Justice online: a new kind of justice?

It is a fact that mediation and other alternative dispute resolution means are becoming increasingly popular. Actually, governments are encouraging people to use them instead of going to Court, as they are quicker, cheaper and more informal than trials, and can be implemented using internet. The author focus on the analysis of the structure and purposes of mediation, in particular. The paper aims to discuss and understand what kind of justice, if any, is offered by alternative dispute resolution

Autonomic Cloud Computing: Open Challenges and Architectural Elements

As Clouds are complex, large-scale, and heterogeneous distributed systems, management of their resources is a challenging task. They need automated and integrated intelligent strategies for provisioning of resources to offer services that are secure, reliable, and cost-efficient. Hence, effective management of services becomes fundamental in software platforms that constitute the fabric of computing Clouds. In this direction, this paper identifies open issues in autonomic resource provisioning and presents innovative management techniques for supporting SaaS applications hosted on Clouds. We present a conceptual architecture and early results evidencing the benefits of autonomic management of Clouds.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conference keynote pape

A Reliable and Cost-Efficient Auto-Scaling System for Web Applications Using Heterogeneous Spot Instances

Cloud providers sell their idle capacity on markets through an auction-like mechanism to increase their return on investment. The instances sold in this way are called spot instances. In spite that spot instances are usually 90% cheaper than on-demand instances, they can be terminated by provider when their bidding prices are lower than market prices. Thus, they are largely used to provision fault-tolerant applications only. In this paper, we explore how to utilize spot instances to provision web applications, which are usually considered availability-critical. The idea is to take advantage of differences in price among various types of spot instances to reach both high availability and significant cost saving. We first propose a fault-tolerant model for web applications provisioned by spot instances. Based on that, we devise novel auto-scaling polices for hourly billed cloud markets. We implemented the proposed model and policies both on a simulation testbed for repeatable validation and Amazon EC2. The experiments on the simulation testbed and the real platform against the benchmarks show that the proposed approach can greatly reduce resource cost and still achieve satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of response time and availability

SLA-Oriented Resource Provisioning for Cloud Computing: Challenges, Architecture, and Solutions

Cloud computing systems promise to offer subscription-oriented, enterprise-quality computing services to users worldwide. With the increased demand for delivering services to a large number of users, they need to offer differentiated services to users and meet their quality expectations. Existing resource management systems in data centers are yet to support Service Level Agreement (SLA)-oriented resource allocation, and thus need to be enhanced to realize cloud computing and utility computing. In addition, no work has been done to collectively incorporate customer-driven service management, computational risk management, and autonomic resource management into a market-based resource management system to target the rapidly changing enterprise requirements of Cloud computing. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of SLA-oriented resource management. The proposed architecture supports integration of marketbased provisioning policies and virtualisation technologies for flexible allocation of resources to applications. The performance results obtained from our working prototype system shows the feasibility and effectiveness of SLA-based resource provisioning in Clouds.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Conference Keynote Paper: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC 2011, IEEE Press, USA), Hong Kong, China, December 12-14, 201

Entradas para um Dicionário de Estética - Vanitas Vanitas et Vanitatem - Vanitas Vanitatum - Vanitas Vanitatis et Omnia Vanitas.

As VANITAS (vaidades) são as expressões artísticas que traduzem, de maneira simbólica e num registo eloquente, sibilino, a nossa relação conflituosa com a morte. São formas artísticas históricas, datadas no tempo (e no entanto de sentido intemporal), que nos confrontam com a maior doença colectiva da humanidade, que é a angústia que resulta da consciência aguda da mortalidade

(...) um tal picardo que pinta uns monos e uns grandes sardões

Património também é preservação do presente, porque é preciso dar um passado memorável ao nosso futuro. Este texto regista o património "de véspera" (da região), ... móvel, ainda que objectual... bens estimáveis, apesar de significativamente mais efémeros do que as construções duradouras! A ideia de Património releva sempre para um universo de valores de memorabilae excelentíssima, passado preservado, memória conservada, e nomeia, invariavelmente, antiguidades e monumentos. É de um renovar da nomeação que consta este texto, que se quer interventivo e mobilizador. Porque a memória historiável, pretérito edificante, de excepção, testemunhal, materializado o seu registo em necessária política de conservação, porque merecedor da posteridade possível, envolve também o passado recentíssimo (a que o marco cronológico do fim do ano, século e milénio, preteriu contudo para o século passado)

