Privacy and Power

Something has gone wrong in modem America, argues Jeffrey Rosen in The Unwanted Gaze. Our medical records are bought and sold by health care providers, drug companies, and the insurance industry. Our e-mails are intercepted and read by our employers. Amazon.com knows everything there is to know about our reading and web-browsing habits. Poor Monica Lewinsky\u27s draft love letters to President Bill Clinton were seized by the villainous Ken Starr, and ultimately plastered all over the nation\u27s newspapers. To Rosen, the nature of the problem is clear: These examples are all part of a troubling phenomenon that affects all Americans: namely, the erosion of privacy at home, at work, and in cyberspace, so that intimate personal information ... is increasingly vulnerable to being wrenched out of context and exposed to the world. Rosen is, of course, hardly unusual in viewing all these issues as quintessential privacy violations. In the past few years the media seem to have woken up to privacy issues, and most of us have been sympathetic readers of dozens of popular articles addressing just such a range of privacy violations. At the moment, the language of privacy seems to be the only language we have for talking about issues such as workplace e-mail monitoring, electronic cookies, medical records, and Monica\u27s love letters. Is this a good thing? Unquestionably, Rosen\u27s examples are troubling, but are they all troubling in precisely the same way? Does it make sense to analyze them all as solely or primarily examples of the erosion of privacy ? Moreover, is there a coherent and articulate conception of privacy that underlies all of Rosen\u27s examples

A barrier or bridge? Serious problems revealed in the UK citizenship test

Thom Brooks has examined the UK citizenship test and finds that it is highly irrelevant to living in this society, has many inconsistencies, and suffers from serious gender imbalance. To make matters worse, changes to the test this year have transformed it from being a practical trivia quiz to being purely trivial. Greater care needs to be taken to ensure balance and consistency, and it is worth reconsidering the purpose of the test

Protecting Rights in the Age of Terrorism: Challenges and Opportunities

Depending on whom you speak to these days (and the mood in which you find them), international law is either practically moribund, or it\u27s more vibrant and important than it has been for years. To take the good news story first, international law issues have been at the forefront of public discourse over the past few years. Pick your issue: the U.N. Charter and the international law on the use of force? The Convention Against Torture? The Geneva Conventions? You\u27ll find it on the front page these days. Journalists are phoning international law professors for background briefings, and students are flocking to courses on international law and human rights. On law school faculties, even those grumpy sorts who have always greeted the mention of international law with a skeptical harrumph have taken to buttonholing their international law colleagues in the hallways, demanding an explication of how the Torture Convention regards so-called stress and duress tactics. Even the Supreme Court has weighed in, with recent decisions referencing everything from the European Convention on Human Rights (cited by Justice Kennedy in Lawrence v. Texas) to the Hague and Geneva Conventions (cited by Justice O\u27Connor in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld). For international lawyers who have long labored in obscurity, this is definitely good news. Right? Right

Cultural aspects of multi-channel customer management: a case study in Egypt

Channel management is one CRM systems component much influenced by the behaviour of customers in relation to the implementation and use of channel management CRM component. The consumers’ behaviours, preferences, perceptions and expectations are crucial for the implementation and use of channel management. Customers’ contact with the organization’s multi-channels can occur at several touch points through out customer lifecycle. Customers’ behaviours may be differentiated according to the individual or micro level, but it might also differ at an ecological or macro level of analysis (Ramaseshan et al., 2006). In this paper the author has conducted a case study in Egypt to analyze customers’ behaviours at a macro level and customers channel choices, through out the customer lifecycle. The author has used a Structurational Analysis model (Ali and Brooks, 2008) to identify the cultural factors (Ali, et al. 2008) that influence the multi-channel customer management in Egypt

3D printing a transposed design in biopolymer materials using an articulated robot and pellet-based extrusion : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a degree of Master of Engineering in Mechatronics at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

