SRML: Space Radio Machine Learning

Space-based communications systems to be employed by future artificial satellites, or spacecraft during exploration missions, can potentially benefit from software-defined radio adaptation capabilities. Multiple communication requirements could potentially compete for radio resources, whose availability of which may vary during the spacecraft\u27s operational life span. Electronic components are prone to failure, and new instructions will eventually be received through software updates. Consequently, these changes may require a whole new set of near-optimal combination of parameters to be derived on-the-fly without instantaneous human interaction or even without a human in-the-loop. Thus, achieving a sufficiently set of radio parameters can be challenging, especially when the communication channels change dynamically due to orbital dynamics as well as atmospheric and space weather-related impairments. This dissertation presents an analysis and discussion regarding novel algorithms proposed in order to enable a cognition control layer for adaptive communication systems operating in space using an architecture that merges machine learning techniques employing wireless communication principles. The proposed cognitive engine proof-of-concept reasons over time through an efficient accumulated learning process. An implementation of the conceptual design is expected to be delivered to the SDR system located on the International Space Station as part of an experimental program. To support the proposed cognitive engine algorithm development, more realistic satellite-based communications channels are proposed along with rain attenuation synthesizers for LEO orbits, channel state detection algorithms, and multipath coefficients function of the reflector\u27s electrical characteristics. The achieved performance of the proposed solutions are compared with the state-of-the-art, and novel performance benchmarks are provided for future research to reference

Miners, Vigilantes & Cattlemen: Overcoming Free Rider Problems in the Private Provision of Law

Law is a good like food, insurance, or housing. Like other goods, it can and often should be provided by private entities. Yet law is usually regarded as the quintessential public good, so obviously public in nature that we need not even discuss its provision by anyone but the State. As Bruce Benson observed [a]nyone who would even question the \u27fact\u27 that law and order are necessary functions of government is likely to be considered a ridiculous, uninformed radical by most observers. Even William Landes and Richard Posner, hardly apologists for the State, have concluded that law often must be publicly provided. Ultimately, the arguments for public provision of law turn on one aspect or another of the free rider problem. In essence this problem arises because it is difficult to exclude those who refuse to pay from the consumption of law. Thus, if you and I agreed to purchase rule of law services from a private firm, even those of our neighbors who refused to contribute a dime would reap some of the benefits of our services if only because they would no longer need to worry about spillover violence from our less peaceful, nonlegal methods of settling disputes. Similarly, rules produced by our litigation could be used by others without payment. The net result could be too little law since many would opt to ride for free on the efforts of others. Despite this seeming consensus on law\u27s public nature, Americans frequently turn to private sources for law. During the development of the American West, private citizens often undertook to privately provide both rules and enforcement mechanisms where governmental systems were absent or ineffective. Some of these examples, like the placer mining districts, Montana cattlemen, and Montana vigilantes, provide positive lessons. Others, like the 1856 San Francisco vigilance committee and Wyoming cattlemen\u27s invasion of Johnson County, provide negative lessons. These experiences with privately produced law answer questions about how some people overcame free rider problems in privately providing law and illustrate how to avoid substituting private for public monopolies. These lessons provide us with guidelines for shifting provision of at least some law provision functions of government to private entities. Briefly, the Western experiences with privately produced, customary law suggest the following are important to successfully overcoming the free rider problems in private provision of law: First, customary legal systems work best when they enforce reasonably well defined rights generally recognized in the community as just. Second, private legal systems flourish spontaneously when they are given space to grow, making the ability to opt out of any State system crucial to their development. Third, removing distortions blocking private law, including pricing State legal institutions at their true costs, can significantly assist the growth of customary legal institutions. Fourth, customary law requires a set of skills and knowledge to succeed. Fostering these skills and disseminating this knowledge can enhance these skills. Finally, customary systems that reward treating others with respect are more likely to succeed. I examine several case studies of non-state legal systems: Miners\u27 law in California, Montana, and the Dakota Black Hills; two prominent vigilante movements in San Francisco in 1856 and Montana in 1863-64; and conflicts between cattlemen and settlers in the 1880s-1890s in Wyoming and Montana. I examine the lessons from Part II on how private law production can be enhanced in Part III and suggest how those principles can be applied today to enable privately produced law to develop regarding the Internet, in Part IV. I also briefly examine the recent phenomenon of common law courts and conclude they do not meet the requirements for successful development of private law

