Securing Our Future Homes: Smart Home Security Issues and Solutions

The Internet of Things, commonly known as IoT, is a new technology transforming businesses, individuals’ daily lives and the operation of entire countries. With more and more devices becoming equipped with IoT technology, smart homes are becoming increasingly popular. The components that make up a smart home are at risk for different types of attacks; therefore, security engineers are developing solutions to current problems and are predicting future types of attacks. This paper will analyze IoT smart home components, explain current security risks, and suggest possible solutions. According to “What is a Smart Home” (n.d.), a smart home is a home that always operates in consideration of security, energy, efficiency and convenience, whether anyone is home or not

Gut microbiota as a trigger of accelerated directional adaptive evolution. Acquisition of herbivory in the context of extracellular vesicles, microRNAs and inter-kingdom crosstalk

According to a traditional view, the specific diet in vertebrates is one of the key factors structuring the composition of the gut microbiota. In this interpretation, the microbiota assumes a subordinate position, where the larger host shapes, through evolution and its fitness, the taxonomical composition of the hosted microbiota. The present contribution shows how the evolution of herbivory, framed within the new concept of holobiont, the possibility of inter-kingdom crosstalk and its epigenetic effects, could pave the way to a completely reversed interpretation: instead of being passively shaped, the microbiota can mold and shape the general host body structure to increase its fitness. Central elements to consider in this context are the inter-kingdom crosstalk, the possibility of transporting RNAs through nanovesicles in feces from parents to offspring, and the activation of epigenetic processes passed on vertically from generation to generation. The new hypothesis is that the gut microbiota could play a great role in the macroevolutionary dynamics of herbivorous vertebrates, causing directly through host-microbiota dialog of epigenetic nature (i.e., methylation, histone acetylation, etc.), major changes in the organisms phenotype. The vertical exchange of the same microbial communities from parents to offspring, the interaction of these microbes with fairly uniform genotypes, and the socially restricted groups where these processes take place, could all explain the reasons why herbivory has appeared several time (and independently) during the evolution of vertebrates. The new interpretation could also represent a key factor in understanding the convergent evolution of analogous body structures in very distant lineages

Comment on “Presidents and the Politics of Structure”

Terry Moe and Scott Wilson\u27s (1994) theory elaborating on the president\u27s countervailing institutional motivation to strengthen and consolidate the bureaucracy under presidential control is examined. The omission of political parties and courts from the analysis could have altered some of their conclusions on comparative institutional advantages

Seven Years with the Swift Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients Project

Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients (SFXTs) are HMXBs with OB supergiant companions. I review the results of the Swift SFXT Project, which since 2007 has been exploiting Swift's capabilities in a systematic study of SFXTs and supergiant X-ray binaries (SGXBs) by combining follow-ups of outbursts, when detailed broad-band spectroscopy is possible, with long-term monitoring campaigns, when the out-of-outburst fainter states can be observed. This strategy has led us to measure their duty cycles as a function of luminosity, to extract their differential luminosity distributions in the soft X-ray domain, and to compare, with unprecedented detail, the X-ray variability in these different classes of sources. I also discuss the "seventh year crisis", the challenges that the recent Swift observations are making to the prevailing models attempting to explain the SFXT behaviour.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. Review paper for "Swift 10 Years of Discovery" conference. Accepted for Publication in the Journal of High Energy Astrophysic

Entanglement magnification induced by local manipulations

We study the entanglement capability of the evolution of a pair of qubits evolving under unitary dynamics, when the local dynamical parameters cannot be modified during the time-evolution. Unlike the fast local control regime, we find that local and non-local contributions to the dynamics are strictly interconnected. Moreover, it is possible to strongly increase the entanglement capability by suitably initializing the characteristic energies of the two parties.Comment: 4 page

Frobenius structures on double Hurwitz spaces

We construct Frobenius structures of "dual type" on the moduli space of ramified coverings of $\mathbb{P}^1$ with given ramification type over two points, generalizing a construction of Dubrovin. A complete hierarchy of hydrodynamic type is obtained from the corresponding deformed flat connection. This provides a suitable framework for the Whitham theory of an enlarged class of integrable hierarchies; we treat as examples the q-deformed Gelfand-Dickey hierarchy and the sine-Gordon equation, and compute the corresponding solutions of the WDVV equations.Comment: 28 page

The K+→π+ννˉK^+ \rightarrow \pi^+ \nu \bar{\nu} decay in the NA62 experiment at CERN

The main aim of the NA62 experiment at CERN is to study the rare $K^+ \rightarrow \pi^+ \nu \bar{\nu}$ decay and measure its Branching Ratio (BR) with $10$ precision. Due to its theoretical precision, this decay is an excellent probe to test the presence of New Physics (NP) at the highest scale complementary to LHC. At less than one month from the starting of the NA62 pilot run, the motivations, strategy and status of the experiment are described.Comment: Presented at "The 8th International Workshop on the CKM Unitarity Triangle" (CKM 2014), Vienna, Austria, September 8-12, 201