Ignatian Spiritual Conversation and Digital Communication Culture

This study seeks to consider the lived experiences of those vulnerable in the culture of digital communication, especially to suggest the possibility of healing and recovery through the practical application of Ignatian spiritual conversation in the new horizon affecting religious life. For this purpose, this study explores the practical implication of Ignatian spiritual conversation in culture of digital communication by employing a hermeneutical methodology, the triple operation of the description of the phenomenon, critical analysis, and constructive interpretation. This study highlights the in-depth understanding and practice of authentic conversation, observing the vulnerability of self-isolation and cognitive bias experienced by networked selves as new subjects created in the digital communication culture and the multifaceted religious phenomenon of networked religion, a new horizon for their spiritual life. Interdisciplinary understanding of psychological counseling, the philosophy of dialogue, and biblical and systematic theology attested to authentic conversation’s healing, relational, and sacred dimensions. Ignatian spiritual conversation can be an applicable model of or alternative to those authentic conversations that help overcome the networked self’s vulnerability in the micro perspective and has an inner transformative potential through the constructive fusion of networked religion and Ignatian spirituality in the macro view. This study provides a theoretical foundation for an interdisciplinary understanding of Christian/Ignatian spiritual conversation. More practically, it will be instructive to pastors so that they will be more sensitive to and able to minister to the needs of elderly and generation MZ who are vulnerable due to self-isolation and cognitive bias, exacerbated by COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, this study presents a good map of the new deinstitutionalized and post-authoritarian religious-spiritual situation represented by those who are spiritual but not religious

Interpersonal Style Predicts Behavioral Heterogeneity During Economic-Exchange Task Gameplay in Individuals With Social Anxiety

Recent evidence suggests that individuals who exhibit socially anxious (SA) symptoms endorse patterns of maladaptive interpersonal behavior that can be parceled into three subtypes based upon interpersonal circumplex theory: friendly-submissive, hostile-submissive, and hostile-dominant. It remains unclear, however, whether these subtypes translate into observable social behavior in laboratory contexts. I used two economic-exchange tasks, the prisoner’s dilemma game (PDG) and the ultimatum game (UG), as models of domains of social behavior to detect interpersonal differences in a sample of college students (N= 88) who endorsed mild-to-severe levels of SA based upon responses to the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale Self-Report (LSAS-SR). Using a two-step automatic clustering procedure, the sample was divided into three groups according to their responses on the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems – 32 (IIP-32). Interpersonal profiles were constructed for these groups and two of the three expected subtypes were identified (friendly-submissive and hostile-submissive); however, instead of hostile-dominance, friendly-dominance emerged as a potential subtype. Hierarchical and quantile regressions were conducted to examine whether SA severity and interpersonal subtype predicted cooperation and acceptance rates in the PDG and UG respectively. The data revealed that in the PDG, SA severity significantly predicted an increase in cooperation rate, while the interpersonal subtypes did not have a significant effect. However, when analyses included only those individuals who met a clinical cutoff for severe SA (N = 66), SA severity no longer predicted cooperation rates. But friendly-submissiveness predicted cooperation rates exceeding 65% during gameplay, while friendly-dominance predicted a ceiling cooperation rate of 65%. Hostile-submissiveness did not predict variance in cooperation rate. In the UG, the interpersonal subtypes and SA severity did not significantly predict acceptance rate. These findings build upon a burgeoning literature substantiating links between self-reported interpersonal problems and unique interindividual psychopathological presentations. However, improvements in sample recruitment, the implementation of economic-exchange tasks, and data-analytic methods need to be put into practice before stronger assertions can be made concerning the therapeutic relevance of these games as social decision-making paradigms

Evolution of Cyberspace as a Landscape in Cyberpunk Novels

Millions of people enter cyberspace on some level daily. This new technology has infiltrated society rapidly since the first computers were networked. Interestingly, cyberpunk, a sub-genre of science fiction, depicted cyberspace many years before mainstream society had ever conceived of it. This thesis explores the changes in science fictional representations of cyberspace by examining William Gibson\u27s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson\u27s Snow crash. In this work I contrast the metaphysical, found nature of the first cyberpunk representation of cyberspace with the homogenized, commodified reality of the last cyberpunk representation

