The Islamization of Southern Kalimantan: Sufi Spiritualism, Ethnic Identity, Political Activism

Religion is generally a key component of ethnic identity in Southeast Asia. This is particularly the case in both Malaysian and Indonesian parts of Borneo, where conversion usually involves a change in ethnicity: converts to Islam undergo a process known as masuk Melayu, "entering Malaydom". However, in southern Kalimantan the close affinity between Islam and Malayness has become more fluid in recent decades. Many Dayaks now identify as Muslim, while many in the Banjarese-Malay community now proudly proclaim their Dayak ancestry. This article explores the theological implications of this changing relationship between ethnicity and religion. Although Islam remains a central element in the identity of the Banjarese, there is evidence that this change in ethnic identity has diluted the form of Sufi Islam to which most Banjarese adhere. Further, I suggest that the growing popularity of Islam within the Dayak community has accelerated the process of "renewal" within the faith, taking it away from local variants and towards more universal norms

Rolling back democracy in the late Soeharto era: some implications for Indonesia's political culture

On 27 July 1996 Indonesian politics was shaken by the most widespread riots to occur in the capital city for over twenty years. The leader of the opposition Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI), Megawati Sukarnoputri, had recently been overthrown from within her party in a government-engineered move. When she refused to bow to pressure and her supporters continued to occupy the PDI headquarters in central Jakarta, her opponents mounted a violent assault, and were actively aided by local sections of the Armed Forces. The forced removal of a popular opposition figure by state-backed armed thugs, leading to perhaps dozens of deaths, caused outrage to spill onto the streets. Crowds of youth and other protestors blocked roads, burned buildings, hurled stones at anyone in uniform, and for the following day played cat-and-mouse with the security forces sent to quell unrest

The fans united will always be connected: building a practical DTN in a football stadium

Football stadia present a difficult environment for the deployment of digital services, due to their architectural design and the capacity problems from the numbers of fans. We present preliminary results from deploying an Android app building an ad hoc network amongst the attendees at matches at Brighton and Hove Albion's AMEX stadium, so as to share the available capacity and supply digital services to season ticket holders. We describe the protocol, how we engaged our users in service design so that the app was attractive to use and the problems we encountered in using Android

Mediating exposure in public interactions

Mobile computing and public interactions together open up a new range of challenges in interaction design. To date a very gregarious model of interaction has been assumed. However, the public setting will invoke feelings of shyness and a desire to control the personal exposure associated with interactions. In this paper we discuss these issues and our initial tests of a system which affords a control beyond "engage or don't engage"

Efficient geocasting in opportunistic networks

With the proliferation of smartphones and their advanced connectivity capabilities, opportunistic networks have gained a lot of traction during the past years; they are suitable for increasing network capacity and sharing ephemeral, localised content. They can also offload traffic from cellular networks to device-to-device ones, when cellular networks are heavily stressed. Opportunistic networks can play a crucial role in communication scenarios where the network infrastructure is inaccessible due to natural disasters, large-scale terrorist attacks or government censorship. Geocasting, where messages are destined to specific locations (casts) instead of explicitly identified devices, has a large potential in real world opportunistic networks, however it has attracted little attention in the context of opportunistic networking. In this paper we propose Geocasting Spray And Flood (GSAF), a simple and efficient geocasting protocol for opportunistic networks. GSAF follows an elegant and flexible approach where messages take random walks towards the destination cast. Messages that are routed away from the destination cast are extinct when devices’ buffers get full, freeing space for new messages to be delivered. In GSAF, casts do not have to be pre-defined; instead users can route messages to arbitrarily defined casts. GSAF does that in a privacy-preserving fashion. We also present DA-GSAF, a Direction-Aware extension of GSAF in which messages are forwarded to encountered nodes based on whether a node is moving towards their destination cast. In DA-GSAF only the direction of a mobile node is revealed to other devices. We experimentally evaluate our protocols and compare their performance to prominent geocasting protocols in a very wide set of scenarios, including different maps, mobility models and user populations. Both GSAF and DA-GSAF perform significantly better compared to all other studied protocols, in terms of message delivery ratio, latency and network overhead. DA-GSAF is particularly efficient in sparse scenarios minimising network overhead compared to all other studied protocols. Both GSAF and DA-GSAF perform very well for a wide range of device/user populations indicating that our proposal is viable for crowded and sparse opportunistic networks

GSAF: efficient and flexible geocasting for opportunistic networks

With the proliferation of smartphones and their advanced connectivity capabilities, opportunistic networks have gained a lot of traction during the past years; they are suitable for increasing network capacity and sharing ephemeral, localised content. They can also offload traffic from cellular networks to device-to-device ones, when cellular networks are heavily stressed. Opportunistic networks can play a crucial role in communication scenarios where the network infrastructure is inaccessible due to natural disasters, large-scale terrorist attacks or government censorship. Geocasting, where messages are destined to specific locations (casts) instead of explicitly identified devices, has a large potential in real world opportunistic networks, however it has attracted little attention in the context of opportunistic networking. In this paper we propose Geocasting Spray And Flood (GSAF), a simple but efficient and flexible geocasting protocol for opportunistic, delay-tolerant networks. GSAF follows a simple but elegant and flexible approach where messages take random walks towards the destination cast. Messages that follow directions away from the cast are extinct when the device buffer gets full, freeing space for new messages to be delivered. In GSAF, casts do not have to be pre-defined; instead users can route messages to arbitrarily defined casts. Our extensive evaluation shows that GSAF is efficient, in terms of message delivery ratio and latency as well as network overhead