Exclusive Access Research Articles

Performing sovereignty: war documentaries and documentary wars in Syria

This essay explores the images emerging from the Syrian conflict through the genre of war documentaries by focusing on the performance of sovereignty. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of governmentality and Butler’s performative theory, the author looks at states as performative agents that stage power in front of the camera as a form of self-legitimisation. War documentaries are part of a documentary war in which image, information and emotional involvement have become weaponised. He assesses a few examples of religious and secular sovereignty performed for journalists who are embedded with various militias. This genre is brought about through cooperation between the embedded reporters (i.e. working inside an army or militia) and the fighters assigned to protect and show them around the territory they control. This results in a symbiotic relationship in which both sides co-produce a heavily mediated image of the war from the inside, one that satisfies the journalist’s desire for ‘exclusive access’ and the fighter’s desire for recognition. Such a representational pact contributes a unique feature to the war documentary genre in which the films show the raw reality of war as much they offer an opportunity to perform the state before the camera. From this perspective, the fighters appear not only as destroyers but as builders of a new order, thus complicating the image of the jihadi as an irrational, nihilistic and violent subject.

Salmonella-Mediated Inflammation Eliminates Competitors for Fructose-Asparagine in the Gut.

Salmonella enterica elicits intestinal inflammation to gain access to nutrients. One of these nutrients is fructose-asparagine (F-Asn). The availability of F-Asn to Salmonella during infection is dependent upon Salmonella pathogenicity islands 1 and 2, which in turn are required to provoke inflammation. Here, we determined that F-Asn is present in mouse chow at approximately 400 pmol/mg (dry weight). F-Asn is also present in the intestinal tract of germfree mice at 2,700 pmol/mg (dry weight) and in the intestinal tract of conventional mice at 9 to 28 pmol/mg. These findings suggest that the mouse intestinal microbiota consumes F-Asn. We utilized heavy-labeled precursors of F-Asn to monitor its formation in the intestine, in the presence or absence of inflammation, and none was observed. Finally, we determined that some members of the class Clostridia encode F-Asn utilization pathways and that they are eliminated from highly inflamed Salmonella-infected mice. Collectively, our studies identify the source of F-Asn as the diet and that Salmonella-mediated inflammation is required to eliminate competitors and allow the pathogen nearly exclusive access to this nutrient.

Platform competition: Who benefits from multihoming?

Competition between two-sided platforms is shaped by the possibility of multihoming (i.e., some users joining both platforms). If initially both sides singlehome, each platform provides users on one side exclusive access to its users on the other side. If then one side multihomes, platforms compete on the singlehoming side and exert monopoly power on the multihoming side. This paper explores the allocative effects of such a change from single- to multihoming. Our results challenge the conventional wisdom, according to which the possibility of multihoming hurts the side that can multihome, while benefiting the other side. This in not always true, as the opposite may happen or both sides may benefit.

Measuring the World

The authors claim that location information of stationary ICT components can never be unclassified. They describe how swarm-mapping (crowd sourcing) is used by Apple and Google to worldwide harvest geo-location information on wireless access points and mobile telecommunication systems' base stations to build up gigantic databases with very exclusive access rights. After having highlighted the known technical facts, in the speculative part of this article, the authors argue how this may impact cyber deterrence strategies of states and alliances understanding the cyberspace as another domain of geostrategic relevance. The states and alliances spectrum of activities due to the potential existence of such databases may range from geopolitical negotiations by institutions understanding international affairs as their core business, mitigation approaches at a technical level, over means of cyber deterrence-by-retaliation.

