Circle Of Trust Research Articles

Staying safe and visible via message sharing in online social networks

As an imperative channel for fast information propagation, online social networks (OSNs) also have their defects. One of them is the information leakage, i.e., information could be spread via OSNs to the users whom we are not willing to share with. Thus the problem of constructing a circle of trust to share information with as many friends as possible without further spreading it to unwanted targets has become a challenging research topic but still remained open. Our work is the first attempt to study the Maximum Circle of Trust problem seeking to share the information with the maximum expected number of poster's friends such that the information spread to the unwanted targets is brought to its knees. First, we consider a special and more practical case with the two-hop information propagation and a single unwanted target. In this case, we show that this problem is NP-hard, which denies the existence of an exact polynomial-time algorithm. We thus propose a Fully Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme (FPTAS), which can not only adjust any allowable performance error bound but also run in polynomial time with both the input size and allowed error. FPTAS is the best approximation solution one can ever wish for an NP-hard problem. We next consider the number of unwanted targets is bounded and prove that there does not exist an FPTAS in this case. Instead, we design a Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) in which the allowable error can also be controlled. When the number of unwanted targets are not bounded, we provide a randomized algorithm, along with the analytical theoretical bound and inapproximaibility result. Finally, we consider a general case with many hops information propagation and further show its #P-hardness and propose an effective Iterative Circle of Trust Detection (ICTD) algorithm based on a novel greedy function. An extensive experiment on various real-world OSNs has validated the effectiveness of our proposed approximation and ICTD algorithms. Such an extensive experiment also highlights several important observations on information leakage which help to sharpen the security of OSNs in the future.

Der Nutzen der Schweizer Teilnahme im europäischen Projekt epSOS

epSOS (Smart Open Services for European Patients) was launched in July 2008 and is a European project, which is organised by representatives from different countries. The main objective of epSOS is the development and practical implementation of an eHealth framework and an information and communication technology infrastructure in Europe. Switzerland participates with the Canton of Geneva and the University Hospitals of Geneva with epSOS. Each participating country had to build a National Contact Point (NCP) as a national gateway for the transnational data exchange within epSOS. The secure connection between the various national NCPs forms the basis for the epSOS ‘circle of trust’. In epSOS at project start various legal, political, organisational and technical challenges arose based on the heterogeneity of the health systems in the EU countries, especially as health care is not part of the EU treaty. In this sense, the European situation at the beginning of the project is comparable with the Swiss one: firstly both don’t have a uniform legal basis, and secondly, the EU has a federal structure that is similar to the one in Switzerland. Both require a high coordination effort. The epSOS project has achieved the desired proof of concept. Since the second semester of 2012, the first countries are online with their use cases. This demonstrates that it is possible to find unified electronic processes even when starting from diverse situations. However, epSOS probably won’t be the solution for a homogeneous European solution for the transnational exchange of health data in the near future – as there are tremendous differences between the national eHealth infrastructures, policies and levels of development. The in epSOS implemented emergency data sets, electronic patient records and electronic prescriptions can make a major contribution to patient safety, by providing the medical personnel in emergency situations with lifesaving information to prevent treatment errors and to avoid the repetition of diagnostic procedures .

A Review of Methods for Preventing Spam in IP Telephony

Voice over IP telephony reduces communications costs, but it is also subject to spam, i.e. unwanted, unsolicited calls. This paper discusses the problem of spam over IP telephony and reviews published techniques to reject likely nuisance callers. The techniques investigated include content filtering, black lists, white lists, gray lists, call rate monitoring, IP/domain correlation, reputation systems, consent-based communications, address obfuscation, limited-use addresses, computational puzzles, Turing tests, payments at risk, legislation, centralized SIP providers, circles of trust and authenticated identity. The advantages and disadvantages of each are analyzed. It is concluded that no single technique is sufficient and that a framework of multiple techniques is required. One proposed framework is analyzed and it is found that it has limited support for voicemail spam and contact request spam.

