7 research outputs found
Novel linguistic steganography based on character-level text generation
With the development of natural language processing, linguistic steganography has become a research hotspot in the field of information security. However, most existing linguistic steganographic methods may suffer from the low embedding capacity problem. Therefore, this paper proposes a character-level linguistic steganographic method (CLLS) to embed the secret information into characters instead of words by employing a long short-term memory (LSTM) based language model. First, the proposed method utilizes the LSTM model and large-scale corpus to construct and train a character-level text generation model. Through training, the best evaluated model is obtained as the prediction model of generating stego text. Then, we use the secret information as the control information to select the right character from predictions of the trained character-level text generation model. Thus, the secret information is hidden in the generated text as the predicted characters having different prediction probability values can be encoded into different secret bit values. For the same secret information, the generated stego texts vary with the starting strings of the text generation model, so we design a selection strategy to find the highest quality stego text from a number of candidate stego texts as the final stego text by changing the starting strings. The experimental results demonstrate that compared with other similar methods, the proposed method has the fastest running speed and highest embedding capacity. Moreover, extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effect of the number of candidate stego texts on the quality of the final stego text. The experimental results show that the quality of the final stego text increases with the number of candidate stego texts increasing, but the growth rate of the quality will slow down
Applied Metaheuristic Computing
For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC
Applied Methuerstic computing
For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC
Stories that Make History: The Experience and Memories of the Japanese Military 'Comfort Girls-Women'
The experiences of Korean comfort girls-women are a paradigmatic example of how military sexual violence can obliterate the dignity of women and shame them into nonexistence. This book examines how the turning of their innocence into inadequacy, compounded their long, miserable suffering for half a century
Stories that Make History
The experiences of Korean comfort girls-women are a paradigmatic example of how military sexual violence can obliterate the dignity of women and shame them into nonexistence. This book examines how the turning of their innocence into inadequacy, compounded their long, miserable suffering for half a century
The effect of semitic primal religion on Israelite religion: a pattern for a contextual biblical interpretation in Nigerian Christianity.
Doctor of Philosophy in Theology. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg 2016.This research adds to the many voices from African Biblical scholarship, contributing towards an analysis of
how Africans relate to the Bible in the way they do. While social, political, and even cultural factors are
important, this thesis examines the role of primal religion in African interpretation of the Bible.
The perception of Western scholars of African primal religion has not always been that wholesome. But this
study has brought to light how significant a role primal religion has played in African interpretation of the
Bible, particularly for those to whom the Bible is a key resource in their struggle for basic existence. Primal
religion in Nigeria (specifically among the Yoruba) serves as a fundamental tool in the interpretation of the
Bible. The enduring effectiveness of primal religion, this thesis argues, can be found in the weekly sermons
preached in Nigerian churches, churches that are growing in membership. In other words, this kind of
interpretation appeals to the African person in ways that missionary and colonial forms of biblical
interpretation do not.
The effectiveness of the primal religion is an anthropological phenomenon; therefore it goes beyond the
African context. The thesis analyses how the primal religious beliefs of the biblical Israelites too had had an
effect on their religious thought, and in the thesis I argue that this is analogous to the African situation in
Nigeria among the Yoruba.
Therefore the research juxtaposed how the ideo-theological orientation of the writers of certain texts in the
Old Testament (affected by the Semitic background, and their perception of God’s message to them and
their context), and the manner the ideo-theological orientation of the Nigerian preacher/Christian (affected
by his/her primal religion) and his/her perception of the Bible affects his/her interpretation.
The thesis analyses the enduring effect of Near Eastern religious thought on the Old Testament, and then
goes on to analyse the effect of African primal religion on how a selection of Yoruba preachers/Christians
interpret the Bible. These two sets of analysis are then brought into critical dialogue, with a view to
revealing a similar pattern.
Apart from presenting a comparison between the role of primal religion in the Israelites’ religion and
Yoruba Christianity, this research also examined briefly how the biblical interpretation peculiar to these
Yoruba preachers plays a role in the nation-building. I believe the Church has a role to play in the
community in which it is professing its faith. In some other African nations, there had been cases or contexts
whereby the Church rose to its occasion in fighting for independence, or/and even standing against
dictatorship in every form. This thesis concludes with a reflection on how the kind of interpretation
preachers are giving to the Bible today in Nigeria effects positive change in the values and orientation of
civil society more generally. Can this type of Christianity offer a push in the right direction in the practice of
politics and governance in Nigeria
Dissertation in Which There Appear Lost Punchlines, Dreadful Puns, Low Resolution, etc.: On the Failure of Humour in Avant-garde Film and Video
This dissertation explores the overlooked functions that humour has served in American avant-garde film and video, arguing that humour is involved consistently in many of the key operations and philosophies that have energized these moving image practices. Taking humour as an alternative historical and interpretive lens, this dissertation conducts new readings of three major formations or moments in the discourse of the American avant-gardes. These are: underground film, structural film, and early feminist video art.
A branching theme of these readings is failure, seen to carry complex meanings and humorous pleasures in various cases of avant-garde activity. The introductory chapter details the propagandization of failure in the 1960s underground cinema, and argues that a divisive brand of humour highlights the sense of the avant-garde in this cinema. Chapter 1 re-conceptualizes the humourless structural film movement of the 60s and 70s, arguing that, for filmmakers like Michael Snow, the idea of structure is not a dogmatic working principle but something of a ruse, one whose limits are meant to be teased, pushed, and exceeded. Moving to early feminist video art, Chapter 2 emphasizes the importance of humour in the project of articulating feminist political horizons. In videotapes by Susan Mogul and Martha Rosler, performative nonchalance and lack of preciousness about low-grade equipment can be seen as forms of humorous delivery, which stay utopically open to future re-articulations. Circling back to underground film, Chapter 3 locates humour in the failure to distinguish sharply between the avant-garde and popular culture. Through readings of humour in queer underground film, and then in more recent pop appropriation videos, this chapter illustrates the hilarity, critique, and utopian feeling that can result when the effects of pop and of the avant-garde are brought excessively close.
This dissertation assembles conceptual scaffolding for understanding humorous failure as a variable avant-garde theme, drawing upon such scholars as Matei Calinescu, Jack Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz. With failure in mind, this dissertation further reflects on the instability of humour itself as an object of study, and as a device, attitude, or value that might be put to work for us