Development of a discrete event simulation model for evaluating strategies of red blood cell provision following mass casualty events

Timely and adequate provision of blood following mass casualty events (MCEs) is critical to reducing mortality rates amongst casualties transported to hospital following an event. Developing planning strategies to ensure the blood transfusion demands of casualties are met is challenging. Discrete event simulation (DES) offers a novel solution to this problem which is financially efficient, less disruptive to services and allows for rich experimentation compared to the current industry standards of live exercises, round-table discussion or tabletop planning. There are currently no published models of this type for investigating blood provision in MCEs. The objective of this study was to develop a working model which could be used to target the in-hospital 'levers' and 'supply levels' of the transfusion system and improve outcomes during the response to future events. This was achieved through the robust design of a DES model using exclusive access to qualitative and quantitative data as well as a panel of experts from the field of transfusion and MCE management. The completed model was extensively and formally evaluated with secondary data from the 7th of July 2005 London bombings, the largest UK based civilian MCE in over 50 years. A subsequent sensitivity analysis revealed the five factors displaying the greatest influence on casualty outcomes. Experimental themes based on these findings have generated new solutions for managing future events which have since been presented to MCE stakeholders and policy makers.

Internalised and Social Experiences of HIV-Induced Stigma and Discrimination in Urban Ghana

HIV-induced stigma and discrimination remain a prevalent global challenge especially in low-income countries which may compromise the emotional and social well-being of people living with HIV (PLHIV). Despite the efforts so far, the incidence of HIV-related stigma remains high in Ghana. Drawing on the Goffman’s theory of social stigma and interpretivist research paradigm, the paper explores the lived experiences of 123 PLHIV in HIV-endemic cities in Ghana. Findings suggest that PLHIV largely suffer from three levels of stigma—internal, received and associated—with complex discriminatory dimensions. PLHIV are stigmatised and discriminated against at home, in the community and in institutional settings. This is manifested through familial neglect, social exclusion and poor access to jobs and health services. These prejudices presaged suicidal ideations, non-disclosure of HIV serostatus, poor adherence to treatment interventions and further spread of the epidemic. Progressive social and health policy framework and programmes on eradicating HIV are pressing. These should conspicuously include HIV-related stigma and discrimination through behavioural change and culturally acceptable public education about the myths and realities surrounding HIV in order to mitigate the associated debilitating outcomes.

Postwar Growth in New Castle County is Defined by Suburban Pattern

America’s settlements have been carefully planned since colonial times. From the 1600s through the early 20th century our cities and towns were designed in compact, interconnected urban patterns modeled after the European cities known to early colonists. This settlement pattern is steeped in urban traditions that go back thousands of years and is very flexible and efficient. However, the rapid industrialization in the 19th century led to serious urban problems including pollution, poor sanitation, and abhorrent housing conditions for working class people. A new, uniquely American, form of development evolved in the early 20th century and greatly accelerated after World War II. This is known as the suburban pattern of development, which is characterized by the segregation of land uses, the dominance of single family detached housing, and nearly exclusive automobile access. While this development pattern has its benefits, and helped ease many of the problems of the previous era, it has created new social and health consequences. New Castle County’s rapid growth since 1950 has followed, and even epitomized, this suburban pattern. Today’s built environment in New Castle County (and indeed throughout the USA) has created several challenges for both planners and health professionals. These are beginning to be addressed in many creative ways to create modern, complete, and healthy communities.

A root privilege management scheme with revocable authorization for Android devices

As a critical part in mobile cloud computing, the vulnerability of Android devices can directly affect the security of the mobile cloud. The unsecured Android can be potentially exploited by malwares to obtain the root privilege. Root privilege misuse is the critical issue for Android security, which breaks the integrity of Android security and rises the risk of permission escalation from malwares. The existing solutions still fail to balance the trade-off between the users desires on using root privilege and the Android security, which lays risks in leading to the root privilege misuse. To address this issue, a root privilege management scheme named Root Privilege Manager (RPM) is proposed, which adopts the root privilege access control to guarantee the exclusive root access opportunity of the authenticated apps. RPM verifies the authorization and integrity of root requesting apps based on the extracted authorization files during app installation, and then root access management controls the granting of root privilege based on the authenticated results. In this way, the end users are free from the embarrassment of appropriate decision-making while confront root access management. The prototype of RPM is implemented to evaluate its effectiveness, efficiency and performance. The experiments show RPM can effectively control the granting of root privilege and the time consumption in root access management is increased by 0.21%–0.94% respectively compared with the user management.

