Paradise Lost Revisited: GM and the UAW in Historical Perspective

Purpose Analysis of historic relationship between GM and Union of Automobile Workers (UAW) from 1936 through the moment of bankruptcy of GM in 2009. How can this historic relationship be explained from the viewpoint of evolving labor and industrial relations in the US? Design/methodology/approach Historical and comparative analyses. Secondary analysis. Findings Over time the relationship has been a dynamic and flexible one. In the first decades the most important objective of the UAW was the recognition of the union by GM. From the second half of the 1940s until the 1970s the main attention of both parties shifted towards a dynamic wage policy. Finally, from the 1970s onwards the safeguarding of job security became the main objective of the UAW, whereas GM tried to maximize its room of maneuver to transform its Fordist production system into a more flexible one. Research limitations/implications The present study provides a starting point for further in-depth research towards the historic relationship between GM & the UAW. Originality/value Longitudinal approach of development of labor-management relationship between two opposite parties in differing economic and technological contexts

The Financial Impact of Social Security by Cohort Under Alternative Financing Assumptions

This paper analyses the financial impact of Social Security by age cohort under alternative assumptions concerning future financing of Social Security. It examines the Social Security Administration's intermediate IIB and various combinations of optimistic and pessimistic assumptions concerning fertility, mortality, and wage growth. Importantly, it examines the implications of alternative potential resolutions of the long-term financing deficit and scenarios concerning the planned systematic deviation from pay-as-you-go finance in the retirement and disability funds. The results suggest that the Social Security retirement program offers vastly different returns to households in different circumstances, and especially to different cohorts. Most important, if Social Security does not maintain the large retirement trust fund surplus currently projected for the next 30 years, alternative scenarios for return to pay-as-you-go finance differ dramatically in the taxes, benefits, transfers, and real rates of return that can be offered to different birth cohorts. The implications of cutting taxes, raising benefits or diverting the surplus to other purposes have dramatic impact on the overall financial status of the system, the time pattern of taxes, benefits and surpluses or deficits, and therefore, the treatment of different age cohorts. Under the intermediate assumptions, the OASDI surplus is projected to grow almost as large as a fraction of GNP as the current ratio of privately held national debt to GNP. For example, if the OASDI surplus is used to raise benefits, and they remained at higher levels thereafter during the height of the baby-boom generation's retirement, the long-run actuarial deficit will zoom from $500 billion to over$3 trillion. Correspondingly, if benefits increase, financed by the OASDI surplus over the next 30 years, the expected rate of return on lifetime contributions increases for those currently about 40 years old from 1.9% to 2.7%, about a 40% increase. Correspondingly, if the surplus is dissipated and the subsequent long-run deficit is made up with a tax increase on a pay-as-you-go basis at the time of the projected deficit, the rate of return relative to the intermediate assumptions for those persons now being born will fall by about 158, and in this case, the overall system finances would move from a long-run actuarial deficit of slightly under one-half percent of taxable payroll to actuarial balance. Thus, as Social Security is projected to deviate systematically from pay-as-you-go finance, the potential alternative scenarios with respect to accruing the surplus and/or dissipating it in various ways have potentially large intergenerational redistribution effects.

How fiscally tolerable is Thailand’s social security pension fund to early retirement decisions?

This research paper assesses the fiscal tolerability of the Thai Social Security Pension Fund to early retirement decisions, particularly among the workforce aged 50-54. Starting from 2014, the Social Security Pension Fund is due to pay regular monthly pension benefits to eligible insured persons. There has been increasing concern over the potentially high proportion of early retirees opting for one-time lump-sum old-age benefits instead of the more modest amount of monthly retirement pension. This can create severe shocks to the system. Forecasts and sensitivity analyses under alternative scenarios are conducted using an actuarial method. The estimation employs the latest 2010 National Economic and Social Development Board population forecast. In the worst case scenario, with an early retirement rate of 9 percent or higher per year, the tolerability of the system can be maintained for no longer than 25 years from now. The future generations risk facing a situation in which the old-age benefits may not be promptly received in the expected amount. This points to the important policy precaution that the currently high level of reserves in the Social Security Pension Fund does not ensure fiscal sustainability and tolerability as commonly believed. The result also implies that withdrawal from the social security pension fund by the government for other purposes is fiscally detrimental to life of the fund.Euamporn Phijaisanit, Gareth D Myle

