Transport ticketing security and fraud controls

For many years, public transportation systems have been an essential part of day-to-day life and so the principle of needing a “ticket” has been familiar to generations of travellers. However as technology has advanced it has become possible to make use of electronic tickets that have significant advantages both for travellers and for the transport system operators. There has been a lot of recent publicity regarding weaknesses in some electronic ticket solutions; which whilst based on some solid facts tend to suggest that transport ticket security and fraud control is primarily a smart card/RFID technology issue. However this cannot be the case as systems exist that do not use such technology; or use it along side legacy systems. This paper will consider technology problems, but will first establish the bigger picture of transport ticketing and will finally make suggestions for future evolution of such systems.     

Evidence for Glass–glass Interfaces in a Columnar Cu–Zr Nanoglass

Comprehensive analyses of the atomic structure using advanced analytical transmission electron microscopy-based methods combined with atom probe tomography confirm the presence of distinct glass–glass interfaces in a columnar Cu-Zr nanoglass synthesized by magnetron sputtering. These analyses provide first-time in-depth characterization of sputtered film nanoglasses and indicate that glass–glass interfaces indeed present an amorphous phase with reduced mass density as compared to the neighboring amorphous regions. Moreover, dedicated analyses of the diffusion kinetics by time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectroscopy (ToF SIMS) prove significantly enhanced diffusivity, suggesting fast transport along the low density glass–glass interfaces. The present results further indicate that sputter deposition is a feasible technique for reliable production of nanoglasses and that some of the concepts proposed for this new class of glassy materials are applicable.     

Reasoning about action and change

Reasoning about change is a central issue in research on human and robot planning. We study an approach to reasoning about action and change in a dynamic logic setting and provide a solution to problems which are related to the Frame problem. Unlike most work on the frame problem the logic described in this paper is monotonic. It (implicitly) allows for the occurrence of actions of multiple agents by introducing non-stationary notions of waiting and test. The need to state a large number of frame axioms is alleviated by introducing a concept of chronological preservation to dynamic logic. As a side effect, this concept permits the encoding of temporal properties in a natural way. We compare the relative merits of our approach and non-monotonic approaches as regards different aspects of the frame problem. Technically, we show that the resulting extended systems of propositional dynamic logic preserve (weak) completeness, finite model property and decidability.     

The SHARC framework for data quality in Web archiving

Web archives preserve the history of born-digital content and offer great potential for sociologists, business analysts, and legal experts on intellectual property and compliance issues. Data quality is crucial for these purposes. Ideally, crawlers should gather coherent captures of entire Web sites, but the politeness etiquette and completeness requirement mandate very slow, long-duration crawling while Web sites undergo changes. This paper presents the SHARC framework for assessing the data quality in Web archives and for tuning capturing strategies toward better quality with given resources. We define data quality measures, characterize their properties, and develop a suite of quality-conscious scheduling strategies for archive crawling. Our framework includes single-visit and visit?Crevisit crawls. Single-visit crawls download every page of a site exactly once in an order that aims to minimize the ??blur?? in capturing the site. Visit?Crevisit strategies revisit pages after their initial downloads to check for intermediate changes. The revisiting order aims to maximize the ??coherence?? of the site capture(number pages that did not change during the capture). The quality notions of blur and coherence are formalized in the paper. Blur is a stochastic notion that reflects the expected number of page changes that a time-travel access to a site capture would accidentally see, instead of the ideal view of a instantaneously captured, ??sharp?? site. Coherence is a deterministic quality measure that counts the number of unchanged and thus coherently captured pages in a site snapshot. Strategies that aim to either minimize blur or maximize coherence are based on prior knowledge of or predictions for the change rates of individual pages. Our framework includes fairly accurate classifiers for change predictions. All strategies are fully implemented in a testbed and shown to be effective by experiments with both synthetically generated sites and a periodic crawl series for different Web sites.     

Automated Flaw Detection in Algebraic Specifications

In interactive theorem proving practice a significant amount of time is spent on unsuccessful proof attempts of wrong conjectures. An automatic method that reveals them by generating finite counter examples would offer an extremely valuable support for a proof engineer by saving his time and effort. In practice, such counter examples tend to be small, so usually there is no need to search for big instances. Most definitions of functions or predicates on infinite structures do not preserve the semantics if a transition to arbitrary finite substructures is made. We propose constraints which guarantee a correct axiomatization on finite structures and present an approach which uses the Alloy Analyzer to generate finite instances of theories in the theorem prover KIV. It is evaluated on the library of basic data types as well as on some challenging case studies in KIV. The technique is implemented using the Kodkod constraint solver which is a successor of Alloy.     