Platform Competition Under Network Effects: Piggybacking and Optimal Subsidization

A repeated challenge in launching a two-sided market platform is how to ignite the cross-side network effects to jumpstart adoption. Prior literature often addresses this issue by using pricing controls – a high price on one side to raise the margin and a low price on the other to attract users – or the “seesaw principle.” More recently, platforms are increasingly embracing non-pricing controls to accelerate user adoptions. Little is known, however, about the role of non-pricing controls and their interplay with pricing controls. In this research note, using a game-theoretic framework, we study “piggybacking” – i.e., expanding the focal market to recruit exclusive users from external networks – as a new and non-pricing control to launch platforms in conjunction with pricing controls. We first consider consumer-side piggybacking. In a standard “competitive bottlenecks” setting where consumers single-home and providers multi-home, we provide a rich set of novel insights into strategies that platforms use to monetize exclusive access to external users, with non-trivial characterizations of the interplay among piggybacking, cross-side network effects, and price competition. We identify necessary and sufficient conditions when piggybacking is profit improving and when it leads to a prisoner’s dilemma, depending on the piggybacking cost and strengths of cross-side network effects. Among others, we show that if the platforms’ equilibrium strategies were to subsidize consumers (when provider-side network effects are stronger than consumer-side network effects), piggybacking may intensify rather than ease price competition. In contrast, if the platforms’ equilibrium strategies were to subsidize providers (when provider-side network effects are weaker than consumer-side network effects), piggybacking may ease price competition. Interestingly, piggybacking reinforces the seesaw principle for the piggybacking platform. We provide a full characterization on such non-trivial equilibrium outcomes. We then consider provider-side piggybacking, and we show that the insights are qualitatively the same as consumer-side piggybacking except that the prisoner’s dilemma disappears if piggybacking providers multi-home. Managerial implications for platform practitioners are also discussed.

Female house wrens value the nest cavity more than exclusive access to males during conflicts with female intruders

AbstractIndividuals should fight hardest when they stand to lose the most. Whereas males frequently compete for fertile females, females more often compete for high quality males, male care, or resources required to breed. We asked whether established, territorial female house wrens (Troglodytes aedon) challenged by simulated female intruders fight as if they place more value on retaining (1) their nesting cavity or (2) exclusive access to other benefits offered by males. We randomly assigned house wren pairs to receive one or three nest boxes and then assayed female aggression. The relative costs to losing differed between box treatments. For one-box females, the risk of losing the cavity and territory was higher. For three-box females, the risk of losing the cavity may be lower because intruders may be able to settle as secondary females in the supplemental boxes. In this situation, females would lose exclusive access to males and their territories but would still retain the male’s assistance rearing offspring since male house wrens favour their oldest brood. We found that one-box females were significantly more aggressive. This response may be adaptive, as females that switched territories between broods were significantly more likely to lose their entire nest prior to hatching than females that retained the same territory. We interpret our results to mean that female house wrens value the nest cavity more than other benefits from exclusive access to males and their territories. This work contributes to a body of evidence that females often compete for resources required to breed.

