Cannabis farmers or criminals? Enforcement-first approaches fuel disparity and hinder regulation

Since California's cannabis legalization, localities have played a central role in determining the regulatory terms of where, how and within what legal bounds cannabis cultivation occurs. Siskiyou County, a rural, conservative and majority white county in Northern California, chose not to recognize cannabis cultivation as agriculture. It drew up highly restrictive cannabis cultivation regulations, largely under the purview of law enforcement rather than civil agencies. Hmong-American cultivators, made highly visible through enforcement practices, policy forums and media discourses, have borne the brunt of this regulatory regime. Cannabis policy, especially in its ethnic-racial dimensions, has become symbolic of broader anxieties about cultural and agricultural change. We employed ethnographic methods to research the formation and enforcement of Siskiyou's restrictive cannabis cultivation regulations, and their differential effects across local populations. We found that the county's law enforcement–first regulatory approach blurred civil and criminal lines, made some cultivators more visible and vulnerable to enforcement, and promoted criminalizing approaches to cultivators, even among civil regulatory agencies. These developments hinder the ability of agencies (including the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife) to ameliorate negative social and ecological effects of cannabis cultivation through civil regulation, support and services

Authentication : can mobile environments be secured?

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to [email protected], referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 29-32).A mobile system is defined as a network in which one or more of the interconnection links is a wireless medium. Wireless media include but are not limited to, cellular or radio transmissions, satellite services, and wireless computer networks. The fundamental operations of storage, processing, and transmission of information are undergoing such rapid improvement that the application of securing mobile systems cannot keep up with the rate of advance. This research analyzes security problems and investigates possible solutions that stem from the absence of a "fixed" link between the user and service provider in mobile systems. This research approaches all security issues from the authentication standpoint, i.e. the process of reliably verifying the identity of two parties in a communication channel. Once identities have been verified, the channel authenticity must be maintained. Mobile communication systems that utilize three systems, symmetric ciphers, public key systems, and zero-knowledge techniques, are shown to be highly secure. The level security is not degraded due to the absence of a "fixed" link between the user and service provider

ECGadv: Generating Adversarial Electrocardiogram to Misguide Arrhythmia Classification System

Deep neural networks (DNNs)-powered Electrocardiogram (ECG) diagnosis systems recently achieve promising progress to take over tedious examinations by cardiologists. However, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks still lack comprehensive investigation. The existing attacks in image domain could not be directly applicable due to the distinct properties of ECGs in visualization and dynamic properties. Thus, this paper takes a step to thoroughly explore adversarial attacks on the DNN-powered ECG diagnosis system. We analyze the properties of ECGs to design effective attacks schemes under two attacks models respectively. Our results demonstrate the blind spots of DNN-powered diagnosis systems under adversarial attacks, which calls attention to adequate countermeasures.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 202

The Global Risks Report 2016, 11th Edition

Now in its 11th edition, The Global Risks Report 2016 draws attention to ways that global risks could evolve and interact in the next decade. The year 2016 marks a forceful departure from past findings, as the risks about which the Report has been warning over the past decade are starting to manifest themselves in new, sometimes unexpected ways and harm people, institutions and economies. Warming climate is likely to raise this year's temperature to 1° Celsius above the pre-industrial era, 60 million people, equivalent to the world's 24th largest country and largest number in recent history, are forcibly displaced, and crimes in cyberspace cost the global economy an estimated US$445 billion, higher than many economies' national incomes. In this context, the Reportcalls for action to build resilience – the "resilience imperative" – and identifies practical examples of how it could be done.The Report also steps back and explores how emerging global risks and major trends, such as climate change, the rise of cyber dependence and income and wealth disparity are impacting already-strained societies by highlighting three clusters of risks as Risks in Focus. As resilience building is helped by the ability to analyse global risks from the perspective of specific stakeholders, the Report also analyses the significance of global risks to the business community at a regional and country-level

Liquid Gold

This Article deals with fraudulent practices in the residential drug treatment industry. It will principally focus on the two related issues of quality of care and patient brokering. The lack of regulation in the residential drug treatment industry is practically an invitation for deceptive business practices such as patient brokering, insurance fraud, and substandard care. While many scholars have written articles addressing the opioid crisis and the best way to address it, this is the first article to address the corruption in the residential drug rehabilitation market. This Article argues that the government must address the crisis in the residential drug treatment industry with national legislation

COVID-19 Antibody Test/Vaccination Certification There’s an app for that

Goal: As the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2019/2020 unfolds, a COVID-19 ‘Immunity Passport’ has been mooted as a way to enable individuals to return back to work. While the quality of antibody testing, the avail- the ability of vaccines, and the likelihood of even attaining COVID-19 immunity continue to be researched, we address the issues involved in providing tamper-proof and privacy-preserving certification for test results and vaccinations. Methods: We developed a prototype mobile phone app and requisite decentralized server architecture that facilitates instant verification of tamper-proof test results. Personally identifiable information is only stored at the user’s discretion, and the app allows the end-user selectively to present only the specific test result with no other personal information revealed. The architecture, designed for scalability, relies upon (a) the 2019 World Wide Web Consortium standard called ‘Verifiable Credentials’, (b) Tim Berners-Lee’s decentralized personal data platform ‘Solid’, and (c) a Consortium Ethereum-based blockchain. Results: Our mobile phone app and decentralized server architecture enable the mixture of verifiability and privacy in a manner derived from public/private key pairs and digital signatures, generalized to avoid restrictive ownership of sensitive digital keys and/or data. Benchmark performance tests show it to scale linearly in the worst case, as significant processing is done locally on each app. For the test certificate Holder, Issuer (e.g. healthcare staff, pharmacy) and Verifier (e.g. employer), it is ‘just another app’ which takes only minutes to use. Conclusions: The app and decentralized server architecture offer a prototype proof of concept that is readily scalable, applicable generically, and in effect ‘waiting in the wings’ for the biological issues, plus key ethical issues raised in the discussion section, to be resolved

Research in multi-cultural relationship building

This study aims to explore the ‘missing gap' between the values of an Accounting firm and the preference shown by Maaori on how they would like to be approached when wanting to build a trusted relationship within a business sense. This study makes use of qualitative approaches in which data is collected primarily through interviews and analysed to produce results and recommendations. The study found that Maaori would like to be approached in a way that makes sense to them and also identifies with their cultural proceedings. It also provides insight into how important trust is when establishing a relationship with Maaori. The study recommends that further studies conducted should interview a wider variety of focus groups to add different elements to this research and that FIRM A's small business department's offerings do not align with what Maaori want so need to be rethought to adapt to Maaor expectations