Adding Salt to Pepper: A Structured Security Assessment over a Humanoid Robot

The rise of connectivity, digitalization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our society and shaping its future development. During this technological and societal revolution, security has been persistently neglected, yet a hacked robot can act as an insider threat in organizations, industries, public spaces, and private homes. In this paper, we perform a structured security assessment of Pepper, a commercial humanoid robot. Our analysis, composed by an automated and a manual part, points out a relevant number of security flaws that can be used to take over and command the robot. Furthermore, we suggest how these issues could be fixed, thus, avoided in the future. The very final aim of this work is to push the rise of the security level of IoT products before they are sold on the public market.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 4 table

SatNOGS Website Project

The SatNOGS Website project aims to create a web interface for the SatNOGS, or Satellite Network Open Ground Stations, project. The intent of the ongoing project is to make the main SatNOGS project more accessible by creating a web-based software system that contains many of the necessary features needed to run a ground station, and do it in a way that is visually appealing and human-friendly, and to also provide an extension to the main client for control and information presentation needs. A large feature that the application will offer is displaying much of the information that the transmitter is receiving, such as where in the sky the satellite that is being observed is at, whether the ground station is currently on the network, whether it is able to receive information, and even more data on the satellite it is looking at, including possibly a picture and the raw data the satellite is transmitting. This work is being done in collaboration with the ECE Department at Valparaiso University, which is working on aspects of the physical and electronic components. This project, in addition to contributing to this international effort, also provides a laboratory for experiencing and learning the technology and processes for large-scale software system construction

Time-to-build obsolescence and the technological paradox

The paper focusses on the technological paradox. To analyze the possible temporary negative eect of an innovation, we make use of a ow representation of production. Our aim is to show that such phenomenon can be justied by a simple property of the production process: in real time costs strictly come before proceeds.Moving in the same direction of Amendola (1974), we analyze the obsolescence effect induced by a rise in the interest rate. Furthermore, we analyze the role of capital market stickiness on the timing of the technological paradox and on the distribution of the obsolescence eect among the different stages of a vertical integrated production system.Technological paradox, technology adoption, time-to-build, obsolescence.

EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ESERVICE QUALITY, SATISFACTION, ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS IN E-STORE WEBSITE

EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ESERVICE QUALITY, SATISFACTION, ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS IN E-STORE WEBSITE - E-service Quality, Satisfaction, Attitude towards the website, Behavioral Intentio

Newsletter of the analytical and capacity development partnership (ACDP), March 2015

The newsletter have information about OECD review of the Indonesia education sector, development of the Indonesia qualifications framework, teacher absenteeism in Indonesia, rural and remote area education strategic planning for Tanah Papua, improving the teaching of islamic education, and improving student assessment

Promoting Chiaro Hotel Using a Website

Chiaro Hotel is a one-star hotel in Sidoarjo that is located at a strategic location. It is clean and comfortable family hotel. The problem of Chiaro Hotel is lack of promotion. Even though Chiaro Hotel has had some promotional tools, such as short promotional video, marketing booklet, and flyer, those promotional tools do not give good impact for the hotel because they do not show the uniqueness of Chiaro Hotel. Therefore, I make a website to solve Chiaro Hotel's problem. This website can reach people in many places. Also, this website can help Chiaro Hotel to show the uniqueness that the hotel has. For my project, the website is mostly in English. The features in this website are “Home”, “About Us”, “Room”, “Facilities”, “Latest News”, ”Contact Us”, and “Booking Feature”. The benefits that Chiaro Hotel can get from this website are to be well-known among its competitors and get more customers

Effective website for educational institution

This paper examines the current status of a New Zealand educational institution’s website and makes a comparison among 44 samples. Two main sections have been contained in this research, secondary resource collection and observation. The aim of this research is to raise the awareness of this organisation and to attract potential students from the Chinese market by improve the organisation’s official website. This is desk research which has made use of qualitative methods. The results of the secondary resource collection mainly illustrate the general concepts of website design, the key factors of the education website, and Chinese web page preferences. The results from observation of 44 samples have been divided into two aspects, functionality and content. Most educational institution website pages are functional, while their online communication channels are basically limited to social media links; from the content point of view, school websites with Chinese versions generally have poor translations, and existing educational institution website samples can provide the information that the viewer needs through different presentation methods. These differences are explained in the discussion section. In conclusion, it suggested that in the current stage, educational institution websites could gain development by diversifying their communication channels and information presentation

