Peer-to-Peer Systems: The Present and the Future

Nowadays Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems became an important part of Internet, millions of users have been attracted to use their structures and services. The popularity of Peer-to-Peer systems speed up academic research joining researchers from systems, networking and theory. The most popular P2P applications support file-sharing and content distribution, new applications are emerging in different fields, Internet telephony is an example. This paper discusses the issues of P2P systems such as characteristics, structures, protocols, drawbacks, open problems and futures fields of development.Facultad de Informátic

Master of Arts

thesisMothers, through their delivery of breast milk to developing infants, are consistently portrayed as nourishing figures who endow the sacramental gifts of love and health upon their children. Using scientific studies, I catalogue the emotional and physiological benefits of breast milk, but I subsequently move toward the complications of "mother-as-nurturer" in light of the litany of foreign contaminants now found in human milk. I expose and explicate the potential harm of contaminated breast milk upon suckling infants, and suggest that the depiction of the nurturing and nourishing mother figure must be reconsidered as evidence of synthetic chemicals in milk emerges. Modern mothers now occupy separate realms: they are caring and contaminating. I frame my work through a personal understanding of my mother as a contaminated woman, and consider the ways in which my lineage-a lineage embodied in breast milk-is tainted by chemical pollutants and their migration into my own breasts

Still unfolding : paths to womanhood in the new American bildungsroman

This dissertation examines generic trends and ideological innovations in contemporary women’s coming-of-age narratives in the United States. Through a comparative genre study, I illuminate and interpret a number of key revisions within the genre since the late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century classics, including a radical shift in the endings of many recent texts. I show that today’s female bildungsroman subject is ethnically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse, and that she is getting older. She has an overall broader sense of educational and professional opportunity, and more relaxed attitudes toward sexuality and marriage than protagonists in the past. These shifts have implications for today’s narrative endpoints, and as I demonstrate throughout this dissertation, many recent female bildungsromane have conclusions that are conspicuously open-ended and future-oriented, rather than ending in marriage, death, or disillusionment. Contra Franco Moretti’s 1987 claim that “A Bildung is truly such only if, at a certain point, it can be seen as concluded: only if youth passes into maturity, and comes there to a stop” (26), authors today often eschew traditional endpoints for their female protagonists, suggesting and often celebrating the opportunity for protagonists’ further development and personal exploration. This kind of flexible, “in process” narrative resolution reflects, I argue, a contemporary view of development as a continual experience, rather than a discrete stage that is confined to youth. Implicit in the view of development as an ongoing process is a sense of hopefulness. Though that hope may be tentative, it marks many of today’s texts, even those that feature traumatic conditions and hardship. In this dissertation, I show that the shift to flexible, open endings is borne out across a diverse group of texts from the past decade (2006-2016): Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone (2006), Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (2011), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Susan Choi’s My Education (2013), and Patricia Park’s Re Jane (2015). In each of my three chapters, I explore generic revisions by focusing on a classic bildungsroman trope— education, migration and mobility, and social class. Contemporary modifications to these tropes correspond to revisions in the ways that today’s female protagonists view themselves in the world. While these texts remain identifiable as bildungsromane and are connected to the generic tradition in key ways, this body of texts also reconceptualizes the sites, timelines, and goals for female development and identity formation todayEnglis

A Network of One’s Own: Struggles to Domesticate the Internet

This thesis is a design research practice-led inquiry into the domesticated Internet. It first seeks to complicate simplistic corporate and academic visions by naming some of the struggles it encounters – not least to assert a private home and network of one's own. It is argued that a century of domestic technologies has emphasised invisibility, ubiquity, and automation in ways that obscure a network of exploited people and finite resources. Furthermore, these technological ambitions are met through machine surveillance, in ways newly enabled by the domesticated Internet, that threaten the privacy of the home. In response, this thesis seeks some practical ways to design alternatives that assert a network of one's own and makes the work it implicates visible. The methodological approach is broadly Research Through Design supplemented by a practice described as designerly hacking through which hidden technical potential is revealed and given meaning. Two empirical studies are described that together make an account of the technical possibility and social reality of the networked home: an autobiographical technical exploration of the author's home and network with the making of hacks and Research Products privately and in public; and a cultural probe engagement with six rented households surfacing contemporary accounts of the domesticated Internet and in particular the challenges and opportunities of wireless networking. Together this yields a series of technical and social insights for design and two forms are offered to communicate these: a framework for understanding change in the networked home (The Stuff of Home) and a set of 30 design patterns for a network of one's own; each invites different analyses. The conclusion then draws together the multiple threads developed through this thesis and offers some reflection on the complexity of doing contemporary technical design work

