Confronting the Future: Coping with Discovery of Electronic Material

Earlier research has found that housing and childbearing are linked, difficulties accessinghousing possibly delaying childbearing and negatively effecting education opportunities. Toincrease housing accessibility, some municipalities have earmarked apartments for youngadults. These “youth dwellings” are criticized for being small and not necessarily facilitatingfamily formation and fertility, better suiting students’ needs. We analyze the childbearing andeducation patterns of young adults entering youth housing in 1996. We follow them for 14years to examine the causal effect of youth housing on childbearing and higher educationusing a propensity score matching technique. Results indicates that gaining access to small,low-rent inner-city rental apartments earmarked for young adults promote higher educationbut negatively affect childbearing, unless the rest of the housing market permits these rentersto advance their housing careers.Qc 20150205</p

Updating democracy studies: outline of a research program

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics that warn cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This paper sets the problem – “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?” – into the broad context of practical philosophy, by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy”. The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function, in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. My claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fails or succeeds. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

Beyond the buzzword: big data and national security decision-making

This article explores the role big data plays in the national security decision-making process. The global surveillance disclosures initiated by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have increased public and academic discussions about big data and national security. Yet, efforts to summarize and import insights from the vast and interdisciplinary literature on data analytics have remained rare in the field of security studies. To fill this gap, we explain the core characteristics of big data, provide an overview of the techniques and methods of data analytics, and explore how big data can support the core national security process of intelligence. Big data is not only defined by the volume of data but also by their velocity, variety and issues of veracity. Scientists have developed a number of techniques to extract information from big data and support national security practices. We find that data analytics tools contribute to and influence all the core intelligence functions in the contemporary US national security apparatus. However, these tools cannot replace the central role of humans and their ability to contextualize security threats. The fundamental value of big data lies in humans' ability to understand its power and mitigate its limits

Privacy, Visibility, Transparency, and Exposure

This essay considers the relationship between privacy and visibility in the networked information age. Visibility is an important determinant of harm to privacy, but a persistent tendency to conceptualize privacy harms and expectations in terms of visibility has created two problems. First, focusing on visibility diminishes the salience and obscures the operation of nonvisual mechanisms designed to render individual identity, behavior, and preferences transparent to third parties. The metaphoric mapping to visibility suggests that surveillance is simply passive observation, rather than the active production of categories, narratives, and, norms. Second, even a broader conception of privacy harms as a function of informational transparency is incomplete. Privacy has a spatial dimension as well as an informational dimension. The spatial dimension of the privacy interest, which the author characterizes as an interest in avoiding or selectively limiting exposure, concerns the structure of experienced space. It is not negated by the fact that people in public spaces expect to be visible to others present in those spaces, and it encompasses both the arrangement of physical spaces and the design of networked communications technologies. U.S. privacy law and theory currently do not recognize this interest at all. This essay argues that they should

How Blockchain Solutions Enable Better Decision Making Through Blockchain Analytics

Since the founding of computers, data scientists have been able to engineer devices that increase individuals’ opportunities to communicate with each other. In the 1990s, the internet took over with many people not understanding its utility. Flash forward 30 years, and we cannot live without our connection to the internet. The internet of information is what we called early adopters with individuals posting blogs for others to read, this was known as Web 1.0. As we progress, platforms became social allowing individuals in different areas to communicate and engage with each other, this was known as Web 2.0. As Dr. Mary Lacity put in her Blockchain for Business textbook, we are shifting towards the ‘Internet of Value’ with blockchain’s emergence (Lacity, 2020). Blockchain solution enabling true ownership of data is a major force in the push for Web 3.0. As individuals take back more power, it is important to ensure proper analysis of current and future situations. This is conducted through data analysis, but we now have an emerging technology that can record large amounts of information and provide quick insight. We can also ensure the data is clean through its native open-source architecture that prevents duplication of data points. The most complete and exact results can be found in a blockchain network where inputted data is automatically organized and scrubbed. Data grows exponentially, it is important to find ways to store this data while also ensuring it is complete

Cybercrime: a theoretical overview of the growing digital threat

This theoretical paper is published by the EUCPN Secretariat in connection with the theme of the Luxembourgian presidency which was cybercrime. Cybercrime is a global definition which characterizes many different criminal forms committed in the virtual world. This means the phenomenon covers a very wide scope of activities. This theoretical paper is written as an overview to help understand the definition of cybercrime and its forms. We concentrate on the variety of consequences as a result of the phenomenon. Moreover, this paper also has attention to the current European law and legislative actions against cybercrime