Carl Schmitt and international relations - actuality and theoretical position

Carl Schmitt (1888-1885) is one of the great absentees from the university in Portugal. We can even say that Portugal is one of the most arid landscapes existing in European lands regarding Schmittian studies (although a reference is due, among others, to Professor Alexandre Franco de Sá, the main disseminator and translator of his work in our country). Author of a multifaceted oeuvre, he influenced several disciplines - constitutional and international law, political science, history of ideas, political philosophy, and political theology - as well as international relations and its history, geopolitics and polemology. Breaking paradigms, he left us a "heterodox" work (Odisseos and Petito, 2007: 11), where his intuition about the concept of the political stands out naturally; but he was also a man who lived in a dangerous moment, in an almost permanent state of exception, who suffered temptations and disillusions, who was judged by the authorities and, more severely, by the people. Especially by his peers. Momentary adhesion to the Third Reich was at the basis of his demonization and exclusion from the university (Balakrishnan, 2006: 27), he who was a Catholic conservative and one of the central figures of the "Conservative Revolution" movement (Mohler, 1993: 661) and even, during the Weimar Republic, tried to prevent Hitler from coming to power. In this article we will focus on Carl Schmitt's contribution to international relations. But why talk about him now? Because we cannot fail to highlight - whether we agree with him or not - his concept of the political; because we believe that some of his theorizations – the case of the partisan or the great space - are important for the understanding of the moment we live in, namely regarding the changing international system, helping us to understand the emergence of the new civilization states and the concept of illiberal democracy; finally, because works such as "The Nomos of the Earth" should be part of the canon of mandatory readings of the discipline of International Relations. His trajectory is well known, especially in its more controversial aspects. By way of introduction, we will make a quick tour through his life, framing his personal evolution in the great trends of the century. Then, we will try to analyze some central aspects of his work, which constitute relevant contributions to the study of international relations. We will analyze the timeliness of his thought, seeking to prove - this is our ambition - that he is a "modern" and important author for understanding current events, and that he should be an obligatory reference in the discipline of international relations

VIoLET: A Large-scale Virtual Environment for Internet of Things

IoT deployments have been growing manifold, encompassing sensors, networks, edge, fog and cloud resources. Despite the intense interest from researchers and practitioners, most do not have access to large-scale IoT testbeds for validation. Simulation environments that allow analytical modeling are a poor substitute for evaluating software platforms or application workloads in realistic computing environments. Here, we propose VIoLET, a virtual environment for defining and launching large-scale IoT deployments within cloud VMs. It offers a declarative model to specify container-based compute resources that match the performance of the native edge, fog and cloud devices using Docker. These can be inter-connected by complex topologies on which private/public networks, and bandwidth and latency rules are enforced. Users can configure synthetic sensors for data generation on these devices as well. We validate VIoLET for deployments with > 400 devices and > 1500 device-cores, and show that the virtual IoT environment closely matches the expected compute and network performance at modest costs. This fills an important gap between IoT simulators and real deployments.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 24TH International European Conference On Parallel and Distributed Computing (EURO-PAR), August 27-31, 2018, Turin, Italy, europar2018.org. Selected as a Distinguished Paper for presentation at the Plenary Session of the conferenc

Filosofia Proudhoniana do Direito

Neste texto, a autora procura apresentar algumas reflexões sobre a importância do pensamento de Proudhon no contexto específico da filosofia do direito portuguesa, em especial, a que se produziu num momento histórico próximo ao tempo de vida deste autor, ou seja, no século XIX. Busca-se sobretudo um olhar para a sua obra que é feito à luz da filosofia do direito portu­guesa, tentando identificar os aspectos que esta tenha porventura ido beber às leituras de Proudhon. Todavia, acresce que não seria possível falar de forma coerente e substantiva sobre a influência da filosofia do direito de Proudhon em Portugal, no curto espaço de que dispomos, sem centrar a nossa análise no pen­ samento jurídico de um jusfilósofo em particular, Joaquim Maria Rodrigues de Brito, Professor da Faculdade de Leis da Universidade de Coimbra, no século XIX e autor de uma curta, mas interessante obra, cuja publicação criaria algumas "ondas de choque" no panorama da filosofia do direito portuguesa de então, dando origem, também no direito, a uma "questão coimbrã".info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio