What Happened Here: A Photographer in Sarajevo, 1992-1996

An essay discussing Paul Lowe's photographs, made during the Siege of Sarajevo. The essay appeared in Fieldstudy 21, to accommpany the exhibition SCAR, which was the lead exhibition in the 2015 Moose on the Loose Biennale of Research: Archives in Time and Spac

Samuel Holland: From Gunner and Sapper to Surveyor-General 1755-1764

The British Army engaged, in 1755, the young Dutch officer, Samuel Holland (whose patron was already the Third Duke of Richmond), to serve in North America as an artillery and engineering subaltern. Following many months’ service directly under the field commander, Holland became deeply involved in the siege of Louisbourg (1758) as the engineering assistant to James Wolfe. The latter warmly commended Holland to Richmond for his superior efficiency and his bravery under constantly heavy enemy fire. After the siege, Holland drew an accurate plan of the fortified port, illustrating the steps of the siege-attack and defence. He became busy in 1758 and 1759 in the preparation of the British attack on Quebec, during which he met the famous British navigator, James Cook, with whom he exchanged expertise. At the siege of Quebec he continued to serve Wolfe until the latter’s death in the battle of September 1759. From then until 1762 Holland served James Murray, first as part of a team of engineers participating in the defence of Quebec against a French siege, during which he was named acting chief engineer in place of a wounded officer and eventually confined in the city with the rest of the garrison until the siege was raised by the Royal Navy. Thereafter, under Murray’s command, Holland’s main achievement was his part in the surveying and mapping of the St. Lawrence valley, leading to the production of the “Murray Map”, an immense contribution to eighteenth-century cartography. Murray vehemently held, in the face of claims by officers of the Royal Engineers, that Samuel Holland deserved the most credit for the success and high quality of the product. During the Seven Years War, Holland had been promoted Captain. Excluded from the Royal Engineers, he was therefor quite independent of the bureaucracy of that corps when in 1763 he sought-in new American colonies ceded by France-an appointment in surveying and cartography. As a guest in the London house of the Duke of Richmond he had the opportunity of meeting influential politicians, where the recognition by Wolfe and Murray of the high quality of his professional competence finally led the British government to appoint him Surveyor General in North America

Gaming security by obscurity

Shannon sought security against the attacker with unlimited computational powers: *if an information source conveys some information, then Shannon's attacker will surely extract that information*. Diffie and Hellman refined Shannon's attacker model by taking into account the fact that the real attackers are computationally limited. This idea became one of the greatest new paradigms in computer science, and led to modern cryptography. Shannon also sought security against the attacker with unlimited logical and observational powers, expressed through the maxim that "the enemy knows the system". This view is still endorsed in cryptography. The popular formulation, going back to Kerckhoffs, is that "there is no security by obscurity", meaning that the algorithms cannot be kept obscured from the attacker, and that security should only rely upon the secret keys. In fact, modern cryptography goes even further than Shannon or Kerckhoffs in tacitly assuming that *if there is an algorithm that can break the system, then the attacker will surely find that algorithm*. The attacker is not viewed as an omnipotent computer any more, but he is still construed as an omnipotent programmer. So the Diffie-Hellman step from unlimited to limited computational powers has not been extended into a step from unlimited to limited logical or programming powers. Is the assumption that all feasible algorithms will eventually be discovered and implemented really different from the assumption that everything that is computable will eventually be computed? The present paper explores some ways to refine the current models of the attacker, and of the defender, by taking into account their limited logical and programming powers. If the adaptive attacker actively queries the system to seek out its vulnerabilities, can the system gain some security by actively learning attacker's methods, and adapting to them?Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables; final version appeared in the Proceedings of New Security Paradigms Workshop 2011 (ACM 2011); typos correcte