Is income becoming more polarized Italy? A closer look with a distributional approach

During the 1990’s and the early 2000’s income inequality in Italy shows levels higher than many other OECD countries, not displaying any significant trend, upward or downward. This evidence relies essentially on summary measures of inequality, which may not capture aspects of the whole income probability density, such as multi-modalities and polarization. This paper applies a non-parametric tool, the “relative distribution”, to describe patterns of changes on the entire Italian household income distribution over the period 1989–2006. Furthermore, this approach also allows us to decompose the relative density into changes in location and changes in shape, in order to emphasize whether income distribution becomes more polarized or exhibits patterns of convergence toward middle income classes. A similar decomposition enables us to analyze the impact of selected covariates on income distribution. During the period Italy experienced a significant increase of household income polarization, which has particularly affected incomes below the median. In addition, this relative polarization is mainly correlated to changes in the returns to household-head occupational status.Income distribution, Relative Distribution, Polarization

The economic impact of upward and downward occupational mobility: A comparison of eight EU member states

Recent literature agrees that the degree of intergenerational mobility substantially differs across European countries, ranked between the “mobile” Nordic countries and the “immobile” Anglo-Saxon and Southern ones. In this paper we will compare the intergenerational transmission of advantages in 8 European countries using EU-SILC dataset. Considering parental occupations as background variable, our main aims are to assess whether residual returns to background on offspring’s labour incomes persist after controlling for intermediated background-related outcomes (education and occupation) and to disentangle the role played by upward and downward occupational mobility on earnings. Our empirical analyses show that cross-country differences occur in the labour markets rather than in the educational stream. Consistently with previous findings, residual background effects on earnings are not significant in Nordic and Continental countries whereas they appear large in Anglo-Saxon and Southern ones. When the impact of backward and upward mobility is assessed, in all countries but Nordic ones penalties for upgrading emerge mostly in top occupations and are higher in less-mobile countries. These patterns are smoothened but preserved in bottom occupations and robust to different labour income measures.Residual Returns to Background, Earning Impact of Occupational Mobility, International comparison, Intergenerational Inequality

When staff handle staph : user-driven versus expert-driven communication of infection control guidelines

Health care-associated infections cause thousands of preventable deaths each year. Therefore, it is crucial that health care workers (HCWs) adhere to infection control guidelines. Although most HCWs are aware of the rationale for guidelines, adherence is generally poor, which might be caused by the guidelines’ expert-driven character. Whereas traditional, paper-based guidelines have a strong focus on scientific validation, regulation, and legislation, HCWs’ information need is rather action-oriented.\ud \ud Based on extensive user-centered research involving HCWs (comprised of eight studies including Card Sort, scenario testing with thinking aloud, prototyping, interviewing, etc), a multimodal website was developed that presents evidence-based guidelines as answers to questions that reflect HCWs’ practical informational needs. \ud \ud Evaluation studies showed that the website outperformed the traditional, paper-based guidelines with regard to efficiency (time for task completion decreased significantly from six to two minutes), effectiveness (successful task completion rate increased significantly from 50% to 90%), and user satisfaction. The website appeared to ‘empower’ HCWs since it allowed them to take decisions for daily work practice, and thereby reduced infection control professionals’ workload. \ud \ud Since a website in itself is not enough to change HCWs’ behavioral intention to adhere to the guidelines, the factors that affect adoption of the website in daily work practice were investigated next to the determinants of intention to adhere. These factors were considered during the implementation phase of the website. \ud \ud The studies that together composed the user-centered design process of the website are described in a dissertation (thesis defense October 2nd, 2009). This dissertation provides the methodological steps and design principles necessary to communicate user-driven guidelines via a website and suggests how to optimally implement this website in daily work practice, in order to enhance effective and efficient risk- and crisis communication. Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (also known as “hospital bacteria”) served as a case study for this dissertation research, but the thesis might also serve as a manual for the communication of guidelines regarding all types of infectious diseases, such as Mexican flu (H1N1)). This is subject of future research.\ud \ud Furthermore, future studies will concentrate on the development of e-learning strategies for HCWs and incorporating an advanced dialogue system into the website