Education and Research in Times of Population Ageing

-Education; Population Ageing

Health and Wealth: The Contribution of Welfare State Policies to Economic Growth

-health; wealth; welfare state policies;

Four Phases in the demographic transition. Implications for economic and social development.

Traditionally, the demographic transition model has focused primarily on long-term changes in mortality rates, fertility rates and population growth rates. Of equal, or perhaps even greater, importance is however the transformation of the age structure that the transition engenders. In this paper we focus on this age transition and argue that (1) The age transition is a more extended process than the mortality and fertility transition. It starts simultaneously with the mortality decline and continues almost one hundred years after a stabilization of the birth rates. (2) During the age transition population growth will be concentrated in turn to the youngest age groups, the young adult group, the middle age group and the old age group. (3) During these different phases of the age transition, the social and economic effects of population growth will be different. Poverty, child labor and low savings rates characterize the phase child abundance. The second phase, when young adults predominate, is characterized by high rates of migration, urbanization and proletarization, and by early industrialization and institutional transformation. In the third phase, when the number of middle aged increase, the economy is characterized by high savings rates and large increases in per capita income. The old age phase, finally is characterized by an increasing dependency burden, declining savings rates, inflationary pressures, an expanding public sector, and stagnating economic growth. The paper argues that these patterns may be explained by the shifts in economic behavior that take place during the life cycle. Recent studies of age structure effects on macro-economic variables are referred. The argument is illustrated with historical examples from Sweden, England, and Western Europe, along with modern examples from Asia, Africa and Latin-America.Age; transition

Wage Earners’ Priority in Bankruptcy: Application to Welfare Fund Payments

This paper describes a study on how cyber security experts assess the importance of three variables related to the probability of successful remote code execution attacks – presence of: (i) non-executable memory, (ii) access and (iii) exploits for High or Medium vulnerabilities as defined by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System. The rest of the relevant variables were fixed by the environment of a cyber defense exercise where the respondents participated. The questionnaire was fully completed by fifteen experts. These experts perceived access as the most important variable and availability of exploits for High vulnerabilities as more important than Medium vulnerabilities. Non-executable memory was not seen as significant, however, presumably due to lack of address space layout randomization and canaries in the network architecture of the cyber defense exercise scenario.QC 20140908</p

Tunga trender i den globala utvecklingen

Huvudsyftet med denna rapport är att identifiera vilka ”tunga trender” som kommer att prägla samhällsutvecklingen under 2000-talet. Metodiskt har vi valt att utnyttja en demografisk förklaringsansats. På basis av befolkningsprognoser som visar förskjutningar i den globala åldersstrukturen, konstruerar vi prognoser över förväntad inkomstutveckling i olika delar av världen år fram till år 2050. Dessa prognoser utgör, enligt vår uppfattning, det basscenario, som varje framtidsdiskussion måste förhålla sig till. I rapporten diskuteras vidare vad de globala demografiska och ekonomiska trenderna kan komma att betyda ur ett miljöperspektiv. Dels analyseras möjliga samband mellan åldersstruktur, inkomstnivå och miljöpåverkan, dels försöker vi identifiera centrala utmaningar för 2000-talets miljöarbete.trender; samhällsutvecklingen; 2000-talet

Formalizing Threat Models for Virtualized Systems

We propose a framework, called FATHoM (FormAlizing THreat Models), to define threat models for virtualized systems. For each component of a virtualized system, we specify a set of security properties that defines its control responsibility, its vulnerability and protection states. Relations are used to represent how assumptions made about a component’s security state restrict the assumptions that can be made on the other components. FATHoM includes a set of rules to compute the derived security states from the assumptions and the components’ relations. A further set of relations and rules is used to define how to protect the derived vulnerable components. The resulting system is then analysed, among others, for consistency of the threat model. We have developed a tool that implements FATHoM, and have validated it with use-cases adapted from the literature

A Pattern-based Approach to Quantitative Enterprise Architecture Analysis

Enterprise Architecture (EA) management involves tasks that substantially contribute to the operations of an enterprise, and to its sustainable market presence. One important aspect of this is the availability of services to customers. However, the increasing interconnectedness of systems with other systems and with business processes makes it difficult to get a clear view on change impacts and dependency structures. While management level decision makers need this information to make sound decisions, EA models often do not include quality attributes (such as availability), and very rarely provide quantitative means to assess them. We address these shortcomings by augmenting an information model for EA modeling with concepts from Probabilistic Relational Models, thus enabling quantitative analysis. A sample business case is evaluated as an example of the technique, showing how decision makers can benefit from information on availability impacts on enterprise business services

McCarran-Ferguson Act’s Antitrust Exemption for Insurance: Language, History and Policy

Security vulnerabilities continue to be an issue in the software field and new severe vulnerabilities are discovered in software products each month. This paper analyzes estimates from domain experts on the amount of effort required for a penetration tester to find a zero-day vulnerability in a software product. Estimates are developed using Cooke's classical method for 16 types of vulnerability discovery projects – each corresponding to a configuration of four security measures. The estimates indicate that, regardless of project type, two weeks of testing are enough to discover a software vulnerability of high severity with fifty percent chance. In some project types an eight-to-five-week is enough to find a zero-day vulnerability with 95 percent probability. While all studied measures increase the effort required for the penetration tester none of them have a striking impact on the effort required to find a vulnerability.QC 20121018</p

A Probabilistic Framework for Security Scenarios with Dependent Actions

This work addresses the growing need of performing meaningful probabilistic analysis of security. We propose a framework that integrates the graphical security modeling technique of attack–defense trees with probabilistic information expressed in terms of Bayesian networks. This allows us to perform probabilistic evaluation of attack–defense scenarios involving dependent actions. To improve the efficiency of our computations, we make use of inference algorithms from Bayesian networks and encoding techniques from constraint reasoning. We discuss the algebraic theory underlying our framework and point out several generalizations which are possible thanks to the use of semiring theory