Synergy between biology and systems resilience

Resilient systems have the ability to endure and successfully recover from disturbances by identifying problems and mobilizing the available resources to cope with the disturbance. Resiliency lets a system recover from disruptions, variations, and a degradation of expected working conditions. Biological systems are resilient. Immune systems are highly adaptive and scalable, with the ability to cope with multiple data sources, fuse information together, makes decisions, have multiple interacting agents, operate in a distributed manner over a multiple scales, and have a memory structure to facilitate learning. Ecosystems are resilient since they have the capacity to absorb disturbance and are able to tolerate the disturbances. Ants build colonies that are dispersed, modular, fine grained, and standardized in design, yet they manage to forage intelligently for food and also organize collective defenses by the property of resilience. Are there any rules that we can identify to explain the resilience in these systems? The answer is yes. In insect colonies, rules determine the division of labor and how individual insects act towards each other and respond to different environmental possibilities. It is possible to group these rules based on attributes. These attributes are distributability, redundancy, adaptability, flexibility, interoperability, and diversity. It is also possible to incorporate these rules into engineering systems in their design to make them resilient. It is also possible to develop a qualitative model to generate resilience heuristics for engineering system based on a given attribute. The rules seen in nature and those of an engineering system are integrated to incorporate the desired characteristics for system resilience. The qualitative model for systems resilience will be able to generate system resilience heuristics. This model is simple and it can be applied to any system by using attribute based heuristics that are domain dependent. It also provides basic foundation for building computational models for designing resilient system architectures. This model was tested on recent catastrophes like the Mumbai terror attack and hurricane Katrina. With the disturbances surrounding the current world this resilience model based on heuristics will help a system to deal with crisis and still function in the best way possible by depending mainly on internal variables within the system --Abstract, page iii

Jagged blue frontiers: The police and the policing of boundaries in South Africa

Social and territorial boundaries have been fundamental to the approaches and practices of policing bodies in South Africa for centuries, from the mounted colonial paramilitary forces of the 1800s to the 21st century professional police. Boundaries have not only been a central mechanism that the police have consistently used to control and regulate the general population, but have also been catalysts for change in terms of operational policing strategies and tactics. This has typically been the case when a threat has been ascribed to a bounded area and/or populations that reside within the confines of the boundary, or on the other side of the boundary. The nature of the such a threat is considered to be even more severe when communities within the bounded space, or on the other side of the boundary, acquire significant quantities of firearms and ammunition, as this provides such populations with the lethal technology to defy and contest the police's coercive authority and ability to conserve boundaries relating to the maintenance of order and the enforcement of laws. South Africa is a distinctly relevant case study for an examination of the relationship between boundaries and the police as for the past three and a half centuries South Africa's diverse policing history has been profoundly framed by territorial, social and political boundaries. The police and the proto-police have been at the sharp edge of the application of authority by assorted forms of government, and have often acted to safeguard the interests of economic and political elites. That is, the police and formal policing bodies have been required to subdue and suppress groups and individuals that resisted or threatened the process of state building and resource extraction. The police were also regularly deployed to protect the territorial borders of South Africa from menacing others. By means of this historical analysis of South Africa, this thesis introduces a new concept, 'police frontierism', which illuminates the nature of the relationships between the police, policing and boundaries, and can potentially be used for future case study research. It is an alternative way of conceptualising policing, one in which police work is fundamentally framed by social and territorial boundaries. Such boundaries delineate perceived safe or 'civilised' spaces from dangerous or 'uncivilised' ones. The police tend to concentrate their resources in the frontier zone immediately adjacent to the boundary in order to preserve or extend the boundary of safety and 'civilisation', and restrict, subdue or eliminate those individuals, groups or circumstances from the 'uncivilised' spaces that a government authority or elites have deemed to be a threat to order and peace. An essential dynamic of this policing approach is that the boundary and the adjoining frontier zone strongly influence police practices and behaviour in this context. In particular, territorial and social delineations amplify and distort existing police prejudices against those communities on the other side of the boundary. The police often engage in othering, where the communities of interest are viewed negatively, and are predominantly seen as agents of disorder and law breaking. This othering may lead to an intensification of aggressive police behaviour towards the targeted communities

The material culture of children's play: space, toys and the commoditization of childhood in a Greek community.

This thesis is an ethnography of children's play in Palaia Phocaea of Attica Greece, with a particular focus on its material aspects: the spaces and objects of children's playful interactions with the social world. The evidence is also used to discuss various theories as to the impact of the commoditization of toys. Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical perspectives adopted throughout the thesis and the key concepts employed such as the notion of interpretive reproduction and cultural appropriation. Chapter 2 spells out the methodological problems of research with children, in order to discuss the adopted research strategies and methods. Chapter 3 provides a historical background and a summary of the changes that transformed the economy of Phocaea, as a context to children's play and its social parameters. Chapter 4 focuses on play at school, including factors beyond the school environment that influence children's play in the school playground. The main issues discussed concern the appropriation of space for the performance of children's play related projects, debates on gender separation in the school playground and questions regarding the performance of gender and age identities in the school playground of Phocaea. Chapter 5 turns to both issues of appropriation of space and its contestation in the context of neighbourhood play. The emphasis is on the construction, transformation and reproduction of social, spatial and temporal boundaries that circumscribe children's play and their relationships to adults and other children. Chapter 6 deals with children's play at home as the main site of symbolic constructions and hence with children's imaginary domains to address issues arising from the comrnoditization of toys and their influence upon children' play. The thesis concludes with a general discussion of materiality and play and of the commoditization of children's culture

