4,173 research outputs found

    Democracy and social democracy facing contemporary capitalisms: A "régulationist" approach

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    This article surveys some old and recent political economy research about the long term transformations and contemporary diversity in the mutual relationships between State, civil society and the economy. The hypothesis of institutional complementarity is extended from the institutional forms that sustain "regulation" modes to the analysis of the spill over from the polity to the economy and conversely from the economy to the polity. In spite of common challenges originating from individualization, globalization and financiarization, contrasted national trajectories for socio-economic and political regimes still coexist in contemporary world. The assessment of the relative merits of liberal capitalism, social-liberalism and renewed social-democracy suggests that the later regime is the best suited to limit the process of de-democratization to follow the concept coined by Charles Tilly in his 2007 book on "Democracy". Would social-democracy be the best rampart against the contemporary disenchantment about democracy? This unconventional hypothesis has to be mitigated by the fact that social-democracy - but also liberal democracy - cannot be imported as such. Its basic principles have to follow a process of hydridization according to various national traditions, let them be statist in France or meso-coporatist in Japan since the new demands from diverse civil societies have to be taken into account.variety of capitalisms ; long run evolutions of capitalism ; institutional complementarity hypothesis ; socioeconomic-political regimes ; liberalism, variety of democracies ; old and new social-democracy ; régulation theory

    Space tug/shuttle interface compatibility study. Volume 1: Executive summary

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    Shuttle interfaces required for space tug accommodation are primarily involved with supporting and servicing the tug during launch countdown, flight, and postlanding; deploying and retrieving the tug on orbit; and maintaining control over the tug when it is in or near the orbiter. Each of these interface areas was investigated to determine the best physical and operational method of accomplishing the required functions, with an overriding goal of establishing simple and flexible orbiter interface requirements suitable for tug, tug payloads, IUS and other cargo. It is concluded the orbiter payload accommodations and the MSFC baseline tug are generally interface compatible. Specific minor changes to tug and orbiter interfaces were identified to provide full compatibility. A system concept for supporting and deploying tug from orbiter is described

    Global Title X Series \u2713: Game Report

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    The Chief of Naval Operations’ (CNO’s) annual Title 10 War Game (also known as Global) conducted at the Naval War College (NWC) has become a primary venue for exploring emerging concepts. This year’s effort is a continuation of the NWC War Gaming Department’s examination of the Air-Sea Battle (ASB) concept. The 2012 Global War Game concluded that current command and control (C2) structures at the operational level of war may be inadequate to effectively execute cross-domain operations as envisioned by the concept. While the ASB concept outlines the need to command and control ‘cross-domain operations’ which are joint, networked and integrated, no organizational structure is proposed. The concept only suggests that any suitable structure must be capable of tight, real-time coordination

    Union strategies in the era of globalisation: case studies from Chile's large-scale copper mining sector (1982-2009)

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    Trade unions, workers’ collective organisations, are facing tough times almost everywhere. Research on union strategies of revitalisation has largely focused on advanced industrialised countries thereby overlooking potentially interesting developments elsewhere. This thesis aims at contributing to fill this gap by widening the breath of empirical research and bringing in evidence from Chile’s large-scale copper mining sector. Chile and its copper sector are often heralded as prominent examples of the benefits globalisation can bring to developing countries but much less publicised has been the extent to which neoliberal policy has negatively affected workers and their organisations. The purpose of this thesis is to understand these challenges and to address the issues of in what ways, why, and how far workers and trade unions have effectively confronted their changing environments. More specifically, the thesis aims at analysing and explaining similarities and differences in the emergence, form, and outcomes of union strategy. The research is based on a comparative multi case study of nine union organisations and draws on semi-structured interviews with union leaders, senior managers, state officials, academics, and elite interviewees. This work employs a preliminary framework of analysis that conceives of union strategy as multi-dimensional and aims at explaining its changing nature by elaborating on Frege and Kelly’s (2003) social movement model of union strategic choice, thereby integrating structural determinants with purposeful agency. The thesis shows that since the early 1980s Chile’s labour regulatory regimes have been redesigned to subordinate groups’ disadvantage, severely impacting workers and unions structure of opportunity. It distinguishes three groups. (1) Unions of core workers in union-accepting regimes have stabilised their situation by engaging in different forms of union-management co-operation and membership de-mobilisation. (2) Unions of core workers in anti-union regimes have developed successful organising campaigns and union-building strategies, transforming their original ‘unionfree’ status into a heavily unionised one. (3) Unions of contract workers in harsh anti-union regimes have developed militant ‘direct action’ strategies, becoming prominent nation-wide organisations. At its most general, the thesis argues that meaningful union strategic choice is possible, even in the most difficult of conditions, thereby contradicting claims that unions have become powerless, ineffective, and unnecessary organisations in the era of ‘globalisation’. It acknowledges the relevance of different strategic paths to union effectiveness but suggests that broadly defined militant types of unionism may be better placed to promote union revitalisation. It suggests that structural determinants are insufficient in explaining the form and outcomes of union choices, and that renewed attention must be paid to the social processes of collective action, in particular to the dynamics of micromobilisation

