Archway Commencement Issue, v. 19, no. 18, July 11, 1958

Archway v. 19, no. 18, July 11, 1958 - Commencement issue

@THEVIEWER: Analyzing the offline and online impact of a dedicated conversation manager in the newsroom of a public broadcaster

This study is built around the appointment of a dedicated “conversation manager” at the Flemish public broadcaster VRT. We focus on (1) the impact of the conversation manager on Twitter activity of the viewers and (2) the impact of the tweeting audience in the newsroom. Our framework combines journalistic as well as social media logics in Bourdieu’s field framework, for which we combine Twitter data and newsroom inquiry. The network analysis of Twitter activity shows the impact of the conversation manager, although his activities are primarily guided by traditional journalistic values. In turn, the tweeting audience impacts newsroom practices, predominantly as an indicator of audience appreciation. To conclude, social media data further complicate the definition and understanding of “the public.

Counting to Ten with Two Fingers: Compressed Counting with Spiking Neurons

We consider the task of measuring time with probabilistic threshold gates implemented by bio-inspired spiking neurons. In the model of spiking neural networks, network evolves in discrete rounds, where in each round, neurons fire in pulses in response to a sufficiently high membrane potential. This potential is induced by spikes from neighboring neurons that fired in the previous round, which can have either an excitatory or inhibitory effect. Discovering the underlying mechanisms by which the brain perceives the duration of time is one of the largest open enigma in computational neuro-science. To gain a better algorithmic understanding onto these processes, we introduce the neural timer problem. In this problem, one is given a time parameter t, an input neuron x, and an output neuron y. It is then required to design a minimum sized neural network (measured by the number of auxiliary neurons) in which every spike from x in a given round i, makes the output y fire for the subsequent t consecutive rounds. We first consider a deterministic implementation of a neural timer and show that Theta(log t) (deterministic) threshold gates are both sufficient and necessary. This raised the question of whether randomness can be leveraged to reduce the number of neurons. We answer this question in the affirmative by considering neural timers with spiking neurons where the neuron y is required to fire for t consecutive rounds with probability at least 1-delta, and should stop firing after at most 2t rounds with probability 1-delta for some input parameter delta in (0,1). Our key result is a construction of a neural timer with O(log log 1/delta) spiking neurons. Interestingly, this construction uses only one spiking neuron, while the remaining neurons can be deterministic threshold gates. We complement this construction with a matching lower bound of Omega(min{log log 1/delta, log t}) neurons. This provides the first separation between deterministic and randomized constructions in the setting of spiking neural networks. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of compressed counting networks for synchronizing neural networks. In the spirit of distributed synchronizers [Awerbuch-Peleg, FOCS\u2790], we provide a general transformation (or simulation) that can take any synchronized network solution and simulate it in an asynchronous setting (where edges have arbitrary response latencies) while incurring a small overhead w.r.t the number of neurons and computation time

Too Much of a Good Thing?: Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Papers of George Washington\u3c/i\u3e, W. W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig, Editors; Philander D. Chase and Beverly H. Runge, Associate Editors. \u3ci\u3eRevolutionary War Series, Volume 4: April-June I776\u3c/i\u3e, Philander D. Chase, Editor.

One hundred and seventy-two pages into this exemplar of many of the best aspects of contemporary historical documentary editing, Philander D. Chase prints George Washington\u27s 29 April 1776 letter to his brother John Augustine Washington. His last letter to his brother had been penned on 31 March, the last date included in the previous volume, and thus this renewal of the correspondence afforded the opportunity to summarize the activities of the first month encompassed in this book\u27s covers. At the beginning of the month, General Washington had been preparing to leave Cambridge for New York after a successful siege had caused the British to abandon Boston. Washington had detached reinforcements to Canada. Additional regiments were just now Imbarking . . . for the same place, but the general was affraid we are rather too late. Every effort, including skillful handling of the New York Committee of Safety, had also gone into fortifying New York. Pieced together from the recipient\u27s copy in the Washington Papers at the Library of Congress and the clipped closing, signature, and dateline now at Cornell, the letter to John Augustine Washington is carefully transcribed, intelligently annotated, and handsomely printed. One hopes that John Richard Alden, who directed Chase\u27s 1973 dissertation on Baron von Steuben and to whom the volume is dedicated, had it in hand in these covers before his recent death. Washington\u27s letter to his brother, however, raises the issue of How much is enough?, a fundamental question that must be asked of the Revolutionary War Series. One hundred and thirty- four letters to and from Washington precede it in this volume, yet this one letter succinctly summarizes the content of all those letters and provides insight into the general\u27s rationale that is missing in their day-today detail. Military historians will want every false alarm, troop movement, promotion, question of supply, and sign and countersign presented here in so elegant and useful a way, but previous efforts to make these sources accessible suggest the title of this essay

A smooth changeover and the challenge of managing ICM today.

n/

Low-latency mix networks for anonymous communication

Every modern online application relies on the network layer to transfer information, which exposes the metadata associated with digital communication. These distinctive characteristics encapsulate equally meaningful information as the content of the communication itself and allow eavesdroppers to uniquely identify users and their activities. Hence, by exposing the IP addresses and by analyzing patterns of the network traffic, a malicious entity can deanonymize most online communications. While content confidentiality has made significant progress over the years, existing solutions for anonymous communication which protect the network metadata still have severe limitations, including centralization, limited security, poor scalability, and high-latency. As the importance of online privacy increases, the need to build low-latency communication systems with strong security guarantees becomes necessary. Therefore, in this thesis, we address the problem of building multi-purpose anonymous networks that protect communication privacy. To this end, we design a novel mix network Loopix, which guarantees communication unlinkability and supports applications with various latency and bandwidth constraints. Loopix offers better security properties than any existing solution for anonymous communications while at the same time being scalable and low-latency. Furthermore, we also explore the problem of active attacks and malicious infrastructure nodes, and propose a Miranda mechanism which allows to efficiently mitigate them. In the second part of this thesis, we show that mix networks may be used as a building block in the design of a private notification system, which enables fast and low-cost online notifications. Moreover, its privacy properties benefit from an increasing number of users, meaning that the system can scale to millions of clients at a lower cost than any alternative solution