The IT outsourcing market-place: vendors and their selection

This paper focuses on outsourcing vendors, their characteristics and the vendor selection process. It draws on current research and two research studies, one specifi- cally examining outsourcing vendors and the other examining vendor-client issues. We first outline the development of the market for the outsourcing of information technology/information systems services and activities, then detail the characteristics of different types of vendor companies and their competitive positions, before providing a client perspective to the issue of vendor selection.

Soil, food security and human health: a review

Direct effects of soil or its constituents on human health are through its ingestion, inhalation or absorption. The soil contains many infectious organisms that may enter the human body through these pathways, but it also provides organisms on which our earliest antibiotics are based. Indirect effects of soil arise from the quantity and quality of food that humans consume. Trace elements can have both beneficial and toxic effects on humans, especially where the range for optimal intake is narrow. We focus on four trace elements (iodine, iron, selenium and zinc) whose deficiencies have substantial effects on human health. As the world’s population increases issues of food security become more pressing, as does the need to sustain soil fertility and minimize its degradation. Lack of adequate food and food of poor nutritional quality lead to differing degrees of under-nutrition, which in turn causes ill health. Soil and land are finite resources and agricultural land is under severe competition from other uses. Relationships between soil and health are often difficult to extricate because of the many confounding factors present. Nevertheless, recent scientific understanding of soil processes and factors that affect human health are enabling greater insight into the effects of soil on our health. Multidisciplinary research that includes soil science, agronomy, agricultural sustainability, toxicology, epidemiology and the medical sciences will facilitate the discovery of new antibiotics, a greater understanding of how materials added to soil used for food production affect health and deciphering of the complex relationships between soil and human health.

The neoliberal way of war: a critical analysis of contemporary British security in policy and practice.

Dominant paradigms of causal explanation for why and how Western liberal-democracies go to war in the post-Cold War era remain versions of the 'liberal peace' or 'democratic peace' thesis. Yet such explanations have been shown to rest upon deeply problematic epistemological and methodological assumptions. Of equal importance, however, is the failure of these dominant paradigms to account for the 'neoliberal revolution' that has gripped Western liberal-democracies since the 1970s. The transition from liberalism to neoliberalism remains neglected in analyses of the contemporary Western security constellation. Arguing that neoliberalism can be understood simultaneously through the Marxian concept of ideology and the Foucauldian concept of governmentality – that is, as a complementary set of 'ways of seeing' and 'ways of being' – the thesis goes on to analyse British security in policy and practice, considering it as an instantiation of a wider neoliberal way of war. In so doing, the thesis draws upon, but also challenges and develops, established critical discourse analytic methods, incorporating within its purview not only the textual data that is usually considered by discourse analysts, but also material practices of security. This analysis finds that contemporary British security policy is predicated on a neoliberal social ontology, morphology and morality – an ideology or 'way of seeing' – focused on the notion of a globalised 'network-market', and is aimed at rendering circulations through this network-market amenable to neoliberal techniques of government. It is further argued that security practices shaped by this ideology imperfectly and unevenly achieve the realisation of neoliberal 'ways of being' – especially modes of governing self and other or the 'conduct of conduct' – and the re-articulation of subjectivities in line with neoliberal principles of individualism, risk, responsibility and flexibility. The policy and practice of contemporary British 'security' is thus recontextualised as a component of a broader 'neoliberal way of war'.

France and the United Kingdom in the Security Council

The chapter examines the role of the UK and France in the Security Council during the last 20 years.

The legitimacy of the UN Security Council: evidence from recent General Assembly debates

Existing research on the legitimacy of the UN Security Council is conceptual or theoretical, for the most part, as scholars tend to make legitimacy assessments with reference to objective standards. Whether UN member states perceive the Security Council as legitimate or illegitimate has yet to be investigated systematically; nor do we know whether states care primarily about the Council's compliance with its legal mandate, its procedures, or its effectiveness. To address this gap, our article analyzes evaluative statements made by states in UN General Assembly debates on the Security Council, for the period 1991–2009. In making such statements, states confer legitimacy on the Council or withhold legitimacy from it. We conclude the following: First, the Security Council suffers from a legitimacy deficit because negative evaluations of the Council by UN member states far outweigh positive ones. Nevertheless, the Council does not find itself in an intractable legitimacy crisis because it still enjoys a rudimentary degree of legitimacy. Second, the Council's legitimacy deficit results primarily from states' concerns regarding the body's procedural shortcomings. Misgivings as regards shortcomings in performance rank second. Whether or not the Council complies with its legal mandate has failed to attract much attention at all.