    Coalition based approach for shop floor agility – a multiagent approach

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    Dissertation submitted for a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, speciality of Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaThis thesis addresses the problem of shop floor agility. In order to cope with the disturbances and uncertainties that characterise the current business scenarios faced by manufacturing companies, the capability of their shop floors needs to be improved quickly, such that these shop floors may be adapted, changed or become easily modifiable (shop floor reengineering). One of the critical elements in any shop floor reengineering process is the way the control/supervision architecture is changed or modified to accommodate for the new processes and equipment. This thesis, therefore, proposes an architecture to support the fast adaptation or changes in the control/supervision architecture. This architecture postulates that manufacturing systems are no more than compositions of modularised manufacturing components whose interactions when aggregated are governed by contractual mechanisms that favour configuration over reprogramming. A multiagent based reference architecture called Coalition Based Approach for Shop floor Agility – CoBASA, was created to support fast adaptation and changes of shop floor control architectures with minimal effort. The coalitions are composed of agentified manufacturing components (modules), whose relationships within the coalitions are governed by contracts that are configured whenever a coalition is established. Creating and changing a coalition do not involve programming effort because it only requires changes to the contract that regulates it

    Deployment Strategies for a Fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Providing Cellular and Data Services

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    Wireless voice and data communications have become an essential part of our day to day lives. In order to provide these services to as many people as possible, a great infrastructure has been put in place over the last two decades throughout the world. The current infrastructure is mainly consists of cellular towers with gateways to the telecommunication backbone. The wireless infrastructure is doing an adequate job of providing voice and data services, getting more powerful and efficient every day. However, because wireless infrastructure is mainly based on fixed cell towers, it lacks the flexibility and dynamism that may be needed in several important scenarios. For example, a natural or man-made disaster, like an earthquake or war, often results in partial or full destruction of power grids and cellular infrastructure. Our current cellular system lacks the ability to restore the service in a timely manner in these situations, when it is needed the most. Another scenario where a fixed cellular system can be problematic is a metropolitan area where there is a great shift on the demand for services in specific areas at specific times. A more dynamic and mobile system is desirable in such situations. Another example can be a sports stadium or a big convention center that need to provide a large sum of users, service during an event. There are many such examples. However, if we put several fixed towers accommodating the need, they will be wasted the rest of the times. The emergence of unmanned aerial system (UAS) to be used in commercial and civilian applications provides a solution to add dynamism and flexibility to the current wireless infrastructure. In particular, we are looking at a UAS mainly consisting of several low end unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Each of these UAVs will act as a wireless service provider making up a network which covers a specific area and route the communication through a ground station connected to the backbone or a satellite link. Such a system is very flexible and dynamic. This system can be deployed in an efficient and rapid manner when the need arises, such as a natural or man-made disaster. It can also be used as an auxiliary part of a normal working fixed infrastructure to add dynamism and provide additional temporary services in places and at times they are needed. These can be reused in other areas at other times. UAV networks may vary in different aspects such the dynamism of the network and topology of the network. If designed carefully, such a system not only can be lifesaving in a disaster relief, it can also be cost-effective to be used to complement to the cellular infrastructure in normal situations. Designing a UAS to provide wireless services requires a lot of interdisciplinary research from designing the UAVs themselves to designing the payload that provides the wireless services and accommodates wireless network interconnection to itself or to the ground station. In this thesis, we consider the limitations of the elements making such a system and how they impact the coverage they can provide in practical scenarios. We discuss systematic and physical attributes of UAVs and mathematically model the limitation they put on the system performance. After establishing reasonable restricting parameters, we define an optimization problem where for a given set of UAVs and a given area to provide service for, we answer the question of how to deploy each UAV such that we have maximum possible coverage. The idea of having a population map as an input to our optimization problem and how to obtain an approximate map has been discuss. Then, several sub-optimal solutions for the optimization problem are discussed, simulated and compared for some typical population maps. We also consider what changes when we apply the same approaches to larger areas and introduce the concept of reconfiguration as important part of the system in these cases. We then introduce different approaches for reconfiguration discussing their benefits and shortcomings. Our simulation results show that in order to have practical systems in large areas, either the number of UAVs should significantly increase, or one need to design very powerful payload providing higher capacity for individual UAV

