Rapid Mission Assurance Assessment via Sociotechnical Modeling and Simulation

How do organizations rapidly assess command-level effects of cyber attacks? Leaders need a way of assuring themselves that their organization, people, and information technology can continue their missions in a contested cyber environment. To do this, leaders should: 1) require assessments be more than analogical, anecdotal or simplistic snapshots in time; 2) demand the ability to rapidly model their organizations; 3) identify their organization’s structural vulnerabilities; and 4) have the ability to forecast mission assurance scenarios. Using text mining to build agent based dynamic network models of information processing organizations, I examine impacts of contested cyber environments on three common focus areas of information assurance—confidentiality, integrity, and availability. I find that assessing impacts of cyber attacks is a nuanced affair dependent on the nature of the attack, the nature of the organization and its missions, and the nature of the measurements. For well-manned information processing organizations, many attacks are in the nuisance range and that only multipronged or severe attacks cause meaningful failure. I also find that such organizations can design for resiliency and provide guidelines in how to do so

Automated Integration of Infrastructure Component Status for Real-Time Restoration Progress Control: Case Study of Highway System in Hurricane Harvey

Following extreme events, efficient restoration of infrastructure systems is critical to sustaining community lifelines. During the process, effective monitoring and control of the infrastructure restoration progress is critical. This research proposes a systematic approach that automatically integrates component-level restoration status to achieve real-time forecasting of overall infrastructure restoration progress. In this research, the approach is mainly designed for transportation infrastructure restoration following Hurricane Harvey. In detail, the component-level restoration status is linked to the restoration progress forecasting through network modeling and earned value method. Once the new component restoration status is collected, the information is automatically integrated to update the overall restoration progress forecasting. Academically, an approach is proposed to automatically transform the component-level restoration information to overall restoration progress. In practice, the approach expects to ease the communication and coordination efforts between emergency managers, thereby facilitating timely identification and resolution of issues for rapid infrastructure restoration

Cogestion des ressources naturelles : une approche structurale pour quantifier la contribution des réseaux d'acteurs à la résilience des systèmes socio-écologiques

