34,743 research outputs found
Computable Rationality, NUTS, and the Nuclear Leviathan
This paper explores how the Leviathan that projects power through nuclear arms exercises a unique nuclearized sovereignty. In the case of nuclear superpowers, this sovereignty extends to wielding the power to destroy human civilization as we know it across the globe. Nuclearized sovereignty depends on a hybrid form of power encompassing human decision-makers in a hierarchical chain of command, and all of the technical and computerized functions necessary to maintain command and control at every moment of the sovereign's existence: this sovereign power cannot sleep. This article analyzes how the form of rationality that informs this hybrid exercise of power historically developed to be computable. By definition, computable rationality must be able to function without any intelligible grasp of the context or the comprehensive significance of decision-making outcomes. Thus, maintaining nuclearized sovereignty necessarily must be able to execute momentous life and death decisions without the type of sentience we usually associate with ethical individual and collective decisions
XTribe: a web-based social computation platform
In the last few years the Web has progressively acquired the status of an
infrastructure for social computation that allows researchers to coordinate the
cognitive abilities of human agents in on-line communities so to steer the
collective user activity towards predefined goals. This general trend is also
triggering the adoption of web-games as a very interesting laboratory to run
experiments in the social sciences and whenever the contribution of human
beings is crucially required for research purposes. Nowadays, while the number
of on-line users has been steadily growing, there is still a need of
systematization in the approach to the web as a laboratory. In this paper we
present Experimental Tribe (XTribe in short), a novel general purpose web-based
platform for web-gaming and social computation. Ready to use and already
operational, XTribe aims at drastically reducing the effort required to develop
and run web experiments. XTribe has been designed to speed up the
implementation of those general aspects of web experiments that are independent
of the specific experiment content. For example, XTribe takes care of user
management by handling their registration and profiles and in case of
multi-player games, it provides the necessary user grouping functionalities.
XTribe also provides communication facilities to easily achieve both
bidirectional and asynchronous communication. From a practical point of view,
researchers are left with the only task of designing and implementing the game
interface and logic of their experiment, on which they maintain full control.
Moreover, XTribe acts as a repository of different scientific experiments, thus
realizing a sort of showcase that stimulates users' curiosity, enhances their
participation, and helps researchers in recruiting volunteers.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, 2013 Third International Conference on
Cloud and Green Computing (CGC), Sept. 30 2013-Oct. 2 2013, Karlsruhe,
German
SensorCloud: Towards the Interdisciplinary Development of a Trustworthy Platform for Globally Interconnected Sensors and Actuators
Although Cloud Computing promises to lower IT costs and increase users'
productivity in everyday life, the unattractive aspect of this new technology
is that the user no longer owns all the devices which process personal data. To
lower scepticism, the project SensorCloud investigates techniques to understand
and compensate these adoption barriers in a scenario consisting of cloud
applications that utilize sensors and actuators placed in private places. This
work provides an interdisciplinary overview of the social and technical core
research challenges for the trustworthy integration of sensor and actuator
devices with the Cloud Computing paradigm. Most importantly, these challenges
include i) ease of development, ii) security and privacy, and iii) social
dimensions of a cloud-based system which integrates into private life. When
these challenges are tackled in the development of future cloud systems, the
attractiveness of new use cases in a sensor-enabled world will considerably be
increased for users who currently do not trust the Cloud.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, published as technical report of the Department
of Computer Science of RWTH Aachen Universit
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