Review of \u3cem\u3eSurvival of the Knitted: Immigrant Social Networks in a Stratified World.\u3c/em\u3e Vilna Francine Bashi. Reviewed by Qingwen Xu.

Book review of Vilna Francine Bashi, Survival of the Knitted: Immigrant Social Networks in a Stratified World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. $21.95 papercover

Globalization, Immigration and the Welfare State: A Cross-National Comparison

Over the past decades, the forces of globalization have helped created a huge wave of immigration. The relationship between globalization and immigration has been intensely examined in the last decade with a focus not only on whether and how much globalization has caused international immigration but also how to promote and sustain a just global system for the growing number of immigrants. This study selects three developed countries with different welfare state philosophies and traditions-Australia, Sweden and the United States-and compares how they cope with the growing number of immigrants and their various needs. This paper reflects thinking about states\u27 ability to redistribute resources, about the ability to agree upon a unified theory of welfare rights in a diverse society, and the feasibility of opening nations\u27 welfare systems to all immigrants in the globalization context and from a rights-based social work perspective

Energy-Efficient Self-Organization Protocols for Sensor Networks

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN, for short) consists of a large number of very small sensor devices deployed in an area of interest for gathering and delivery information. The fundamental goal of a WSN is to produce, over an extended period of time, global information from local data obtained by individual sensors. The WSN technology will have a significant impact on a wide array of applications on the efficiency of many civilian and military applications including combat field surveillance, intrusion detection, disaster management among many others. The basic management problem in the WSN is to balance the utility of the activity in the network against the cost incurred by the network resources to perform this activity. Since the sensors are battery powered and it is impossible to change or recharge batteries after the sensors are deployed, promoting system longevity becomes one of the most important design goals instead of QoS provisioning and bandwidth efficiency. On the other hand the self-organization ability is essential for the WSN due to the fact that the sensors are randomly deployed and they work unattended. We developed a self-organization protocol, which creates a multi-hop communication infrastructure capable of utilizing the limited resources of sensors in an adaptive and efficient way. The resulting general-purpose infrastructure is robust, easy to maintain and adapts well to various application needs. Important by-products of our infrastructure include: (1) Energy efficiency: in order to save energy and to extend the longevity of the WSN sensors, which are in sleep mode most of the time. (2) Adaptivity: the infrastructure is adaptive to network size, network topology, network density and application requirement. (3) Robustness: the degree to which the infrastructure is robust and resilient. Analytical results and simulation confirmed that our self-organization protocol has a number of desirable properties and compared favorably with the leading protocols in the literature