A privacy awareness system for software design

There have been concerting policy and legal initiatives to mitigate the privacy harm resulting from badly designed software technology. But one main challenge to realizing these initiatives is the difficulty in translating proposed principles and regulations into concrete and verifiable evidence in technology. This is partly due to the lack of systematic techniques and tools to address privacy in the software design, hence making it difficult for the designer to measure disclosure risk in a more intuitive way, taking into account the privacy objective that matters to each end user. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework for verifying the satisfaction of user privacy objectives in software design. Our approach is based on the (un)awareness that users acquire when information is disclosed, as it relates to the communication properties of objects in a design. This property is used to determine the expected privacy utility that users will derive from the design for a specified privacy objective. We demonstrate through case studies how this approach can help designers determine which design decision undermines users’ privacy expectations and better design alternatives

Privacy conflict analysis in web interaction models

User privacy has become an important topic with strong implications for the manner by which software systems are designed and used. However, it is not a straightforward consideration on how the instrumentation of data processing activities contribute to the privacy risk of data subjects when interacting with data processors online. In this work, we present a series of methods to assist Data Protection Officers (DPOs) in the modelling and review of data processing activity between data processors online. We articulate an awareness formalism to model the knowledge gain of data processors and the privacy expectations of a data subject. Privacy conflict is defined in this work as an event where the expectations of the data subject do not align with the data processors knowledge gain resulting from data processing activity. We introduce a Selenium workflow for the elicitation of data processing activity of web services online in the creation of an information flow network model. We further articulate a series of privacy anti-patterns to be matched as attributes on this model to identify data processing activity between two data processors facilitating conflict between data subjects and processors. Each anti-pattern illustrates a distinct manner by which conflict can arise on the information flow model. We define privacy risk as the ratio of third party data processors that facilitate an anti-pattern to the total number of third party data processors connected to a first party data processor. Risk in turn quantifies the privacy harm a data subject may incur when interacting with data processors online. Pursuant to the reduction of privacy risk, we present a multi objective approach to model the inherit tensions of balancing the utility of a data subject against the cost incurred by a data processor in the removal of anti-patterns. We present our approach to first elicit the Pareto efficient set of anti-patterns, before operating on a utility function of programmable biases to output a single recommendation. We evaluate our approach against trivial selection strategies to reduce privacy risk and illustrate the key benefit of a granular approach to analysis. We conclude this work with an outlook on how the work can be expanded along with critical reflections

Quasi-Periodic Pulsations during the Impulsive and Decay phases of an X-class Flare

Quasi-periodic pulsations (QPP) are often observed in X-ray emission from solar flares. To date, it is unclear what their physical origins are. Here, we present a multi-instrument investigation of the nature of QPP during the impulsive and decay phases of the X1.0 flare of 28 October 2013. We focus on the character of the fine structure pulsations evident in the soft X-ray time derivatives and compare this variability with structure across multiple wavelengths including hard X-ray and microwave emission. We find that during the impulsive phase of the flare, high correlations between pulsations in the thermal and non-thermal emissions are seen. A characteristic timescale of ~20s is observed in all channels and a second timescale of ~55s is observed in the non-thermal emissions. Soft X-ray pulsations are seen to persist into the decay phase of this flare, up to 20 minutes after the non-thermal emission has ceased. We find that these decay phase thermal pulsations have very small amplitude and show an increase in characteristic timescale from ~40s up to ~70s. We interpret the bursty nature of the co-existing multi-wavelength QPP during the impulsive phase in terms of episodic particle acceleration and plasma heating. The persistent thermal decay phase QPP are most likely connected with compressive MHD processes in the post-flare loops such as the fast sausage mode or the vertical kink mode.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

Internal Stipe Necrosis of Agaricus bisporus - Etiology and Molecular Genetic Studies

The button mushroom, Agaricus bisporus is the most popular mushroom in cultivation worldwide, and is the most valuable protected crop in the UK, with an estimated wholesale value exceeding £250 million. In 1991 a new disease emerged in mushroom crops in the UK, called Internal Stipe Necrosis (ISN). Crop losses due to this disease may reach 10 %, since affected mushrooms must be downgraded or discarded. Symptoms take the form of a variable browning reaction in the central region of the mushroom stipe, which may also demonstrate varying degrees of internal collapse. During an exhaustive study of ISN over the past 3 years, it was found that an unusual enteric bacterium was consistently associated with the disease, along with diverse members of the Pseudomonas fluorescens complex, which probably represent secondary colonisers. Several strains of the enteric bacterium reproduced ISN symptoms in trials in which mushrooms were injected with bacteria and in trials where bacteria were sprayed onto otherwise normal mushroom beds. Isolates collected from deliberate infection experiments were shown to be identical to the applied strains by the use of restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) studies, using a cloned 16s rRNA gene isolated from a representative strain of the enteric bacteria. These bacteria therefore appear to satisfy Koch's Postulates as the causative agent of ISN. Conventional biochemical profiles identified the ISN causative agent as Ewingella americana, an unusual species previously unknown in mushrooms or their growing environment. This identification was confirmed by genomic DNA hybridisation using a range of reference strains taxonomically related to and including E. americana. Evidence presented suggests that E. americana produces a single endo-acting chitinase. The significance of this enzyme in ISN pathogenesis is discussed. This 33 kDa enzyme has been purified by hydrophobic interaction chromatography and the encoding gene cloned and expressed in E. coli. Sequence analysis of this gene (designated chiA) revealed an open reading frame of 921 bp, with a deduced peptide size corresponding closely to the size of the purified enzyme. The deduced amino acid sequence was most similar to the chitinase II of Aeromonas sp. No. 10S-24 and, to a lesser extent, the chitinase of Saccharopolyspora erythraeus. Alignment with other chitinases, however, revealed very low homology with the exception of two conserved motifs in the catalytic domain of these enzymes. The E. americana sequence also lacks the chitin binding and Type III fibronectin homology units common to many bacterial chitinases. Deletion of a conserved motif, which has previously been implicated as forming the active site of chitinases, produced a product retaining significant chitinolytic activity. Such evidence may lead to a reappraisal of the significance of this motif in catalysis

Detection and Interpretation Of Long-Lived X-Ray Quasi-Periodic Pulsations in the X-Class Solar Flare On 2013 May 14

Quasi-periodic pulsations (QPP) seen in the time derivative of the GOES soft X-ray light curves are analyzed for the near-limb X3.2 event on 14 May 2013. The pulsations are apparent for a total of at least two hours from the impulsive phase to well into the decay phase, with a total of 163 distinct pulses evident to the naked eye. A wavelet analysis shows that the characteristic time scale of these pulsations increases systematically from $\sim$25 s at 01:10 UT, the time of the GOES peak, to $\sim$100 s at 02:00 UT. A second ridge in the wavelet power spectrum, most likely associated with flaring emission from a different active region, shows an increase from $\sim$40 s at 01:40 UT to $\sim$100 s at 03:10 UT. We assume that the QPP that produced the first ridge result from vertical kink-mode oscillations of the newly formed loops following magnetic reconnection in the coronal current sheet. This allows us to estimate the magnetic field strength as a function of altitude given the density, loop length, and QPP time scale as functions of time determined from the GOES light curves and RHESSI images. The calculated magnetic field strength of the newly formed loops ranges from about $\sim$500 G at an altitude of 24 Mm to a low value of $\sim$10 G at 60 Mm, in general agreement with the expected values at these altitudes. Fast sausage mode oscillations are also discussed and cannot be ruled out as an alternate mechanism for producing the QPP