Technical guidance on monitoring for the Marine Stategy Framework Directive

The Marine Directors of the European Union (EU), Acceding Countries, Candidate Countries and EFTA Countries have jointly developed a common strategy for supporting the implementation of the Directive 2008/56/EC, “the Marine Strategy Framework Directive” (MSFD). The main aim of this strategy is to allow a coherent and harmonious implementation of the Directive. Focus is on methodological questions related to a common understanding of the technical and scientific implications of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. In particular, one of the objectives of the strategy is the development of non-legally binding and practical documents, such as this technical guidance on monitoring for the MSFD. These documents are targeted to those experts who are directly or indirectly implementing the MSFD in the marine regions. The document has been prepared by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC) with the contribution of experts from Member States, Regional Seas Conventions and ICES and following consultation of the Working Group on Good Environmental Status.JRC.H.1-Water Resource

Group Key Agreement for Ad Hoc Networks

Over the last 30 years the study of group key agreement has stimulated much work. And as a result of the increased popularity of ad hoc networks, some approaches for the group key establishment in such networks are proposed. However, they are either only for static group or the memory, computation and communication costs are unacceptable for ad-hoc networks. In this thesis some protocol suites from the literature (2^d-cube, 2^d-octopus, Asokan-Ginzboorg, CLIQUES, STR and TGDH) shall be discussed. We have optimized STR and TGDH by reducing the memory, communication and computation costs. The optimized version are denoted by µSTR and µTGDH respectively. Based on the protocol suites µSTR and µTGDH we present a Tree-based group key agreement Framework for Ad-hoc Networks (TFAN). TFAN is especially suitable for ad-hoc networks with limited bandwidth and devices with limited memory and computation capability. To simulate the protocols, we have implemented TFAN, µSTR and µTGDH with J2ME CDC. The TFAN API will be described in this thesis

Recent Trends in Communication Networks

In recent years there has been many developments in communication technology. This has greatly enhanced the computing power of small handheld resource-constrained mobile devices. Different generations of communication technology have evolved. This had led to new research for communication of large volumes of data in different transmission media and the design of different communication protocols. Another direction of research concerns the secure and error-free communication between the sender and receiver despite the risk of the presence of an eavesdropper. For the communication requirement of a huge amount of multimedia streaming data, a lot of research has been carried out in the design of proper overlay networks. The book addresses new research techniques that have evolved to handle these challenges

East African stories of love: Challenging cultural perceptions

In recent decades a call for ‘outsiders’ to cease the dominant practice of perpetuating negative stereotypes of Africa and African people has continued to grow (Achebe 1977; Adichie 2009; Asante 1988; Diop 1974; Mudimbe 1988; Mwenda 2007; Wainaina 2008). The demand is in response to the homogenising of the fifty-four African nations and their complex sociocultural relationships into a sustained colonial perception of ‘Otherness’. This creative arts PhD attempts to answer that call by challenging non-African normative expectations of Africa and Africans. It employs processes of participatory autoethnography (Conquergood 1985) that integrate autobiographical and fictional storytelling to create four ‘stories of love’ with the diverse collaboration of eight East African participants in Tanzania and Zanzibar. The research is structured to achieve its creative praxis goals through the ‘observer and observed’ experience (Robson and McCartan 2016), utilising individual and collaborative ‘workshops’ with participants whose fictional characterisations were fully informed by their personal experiences with the subject of love – and most specifically those of ‘romantic love’ (Singer 2009; Solomon 2006). The resulting creative output, complementing the exegetical approach of the thesis, is a literary work (prose treatment) that reveals complex, multidimensional characters who portray nuanced and universal experiences of love. Throughout the dissertation attention is directed towards the rights and experiences of the human subjects as creative participants. Hence, this self-consciously, outsider-generated project undertakes an exegetical examination of the creative experiences informing the participatory storytelling model, its application of important methodologies (Pitts and Miller-Day 2007; Way, Zwier, and Tracy 2015) and the subsequent character and story evolution

Climate, Society and Elemental Insurance

In this book, world-leading social scientists come together to provide original insights on the capacities and limitations of insurance in a changing world. Climate change is fundamentally changing the ways we insure, and the ways we think about insurance. This book moves beyond traditional economics and financial understandings of insurance to address the social and geopolitical dimensions of this powerful and pervasive part of contemporary life. Insurance shapes material and social realities, and is shaped by them in turn. The contributing authors of this book show how insurance constitutes and is constituted through the traditional elements of earth, water, air, fire, and the novel element of big data. The applied and theoretical insights presented through this novel elemental approach reveal that insurance is more dynamic, multifaceted, and spatially variegated than commonly imagined. This book is an authoritative source on the capacities and limitations of insurance. It is a go-to reference for researchers and students in the social sciences – particularly those with an interest in economics and finance, and how these intersect with geography, politics, and society. It is also relevant for those in the disaster, environmental, health, natural, and social sciences who are interested in the role of insurance in addressing risk, resilience, and adaptation

