Some Implications of Cognitive Psychology for Risk Regulation

Beginning with a set of books and articles published in the 1950s, cognitive psychologists have developed a new descriptive theory of how people make decisions under conditions of risk and uncertainty. A dominant theme in the theory is that most people do not evaluate risky circumstances in the manner assumed by conventional decision theory-they do not, that is, seek to maximize the expected value of some function when selecting among actions with uncertain outcomes. The purpose of this article is to consider some implications of the cognitive theory for regulatory policies designed to control risks to life, health, and the environment. Section I describes the theory and outlines the key differences between it and conventional decision theory. Sections II and III then address, in turn, two central questions about the uses of the theory. First, if people behave in the manner described by the cognitive psychologists, how will this shape the demands that citizens make, through the political system, for risk regulation, and how (if at all) might these demands differ from those that would be expected if citizens behaved, instead, in the manner assumed by conventional decision theorists? Second, if citizens make demands as predicted by the cognitive theory, how (if at all) might their behavior affect the regulatory responses that political actors supply

CULTURAL DETERMINANTS OF ECONOMIC GROWTH: THE CASE OF EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

The economic growth is based on a complex set of determinants, inside which the “pure” economic variables plays an important but not unique role. The “soft” factors like information and social institutions, rules and behaviours, as well as the elements of the dominant cultural paradigm could not be easily included in the “and others” category. Thus, the aim of this paper is to provide a possible framework for the analysis of this type of determinants, able to deal especially with the interactions between culture and growths. Part I deals with the theoretical foundation by argue that “in long run” the social dynamic is not influenced only by resources and technology but also by the way in which the social actors interact in the primary distribution of the resources and in their social reallocation taking into account the cultural restrictions and requirements. Part II is an attempt to examine some empirical evidences in the favour of some results derived from this foundation. The main conclusion of the paper could be resumed by the thesis that the process of the sustainable growth could not be comparer with a linear voyage in a modern train “from here to eternity”. Rather is a trip into unknown with a colour and noisy caravan.Sustainable growth, “soft determinants”, cultural paradigm

Universal mental health screening with a focus on suicidal behaviour using smartphones in a Mexican rural community: Protocol for the SMART-SCREEN population-based survey

Introduction Mental disorders represent the second cause of years lived with disability worldwide. Suicide mortality has been targeted as a key public health concern by the WHO. Smartphone technology provides a huge potential to develop massive and fast surveys. Given the vast cultural diversity of Mexico and its abrupt orography, smartphone-based resources are invaluable in order to adequately manage resources, services and preventive measures in the population. The objective of this study is to conduct a universal suicide risk screening in a rural area of Mexico, measuring also other mental health outcomes such as depression, anxiety and alcohol and substance use disorders. Methods and analysis A population-based cross-sectional study with a temporary sampling space of 9 months will be performed between September 2019 and June 2020. We expect to recruit a large percentage of the target population (at least 70%) in a short-term survey of Milpa Alta Delegation, which accounts for 137 927 inhabitants in a territorial extension of 288 km 2. They will be recruited via an institutional call and a massive public campaign to fill in an online questionnaire through mobile-assisted or computer-assisted web app. This questionnaire will include data on general health, validated questionnaires including Well-being Index 5, Patient Health Questionnaire-9, Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale 2, Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, selected questions of the Drug Abuse Screening Test and Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scales and Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-5) questions about self-harm. We will take into account information regarding time to mobile app response and geo-spatial location, and aggregated data on social, demographical and environmental variables. Traditional regression modelling, multilevel mixed methods and data-driven machine learning approaches will be used to test hypotheses regarding suicide risk factors at the individual and the population level. Ethics and dissemination Ethical approval (002/2019) was granted by the Ethics Review Board of the Hospital Psiquiátrico Yucatán, Yucatán (Mexico). This protocol has been registered in ClinicalTrials.gov. The starting date of the study is 3 September 2019. Results will serve for the planning and healthcare of groups with greater mental health needs and will be disseminated via publications in peer-reviewed journal and presented at relevant mental health conferences. Trial registration number NCT04067063

On Achieving Diversity in the Presence of Outliers in Participatory Camera Sensor Networks

This paper addresses the problem of collection and delivery of a representative subset of pictures, in participatory camera networks, to maximize coverage when a significant portion of the pictures may be redundant or irrelevant. Consider, for example, a rescue mission where volunteers and survivors of a large-scale disaster scout a wide area to capture pictures of damage in distressed neighborhoods, using handheld cameras, and report them to a rescue station. In this participatory camera network, a significant amount of pictures may be redundant (i.e., similar pictures may be reported by many) or irrelevant (i.e., may not document an event of interest). Given this pool of pictures, we aim to build a protocol to store and deliver a smaller subset of pictures, among all those taken, that minimizes redundancy and eliminates irrelevant objects and outliers. While previous work addressed removal of redundancy alone, doing so in the presence of outliers is tricky, because outliers, by their very nature, are different from other objects, causing redundancy minimizing algorithms to favor their inclusion, which is at odds with the goal of finding a representative subset. To eliminate both outliers and redundancy at the same time, two seemingly opposite objectives must be met together. The contribution of this paper lies in a new prioritization technique (and its in-network implementation) that minimizes redundancy among delivered pictures, while also reducing outliers.unpublishedis peer reviewe