Effect of physical vapor deposition metallic thin films on micro injection molded weld line mechanical properties

Micro injection molded polymeric parts coated with functional thin films/layers show off the promising applications in microsystems area. But the unfavorable and unavoidable defect of weld line in micro injection molding part leads to detrimental mechanical and surface properties. The possibility of the functional thin film for enhancing micro injection molded weld lines was investigated. Two typical coating materials (aluminum and titanium) with various film thicknesses (400, 600, 800 nm) were deposited on one side of the micro injection molded weld line tensile sample via physical vapor deposition (PVD) method. The coated micro weld line samples were characterized by tensile tests. The results show that PVD films of aluminum and titanium can reinforce the strength and stiffness of micro injection molded weld line, even at thin thickness levels. But when the film thickness is increasing, the weaker adhesion between metallic films and polymers decreased the PVD films’ enhancing performance for micro weld line mechanical properties due to the degradation of polymers related to longer time exposure under high temperature.     

Sozialdatenschutz — eine Frage des Beschäftigtendatenschutzes?

Im Bereich des Sozialdatenschutzes besteht im Zusammenhang mit dem Besch?ftigtendatenschutz ein gesetzgeberischer Handlungsbedarf. Die Regierungsparteien haben sich im Koalitionsvertrag darauf geeinigt, dass nach Jahren der Diskussion der Besch?ftigtendatenschutz in einem Kapitel des BDSG geregelt werden soll. Hier kann die Frage dahingestellt bleiben, ob nicht eine bereichsspezifische Regelung effektiver w?re. Eine Verbindung zwischen Besch?ftigtendatenschutz und Sozialdatenschutz wurde jedenfalls bisher nicht ins Visier genommen. Eine solche Verknüpfung ist jedoch notwendig, wie die nachfolgend aufgezeigten Konfliktfelder und der nachfolgend geschilderte Fall beispielhaft zeigen. Sie deuten die datenschutzrechtlichen Schwierigkeiten an, die durch das Fehlen eines Besch?ftigtendatenschutzgesetzes für Besch?ftigte im Bereich der Jugendhilfe entstehen k?nnen. Anschlie?end sollen sachgerechte Antworten ausgelotet werden. Sie führen gleichzeitig zu der kritischen Frage nach der Zust?ndigkeit von Aufsichtsbeh?rden und Landesdatenschutzbeauftragten in F?llen, in denen die T?tigkeit ?ffentlicher (hier Jugendamt und Heimaufsicht) und nicht-?ffentlicher Stellen (hier freie Tr?ger der Jugendhilfe) eng aufeinander abgestimmt werden muss.     

A model, a heuristic and a decision support system to solve the scheduling problem of an earth observing satellite constellation

China plans to launch four small optical satellites and four small SAR satellites to form a natural disaster monitoring constellation. Data can be obtained by the constellation in all weather conditions for disaster alert and environmental damage analysis. The scheduling problem for the constellation consists of selecting and timetabling the observation activities to acquire the requested images of the earth surface and scheduling the download activities to transmit the image files to a set of ground stations. The scheduling problem is required to be solved every day in a typical 1-day horizon and it must respect complex satellite operational constraints as well as request preferences, such as visibility time windows, transition time between consecutive observations or downloads, memory capacity, energy capacity, polygon target requests and priorities. The objective is to maximize the rewards of the images taken and transmitted. We present a nonlinear model of the scheduling problem, develop a priority-based heuristic with conflict-avoided, limited backtracking and download-as-needed features, which produces satisfactory feasible plans in a very short time. A decision support system based on the model and the heuristic is also provided. The system performance shows a significant improvement with respect to faster and better scheduling of an earth observing satellite constellation.     

Distributed top-<Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis> aggregation queries at large

Top-k query processing is a fundamental building block for efficient ranking in a large number of applications. Efficiency is a central issue, especially for distributed settings, when the data is spread across different nodes in a network. This paper introduces novel optimization methods for top-k aggregation queries in such distributed environments. The optimizations can be applied to all algorithms that fall into the frameworks of the prior TPUT and KLEE methods. The optimizations address three degrees of freedom: 1) hierarchically grouping input lists into top-k operator trees and optimizing the tree structure, 2) computing data-adaptive scan depths for different input sources, and 3) data-adaptive sampling of a small subset of input sources in scenarios with hundreds or thousands of query-relevant network nodes. All optimizations are based on a statistical cost model that utilizes local synopses, e.g., in the form of histograms, efficiently computed convolutions, and estimators based on order statistics. The paper presents comprehensive experiments, with three different real-life datasets and using the ns-2 network simulator for a packet-level simulation of a large Internet-style network.