A 'Teague' and a 'True Briton': Charles Johnstone, Ireland, and Empire

Charles Johnstone's literary output - which included Chrysal: or, the Adventures of a Guinea (1760) and a series of novels between 1762 and 1781 prior to his departure for Calcutta in 1782 - features a marked geographical and historical preoccupation with empire. The trajectory of Johnstone's life from Carrigogunnell and Dublin in Ireland, to London, and finally to Calcutta, indicates the remarkable possibilities for self-transformation which empire from Ireland to India offered during the eighteenth century. This paper examines the significance of empire in Johnstone's oeuvre, and identifies for the first time a series of articles written by him in The Calcutta Gazette in 1785.

Load Balanced Scalable Byzantine Agreement through Quorum Building, with Full Information

We address the problem of designing distributed algorithms for large scale networks that are robust to Byzantine faults. We consider a message passing, full information model: the adversary is malicious, controls a constant fraction of processors, and can view all messages in a round before sending out its own messages for that round. Furthermore, each bad processor may send an unlimited number of messages. The only constraint on the adversary is that it must choose its corrupt processors at the start, without knowledge of the processors’ private random bits.

A good quorum is a set of O(logn) processors, which contains a majority of good processors. In this paper, we give a synchronous algorithm which uses polylogarithmic time and Õ(vn) bits of communication per processor to bring all processors to agreement on a collection of n good quorums, solving Byzantine agreement as well. The collection is balanced in that no processor is in more than O(logn) quorums. This yields the first solution to Byzantine agreement which is both scalable and load-balanced in the full information model.

The technique which involves going from situation where slightly more than 1/2 fraction of processors are good and and agree on a short string with a constant fraction of random bits to a situation where all good processors agree on n good quorums can be done in a fully asynchronous model as well, providing an approach for extending the Byzantine agreement result to this model.