An ad hoc wireless mobile communications model for Special Operations Forces

The digitization of the battlefield enables special operators to use improved communications supported by computer networks across a range of missions. The communications paradigm is evolving toward mobile wireless ad hoc networks. This development enables an autonomous system of mobile nodes supporting peer-to-peer communications in forward-deployed military networks. Ad hoc networks have to establish a reliable, secure, instant, and usually temporary, communication infrastructure and to be able to access in a global communications infrastructure. Our model describes a global communication network supporting the special operator in mobile wireless communications. The main purpose is to provide a handheld wireless communications node which is capable of transferring voice, data, and imagery to and from parallel and vertical command structures within an environment replete with electronic countermeasures. The model will support the representation of requirements such as throughput, quality of service with low power consumption, and low probability of detection/interception. Special Forces are moving toward using commercial-off-the- shelf products and services based on availability and cost effectiveness. Using GloMoSim tool, we run simulations for a direct action scenario and compared the efficiency of on-demand and table-driven routing protocols under different bandwidths and communications loadshttp://www.archive.org/details/adhocwirelessmob00ogutFirst Lieutenant, Turkish ArmyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Accountable to No One : Confronting Police Power in Black Milwaukee

This dissertation uncovers the roots of discriminatory police power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and traces Black-led efforts to make the city’s police bureaucracy more accountable to all citizens. It analyzes the politics of police reform in the century spanning the passage of two state laws that reconfigured Milwaukee’s law enforcement arrangements. The first (1885) removed City Hall’s managerial control over the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD). Corporate elites and social reformers fearful of rising working-class power and moral degeneration in the immigrant-industrial city lobbied for the statute’s enactment. The second (1984) reversed course, re-empowering non-police officials after decades of Black-led campaigns for diverse input, representation, and oversight within Milwaukee’s white-controlled police bureaucracy. While the 1885 law created a civil service commission to regulate public safety hiring free of political machine influence, it also gave exclusive accountability to property-holders and shielded department heads from external supervision—provisions later targeted by activists. A revision (1911) clarified the power of the city’s public safety chiefs, granting them indefinite tenure, policymaking authority, and institutional autonomy. In turn, the MPD fostered an outwardly exceptional status at the height of policing’s “reform era” (1920s-1950s). This apparent exceptionalism, marked by a value-neutral self-image, was established around administrative innovations and crime control efficiencies heralded by national policing experts. It was a dynamic that broadly served white middle-class and corporate interests, as the MPD’s perceived legitimacy was contingent on biased discretionary practices and surveillance of labor militants, political-left radicals, the poor, and, increasingly after World War II, Black migrants seeking jobs and freedom. The department’s exalted status was tied to economic growth and acculturation programs that criminalized blackness and excused government actions that worsened segregation and inequality. Aggressive policing in Black Milwaukee compounded related injustices in public and private sectors, reinforcing racist narratives and uneven policy outcomes. With their number rising, African Americans confronted mounting instances of unchecked state violence using tactics like street-level resistance, civic negotiation, direct action protest, litigation, and federal intervention. Black and allied groups challenged a police power whose racist double-standards remained a threat irrespective of whether police chiefs employed liberal or reactionary law-and-order approaches. “‘Accountable to No One’” argues that the MPD sustained its authority by relying on an impervious blend of legal protections, social customs, and repressive policies that narrowed the scope of reform proposals intended to limit coercive police power. Racist discretionary practices in criminalized Black spaces exacerbated deteriorating economic conditions, unduly harming African Americans and justifying fresh cycles of police abuse. The MPD’s state-sanctioned legitimacy—backed by the city’s white ethnic majority and a compliant criminal-legal system—maintained Black Milwaukee’s subordination based on common ideas about policing as a perfectible institution vital to democratic societies. This view blinded even the most progressive accountability advocates. Still, the movement garnered procedural reforms, despite struggling to improve the outlook of overpoliced and underprotected Black citizens, who faced declining public investments in housing, jobs, education, and healthcare. Meanwhile, police spending, institutional diversity, and police union protections grew, setting up new barriers to accountability. An overall disregard among liberal advocates for the economic dimensions of Milwaukee’s policing crisis meant that a recalibrated MPD continued to uphold a racial-capitalist system that marginalized Black working-class power

Terrorism, Islamization, and Human Rights: How Post 9/11 Pakistani English Literature Speaks to the World

