Information Waste on the World Wide Web and Combating the Clutter

The Internet has become a critical part of the infrastructure supporting modern life. The high degree of openness and autonomy of information providers determines the access to a vast amount of information on the Internet. However, this makes the web vulnerable to inaccurate, misleading, or outdated information. The unnecessary and unusable content, which is referred to as “information waste,” takes up hardware resources and clutters the web. In this paper, we examine the phenomenon of web information waste by developing a taxonomy of it and analyzing its causes and effects. We then explore possible solutions and propose a classification approach using quantitative metrics for information waste detection

The Journal of ERW and Mine Action Issue 18.2 (2014)

Focus: CWD Emergency Response Feature: Sahel and Maghreb Special Report: SA/LW Marking and Tracing Initiatives in Latin Americ

Rule of Thumb: Mobiles for governance in India

Between 1996 and 2012, India's standing dropped on five of the six indicators of governance developed by the World Bank. Today, with over 900 million mobile phone subscriptions, India's mobile revolution presents an unprecedented opportunity to address this deficit and bring good governance to the farthest corners of the country. Adding 10 mobile phones per 100 people in a developing country can lead to half a point of additional GDP growth per person. Rule of Thumb makes a case for m-governance, and for reimagining the ways in which governments and citizens function, transact and interact with each other. It also explores how, in India and the world over, non-profits and social businesses are marrying the ubiquity of mobile technology with governance systems and processes to produce great benefits for citizens and governments alike. Dasra mapped over 130 organizations and profiled the work of 11 organizations with the most impactful and scalable programs

Gone in Sixty Milliseconds: Trademark Law and Cognitive Science

Trademark dilution is a cause of action for interfering with the uniqueness of a trademark. For example, consumers would probably not think that Kodak soap was produced by the makers of Kodak cameras, but its presence in the market would diminish the uniqueness of the original Kodak mark. Trademark owners think dilution is harmful but have had difficulty explaining why. Many courts have therefore been reluctant to enforce dilution laws, even while legislatures have enacted more of them over the past half century. Courts and commentators have now begun to use psychological theories, drawing on associationist models of cognition, to explain how a trademark can be harmed by the existence of similar marks even when consumers can readily distinguish the marks from one another and thus are not confused. Though the cognitive theory of dilution is internally consistent and appeals to the authority of science, it does not rest on sufficient empirical evidence to justify its adoption. Moreover, the harms it identifies do not generally come from commercial competitors but from free speech about trademarked products. As a result, even a limited dilution law should be held unconstitutional under current First Amendment commercial-speech doctrine. In the absence of constitutional invalidation, the cognitive explanation of dilution is likely to change the law for the worse. Rather than working like fingerprint evidence--which ideally produces more evidence about already-defined crimes--psychological explanations of dilution are more like economic theories in antitrust, which changed the definition of actionable restraints of trade. Given the empirical and normative flaws in the cognitive theory, using it to fill dilution\u27s theoretical vacuum would be a mistake

Maintaining Information Dominance in Complex Environments

There are many risks to the U.S. Army’s command and control (C2) operations and to its intelligence and information warfare (IW) capabilities. The challenges include: significant uncertainty; sudden unexpected events; high noise and clutter levels in intelligence pictures; basic and complex deceptions exercised through a variety of channels; the actions of hidden malign actors; and novel forms of attack on U.S. and allied command, control, communications, computers, information/intelligence, surveillance, targeting acquisition, and reconnaissance (C4ISTAR) systems. If the U.S. Army is to secure and maintain information dominance in all environments, it must exploit complexity and uncertainty in the battlespace and not simply seek to overcome it. Innovation requires that new ideas are considered, and that old ideas should be robustly challenged. To achieve and maintain information dominance, the U.S. Army will also require a significant injection of innovation, a robust and resilient C2 and intelligence capability, novel technologies and an accelerated information operations capability development program that is broad, deep, sustained and well-coordinated. Furthermore, once information dominance is achieved, maintaining it will demand continuous change and development.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1390/thumbnail.jp