Pathways for Irregular Forces in Southeast Asia

An exploration of the roles that pro- and anti-government militias, private armed groups, vigilantes, and gangs play in local communities in the new democracies of Southeast Asia. Scholars have typically characterized irregular forces as spoilers and infiltrators in post-conflict peacebuilding processes. The contributors to this book challenge this conventional understanding of irregular forces in Southeast Asia, demonstrating that they often attract solid support from civilians and can be major contributors to the building of local security — a process by which local residents, in the absence of an effective police force, develop, partner or are at least included in the management of community crimes and other violence. They analyze irregular forces’ dealings with political actors at the community level, explaining why and how forces are incorporated in and collaborate with legitimate institutions without using violence against them. Offering a new approach to dealing with irregular forces in Southeast Asia, contributors explore new theoretical frameworks that are better suited for evaluating irregular forces’ relationship to different security providers and the political environments in the region. Specifically, they examine case studies from Indonesia, Timor-Leste, the Philippines, and Thailand. A valuable resource for researchers, students and practitioners in the areas of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and security governance, especially those with a focus on Southeast Asia. This book will also be of great interest to scholars of the sociology and anthropology of the region

Globalization and transnational organized crime : the making of the Nigerian fraudster

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-98)

Three Essays on Defending Common-Pool Resources

% !TEX root = ../degeest2017dissertation.tex Environmental protection often relies on cooperation between individuals in uncoordinated groups. In cases such as the management of common-pool resources, individuals must not only monitor and enforce behavior within their group to prevent over-exploitation. They must also contend with external threats on the resource like poaching. This dissertation studies how individuals cooperate to manage shared resources and deter shared threats. The first chapter, Deterring poaching of a common-pool resource , considers the problem of deterring a threat that cannot be perfectly observed. I present results from common pool resource experiments designed to examine the ability of a group of resource users, called insiders, to simultaneously manage their own exploitation and defend their resource from encroachment by outsiders. The insiders can use communication, peer monitoring and sanctions to coordinate their decisions. In addition, they can sanction any outsiders they observe. I vary the insiders\u27 ability to observe and sanction the outsiders from no observability to partial and full observability. I find a striking non-monotonicity between observability of the outsiders and levels of poaching. Poaching was higher under partial monitoring than zero monitoring, and was lower and more stable under full monitoring. Although full observability allowed the insiders to better coordinate their own harvests, they were unable to fully deter poaching because their sanctions were far too low and they were unwilling to punish low levels of poaching. The second chapter, Defending public goods and common-pool resources , studies cooperation and deterrence of a shared threat in different strategic environments. In many real-world social dilemmas, groups of individuals must cooperate to create surplus and defend it from theft. Theft can either foster or discourage collective action. On the one hand, a shared threat can align individual incentives. On the other hand, surplus creation may decrease if individuals are unsure how group members will contribute towards defense. Moreover, there is literature that suggests cooperation is sensitive to whether individual actions confer positive externalities (public goods, PG) or negative externalities (common-pool resources, CPR) on group members -- the cooperation divergence . To examine the relationship between cooperation and defense in different externality settings, I conduct an experiment in which a group of insiders providing a public good or conserving a common-pool resource must coordinate to deter outsiders from stealing the value of their surplus. Our theory predicts that theft will have no different effect on behavior across externality settings. However, I find that it does. Surplus creation is significantly higher in the CPR treatment, while surplus defense is significantly higher in the PG treatment. Across both treatments, I find that the shared threat increases variation within groups, but the effect is more dramatic in the PG treatment. Finally, the third chaper, Enforcement networks in social dilemmas , studies how enforcement emerges and evolves in the first chapter. Sanctions can increase cooperation in social dilemmas, but they impose a high social cost until a credible threat to non-cooperative behavior is established. Moreover, credible threats depend on enforcement structure. For example, small sanctions implemented by many subjects may have a different impact on behavior than the same volume of sanctions meted out by a single subject. In order to understand how credible threats to deviant behavior emerge, it is therefore necessary to study how enforcement structure emerges and evolves in groups. I study enforcement structure by taking a network approach to data from a social dilemma experiment with peer punishment. The exchange of sanctions between subjects can be framed as a directed, weighted network that evolves, enabling us to use tools from network structure to summarize, predict and simulate behavior. I first visualize and summarize the structure of these networks and show that enforcement structure is non-random and tends to cluster around a few individuals. I then model network formation and network efficiency using an empirical framework that separately considers edge formation (a binary sanctioning event) from edge weight (sanction size) and find that subjects respond more to the act of being sanctioned rather than the volume of sanctions. Finally, I recover the underlying Markov process governing enforcement structure and simulate expected long-run behavior. I conclude with a discussion of how my approach can be used to study generalized exchange networks