Polly, Nancy, and Torchy Crack the Case: Those Relentless Women Reporters

WORLDLIT.ORG 9 photo : laura rodríguez / argentina / rnw . org / flickr Features “We are neither museum pieces nor part of a distant and harmless folklore. We are a living people, we exist. We are still alive.” – from the inaugural address of Petü Mogeleiñ (Mapuche Community Radio), El Maitén Chubut, Argentina, March 2008 To read an essay and poem by Mapuche poet Liliana Ancalao, turn to page 59. 10 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2018 O ne of the most implausible failures of realism that mystery readers generally accept is one posed by the series detectives, particularly the amateur sleuths in traditional mysteries. In novel one, Lord Fotheringale goes on holiday. A guest is murdered in the hotel, and Fotheringale unmasks the killer. In two, Fotheringale takes the train to London. An acquaintance is murdered in the next compartment . In three, he attends a dinner at stately Popham Grange, and—wouldn’t you know!—the heir of the estate is found dead in his locked bedroom. In story after story, the mere presence of Lord Fotheringale brings on murder like ragweed brings the sniffles. The amateur detective is an angel of death, and, not only that, the police even more implausibly put up with his or her meddling. The characters may grumble a bit to put a patch on it, but an amateur meddling in their work? No police force or prosecutor’s office of merit would in reality tolerate it. Nonetheless, the Sherlock Holmes template set the pattern, even to the point of justifying the illogical meddling by making the detective an adviser to the police. Holmes is called the world’s first “consulting detective.” Cases rap on his door. S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance is a friend of the district attorney, and James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers is a friend of a detective inspector. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote annoy the police but still nudge them to the crime’s solution. As the traditional detective evolves into the private eye from the late 1920s on, the gumshoe exceeds almost every legal limit on private investigation, even though in the real world, murder is strictly police business and meddling has serious legal consequences. At least the fictional premise justifies their role. In the late 1940s, the authenticity of the police procedural began to assert itself more powerfully, so presently most murder stories are set in the world of police work. Despite many errors about police procedure, they avoid the credibility issue—at least for the average reader. The legal thriller also regularly offers prosecutors and defense attorneys as investigators, which is totally credible, except to actual lawyers. Even Perry Mason pays Paul Drake to do the legwork. Almost from the beginnings of the modern mystery , fictional reporters have been used to provide a character whose occupation can put him or her in proximity to crime, offering a motivation and compulsion to dig up the hidden facts and the pretense to knock on doors and butt into other people’s business. In a sense, Watson and the unnamed narrator of Poe’s mystery stories function like reporters with exclusive access to Holmes and Dupin. Gaston Leroux, most famous for The Phantom of the Opera, was one of the French pioneers of the mystery and exploited his experience as a correspondent. Among other stories, he covered the 1905 Russian Revolution. When he turned to fiction, he created the eighteen-year-old reporter Joseph Rouletabille to solve Le mystère de la chambre jaune (1907; The Mystery of the Yellow Room) and continued with Rouletabille stories until 1922. The device of using women reporters as detectives appeared early in the rise of the mystery as well. Journalism was relatively open to women, compared to most other professions in the late nineteenth century. The first municipal female detective in New York City (and possibly the world) wasn’t hired until 1912, but reporters, particularly the legendary Nellie Bly, became the inspiration for dozens of fictional female sleuths. The fantasy of an exciting, independent life must have been almost breathtaking to many women in the decades leading up to the Roaring Twenties. Nellie Bly Polly, Nancy, and...

A Shared Network Access Business Model for Distribution Networks

This letter proposes a new business model for distribution network operators (DNOs)—shared network access (SNA), aiming to integrate flexible demand in a cost-effective manner. The SNA scheme incentivises the incumbent DNOs to give up its exclusive access to the network, leasing the spare capacity or back up capacity to a licensed independent party. The ownership of assets will be retained by the incumbent DNO while competition will be introduced in the operation of the spare capacity. The independent parties who have license for SNA will act as secondary DNOs, tapping into the spare capacity in the network to provide flexible network services for flexible generation and demand, thus substantially reduce the network access cost for flexibility. This paper quantifies the potential benefit of mobilizing spare capacity for flexibility network usage and discusses how the proposed business model can capture such value for each player. The results demonstrate that the competition brought by the proposed SNA can take advantage of the unused capacities in the existing network assets and be able to substantially increase their capability in integrating flexible demand and generation.

Iron-Catalyzed Synthesis of Tetrahydronaphthalenes via 3,4-Dihydro-2H-pyran Intermediates.

The development of an iron(III)-catalyzed synthetic strategy toward functionalized tetrahydronaphthalenes is described. This approach is characterized by its operational simplicity and is distinct from currently available procedures that rely on [4 + 2]-cycloadditions. Our strategy takes advantage of the divergent reactivity observed for simple aryl ketone precursors to gain exclusive access to tetrahydronaphthalene products (23 examples). Detailed mechanistic investigations identified pyrans as reactive intermediates that afford the desired tetrahydronaphthalenes in high yields upon iron(III)-catalyzed Friedel-Crafts alkylation.