Towards anomaly detection for increased security in multibiometric systems: spoofing-resistant 1-median fusion eliminating outliers

Multibiometrics aims at improving biometric security in presence of spoofing attempts, but exposes a larger availability of points of attack. Standard fusion rules have been shown to be highly sensitive to spoofing attempts – even in case of a single fake instance only. This paper presents a novel spoofing-resistant fusion scheme proposing the detection and elimination of anomalous fusion input in an ensemble of evidence with liveness information. This approach aims at making multibiometric systems more resistant to presentation attacks by modeling the typical behaviour of human surveillance operators detecting anomalies as employed in many decision support systems. It is shown to improve security, while retaining the high accuracy level of standard fusion approaches on the latest Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet) 2013 dataset.

Putting the Canal on the map: Panamanian agenda-setting and the 1973 Security Council meetings

In the early 1970s, Panama’s negotiations with the United States over the status of the Panama Canal ground to a standstill. General Omar Torrijos had rejected treaties left unratified by previous governments only to receive a less generous offer from the Nixon administration. Realizing that the talks were being ignored in Washington, the Panamanian government worked to internationalize the previously bilateral issue, creating and exploiting a high-profile forum: Extraordinary meetings of the UN Security Council in March 1973 held in Panama City. In those meetings, Panama isolated the United States in order to raise the issue’s profile and amplify the costs of leaving the matter unsettled. Using underutilized Panamanian sources, this article examines that meeting, the succeeding progress, and the effect of this early stage on the final negotiations several years later. The case also illustrates how, during the unsettled international environment of the 1970s, a small state utilized international organizations to obtain attention and support for its most important cause.

Scalable model-based configuration management of security services in complex enterprise networks

Security administrators face the challenge of designing, deploying and maintaining a variety of configuration files related to security systems, especially in large-scale networks. These files have heterogeneous syntaxes and follow differing semantic concepts. Nevertheless, they are interdependent due to security services having to cooperate and their configuration to be consistent with each other, so that global security policies are completely and correctly enforced. To tackle this problem, our approach supports a comfortable definition of an abstract high-level security policy and provides an automated derivation of the desired configuration files. It is an extension of policy-based management and policy hierarchies, combining model-based management (MBM) with system modularization. MBM employs an object-oriented model of the managed system to obtain the details needed for automated policy refinement. The modularization into abstract subsystems (ASs) segment the system-and the model-into units which more closely encapsulate related system components and provide focused abstract views. As a result, scalability is achieved and even comprehensive IT systems can be modelled in a unified manner. The associated tool MoBaSeC (Model-Based-Service-Configuration) supports interactive graphical modelling, automated model analysis and policy refinement with the derivation of configuration files. We describe the MBM and AS approaches, outline the tool functions and exemplify their applications and results obtained. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Formal validation of automated policy refinement in the management of network security systems

Policy hierarchies and automated policy refinement are powerful approaches to simplify administration of security services in complex network environments. A crucial issue for the practical use of these approaches is to ensure the validity of the policy hierarchy, i.e. since the policy sets for the lower levels are automatically derived from the abstract policies (defined by the modeller), we must be sure that the derived policies uphold the high-level ones. This paper builds upon previous work on Model-based Management, particularly on the Diagram of Abstract Subsystems approach, and goes further to propose a formal validation approach for the policy hierarchies yielded by the automated policy refinement process. We establish general validation conditions for a multi-layered policy model, i.e. necessary and sufficient conditions that a policy hierarchy must satisfy so that the lower-level policy sets are valid refinements of the higher-level policies according to the criteria of consistency and completeness. Relying upon the validation conditions and upon axioms about the model representativeness, two theorems are proved to ensure compliance between the resulting system behaviour and the abstract policies that are modelled.

The Evolution of a Responsibility to Protect in Africa : The African Unions Emerging Peace and Security Regime

The thesis focuses on, and tries to evaluate, the role that the African Union (AU) plays in protecting the peace and security on the African continent. The thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to the topic by both utilizing international relations and international law theories. The two disciplines are combined in an attempt to understand the evolution of the AU’s commitment to the pragmatist doctrine: responsibility to protect (R2P). The AU charter is considered to be the first international law document to cover R2P as it allows the AU to interfere in the internal affairs of its member states. The R2P doctrine was evolved around the notion of a need to arrive at a consensus in regard to the right to intervene in the face of humanitarian emergencies. A part of the post-Cold War shift in UN behaviour has been to support local solutions to local problems. Hereby the UN acts in collaboration with regional organizations, such as the AU, to achieve the shared aspirations to maintain international peace and security without getting directly involved on the ground. The R2P takes a more holistic and long-term approach to interventions by including an awareness of the need to address the root causes of the crisis in order to prevent future resurrections of conflicts. The doctrine also acknowledges the responsibility of the international community and the intervening parties to actively participate in the rebuilding of the post-conflict state. This requires sustained and well planned support to ensure the development of a stable society.While the AU is committed to implementing R2P, many of the AU’s members are struggling, both ideologically and practically, to uphold the foundations on which legitimate intervention rests, such as the protection of human rights and good governance. The fact that many members are also among the poorest countries in the world adds to the challenges facing the AU. A lack of human and material resources leads to a situation where few countries are willing, or able, to support a long-term commitment to humanitarian interventions. Bad planning and unclear mandates also limit the effectiveness of the interventions. This leaves the AU strongly dependent on regional powerbrokers such as Nigeria and South Africa, which in itself creates new problems in regard to the motivations behind interventions. The current AU charter does not provide sufficient checks and balances to ensure that national interests are not furthered through humanitarian interventions. The lack of resources within the AU also generates worries over what pressure foreign nations and other international actors apply through donor funding. It is impossible for the principle of “local solutions for local problems? to gain ground while this donor conditionality exists.The future of the AU peace and security regime is not established since it still is a work in progress. The direction that these developments will take depends on a wide verity of factors, many of which are beyond the immediate control of the AU.

