317 research outputs found
Cybersecurity: mapping the ethical terrain
This edited collection examines the ethical trade-offs involved in cybersecurity: between security and privacy; individual rights and the good of a society; and between the types of burdens placed on particular groups in order to protect others.
Foreword
Governments and society are increasingly reliant on cyber systems. Yet the more reliant we are upon cyber systems, the more vulnerable we are to serious harm should these systems be attacked or used in an attack. This problem of reliance and vulnerability is driving a concern with securing cyberspace. For example, a âcybersecurityâ team now forms part of the US Secret Service. Its job is to respond to cyber-attacks in specific environments such as elevators in a building that hosts politically vulnerable individuals, for example, state representatives. Cybersecurity aims to protect cyberinfrastructure from cyber-attacks; the concerning aspect of the threat from cyber-attack is the potential for serious harm that damage to cyber-infrastructure presents to resources and people.
These types of threats to cybersecurity might simply target information and communication systems: a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on a government website does not harm a website in any direct way, but prevents its normal use by stifling the ability of users to connect to the site. Alternatively, cyber-attacks might disrupt physical devices or resources, such as the Stuxnet virus, which caused the malfunction and destruction of Iranian nuclear centrifuges. Cyber-attacks might also enhance activities that are enabled through cyberspace, such as the use of online media by extremists to recruit members and promote radicalisation. Cyber-attacks are diverse: as a result, cybersecurity requires a comparable diversity of approaches.
Cyber-attacks can have powerful impacts on peopleâs lives, and soâin liberal democratic societies at leastâgovernments have a duty to ensure cybersecurity in order to protect the inhabitants within their own jurisdiction and, arguably, the people of other nations. But, as recent events following the revelations of Edward Snowden have demonstrated, there is a risk that the governmental pursuit of cybersecurity might overstep the mark and subvert fundamental privacy rights. Popular comment on these episodes advocates transparency of government processes, yet given that cybersecurity risks represent major challenges to national security, it is unlikely that simple transparency will suffice.
Managing the risks of cybersecurity involves trade-offs: between security and privacy; individual rights and the good of a society; and types of burdens placed on particular groups in order to protect others. These trade-offs are often ethical trade-offs, involving questions of how we act, what values we should aim to promote, and what means of anticipating and responding to the risks are reasonablyâand publiclyâjustifiable. This Occasional Paper (prepared for the National Security College) provides a brief conceptual analysis of cybersecurity, demonstrates the relevance of ethics to cybersecurity and outlines various ways in which to approach ethical decision-making when responding to cyber-attacks
Arctic troposphere warming Driven by external radiative forcing and modulated by the Pacific and Atlantic
During the past decades, the Arctic has experienced significant tropospheric warming, with varying decadal warming rates. However, the relative contributions from potential drivers and modulators of the warming are yet to be further quantified. Here, we utilize a unique set of multi-model large-ensemble atmospheric simulations to isolate the respective contributions from the combined external radiative forcing (ERF-AL), interdecadal Pacific variability (IPV), Atlantic multidecadal variability (AMV), and Arctic sea-ice concentration changes (ASIC) to the warming during 1979â2013. In this study, the ERF-AL impacts are the ERF impacts directly on the atmosphere and land surface, excluding the indirect effects through SST and SIC feedback. The ERF-AL is the primary driver of the AprilâSeptember tropospheric warming during 1979â2013, and its warming effects vary at decadal time scales. The IPV and AMV intensify the warming during their transitioning periods to positive phases and dampen the warming during their transitioning periods to negative phases. The IPV impacts are prominent in winter and spring and are stronger than AMV impacts on 1979â2013 temperature trends. The warming impacts of ASIC are generally restricted to below 700 hPa and are strongest in autumn and winter. The combined effects of these factors reproduce the observed accelerated and step-down Arctic warming in different decades, but the intensities of the reproduced decadal variations are generally weaker than in the observed. © 2022. The Authors
Thermodynamics of the 3-flavor NJL model : chiral symmetry breaking and color superconductivity
Employing an extended three flavor version of the NJL model we discuss in
detail the phase diagram of quark matter. The presence of quark as well as of
diquark condensates gives raise to a rich structure of the phase diagram. We
study in detail the chiral phase transition and the color superconductivity as
well as color flavor locking as a function of the temperature and chemical
potentials of the system.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure
Strange quark production in a statistical effective model
An effective model with constituent quarks as fundamental degrees of freedom
is used to predict the relative strangeness production pattern in both high
energy elementary and heavy ion collisions. The basic picture is that of the
statistical hadronization model, with hadronizing color-singlet clusters
assumed to be at full chemical equilibrium at constituent quark level. Thus, by
assuming that at least the ratio between strange and non-strange constituent
quarks survives in the final hadrons, the apparent undersaturation of strange
particle phase space observed in the data can be accounted for. In this
framework, the enhancement of relative strangeness production in heavy ion
collisions in comparison with elementary collisions is mainly owing to the
excess of initial non-strange matter over antimatter and the so-called
canonical suppression, namely the constraint of exact color and flavor
conservation over small volumes.Comment: 22 pages, 9 postscript figures, slightly shortened version published
in Phys. Rev.