Consumption of Organic Fruits and Vegetables in Chennai, India

India’s booming population and the high amount of pesticide produced and used in agriculture to meet the demands of the growing population, has led to the contamination of the air, water, and soil. Organic food products help to preserve land and water resources and have led to a steady increase in the organic food consumption in India, especially in the urban centres of the country. Although there has been a steady increase in the sale of organic food products in India, the growth is slow. The research on the consumption of organic food in the Indian domestic market is inadequate, and more information with regard to the preferences and motivation to purchase organic food is required. Food consumption is a daily activity in everybody’s life causing environmental impact and buying organic food products is one of the effective ways to improve the sustainability of food consumption. Organic fruits and vegetables have the highest demand in the organic food category and at present dominate the Indian domestic market. Previous research suggests that attributes, consequences and values influence people’s purchase decisions. Attributes are the inherent characteristic of a product, consequences are the benefits obtained from consuming the product, and values are principles and standards that guide behaviour. The motivation of Indian consumers to consume organic fruits and vegetables can be explored with the help of attributes, consequences, and values. Consumers organize product information in their memory at various levels of abstraction ranging from product attributes to personal values. The method that aids in understanding the cognitive structure of consumers is the Means-End Chain (MEC) approach. The means are the attributes, the ends are the values, and in between them are consequences. The MEC approach aids in understanding why consumers opt for certain products as it links the product attributes to their consequences and the consequences are in turn linked to values. The interview technique that assists in obtaining the information pertaining to attributes, consequences, and values is Laddering. Laddering techniques use a series of direct and indirect probes, which enable a consumer to think critically and bring out in-depth information that shows the associations between attributes, consequences, and values. An analysis of these laddering probes revealed the motivational aspect behind a purchase or the underlying reasons for a purchase. Organic was found to be a central attribute as organic enabled people to distinguish between organic and inorganic fruits and vegetables. Other attributes like chemical free, farming method, taste, fresh, nutrition, and quality were also found to be important. Health was found to be the main motivation to purchase organic fruits and vegetables

What is the contribution of personal information management systems (PIMS) to the Working Model and personal work system of knowledge workers?

The thesis reports research into a phenomenon which it calls the personal working model of an individual knowledge worker. The principal conjecture addressed in this thesis is that each of us has a personal working model which is supported by a personal work system enabled by a personal information management system. For some people, these are well defined; for most they are not even explicit. By means of structured self-reflection aided by conceptual knowledge modelling within the context of a process of action learning they can be improved. That personal working model is predicted by Ashby's law of requisite variety and by the good regulator theorem of Conant and Ashby. The latter theorem states that the only good regulator of a system is a model of that system. The thesis and the work it reports result from a systemic approach to identifying the personal information management system and personal work system which together contribute to the personal working model. Starting with abductive conjecture, the author has sought to understand what models are and to explore ways in which those models can themselves be expressed. The thesis shows how a new approach to the conceptual modelling of aspects of the personal knowledge of knowledge worker was designed, built and then used. Similarly, the actual data used by a knowledge worker had to be stored, and for this purpose a personal information management system was also designed. Both these artefacts are evaluated in accordance with principles drawn from the literature of design science research. The research methodology adopted in the first phase of the research now ending also included a relatively novel approach in which the PhD student attempted to observe himself over the last five years of his PhD research – this approach is sometimes called autoethnography. This autoethnographic element is one of a number of methods used within an overall framework grounded by the philosophical approach called critical realism. The work reported in the thesis is initial exploratory research which, it is planned, will continue in empirical action research involving mentored action learning undertaken by professional knowledge workers

Gardens in Cyprus: reflections of being and doing

Cyprus is a place that, particularly over recent months, is beginning to dismantle the scaffolding of political deadlock that has blighted the country for the past thirty years. The Turkish invasion of 1974 happened only thirteen years after Cyprus had gained independence from the British, and so the process of creating itself was abruptly and violently truncated. Life, of course, goes on, and this thesis broadly examines some aspects of that life through one very quotidian aspect of that continuity - gardening.What follows brings the practice of gardening, and gardens as cultural artefacts into the forefront of anthropological consideration. It also uses gardens as a starting point to build on the rich anthropology of Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean. Avoiding the niche that Cyprus inhabits as a political 'problem', the analysis acknowledges its liminality by dint of its physical location between three continents, and at least two 'zones' of anthropological theorising: namely the Mediterranean and the Arab World. A temptation to regionalise is resisted. Account is taken however, of local essentialising, which was a distinctive feature of the fieldwork. With EU expansion, the question of where Europe begins and ends is as political a preoccupation as it is a preoccupation of anthropological theorising. In one form or another, the discourse around the relationship with Europe has been present in the Greek world for a long time, and persists in Cyprus, and this is a thematic thread that runs through the thesis. Over the past twenty to thirty years, the south of the island has vigorously promoted itself as a holiday destination, and the main income for Cypriots is from tourism. The debates around the impact of tourism are examined both through the contests over the 'environment' and over what is the 'authentic' Cyprus. It is argued that the authentic Cyprus is happening in spite of the heavy use of pathos (bathos) in some political rhetoric that exploits the trauma of the invasion and subsequent events, and the thesis engages with this rhetoric. This authentic, ordinary Cyprus is found, for example, in the intimate gardens that refugees have created; in the abandoned vineyards that surround so many of the villages because of mass migration to the cities; and in gardens created as expressions of self, of status, or of ideology