A subdiffusive behaviour of recurrent random walk in random environment on a regular tree

We are interested in the random walk in random environment on an infinite tree. Lyons and Pemantle [11] give a precise recurrence/transience criterion. Our paper focuses on the almost sure asymptotic behaviours of a recurrent random walk $(X\_n)$ in random environment on a regular tree, which is closely related to Mandelbrot [13]'s multiplicative cascade. We prove, under some general assumptions upon the distribution of the environment, the existence of a new exponent $\nu\in (0, {1\over 2}]$ such that $\max\_{0\le i \le n} |X\_i|$ behaves asymptotically like $n^{\nu}$. The value of $\nu$ is explicitly formulated in terms of the distribution of the environment.Comment: 29 pages with 1 figure. Its preliminary version was put in the following web site: http://www.math.univ-paris13.fr/prepub/pp2005/pp2005-28.htm

Learning about America's Best: Resources on Educating, Training, and Hiring Returning Veterans and Service Members

This document provides a quick list of some of the many books, articles, and web sites that offer information for educators, trainers, employers, service members, veterans, and family members. It is part of a series of materials written to address the growing need for information and ideas that can help our nation's schools, training organizations, and workplaces make a welcoming, productive, and satisfying place for returning veterans and transitioning service members

Blogging as a viable research methodology for young people with arthritis: a qualitative study.

The development of services that are responsive to the needs of users is a health policy priority. Finding ways of engaging young people in research to gain insights into their particular experiences, perspectives, and needs is vital but challenging. These data are critical to improving services in ways that meet the needs of young people

Removing the Digital Divide for Senior Web Users

It is hard for the elderly to use the internet to find the resource they want. Usually help is needed for them to complete the task on the technology things. The main reason for this project is to research ideas on encourage senior people to make use of the web to locate helps they want, such as finding volunteers and professional helps. The scope of this project is to develop a new way of web access and content presentation methodologies that let senior people getting help from volunteers and various service providers more easily that incorporates social networking technology e.g. Facebook. By incorporating the social network web site like Facebook into the web application, senior people will be able to find volunteering help or other related service providers through social networking. Volunteers will show up in Google map in search results for senior to easily locate helps. Senior people can also search for self help videos tutorials through the web application search engine. A mobile version of the senior user application will also be developed for easy access on the road. Other features that benefit senior users includes voice input, control / content posting and collaborative social networking where a sponsors would sponsor a help task volunteer undertake

Exposed Online: Why the New Federal Health Privacy Regulation Doesn't Offer Much Protection to Internet Users

Provides an analysis of how the HIPAA regulation may or may not cover consumer-oriented health Web sites and Internet based health care. Comments on what new standards will be required for those sites covered by the regulation

Web Security Detection Tool

According to Government Computer News (GCN) web attacks have been marked as all- time high this year. GCN says that some of the leading security software like SOPHOS detected about 15,000 newly infected web pages daily in initial three months of 2008 [13]. This has lead to the need of efficient software to make web applications robust and sustainable to these attacks. While finding information on different types of attacks, I found that SQL injection and cross site scripting are the most famous among attackers. These attacks are used extensively since, they can be performed using different techniques and it is difficult to make a web application completely immune to these attacks. There are myriad detection tools available which help to detect vulnerabilities in web applications. These tools are mainly categorized as white-box and black-box testing tools. In this writing project, we aim to develop a detection tool which would be efficient and helpful for the users to pinpoint possible vulnerabilities in his/her PHP scripts. We propose a technique to integrate the aforementioned categories of tools under one framework to achieve better detection against possible vulnerabilities. Our system focuses on giving the developer a simple and concise tool which would help him/her to correct possible loopholes in the PHP code snippets

Web apps and imprecise probabilities

We propose a model for the behaviour of Web apps in the unreliable WWW. Web apps are described by orchestrations. An orchestration mimics the personal use of the Web by defining the way in which Web services are invoked. The WWW is unreliable as poorly maintained Web sites are prone to fail. We model this source of unreliability trough a probabilistic approach. We assume that each site has a probability to fail. Another source of uncertainty is the traffic congestion. This can be observed as a non-deterministic behaviour induced by the variability in the response times. We model non-determinism by imprecise probabilities. We develop here an ex-ante normal to characterize the behaviour of finite orchestrations in the unreliable Web. We show the existence of a normal form under such semantics for orchestrations using asymmetric parallelism.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control

"Fair use" is a crucial exception to "intellectual property" controls - it allows users to publish, distribute, or reproduce copyrighted or trademarked material without permission, for certain purposes. But extensive research, including statistical analysis and scores of firsthand stories from artists, writers, bloggers, and others, shows that many producers of creative works are wary of claiming fair use for fear of getting sued. The result is a serious chilling effect on creative expression and democratic discussion.Several factors must be considered in deciding whether a use of copyrighted material is "fair." Four factors identified in the copyright law are: 1) the purpose and character of the new work; 2) the nature of the original work; 3) the amount and substantiality of the original work that was used; and 4) the effect of the new work on the market for the original. Examples of fair use are criticism, commentary, news reporting, scholarship, and "multiple copies for classroom use." "Will Fair Use Survive?" suggests the need for strengthening fair use so that it can be an effective tool for anyone who contributes to culture and democratic discourse. The report finds: Artists, writers, historians, and filmmakers are burdened by a "clearance culture" that ignores fair use and forces them to seek permission (which may be denied) and pay high license fees in order to use even small amounts of copyrighted or trademarked material.The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DMCA) is being used by copyright owners to pressure Internet service providers to take down material from their servers on the mere assertion that it is infringing, with no legal judgment and no consideration of fair use.An analysis of 320 letters on the Chilling Effects website, an online repository of threatening cease and desist and "take down" letters, showed that nearly 50% of the letters had the potential to stifle protected speech. Report Highlights:The giant Bank of America sent a threatening letter to a small ceramic piggy bank company called Piggy Bank of America, claiming its use of the name was a trademark violation.A "planetary enlightenment" group called Avatar consistently suppressed online discussion group postings critical of its program by using DMCA "take down" letters.MassMutual sent a cease and desist letter to the gripe site "MassMutualSuks.com," claiming trademark infringement.Mattel sued artist Tom Forsythe for his series of "Food Chain Barbies," acerbic commentaries on Mattel's role in perpetuating gender inequality. Only after a long, bruising court fight did Forsythe win the right to parody Barbie.The report recommends: creating a clearinghouse for information, including sample replies to cease and desist and "take down" letters; outreach to Internet service providers who are instructed by companies to take down sites with material they claim as copyright-protected; changes in the law to reduce the penalty for guessing wrong about fair use; and the creation of a national pro bono legal support network.On December 15, 2005, Representatives Rick Boucher, Zoe Lofgren, and John Doolittle circulated a "Dear Colleague" letter praising the report for explaining why fair use "is a crucial part of our copyright law," and why legislation is needed to secure fair use rights in the digital environment

Evaluating Variable Length Markov Chain Models for Analysis of User Web Navigation Sessions

Markov models have been widely used to represent and analyse user web navigation data. In previous work we have proposed a method to dynamically extend the order of a Markov chain model and a complimentary method for assessing the predictive power of such a variable length Markov chain. Herein, we review these two methods and propose a novel method for measuring the ability of a variable length Markov model to summarise user web navigation sessions up to a given length. While the summarisation ability of a model is important to enable the identification of user navigation patterns, the ability to make predictions is important in order to foresee the next link choice of a user after following a given trail so as, for example, to personalise a web site. We present an extensive experimental evaluation providing strong evidence that prediction accuracy increases linearly with summarisation ability