Legislative Threats

The Article presents a theory of legislative threats that pierces the fundamental concept of the legal system as a regulatory institution and more generally as a mechanism of social governance. It examines ten case studies that demonstrate the use of legislative threats in diverse areas of law and social policy. Conceptually, legislative threats encompass a variety of threats that legislators exert on firms and financial institutions, organizations and institutional shareholders, professions and industrial sectors, universities and public institutions, federal agencies, and possibly even U.S. states, according to which legislators will exercise their legislative mandate and enact adverse legislation in order to regulate the conduct or condition in question, unless the recipients of the threat alter their behavior so as to bring it in line with the legislators’ demands (Implicit in the threat is the inverse promise that the legislators will forgo the threatened legislation if, and only if the recipients of the threat comply with the demands). The Article also offers an analytic taxonomy of threats that includes explicit, implicit, and anticipatory legislative threats. Using non-cooperative game-theory, the Article models the strategic interaction between legislators and threat-recipients and generates predictions concerning the inducement effect of legislative threats on behavior. Specifically, the analysis considers conditions that may render threats credible, including (i) legislators’ pre-game commitment; (ii) legislators’ reputation; and (iii) legislators’ emotional motivations. The analysis also examines (i) the effects of the probabilistic nature of legislative threats; (ii) the effects of imperfect and asymmetric information on the threat’s inducement effects; (iii) the effects of legislative threats on the properties of regulatory bargaining in the shadow of the threat (e.g., the magnitude of transaction costs, information revelation, and degree of contractual incompleteness); and (iv) the effects of strategic interaction within homogenous and heterogeneous as well as organized and unorganized groups on threat-induced compliance. The Article considers the effects of legislative threats on (i) social control efficacy and (ii) democratic and constitutional legitimacy. To that end, the analysis highlights functional and institutional considerations pertaining, respectively, to the comparative capacity of legislative threats to effectively control behavior in an increasingly-complex and information-intensive social reality; and to various political, constitutional, and democratic implications arising from the use of legislative threats. Functional considerations include: (i) the asymmetric information of social planners and its effects on social control; (ii) the superiority of threat-induced self-regulation of conduct compared with “top down” regulation of conduct; (iii) the capacity of threat-induced self-regulation to accommodate rapidly-changing demands of social control; and (iv) the effects of threat-induced self-regulation on reducing the costs of law enforcement. In this respect, the analysis advances the following claim: legislative threats can be viewed as a spontaneous response to the institutionally-handicapped position of lawmakers and to the limits of the law in effectively controlling social activities; to that end, legislative threats are designed to reduce information and transaction costs of policy-making and regulatory bargaining. Institutional considerations encompass ways in which the use of legislative threats enables legislators and regulators to evade procedural safeguards, institutional constraints, and substantive controls designed to limit the power to make law and effect policy changes. These considerations are based upon the following observations: (i) using legislative threats, legislators opt-out of the “rules of the game,” disenfranchise fellow legislators, and are therefore able to effect policy changes notwithstanding a possible lack of majoritarian support; (ii) legislative threats disenfranchise the executive branch by preventing a possible presidential veto and by sidestepping the government’s role in law enforcement; (iii) legislative threats disenfranchise the states by redrawing the federal-state allocation of regulatory powers; (iv) legislative threats bypass constitutional safeguards by evading judicial review of statutes; and (v) legislative threats disenfranchise the judiciary by circumventing precedent-setting interpretation of statutes. The Article argues that notwithstanding the superior functional capacity of legislative threats to control behavior in an increasingly-complex and information-intensive society, the institutionally-unregulated and politically-unaccountable use of implicit and explicit threats poses formidable normative challenges for the most treasured attributes of American constitutional democracy. On balance, it seems that even though the benefits of legislative threats may exceed their short-term cost (thus becoming efficient in the short-term), in the long-term the reverse is true, thus suggesting that the best domain of legislative threats consists, in fact, of an empty set. For, any increase in individual well-being and aggregate social welfare—due to the improved efficacy of social control—is inevitably outweighed by a higher commensurate decrease in well-being and social welfare, reflecting in turn the toll of violating constitutional and democratic principles; the negative impact on societal stability and the disincentive on private investment; and the consequential decline in economic growth. In turn, the discussion develops a social control scheme that is rooted in the province of legislation and is designed to ensure the socially-optimal trade-off between regulatory efficacy and the toll on democratic accountability, namely: an outcome-oriented or risk-focused, deferred-implementation, contingent sunset legislation. Lastly, the Article argues that the exponential increase in the complexity of activities and the rapid changes in behavior across all social domains are two major sources of growth-driven social instability. Paradoxically, absent effective social control, the processes that drive well-developed market economies towards economic growth and social progress, may ultimately propel their economic decline, increase social instability, and lead to their gradual societal deterioration. Thus, the more advanced a society becomes the more demanding is the lawmakers’ role. Viewed from this perspective, the emergence of legislative threats—though institutionally illegitimate and socially unwarranted—demonstrates the limits of law and the severe limitations of lawmakers. Moreover, they underscore the growing incapacity of the legal system to deliver its pre-eminent promise: to maintain ordered liberty and to promote sound public policies. Viewed from an ever broader perspective, the widespread use of legislative threats demonstrates an increasing tendency towards (what I label) a second-order social control system, where legislators establish second-order rules designed to create the incentives necessary to induce entities and groups to adopt socially-desired rules of conduct. Inevitably, the trend toward second-order social control diminishes the traditionally-extensive role of the regulatory state, but increases the power of groups that, in shaping their regulatory environment, practically turn into islands of self-regulation

