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