Immigration, security and the public debate on US language policy : a critical discourse analysis of language attitudes in the United States of America

The narrative of the United States is of a "nation of immigrants" in which the language shift patterns of earlier ethnolinguistic groups have tended towards linguistic assimilation through English. In recent years, however, changes in the demographic landscape and language maintenance by non-English speaking immigrants, particularly Hispanics, have been perceived as threats and have led to calls for an official English language policy.This thesis aims to contribute to the study of language policy making from a societal security perspective as expressed in attitudes regarding language and identity originating in the daily interaction between language groups. The focus is on the role of language and American identity in relation to immigration. The study takes an interdisciplinary approach combining language policy studies, security theory, and critical discourse analysis. The material consists of articles collected from four newspapers, namely USA Today, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle between April 2006 and December 2007.Two discourse types are evident from the analysis namely Loyalty and Efficiency. The former is mainly marked by concerns of national identity and contains speech acts of security related to language shift, choice and English for unity. Immigrants are represented as dehumanised, and harmful. Immigration is given as sovereignty-related, racial, and as war. The discourse type of Efficiency is mainly instrumental and contains speech acts of security related to cost, provision of services, health and safety, and social mobility. Immigrants are further represented as a labour resource. These discourse types reflect how the construction of the linguistic 'we' is expected to be maintained. Loyalty is triggered by arguments that the collective identity is threatened and is itself used in reproducing the collective 'we' through hegemonic expressions of monolingualism in the public space and semi-public space. The denigration of immigrants is used as a tool for enhancing societal security through solidarity and as a possible justification for the denial of minority rights. Also, although language acquisition patterns still follow the historical trend of language shift, factors indicating cultural separateness such as the appearance of speech communities or the use of minority languages in the public space and semi-public space have led to manifestations of intolerance. Examples of discrimination and prejudice towards minority groups indicate that the perception of worth of a shared language differs from the actual worth of dominant language acquisition for integration purposes. The study further indicates that the efficient working of the free market by using minority languages to sell services or buy labour is perceived as conflicting with nation-building notions since it may create separately functioning sub-communities with a new cultural capital recognised as legitimate competence. The discourse types mainly represent securitising moves constructing existential threats. The perception of threat and ideas of national belonging are primarily based on a zero-sum notion favouring monolingualism. Further, the identity of the immigrant individual is seen as dynamic and adaptable to assimilationist measures whereas the identity of the state and its members are perceived as static. Also, the study shows that debates concerning language status are linked to extra-linguistic matters. To conclude, policy makers in the US need to consider the relationship between four factors, namely societal security based on collective identity, individual/human security, human rights, and a changing linguistic demography, for proposed language intervention measures to be successful.

A security architecture for a semantic Grid registry

Existing registry technologies such as UDDI can be enhanced to support capabilities for semantic reasoning and inquiry, which subsequently increases its usability range. The Grimoires registry was developed to provide such support through the use of metadata attachments to registry entities. The use of such attachments provides a way for allowing service operators to specify security assertions pertaining to registry entities owned by them. These assertions may however have to be reconciled with existing registry policies. A security architecture based on the XACML standard and deployed in the OMII framework is outlined to demonstrate how this goal is achieved in the registry.

Security Issues in a SOA-based Provenance System

Recent work has begun exploring the characterization and utilization of provenance in systems based on the Service Oriented Architecture (such as Web Services and Grid based environments). One of the salient issues related to provenance use within any given system is its security. In a broad sense, security requirements arise within any data archival and retrieval system, however provenance presents unique requirements of its own. These requirements are additionally dependent on the architectural and environmental context that a provenance system operates in. We seek to analyze the security considerations pertaining to a Service Oriented Architecture based provenance system. Towards this end, we describe the components of such a system and illustrate the security considerations that arise within it. Concurrently, we outline possible approaches to address them.