Large-angle Polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and Reionization

We discuss the effect of matter reionization on the large-angular-scale anisotropy and polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) in the standard CDM model. We separate three cases in which the anisotropy is induced by pure scalar, pure tensor, and mixed metric perturbations respectively. It is found that, if reionization occurs early enough, the polarization can reach a detectable level of sequentially $6\%$, $9\%$, and $6.5\%$ of the anisotropy. In general, a higher degree of polarization implies a dominant contribution from the tensor mode or reionization at high redshift. Since early reionization will suppress small-scale CMBR anisotropies and polarizations significantly, measuring the polarization on few degree scales can be a direct probe of the reionization history of the early universe.Comment: Changes in the revised version: 1. Below Eq. (2), we demonstrate the method of our numerical work, by adding the evolution equations for the Legendre coefficents for both the scalar and tensor mode pertubations. 2. Below Eq. (9), we added a paragraph on discussing the basis we employed in computing the polarization correlation function. 3. In Sec. 4, we have rewritten the first and second paragraphs, where we illustrate how to the explain the discrepancies with the previous wor

Structures and Algorithms for Peer-to-Peer Cooperation

Peer-to-peer overlay networks are distributed systems, without any hierarchical organization or centralized control. Peers form self-organizing overlay networks that are on top of the Internet. Both parts of this thesis deal with peer-to-peer overlay networks, the first part with unstructured ones used to build a large scale Networked Virtual Environment. The second part gives insights on how the users of a real life structured peer-to-peer network behave, and how well the proposed algorithms for publishing and retrieving data work. Moreover we analyze the security (holes) in such a system. Networked virtual environments (NVEs), also known as distributed virtual environments, are computer-generated, synthetic worlds that allow simultaneous interactions of multiple participants. Many efforts have been made to allow people to interact in realistic virtual environments, resulting in the recent boom of Massively Multiplayer Online Games. In the first part of the thesis, we present a complete study of an augmented Delaunay-based overlay for peer-to-peer shared virtual worlds. We design an overlay network matching the Delaunay triangulation of the participating peers in a generalized d-dimensional space. Especially, we describe the self-organizing algorithms for peer insertion and deletion. To reduce the delay penalty of overlay routing, we propose to augment each node of the Delaunay-based overlay with a limited number of carefully selected shortcut links creating a small-world. We show that a small number of shortcuts is sufficient to significantly decrease the delay of routing in the space. We present a distributed algorithm for the clustering of peers. The algorithm is dynamic in the sense that whenever a peer joins or leaves the NVE, the clustering will be adapted if necessary by either splitting a cluster or merging clusters. The main idea of the algorithm is to classify links between adjacent peers into short intracluster and long inter-cluster links. In a structured system, the neighbor relationship between peers and data locations is strictly defined. Searching in such systems is therefore determined by the particular network architecture. Among the strictly structured systems, some implement a distributed hash table (DHT) using different data structures. DHTs have been actively studied in the literature and many different proposals have been made on how to organize peers in a DHT. However, very few DHTs have been implemented in real systems and deployed on a large scale. One exception is KAD, a DHT based on Kademlia, which is part of eDonkey, a peer-to-peer file sharing system with several million simultaneous users. In the second part of this thesis we give a detailed background on KAD, the organization of the peers, the search and the publish operations, and we describe our measurement methodology. We have been crawling KAD continuously for more than a year. We obtained information about geographical distribution of peers, session times, peer availability, and peer lifetime. We found that session times are Weibull distributed and show how this information can be exploited to make the publishing mechanism much more efficient. As we have been studying KAD over the course of the last two years we have been both, fascinated and frightened by the possibilities KAD offers. We show that mounting a Sybil attack is very easy in KAD and allows to compromise the privacy of KAD users, to compromise the correct operation of the key lookup and to mount distributed denial-of-service attacks with very little resources

Brauer-Thrall for totally reflexive modules over local rings of higher dimension

Let $R$ be a commutative Noetherian local ring. Assume that $R$ has a pair $\{x,y\}$ of exact zerodivisors such that $\dim R/(x,y)\ge2$ and all totally reflexive $R/(x)$-modules are free. We show that the first and second Brauer--Thrall type theorems hold for the category of totally reflexive $R$-modules. More precisely, we prove that, for infinitely many integers $n$, there exists an indecomposable totally reflexive $R$-module of multiplicity $n$. Moreover, if the residue field of $R$ is infinite, we prove that there exist infinitely many isomorphism classes of indecomposable totally reflexive $R$-modules of multiplicity $n$.Comment: to appear in Algebras and Representation Theor

SIGCHI Conference Proceedings Format

ABSTRACT In this paper we describe the formatting requirements for SIGCHI Conference Proceedings, and this sample file offers recommendations on writing for the worldwide SIGCHI readership. Please review this document even if you have submitted to SIGCHI conferences before, some format details have changed relative to previous years. Author Keywords Guides; instructions; author's kit; conference publications; keywords should be separated by a semi-colon. Mandatory section to be included in your final version. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI): Miscellaneous See: http://www.acm.org/about/class/1998/ for more information and the full list of ACM classifiers and descriptors. Mandatory section to be included in your final version. On the submission page only the classifiers' letter-number combination will need to be entered