108 research outputs found
Optimal self-stabilizing mobile byzantine-tolerant regular register with bounded timestamps
This paper proposes the first implementation of a self-stabilizing regular register emulated by n servers that is tolerant to both Mobile Byzantine Agents and transient failures in a round-free synchronous model. Differently from existing Mobile Byzantine Tolerant register implementations, this paper considers a weaker model where: (i) the computation of the servers is decoupled from the movements of the Byzantine agents, i.e., movements may happen before, concurrently, or after the generation or the delivery of a message, and (ii) servers are not aware of their failure state i.e., they do not know if and when they have been corrupted by a Mobile Byzantine agent. The proposed protocol tolerates (i) any finite number of transient failures, and (ii) up to f Mobile Byzantine agents. In addition, our implementation uses bounded timestamps from the Z13 domain and it is optimal with respect to the number of servers needed to tolerate f Mobile Byzantine agents in the given model (i.e., n>6f when Δ=2δ, and n>8f when Δ=δ, where Δ represents the period at which the Byzantine agents move and δ is the upper bound on the communication latency)
Rules Britannia: Board Games, Britain, and the World, c. 1759-1860
Focusing on Georgian and Victorian Britain, this thesis examines didactic boardgames as cultural artefacts exploring the bounds of moral sympathy and responsibility in an ostensibly Anglocentric world. It refutes previous conclusions that exposure to imperial ideology via these games in childhood necessarily led to an imperialist identity in adulthood and thence to imperialist activity later in the nineteenth century, highlighting instead how games encouraged players to question the appropriateness of affiliating oneself with the British imperial project by accounting for circumstantial differences at home and abroad. It defies a hypodermic model of communication which posits players as passive and highly susceptible to manipulation by demonstrating instances of player modifications to rules and/or content that, in changing the values and assumptions of the original game, suggest what contemporaries found to be objectionable or missing in standard gameplay. It examines this dialectic between game and player across four thematic categories: teleological games, geographical games, ethnographic games, and zoological games
Command and Persuade
Why, when we have been largely socialized into good behavior, are there more laws that govern our behavior than ever before? Levels of violent crime have been in a steady decline for centuries—for millennia, even. Over the past five hundred years, homicide rates have decreased a hundred-fold. We live in a time that is more orderly and peaceful than ever before in human history. Why, then, does fear of crime dominate modern politics? Why, when we have been largely socialized into good behavior, are there more laws that govern our behavior than ever before? In Command and Persuade, Peter Baldwin examines the evolution of the state's role in crime and punishment over three thousand years. Baldwin explains that the involvement of the state in law enforcement and crime prevention is relatively recent. In ancient Greece, those struck by lightning were assumed to have been punished by Zeus. In the Hebrew Bible, God was judge, jury, and prosecutor when Cain killed Abel. As the state's power as lawgiver grew, more laws governed behavior than ever before; the sum total of prohibited behavior has grown continuously. At the same time, as family, community, and church exerted their influences, we have become better behaved and more law-abiding. Even as the state stands as the socializer of last resort, it also defines through law the terrain on which we are schooled into acceptable behavior. This title is also available in an Open Access edition
How to Be a God
When it comes to questions concerning the nature of Reality, Philosophers and Theologians have the answers.
Philosophers have the answers that can’t be proven right. Theologians have the answers that can’t be proven wrong.
Today’s designers of Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games create realities for a living. They can’t spend centuries mulling over the issues: they have to face them head-on. Their practical experiences can indicate which theoretical proposals actually work in practice.
That’s today’s designers. Tomorrow’s will have a whole new set of questions to answer.
The designers of virtual worlds are the literal gods of those realities. Suppose Artificial Intelligence comes through and allows us to create non-player characters as smart as us. What are our responsibilities as gods? How should we, as gods, conduct ourselves?
How should we be gods
August Strindberg: The Occult Diary
August Strindberg (1849–1912) kept a diary from February 1896 in Paris until the summer of 1908 in Stockholm. He referred to his diary from this period as his Occult Diary and used it to help him decipher the world as he experienced it. He read and reread his own notations, adding new interpretations, and deleting others. He also drew on the diary as material for creative expression, transforming isolated events and observations into groundbreaking works of literature.
