How Should America's Anti-Terrorism Budget Be Allocated? Findings from a National Survey of Attitudes of U.S. Residents about Terrorism

U.S. residents are very concerned about future terrorist attacks and they are willing to commit substantial sums to prevent further terrorist acts. Protecting against another 9/11 style incident is important, but U.S. residents are more concerned about protecting the food supply system and preventing release of chemical or biological agents in public areas. On average respondents would allocate 13.3 percent more to protect the food supply chain and 12.0 percent more to protect against release of a toxic chemical or biological agent than they would to protect against another terrorist attack using hijacked aircraft. Approximately $5 billion is currently spent to protect civil aviation. The 2006 budget provided$8.6 billion of fiscal authority for programs protecting against all types of catastrophic terrorist incidents, including protection against radiological or nuclear incidents, as well as protecting the food supply and preventing chemical or biological attacks. No one would argue that decisions on the size and internal allocation of the nation's homeland security budget should be made on the basis of a public opinion survey, but this survey indicates that Americans would likely support additional spending to defend the food system and protect against release of a chemical or biological agent.Political Economy,

Defending America's Food Supply Against Terrorism: Who is Responsible? Who Should Pay?

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Q18, H44, H56,

On orthogonal generalized equitable rectangles

In this note, we give a complete solution of the existence of orthogonal generalized equitable rectangles, which was raised as an open problem in [4]. Key words: orthogonal latin squares, orthogonal equitable rectangles,

A unified approach to combinatorial key predistribution schemes for sensor networks

There have been numerous recent proposals for key predistribution schemes for wireless sensor networks based on various types of combinatorial structures such as designs and codes. Many of these schemes have very similar properties and are analysed in a similar manner. We seek to provide a unified framework to study these kinds of schemes. To do so, we define a new, general class of designs, termed “partially balanced t-designs”, that is sufficiently general that it encompasses almost all of the designs that have been proposed for combinatorial key predistribution schemes. However, this new class of designs still has sufficient structure that we are able to derive general formulas for the metrics of the resulting key predistribution schemes. These metrics can be evaluated for a particular scheme simply by substituting appropriate parameters of the underlying combinatorial structure into our general formulas. We also compare various classes of schemes based on different designs, and point out that some existing proposed schemes are in fact identical, even though their descriptions may seem different. We believe that our general framework should facilitate the analysis of proposals for combinatorial key predistribution schemes and their comparison with existing schemes, and also allow researchers to easily evaluate which scheme or schemes present the best combination of performance metrics for a given application scenario

Orthogonal Arrays of Strength Three from Regular 3-Wise Balanced Designs

The construction given in Kreher, J Combin Des 4 (1996) 67 is extended to obtain new infinite families of orthogonal arrays of strength 3. Regular 3-wise balanced designs play a central role in this construction

On 1-factorizations of Bipartite Kneser Graphs

It is a challenging open problem to construct an explicit 1-factorization of the bipartite Kneser graph $H(v,t)$, which contains as vertices all $t$-element and $(v-t)$-element subsets of $[v]:=\{1,\ldots,v\}$ and an edge between any two vertices when one is a subset of the other. In this paper, we propose a new framework for designing such 1-factorizations, by which we solve a nontrivial case where $t=2$ and $v$ is an odd prime power. We also revisit two classic constructions for the case $v=2t+1$ --- the \emph{lexical factorization} and \emph{modular factorization}. We provide their simplified definitions and study their inner structures. As a result, an optimal algorithm is designed for computing the lexical factorizations. (An analogous algorithm for the modular factorization is trivial.)Comment: We design the first explicit 1-factorization of H(2,q), where q is a odd prime powe

How To Ensure Forward and Backward Untraceability of RFID Identification Schemes By Using A Robust PRBG

In this paper, we analyze an RFID identification scheme which is designed to provide forward untraceability and backward untraceability. We show that if a standard cryptographic pseudorandom bit generator (PRBG) is used in the scheme, then the scheme may fail to provide forward untraceability and backward untraceability. To achieve the desired untraceability features, the scheme can use a robust PRBG which provides forward security and backward security. We also note that the backward security is stronger than necessary for the backward untraceability of the scheme