Secret and power in social life

Secret and power constitute two fundamental instances of the social world. Secret takes care of the concealment of things and of social processes. Secret is also a power device. Power is the social capacity to do, create, not doing and stop from doing. Secret and power get mutual feedback. Power uses the secret to protect his potential, be it what may, to increment its operative strength. Secret uses the power to achieve its aims and proposals. Social sciences seem to ignore the huge explanatory capacity of these two interrelated concepts, and even more, their powerful intervention in societies.

Secret and power in social life

Secret and power constitute two fundamental instances of the social world. Secret takes care of the concealment of things and of social processes. Secret is also a power device. Power is the social capacity to do, create, not doing and stop from doing. Secret and power get mutual feedback. Power uses the secret to protect his potential, be it what may, to increment its operative strength. Secret uses the power to achieve its aims and proposals. Social sciences seem to ignore the huge explanatory capacity of these two interrelated concepts, and even more, their powerful intervention in societies.

A journey through the secret history of the Flying Geese Model

Economic development in East Asia is characterized by the sequential "take-off" of member countries. This multi-tiered economic development in East Asia is often termed the “Flying Geese” pattern of economic development. However, some authors argue that the traditional Flying Geese pattern is not applicable to some industries such as electronics. Here, Japan may no longer be the sole "leading goose", with "followers" such as China (now producing cutting-edge products) having "caught-up". Does this mean that the Flying Geese Model has become "obsolete" in the 21st century? The main objective of this paper is to clarify the two concepts of Flying Geese which now seem confused: (1) application of the pattern of economic development in one specific country, and (2) application of the pattern of economic development to multiple countries in sequence. This paper provides validity checks of Flying Geese Models after differentiating these two concepts more clearly

Building Trust for Lambda-Congenial Secret Groups

Establishing trust while preserving privacy is a challenging research problem. In this paper we introduce lambda -congenial secret groups which allow users to recognize trusted partners based on common attributes while preserving their anonymity and privacy. Such protocols are different from authentication protocols, since the latter are based on identities, while the former are based on attributes. Introducing attributes in trust establishment allows a greater flexibility but also brings up several issues. In this paper, we investigate the problem of building trust with attributes by presenting motivating examples, analyzing the security requirements and giving an informal definition. We also survey one of the most related techniques, namely private matching, and finally present solutions based on it.

The secret to legal foretelling: generic and inter-generic aspects of vagueness in contracts, patents and regulations

In this genre analysis research paper, we compare U.S. patents, contracts, and regulations on technical matters with a focus upon the relation between vagueness and communicative purposes and subpurposes of these three genres. Our main interest is the investigation of intergeneric conventions across the three genres, based on the software analysis of three corpora (one for each genre, 1 million words per corpus). The result of the investigation is that intergeneric conventions are found at the level of types of expressed linguistic vagueness, but that intergeneric conventions at the level of actual formulations are rare. The conclusion is that at this latter level the influence from the situation type underlying the individual genre is more important than the overarching legal character of the genres, when we talk about introducing explicit vagueness in the text.

Analysis of a rate-adaptive reconciliation protocol and the effect of leakage on the secret key rate

Quantum key distribution performs the trick of growing a secret key in two distant places connected by a quantum channel. The main reason is so that the legitimate users can bound the information gathered by the eavesdropper. In practical systems, whether because of finite resources or external conditions, the quantum channel is subject to fluctuations. A rate-adaptive information reconciliation protocol, which adapts to the changes in the communication channel, is then required to minimize the leakage of information in the classical postprocessing. We consider here the leakage of a rate-adaptive information reconciliation protocol. The length of the exchanged messages is larger than that of an optimal protocol; however, we prove that the min-entropy reduction is limited. The simulation results, both in the asymptotic and in the finite-length regime, show that this protocol allows to increase the amount of a distillable secret key.

Information reconciliation methods in secret key distribution

We consider in this thesis the problem of information reconciliation in the context of secret key distillation between two legitimate parties. In some scenarios of interest this problem can be advantageously solved with low density parity check (LDPC) codes optimized for the binary symmetric channel. In particular, we demonstrate that our method leads to a significant efficiency improvement, with respect to earlier interactive reconciliation methods. We propose a protocol based on LDPC codes that can be adapted to changes in the communication channel extending the original source. The efficiency of our protocol is only limited by the quality of the code and, while transmitting more information than needed to reconcile Alice’s and Bob’s sequences, it does not reveal any more information on the original source than an ad-hoc code would have revealed.---ABSTRACT---En esta tesis estudiamos el problema de la reconciliación de información en el contexto de la destilación de secreto entre dos partes. En algunos escenarios de interés, códigos de baja densidad de ecuaciones de paridad (LDPC) adaptados al canal binario simétrico ofrecen una buena solución al problema estudiado. Demostramos que nuestro método mejora significativamente la eficiencia de la reconciliación. Proponemos un protocolo basado en códigos LDPC que puede ser adaptado a cambios en el canal de comunicaciones mediante una extensión de la fuente original. La eficiencia de nuestro protocolo está limitada exclusivamente por el código utilizado y no revela información adicional sobre la fuente original que la que un código con la tasa de información adaptada habría revelado.

An information reconciliation protocol for secret-key agreement with small leakage

We report on a variant of the so-called Cascade protocol that is well-known for its usage as information reconciliation protocol in quantum cryptography. A theoretical analysis of the optimal size of the parity check blocks is provided. We obtain a very small leakage which is for block sizes of 2^16 typically only 2.5% above the Shannon limit, and notably, this holds for a QBER between 1% and 50%. For a QBER between 1% and 6% the leakage is only 2% above the Shannon limit. As comparison, the leakage of the original Cascade algorithm is 20% (40%) above the Shannon limit for a QBER of 10% (35%).

Comedia del Rey Matarot y la Infanta Tellina o siga Secret de peixar tellines y masa de matar les rates [Manuscrito]

Humedad en parte superior

A Qualitative Study on Successful African American Marriages on How They Create and Repair Attachment Injuries Using Emotional Skillfulness.

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the meanings that Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee Davis attribute to how they have adapted to their marriage and overcame conflict over the years. A purposive sample of this well-known African American married couple, who self-identified as being in a long-term, successful marriage, was used. The subjects of study were married for 56 years. An analysis using Colaizzi's (1978) method revealed 2 themes, with 13 and 2 subthemes respectively. The themes that emerged from the analysis of the formulated meanings were: (1) secrets to a successful marriage; and (2) sources of conflict in marriage. Secrets to a successful marriage included 13 subthemes: (a) egalitarian roles; (b) commitment; (c) forgiveness; (d) communication; (e) love; (f) honesty; (g) understanding the struggles of Black males and females; (h) friendship; (i) religion/ support from God; (j) compromise; (k) beliefs that marriage is a process; (l) emotional availability of spouse; and (m) feelings of security. In addition, the theme sources of conflict in marriage had two subthemes: (a) different decision making styles; and (b) experiences of abandonment. These findings provided insight from this couple's perspective on the secrets to a successful marriage and the ways in which they managed to make their marriage work, in light of the unique challenges that face African American marriages.

A secret sharing scheme based on exponentiation in Galois fields

To provide more efficient and flexible alternatives for the applications of secret sharing schemes, this paper describes a threshold sharing scheme based on exponentiation of matrices in Galois fields. A significant characteristic of the proposed scheme is that each participant has to keep only one master secret share which can be used to reconstruct different group secrets according to the number of threshold values.