Leaders’ Involvement, an Essential Practice for Trust, Learning, Effectiveness and Innovation in Highly Specialized Firms

High-trust relationships are essential for effective management of highly specialized organizations. Executives who choose involvement in problem-solving with employees and who become vulnerable by exposing their ignorance of employees’ unique knowledge, especially tacit know-how acquired by experience, problem-solving and innovating in communities of practice, endanger personal authority but they gain trust, learn, make better decisions, and regain authority provided they have primary source knowledge and interactional expertise for such learning (Collins and Evens, 2007). New executives without such knowledge and expertise, and/or with habitus of detachment and/or personalized leadership, especially outsiders, use detachment to avoid vulnerability, often causing vicious distrust circles that keep them ignorant and fail them in jobs although perhaps not in careers. Others whose knowledge and habitus encourage involvement tend to cause virtuous trust circles, achieving effectiveness and innovativeness. A semi-native ethnography of an outsider-managed automatic plant exposed the decisiveness of vulnerable involvement even more than having insider knowledge. By involvement outsiders gained trust, knowledge sharing, learned, and succeeded like inside-outsiders (Bower, 2007). The findings explain the prime advantage of insider successors differently from Bower (2007): their relevant knowledge encourages vulnerable involvement, engendering trust and learning. These findings offer new yardsticks for decision-making concerning succession.

Your Teams Aren't Good Enough

Welcome to Reality Check. In this column, I'll paint provocative pictures for innovation managers based on snippets from science, history, demographics, and respected business observers. As an experimental scientist, I promise to be objective and cite my sources. As a former senior manager in a Fortune 100 corporation, I'll strive to make this column worth your attention. As a lifelong rebel against intellectual laziness and unexamined premises, I'll try to make you think. If you sometimes find the conclusions unsettling, that will be because the evidence is convincing and the arrow's found its mark. Many thanks to Jim Euchner and MaryAnne Gobble for the opportunity! Your Teams Aren't Good Enough It's a pretty bald assertion. But what we know about people and knowledge, communication and teamwork, and the speed of change makes it certain: It's almost impossible that you have the team you need today, especially if you're building teams the old-fashioned way, by selecting people to work on a project from available employees. People and Knowledge Herbert Simon, computer scientist and Nobel Laureate in economics, did a study of chess grandmasters, from which he concluded that an expert's memory can hold about 50,000 chunks--action-oriented facts or patterns (Simon 1996, 89-93). He also concluded that it takes about a decade of hard practice to attain such knowledge, the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell (2008) concludes separate the best from the mediocre. If anything, it's taking longer to become an expert as the ever-growing mountain of world knowledge is stretching the time it takes to develop creative expertise (Jones 2009). Now consider a big, important business project, and try to estimate how many little facts might matter along the way. In my first career, pharmaceutical drug discovery, a project might easily require many thousands of nuggets: facts about historic approaches, biochemistry, tissue biology, physical properties, synthetic chemistry, patents, toxicity, disease, economics, regulations, and on and on. I suspect it's no different if you're designing and selling aircraft, automobiles, smart-phones, or financial systems. It may be becoming more true as software becomes the differentiator in so many products, because software systems may be the most complex things that humans have ever created (Brooks 1995). Conclusion: Developing new, market-creating or market-leading products takes world-class talent, built on a mass of detail and experience that takes an individual many years to acquire. Communication and Teamwork To accommodate the growing complexity of projects and the limits of any one person's time and knowledge, work is increasingly done in teams, and the teams are getting larger (Jones 2009, figure 1C). But teamwork has intrinsic limits: Brooks's Law (The way to slow down a project is to put more people on it) captures the tradeoff between the benefit of distributing the work to more people and the exponential growth in the inefficiency of interpersonal communication as teams expand (Brooks 1995). To work together, people must share not only facts but trust; unfortunately, our circles of trust are modest in size and slowly built (Dunbar 1997). The scaling math is not good: for a team of n people, the number of connections for facts and trust grows as n-squared, which is why the rule of thumb for effective team size is a number between four and ten. Bigger teams will have idle participants and bog down in slow decision-making. Fighting that tendency exacts a cost in hands-on management. But if a team should be small, can we count on it to pick up the knowledge it needs from the rest of the company without having to formalize those connections? A large study at Cornell suggests not; an analysis of 14 million e-mails among 43,000 students showed that people at three or more degrees of separation (Alice knows Bob, who knows Christine, who knows David) will essentially never communicate (daily probability about 0. …

Trust Federation of Identity Management in Distributed Environment

Identity management systems in Internet belong to different circles of trust and it is difficult to set up trust relationship among Identity Providers (IdPs) or Service Providers (SPs) which are located in different circles of trust. This paper proposes a distributed trust federation framework to solve the problem and its efficiency is analyzed with several experiments. It uses IdPs which belong to multiple Circles of Trust (CoTs) as relay entities to set up trust relationship among CoTs. The proposed framework is effective to extend the trust federation of identity management systems and thus improve easy of use for users in Internet..

