The Privacy Advocates Bennett, Colin J
2010, 20100813, 20080829, 2008, 2010-08-13, 2019-06-20
eBook
Today, personal information is captured, processed, and disseminated in a bewildering variety of ways, and through increasingly sophisticated, miniaturized, and distributed technologies: identity ...cards, biometrics, video surveillance, the use of cookies and spyware by Web sites, data mining and profiling, and many others. In The Privacy Advocates, Colin Bennett analyzes the people and groups around the world who have risen to challenge the most intrusive surveillance practices by both government and corporations. Bennett describes a network of self-identified privacy advocates who have emerged from civil society--without official sanction and with few resources, but surprisingly influential. A number of high-profile conflicts in recent years have brought this international advocacy movement more sharply into focus. Bennett is the first to examine privacy and surveillance not from a legal, political, or technical perspective but from the viewpoint of these independent activists who have found creative ways to affect policy and practice. Drawing on extensive interviews with key informants in the movement, he examines how they frame the issue and how they organize, who they are and what strategies they use. He also presents a series of case studies that illustrate how effective their efforts have been, including conflicts over key-escrow encryption (which allows the government to read encrypted messages), online advertising through third-party cookies that track users across different Web sites, and online authentication mechanisms such as the short-lived Microsoft Passport. Finally, Bennett considers how the loose coalitions of the privacy network could develop into a more cohesive international social movement.
The ongoing novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has already infected millions worldwide and, with no vaccine available, interventions to mitigate transmission are urgently needed. While ...there is broad agreement that travel restrictions and social distancing are beneficial in limiting spread, recommendations around face mask use are inconsistent. Here, we use mathematical modeling to examine the epidemiological impact of face masks, considering resource limitations and a range of supply and demand dynamics. Even with a limited protective effect, face masks can reduce total infections and deaths, and can delay the peak time of the epidemic. However, random distribution of masks is generally suboptimal; prioritized coverage of the elderly improves outcomes, while retaining resources for detected cases provides further mitigation under a range of scenarios. Face mask use, particularly for a pathogen with relatively common asymptomatic carriage, is an effective intervention strategy, while optimized distribution is important when resources are limited.
Current cosmological data exhibit a tension between inferences of the Hubble constant, H0, derived from early and late-Universe measurements. One proposed solution is to introduce a new component in ...the early Universe, which initially acts as "early dark energy" (EDE), thus decreasing the physical size of the sound horizon imprinted in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and increasing the inferred H0. Previous EDE analyses have shown this model can relax the H0 tension, but the CMB-preferred value of the density fluctuation amplitude, σ8, increases in EDE as compared to Λ cold dark matter (Λ CDM ), increasing tension with large-scale structure (LSS) data. We show that the EDE model fit to CMB and SH0ES data yields scale-dependent changes in the matter power spectrum compared to Λ CDM, including 10% more power at k = 1h/Mpc. Motivated by this observation, we reanalyze the EDE scenario, considering LSS data in detail. We also update previous analyses by including Planck 2018 CMB likelihoods, and perform the first search for EDE in Planck data alone, which yields no evidence for EDE. We consider several data set combinations involving the primary CMB, CMB lensing, supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations, redshift-space distortions, weak lensing, galaxy clustering, and local distance-ladder data (SH0ES). While the EDE component is weakly detected (3σ) when including the SH0ES data and excluding most LSS data, this drops below 2σ when further LSS data are included. Further, this result is in tension with strong constraints imposed on EDE by CMB and LSS data without SH0ES, which show no evidence for this model. We also show that physical priors on the fundamental scalar field parameters further weaken evidence for EDE. We conclude that the EDE scenario is, at best, no more likely to be concordant with all current cosmological data sets than Λ CDM , and appears unlikely to resolve the H0 tension.
While green innovation has a positive impact on firms' performance, some established firms that initiate green innovation activities (referring to diversifying green entrants) could suffer from ...insufficient new green knowledge and skills. Since adopting a sustainability orientation helps firms commit to the creation of superior sustainable practices, and efficiently invest resources necessary to develop appropriate new green products, leading to superior green innovation performance, sustainability orientation offers an alternative approach for diversifying green entrants to achieve green innovation success. Building on resource-based, knowledge-based, and capabilities theories, this study aims to identify key factors that enable sustainability orientation of diversifying green entrants and enhance its effect on green innovation performance. As sustainability issues frequently occur upstream at the supplier level, and since supplier involvement effectively determines new product success, this study theorizes that diversifying green entrants that adopt sustainability orientation require two types of green supplier involvement (as a knowledge source and a co-creator) to enhance the effect of sustainability orientation on green innovation performance. Green knowledge-processing capability and green R&D capability complement green supplier involvement as a knowledge source and green supplier involvement as a co-creator, respectively, to further enhance the amount of green innovation performance. Based on a longitudinal dataset of 336 diversifying green entrants, the results support all our hypotheses. Interestingly, an additional analysis suggests that when diversifying green entrants implement green supplier involvement as a co-creator, they achieve greater green innovation performance than those who implement green supplier involvement as a knowledge source. These findings provide important theoretical implications and practical guidance for established firms to pursue green innovation.
Text provides data on all key aspects of metallic materials, including narrative information on metallurgical and related topics. Chapters have been extensively revised or rewritten completely to ...reflect the current state of the art. Coverage has been expanded to include data on additional classes of metallic materials, heat-treatment technologies, and more. Provides an invaluable reference source for all workers, libraries and research laboratories in the field of engineering and metallurgy.
In this Letter, we propose a method for optical image encryption based on diffractive imaging. An optical multiple random phase mask encoding system is applied, and one of the phase-only masks is ...selected and laterally translated along a preset direction during the encryption process. For image decryption, a phase retrieval algorithm is proposed to extract a high-quality plaintext. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated by numerical results. The proposed method can provide a new strategy instead of conventional interference methods, and it may open up a new research perspective for optical image encryption.
Face pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing facelike structures in everyday objects. Here, we tested the hypothesis that face pareidolia, rather than being limited to a cognitive or mnemonic ...association, reflects the activation of visual mechanisms that typically process human faces. We focused on sensory cues to social attention, which engage cell populations in temporal cortex that are susceptible to habituation effects. Repeated exposure to “pareidolia faces” that appear to have a specific direction of attention causes a systematic bias in the perception of where human faces are looking, indicating that overlapping sensory mechanisms are recruited when we view human faces and when we experience face pareidolia. These cross-adaptation effects are significantly reduced when pareidolia is abolished by removing facelike features from the objects. These results indicate that face pareidolia is essentially a perceptual phenomenon, occurring when sensory input is processed by visual mechanisms that have evolved to extract specific social content from human faces.
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