The Occult Diary is published here in its entirety in English translation for the first time, in a final revision by Ann-Charlotte Gavel Adams and with an introduction by Per Stam. The Occult Diary is a key resource for international Strindberg scholars and theater professionals and more broadly for scholars focusing on drama, theater history, stage performance, and literary currents at the turn of the previous century. The diary initiates the reader into the writer’s inner world during a crucial transitional period in his personal and literary life. It documents his readings and observations and gives important clues and information about an ongoing process of artistic reorientation. Strindberg was exploring new ways of looking at, interpreting, and writing about nature, science, art, the occult, and his fellow human beings
Creating Through Mind and Emotions
The texts presented in Proportion Harmonies and Identities (PHI) Creating Through Mind and Emotions were compiled to establish a multidisciplinary platform for presenting, interacting, and disseminating research. This platform also aims to foster the awareness and discussion on Creating Through Mind and Emotions, focusing on different visions relevant to Architecture, Arts and Humanities, Design and Social Sciences, and its importance and benefits for the sense of identity, both individual and communal. The idea of Creating Through Mind and Emotions has been a powerful motor for development since the Western Early Modern Age. Its theoretical and practical foundations have become the working tools of scientists, philosophers, and artists, who seek strategies and policies to accelerate the development process in different contexts
THE SEDS CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR HEALTH POLICY JUSTICE
This dissertation suggests a conceptual framework for thinking about the justness of state health policy interventions. Instituting health regulations always involves limiting individual freedom for the sake of improving health outcomes. Both freedom and healthfulness are widely acknowledged to be foundational moral goods, but the state must often choose to protect one of these goods at the cost of the other. For this reason, the regulatory decisions of the state rightly attract significant attention from political theorists, philosophers, public policymakers, and everyday citizens as eminent issues of justice. However, despite near universal urgency to get health policy right, little consensus exists regarding the moral permissibility of discrete policy interventions. Even authors who agree about the justifiability of particular policies frequently offer incompatible explanations for their views. This dissertation seeks to intervene in these debates by offering a conceptual framework for comparing the plausibility of competing arguments about policy justice. This framework includes four criteria for assessing moral arguments’ plausibility: 1) Soundness, which considers whether arguments’ conclusions validly follow from plausible premises; 2) Endorsement, which considers the goods that arguments propose to secure in exchange for restricting individual freedom; 3) Desert, which considers how well arguments prescribe regulatory protection and restraint according to suffering and responsibility, respectively; and 4) Speech, which considers how arguments as political speech themselves support or undermine broader efforts to achieve justice in state policy. After defining the elements of the SEDS framework, the bulk of the dissertation applies it to arguments in favor of two familiar health policy cases: laws requiring the use of motorcycle helmets, and laws requiring vaccination against tetanus. These case studies show that more sustained theoretical reflection on our justifying arguments is warranted: political theorists, empirical social scientists, and policymakers routinely invoke justifications for state policy that fail to reflect basic and noncontroversial assumptions about justice and rhetoric. By identifying the strengths of arguments for common health policy interventions, the SEDS framework improves our thinking about how to balance the goods of health and freedom and gestures toward actionable ways we might achieve more just health policies.Doctor of Philosoph
Faith and action rooted in Christ : reflections on spirituality, justice, and ethical living
in Collaboration with Chidi Ilechukwu“Faith and Action Rooted in Christ”. This is a large collection of 89 short essays on
the utility of the Catholic theology for life, in times of radical changes. This work
answers in a powerful way, the contemporary questions of modern life and society
in simple language, finely narrated and here presented with a selected range of texts
from the Old and New Testaments. Notice that the content of the book is richly
profound with philosophical insights, common sense, wisdom of the sages and
founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ which continues to challenge humanity to
wake up from sleeping and snoring and find in living and working the fulfilment of
the creator. The narration must wake anybody up from dogmatic sleep to living the
faith in loving action.
The reflections bring spiritual insights into the underlining essential role of Christian
faith and the value of Christian communities in dealing with social justice, integral
development and peace matters. The book and reflections rendered in a parish as
sermons at St Leo the Great Catholic Parish Enugu (2010 to 2016) with Obiora as
Parish Priest and Chidi as visiting associate
ACE: Abstract Consensus Encapsulation for Liveness Boosting of State Machine Replication
With the emergence of attack-prone cross-organization systems, providing asynchronous state machine replication (SMR) solutions is no longer a theoretical concern. This paper presents ACE, a framework for the design of such fault tolerant systems. Leveraging a known paradigm for randomized consensus solutions, ACE wraps existing practical solutions and real-life systems, boosting their liveness under adversarial conditions and, at the same time, promoting load balancing and fairness. Boosting is achieved without modifying the overall design or the engineering of these solutions.
ACE is aimed at boosting the prevailing approach for practical fault tolerance. This approach, often named partial synchrony, is based on a leader-based paradigm: a good leader makes progress and a bad leader does no harm. The partial synchrony approach focuses on safety and forgoes liveness under targeted and dynamic attacks. Specifically, an attacker might block specific leaders, e.g., through a denial of service, to prevent progress. ACE provides boosting by running waves of parallel leaders and selecting a winning leader only retroactively, achieving boosting at a linear communication cost increase.
ACE is agnostic to the fault model, inheriting it s failure model from the wrapped solution assumptions. As our evaluation shows, an asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) replication system built with ACE around an existing partially synchronous BFT protocol demonstrates reasonable slow-down compared with the base BFT protocol during faultless synchronous scenarios, yet exhibits significant speedup while the system is under attack
Essential Notes in Psychiatry
Psychiatry is one of the major specialties of medicine, and is concerned with the study and treatment of mental disorders. In recent times the field is growing with the discovery of effective therapies and interventions that alleviate suffering in people with mental disorders. This book of psychiatry is concise and clearly written so that it is usable for doctors in training, students and clinicians dealing with psychiatric illness in everyday practice. The book is a primer for those beginning to learn about emotional disorders and psychosocial consequences of severe physical and psychological trauma; and violence. Emphasis is placed on effective therapies and interventions for selected conditions such as dementia and suicide among others and the consequences of stress in the workplace. The book also highlights important causes of mental disorders in children
- …