Fighting Terror with Error: Effects of Fact-free Policy Making

Remittances

A Novel Handover Decision Policy for Reducing Power Transmissions in the two-tier LTE network

Femtocells are attracting a fast increasing interest nowadays, as a promising solution to improve indoor coverage, enhance system capacity, and lower transmit power. Technical challenges still remain, however, mainly including interference, security and mobility management, intercepting wide deployment and adoption from mobile operators and end users. This paper describes a novel handover decision policy for the two-tier LTE network, towards reducing power transmissions at the mobile terminal side. The proposed policy is LTE backward-compatible, as it can be employed by suitably adapting the handover hysteresis margin with respect to a prescribed SINR target and standard LTE measurements. Simulation results reveal that compared to the widely-adopted strongest cell policy, the proposed policy can greatly reduce the power consumption at the LTE mobile terminals, and lower the interference network-wide

An energy-centric handover decision algorithm for the integrated LTE macrocell–femtocell network

Femtocells are attracting a fast increasing interest nowadays, as a promising solution to improve indoor coverage and system capacity. Due to the short transmit-receive distance, femtocells can greatly lower transmit power, prolong handset battery life, and enhance the user-perceived Quality of Service (QoS). On the other hand, technical challenges still remain, mainly including interference mitigation, security and mobility management, intercepting wide deployment and adoption by both mobile operators and end users. This paper introduces a novel energy-centric handover decision policy and its accompanied algorithm, towards minimizing the power consumption at the mobile terminal side in the integrated LTE macrocell–femtocell network. The proposed policy is shown to extend the widely-adopted strongest cell policy, by suitably adapting the handover hysteresis margin in accordance with standardized LTE measurements on the tagged user’s neighbor cells. Performance evaluation results show that significantly lower interference and power consumption can be attained for the cost of a moderately increased number of network-wide handover executions events

Hidden agendas, social norms and why we need to re-think anti-corruption

In many countries high levels of corruption persist in spite of the adoption of so-called anti-corruption "best practices". In this paper we make a call to pursue a context-sensitive inquiry into the drivers of corruption in order to substantially improve the practices and effects of anti- corruption. We discuss evidence from case studies in Africa, Central Asia and the Caucasus suggesting that high levels of corruption are associated to a significant discrepancy between formal rules and informal practices. Informal practices of co-optation, control and camouflage are used by political and business elites to safeguard regime survival via a de facto re-distribution of public resources in favour of informal networks of "insiders". From the perspective of citizens, corrupt acts such as bribing enjoy social acceptability especially when they are effective in solving practical problems and protecting livelihoods. The functional relevance of informal practices clarifies the factors behind the limited effectiveness of anti-corruption law-driven reforms, short-term action plans, and technical measures that focus on particular processes, procedures and institutions. We argue for the need to ponder informality and consider how it may help us develop better anti-corruption strategies. The prevalence and entrenched nature of informal practices indicate their heuristic potential: they can tell us what we are missing in official policies, inform about resistances and can help uncover pathways to strategic, sustainable reforms

State and Corporate Drivers of Global Dysnomie: Horrendous Crimes and the Law

The press is awash with accounts of serious cross-border crimes; the responsibility for which is attributed to dangerous and radical groups. This has included the Islamic State, “bad apples” working in banks, organized criminal groups, and rogue state actors. The responses to these kinds of problems have ranged from a tsunami of international conventions against terrorism, transnational crime and corruption, intensified intelligence operations, military interventions, and humanitarian projects. As the current approaches do not seem to yield the desired results – as crime threats continue to grow – it is important to transcend discourses that individualize and externalize blame and examine structural sources of these risks in search of better, less costly, and more effective policies. Typically, crime control policies focus on supply rather than demand. For instance, policies focus on eliminating the production and exports of illegal drugs rather than trying to reduce the demand that gives rise to profitable illegal markets. In this analysis the approach is to look back and consider the role played by decisions, policies, and initiatives in the global North, by public and corporate actors. This is not merely an attempt at broadening accountability but a way to identify the extent to which neoliberal policies contribute to criminogenic processes. In order to shed light on these criminogenic processes, this chapter employs the analytical framework of global anomie theory (GAT) and focuses on two case studies. The first one is maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia, where efforts have centered on improving the governance of the state, tackling the al Shabaab group, and assisting with famine and economic challenges. The second one is the theft of the Chagossian nation, a case of forced eviction of an entire people against a host of basic international legal principles. Despite the globalization of media and availability of information on this case, it is a story that the mainstream media has ignored for the most part. Both case studies deal with what can be termed “horrendous crimes”, a term to capture a set of behaviors broader than those officially defined as illegal or criminal. With this term we refer to practices that constitute a serious threat and cost to society but may be deemed lawful by certain legal standards. We understand the essence of crime as: “misconduct that entails avoidable and unnecessary harm to society, which is serious enough to warrant state intervention and similar to other kinds of acts criminalized in the countries concerned” (Passas, 1999, p. 401). By using this broader definition we do not distance ourselves from legal standards, but seek to avoid national laws that may be unhelpful for the defining of global phenomena because of their domestic particularities, biases, and political agendas (Friedrichs, 2007). These crimes include transnational and international crime, as well as state, corporate, and state-corporate crimes. The latter crimes often fall below the radar of conventional criminology, but are crucial to consider since they exacerbate economic inequality within and across nations (UN, 2002) and have broader criminogenic effects. The chapter begins with an outline of the analytical framework, proceeds with the two case studies, and concludes with research and policy implications

Distance Distributions and Proximity Estimation Given Knowledge of the Heterogeneous Network Layout

Today's heterogeneous wireless network (HWN) is a collection of ubiquitous wireless networking elements (WNEs) that support diverse functional capabilities and networking purposes. In such a heterogeneous networking environment, proximity estimation will play a key role for the seamless support of emerging applications that span from the direct exchange of localized traffic between homogeneous WNEs (peer-to-peer communications) to positioning for autonomous systems using location information from the ubiquitous HWN infrastructure. Since most of the existing wireless networking technologies enable the direct (or indirect) estimation of the distances and angles between their WNEs, the integration of such spatial information is a natural solution for robustly handling the unprecedented demand for proximity estimation between the myriads of WNEs. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework that integrates existing knowledge of the HWN layout to enable proximity estimation between WNE supporting different radio access technologies (RATs). In this direction, we derive closed-form expressions for the distance distribution between two tagged WNEs given partial (or full) knowledge of the HWN topology. The derived expressions enable us to analyze how different levels of location-awareness affect the performance of proximity estimation between WNEs that are not necessarily capable of communicating directly. Optimal strategies for the deployment of WNEs, as means of maximizing the probability of successful proximity estimation between two WNEs of interest, are presented, and useful guidelines for the design of location-aware proximity estimation in the nowadays HWN are drawn