Seeking Anonymity in an Internet Panopticon

Obtaining and maintaining anonymity on the Internet is challenging. The state of the art in deployed tools, such as Tor, uses onion routing (OR) to relay encrypted connections on a detour passing through randomly chosen relays scattered around the Internet. Unfortunately, OR is known to be vulnerable at least in principle to several classes of attacks for which no solution is known or believed to be forthcoming soon. Current approaches to anonymity also appear unable to offer accurate, principled measurement of the level or quality of anonymity a user might obtain. Toward this end, we offer a high-level view of the Dissent project, the first systematic effort to build a practical anonymity system based purely on foundations that offer measurable and formally provable anonymity properties. Dissent builds on two key pre-existing primitives - verifiable shuffles and dining cryptographers - but for the first time shows how to scale such techniques to offer measurable anonymity guarantees to thousands of participants. Further, Dissent represents the first anonymity system designed from the ground up to incorporate some systematic countermeasure for each of the major classes of known vulnerabilities in existing approaches, including global traffic analysis, active attacks, and intersection attacks. Finally, because no anonymity protocol alone can address risks such as software exploits or accidental self-identification, we introduce WiNon, an experimental operating system architecture to harden the uses of anonymity tools such as Tor and Dissent against such attacks.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure

Effective Mentoring of Novice Nurses during a Healthcare Crisis

Novice nurses are entering the workforce at an unprecedented time during a pandemic. Nursing mentorship is important in helping the transition of novice nurses into the nursing profession. The healthcare crisis presented by a pandemic makes this even more integral as new entrants enter the workforce at an unprecedented time. This has now brought to fore the need to critically reflect on how are novice nurses being supported to make the transition into the nursing workforce during a stressful time in healthcare. This paper discusses the nursing mentorship process and applies the theoretical framework of authentic leadership to explore the importance of novice nurses embracing the self to combat the challenges of entering the nursing workforce during a pandemic. This discussion paper promotes authentic leadership as an effective complement to the nursing mentorship process to better help novice nurses’ transition into their nursing role during challenging times of a healthcare crisis. Recommendations are given to enhance the nursing mentorship culture by co creating an authentic environment that allows nurse mentors and novice nurses to embrace the self through self-awareness and self-development. Nursing mentorship is integral to the success of novice nurses’ transition into their professional role and into the complex healthcare environment at unprecedented times when healthcare providers have to quickly adapt and develop readiness to perform professional roles due to the health crisis and demands created by a global pandemic

Laundering pesticide contaminated clothing

"File: Textiles and Clothing""The problem of how to launder pesticide contaminated clothing has puzzled many as pesticide use has become widespread. What is the best method? What water temperature should be used? Is there a different in detergent performance? Must you be careful about washing contaminated clothes with other clothing?"--First paragraph.Carol Bryan Easley (Research Technologist, Textiles, Clothing and Design), Joan Laughlin (Assoc. Professor of Textiles, Clothing and Design), Roger Gold (Extension Specialist - Environmental Program

Ejercita tu mente jugando ajedrez, en la Unidad Educativa Particular Misioneros Oblatos

Leonel, Joan y Bryan, somos tres amigos aficionados por el ajedrez, este es nuestro deporte favorito y lo practicamos en momentos libres en la biblioteca de nuestra institución. Como acudimos constantemente a este departamento, nos ha llamado mucho la atención algunas situaciones; como por ejemplo: El interés de los más pequeños por jugar el ajedrez, pero como hay pocos juegos y no conocen los movimientos ni reglas se dan diferencias entre ellos que terminan en discusión. Es por ello, que hemos querido realizar una investigación y presentar una propuesta para mejorar el ambiente en los tiempos libres dentro de nuestra institución. Considerando que el ajedrez nos ayuda en muchos aspectos tanto a niños como a adolescentes muchos educadores manifiestan que aprender a hablar, aprender a pensar y aprender a razonar están mutuamente ligados. En [1] se indica que este tipo de actividades ayuda a mejorar el coeficiente intelectual, ejercita los hemisferios cerebrales, desarrolla la creatividad, la concentración según diversos estudios y sobre todo, nos da la oportunidad de ocupar de la mejor manera nuestro tiempo libre

An Efficient Approach to Automatic Generation of Time-lapse Video Sequences

Time-lapse video sequences have recently become a highly utilised asset for marketing and advertising, particularly within the field of construction and landscape development. However, the manual generation of these videos, at a quality that can be used for marketing purposes, can be quite time-consuming. In this paper, a novel application for generating time-lapse videos is proposed, which will automatically select the optimal frames for time-lapse video generation, enhance these frames by applying a number of image pre- processing and machine learning techniques such as FAST super-resolution to improve the frames quality, and finally, provide an intuitive user interface to allow users to customise the time-lapse video with company branding. The auto-generated time-lapse videos will use techniques such as Laplacian filtering and temporal smoothing filtering to determine inactivity within the video sequence, classify day or night and, by use of optical character recognition, have the ability to remove unwanted artefacts such as the captured video date and time stamp. The obtained results from the proposed approach produce comparable video sequences to those produced manually, but with the advantage of being generated much faster and not requiring specialised video editing skills to complete

Spatial and Seasonal Nutrient Trends in Manila Bay Aquaculture Farms

Sampling was done in duplicates during dry (May 2014 and February 2015) and wet season (September 2014 and November 2014) following the blocking scheme for the nutrient trends. As for the nutrient loading, water samples were collected in three ponds after flooding (water intrusion) and prior to draining (water release). Colorimetric analyses by UV-Vis Spectroscopy following the US EPA standard methods were used to determine the samples’ nutrient levels specifically, ammonia, nitrate, nitrite, and phosphorus. Results showed that ammonia had the highest levels followed by phosphorus, nitrate, and nitrite. Geographically, higher concentration of nitrogen and phosphorus were observed in Eastern Bulacan aquaculture farms, which is attributed to the farmers’ disregard of the important pond preparation activities. Varying seasonal trends were noted among nutrient species due to the different reactions of each analyte under changing climatic conditions. Nutrient levels in sediments were several folds higher than that in the water column. Results of correlation analyses of nutrients in water and sediments showed: a) a good correlation for phosphorus, b) weak correlation for ammonia, and c) no correlation for nitrites and nitrates, implying that sediments maybe a possible contributor of phosphorus and ammonia in water but not nitrite and nitrate. Ammonia and TKN were significantly higher during the flooding suggesting that water coming in to the pond already contains high levels of said nutrients possibly due to higher organic load. Conversely, nitrite and nitrate levels were significantly higher during the draining suggesting transformation of ammonia into these less toxic substances by nitrifying bacteria