Unified Governance and Planning for High Impact Events in Finance, Climate and Those Caused by Malice

In 2007, the US Transportation Security Administration agency said Boeing would use its Monte Carlo simulation model “to identify U.S. commercial aviation system vulnerabilities against a wide variety of attack scenarios.” The Boeing and TSA team that crafted the model said that because of the Monte Carlo method’s success, the agency is considering extending its use to the analysis of policy problems outside the realm of security. Perplexed by the complexity implied by the above announcement, I started looking for simpler ways of achieving the TSA objectives. Here are some of the conclusions.finance, transportation

DLR Schlussbericht e-Triage: Verbundprojekt Elektronische Betroffenenerfassung in Katastrophenfällen "e-Triage"; Teilvorhaben Synchronisation von verteilten Datenbanken über Satelliten- und terrestrische Netze

1. Derzeitiger Stand von Wissenschaft und Technik: Es existieren bereits eine Reihe frei verfügbarer und kommerziell vertriebener Replikationslösungen für Distributed Database Management Systems (DDBMS). Keines der bekannten Produkte erfüllte gänzlich die Anforderungen des e-Triage Projekts. 2. Begründung/Zielsetzung der Untersuchung: Die große Herausforderung im Einsatzgeschehen ist, verteilt vorliegende Daten zu aggregieren und allen beteiligten Entscheidungsträgern zeitgleich vorzulegen (Sanduhr-Modell). Die einzelnen Datenbanken müssen sich über die vorhandenen (möglicherweise unzuverlässigen) Übertragungskanäle automatisch synchronisieren. Außerdem müssen sich die Datenbanken gegenseitig finden. 3. Methode: Zunächst wurde ein passendes Open-Source-Projekt als Grundlage ausgewählt. In einem zweiten Schritt wurde der asynchrone Datenbankreplikator mit einer hocheffizienten Synchronisierungslösung verbunden. 4. Ergebnis: Die Arbeiten führten zu einem neuartigen Replikatorlösung, die problemlos mit Linkunterbrechungen umgehen kann. Die Ergebnisse wurden mit zwei Patenten geschützt. 5. Schlussfolgerung/Anwendungsmöglichkeiten: Neben dem MANV-Management sind alle Anwendungsbereiche denkbar, bei denen eine Instanz eines verteilten Datenbanksystems auf einem mobilen Terminal laufen soll. Möglich sind alle Bereiche der mobilen Datenerfassung, Logistik, Warenwirtschaft usw

Exchanging uncertainty: interoperable geostatistics?

Traditionally, geostatistical algorithms are contained within specialist GIS and spatial statistics software. Such packages are often expensive, with relatively complex user interfaces and steep learning curves, and cannot be easily integrated into more complex process chains. In contrast, Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) promote interoperability and loose coupling within distributed systems, typically using XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and Web services. Web services provide a mechanism for a user to discover and consume a particular process, often as part of a larger process chain, with minimal knowledge of how it works. Wrapping current geostatistical algorithms with a Web service layer would thus increase their accessibility, but raises several complex issues. This paper discusses a solution to providing interoperable, automatic geostatistical processing through the use of Web services, developed in the INTAMAP project (INTeroperability and Automated MAPping). The project builds upon Open Geospatial Consortium standards for describing observations, typically used within sensor webs, and employs Geography Markup Language (GML) to describe the spatial aspect of the problem domain. Thus the interpolation service is extremely flexible, being able to support a range of observation types, and can cope with issues such as change of support and differing error characteristics of sensors (by utilising descriptions of the observation process provided by SensorML). XML is accepted as the de facto standard for describing Web services, due to its expressive capabilities which allow automatic discovery and consumption by ‘naive’ users. Any XML schema employed must therefore be capable of describing every aspect of a service and its processes. However, no schema currently exists that can define the complex uncertainties and modelling choices that are often present within geostatistical analysis. We show a solution to this problem, developing a family of XML schemata to enable the description of a full range of uncertainty types. These types will range from simple statistics, such as the kriging mean and variances, through to a range of probability distributions and non-parametric models, such as realisations from a conditional simulation. By employing these schemata within a Web Processing Service (WPS) we show a prototype moving towards a truly interoperable geostatistical software architecture

General E-S-QUAL Scales Applied To Websites Satisfaction and Loyalty Model

This study considers E-S-QUAL and E-RecS-QUAL, the newly developed multiple-item scales for assessing electronic service quality (e-SQ) in E-commerce, as the antecedents to Website satisfaction and assesses their effects on online consumer satisfaction and loyalty. Using online survey data from those who had nonroutine encounters with Websites, this study examines and validates the effectiveness of the e-SQ in explaining the variance in the e-shoppers’ satisfaction and loyalty. The study results show that both E-S-QUAL and E-RecS-QUAL have strong and equal effects on satisfaction and loyalty, and all dimensions of these two constructs are important and influential factors to online satisfaction and loyalty. In addition, the mediating role of online satisfaction was assessed by using a structural equation modeling program when latent variables were included in the model. The findings constitute a contribution to, and extension of, the literature in the application of the e-SQ to Website service loyalty model and e-store management