Pattern Discrimination

Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation - in a digital world, identity politics is pattern discrimination. It is by recognizing patterns in input data that Artificial Intelligence algorithms create bias and practice racial exclusions thereby inscribing power relations into media. How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs

Pattern Discrimination

Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation—in a digital world, identity politics is pattern discrimination. It is by recognizing patterns in input data that Artificial Intelligence algorithms create bias and practice racial exclusions thereby inscribing power relations into media. How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs

From Spectrum to Beam in Iraq Organizational Adaptation: Combat, Stability, and Beyond

On 20 March 2003, the United States Army participated in the invasion of Iraq as part of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF). Despite the announcement from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln of the end of major combat operations on 1 May 2003, the U.S. Army is still conducting maneuvers and missions throughout the cities and desert plains of Iraq. Fundamentally, the U.S. Army was incapable of translating initial combat success into the accomplishment of strategic objectives and political victory. What emerged from tactical and operational victories against Iraqi forces was not a stable democratic peace; instead, Iraq plunged into a long and complex insurgency that fused the spectrum of conflict into a single beam where the full range of military operations had to be performed nearly simultaneously.Combating and defeating this insurgency required a capacity for conducting simultaneous full spectrum operations in a competitive environment populated by highly adaptive foes. But the U.S. Army was unprepared for this task. A Cycle of Mutual Adaptation between hierarchical and vertically integrated organizations and networked and horizontally integrated competitors ensued. The latter was predisposed to organizational adaptation and conducting networked operations in a decentralized fashion; the former was predisposed to quickly vanquishing threats along prescriptive plans with centralized command and control systems. How this competition unfolded and the implications of this process are the subject of this study.Although the insurgency in Iraq has largely been quelled, the cyclical and competitive process producing this tenuous stability has raised serious questions regarding the efficacy of post-Cold War and post-9/11 strategies, force structures, doctrine, training, and the U.S. Army's organizational capacity for adaptation in light of national interests, strategic requirements, and institutional legacies. This study charts the historical factors contributing to the Cycle of Mutual Adaptation in OIF, analyzes this cycle, gives an assessment of the international security environment in the wake of this conflict, and concludes with policy recommendations for improving the U.S. Army's capacity for organizational adaptation in the 21st Century

System PIE : The Primary Phoneme Inventory and Sound Law System for Proto-Indo-European