Experiences and issues for environmental engineering sensor network deployments

Sensor network research is a large and growing area of academic effort, examining technological and deployment issues in the area of environmental monitoring. These technologies are used by environmental engineers and scientists to monitor a multiplicity of environments and services, and, specific to this paper, energy and water supplied to the built environment. Although the technology is developed by Computer Science specialists, the use and deployment is traditionally performed by environmental engineers. This paper examines deployment from the perspectives of environmental engineers and scientists and asks what computer scientists can do to improve the process. The paper uses a case study to demonstrate the agile operation of WSNs within the Cloud Computing infrastructure, and thus the demand-driven, collaboration-intense paradigm of Digital Ecosystems in Complex Environments

Experiences and issues for environmental science sensor network deployments

Sensor network research is a large and growing area of academic effort, examining technological and deployment issues in the area of environmental monitoring. These technologies are used by environmental engineers and scientists to monitor a multiplicity of environments and services, and, specific to this paper, energy and water supplied to the built environment. Although the technology is developed by Computer Science specialists, the use and deployment is traditionally performed by environmental engineers. This paper examines deployment from the perspectives of environmental engineers and scientists and asks what computer scientists can do to improve the process. The paper uses a case study to demonstrate the agile operation of WSNs within the Cloud Computing infrastructure, and thus the demand-driven, collaboration-intense paradigm of Digital Ecosystems in Complex Environments

“Within Ourselves”: The Development of British Light Infantry in North America during the Seven Years’ War

The first British regulars to appear in North America were those accompanying a small British expedition to wrest Manhattan from the Dutch in 1664. Colonel Richard Nicolls’ troops landed on Long Island 25 August 1664 at the exact site where General William Howe’s troops would disembark over a century later. After a swift Dutch capitulation, Nicolls’ redcoats and subsequent garrisons of British regulars would maintain a solid presence in New York for a virtually uninterrupted period of 119 years. It has been suggested by one American historian that this factual record has been conveniently overlooked by most of his colleagues in order that “the dismal episode of Braddock’s defeat” can figure prominently in history books as the first appearance of British redcoats on the North American scene. Thus “they could be made to appear as stupid brutes led by an eighteenth century Colonel Blimp while American militia simultaneously appeared as a keen and valiant yeomanry led by that paragon of all virtue and destined military hero of the fight for American liberty, George Washington.” His accusation is a valid one, but not very surprising, as much of early American history has become firmly embedded in myth, legend and folklore. “Braddock’s Defeat,” “The Massacre at Fort William Henry,” “The Boston Massacre” and even “George Washington’s Cutting Down the Cherry Tree” have all served a variety of purposes down through the centuries. All have become part of the “usable past” and have been extensively deployed in any discussions of one of those favourite themes of North American historians—the conflict between European and colonial values and methods. Inevitably European warfare vs. North American warfare (la petite guerre) has been drawn into the mythic vortex. Canadian historian I.K. Steele writes that “North American pride in the ways of the New World has often led to the assumption that, in warfare as in everything else, the new men of the New World were better than the history-laden men of the Old.” Braddock’s defeat more than any other engagement of the Seven Years’ War has, “with some misrepresentation,” been used as key evidence to support this assumption of superiority. Stanley Pargellis reinforces this view: Military historians hold that Braddock’s defeat taught a lesson badly needed for the time: you cannot employ parade ground tactics in the bush. To almost everyone who in one connection or another remembers Braddock, this episode stands as a conflict between Old World and New World ways, with the outcome justifying the new. However, many historians led by Pargellis, with Paul Koppermans, Ian Strachan, and Steele in close support, stress that Braddock’s defeat can no longer be perceived or used as such. While broad generalizations about the utility of close-order formations in woods or the cunning and ruthlessness of Indian tactics or the command abilities of the young Washington may all be still true, they are not true as inferences from Braddock’s defeat. The general consensus now is that Braddock’s debacle was precipitated in large part by his critical neglect on the day of battle to observe the fundamental rules of war laid down in the European manuals of the day. His leadership lapse and complacency once nearing his objective meant that his soldiers were never given a chance to demonstrate that Old World methods, properly applied, might have very well won the day. His column from the day it launched into the North American wilderness adopted well-conceived and generally well-executed security measures as per the manuals. On the day however, these careful measures were inexplicably not ordered nor implemented by Braddock and his staff and their absence was enough to ensure the ruin of their army and give British officers a reputation for ineptitude under frontier conditions. This reputation is undeserved, for British regulars took especial care to prepare themselves for the American theatre, including Braddock and subsequent commanders. After Braddock’s defeat no inferior guerilla force would ever overcome any substantial body of British regulars during the Seven Years’ War in North America

