Network Analysis with Stochastic Grammars

Digital forensics requires significant manual effort to identify items of evidentiary interest from the ever-increasing volume of data in modern computing systems. One of the tasks digital forensic examiners conduct is mentally extracting and constructing insights from unstructured sequences of events. This research assists examiners with the association and individualization analysis processes that make up this task with the development of a Stochastic Context -Free Grammars (SCFG) knowledge representation for digital forensics analysis of computer network traffic. SCFG is leveraged to provide context to the low-level data collected as evidence and to build behavior profiles. Upon discovering patterns, the analyst can begin the association or individualization process to answer criminal investigative questions. Three contributions resulted from this research. First , domain characteristics suitable for SCFG representation were identified and a step -by- step approach to adapt SCFG to novel domains was developed. Second, a novel iterative graph-based method of identifying similarities in context-free grammars was developed to compare behavior patterns represented as grammars. Finally, the SCFG capabilities were demonstrated in performing association and individualization in reducing the suspect pool and reducing the volume of evidence to examine in a computer network traffic analysis use case

Emerging perception of causality in action-and-reaction sequences from 4 to 6 months of age: is it domain-specific?

Two experiments (N=136) studied how 4- to 6-month-olds perceive a simple schematic event, seen as goal-directed action and reaction from 3 years of age. In our causal reaction event, a red square moved toward a blue square, stopping prior to contact. Blue began to move away before red stopped, so that both briefly moved simultaneously at a distance. Primarily, our study sought to determine from what age infants see the causal structure of this reaction event. In addition, we looked at whether this causal percept depends on an animate style of motion and whether it correlates with tasks assessing goal perception and goal-directed action. Infants saw either causal reactions or noncausal delayed control events in which blue started some time after red stopped. These events involved squares that moved either rigidly or nonrigidly in an apparently animate manner. After habituation to one of the four events, infants were tested on reversal of the habituation event. Spatiotemporal features reversed for all events, but causal roles changed only in reversed reactions. The 6-month-olds dishabituated significantly more to reversal of causal reaction events than to noncausal delay events, whereas younger infants reacted similarly to reversal of both. Thus, perceptual causality for reaction events emerges by 6 months of age, a younger age than previously reported but, crucially, the same age at which perceptual causality for launch events has emerged in prior research. On our second question, animate/inanimate motion had no effect at any age, nor did significant correlations emerge with our additional tasks assessing goal perception or goal-directed object retrieval. Available evidence, here and elsewhere, is as compatible with a view that infants initially see A affecting B, without differentiation into physical or psychological causality, as with the standard assumption of distinct physical/psychological causal perception

Three Temporalities: Toward a Sociology of the Event

Also CSST Working Paper #58.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51215/1/448.pd

How Diverse is Entrepreneurship? Observations on the social heterogeneity of self-employment in Germany

The discussion on entrepreneurship often treats entrepreneurs as agents of ideas of economic change and growth. Entrepreneurs are considered to serve as potential multipliers delivering individual and social wealth and prosperity. In that context entrepreneurship has been treated as a rather homogenous category, internal differences were not in the focus of academic talk. In public policy discourse entrepreneurship and the labour market category of self-employment are often used interchangeably. Images and interpretation of self-employment are mostly based on comparison of self-employment with other categories of wage or salary dependent labour market groups. This way self-employed people prove to become an averaged one-type figure. The proposed paper wants to highlight the other side of economic and social reality: the heterogeneity of self-employment. Referring to empirical data for the case of Germany the argumentation intends to illuminate different levels of social and economic integration of self-employed people. Working parameters and firm sizes, economic sectors of activity, income patterns, working hours and biographies have diversified and became increasingly heterogeneous so that further discussion is ultimately provoked: Which entrepreneurship are we talking about when talking entrepreneurship? Where are links between different fractions of the category of self-employment compared to each other and to other socio-economic groups? The contribution must be regarded as a theoretical and empirical task to connect entrepreneurship with debate on innovation, culture and finance.self-employment; heterogeneity; entrepreneurship

Engineering Systems Integration

Dreamers may envision our future, but it is the pragmatists who build it. Solve the right problem in the right way, mankind moves forward. Solve the right problem in the wrong way or the wrong problem in the right way, however clever or ingenious the solution, neither credits mankind. Instead, this misfire demonstrates a failure to appreciate a crucial step in pragmatic problem solving: systems integration. The first book to address the underlying premises of systems integration and how to exposit them in a practical and productive manner, Engineering Systems Integration: Theory, Metrics, and Methods looks at the fundamental nature of integration, exposes the subtle premises to achieve integration, and posits a substantial theoretical framework that is both simple and clear. Offering systems managers and systems engineers the framework from which to consider their decisions in light of systems integration metrics, the book isolates two basic questions, 1) Is there a way to express the interplay of human actions and the result of system interactions of a product with its environment?, and 2) Are there methods that combine to improve the integration of systems? The author applies the four axioms of General Systems Theory (holism, decomposition, isomorphism, and models) and explores the domains of history and interpretation to devise a theory of systems integration, develop practical guidance applying the three frameworks, and formulate the mathematical constructs needed for systems integration. The practicalities of integrating parts when we build or analyze systems mandate an analysis and evaluation of existing integrative frameworks of causality and knowledge. Integration is not just a word that describes a best practice, an art, or a single discipline. The act of integrating is an approach, operative in all disciplines, in all we see, in all we do