The Indo-European (IE) sound laws are the best known of all language families. Yet many laws remain incompletely formulated due to a failure in the interpretation of the Old Anatolian laryngeal. The postulation of multiple laryngeals (at least three in the mainstream laryngeal theory) has led to a detour in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). A single laryngeal PIE *ḫ ≡ Ḫi. ḫ was already discovered by Ladislav Zgusta, however, and subsequently it was confirmed by Johann Tischler. The dissertation studies unexplored properties of PIE *ḫ and demonstrates that it had a voiceless (PIE *h) and a voiced (PIE *ɦ) variant with glottal fricative articulation. PIE *ḫ appears with PIE *a in diphonemic PIE *ḫa and *aḫ. The solution to the laryngeal problem allows for a clarification of the relationship between PIE *h/ɦ and the rest of the phoneme inventory. This analysis results in the primary phoneme inventory for Proto-Indo-European consisting of PIE *a/ā? *e/ē *h/ɦ *i/y *k/g *l/L *m/M *n/N *o/ō *p/b *r/R *s/z *t/d *u/w. The inventory is minimal: it cannot be reduced and it is sufficient to generate attested IE forms. Accordingly, the import of System PIE for Indo-European linguistics is comparable to mastery of the building blocks of DNA. In addition, the dissertation modernizes the IE sound laws in terms of PIE *h/ɦ. Due to the advanced stage of IE linguistics, no entirely new sound laws are presented, because the yet remaining problems of the traditional sound laws reflect the absence of the comparative interpretation of the Old Anatolian laryngeal. The scientific framework is the comparative method of reconstruction, recognized as a branch of natural science already by August Schleicher. The dissertation contributes to the development of the field by explicating the method by means of predicate calculus, including a formulation of Schleicher s intuitive description of the decision method for IE etymology. As such, System PIE can be digitalized i.e. turned into a programming language that can generate IE data from reconstructions. The most reliable etymological and standard dictionaries are used as the material. While these sources present the data and etymological suggestions, no full comparative conclusions have yet been drawn. As a contribution to this area of the field, the dissertation presents hundreds of new etymologies, which serve as examples of the Proto-Indo-European Lexicon, a digital etymological dictionary of IE languages that will be published at http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fiLäpimurto protoindoeuroopan rekonstruktiossa Väitöskirja esittelee olennaisesti laajentuneeseen kieliaineistoon perustuvan päivitetyn äänne- ja äännelakijärjestelmän protoindoeuroopalle (PIE), indoeurooppalaisten kielten kantamuodolle. Luonnontieteelliseen metodiin perustuva tutkimus avautuu esittelemällä viimein ratkaisun vuosisadan kiistanalaisena pysyneeseen laryngaaliongelmaan. Väitöskirja vahvistaa Zgustan (1951) ja Tischlerin (1977ff.) alustavan väittämän jonka mukaan heetissä (ja yleisemmin protoindoeuroopassa) oli ainoastaan yksi laryngaali Ḫi. ḫ ≡ PIE *ḫ, ei kolmea tai useampaa (*h1 h2 h3, ) kuten valtavirtaa edustavassa laryngaaliteoriassa (LT) on tähän asti oletettu. Tästä lähtökohdasta väitöskirja määrittää laryngaalin PIE *ḫ ominaisuudet ja suhteet muuhun foneemijärjestelmään. PIE *ḫ oli äännearvoltaan glottaalinen frikatiivi, jolla oli soinnition (PIE *h) ja soinnillinen muunnos (PIE *ɦ). Laryngaali esiintyy yksinomaan vokaalin PIE *a yhteydessä muodostaen difoneemiset parit PIE *ḫa ja PIE *aḫ. Alan keskeisen ongelman ratkaiseminen mahdollistaa kokonaisselvityksen PIE *h/ɦ:n ja muun äännejärjestelmän yhteyksistä, jonka tuloksena protoindoeuroopan foneemijärjestelmä koostuu vain 14 äänteestä. Äännejärjestelmä on minimaalinen, ts. sitä ei voida supistaa, mutta se riittää indoeurooppalaisten kielten tuottamiseen. Tältä kannalta väitöskirjan merkitys indoeuropeistiikalle on verrannollinen DNA:n tuntemukseen. Anatolialaisten kielten laryngaalin ja sen korrektin tulkinnan (PIE *h/ɦ) puuttuminen aikaisemmista teorioista on aiheuttanut säännöllisiä ongelmia äännelakeihin ja tutkimus modernisoi indoeurooppalaisen äännelakijärjestelmän keskeiset osat. Tutkimuksen tieteellinen viitekehys on vertaileva menetelmä jonka tunnisti luonnontieteeksi jo August Schleicher 1800-luvun puolivälissä. Väitöskirja ajaa alan yleistä kehitystä muotoilemalla sekä komparatiivisen metodin että Schleicherin intuitiivisen ratkaisumenetelmän predikaattikalkyylissa. Tämän ansiosta rekonstruktioteoria System PIE on sellaisenaan käännettävissä digitaaliselle ohjelmointikielelle joka mahdollistaa indoeurooppalaisten kielten generoimisen kantakielen rekonstruktioista tarjoten lukemattomia käytännön sovelluksia. Väitöskirjan aineisto koostuu luotetuimmista sanakirjoista. Huolimatta siitä, että nämä esittelevät sekä aineiston että etymologioita, kaikkia komparatiivisia johtopäätöksiä ei ole kokonaisuudessaan vedetty. Näiden puutteiden korjaamiseksi väitöskirja esittelee satoja uusia vertailuita, jotka samalla toimivat näytteinä tulevasta käytännön sovelluksesta, indoeurooppalaisten kielten digitaalisesta sanakirjasta Proto-Indo-European Lexicon http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.f

