Polio Eradication: How the War on Terror Has Led to the Persistence of Polio in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria

In 1988, the World Health Organization (WHO) initiated a campaign to eradicate the polio virus from the world population (Bari 2006). Since 1988, the WHO has used polio vaccines to successfully interrupt transmission of the disease to new individuals in all but three countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria (WHO 2012). This paper examines how The War on Terror, stated by President George W. Bush to be a war against every terrorist group of global reach and the governments that support these groups, has led the populations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria, as well as vaccinators and health officials in these countries, to adopt the culture of war (Bush 2001). The purpose of this paper is to examine how this culture, marked by insecurity, hostility, and distrust, has affected the polio eradication campaign. The insecurity felt by the populations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria led Muslim and Taliban leaders in these countries to act out against all Western activity within their borders, including the polio vaccination campaign (Jegede 2007). Although Nigeria is not directly linked to the War on Terror, it participated in the culture of war through its shared Islamic faith with Afghanistan and Pakistan. By participating in the culture of war, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria have harmed eradication efforts and have allowed the polio virus to persist within their countries. If the war continues, it risks potentially unleashing the virus, paralyzing hundreds of thousands of children (Walsh 2012)

On BEL-configurations and finite semifields

The BEL-construction for finite semifields was introduced in \cite{BEL2007}; a geometric method for constructing semifield spreads, using so-called BEL-configurations in $V(rn,q)$. In this paper we investigate this construction in greater detail, and determine an explicit multiplication for the semifield associated with a BEL-configuration in $V(rn,q)$, extending the results from \cite{BEL2007}, where this was obtained only for $r=n$. Given a BEL-configuration with associated semifields spread $\mathcal{S}$, we also show how to find a BEL-configuration corresponding to the dual spread $\mathcal{S}^d$. Furthermore, we study the effect of polarities in $V(rn,q)$ on BEL-configurations, leading to a characterisation of BEL-configurations associated to symplectic semifields. We give precise conditions for when two BEL-configurations in $V(n^2,q)$ define isotopic semifields. We define operations which preserve the BEL property, and show how non-isotopic semifields can be equivalent under this operation. We also define an extension of the ```switching'' operation on BEL-configurations in $V(2n,q)$ introduced in \cite{BEL2007}, which, together with the transpose operation, leads to a group of order $8$ acting on BEL-configurations

Semifields from skew polynomial rings

Skew polynomial rings were used to construct finite semifields by Petit in 1966, following from a construction of Ore and Jacobson of associative division algebras. In 1989 Jha and Johnson constructed the so-called cyclic semifields, obtained using irreducible semilinear transformations. In this work we show that these two constructions in fact lead to isotopic semifields, show how the skew polynomial construction can be used to calculate the nuclei more easily, and provide an upper bound for the number of isotopism classes, improving the bounds obtained by Kantor and Liebler in 2008 and implicitly in recent work by Dempwolff

Linux XIA: an interoperable meta network architecture to crowdsource the future Internet

With the growing number of proposed clean-slate redesigns of the Internet, the need for a medium that enables all stakeholders to participate in the realization, evaluation, and selection of these designs is increasing. We believe that the missing catalyst is a meta network architecture that welcomes most, if not all, clean-state designs on a level playing field, lowers deployment barriers, and leaves the final evaluation to the broader community. This paper presents Linux XIA, a native implementation of XIA [12] in the Linux kernel, as a candidate. We first describe Linux XIA in terms of its architectural realizations and algorithmic contributions. We then demonstrate how to port several distinct and unrelated network architectures onto Linux XIA. Finally, we provide a hybrid evaluation of Linux XIA at three levels of abstraction in terms of its ability to: evolve and foster interoperation of new architectures, embed disparate architectures inside the implementation’s framework, and maintain a comparable forwarding performance to that of the legacy TCP/IP implementation. Given this evaluation, we substantiate a previously unsupported claim of XIA: that it readily supports and enables network evolution, collaboration, and interoperability—traits we view as central to the success of any future Internet architecture.This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under awards CNS-1040800, CNS-1345307 and CNS-1347525

Social Choice with Analytic Preferences

A social welfare function is a mapping from a set of profiles of individual preference orderings to the set of social orderings of a universal set of alternatives. A social choice correspondence specifies a nonempty subset of the agenda for each admissible preference profile and each admissible agenda. We provide examples of economic and political preference domains for which the Arrow social welfare function axioms are inconsistent, but whose choice-theoretic counterparts (with nondictatorship strengthened to anonymity) yield a social choice correspondence possibility theorem when combined with a natural agenda domain. In both examples, agendas are compact subsets of the nonnegative orthant of a multidimensional Euclidean space. In our first possibility theorem, we consider the standard Euclidean spatial model used in many political models. An agenda can be interpreted as being the feasible vectors of public goods given the resource constraints faced by a legislature. Preferences are restricted to be Euclidean spatial preferences. Our second possibility theorem is for economic domains. Alternatives are interpreted as being vectors of public goods. Preferences are monotone and representable by an analytic utility function with no critical points. Convexity of preferences can also be assumed. Many of the utility functions used in economic models, such as Cobb-Douglas and CES, are analytic. Further, the set of monotone, convex, and analytic preference orderings is dense in the set of continuous, monotone, convex preference orderings. Thus, our preference domain is a large subset of the classical domain of economic preferences. An agenda can be interpreted as the set of feasible allocations given an initial resource endowment and the firms' production technologies. To establish this theorem, an ordinal version of the Analytic Continuation Principle is developed.