The start of the twenty-first century has witnessed a simultaneous rise of three areas of scholarly interest: 9/11 literature, human rights discourse, and War on Terror studies. The resulting intersections between literature and human rights, foregrounded by an overarching narrative of terror, have led to a new area of interdisciplinary enquiry broadly classed under human rights literature, at the point of the convergence of which lies the idea of human empathy. Concurrently with the development of human rights literature as a distinct field of study, two new strains of Pakistani literature have emerged on the Anglophone literary scene. Firstly, there are biographical works by women, co-authored with Western journalists, that have become controversial because there are contesting claims about human rights that emerge from their authorship, circulation and reception. Secondly, there are works of fiction, with the potential to be read as rights narratives, that problematize the current universal view of human rights based in the Western tradition of liberalism. The role of these writings is both valuable and disputable, as is reflected in its widely divergent reception by local and global audiences, and in its ambivalent position vis-a-vis universal human rights debates. Therefore, an examination of how Pakistani English literature speaks to the global reader is not only timely, but gainful in its insights. My dissertation has a two-pronged focus. I examine memoirs by Malala Yousafzai and Mukhtaran Mai to highlight how conflicting reader reactions in Pakistan and in the Western world shape such memoirs’ conversation with human rights in the current climate of geopolitical tension. I also analyze recent fiction by Mohsin Hamid, Muhammed Hanif, Kamila Shamsie, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Nadeem Aslam and Jamil Ahmad who face a double challenge: writing about human rights violations in Pakistan without being accused of subscribing to Western agendas that promote the same instances of violence to justify military intervention in the region, and shifting the focus of 9/11 trauma writing to include the equally calamitous human rights issues that have resulted in its global aftermath. I propose that close readings of contemporary Pakistani literature can aid in promoting the pluralities of vision that support the “new universalism” movement in human rights as a viable option for global solidarity

The Cold Culture Wars: The Fight for Democratic Education in Post-War New York

This dissertation explores how the American public school system has become the primary institution for citizens to project, contest, or affirm their values. Primarily, this revolves around competing ideas of democratic education. After World War II, politicians utilized the schools to propagate American democracy, while citizens viewed education as a means to reconstruct the post-war democratic order. Although most representatives acknowledged the schools needed to guard democracy and stem totalitarian aggression, few agreed on how education should accomplish such a feat. Consequently, democratic education deviated from its theoretical moorings and found a newly nationalistic expression in a Cold War era of scrutiny and hyper-politicization This development magnified the societal importance of the American school, as debates no longer hinged around purely education but rather over competing notions of American democracy. As educational policies took on new political dimensions, this simultaneously served to both cloud and enlarge the mission of American schools. Tasked with rehabilitating American democracy at home and fighting totalitarianism abroad, American education became freighted with a host of newfound responsibilities and obligations, often outside the schools\u27 reach. Accordingly these expanded obligations opened education up to newfound educational constituencies rife with critiques, as they evaluated the ability of American schools to live up to their democratic promise.;Indeed, no longer were educational disputes the sole domain of rival educational camps. Rather educational disputes once contained within schoolroom walls increasingly became hashed out in New York\u27s schools, churches, labor unions, civic centers, and neighborhoods. These educational disputes, heightened in fury, and feverish in pitch, ushered in a new era of educational controversy that became part of America\u27s Cold Culture Wars.

Configuration Management of Distributed Systems over Unreliable and Hostile Networks

Economic incentives of large criminal profits and the threat of legal consequences have pushed criminals to continuously improve their malware, especially command and control channels. This thesis applied concepts from successful malware command and control to explore the survivability and resilience of benign configuration management systems. This work expands on existing stage models of malware life cycle to contribute a new model for identifying malware concepts applicable to benign configuration management. The Hidden Master architecture is a contribution to master-agent network communication. In the Hidden Master architecture, communication between master and agent is asynchronous and can operate trough intermediate nodes. This protects the master secret key, which gives full control of all computers participating in configuration management. Multiple improvements to idempotent configuration were proposed, including the definition of the minimal base resource dependency model, simplified resource revalidation and the use of imperative general purpose language for defining idempotent configuration. Following the constructive research approach, the improvements to configuration management were designed into two prototypes. This allowed validation in laboratory testing, in two case studies and in expert interviews. In laboratory testing, the Hidden Master prototype was more resilient than leading configuration management tools in high load and low memory conditions, and against packet loss and corruption. Only the research prototype was adaptable to a network without stable topology due to the asynchronous nature of the Hidden Master architecture. The main case study used the research prototype in a complex environment to deploy a multi-room, authenticated audiovisual system for a client of an organization deploying the configuration. The case studies indicated that imperative general purpose language can be used for idempotent configuration in real life, for defining new configurations in unexpected situations using the base resources, and abstracting those using standard language features; and that such a system seems easy to learn. Potential business benefits were identified and evaluated using individual semistructured expert interviews. Respondents agreed that the models and the Hidden Master architecture could reduce costs and risks, improve developer productivity and allow faster time-to-market. Protection of master secret keys and the reduced need for incident response were seen as key drivers for improved security. Low-cost geographic scaling and leveraging file serving capabilities of commodity servers were seen to improve scaling and resiliency. Respondents identified jurisdictional legal limitations to encryption and requirements for cloud operator auditing as factors potentially limiting the full use of some concepts