Towards Automated Android App Collusion Detection

Android OS supports multiple communication methods between apps. This opens the possibility to carry out threats in a collaborative fashion, c.f. the Soundcomber example from 2011. In this paper we provide a concise definition of collusion and report on a number of automated detection approaches, developed in co-operation with Intel Security

Multi-domain comparison of safety standards

International audienceThis paper presents an analysis of safety standards and their implementation in certification strategies from different domains such as aeronautics, automation, automotive, nuclear, railway and space. This work, performed in the context of the CG2E ("Club des Grandes Entreprises de l'Embarqué"), aims at identifying the main similarities and dissimilarities, for potential cross-domain harmonization. We strive to find the most comprehensive 'trans-sectorial' approach, within a large number of industrial domains. Exhibiting the 'true goals' of their numerous applicable standards, related to the safety of system and software, is a first important step towards harmonization, sharing common approaches, methods and tools whenever possible

Wide-Area Situation Awareness based on a Secure Interconnection between Cyber-Physical Control Systems

Posteriormente, examinamos e identificamos los requisitos especiales que limitan el diseño y la operación de una arquitectura de interoperabilidad segura para los SSC (particularmente los SCCF) del smart grid. Nos enfocamos en modelar requisitos no funcionales que dan forma a esta infraestructura, siguiendo la metodología NFR para extraer requisitos esenciales, técnicas para la satisfacción de los requisitos y métricas para nuestro modelo arquitectural. Estudiamos los servicios necesarios para la interoperabilidad segura de los SSC del SG revisando en profundidad los mecanismos de seguridad, desde los servicios básicos hasta los procedimientos avanzados capaces de hacer frente a las amenazas sofisticadas contra los sistemas de control, como son los sistemas de detección, protección y respuesta ante intrusiones. Nuestro análisis se divide en diferentes áreas: prevención, consciencia y reacción, y restauración; las cuales general un modelo de seguridad robusto para la protección de los sistemas críticos. Proporcionamos el diseño para un modelo arquitectural para la interoperabilidad segura y la interconexión de los SCCF del smart grid. Este escenario contempla la interconectividad de una federación de proveedores de energía del SG, que interactúan a través de la plataforma de interoperabilidad segura para gestionar y controlar sus infraestructuras de forma cooperativa. La plataforma tiene en cuenta las características inherentes y los nuevos servicios y tecnologías que acompañan al movimiento de la Industria 4.0. Por último, presentamos una prueba de concepto de nuestro modelo arquitectural, el cual ayuda a validar el diseño propuesto a través de experimentaciones. Creamos un conjunto de casos de validación que prueban algunas de las funcionalidades principales ofrecidas por la arquitectura diseñada para la interoperabilidad segura, proporcionando información sobre su rendimiento y capacidades.Las infraestructuras críticas (IICC) modernas son vastos sistemas altamente complejos, que precisan del uso de las tecnologías de la información para gestionar, controlar y monitorizar el funcionamiento de estas infraestructuras. Debido a sus funciones esenciales, la protección y seguridad de las infraestructuras críticas y, por tanto, de sus sistemas de control, se ha convertido en una tarea prioritaria para las diversas instituciones gubernamentales y académicas a nivel mundial. La interoperabilidad de las IICC, en especial de sus sistemas de control (SSC), se convierte en una característica clave para que estos sistemas sean capaces de coordinarse y realizar tareas de control y seguridad de forma cooperativa. El objetivo de esta tesis se centra, por tanto, en proporcionar herramientas para la interoperabilidad segura de los diferentes SSC, especialmente los sistemas de control ciber-físicos (SCCF), de forma que se potencie la intercomunicación y coordinación entre ellos para crear un entorno en el que las diversas infraestructuras puedan realizar tareas de control y seguridad cooperativas, creando una plataforma de interoperabilidad segura capaz de dar servicio a diversas IICC, en un entorno de consciencia situacional (del inglés situational awareness) de alto espectro o área (wide-area). Para ello, en primer lugar, revisamos las amenazas de carácter más sofisticado que amenazan la operación de los sistemas críticos, particularmente enfocándonos en los ciberataques camuflados (del inglés stealth) que amenazan los sistemas de control de infraestructuras críticas como el smart grid. Enfocamos nuestra investigación al análisis y comprensión de este nuevo tipo de ataques que aparece contra los sistemas críticos, y a las posibles contramedidas y herramientas para mitigar los efectos de estos ataques