The Montclarion, April 26, 1984

Student Newspaper of Montclair State Collegehttps://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/montclarion/2524/thumbnail.jp

Perceptions of online fraud and the impact on the countermeasures for the control of online fraud in Saudi Arabian financial institutions

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThis study addresses the impact of countermeasures in the control and prevention of online fraud in Saudi Arabia and the influence of the environmental context. Combatting online fraud is facilitated when the public is fully educated and is aware of its types and of the prevention methods available. People are reliant on the Internet; the possibility of being breached by hackers and fraudsters is growing, especially as socialising, online shopping and banking are carried out through personal computers or mobile devices. Online fraud has been described as an epidemic that has spread to most online activities. Its prevalence has been noted to be in regions where there is high adoption of e-commerce, and, along with it, large online financial transactions. The argument is therefore the measures taken are either are inadequate or have failed to effectively address all the issues because of the organisational and environmental context of the country. This research aims to examine online fraud perceptions and the countermeasures designed and used by financial institutions in Saudi Arabia to control and prevent online fraud in its environmental context, to examine the effectiveness/impact of the countermeasures and to examine the factors that may affect/influence the impact of the countermeasures. The qualitative method approach was chosen to ensure balanced coverage of the subject matter. The nature of the research requires a broader, in-depth, examination of the experiences of the participants from their own perspective. Meanwhile levels of awareness are low, because of lack of knowledge and training, a lack of government sensitisation and the religious inclinations of the population. The findings also confirm the efforts of organisations to put in place countermeasures using various technological means, coupled with procedural controls and checks. The measures create obstacles to most customers, who find it cumbersome to engage in online activities because of those procedures and checks. The findings also show two types of regulations: government and organisational rules, with different foci and purposes, which are mostly centred on the monitoring of Internet operations and operational guidelines. The enforcement of rules in the light of prosecuting offenders has also been minimal and passive. The countermeasures of most banks/organisations mostly focus on prevention and detection. However, the findings suggest that the activities in each component and their interrelationships have a collective impact on combatting online fraud. The success of any effort or approach to combat fraudulent activities therefore depends on the activities of the four countermeasure components

“Making a Science of Cooperation”: Labor, Business, Government, and the Defense Council System in the Wartime American West, 1916-1921

“Making a Science of Cooperation”: Labor, Business, Government, and the Defense Council System in the Wartime American West, 1916-1921” examines the socioeconomic and political transformations that occurred in the American West as a result of homefront mobilization for World War I. While those transformations happened at the national level as well, they were the most impactful in and inherently informed by the political and socioeconomic developments occurring in the western states at the time. The vehicle in which those transformations were delivered was the Defense Council System (DCS), a unique federal mobilization program that enlisted the help of the nation’s state and county governments to mobilize their populations for the Great War. The most significant aspect of the process was seen in the amalgamation of the public and private sectors, whose wartime cooperation blurred the lines between the duties of government and those of business. The private sector participants appointed to lead the DCS by the Wilson Administration, including some of the nation’s most powerful and influential corporate executives and leaders of organized labor, worked together in the name of patriotic coordination and cooperation for the purpose of mobilization. Ironically enough, it was the inclusion of business associations and labor organizations who, in working together along with the government to create a practical and expeditious manner of homefront mobilization, ushered in the rise of the administrative state in American governance in the decades following World War I