Better to be resident, larger or coloured? Experimental analysis on intraspecific aggression in the ruin lizard

AbstractTerritoriality evolves when the benefits gained from exclusive access to limited resources exceed the costs of defence. Sometimes animals evolve distinct morphs, that may reflect different capability, and in some territorial species of lizards the polymorphism is associated to alternative strategies, both for reproductive efficiency and territorial dominance. It is known that normally larger males are more aggressive and are able to defend a larger area and for longer than small males; in fact this dynamic is widespread in many animal species including the genus Podarcis. The aim of our study was to test which factors determine the outcome of fighting in the strongly territorial Italian ruin lizard, Podarcis siculus, using two types of contests: (1) resident versus intruder and (2) in a neutral arena. Furthermore, because these lizards are characterized by strong ventral colour variability, usually restricted to jaws and throat, we wanted to investigate if coloured lizards have higher chances at winning than white lizards. The results showed that the fight's result was significantly influenced by the state of residence, while the colour had no effect; instead, the snout to vent length difference between opponents had significant influence on the outcome in the neutral arena. Our results suggest that, in this lizard, both the size and the state of residency, no matter of colour, play an important role to determine the outcome of a fight, however, highly depending on the contest. We think that P. siculus should be object of future studies, focusing on behavioural and ecological aspects, even considering the occurrence of different colours within and among populations.

Access Denied: The Continuing Challenge to Environmental Sciences in the Trump Era

Access Denied: The Continuing Challenge to Environmental Sciences in the Trump Era

How to feed The Ferret: Understanding subscribers in the search for a sustainable model of investigative journalism

The Ferret was founded in Scotland in 2015 as a co-operative. Drawing funding from a variety of sources – including grants, crowdfunding, training and events – the organisation relies heavily on subscriptions for its core business model. The Ferret is one of a number of recent digital start-ups seeking to explore new ways of funding and sustaining investigative journalism against a backdrop of declining levels of such journalism from the mainstream media. Despite this, to date there has been very little detailed, empirical work into subscription or membership models of funding journalism. This article begins to address this by presenting the results of an online survey of The Ferret’s subscribers. The findings are discussed in the context of recent work from international scholars about paying for online news and new business models for public interest journalism. The results suggest that subscribers tend to be middle aged or older, to the left of the political spectrum and motivated mainly by a desire to support the production of investigative journalism – rather than gain exclusive access to its content. The article concludes by arguing that recruiting such people offers a potentially sustainable membership model for investigative journalism platforms, whereby journalism for the benefit of society is funded by the few.

A multipurpose computing center with distributed resources

The Computing Center of the Institute of Physics (CC IoP) of the Czech Academy of Sciences serves a broad spectrum of users with various computing needs. It runs WLCG Tier-2 center for the ALICE and the ATLAS experiments; the same group of services is used by astroparticle physics projects the Pierre Auger Observatory (PAO) and the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). OSG stack is installed for the NOvA experiment. Other groups of users use directly local batch system. Storage capacity is distributed to several locations. DPM servers used by the ATLAS and the PAO are all in the same server room, but several xrootd servers for the ALICE experiment are operated in the Nuclear Physics Institute in Řež, about 10 km away. The storage capacity for the ATLAS and the PAO is extended by resources of the CESNET - the Czech National Grid Initiative representative. Those resources are in Plzen and Jihlava, more than 100 km away from the CC IoP. Both distant sites use a hierarchical storage solution based on disks and tapes. They installed one common dCache instance, which is published in the CC IoP BDII. ATLAS users can use these resources using the standard ATLAS tools in the same way as the local storage without noticing this geographical distribution. Computing clusters LUNA and EXMAG dedicated to users mostly from the Solid State Physics departments offer resources for parallel computing. They are part of the Czech NGI infrastructure MetaCentrum with distributed batch system based on torque with a custom scheduler. Clusters are installed remotely by the MetaCentrum team and a local contact helps only when needed. Users from IoP have exclusive access only to a part of these two clusters and take advantage of higher priorities on the rest (1500 cores in total), which can also be used by any user of the MetaCentrum. IoP researchers can also use distant resources located in several towns of the Czech Republic with a capacity of more than 12000 cores in total.