Integrated Framework For Mobile Low Power IoT Devices

Ubiquitous object networking has sparked the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) which defines a new era in the world of networking. The IoT principle can be addressed as one of the important strategic technologies that will positively influence the humans’ life. All the gadgets, appliances and sensors around the world will be connected together to form a smart environment, where all the entities that connected to the Internet can seamlessly share data and resources. The IoT vision allows the embedded devices, e.g. sensor nodes, to be IP-enabled nodes and interconnect with the Internet. The demand for such technique is to make these embedded nodes act as IP-based devices that communicate directly with other IP networks without unnecessary overhead and to feasibly utilize the existing infrastructure built for the Internet. In addition, controlling and monitoring these nodes is maintainable through exploiting the existed tools that already have been developed for the Internet. Exchanging the sensory measurements through the Internet with several end points in the world facilitates achieving the concept of smart environment. Realization of IoT concept needs to be addressed by standardization efforts that will shape the infrastructure of the networks. This has been achieved through the IEEE 802.15.4, 6LoWPAN and IPv6 standards. The bright side of this new technology is faced by several implications since the IoT introduces a new class of security issues, such as each node within the network is considered as a point of vulnerability where an attacker can utilize to add malicious code via accessing the nodes through the Internet or by compromising a node. On the other hand, several IoT applications comprise mobile nodes that is in turn brings new challenges to the research community due to the effect of the node mobility on the network management and performance. Another defect that degrades the network performance is the initialization stage after the node deployment step by which the nodes will be organized into the network. The recent IEEE 802.15.4 has several structural drawbacks that need to be optimized in order to efficiently fulfil the requirements of low power mobile IoT devices. This thesis addresses the aforementioned three issues, network initialization, node mobility and security management. In addition, the related literature is examined to define the set of current issues and to define the set of objectives based upon this. The first contribution is defining a new strategy to initialize the nodes into the network based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. A novel mesh-under cluster-based approach is proposed and implemented that efficiently initializes the nodes into clusters and achieves three objectives: low initialization cost, shortest path to the sink node, low operational cost (data forwarding). The second contribution is investigating the mobility issue within the IoT media access control (MAC) infrastructure and determining the related problems and requirements. Based on this, a novel mobility scheme is presented that facilitates node movement inside the network under the IEEE 802.15.4e time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) mode. The proposed model mitigates the problem of frequency channel hopping and slotframe issue in the TSCH mode. The next contribution in this thesis is determining the mobility impact on low latency deterministic (LLDN) network. One of the significant issues of mobility is increasing the latency and degrading packet delivery ratio (PDR). Accordingly, a novel mobility protocol is presented to tackle the mobility issue in LLDN mode and to improve network performance and lessen impact of node movement. The final contribution in this thesis is devising a new key bootstrapping scheme that fits both IEEE 802.15.4 and 6LoWPAN neighbour discovery architectures. The proposed scheme permits a group of nodes to establish the required link keys without excessive communication/computational overhead. Additionally, the scheme supports the mobile node association process by ensuring secure access control to the network and validates mobile node authenticity in order to eliminate any malicious node association. The purposed key management scheme facilitates the replacement of outdated master network keys and release the required master key in a secure manner. Finally, a modified IEEE 802.15.4 link-layer security structure is presented. The modified architecture minimizes both energy consumption and latency incurred through providing authentication/confidentiality services via the IEEE 802.15.4

Privacy\u27s Three Mile Island and the Need to Protect Political Privacy in Private-Law Contexts