Climate, Society and Elemental Insurance

In this book, world-leading social scientists come together to provide original insights on the capacities and limitations of insurance in a changing world. Climate change is fundamentally changing the ways we insure, and the ways we think about insurance. This book moves beyond traditional economics and financial understandings of insurance to address the social and geopolitical dimensions of this powerful and pervasive part of contemporary life. Insurance shapes material and social realities, and is shaped by them in turn. The contributing authors of this book show how insurance constitutes and is constituted through the traditional elements of earth, water, air, fire, and the novel element of big data. The applied and theoretical insights presented through this novel elemental approach reveal that insurance is more dynamic, multifaceted, and spatially variegated than commonly imagined. This book is an authoritative source on the capacities and limitations of insurance. It is a go-to reference for researchers and students in the social sciences – particularly those with an interest in economics and finance, and how these intersect with geography, politics, and society. It is also relevant for those in the disaster, environmental, health, natural, and social sciences who are interested in the role of insurance in addressing risk, resilience, and adaptation

Proceedings of the 2021 DigitalFUTURES

This open access book is a compilation of selected papers from 2021 DigitalFUTURES—The 3rd International Conference on Computational Design and Robotic Fabrication (CDRF 2021). The work focuses on novel techniques for computational design and robotic fabrication. The contents make valuable contributions to academic researchers, designers, and engineers in the industry. As well, readers encounter new ideas about understanding material intelligence in architecture

Cloud Workload Allocation Approaches for Quality of Service Guarantee and Cybersecurity Risk Management

It has become a dominant trend in industry to adopt cloud computing --thanks to its unique advantages in flexibility, scalability, elasticity and cost efficiency -- for providing online cloud services over the Internet using large-scale data centers. In the meantime, the relentless increase in demand for affordable and high-quality cloud-based services, for individuals and businesses, has led to tremendously high power consumption and operating expense and thus has posed pressing challenges on cloud service providers in finding efficient resource allocation policies. Allowing several services or Virtual Machines (VMs) to commonly share the cloud\u27s infrastructure enables cloud providers to optimize resource usage, power consumption, and operating expense. However, servers sharing among users and VMs causes performance degradation and results in cybersecurity risks. Consequently, how to develop efficient and effective resource management policies to make the appropriate decisions to optimize the trade-offs among resource usage, service quality, and cybersecurity loss plays a vital role in the sustainable future of cloud computing. In this dissertation, we focus on cloud workload allocation problems for resource optimization subject to Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee and cybersecurity risk constraints. To facilitate our research, we first develop a cloud computing prototype that we utilize to empirically validate the performance of different proposed cloud resource management schemes under a close to practical, but also isolated and well-controlled, environment. We then focus our research on the resource management policies for real-time cloud services with QoS guarantee. Based on queuing model with reneging, we establish and formally prove a series of fundamental principles, between service timing characteristics and their resource demands, and based on which we develop several novel resource management algorithms that statically guarantee the QoS requirements for cloud users. We then study the problem of mitigating cybersecurity risk and loss in cloud data centers via cloud resource management. We employ game theory to model the VM-to-VM interdependent cybersecurity risks in cloud clusters. We then conduct a thorough analysis based on our game-theory-based model and develop several algorithms for cybersecurity risk management. Specifically, we start our cybersecurity research from a simple case with only two types of VMs and next extend it to a more general case with an arbitrary number of VM types. Our intensive numerical and experimental results show that our proposed algorithms can significantly outperform the existing methodologies for large-scale cloud data centers in terms of resource usage, cybersecurity loss, and computational effectiveness

Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook

The purpose of the Sourcebook is to act as a guide for practitioners and technical staff in addressing gender issues and integrating gender-responsive actions in the design and implementation of agricultural projects and programs. It speaks not with gender specialists on how to improve their skills but rather reaches out to technical experts to guide them in thinking through how to integrate gender dimensions into their operations. The Sourcebook aims to deliver practical advice, guidelines, principles, and descriptions and illustrations of approaches that have worked so far to achieve the goal of effective gender mainstreaming in the agricultural operations of development agencies. It captures and expands the main messages of the World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development and is considered an important tool to facilitate the operationalization and implementation of the report's key principles on gender equality and women's empowerment