The Czech National Grid Infrastructure

The Czech National Grid Infrastructure is operated by MetaCentrum, a CESNET department responsible for coordinating and managing activities related to distributed computing. CESNET as the Czech National Research and Education Network (NREN) provides many e-infrastructure services, which are used by 94% of the scientific and research community in the Czech Republic. Computing and storage resources owned by different organizations are connected by fast enough network to provide transparent access to all resources. We describe in more detail the computing infrastructure, which is based on several different technologies and covers grid, cloud and map-reduce environment. While the largest part of CPUs is still accessible via distributed torque servers, providing environment for long batch jobs, part of infrastructure is available via standard EGI tools in EGI, subset of NGI resources is provided into EGI FedCloud environment with cloud interface and there is also Hadoop cluster provided by the same e-infrastructure.A broad spectrum of computing servers is offered; users can choose from standard 2 CPU servers to large SMP machines with up to 6 TB of RAM or servers with GPU cards. Different groups have different priorities on various resources, resource owners can even have an exclusive access. The software is distributed via AFS. Storage servers offering up to tens of terabytes of disk space to individual users are connected via NFS4 on top of GPFS and access to long term HSM storage with peta-byte capacity is also provided. Overview of available resources and recent statistics of usage will be given.

Spectrum and Network Density Management in 5G Ultra-Dense Networks

Recent studies argue that optimizing the utilization of the density of the radio access network plays a crucial role in fully attaining the spectral efficiency of modern ultra-dense networks. This insight implicitly unveils a trade-off between the management of spectrum resource and the network density that offers new angles to systematically optimize the network spectral efficiency. Leveraging this tradeoff, this article proposes a framework for joint management of spectrum and network density in ultra-dense networks where the frequency spectrum and the density of the radio access network are treated as resources to be jointly optimized to improve the network spectral efficiency. The generality of this approach is demonstrated in several scenarios, including spectrum and network density management for network slicing, and spectrum sharing among multiple operators of co-located ultra-dense networks. In the process, we also discuss centralized and distributed architectural solutions for spectrum management where a network operator is granted either exclusive or non-exclusive access to a portion of the shared spectrum band.

A Sports-Based Youth Development Program, Teen Mental Health, and Physical Fitness: An RCT.

To assess the effectiveness of a positive youth development (PYD)-based sports mentorship program on the physical and mental well-being of adolescents recruited in a community setting. This is a randomized controlled trial in which we recruited students from 12 secondary schools in Hong Kong, China. Participants were randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to an intervention or a control arm after stratification for school from October 2013 to June 2014. Participants were not blinded to allocation because of the nature of the intervention. Students in the intervention arm received an after-school, PYD-based sports mentorship for 18 weeks. Each weekly session lasted 90 minutes. Students in the control arm received exclusive access to a health education Web site. Six hundred and sixty-four students (mean age 12.3 years [SD 0.76]; 386 girls [58.1%]) completed baseline and postintervention assessments. The intervention improved students' mental well-being (Cohen's d, 0.25; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.10 to 0.40; P = .001), self-efficacy (Cohen's d, 0.22; 95% CI, 0.07 to 0.37; P = .01), resilience (Cohen's d, 0.19; 95% CI, 0.03 to 0.34; P = .02), physical fitness (flexibility [Cohen's d, 0.28; 95% CI, 0.13 to 0.43; P = .02], lower limb muscle strength [Cohen's d, 0.18; 95% CI, 0.03 to 0.33; P = .03], and dynamic balance [Cohen's d, 0.21; 95% CI, 0.06 to 0.37; P = .01]), and physical activity levels (Cohen's d, 0.39; 95% CI, 0.24 to 0.55; P < .0001). The intervention did not significantly improve physical well-being (Cohen's d, -0.01; 95% CI, -0.17 to 0.14; P = .86), BMI z scores (Cohen's d, -0.03; 95% CI, -0.18 to 0.12; P = .69), body fat proportion (Cohen's d, -0.15; 95% CI, -0.31 to 0.00; P = .051), and social connectedness (Cohen's d, -0.03; 95% CI, -0.18 to 0.12; P = .72). A PYD-based sports mentorship intervention improved healthy adolescents' mental well-being, psychological assets, physical fitness, and physical activity levels.