Synchronic Analysis of Adversarial Attacks in Syria Committed by the Islamic State

Militarized technologies, large support infrastructures, and the unintended consequences of increased violence demonstrate that the current strategies are unsustainable to end modern conflict. However, the potential exists to precisely identify patterns from empirically reduced adversarial behaviors. Therefore, the purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental synchronic retrospective analysis was to determine the relationship between the distance, fatalities, and time (independent variables) to the hazard force (dependent variable) executed by ISIS in Syria between the years 2007 to 2015. A data set containing 12,326 records for attacks committed by U.S. adversaries in 20 countries between the years of 2007-2015 was analyzed using multiple linear regression. The theoretical foundation for this study was based on symmetrical and asymmetrical applied gaming theory, which differentiates between adversarial sizes and strategies. According to this theory, the potential direction between two attacks occurs because (a) adversaries operate with rationality, and (b) between any two targets (A and B); the rational preference is determined when the ratio of value of B over A is greater than A over B. This rational preference was calculated as intensity and was called hazard force. The analysis demonstrated a statistically significant association between fatalities and distance. The potential for positive social change as a result of this study may be through modeling adversarial events more accurately, reducing human costs, and redirecting finite resources to greater human endeavors, or creating policies with greater efficacy

The reliable multicast protocol application programming interface

The Application Programming Interface for the Berkeley/WVU implementation of the Reliable Multicast Protocol is described. This transport layer protocol is implemented as a user library that applications and software buses link against

Global Seismicity: Three New Maps Compiled with Geographic Information Systems

This paper presents three new maps of global seismicity compiled from NOAA digital data, covering the interval 1963-1998, with three different magnitude ranges (mb): greater than 3.5, less than 3.5, and all detectable magnitudes. A commercially available geographic information system (GIS) was used as the database manager. Epicenter locations were acquired from a CD-ROM supplied by the National Geophysical Data Center. A methodology is presented that can be followed by general users. The implications of the maps are discussed, including the limitations of conventional plate models, and the different tectonic behavior of continental vs. oceanic lithosphere. Several little-known areas of intraplate or passive margin seismicity are also discussed, possibly expressing horizontal compression generated by ridge push

Reliable multicast protocol specifications protocol operations

This appendix contains the complete state tables for Reliable Multicast Protocol (RMP) Normal Operation, Multi-RPC Extensions, Membership Change Extensions, and Reformation Extensions. First the event types are presented. Afterwards, each RMP operation state, normal and extended, is presented individually and its events shown. Events in the RMP specification are one of several things: (1) arriving packets, (2) expired alarms, (3) user events, (4) exceptional conditions

An Automated Student Advisement and Projected Course Enrollments

One of the major problems of the modern university is the process of student advisement and course scheduling. The purpose of this paper is to write a computer program which will aid in solving this problem of student advisement and course scheduling for the undergraduate students of the College of Engineering at Florida Technological University. the computer program which is developed in this paper, aids in the problem of student advisement by producing a one page output for each student. This output page, which is separated by department, lists all courses the student has taken and passed, all transfer hours, and a list of courses recommended to be taken in the next three sequential quarters. The input data is taken from the master student file and the approved petitions for transfer hours which are kept in the Dean\u27s office. In addition the program produces projected enrollment figures for the next three sequential quarters. This output is intended for the administrative personnel responsible for course scheduling. Future development using this program could be the development of a program to help advise students for the entire university and to schedule courses, faculty members and rooms

Fault recovery in the reliable multicast protocol

The Reliable Multicast Protocol (RMP) provides a unique, group-based model for distributed programs that need to handle reconfiguration events at the application layer. This model, called membership views, provides an abstraction in which events such as site failures, network partitions, and normal join-leave events are viewed as group reformations. RMP provides access to this model through an application programming interface (API) that notifies an application when a group is reformed as the result of a some event. RMP provides applications with reliable delivery of messages using an underlying IP Multicast (12, 5) media to other group members in a distributed environment even in the case of reformations. A distributed application can use various Quality of Service (QoS) levels provided by RMP to tolerate group reformations. This paper explores the implementation details of the mechanisms in RMP that provide distributed applications with membership view information and fault recovery capabilities

Reliable multicast protocol specifications flow control and NACK policy

This appendix presents the flow and congestion control schemes recommended for RMP and a NACK policy based on the whiteboard tool. Because RMP uses a primarily NACK based error detection scheme, there is no direct feedback path through which receivers can signal losses through low buffer space or congestion. Reliable multicast protocols also suffer from the fact that throughput for a multicast group must be divided among the members of the group. This division is usually very dynamic in nature and therefore does not lend itself well to a priori determination. These facts have led the flow and congestion control schemes of RMP to be made completely orthogonal to the protocol specification. This allows several differing schemes to be used in different environments to produce the best results. As a default, a modified sliding window scheme based on previous algorithms are suggested and described below