Blogging the Virtual: New Geographies of Domination and Resistance In and Beyond Russia

Russia’s accelerating authoritarian turn has not ignored the internet, and in recent years, the Russian state has clamped down on internet activities that diverge from the statist line, employing a variety of strategies to dominate online spaces. Nevertheless, oppositional voices flourish on the Russian internet, taking shape in independent blogs and videos. This paper explores three political bloggers through surveillant and resistance assemblages, making sense of this contestation through an interpretation of the Deleuzian virtual that underscores the emancipatory potential of online activities for producing more egalitarian configurations, but also taking stock of the ways that these technologies have increased domination. Encompassing the blurriness between digital and corporeal spaces, the paper contributes by revealing new geographies of contestation against state strategies to dominate the Russian internet. Overlapping with but not corresponding to Russian territorial boundaries, these dynamics highlight shifting spaces of power and resistance in the increasingly illiberal world

Climate change, water security and the need for integrated policy development: the case of on-farm infrastructure investment in the Australian irrigation sector

The Australian Government is currently addressing the challenge of increasing water scarcity through significant on-farm infrastructure investment to facilitate the adoption of new water-efficient pressurized irrigation systems. However, it is highly likely that conversion to these systems will increase on-farm energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, suggesting potential conflicts in terms of mitigation and adaptation policies. This study explored the trade-offs associated with the adoption of more water efficient but energy-intensive irrigation technologies by developing an integrated assessment framework. Integrated analysis of five case studies revealed trade-offs between water security and environmental security when conversion to pressurized irrigation systems was evaluated in terms of fuel and energy-related emissions, except in cases where older hand-shift sprinkler irrigation systems were replaced. These results suggest that priority should be given, in implementing on-farm infrastructure investment policy, to replacing inefficient and energy-intensive sprinkler irrigation systems such as hand-shift and roll-line. The results indicated that associated changes in the use of agricultural machinery and agrochemicals may also be important. The findings of this study support the use of an integrated approach to avoid possible conflicts in designing national climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, both of which are being developed in Australia

Investigation of the characteristics of thermoluminescence glow curves of natural hydrothermal quartz from Hakkari area in Turkey

In this study the dosimetric characteristics of some natural hydrothermal quartz (NHQJ samples collected from 1-Iakkari were investigated by using the thermoluminescence (TL) technique for the purpose of determining whether they are suitable as dosimetric materials or not and calculating the kinetic parameters. The experiments carried out can be outlined as: analyzing TL glow curves of NHQ; determining the annealing conditions; the effects of pre-irradiation annealing procedures on TL sensitivity; the investigation of the characteristics of TL glow curves obtained after annealing the samples; determination of the trap parameters with the computerized glow curve deconvolution (CGCD) method and the peak shape (PS) method. The obtained results showed that the trap depths and the frequency factor values are consistent with the literature. The studied samples have linear dose responses for the absorbed doses ranging between ~6689 Gy and ~301 Gy. In conclusion, the examined quartz samples can be used as dosimetric materials in high dose applications. © 2013 Elsevier BY. All rights reserved.105Y349This study was carried out at the Cukurova University and Adiyaman University, Department of Physics . We are grateful to TUBITAK (Turkish Scientific and Technology Research Council) for its financial support under the Contract no. 105Y349 to purchase RISO TL/OSL DA-20 equipment

A Theoretical Framework for Data-Hiding in Digital and Printed Text Documents

In this work, we consider the text data-hiding problem as a particular instance of the well-known Gel’fand-Pinsker problem [1]. The text, where some message m ∈ M is to be hidden, is represented by x and called cover text. Each component xi, i = 1,2,...,N, of x represents one character from this text. Here, we define a character as an element from a given language alphabet (e.g. the latin alphabet {A, B,..., Z}). To be more precise, we conceive each character xi as a data structure consisting of multiple component fields (features): name, shape, position, orientation, size, color, etc. Assuming the knowledge of the conditional probability distribution p(u|x), |M||J | codewords u are generated independently at random and located into |M | bins, each of them with |J | codewords. Once generated, the codebook is revealed to both the encoder and the decoder. Given m to be communicated, the encoder produces the watermark w by finding first a jointly strongly typical pair (x,u(m,j)), where u(m,j) is the j-th codeword inside the bin corresponding to m, and then, by using a deterministic mapping w = ϕ N (x,u). The influence o

Text Data-Hiding for Digital and Printed Documents: Theoretical and Practical Considerations

In this paper, we propose a new theoretical framework for the data-hiding problem of digital and printed text documents. We explain how this problem can be seen as an instance of the well-known Gel'fand-Pinsker problem. The main idea for this interpretation is to consider a text character as a data structure consisting of multiple quantifiable features such as shape, position, orientation, size, color, etc. We also introduce color quantization, a new semi-fragile text data-hiding method that is fully automatable, has high information embedding rate, and can be applied to both digital and printed text documents. The main idea of this method is to quantize the color or luminance intensity of each character in such a manner that the human visual system is not able to distinguish between the original and quantized characters, but it can be easily performed by a specialized reader machine. We also describe halftone quantization, a related method that applies mainly to printed text documents. Since these methods may not be completely robust to printing and scanning, an outer coding layer is proposed to solve this issue. Finally, we describe a practical implementation of the color quantization method and present experimental results for comparison with other existing methods

A Theoretical Framework for Data-Hiding Data Hiding in Digital and Printed Text Documents

• Is the problem of text data-hiding data hiding too difficult to solve? • Answer depends on the application requirements: • If robust data-hiding is required (e.g. copyright protection): probably YES, the attacker can always use Optical Character Recognition. • If either semi-fragile or fragile data-hiding is required (e.g. identification, authentication and tamper proofing): NO • Goals: • New theoretical framework for the text data-hiding problem. • New semi-fragile text data-hiding method, color quantization, that is fully automatable, has high information embedding rate, is resistant to printing and scanning, and can be applied to both digital and printed text documents. Gel’fand Gel fand-Pinske