At War Over CISPA: Towards a Reasonable Balance between Privacy and Security

Cyberattacks loom over the technological landscape as a dire threat to Internet commerce, information security, and even national security. Meaningfully improving cybersecurity and ensuring the resilience of systems will require cooperation between members of the private sector and the government. To this end, we propose a framework that creates a circle of trust for the sharing of information about threats and solutions. To emphasize the importance of cooperation to enhance cyber defense, this Article presents a case study of two items: the proposed legislative regime of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, and President Obama’s Executive Order 13,636 with its emphasis on a Cybersecurity Framework that would establish voluntary cybersecurity standards. Through application of our circle of trust framework, we hope to provide a solution that balances the sometimes competing concerns of privacy and cybersecurity.Our secondary focus is whether such a program should emphasize voluntary or mandatory compliance. A proper balance between the two approaches could improve the dynamics between the public and private sectors in a way that increases respective levels of trust. The Executive Order and CISPA both use a voluntary approach. Under each system as currently proposed, firms could choose to follow the program, but compliance is not mandatory and there is no penalty for noncompliance. However, mandatory programs with effective enforcement mechanisms are likely to result in higher levels of compliance than purely voluntary programs in many situations. We urge that government intervention in the free market should be kept at a low level, but because cybersecurity issues can have implications for national security, we believe that some degree of mandatory regulation would be beneficial.We believe that cybersecurity can be enhanced without creating a Big Brother world, and encourage the development of a circle of trust that brings the public and private sectors together to resolve cybersecurity threats more effectively. It is vital that these issues be addressed soon while there is still a chance to prevent a catastrophic cyber event. It would be ill-advised to rely solely on executive power or on legislation that is quickly drafted and enacted after an emergency. A careful, deliberative process aimed at protecting cybersecurity and civil liberties would ultimately be the most beneficial approach, and these steps must be taken now, before the emergence of a cybersecurity crisis that causes us to suspend reason.

Measuring the impact of the Circle of Trust® approach

AbstractThis chapter reports the findings of an evaluation that explored the impact of Circle of Trust retreats and the learning and personal and professional applications in the lives of retreat participants. The Center for Courage & Renewal began offering Circle of Trust cross‐professional retreats in 2005 to provide people from any profession with an opportunity to experience a “circle of trust” as described by Parker J. Palmer in his 2004 book, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.

The Circle of Trust® approach and a counselor training program: A hand in glove fit

AbstractThis chapter describes how the principles and practices of a Circle of Trust® approach are infused into the Master's in Counseling Psychology program, marriage and family therapy emphasis, at the University of San Francisco. The interface between the Circle of Trust® approach and other on‐campus activities is described; the model is proposed as of value to all in higher education independent of role or discipline.

Soul and role dialogues in higher education: Healing the divided self

AbstractThis chapter describes the origin of faculty–staff gatherings modeled on the Circle of Trust® approach. It outlines the structure of the meetings, offers descriptions of participant experiences, and ends with suggestions for ways of hosting similar gatherings on other college campuses.

Principles and practices of the Circle of Trust® approach

AbstractThis chapter describes the history, rationale, and core content of the principles and practices that define the Circle of Trust® approach as developed by Parker J. Palmer and the Center for Courage & Renewal. Courage to Teach®, Courage to Lead®, and other Courage & Renewal programs are built upon this distinctive approach.

Circles of learning in Mississippi: Community recovery and democracy building

AbstractThis chapter explores how utilizing the principles and practices of the Circle of Trust® approach helped to lay a generative foundation for democratic education in service of community healing and transformation in Mississippi.

