve Cooper (CIO, Office ofHomeland Security) 2003: ‘Developing the New Infostructure’ Richard P. Lee (Assistant Deputy Under Secretary, OSD); and, MichaelO’Neil (Boeing) 2004: ‘Interoperability’ MajGen Bradley M. Lott (USMC), Deputy Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command; Donald Diggs, Director, C2 Policy, OASD (NII

Key distribution and distributed intrusion detection system in wireless sensor network

This thesis proposes a security solution in key management and Intrusion Detection System (IDS) for wireless sensor networks. It addresses challenges of designing in energy and security requirement. Since wireless communication consumes the most energy in sensor network, transmissions must be used efficiently. We propose Hint Key Distribution (HKD) for key management and Adaptive IDS for distributing activated IDS nodes and cooperative operation of these two protocols. HKD protocol focuses on the challenges of energy, computation and security. It uses a hint message and key chain to consume less energy while self-generating key can secure the secret key. It is a proposed solution to key distribution in sensor networks. Adaptive IDS uses threshold and voting algorithm to distribute IDS through the network. An elected node is activated IDS to monitor its network and neighbors. A threshold is used as a solution to reduce number of repeated activations of the same node. We attempt to distribute the energy use equally across the network. In a cooperative protocol, HKD and Adaptive IDS exchange information in order to adjust to the current situation. The level of alert controls the nature of the interaction between the two protocols

Compressive sensing for signal ensembles

Compressive sensing (CS) is a new approach to simultaneous sensing and compression that enables a potentially large reduction in the sampling and computation costs for acquisition of signals having a sparse or compressible representation in some basis. The CS literature has focused almost exclusively on problems involving single signals in one or two dimensions. However, many important applications involve distributed networks or arrays of sensors. In other applications, the signal is inherently multidimensional and sensed progressively along a subset of its dimensions; examples include hyperspectral imaging and video acquisition. Initial work proposed joint sparsity models for signal ensembles that exploit both intra- and inter-signal correlation structures. Joint sparsity models enable a reduction in the total number of compressive measurements required by CS through the use of specially tailored recovery algorithms. This thesis reviews several different models for sparsity and compressibility of signal ensembles and multidimensional signals and proposes practical CS measurement schemes for these settings. For joint sparsity models, we evaluate the minimum number of measurements required under a recovery algorithm with combinatorial complexity. We also propose a framework for CS that uses a union-of-subspaces signal model. This framework leverages the structure present in certain sparse signals and can exploit both intra- and inter-signal correlations in signal ensembles. We formulate signal recovery algorithms that employ these new models to enable a reduction in the number of measurements required. Additionally, we propose the use of Kronecker product matrices as sparsity or compressibility bases for signal ensembles and multidimensional signals to jointly model all types of correlation present in the signal when each type of correlation can be expressed using sparsity. We compare the performance of standard global measurement ensembles, which act on all of the signal samples; partitioned measurements, which act on a partition of the signal with a given measurement depending only on a piece of the signal; and Kronecker product measurements, which can be implemented in distributed measurement settings. The Kronecker product formulation in the sparsity and measurement settings enables the derivation of analytical bounds for transform coding compression of signal ensembles and multidimensional signals. We also provide new theoretical results for performance of CS recovery when Kronecker product matrices are used, which in turn motivates new design criteria for distributed CS measurement schemes

Recent work on inequality: thoughts on audience, analysis, advocacy and the role of the academic

Recent years have seen an explosion of academic work exploring the increase in economic inequality in western, developed countries over the last thirty years. This work gives accounts of the extent of this increase (Atkinson & Leigh, 2005; OECD, 2011; Perry, 2013), its possible causes (Autor, Katz & Kearney, 2006; OECD, 2008) and its various consequences. Accounts of these consequences may be divided (somewhat arbitrarily) into those that focus on broadly-experienced social consequences (Wilkinson, 1996; Jencks, 2002; Rothstein & Uslaner, 2005); political consequences (OECD, 2011; Bartels, 2008) and economic consequences (Persson & Tabellini, 1994; Piketty & Saez, 2003). Other work takes a more explicitly normative approach, or a focus on public attitudes towards rising inequality (Humpage, 2008; Bamfield and Horton 2009; Jost & Major, 2001). Academic work on inequality is thus a massive and massively complex field, even without mentioning work by such important authors as Bernd Wegener, Martin Gilens, Alberto Allesina, Peter Taylor-Gooby, Morton Deutsch, Christopher Jencks or David Miller). One might also note the increasing concern about inequality expressed by politicians and media sources. A non-exhaustive list would include figures hardly associated with the political left, such as David Cameron, the World Economic Forum, the Financial Times, and the Economist

Global Perspectives on China's Belt and Road Initiative

This edited volume discusses the question of how different actors give shape to BRI projects. It outlines how, rather than treating nation states as singular, monolithic actors, this volume teases apart the way different people and organizations insert themselves into BRI decision-making and implementation