When it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica obtained the personal and private information of eighty-seven million Facebook users to aid the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, it was described as privacy\u27s Three Mile Island : an event, like the famed nuclear accident from which the term comes, that would shake and shape an industry and its approach to digital privacy and the underlying political information such privacy protects. In the intervening four years, despite these revelations, while some social media companies took voluntary measures to prevent a repeat of the types of abuses that plagued the 2016 election, little has changed in terms of the legal infrastructure that could protect the type of private information essential to the functioning of democracies. But what the Cambridge Analytica scandal also made clear is that threats to private information revealed and embedded in our digital activities threaten democracy. What is more, these threats risk undermining individual identity and autonomy and the ability of individuals to pursue individual and collective self-determination. An individual\u27s political identity-with whom she associates, what she says, what she thinks, the questions and ideas she explores, for whom she votes-is all caught up in notions of political privacy. While current public-law protections are fairly robust when it comes to protecting political privacy, even as some fear that current responses to the pandemic may require a degree of intrusion upon privacy by government, the threats to privacy that have emerged in the digital age preceded the current public health crisis and emanate mostly from private actors, where protections for political privacy are quite weak. Nevertheless, democracy requires a high degree of protection for individual identity and political privacy, regardless of the source of the threat, especially when the lines between private action and public effects are blurred, as in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Given the importance of the integrity of identity to democracy and the fact that many of the threats to political privacy emanate from private actors, as this Article shows, enhanced protections for this political privacy are also necessary in the private-law context. Calls for greater protection of digital privacy often result in recommendations that a single institution-the market, political bodies, or the courts-should take a greater role in policing online privacy. Yet these institutions are often interdependent when it comes to protecting digital privacy, and, by extension, political privacy. Efforts promoted through one institution can often have positive-and negative-spillover effects on the functioning of other institutions: they can at times strengthen the protections of such privacy in other institutional settings or undermine the ability of those other institutions to function effectively to protect political privacy. So which institution or set of institutions is best suited to protect such political privacy? This question calls for the application of the method known as comparative institutional analysis, which assesses the relative strengths and weaknesses of different institutions in achieving desired policy goals. At the same time, as this discussion will reveal, even comparative institutional analysis, if it does not take into account the extent to which different institutional settings can have spillover effects on the ability of other institutions to achieve particular policy goals, fails to offer sufficient tools for the assessment of the best institution or institutions to achieve such goals. Indeed, as this Article attempts to show, at least when it comes to protecting political privacy in private-law contexts, any effective institutional response to the threats to political privacy will likely require not just an appreciation for the ways in which different institutional settings are interdependent when it comes to achieving that goal but also that any such effort will require an integrated and comprehensive approach that spans different institutional settings. In the end, this Article is an attempt to use the tools of comparative institutional analysis to assess the relative abilities of different institutions to protect political privacy, including an assessment of the litigation that has arisen in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to determine the role of different institutions in protecting political privacy in private-law--as opposed to public-law-settings. Through a review of this and other litigation to protect digital privacy, which, more and more, affects political privacy, I will show not just how different institutional settings can strengthen the functioning of other settings but also how they can undermine such settings. Thus, given the fact that institutions that protect political privacy can often work at cross-purposes in policing political privacy, this Article argues for the need for comprehensive, integrated, and cooperative action across institutions to ensure the proper protection of this type of privacy

Actas da 10ª Conferência sobre Redes de Computadores

Universidade do MinhoCCTCCentro AlgoritmiCisco SystemsIEEE Portugal Sectio

Electronic bazaar: Social Media as a marketplace in contemporary Kazakhstan

This study focuses on different modalities of social media trade in Kazakhstan and how sellers create trust online using platform features, personal skills and physical locations of stores associated with social media accounts. Researching this topic in Kazakhstan locates this study in a specifically interesting intersection of trade, technology, informality and trust. Social media trade is a part of electronic commerce that is new and technologically advanced type of business, however many traders work informally as they fail to meet legal norms as business registration, paying taxes and giving receipts. Just as individual traders poured to the streets in the period of perestroika, modern day small business owners have occupied social media and turned it into an electronic bazaar. As shops located at bazaars transfer their stores online, and traders learn new technology in order to increase their sales, this study challenges the notion of bazaars being static and backward.   Driven by the question of trust building in a complex realm of electronic but yet informal trade, I focus on a concept of a “living account” that is coined by my ethnographic data (interviews, observations and social media content analysis). I explore different dimensions of trade both online and offline to understand how these realms are intertwined in the question of informality and trust. I argue that the "aliveness" of an account produced through regular contact allows sellers to create trust that results in a successful sale. So, as long as an account is perceived to be “living” the question of formal registration, taxes and receipts is not relevant to customers

Techno-Salvation: Developing a Christian Hermeneutic of Enhancement Technology

A cadre of scientists, philosophers, and ethicists labeled transhumanists and posthumanists argue that by strategic use of technology we can greatly enhance human beings into our next stage of evolution. Rather than leave the evolutionary process to natural results, transhumanists and posthumanists want to shape humanity to meet our own desires. This direct goal of changing human beings has profound implications for Christian faith and practices. At the same time, there is no reason to think that the utilization of technological enhancements will not happen. As such, to best meet the challenge, it is unavoidable for Christians to engage transhumanism and posthumanism in an attempt to help guide which technologies should be pursued and which should be avoided. This project works toward that end. Beginning with competing views of what it means to be human the common positions of physicalism and substance dualism are shown wanting despite strong arguments in their favor. This project argues for a middle position – ensoulment – that attempts to take the best of both approaches but minimize their weaknesses. Likewise, this project examines the moral positions that propose the only moral criteria that matters is either “personhood only” or “human nature only.” Both of these positions are likewise found wanting and a third mediating position is pursued – an agency of relational responsibility. With these preliminary issues established, this project then proceeds to develop a hermeneutic of enhancement from a Christian perspective. The hope is that by following this model, Christians can help guide, accept, or reject various technologies as they are presented. The push for human enhancement cannot be stopped – there are simply too many goods to be obtained by their pursuit. However, any particular enhancement is not inevitable, and by utilizing the hermeneutic proposed in this project Christians can principally evaluate which enhancements should be allowed and which should be avoided