    Democracy and social democracy facing contemporary capitalisms: A "régulationist" approach

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    This article surveys some old and recent political economy research about the long term transformations and contemporary diversity in the mutual relationships between State, civil society and the economy. The hypothesis of institutional complementarity is extended from the institutional forms that sustain "regulation" modes to the analysis of the spill over from the polity to the economy and conversely from the economy to the polity. In spite of common challenges originating from individualization, globalization and financiarization, contrasted national trajectories for socio-economic and political regimes still coexist in contemporary world. The assessment of the relative merits of liberal capitalism, social-liberalism and renewed social-democracy suggests that the later regime is the best suited to limit the process of de-democratization to follow the concept coined by Charles Tilly in his 2007 book on "Democracy". Would social-democracy be the best rampart against the contemporary disenchantment about democracy? This unconventional hypothesis has to be mitigated by the fact that social-democracy - but also liberal democracy - cannot be imported as such. Its basic principles have to follow a process of hydridization according to various national traditions, let them be statist in France or meso-coporatist in Japan since the new demands from diverse civil societies have to be taken into account.Les transformations à long terme et la diversité contemporaine des relations croisées entre Etat, société civile et économie sont analysées à la lumière de recherches en économie politique, tant anciennes que récentes. L'hypothèse de complémentarité institutionnelle utilisée par la théorie de la régulation pour rendre compte de la cohérence des régimes de croissance est ici étendue à l'étude des relations mutuelles entre sphères politique et économique. En dépit de processus communs d'individualisation, de globalisation et de fianciarisation, coexistent, aujourd'hui encore, différents régimes socioéconomiques et politiques. Une mise en perspective des mérites comparés du capitalisme libéral, du social-libéralisme et d'une nouvelle social-démocratie suggère que ce dernier régime est le mieux placé pour limiter le processus de de-démocratisation mis en avant par Charles Tilly dans son ouvrage "Democracy" publié en 2007. La nouvelle social-démocratie serait-elle le meilleur rempart contre le désenchantement contemporain concernant la démocratie ? Le charme de cette hypothèse peu conventionnelle doit être tempéré par le fait que la social-démocratie - pas plus que la démocratie libérale - ne peut s'importer telle quelle mais que ses principes de base doivent connaître un processus d'hybridation avec des traditions nationales variées qu'elles soient étatiques en France ou méso-corporatistes au Japon, sachant que l'enjeu tient à la prise en compte des nouvelles demandes exprimées par les différentes sociétés civiles

    Decentralized task allocation for dynamic, time-sensitive tasks

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    Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2018.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 103-110).In time-sensitive and dynamic missions, autonomous vehicles must respond quickly to new information and objectives. In the case of dynamic task allocation, a team of agents are presented with a new, unknown task that must be allocated with their original allocations. This is exacerbated further in decentralized settings where agents are limited to utilizing local information during the allocation process. This thesis presents a fully decentralized, dynamic task allocation algorithm that extends the Consensus-Based Bundle Algorithm (CBBA) to allow for allocating new tasks. Whereas static CBBA requires a full resetting of previous allocations, CBBA with Partial Replanning (CBBA-PR) enables the agents to only partially reset their allocations to efficiently and quickly allocate a new task. By varying the number of existing tasks that are reset during replan, the team can trade-off convergence speed with amount of coordination. By specifically choosing the lowest bid tasks for resetting, CBBA-PR is shown to converge linearly with the number of tasks reset and the network diameter of the team. In addition, limited replanning methods are presented for scenarios without sufficient replanning time. These include a single reset bidding procedure for agents at capacity, a no-replanning heuristic that can identify scenarios that does not require replanning, and a subteam formation algorithm for reducing the network diameter. Finally, this thesis describes hardware and simulation experiments used to explore the effects of ad-hoc, decentralized communication on consensus algorithms and to validate the performance of CBBA-PR.by Noam Buckman.S.M