Dialing in to a Circle of Trust: A “medium” tech experiment and poetic evaluation

Abstract“Found poetry” illustrates how an experimental series of reflective audio teleconference retreats became a transforming experience.

Trust discrimination tendency of trust circles in the positive and negative information-sharing/disclosing domains and cultural differences between Canada and China.

The purpose of the study was to explore how the size and composition of a trust circle discriminate in both positive and negative personal/social information-domains in Canada and China. A total of 202 Canadians (102) and Chinese (100, living in China) participated in the study. A set of self-developed questionnaires was used in the survey. The results showed that the trust discrimination tendency (TDT) in the trust circle size and trust circle composition is induced by the nature and levels of the shared personal/social information and culture. Specifically, people tend to trust more others in sharing their positive than in disclosing negative personal/social information. Chinese tend to trust fewer others than Canadians do in sharing/disclosing both negative and positive personal/social information. People are more likely to trust their spouse/partner and blood kin in the positive information-sharing domain; in the negative informationdisclosing domain, the trust rank of blood kin decreased the most, and spouse/partner decreased least. Canadians also always trust their spouse/partner more than Chinese do, and preserve more stable top core trustee ranks than Chinese do in both domains. To summarize the relationship between trustee ranks and the levels of information, one could say “how bad matters, but how good doesn’t.”

Man and God and Circle of Trust

Man and God and Circle of Trust

Effective and Valuable Relationships of Involved Managers: The Prime Contextual Factor of High-Trust Relations in Highly Specialized Organizations

High-trust relationships are both effective and valuable for managing highly specialized organizations, but their creation requires involved managers who expose ignorance, become vulnerable, and endanger personal authority in order to gain trust, learn by cooperative problem-solving, and innovate for efficiency, effectiveness, and adaptability. Successors without enough relevant knowledge and expertise and/or with detachment habitus, especially outsiders, tend to avoid involvement and vulnerability, causing vicious distrust circles that keep them ignorant and fail them. Outsiders whose relevant knowledge and involvement habitus encourage involved vulnerability engender virtuous trust circles, valuable relations, effectiveness, and innovativeness. Ethnography of outsiders-managed automatic processing plant proved decisiveness of choosing vulnerable involvement more than having insider knowledge when taking charge (Bower, 2007): By this choice outsiders gained trust, acquired knowledge, and succeeded, while an inside successor’s detachment that minimizes trust with employees who just became his subordinates retains knowledge gaps that would cause failures.

Imagine a Circle of Trust for Doctors

Imagine a group of physicians sitting in a circle having open and honest conversations about what makes them feel alive—organized by an accrediting organization. For the past decade, this has happened at the Fetzer Institute's retreat center in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which has hosted the annual Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education's (ACGME's) Courage to Teach Physicians Formation Retreat.

From vicious to virtuous circle: Moralistic trust, diffuse reciprocity, and the American security commitment to Europe

Constructivists maintain that a shared identity was crucial for explaining the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the multilateral form that it took. I challenge this view, arguing instead that the alliance was based on moralistic trust, the belief that others will live up to their moral obligations. Moralistic trust facilitates the initiation of cooperation, so that states can begin a virtuous circle of trust, collaboration, and enhanced trust. It is also the foundation of the diffuse reciprocity inherent to multilateralism. In two case studies of the domestic politics in the United States of making a multilateral security commitment to Europe, the first being the League of Nations, I demonstrate that identity was not a prominent consideration and did not lead individuals to embrace multilateralism. This social-psychological account improves upon constructivism and rationalism by offering a way to embed ideational variables in studies of strategic interaction.

Secure interoperation of identity managements among different circles of trust

Secure Interoperation between different identity management (IdM) systems has become a challenge. In this paper, a framework is proposed to discover interoperation paths among identity providers (IdP) located in different circles of trust (CoT). According to the proposed framework, interoperation path and path discovery algorithm are proposed to establish a trust relationship between different CoTs. Security of the interoperation path is improved by the deployment of authentication assurance level (AAL) conversion and role mapping. Moreover, security of the path discovery process is guaranteed by path authentication which can resist security violation.

Circle of Trust

Circle of Trust