TRUSS STRUCTURE OPTIMIZATION BASED ON IMPROVED WOLF PACK ALGORITHM

Aiming at the optimization of truss structure, a wolf pack algorithm based on chaos and improved search strategy was proposed. The mathematical model of truss optimization was constructed, and the classical truss structure was optimized. The results were compared with those of other optimization algorithms. When selecting and updating the initial position of wolves, chaos idea was used to distribute the initial value evenly in the solution space; phase factor was introduced to optimize the formula of wolf detection; information interaction between wolves is increased and the number of runs is reduced. The numerical results show that the improved wolf pack algorithm has the characteristics of fewer parameters, simple programming, easy implementation, fast convergence speed, and can quickly find the optimal solution. It is suitable for the optimization design of the section size of space truss structures

The Danger to the Chemical Weapons Convention from Incapacitating Chemicals

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Performance Analysis of Three Database Server Distribution Algorithms

Although the concept of the distributed database has been around for over 20 years, it has not dominated the computer landscape especially in business-related applications. This paper will explore the effectiveness of distributed database under a variety of conditions by conducting experiments using a number of different combinations of variables listed below. Specifically, the following questions will be researched: How does the workload intensity influence the need and performance of distributed database applications? How does the number of nodes the database is stored upon affect the data access time? How does the method used to assign a given query to a specific database node influence the access time? The first variable is workload intensity. It is expected as intensity increases the need to utilize some form of distributed database increases. The second factor is number of nodes upon which the database is distributed. One would expect that as the number of nodes increases, access time would be reduced. The third variable is the algorithm used to distribute the inquiries across multiple nodes. A symmetric algorithm, one that provides an equal chance of any given inquiry landing on any specific node, would be expected to offer the most promise. However, results indicate the load balanced method outperforms both the sequential and random selection methods

Extending the Functionality of the Realm Gateway

The promise of 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) expects the coming years to witness substantial growth of connected devices. This increase in the number of connected devices further aggravates the IPv4 address exhaustion problem. Network Address Translation (NAT) is a widely known solution to cater to the issue of IPv4 address depletion but it poses an issue of reachability. Since Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) application layer protocols play a vital role in the communication of the mobile devices and IoT devices, the NAT reachability problem needs to be addressed particularly for these protocols. Realm Gateway (RGW) is a solution proposed to overcome the NAT traversal issue. It acts as a Destination NAT (DNAT) for inbound connections initiated towards the private hosts while acting as a Source NAT (SNAT) for the connections in the outbound direction. The DNAT functionality of RGW is based on a circular pool algorithm that relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) queries sent by the client to maintain the correct connection state. However, an additional reverse proxy is needed with RGW for dealing with HTTP and HTTPS connections. In this thesis, a custom Application Layer Gateway (ALG) is designed to enable end-to-end communication between the public clients and private web servers over HTTP and HTTPS. The ALG replaces the reverse proxy used in the original RGW software. Our solution uses a custom parser-lexer for the hostname detection and routing of the traffic to the correct back-end web server. Furthermore, we integrated the RGW with a policy management system called Security Policy Management (SPM) for storing and retrieving the policies of RGW. We analyzed the impact of the new extensions on the performance of RGW in terms of scalability and computational overhead. Our analysis shows that ALG's performance is directly dependent on the hardware specification of the system. ALG has an advantage over the reverse proxy as it does not require the private keys of the back-end servers for forwarding the encrypted HTTPS traffic. Therefore, using a system with powerful processing capabilities improves the performance of RGW as ALG outperforms the NGINX reverse proxy used in the original RGW solution