Security and computer forensics in web engineering education

The integration of security and forensics into Web Engineering curricula is imperative! Poor security in web-based applications is continuing to cost organizations millions and the losses are still increasing annually. Security is frequently taught as a stand-alone course, assuming that security can be 'bolted on' to a web application at some point. Security issues must be integrated into Web Engineering processes right from the beginning to create secure solutions and therefore security should be an integral part of a Web Engineering curriculum. One aspect of Computer forensics investigates failures in security. Hence, students should be aware of the issues in forensics and how to respond when security failures occur; collecting evidence is particularly difficult for Web-based applications

Organizational Innovations of Firms from the 1850s in the USA and Japan

Organizational Innovations (OIs) are defined as disembodied technology as against embodied technology or technical (technological) innovations. The firms, as we see them today in the USA, Japan and many other countries, are organized according to OIs that took place in the USA and Japan in the last 150 years or so. A historical review during that period will identify OIs in these two countries. OIs such as integration of production and distribution, focal factories, and just-in-time cum quality control (JIT/QC) are more thoroughly described.organizational innovations, disembodied technology, firms, economic growth, historical review

Implications of Spatially Variable Costs and Habitat Conversion Risk in Landscape-Scale Conservation Planning

‘‘Strategic habitat conservation’’ refers to a process used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to develop cost-efficient strategies for conserving wildlife populations and their habitats. Strategic habitat conservation focuses on resolving uncertainties surrounding habitat conservation to meet specific wildlife population objectives (i.e., targets) and developing tools to guide where conservation actions should be focused on the landscape. Although there are examples of using optimization models to highlight where conservation should be delivered, such methods often do not explicitly account for spatial variation in the costs of conservation actions. Furthermore, many planning approaches assume that habitat protection is a preferred option, but they do not assess its value relative to other actions, such as restoration. We developed a case study to assess the implications of accounting for and ignoring spatial variation in conservation costs in optimizing conservation targets. We included assumptions about habitat loss to determine the extent to which protection or restoration would be necessary to meet an established population target. Our case study focused on optimal placement of grassland protection or restoration actions to influence bobolink Dolichonyx oryzivorus populations in the tallgrass prairie ecoregion of the north central United States. Our results show that not accounting for spatially variable costs doubled or tripled the cost of meeting the population target. Furthermore, our results suggest that one should not assume that protecting existing habitat is always a preferred option. Rather, our results show that the balance between protection and restoration can be influenced by a combination of desired targets, assumptions about habitat loss, and the relative cost of the two actions. Our analysis also points out how difficult it may be to reach targets, given the expense to meet them. We suggest that a full accounting of expected costs and benefits will help to guide development of viable management actions and meaningful conservation plans

Limits to arbitrage during the crisis: funding liquidity constraints and covered interest parity

Arbitrage normally ensures that covered interest parity (CIP) holds. Until recently, excess profits, if any, were documented to last merely seconds and reach a few pips. Instead, this paper finds that following the Lehman bankruptcy, these were large, persisted for months and involved strategies short in dollars. Profits are estimated by specifying the arbitrage strategy as a speculator would actually implement it, considering both unsecured and secured funding. Either way, it seems that dollar funding constraints kept traders from arbitraging away excess profits. The claim finds support in an empirical analysis drawing on several novel high frequency datasets of synchronous quotes across securities, including transaction costs.arbitrage limits, covered interest parity, funding liquidity, financial crisis

The Financial Crisis and Money Markets in Emerging Asia

Asian money markets entered the financial crisis in better shape than markets in other regions due to a substantial build-up of savings and liquidity in their banking systems, as well as a greater domestic focus in most of the region’s markets. However, despite the higher liquidity and lower levels of global integration, the effects of the crisis in Asia were severe and followed a similar path observed in international markets. The further development of money markets, particularly in less developed economies, will require policies and initiatives that add liquidity and depth to attract broader participation from both domestic and international investors—including regional cooperation, a robust regulatory architecture, and foreign competition to expedite the development of less developed money markets. Risk management and liquidity assumptions also need to be enhanced to establish buffers that will withstand more severe and prolonged external shocks and disruptions to external financing.Money market; money market participants; components of money markets; financial crisis

Dark Energy and Modified Gravity

Despite two decades of tremendous experimental and theoretical progress, the riddle of the accelerated expansion of the Universe remains to be solved. On the experimental side, our understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the major dark energy probes has evolved; here we summarize the major probes and their crucial challenges. On the theoretical side, the taxonomy of explanations for the accelerated expansion rate is better understood, providing clear guidance to the relevant observables. We argue that: i) improving statistical precision and systematic control by taking more data, supporting research efforts to address crucial challenges for each probe, using complementary methods, and relying on cross-correlations is well motivated; ii) blinding of analyses is difficult but ever more important; iii) studies of dark energy and modified gravity are related; and iv) it is crucial that R&D for a vibrant dark energy program in the 2030s be started now by supporting studies and technical R&D that will allow embryonic proposals to mature. Understanding dark energy, arguably the biggest unsolved mystery in both fundamental particle physics and cosmology, will remain one of the focal points of cosmology in the forthcoming decade.Comment: 5 pages + references; science white paper submitted to the Astro2020 decadal surve