The taxonomy and diversity of Proschkinia (Bacillariophyta), a common but enigmatic genus from marine coasts
Detailed morphological documentation is provided for established Proschkinia taxa, including the generitype, P. bulnheimii, and P. complanata, P. complanatula, P. complanatoides and P. hyalosirella, and six new species. All established taxa are characterized from original material from historical collections. The new species described in this paper (P. luticola, P. staurospeciosa, P. impar, P. modesta, P. fistulispectabilis, and P. rosowskii) were isolated from the Western Pacific (Yellow Sea coast of Korea) and the Atlantic (Scottish and Texas coasts). Thorough documentation of the frustule, valve and protoplast architecture revealed the combination of characters diagnostic of the genus Proschkinia: a singleâlobed chloroplast; a broad girdle composed of Uâshaped, perforated bands; the position of the conopeate rapheâsternum relative to the external and internal valve surface; and the presence of an occluded process through the valve, termed the âfistulaâ. Seven strains of Proschkinia were grown in culture and five of these were sequenced for nuclear ribosomal SSU and plastidâencoded rbcL. Phylogenetic analysis recovered a clade of Proschkinia with Fistulifera, another fistulaâbearing diatom genus, and together these were sister to a clade formed of the Stauroneidaceae; in turn, all of these were sister to a clade composed of Parlibellus and two monoraphid genera Astartiella and Schizostauron. Despite morphological similarities between Proschkinia and the Naviculaceae, these two taxa are distant in our analysis. We document the variation in the morphology of Proschkinia, including significant variability in the fistula, suggesting that fistula ultrastructure might be one of the key features for species identification within the genus.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio
Peripheral Blood CD34 Count Can Predict Successful Progenitor Cell Mobilization in Poor Mobiliziers Treated With Plerixafor and G-CSF
Orbital effects of a monochromatic plane gravitational wave with ultra-low frequency incident on a gravitationally bound two-body system
We analytically compute the long-term orbital variations of a test particle
orbiting a central body acted upon by an incident monochromatic plane
gravitational wave. We assume that the characteristic size of the perturbed
two-body system is much smaller than the wavelength of the wave. Moreover, we
also suppose that the wave's frequency is much smaller than the particle's
orbital one. We make neither a priori assumptions about the direction of the
wavevector nor on the orbital geometry of the planet. We find that, while the
semi-major axis is left unaffected, the eccentricity, the inclination, the
longitude of the ascending node, the longitude of pericenter and the mean
anomaly undergo non-vanishing long-term changes. They are not secular trends
because of the slow modulation introduced by the tidal matrix coefficients and
by the orbital elements themselves. They could be useful to indepenedently
constrain the ultra-low frequency waves which may have been indirectly detected
in the BICEP2 experiment. Our calculation holds, in general, for any
gravitationally bound two-body system whose characteristic frequency is much
larger than the frequency of the external wave. It is also valid for a generic
perturbation of tidal type with constant coefficients over timescales of the
order of the orbital period of the perturbed particle.Comment: LaTex2e, 24 pages, no figures, no tables. Changes suggested by the
referees include
Pion Freeze-Out Time in Pb+Pb Collisions at 158 A GeV/c Studied via pi-/pi+ and K-/K+ Ratios
The effect of the final state Coulomb interaction on particles produced in
Pb+Pb collisions at 158 A GeV/c has been investigated in the WA98 experiment
through the study of the pi-/pi+ and K-/K+ ratios measured as a function of
transverse mass. While the ratio for kaons shows no significant transverse mass
dependence, the pi-/pi+ ratio is enhanced at small transverse mass values with
an enhancement that increases with centrality. A silicon pad detector located
near the target is used to estimate the contribution of hyperon decays to the
pi-/pi+ ratio. The comparison of results with predictions of the RQMD model in
which the Coulomb interaction has been incorporated allows to place constraints
on the time of the pion freeze-out.Comment: 9 pages, 12 figure
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