The complete fool: Insights and trajectories from an ancient path

This study presents a novel and accompanying exegesis which explore the fool behind the Fool by stripping away his usual costume and arenas of power and folly to expose an essence – an impulse of potentiality – that helps explain the Fool’s perpetuity and argues his critical significance as a catalyst for creative thinking.

Fool me if you can: mimicking attacks and anti-attacks in cyberspace

Botnets have become major engines for malicious activities in cyberspace nowadays. To sustain their botnets and disguise their malicious actions, botnet owners are mimicking legitimate cyber behavior to fly under the radar. This poses a critical challenge in anomaly detection. In this paper, we use web browsing on popular web sites as an example to tackle this problem. First of all, we establish a semi-Markov model for browsing behavior. Based on this model, we find that it is impossible to detect mimicking attacks based on statistics if the number of active bots of the attacking botnet is sufficiently large (no less than the number of active legitimate users). However, we also find it is hard for botnet owners to satisfy the condition to carry out a mimicking attack most of the time. With this new finding, we conclude that mimicking attacks can be discriminated from genuine flash crowds using second order statistical metrics. We define a new fine correntropy metrics and show its effectiveness compared to others. Our real world data set experiments and simulations confirm our theoretical claims. Furthermore, the findings can be widely applied to similar situations in other research fields.

Being resilient as described by people who experience mental illness

Aim: The purpose of this research was to explore resilience as described by consumers of mental health services in Australia who have experienced mental illness.

Background: Most qualitative research pertaining to resilience has focused on child and adolescent groups. In relation to the Australian context there appears to be a paucity of qualitative studies on resilience and the experience of mental illness.

Method: The study utilized a phenomenological approach elucidated by Colaizzi as the philosophical underpinnings of the study. In keeping with Colaizzi’s (1978) approach to inquiry, information was gathered through in-depth, semi-structured individual interviews. Information analysis utilised Colaizzi’s (1978) original seven-step approach with the inclusion of two additional steps, making this study’s analysis a nine step process.

Findings: Emergent themes explicated from participant transcripts follow: Universality, Acceptance, Naming and knowing, Faith, Hope, Being the fool and, Striking a balance, Having meaning and meaningful relationships, and ‘Just doing it’. The emergent conceptualisation which encapsulated the themes was; Viewing life from the ridge with eyes wide open. - choosing to walk through the darkness all the while knowing the risks and dangers ahead and making a decision for life amid ever-present hardships.

Conclusion: The findings of this study suggest being resilient can be learnt and therefore, should be a fundamental consideration in guiding therapeutic interventions within the context of clinical practice.

Art as parodic practice

Perhaps because of the pervasive sampling, remixing, rehashing and promiscuous citational blending in postmodernity, where quote marks dissolve, parody has come to be seen as a somewhat archaic concept, pertaining to cultures more stably codified and hierarchically ordered, rather than subject to the fluctuations of global markets and phantasmagoric projections affecting the flow of investment moneys. Given the anxiogenic nature of postmodernity under its various guises, willed as hypermodernityand metamodernity or supermodernity, the ideologeme ‘parody’ might be seen as nostalgic symptom in the wake of the ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard 1984 [1979]) – a rehearsed post-apocalyptic nostalgia for a world of neo-feudalism and fiefdoms, where the seasonal lifting of prohibition for carnival brought on the ‘allowed fool’ (Shakespeare 2006) for parody’s brief upending of the hierarchical order, when high became low, mouth met anus, and wise became mad, even within the Pater Noster of the Holy Mass. (Bakhtin 1980: 78). How the revisitation of parody might illuminate contemporary cultural politics is a driving question behind this collection, a questionmade more urgent by recent global developments of terror.