Lines in class The ongoing attack on mass education in England

Andrew McGettigan’s analysis of the financial transformations of higher education (‘Who Let the Dogs Out? The Privatization of Higher Education’, RP 174)is important for comprehending the complexity of the changes universities are undergoing and their implications. As he argues, ‘it is mass higher education in England’ that is now under attack and adequately responding to this requires the development of new habits and new forms of thought. It is also necessary to contextualize this attack in relation to comparable changes occurring in other educational sectors in England, not least because it is through control of the points of intersection between primary, secondary, and tertiary education that the government’s political intent is being most effectively realized. An analysis of these changes reveals the broader nature of the attack on the idea and practice of mass education itself.

Mitigate DoS and DDoS Attack in Ad Hoc Networks

This paper proposes a technique to defeat Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in Ad Hoc Networks. The technique is divided into two main parts and with game theory and cryptographic puzzles. Introduced first is a new client puzzle to prevent DoS attacks in such networks. The second part presents a multiplayer game that takes place between the nodes of an ad hoc network and based on fundamental principles of game theory. By combining computational problems with puzzles, improvement occurs in the efficiency and latency of the communicating nodes and resistance in DoS and DDoS attacks. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the approach for devices with limited resources and for environments like ad hoc networks where nodes must exchange information quickly.

Congressional acquiescence to presidentialism in the US ‘War on Terror’

Congressional dominance theory holds that not only can the US Congress control the executive, it does. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 and the Bush administration's ensuing global 'war on terror' suggest a different result. Bush's response to 9/11 signalled not only new directions in US foreign and domestic policy but a new stage in the aggrandisement of presidential power in the United States and a further step in the marginalisation of the Congress. Informed by a constitutional doctrine unknown to the framers of the US Constitution, the Bush administration pursued a presidentialist or 'ultra-separationist' governing strategy that was disrespectful to the legislature's intended role in the separated system. Using its unilateral powers, in public and in secret, claiming 'inherent' authority from the Constitution, and exploiting the public's fear of a further terrorist attack and of endangering the lives of US troops abroad, the administration skilfully drove its legislation through the Congress. Occasionally, the Congress was able to extract concessions - notably in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when partisan control of the government was split - but more typically, for most of the period, the Congress acquiesced to administration demands, albeit with the consolation of minor concessions. The administration not only dominated the lawmaking process, it also cowed legislators into legitimating often highly controversial (and sometimes illegal) administration-determined definitions of counter-terrorism and national security policy. Certainly, the Congress undertook a considerable amount of oversight during the period of the 'war on terror'; lawmakers also complained. But the effects on policy were marginal. This finding held true for periods of Democratic as well as Republican majorities.

Analyzing and Modeling Medical Data on Distributed Computing Infrastructures

Researchers want to analyse Health Care data which may requires large pools of compute and data resources. To have them they need access to Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI). To use them it requires expertise which researchers may not have. Workflows can hide infrastructures. There are many workflow systems but they are not interoperable. To learn a workflow system and create workflows in a workflow system may require significant effort. Considering these efforts it is not reasonable to expect that researchers will learn new workflow systems if they want to run workflows of other workflow systems. As a result, the lack of interoperability prevents workflow sharing and a vast amount of research efforts is wasted. The FP7 Sharing Interoperable Workflow for Large-Scale Scientific Simulation on Available DCIs (SHIWA) project developed the Coarse-Grained Interoperability (CGI) to enable workflow sharing. The project created the SHIWA Simulation Platform (SSP) to support CGI as a production-level service. The paper describes how the CGI approach can be used for analysis and simulation in Health Care.