Modeling Terrorist Radicalization

Recent high-profile terrorism arrests and litigation in New York, Colorado, and Detroit have brought public attention to the question of how the government should respond to the possibility of domestic-origin terrorism linked to al Qaeda. This symposium essay identifies and discussing one emerging approach in the United States and Europe which attends to the process of terrorist “radicalization.” States on both sides of the Atlantic are investing increasingly in developing an epistemology of terrorist violence. The results have implications for how policing resources are allocated, whether privacy rights are respected, and how religious liberty may be exercised. This essay traces the development of state discourses on “radicalization” in the United States and the United Kingdom. It argues that understanding this new “radicalization” discourse entails attention to interactions between nations and between the federal government and states as well as to the political economy of counter-terrorism

Locally Self-Adjusting Skip Graphs

We present a distributed self-adjusting algorithm for skip graphs that minimizes the average routing costs between arbitrary communication pairs by performing topological adaptation to the communication pattern. Our algorithm is fully decentralized, conforms to the $\mathcal{CONGEST}$ model (i.e. uses $O(\log n)$ bit messages), and requires $O(\log n)$ bits of memory for each node, where $n$ is the total number of nodes. Upon each communication request, our algorithm first establishes communication by using the standard skip graph routing, and then locally and partially reconstructs the skip graph topology to perform topological adaptation. We propose a computational model for such algorithms, as well as a yardstick (working set property) to evaluate them. Our working set property can also be used to evaluate self-adjusting algorithms for other graph classes where multiple tree-like subgraphs overlap (e.g. hypercube networks). We derive a lower bound of the amortized routing cost for any algorithm that follows our model and serves an unknown sequence of communication requests. We show that the routing cost of our algorithm is at most a constant factor more than the amortized routing cost of any algorithm conforming to our computational model. We also show that the expected transformation cost for our algorithm is at most a logarithmic factor more than the amortized routing cost of any algorithm conforming to our computational model

Towards Automatic Capturing of Manual Data Processing Provenance

Often data processing is not implemented by a work ow system or an integration application but is performed manually by humans along the lines of a more or less specified procedure. Collecting provenance information during manual data processing can not be automated. Further, manual collection of provenance information is error prone and time consuming. Therefore, we propose to infer provenance information based on the read and write access of users. The derived provenance information is complete, but has a low precision. Therefore, we propose further to introducing organizational guidelines in order to improve the precision of the inferred provenance information

Launch disasters in Bangladesh: a geographical study

Bangladesh is a riverine country and communication by waterways is of great importance especially in the southern region of the country. From Chandpur southwards, waterway is the only means of transport and so a large number of people has to travel by motor launches in the coastal areas and inland. Since the early 1950's, motor launch services have become popular and in the period 1997-98 there were 1,853 registered launches operating 227 routes. But this important mode is ridden with tragic disasters every year, incurring a heavy toll of human lives. Since 1977, there were 248 motor launch accidents recorded by BIWTA (Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority) with a loss of 2,309 1ives, 374 persons injured and 208 persons missing. This paper attempts to roughly trace out the causes and the geographical distribution of the accidents through an analysis of a time series data covering the period between 1977 and 2000. It was found that the most frequent type or cause of launch accidents was collision, followed by foundering and overloading. The least frequent accident types were due to under-water currents, shoals, leaning electricity poles and country boats travelling without lights at night and manned by untrained operators, followed by cyclones. Interestingly, overcrowding did not seem to be the most typical of launch disasters in the countr

Design and Operational Modifications to Model IV FCCUs to Improve Dynamic Performance

Model IV Fluid Catalytic Cracking Units (FCCUs) differ from other cracking units in that model IV FCCUs do not have slide valves in the catalyst circulation lines to enable direct control of catalyst circulation rate through the unit. Reducing fluctuations in catalyst circulation rate is found to significantly improve closed loop performance of the FCCU. Some design and operational modifications that can be made to model IV FCCUs to improve closed loop performance at the regulatory level based on this insight are modeled and compared. Closed loop performance of a model IV FCCU operated with the weir and standpipe always flooded is examined. The achievable performance is significantly better than that of the standard model IV FCCU. The closed loop performance of the model IV FCCU modified to incorporate slide valves in the catalyst circulation lines is also examined. The performance of the FCCU with slide valves is better than the performance achievable by the FCCU with the weir flooded. It is found that model IV FCCUs are ill-conditioned owing to the use of the weir and standpipe arrangement in the regenerator section. Both the operational and design modifications studied reduce plant ill-conditioning appreciably