Blood is Thicker than Water: Family Ties to Political Power Worldwide

This article analyzes the relevance of family ties for the recruitment of chief executives - presidents or prime ministers - with special emphasis on gender. Based on a cross-national data-set examining political chief executives from 2000-2017 in five world regions (Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America), we test several hypotheses and present four main results. First, belonging to a political family (BPF), is an advantage to entering national executive positions around the world, for both democracies and non-democracies. Among those with a sizeable number of executives in this period, regions range from 9 percent (Africa) to 13 percent (Latin America and Europe) of executives BPF. Second, executives’ family ties are more powerful (with a previous chief executive) in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and more direct (with an immediate family member) in Asia and Africa. Across the globe, women only made up 6% of chief executives in the time period. Third, females who manage to become chief executives are more often BPF than their male counterparts, particularly in Asia and Latin America. Fourth, regardless of region, family ties nearly always originate from men, not women

Restauration d'images floutées & bruitées par une variante originale de la variation totale

National audienceDans cet article, nous introduisons une nouvelle variante de la variation totale (TV ) dont l'objectif est de simplifier la restauration d'images à base de TV lorsque cellesci sont dégradées par un noyau qui se calcule facilement du côté Fourier (flou, transformée de Radon,...). L'idée est de remplacer simplement le terme TV par la norme L1 d'un certain champ de vecteur, pour lequel l'optimisation est beaucoup plus facile. Cette approche nous permet ainsi d'utiliser un algorithme récent et rapide pour restaurer entre autres des images bruitées et floutées. Nous comparons notre approche avec la méthode classique basée sur la variation totale et montrons sa supériorité

Window Based BFT Blockchain Consensus

There is surge of interest to the blockchain technology not only in the scientific community but in the business community as well. Proof of Work (PoW) and Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) are the two main classes of consensus protocols that are used in the blockchain consensus layer. PoW is highly scalable but very slow with about 7 (transactions/second) performance. BFT based protocols are highly efficient but their scalability are limited to only tens of nodes. One of the main reasons for the BFT limitation is the quadratic $O(n^2)$ communication complexity of BFT based protocols for $n$ nodes that requires $n \times n$ broadcasting. In this paper, we present the {\em Musch} protocol which is BFT based and provides communication complexity $O(f n + n)$ for $f$ failures and $n$ nodes, where $f < n/3$, without compromising the latency. Hence, the performance adjusts to $f$ such that for constant $f$ the communication complexity is linear. Musch achieves this by introducing the notion of exponentially increasing windows of nodes to which complains are reported, instead of broadcasting to all the nodes. To our knowledge, this is the first BFT-based blockchain protocol which efficiently addresses simultaneously the issues of communication complexity and latency under the presence of failures.Comment: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData

Fast-HotStuff: A Fast and Resilient HotStuff Protocol

The HotStuff protocol is a breakthrough in Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus that enjoys both responsiveness and linear view change. It creatively adds an additional round to classic BFT protocols (like PBFT) using two rounds. This brings us to an interesting question: Is this additional round really necessary in practice? In this paper, we answer this question by designing a new two-round BFT protocol called Fast-HotStuff, which enjoys responsiveness and efficient view change that is comparable to linear view change in terms of performance. Compared to (three-round) HotStuff, Fast-HotStuff has lower latency and is more robust against performance attacks that HotStuff is susceptible to

Translating Islamic Authority: Chaplaincy and Muslim Leadership Education in North American Protestant Seminaries

This dissertation analyzes the education of Muslim leaders in accredited North American institutions. Currently, the only accredited programs that train Muslim leaders in the United States and Canada are Protestant Christian seminaries. Based on ethnographic research conducted at Hartford Seminary (Hartford, Connecticut), Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario), and Bayan Claremont (Claremont, California), I analyze the impact of multifaith educational models on the development of North American Muslim leaders, such as Muslim chaplains, pastors, and spiritual caregivers. I examine the various rationales provided by the institutions in question for the establishment of Muslim leadership training programs at Christian seminaries, as well as Muslim students’ justifications for studying at these institutions. Subsequently, I argue that these programs depend on multiple forms of “translation” that render members of distinct religious traditions comprehensible to one another. These multifaith programs require translations of space in order to accommodate the practical needs of members of diverse religious backgrounds, and to generate experiences of inclusivity. I also examine curricular translations, specifically focusing on translations of “the spiritual,” given the centrality of the concept within the professional field of chaplaincy. Finally, I analyze translations of debates about gender and authority in Islam into multifaith classrooms. These various negotiations make apparent that the burdens of translation are not equally shared. Within the Protestant milieus in which these Muslim leadership programs take shape, the work of Muslim students is ultimately framed and evaluated within a setting where Christianity provides the overwhelming “logic” of the field. This dissertation thus reveals the inculcation of norms of Muslim authority that align with liberal Christian values, including but not limited to: religious individualism, spirituality (versus legalism), democracy, non-hierarchical forms of authority, ecumenism, and interfaith relationship-building