Organizing the American domestic interior : 1978-2010

Over the past thirty years, organization has become one of the most popular ways to spend time and money on the home in the U.S. In part, this popularity and its attendant fixation on simplicity and stillness is a reaction to historical circumstances of the late twentieth century, in which consumption and time seem to have “sped up” as a result of the postindustrial economy. Situating home organization within the fields of American Studies, Design History, and Material Culture studies, this dissertation examines the contemporary preoccupation with organizing the domestic interior through five case studies: reality television shows about messy homes, the retail vendor The Container Store, Real Simple magazine, self-help books on de-cluttering, and interviews with professional organizers. Although its rhetoric and aesthetics seem to mimic the principles of design modernism, home organization is highly postmodern in its adoption of neoliberal values of self-improvement and its participation in an aestheticized landscape of consumer culture. Each case study in this dissertation exposes a number of tensions at the heart of the trend: home organization is a lucrative industry that relies on anxiety around overconsumption to sell products, often depending on corporate branding techniques that stress organization as an ongoing “lifestyle” of consumption; acknowledging gender inequity in domestic responsibility, home organization advice texts show women how to speed up, rather than delegate, housework, ultimately creating more work for women; de-cluttering manuals ask individuals to detach their sense of self-identity from their belongings, yet use the same principles to explain how editing objects results in the expression of one’s “true” self. Placing the discourse around clutter and order in the home within historical and cultural contexts, these case studies offer valuable insight into gender, middle-class culture, and the domestic interior at the turn of the twenty-first century.American Studie

The Impacts of the Covid-19 Coronavirus Pandemic on International Environmental Protection

The COVID-19 Pandemic, first reported in Wuhan-the capital of Hubei Province of China in December 2019, is a human tragedy that is currently affecting millions of people around the globe. Presently, about 215 countries have reported cases of COVID-19. As of September 23, 2020, case growth, according to the Worldometer, has accelerated to 31,850,036 cases, with 976,559 deaths and 23,449,907 recoveries. The World Health Organization (WHO), on January 30, 2020, announced COVID-19 as a pandemic and listed it as a public health emergency of global concern. It indicated with certainty that the COVID-19 epidemic would extend to every part of the world and noted that all individuals, businesses, and governments could change the disease's trajectory. On March 24, 2020, noting that the COVID-19 Pandemic is progressively spreading and its impacts upon human health and the economy escalating daily, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) urged governments to take urgent actions to minimize possible secondary impacts upon the global environment. However, a cursory survey of the effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the world would show that it has already impacted international environmental protection in multidimensional ways. Thus, this paper focuses on the impacts of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic on international environmental protection. Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic, international environmental protection (IEP), positive impacts of COVID-19 on IEP, negative impacts of COVID-19 on IEP, balancing economic growth with environmental protection. DOI: 10.7176/JLPG/101-12 Publication date:September 30th 202

A Framework for data decay in client-server model

Data breach incidents are a growing concern in both the private and public sector. As an increasing amount of sensitive information is made available through information systems, the number of occurrences and the potential damage as a result of these breaches will continue to expand. There is a clear need for a framework to mitigate the dangers of leaking data while simultaneously allowing authorized individuals to gain access to necessary information. This thesis presents the concept of data decay, applied to a client-server model for retrieval of sensitive data. In this framework, files tagged by the framework and stored on client machines undergo a process in which they become increasingly non-existent to the client in proportion to the time elapsed since the last server connection. In order for a client to continue using a file that has undergone the decay process, it must successfully authenticate to the central server to begin rebuilding the file. The time required to rebuild the file is computed by the length of time since the last client connection to the server, in addition to the level of sensitivity for the specific file (files tagged as highly sensitive have a faster decay rate than those tagged as moderately sensitive). Using this model, an adversary\u27s window of opportunity to view sensitive information diminishes as the client remains disconnected from the central server. A regular user will find this framework a benefit in the ability to work remotely and have access to required sensitive information without the risk of unintentionally leaking it to unintended parties

The Spinnaker Vol. 27 No. 27

Student newspaper for the UNF community