The Risk of Risk: An Exploration of the Impact of “Risk” on Child Welfare Decision-making

Objective: In this paper, child welfare decision-making is critically assessed in relation to Beck’s (1992) concept of ‘risk society’. Three key decisions made by child welfare workers during the initial investigation are examined in order to illustrate how risk influences the type of investigative approach used, the determinations about child maltreatment, and the services provided to children and families and to link theory with policy and practice. Methods: The three exploratory studies all utilize secondary data from several cycles of the Ontario Incidence Study, which collects information directly from frontline child protection workers about incidence of reported maltreatment. Two studies utilize bivariate and multivariate analyses of maltreatment only investigations and risk only investigations respectively, to explore the profile of children and families investigated for various forms of maltreatment and for risk of future maltreatment where no maltreatment has been reported and to explore factors influencing worker decisions to substantiate maltreatment and risk. The third study utilized Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID) analysis in addition to bivariate analyses to examine the decision about the type of response to use. Results: The results indicate that despite child welfare policies introduced over the past 10 years in attempts to balance the focus on risk, the overall rates of substantiated maltreatment and risk only investigations have not changed. The research also revealed that when controlling for multiple factors found in previous studies to influence substantiation decisions, the workers’ perception of the future risk of maltreatment emerged as the strongest influence on their decision to substantiate maltreatment. Families investigated for future risk of maltreatment were found to be different in several important ways from families investigated for maltreatment and factors that influenced workers’ decision to substantiate risk and maltreatment were also different. Children who were maltreated received fewer services from child welfare and were referred to outside services less frequently than children who had not been maltreated but were perceived to be at future risk of maltreatment. Only 10% of all investigations in Ontario were cases with significant protection concerns yet only 30% of these cases receive a traditional forensic investigation (most receive a customized response intended for less serious cases). Exposure to intimate partner violence was the factor which had the most significant influence on the workers’ decision regarding the type of investigation but surprisingly severe physical harm and sexual abuse did not emerge as significant factors. Conclusion: Child protection practice and decision making is complex and risk discourses have had a significant impact on both. Despite policy changes introduced over the past ten years to mediate the negative impact of risk technologies on child welfare decision-making, several risks of risk emerged in the findings including directing attention away from helping children who have already been harmed to a focus on children who are at risk of future maltreatment; contributing to a focus on blaming parents instead of attending to social issues; and reduced opportunities for successful engagement of families. Differential response does not appear to have been successful in addressing the changing needs of families serviced by the Child Welfare system in Ontario. These studies suggest that differential response has not assisted in reducing the number of families subjected to a child welfare investigation nor has it resulted in a tighter more precise classification of reports ensuring that investigations are used when most required. Taken together these studies provide a compelling argument for Ontario to rethink the current approach to both child safety and child and family well-being

Operational Procedures for Releasing Police Records: A Process Evaluation of California Law Enforcement Agencies’ Implementation of Senate Bill 1421

This research intends to explain how law enforcement agencies in California have implemented operational procedures to comply with the CPRA pursuant to SB 1421 requirements. Because SB 1421 vastly expanded the CPRA, demand for law enforcement record requests has significantly increased in volume. Also, due to key components of SB 1421 which lack clarity in defining specific terminology, each law enforcement agency had to develop its own interpretation of how to implement requirements set forth by the statute. Law enforcement agencies have implemented new requirements to reflect the changes in SB 1421 by establishing working protocols for compliance, developing standard operating procedures, and creating new agency policies. Additionally, this research project seeks to identify how law enforcement agencies in California have responded to increased volumes of requests for disclosable records as a result of SB 1421. This research is valuable because law enforcement agencies do not commonly have the needed time to collaborate and share common practices before implementing new measures. Some agencies have had more successful strategies to comply with the new legal mandates than other agencies. Meanwhile, some agencies have experienced challenges that have caused disruptions in their operations and management. There are many possibilities available to adapt to the changes required by SB 1421, as well as different ways to improve efficiencies. This research investigated various solutions that agencies have employed to manage their SB 1421 CPRA requests. Thus, the question for this study is, “How have California law enforcement agencies implemented operational procedures to comply with requirements under the California Public Records Act pursuant to Senate Bill 1421?

Kevoree Modeling Framework (KMF): Efficient modeling techniques for runtime use

The creation of Domain Specific Languages(DSL) counts as one of the main goals in the field of Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE). The main purpose of these DSLs is to facilitate the manipulation of domain specific concepts, by providing developers with specific tools for their domain of expertise. A natural approach to create DSLs is to reuse existing modeling standards and tools. In this area, the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) has rapidly become the defacto standard in the MDSE for building Domain Specific Languages (DSL) and tools based on generative techniques. However, the use of EMF generated tools in domains like Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing or Models@Runtime reaches several limitations. In this paper, we identify several properties the generated tools must comply with to be usable in other domains than desktop-based software systems. We then challenge EMF on these properties and describe our approach to overcome the limitations. Our approach, implemented in the Kevoree Modeling Framework (KMF), is finally evaluated according to the identified properties and compared to EMF.Comment: ISBN 978-2-87971-131-7; N° TR-SnT-2014-11 (2014