Alors que les activités anthropiques font basculer de nombreux écosystèmes vers des régimes fonctionnels différents, la résilience des systèmes socio-écologiques devient un problème pressant. Des acteurs locaux, impliqués dans une grande diversité de groupes — allant d’initiatives locales et indépendantes à de grandes institutions formelles — peuvent agir sur ces questions en collaborant au développement, à la promotion ou à l’implantation de pratiques plus en accord avec ce que l’environnement peut fournir. De ces collaborations répétées émergent des réseaux complexes, et il a été montré que la topologie de ces réseaux peut améliorer la résilience des systèmes socio-écologiques (SSÉ) auxquels ils participent. La topologie des réseaux d’acteurs favorisant la résilience de leur SSÉ est caractérisée par une combinaison de plusieurs facteurs : la structure doit être modulaire afin d’aider les différents groupes à développer et proposer des solutions à la fois plus innovantes (en réduisant l’homogénéisation du réseau), et plus proches de leurs intérêts propres ; elle doit être bien connectée et facilement synchronisable afin de faciliter les consensus, d’augmenter le capital social, ainsi que la capacité d’apprentissage ; enfin, elle doit être robuste, afin d’éviter que les deux premières caractéristiques ne souffrent du retrait volontaire ou de la mise à l’écart de certains acteurs. Ces caractéristiques, qui sont relativement intuitives à la fois conceptuellement et dans leur application mathématique, sont souvent employées séparément pour analyser les qualités structurales de réseaux d’acteurs empiriques. Cependant, certaines sont, par nature, incompatibles entre elles. Par exemple, le degré de modularité d’un réseau ne peut pas augmenter au même rythme que sa connectivité, et cette dernière ne peut pas être améliorée tout en améliorant sa robustesse. Cet obstacle rend difficile la création d’une mesure globale, car le niveau auquel le réseau des acteurs contribue à améliorer la résilience du SSÉ ne peut pas être la simple addition des caractéristiques citées, mais plutôt le résultat d’un compromis subtil entre celles-ci. Le travail présenté ici a pour objectifs (1), d’explorer les compromis entre ces caractéristiques ; (2) de proposer une mesure du degré auquel un réseau empirique d’acteurs contribue à la résilience de son SSÉ ; et (3) d’analyser un réseau empirique à la lumière, entre autres, de ces qualités structurales. Cette thèse s’articule autour d’une introduction et de quatre chapitres numérotés de 2 à 5. Le chapitre 2 est une revue de la littérature sur la résilience des SSÉ. Il identifie une série de caractéristiques structurales (ainsi que les mesures de réseaux qui leur correspondent) liées à l’amélioration de la résilience dans les SSÉ. Le chapitre 3 est une étude de cas sur la péninsule d’Eyre, une région rurale d’Australie-Méridionale où l’occupation du sol, ainsi que les changements climatiques, contribuent à l’érosion de la biodiversité. Pour cette étude de cas, des travaux de terrain ont été effectués en 2010 et 2011 durant lesquels une série d’entrevues a permis de créer une liste des acteurs de la cogestion de la biodiversité sur la péninsule. Les données collectées ont été utilisées pour le développement d’un questionnaire en ligne permettant de documenter les interactions entre ces acteurs. Ces deux étapes ont permis la reconstitution d’un réseau pondéré et dirigé de 129 acteurs individuels et 1180 relations. Le chapitre 4 décrit une méthodologie pour mesurer le degré auquel un réseau d’acteurs participe à la résilience du SSÉ dans lequel il est inclus. La méthode s’articule en deux étapes : premièrement, un algorithme d’optimisation (recuit simulé) est utilisé pour fabriquer un archétype semi-aléatoire correspondant à un compromis entre des niveaux élevés de modularité, de connectivité et de robustesse. Deuxièmement, un réseau empirique (comme celui de la péninsule d’Eyre) est comparé au réseau archétypique par le biais d’une mesure de distance structurelle. Plus la distance est courte, et plus le réseau empirique est proche de sa configuration optimale. La cinquième et dernier chapitre est une amélioration de l’algorithme de recuit simulé utilisé dans le chapitre 4. Comme il est d’usage pour ce genre d’algorithmes, le recuit simulé utilisé projetait les dimensions du problème multiobjectif dans une seule dimension (sous la forme d’une moyenne pondérée). Si cette technique donne de très bons résultats ponctuellement, elle n’autorise la production que d’une seule solution parmi la multitude de compromis possibles entre les différents objectifs. Afin de mieux explorer ces compromis, nous proposons un algorithme de recuit simulé multiobjectifs qui, plutôt que d’optimiser une seule solution, optimise une surface multidimensionnelle de solutions. Cette étude, qui se concentre sur la partie sociale des systèmes socio-écologiques, améliore notre compréhension des structures actorielles qui contribuent à la résilience des SSÉ. Elle montre que si certaines caractéristiques profitables à la résilience sont incompatibles (modularité et connectivité, ou — dans une moindre mesure — connectivité et robustesse), d’autres sont plus facilement conciliables (connectivité et synchronisabilité, ou — dans une moindre mesure — modularité et robustesse). Elle fournit également une méthode intuitive pour mesurer quantitativement des réseaux d’acteurs empiriques, et ouvre ainsi la voie vers, par exemple, des comparaisons d’études de cas, ou des suivis — dans le temps — de réseaux d’acteurs. De plus, cette thèse inclut une étude de cas qui fait la lumière sur l’importance de certains groupes institutionnels pour la coordination des collaborations et des échanges de connaissances entre des acteurs aux intérêts potentiellement divergents.As anthropic activities are slowly pushing many ecosystems towards their functional tipping points, social-ecological resilience has become a pressing concern. Local stakeholders, acting within a diversity of groups — from grassroots organizations to higher-scale institutional structures — may act on these issues and collaborate to develop, promote, and implement more sustainable practices. From these repeated collaborations emerge complex networks, the topologies of which have been shown to either enhance or hinder social-ecological systems’ (SES) resilience. The main topological characteristics of a stakeholder network enhancing SES’s resilience include a combination of: a highly modular community structure, which helps groups of stakeholders develop and propose solutions both more innovative (by reducing knowledge homogeneity in the network), and close to their interest and values; high connectivity and synchronizability, in order to improve consensus building, social capital and learning capacity; and high robustness so as to prevent the first two characteristics from sharply decreasing if some stakeholders were to leave the network. These characteristics are straight-forward both in concept and in their mathematical implementation, and have often been used separately to discuss the structural qualities of stakeholder networks in case studies. However, some of these topological features inherently contradict each other. For example, modularity is in direct conflict with connectivity, which is in conflict with a network’s robustness. This issue makes the creation of a more global measure difficult, as the level to which stakeholders contribute to enhancing SES’s resilience cannot simply be a summation of these features, but instead needs to be the outcome of a delicate trade-off between them. The present study aims to: (1) explore the trade-offs at work between these structural features; (2) produce a measure of how well-suited empirical stakeholder networks are to enhancing the resilience of their SES; and (3) thoroughly analyze an empirical stakeholder network in the context, among other things, of its resilience-enhancing qualities. This dissertation is organized in four parts. The first part (Chapter 2) is a review of the literature on SES resilience. It identifies a series of structural features (as well as their corresponding network metrics) associated with resilience-enhancement in SES. The second part (Chapter 3) is a case study on the Eyre Peninsula (EP), a rural region of South Australia where land-use, as well as climate change, contribute to biodiversity erosion. For this case study, field work was conducted in 2010 and 2011, during which time a series of face-to-face interviews was conducted to populate a list of individuals — and groups of individuals — holding a stake in biodiversity conservation on the EP. The data was thereafter used to develop an online questionnaire documenting interactions between these stakeholders. The two steps led to produce a weighted, directed network of 129 stakeholders interacting through 1180 collaboration links. The third part (Chapter 4) describes a methodology to measure the level to which stakeholder networks contribute to resilience-building in SES. The method is articulated in two steps: (i) an optimization algorithm (simulated annealing — SA —) is used to craft a semi-random archetypal network which scores high in one compromise of modularity, connectivity, synchronizability, and robustness, and (ii) an empirical stakeholder networks (such as our EP network) is compared to the archetypal network through a measure of structural distance. The shorter the distance, the closer the empirical network is to its ideal configuration. The fourth and last part of the dissertation research (Chapter 5) is an improvement on the simulated annealing used in Chapter 4. As is frequently done for this kind of optimization technique, the SA used in Chapter 4 projected the four dimensions of the multi-objective problem into one (as a weighted average). While performing well, this only resolves one of the possible trade-offs between the objectives. To better explore the trade-offs at work in this optimization problem, a true multi-objective simulated annealing (MOSA) is proposed where, instead of optimizing one solution, the algorithm optimizes a multidimensional surface of solutions scoring better than the others in a least one of the objectives. This study, which focuses on the social part of SESs, improves our understanding of the stakeholder collaboration structures which, theoretically, best contribute to resilient SESs. It shows that while some resilience-enhancing topological characteristics are in conflict (modularity vs. connectivity, and connectivity vs. robustness to a lesser extent) others can be easily reconciled (connectivity vs. synchronizability, and, less-so, modularity vs. robustness). It also provides an intuitive method to quantitatively assess empirical stakeholder networks, which opens the way to comparisons between case studies, or monitoring of stakeholder network evolution through time. Additionally, this thesis provides a case study which highlights the importance of a key institutional group in coordinating collaborations and information exchanges among other stakeholders of potentially diverging interests and values