An Extension of Haruspex to Cover Vulnerabilities in Application Environments

—Haruspex is a suite of tools that assesses ICT risk through a scenario approach. Each scenario includes the target system and some threat agents that compose the attacks enabled by the system vulnerabilities to reach some predefined goals. The suite applies a Monte Carlo method with multiple simulations of the agent attacks against the target system. The simulation applies a formal model of the target system that describes the system nodes, the components with their vulnerabilities, and the logical topology. This paper proposes an extension to model in a more accurate way how the relations and the interactions among applications affect the agent attacks. After introducing this extension, we show how it supports the modeling of web applications. Then, we adopt the new model to assess a critical infrastructure that supervises and manages gas distribution

A DISCOURSE ON CHILD MALNUTRITION: ANTHROPOMETRY, EMERGENT THEMES, QUALITY CONTROL MAXIMS, AND CLIMATIC AND ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS

Malnutrition is a detrimental and significant plight for young children, responsible for 45% of all deaths among children worldwide. The aim of my dissertation is to assess the history of the science of anthropometry, synthesize the cumulative findings within the contemporary child malnutrition literature, dispute certain quality control maxims of anthropometric child-health surveys, and quantify the responsible latent factors of child malnutrition. These efforts are in service of a better characterization of malnutrition, a more reliable estimate of how many children are malnourished, and a better understanding of the geographical distribution and dynamic stochastic characteristics of malnutrition. It is essential to better understand malnutrition and its causes to suggest appropriate corrective policy. This dissertation consists of four principal essays, each from a unique conceptual perspective. The first essay is a historical and epistemological perspective of the science of anthropometry. I contextualize the legacy of child malnutrition efforts, including the link between eugenics and contemporary notions of “normal” child growth, the institutional power-struggle for child growth chart superiority, the obfuscated distinction between growth references and standards of growth, and the consequences of universal standards that do not reflect observable populations. The second essay is a systematic review of the literature, the largest of its kind to date. I synthesize 184 disaggregate empirical studies of the determinants of child malnutrition in Africa published since 1990. I find numerous opportunities for development within this corpus, in particular opportunities to enrich the scope, scale, and quantification of the field. The third essay is an analytical perspective on the quality control mechanisms applied to anthropometric surveys. I challenge the practice of rejecting datasets based on overlarge z-score standard deviation values and offer an alternative approach. The fourth essay is an econometric empirical analysis in Kenya and Nigeria of child malnutrition determinants. I use spatial Bayesian kriging and four-level random intercept hierarchical logit models to show the spatial heterogeneity of malnutrition prevalence, and to quantify various socio-economic and climatic determinants of child malnutrition. I find significant spatial and hierarchical relationships and determinants, which can move malnutrition rates by over 50%

Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI) 2016: Technische Universität Ilmenau, 09. - 11. März 2016; Band II

Übersicht der Teilkonferenzen Band II • eHealth as a Service – Innovationen für Prävention, Versorgung und Forschung • Einsatz von Unternehmenssoftware in der Lehre • Energieinformatik, Erneuerbare Energien und Neue Mobilität • Hedonische Informationssysteme • IKT-gestütztes betriebliches Umwelt- und Nachhaltigkeitsmanagement • Informationssysteme in der Finanzwirtschaft • IT- und Software-Produktmanagement in Internet-of-Things-basierten Infrastrukturen • IT-Beratung im Kontext digitaler Transformation • IT-Sicherheit für Kritische Infrastrukturen • Modellierung betrieblicher Informationssysteme – Konzeptuelle Modelle im Zeitalter der digitalisierten Wirtschaft (d!conomy) • Prescriptive Analytics in I