    Security in Cloud Computing: Evaluation and Integration

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    Au cours de la dernière décennie, le paradigme du Cloud Computing a révolutionné la manière dont nous percevons les services de la Technologie de l’Information (TI). Celui-ci nous a donné l’opportunité de répondre à la demande constamment croissante liée aux besoins informatiques des usagers en introduisant la notion d’externalisation des services et des données. Les consommateurs du Cloud ont généralement accès, sur demande, à un large éventail bien réparti d’infrastructures de TI offrant une pléthore de services. Ils sont à même de configurer dynamiquement les ressources du Cloud en fonction des exigences de leurs applications, sans toutefois devenir partie intégrante de l’infrastructure du Cloud. Cela leur permet d’atteindre un degré optimal d’utilisation des ressources tout en réduisant leurs coûts d’investissement en TI. Toutefois, la migration des services au Cloud intensifie malgré elle les menaces existantes à la sécurité des TI et en crée de nouvelles qui sont intrinsèques à l’architecture du Cloud Computing. C’est pourquoi il existe un réel besoin d’évaluation des risques liés à la sécurité du Cloud durant le procédé de la sélection et du déploiement des services. Au cours des dernières années, l’impact d’une efficace gestion de la satisfaction des besoins en sécurité des services a été pris avec un sérieux croissant de la part des fournisseurs et des consommateurs. Toutefois, l’intégration réussie de l’élément de sécurité dans les opérations de la gestion des ressources du Cloud ne requiert pas seulement une recherche méthodique, mais aussi une modélisation méticuleuse des exigences du Cloud en termes de sécurité. C’est en considérant ces facteurs que nous adressons dans cette thèse les défis liés à l’évaluation de la sécurité et à son intégration dans les environnements indépendants et interconnectés du Cloud Computing. D’une part, nous sommes motivés à offrir aux consommateurs du Cloud un ensemble de méthodes qui leur permettront d’optimiser la sécurité de leurs services et, d’autre part, nous offrons aux fournisseurs un éventail de stratégies qui leur permettront de mieux sécuriser leurs services d’hébergements du Cloud. L’originalité de cette thèse porte sur deux aspects : 1) la description innovatrice des exigences des applications du Cloud relativement à la sécurité ; et 2) la conception de modèles mathématiques rigoureux qui intègrent le facteur de sécurité dans les problèmes traditionnels du déploiement des applications, d’approvisionnement des ressources et de la gestion de la charge de travail au coeur des infrastructures actuelles du Cloud Computing. Le travail au sein de cette thèse est réalisé en trois phases.----------ABSTRACT: Over the past decade, the Cloud Computing paradigm has revolutionized the way we envision IT services. It has provided an opportunity to respond to the ever increasing computing needs of the users by introducing the notion of service and data outsourcing. Cloud consumers usually have online and on-demand access to a large and distributed IT infrastructure providing a plethora of services. They can dynamically configure and scale the Cloud resources according to the requirements of their applications without becoming part of the Cloud infrastructure, which allows them to reduce their IT investment cost and achieve optimal resource utilization. However, the migration of services to the Cloud increases the vulnerability to existing IT security threats and creates new ones that are intrinsic to the Cloud Computing architecture, thus the need for a thorough assessment of Cloud security risks during the process of service selection and deployment. Recently, the impact of effective management of service security satisfaction has been taken with greater seriousness by the Cloud Service Providers (CSP) and stakeholders. Nevertheless, the successful integration of the security element into the Cloud resource management operations does not only require methodical research, but also necessitates the meticulous modeling of the Cloud security requirements. To this end, we address throughout this thesis the challenges to security evaluation and integration in independent and interconnected Cloud Computing environments. We are interested in providing the Cloud consumers with a set of methods that allow them to optimize the security of their services and the CSPs with a set of strategies that enable them to provide security-aware Cloud-based service hosting. The originality of this thesis lies within two aspects: 1) the innovative description of the Cloud applications’ security requirements, which paved the way for an effective quantification and evaluation of the security of Cloud infrastructures; and 2) the design of rigorous mathematical models that integrate the security factor into the traditional problems of application deployment, resource provisioning, and workload management within current Cloud Computing infrastructures. The work in this thesis is carried out in three phases

    Wings in Orbit: Scientific and Engineering Legacies of the Space Shuttle, 1971-2010

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    The Space Shuttle is an engineering marvel perhaps only exceeded by the station itself. The shuttle was based on the technology of the 1960s and early 1970s. It had to overcome significant challenges to make it reusable. Perhaps the greatest challenges were the main engines and the Thermal Protection System. The program has seen terrible tragedy in its 3 decades of operation, yet it has also seen marvelous success. One of the most notable successes is the Hubble Space Telescope, a program that would have been a failure without the shuttle's capability to rendezvous, capture, repair, as well as upgrade. Now Hubble is a shining example of success admired by people around the world. As the program comes to a close, it is important to capture the legacy of the shuttle for future generations. That is what "Wings In Orbit" does for space fans, students, engineers, and scientists. This book, written by the men and women who made the program possible, will serve as an excellent reference for building future space vehicles. We are proud to have played a small part in making it happen. Our journey to document the scientific and engineering accomplishments of this magnificent winged vehicle began with an audacious proposal: to capture the passion of those who devoted their energies to its success while answering the question "What are the most significant accomplishments?" of the longestoperating human spaceflight program in our nation s history. This is intended to be an honest, accurate, and easily understandable account of the research and innovation accomplished during the era
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