The spiritual dynamics of the New Age Movement

The aims of this thesis are to provide a general overview of New Age spirituality/theology, and to organize this overview within a framework which highlights and explains many of the fundamental contradictions of the movement. The introductory section begins with a discussion of the problems associated with defining the New Age, and looks at some recent overviews of the movement. It goes on to highlight some of the fundamental contradictions of the New Age, and criticizes attempts by researchers to preserve the notion that it is something characterized by 'common values and a common vision.' The introduction moves on to outline the broad and heuristic framework that this thesis will employ in its overview of New Age spirituality. This framework makes an organizational division between 'patriarchal' and 'ecological' spirituality. The methodology section discusses research methods and definitions of key terms. My definition of 'patriarchal spirituality' is derived from ecofeminist theory. Given that ecofeininism is itself much associated with the New Age, my overview does in a sense reflect a 'New Age' approach to the New Age. 'Ecological' spirituality indicates more than simply concern with the interrelationships among organisms and their physical environment, although this concern is certainly expressed by those who embrace an ecological spirituality. The 'ecological' rubric is employed in a broader sense, indicating: 1) the belief that the earth and the cosmos are home to the human; 2) the belief that all things are interrelated and interdependent; 3) a high regard for 'diversity.' Part One examines the historical roots of the New Age. Part Two is concerned with New Age patriarchal spirituality. Part Three looks at New Age ecological spirituality, with particular emphasis upon Christian creation spirituality and feminist Wicca. The conclusion section highlights problems involved in attempting to make a clear division between these two New Age dynamIcs

