3,591 research outputs found
Legitimacy and Expertise in Global Internet Governance
Over the course of the past decade or so, attention among Internet policymakers and scholars has shifted gradually from substantive design principles to the structure of Internet governance. The Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers in particular now faces a new skepticism about its legitimacy to administer the essential Internet Assigned Numbers Authority function. ICANN has responded to these doubts by proposing a series of major governance reforms that would bring nation-states more into the organization\u27s decisionmaking. After all, transnational governance institutions in other substantive areas privilege nation-states as a matter of course. This Symposium Essay shows that these changes reflect a new era in which ICANN and other Internet policymakers no longer view the Internet as uniquely immune from the geopolitics of the physical world
The Market for User Data
Policymakers are today far more alert than ever before to the myriad ways in which tech companies collect and distribute consumers’ data with third-party data brokers and advertisers. We can attribute this new awareness to at least two major news stories from the past six or so years. The first came in 2013, when Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, leaked highly classified materials that revealed the ways in which United States national security officials, with the indispensable cooperation of U.S. telecommunications companies, systematically monitored telephone conversations and electronic communications of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals. The story triggered a series of rebukes from civil rights groups, consumer advocates, and foreign leaders around the world. It is not clear whether or the extent to which the NSA or other government agencies have terminated those programs since Snowden’s revelation.
The second came in early 2018, when another whistleblower revealed to journalists that researchers to whom Facebook had allowed to collect and study dozens of millions of users’ personal data, in turn, shared those troves of personal data with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy firm. Cambridge Analytica had promoted their access to this data to peddle “psychographic targeting” to political campaigns, including that of Donald Trump in 2016. This more recent revelation has exposed Facebook to what will likely be the largest fine imposed by the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) in history
Tsunami generated by a granular collapse down a rough inclined plane
In this Letter, we experimentally investigate the collapse of initially dry
granular media into water and the subsequent impulse waves. We systematically
characterize the influence of the slope angle and the granular material on the
initial amplitude of the generated leading wave and the evolution of its
amplitude during the propagation. The experiments show that whereas the
evolution of the leading wave during the propagation is well predicted by a
solution of the linearized Korteweg-de Vries equation, the generation of the
wave is more complicated to describe. Our results suggest that the internal
properties of the granular media and the interplay with the surrounding fluid
are important parameters for the generation of waves at low velocity impacts.
Moreover, the amplitude of the leading wave reaches a maximum value at large
slope angle. The runout distance of the collapse is also shown to be smaller in
the presence of water than under totally dry conditions. This study provides a
first insight into tsunamis generated by subaerial landslides at low Froude
number
Motion Planning of Legged Robots
We study the problem of computing the free space F of a simple legged robot
called the spider robot. The body of this robot is a single point and the legs
are attached to the body. The robot is subject to two constraints: each leg has
a maximal extension R (accessibility constraint) and the body of the robot must
lie above the convex hull of its feet (stability constraint). Moreover, the
robot can only put its feet on some regions, called the foothold regions. The
free space F is the set of positions of the body of the robot such that there
exists a set of accessible footholds for which the robot is stable. We present
an efficient algorithm that computes F in O(n2 log n) time using O(n2 alpha(n))
space for n discrete point footholds where alpha(n) is an extremely slowly
growing function (alpha(n) <= 3 for any practical value of n). We also present
an algorithm for computing F when the foothold regions are pairwise disjoint
polygons with n edges in total. This algorithm computes F in O(n2 alpha8(n) log
n) time using O(n2 alpha8(n)) space (alpha8(n) is also an extremely slowly
growing function). These results are close to optimal since Omega(n2) is a
lower bound for the size of F.Comment: 29 pages, 22 figures, prelininar results presented at WAFR94 and IEEE
Robotics & Automation 9
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