Analysis and Implementation of Threat Agents Profiles in Semi-Automated Manner for a Network Traffic in Real-Time Information Environment

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Threat assessment is the continuous process of monitoring the threats identified in the network of the real-time informational environment of an organisation and the business of the companies. The sagacity and security assurance for the system of an organisation and company’s business seem to need that information security exercise to unambiguously and effectively handle the threat agent’s attacks. How is this unambiguous and effective way in the present-day state of information security practice working? Given the prevalence of threats in the modern information environment, it is essential to guarantee the security of national information infrastructure. However, the existing models and methodology are not addressing the attributes of threats like motivation, opportunity, and capability (C, M, O), and the critical threat intelligence (CTI) feed to the threat agents during the penetration process is ineffective, due to which security assurance arises for an organisation and the business of companies. This paper proposes a semi-automatic information security model, which can deal with situational awareness data, strategies prevailing information security activities, and protocols monitoring specific types of the network next to the real-time information environment. This paper looks over analyses and implements the threat assessment of network traffic in one particular real-time informational environment. To achieve this, we determined various unique attributes of threat agents from the Packet Capture Application Programming Interface (PCAP files/DataStream) collected from the network between the years 2012 and 2019.Peer reviewe

UTP e-Summon @nywhere

This paper covers the development of the UTP e-Summon @nywhere as a mobile application. The report consists of FIVE (5) major topics. First, Chapter 1 Introduction explains background of the study, problem statement, system objectives and scope, the relevancy of the project, and the feasibility of the project within the scope and time frame. Second, Chapter 2 Literature Review discusses the literature review from journals, books, magazines, and the Internet as the major references for the project. Third, Chapter 3 System Approach describes the approach to be implemented to develop the project including the system development methodology and requirements-gathering techniques. Fourth, Chapter 4 Result and Discussion explains the findings of the project including the database design, graphical user interfaces, and security measures ofthe system. Finally, Chapter 5 Conclusion entails the overall development of the system including the system future enhancements and the future usage ofthe system. The methodology that will be implemented for system development is phased development-based methodology and to elicit the system information requirements, several methodologies will be adopted including one-toone interview with the security guards, observations, and document analyses. The results explain on the interfaces and the output of the system. As a conclusion, UTP e-Summon @nywhere is developed as a mobile summon application in Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS as part ofthe existing computerized summon applicatio

Unsupervised Threat Hunting using Continuous Bag of Terms and Time (CBoTT)

Threat hunting is sifting through system logs to detect malicious activities that might have bypassed existing security measures. It can be performed in several ways, one of which is based on detecting anomalies. We propose an unsupervised framework, called continuous bag-of-terms-and-time (CBoTT), and publish its application programming interface (API) to help researchers and cybersecurity analysts perform anomaly-based threat hunting among SIEM logs geared toward process auditing on endpoint devices. Analyses show that our framework consistently outperforms benchmark approaches. When logs are sorted by likelihood of being an anomaly (from most likely to least), our approach identifies anomalies at higher percentiles (between 1.82-6.46) while benchmark approaches identify the same anomalies at lower percentiles (between 3.25-80.92). This framework can be used by other researchers to conduct benchmark analyses and cybersecurity analysts to find anomalies in SIEM logs

Audio steganography based on least significant bits algorithm with 4D grid multi-wing hyper-chaotic system

Although variety in hiding methods used to protect data and information transmitted via channels but still need more robustness and difficulty to improve protection level of the secret messages from hacking or attacking. Moreover, hiding several medias in one media to reduce the transmission time and band of channel is the important task and define as a gain channel. This calls to find other ways to be more complexity in detecting the secret message. Therefore, this paper proposes cryptography/steganography method to hide an audio/voice message (secret message) in two different cover medias: audio and video. This method is use least significant bits (LSB) algorithm combined with 4D grid multi-wing hyper-chaotic (GMWH) system. Shuffling of an audio using key generated by GMWH system and then hiding message using LSB algorithm will provide more difficulty of extracting the original audio by hackers or attackers. According to analyses of obtained results in the receiver using peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR)/mean square error (MSE) and sensitivity of encryption key, the proposed method has more security level and robustness. Finally, this work will provide extra security to the mixture base of crypto-steganographic methods