Seeking asylum from sex persecution: Challenging refugee policy and policy-making of Canada in the late twentieth century.

Canada's 1993 refugee policy Guidelines for Women Refugees Fearing Gender-Related Persecution reinterpret the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to radically expand state-responsibilities for women's human rights. The evolution of this novel inter-state responsibility departed from established models of policy-making in some important respects. This study explores how asylum seekers challenged Canada to align domestic policies on violence against women with humanitarian responsibilities in refugee policy, shaping their own eligibility criteria and rights to state protection. These stateless persons and foreign nationals drew upon both human rights and Canadian citizenship rights in order to make claims upon the state and influence policy. Their influence has implications not only for women's rights to inter-state protection, but for non-citizen participation in policy-making. The participation of non-citizens in policy-making has been neglected in academic social policy. Here their role in policy-advocacy networks is explored through an analytic framework that draws on migration system theory and collective action theories. This illuminates the inter-state structural context, interactions between grassroots actors and government, and the interplay of national and supranational identity and rights issues. The study then identifies the structural context and key political opportunities that opened up for women seeking asylum and challenging refugee policy. Case studies are analysed to describe how emerging opportunities were used by the particular asylum seekers and their core network of supporters between 1991 and 1997, and to what effect. Insight is provided into: how refugee policy-making involves asylum seekers whose roles are expanding in complicated and dynamic relationships with receiving-states; why a new international migration flow based on age-old structural persecution emerged in the late twentieth century and who these asylum seekers really are; the ways they influenced policy; and the extent and implications of their influence, for policy and policy-making. The thesis suggests that academic social policy may need to rethink nationally bound policy and policy-change frameworks and their traditional basis in citizenship, which globalisation is calling into question. It suggests that citizenship and human rights discourses and state-responsibilities are merging through the influence of stateless persons and foreign- nationals who make expressly political use of new policy advocacy opportunities, both institutional and extra-institutional, and through transnational identity and rights issues of which feminism is a strong example. It indicates that Canada's policy guidelines are not the end of the road - refugee policy needs to move in a direction that recognises both 'gender- related' and 'sex' persecution at the heart of asylum seekers' claims

A radical relational agency: Foucault, complexity theory and environmental resistances

The aim of this thesis is to examine a radical relational agency, applied to contemporary environmental resistances, that incorporates both the thought of Michel Foucault and complexity theory. While Foucault’s thought, following from his argument that power is a relation, implies a relational agency, it does not, however, account for the agency of nonhumans and environments. Because power is a relation and not a possession, it can no longer be viewed as an attribute of individual subjects. Similarly, a relational agency is defined as an aspect of power relations. Complexity theory, on the other hand, acknowledges that humans interact with nonhumans and environments, but does not acknowledge that all relations are relations of power. In addition to Foucault’s explanation of power relations, complexity theory explicitly describes the processes of self-organization through which individual and diverse agents interact and change can emerge. Thus, a radical relational agency is defined as an aspect of the power relationships between many diverse agents. Change, according to both Foucault and complexity theory, happens nonlinearly. As a result, it often occurs unpredictably. However, change within complex systems is also limited by previous historical emergences. In this sense, both possibility and risk are inherent in the relationships between humans, nonhumans and environments. Indeed, I argue that a radical relational agency occurs because there are both possibilities and risks generated within ecological relations and relations of power. Therefore, I argue that any environmental action must account for the unpredictability inherent to the complex interactions between humans, nonhumans and environments