2,281 research outputs found
Viewpoint | Personal Data and the Internet of Things: It is time to care about digital provenance
The Internet of Things promises a connected environment reacting to and
addressing our every need, but based on the assumption that all of our
movements and words can be recorded and analysed to achieve this end.
Ubiquitous surveillance is also a precondition for most dystopian societies,
both real and fictional. How our personal data is processed and consumed in an
ever more connected world must imperatively be made transparent, and more
effective technical solutions than those currently on offer, to manage personal
data must urgently be investigated.Comment: 3 pages, 0 figures, preprint for Communication of the AC
3D spectroscopy of dwarf elliptical galaxies
I present some results of 3D spectroscopy for a small sample of dwarf
elliptical galaxies, mostly members of small groups. The galaxies under
consideration have a typical absolute magnitude of -18 (B-band), and at the
Kormendy's relation they settle within a transition zone between the main cloud
of giant ellipticals and the sequence of diffuse ellipticals. By measuring Lick
indices and investigating radial profiles of the SSP-equivalent ages and
metallicities of the stellar populations in their central parts, I have found
evolutionary distinct cores in all of them. Typically, the ages of these cores
are 2-4 Gyr, and the metallicities are higher than the solar one. Outside the
cores, the stellar populations are always old, T>12 Gyr, and the metallicities
are subsolar. This finding implies that the well-known correlation between the
stellar age and the total mass (luminosity) of field ellipticals (Trager et al.
2000, Caldwell et al. 2003, Howell 2005) may be in fact a direct consequence of
a larger contribution of nuclear starbursts into the integrated stellar
population in dwarfs with respect to giants, and does not relate to
`downsizing'.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure. Poster contribution to the proceedings of the
conference "A Universe of Dwarf Galaxies" (Lyon, June 14-18, 2010
Joachim Nowotny: Letzter Auftritt der Komparsen
Halle/Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1981. 214 p., 7,- M
Caveat Bibliotheca: The First Sale Doctrine and the Future of Libraries after Omega v. Costco, 11 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 414 (2011)
Having discovered that several of its watches, which were manufactured in Europe, were imported into the United States and sold without authorization, Omega, S.A. ( Omega ) commenced an action against Costco Wholesale Corp. in 2005. These watches are a typical example of what are referred to either as parallel imports or gray market goods. In finding for Omega, the Ninth Circuit held that the first sale doctrine does not apply to goods created or produced outside the United States. Such a rule, however, poses grave problems for libraries, in that circulation materials are not required to have a place of manufacture designated. Thus, libraries will be forced to endure large transaction costs in discerning the place of manufacture for circulation materials, or lend the materials at the risk of copyright infringement litigation. This comment proposes that the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights ( TRIPS ) be amended by recognizing international exhaustion rights, which would preclude most forms of price discrimination across international markets for identical goods, and allow for safer legal waters in which libraries may lend to patrons
CamFlow: Managed Data-sharing for Cloud Services
A model of cloud services is emerging whereby a few trusted providers manage
the underlying hardware and communications whereas many companies build on this
infrastructure to offer higher level, cloud-hosted PaaS services and/or SaaS
applications. From the start, strong isolation between cloud tenants was seen
to be of paramount importance, provided first by virtual machines (VM) and
later by containers, which share the operating system (OS) kernel. Increasingly
it is the case that applications also require facilities to effect isolation
and protection of data managed by those applications. They also require
flexible data sharing with other applications, often across the traditional
cloud-isolation boundaries; for example, when government provides many related
services for its citizens on a common platform. Similar considerations apply to
the end-users of applications. But in particular, the incorporation of cloud
services within `Internet of Things' architectures is driving the requirements
for both protection and cross-application data sharing.
These concerns relate to the management of data. Traditional access control
is application and principal/role specific, applied at policy enforcement
points, after which there is no subsequent control over where data flows; a
crucial issue once data has left its owner's control by cloud-hosted
applications and within cloud-services. Information Flow Control (IFC), in
addition, offers system-wide, end-to-end, flow control based on the properties
of the data. We discuss the potential of cloud-deployed IFC for enforcing
owners' dataflow policy with regard to protection and sharing, as well as
safeguarding against malicious or buggy software. In addition, the audit log
associated with IFC provides transparency, giving configurable system-wide
visibility over data flows. [...]Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure
The Optimal Single Copy Measurement for the Hidden Subgroup Problem
The optimization of measurements for the state distinction problem has
recently been applied to the theory of quantum algorithms with considerable
successes, including efficient new quantum algorithms for the non-abelian
hidden subgroup problem. Previous work has identified the optimal single copy
measurement for the hidden subgroup problem over abelian groups as well as for
the non-abelian problem in the setting where the subgroups are restricted to be
all conjugate to each other. Here we describe the optimal single copy
measurement for the hidden subgroup problem when all of the subgroups of the
group are given with equal a priori probability. The optimal measurement is
seen to be a hybrid of the two previously discovered single copy optimal
measurements for the hidden subgroup problem.Comment: 8 pages. Error in main proof fixe
The case of the vanishing medical student
Medical students are often hard to find on the wards after 3.00pm. In this reflective piece, using our own experiences of clinical teaching we describe the case of an archetypal, and stereotypical medical student who rarely attends a full day of timetabled clinical teaching. Using this case as an example we outline our insights of the reasons underpinning the fact many medical students leave clinical teaching placements well before 5.00pm and in doing so miss out of learning opportunities. We also make two simple recommendations to medical students and teachers that could be employed to incentivise students to linger longer on their clinical placements
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