A Stable Fountain Code Mechanism for Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution

Most peer-to-peer content distribution systems require the peers to privilege the welfare of the overall system over greedily maximizing their own utility. When downloading a file broken up into multiple pieces, peers are often asked to pass on some possible download opportunities of common pieces in order to favor rare pieces. This is to avoid the missing piece syndrome, which throttles the download rate of the peer-to-peer system to that of downloading the file straight from the server. In other situations, peers are asked to stay in the system even though they have collected all the file's pieces and have an incentive to leave right away. We propose a mechanism which allows peers to act greedily and yet stabilizes the peer-to-peer content sharing system. Our mechanism combines a fountain code at the server to generate innovative new pieces, and a prioritization for the server to deliver pieces only to new peers. While by itself, neither the fountain code nor the prioritization of new peers alone stabilizes the system, we demonstrate that their combination does, through both analytical and numerical evaluation.Comment: accepted to IEEE INFOCOM 2014, 9 page

Enhanced lepton flavour violation in the supersymmetric inverse seesaw

In minimal supersymmetric seesaw models, the contribution to lepton flavour violation from Z-penguins is usually negligible. In this study, we consider the supersymmetric inverse seesaw and show that, in this case, the Z-penguin contribution dominates in several lepton flavour violating observables due to the low scale of the inverse seesaw mechanism. Among the observables considered, we find that the most constraining one is the muon to electron conversion rate which is already restricting the otherwise allowed parameter space of the model. Moreover, in this framework, the Z-penguins exhibit a non-decoupling behaviour, which has previously been noticed in lepton flavour violating Higgs decays.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of Discrete 2012, Published under licence in Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS) by IOP Publishing Ltd, v2 includes a preprint numbe

The current European perspective on the exequatur of U.S. punitive damages: opening the gate but keeping a guard

Global trade and intercontinental tourism are on the rise in today’s world. This, in turn, leads to more cross-border law suits. Inevitably, jurisdictions will be confronted with legal concepts that are unknown in the host forum. This contribution investigates whether, and to what extent, punitive damages judgments originating in the United States can be enforced against the assets of a defendant in a number of selected Member States of the EU. More specifically, the article explores the possibilities of enforcing American punitive damages judgments in five EU countries, namely Germany, Italy, Spain, France and England. This comparative analysis reveals that the case law in these selected countries is relatively divergent as to the stance adopted towards foreign punitive damages, resulting in different degrees of acceptance of this legal remedy

Shakespeare: assassin?

Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar' is historically linked to the assassination of President Lincoln and thereby to the Oklahoma bombing. 'The Merchant of Venice' was popular with the Nazis. If we praise Shakespeare for the good effects of his works, logically we should also condemn Shakespeare for the bad effects of his works. You can't have one without the other

'He's dead but he won't lie down!' Posthumous characterisation: the symbiosis of ghost and man, of spirit and flesh

In the case of some Shakespearian characters (e.g.Richard II and Julius Caesar) their postmortal presence influences our reading of their characters when they were alive. The past being is morally nourished by his postmortality. Of course, Shakespeare himself is magnified by his postmortal reputation