The aim of this project was to develop a new method of 3D printing. This method is a mix between Fused Deposition Modelling and freeform printing, using a 6 degree-of-freedom articulated robot and a pellet-based extruder to mix and distribute the biopolymer, to create commercial quality thin-shelled parts with aesthetic aspects unique to the process and with a reduced amount of material wastage. There is the potential for many industries to benefit from this new technology. Initially this project is focused on applications for artists as thin-shelled designs rarely provide the physical properties required for functional parts. An artist has provided a design to test the printer. The hopper is designed to work with a range of different polymer pellets. It is based off a previous student’s design and mimics the operation of an injection moulder by pushing the pellets through a heating chamber with an auger. The robot controlling the movement of the platform is an ABB IRB120. This robot has six degrees-of-freedom that allows it to reach several positions that would otherwise be impossible with a Cartesian system. The IRB120 has a very high spatial accuracy and repeatability. The design’s original format is converted to a flattened 2D format and the lines are interpolated to produce a 2D set of points. The overlaps in the shapes are removed to reduce the number of times the nozzle traces over previous paths, which helps to keep the layer thicknesses the same. These shapes are filled in with points so the contours are not empty. The points are then projected onto a mathematical model of the platform to produce a 3D point cloud. Finally, these points are converted into data for the robot to read. The design data points stream to the robot, which interprets them on the fly. Many iterative changes and improvements were done to the hardware and software as the result of continuous testing of the process and analysis of the print. The pellet-based extruder is an elementary design with numerous variables that affect the resulting extrusion. After many design iterations and improvements to the extruder, the extruder can produce a continuous strand of material, with relatively constant flow. The software accurately converts a design from the given format into a path for the contours, and another path to fill the contours. These paths are projected onto a model of the moulded platform. Each point along the path is put through multiple affine transforms to generate a location and orientation for the end effector of the robot. The robot is moved by streaming each point to the robot one at a time. The extruder was controlled simultaneously to create a printed design. The printed design is geometrically correct. However, the width of the extrusion path needs to be improved to increase the accuracy of the design to the reference one. The current prints achieve the correct visual properties in the extrusion. However, they require a secondary process to improve the surface finish. This project has produced a new 3D printing process, mixing Fused Deposition Modelling and freeform printing. This process can be adapted to be used in a wide range of applications. It has also produced a low-cost, effective pellet-based extruder that can be used to test a range of different materials, and their effectiveness in being used for 3D printing

Drones and Cognitive Dissonance

There’s something about drones that makes sane people crazy. Is it those lean, futurist profiles? The activities drone technologies enable? Or perhaps it’s just the word itself–drone–a mindless, unpleasant, dissonant thrum. Whatever the cause, drones seem to produce an unusual kind of cognitive dissonance in many people. Some demonize drones, denouncing them for causing civilian deaths or enabling long-distance killing, even as they ignore the fact that the same (or worse) could be said of many other weapons delivery systems. Others glorify them as a low-cost way to “take out terrorists,” despite the strategic vacuum in which most drone strikes occur. Still others insist that US drone policy is just “business as usual,” despite the fact that these attacks may undermine US foreign policy goals while creating an array of new problems. It is worth taking a closer look at what is and is not new and noteworthy about drone technologies and the activities they enable. Ultimately, “drones” as such present few new issues—but the manner in which the US has been using them raises grave questions about their strategic efficacy and unintended consequences. In fact, the legal theories used to justify many US drone strikes risk dangerously hollowing out the rule of law itself

The Dies Irae ( Day of Wrath ) and Totentanz ( Dance of Death ): Medieval Themes Revisited in 19th Century Music and Culture

During the pivotal November 2002 football game of Arkansas vs. Georgia in the SEC conference championship, the Georgia marching band struck up their defensive rallying song. Instead of a typical defense song, the band played an excerpt of the Gregorian Sequence Dies Irae ( Day of Wrath\u27\u27) from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass. Drastically dissociated from its original medieval milieu, this musical Sequence still manages to elicit the same effect of fear and foreboding nearly a thousand years later. Precisely because of its deep musical and cultural roots, the Dies Irae occupies a significant place in history, closely intertwined from early on with the medieval folk motif Totentanz ( Dance of Death ), widely depicted in medieval art, and dramatically revived in 19th century music, art, and literature. This multi-disciplinary study focuses on the history of art and music of these two medieval themes during their development, and then moves on to study them in 19th century culture. Specifically, the manipulation of the original Gregorian chant and the incorporation of the idea of a medieval dance are analyzed in the music of Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and Camille Saint-Saens. Numerous other contextual links are explored as well, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo, Henri Cazalis, William Blake, and Alfred Rethel, all of whom created 19th century artistic or literary masterpieces derived from the thematic seeds of the Dies Irae and the Totentanz. Although neither of these ideas endured in their original form during the Romantic era, the inherently compelling nature of these themes that center on the macabre but inevitable end of life captivated the Romantic geniuses and continue to intrigue us to this day