pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
Interfuel substitution in OECD-European electricity production

Fuel substitution in OECD-European electricity production is described by a putty-clay formulation. At the time of investment, fuel shares are determined according to a logit model. These fuel shares are maintained throughout the lifetime of the power plants. However, a significant share of capacity is assumed to be flexible. Short-term fuel switching is described by a logit model. An attempt has been made to formulate the model such that all parameters have a real life interpretation. This enables the use of a priori data about all parameters. The model gives a very good fit to historical time-series for oil, gas and coal demand when fuel premiums are calibrated. The most striking finding is that there is a strong preference for the use of coal. Because of the a priori data, the model is not very sample dependent. Thus, it should be well suited for policy studies or for predictions. The model should be used with caution if very high fuel prices are expected
Construction by Replacement:  A new approach to simulation modeling

Simulation modeling can be valuable in many areas of management science, but it is often costly, time-consuming, and difficult to do. To reduce these problems, system dynamics researchers have previously developed standard pieces of model structure, called molecules, that can be reused in different models. However, the models assembled from these molecules often lacked feedback loops and generated few, if any, insights. This paper describes a new and more promising approach to using molecules in system dynamics modeling. The heart of the approach is a systematically organized library (or taxonomy) of predefined model components, or molecules, and a set of software tools for replacing one molecule with another. Users start with a simple generic model and progressively replace parts of the model with more specialized molecules from a systematically organized library of predefined components. These substitutions either create a new running model automatically or request further manual changes from the user. The paper describes our exploration using this approach to construct system dynamics models of supply chain processes in a large manufacturing company. The experiment included developing an innovative “tangible user interface” and a comprehensive catalog of system dynamics molecules. The paper concludes with a discussion of the benefits and limitations of this approach
Does Formal System Dynamics Training Improve People's Understanding of Accumulation?

Research shows widespread misunderstanding of stocks and flows, even among highly educated adults. People fail to grasp that any stock rises (falls) when the inflow exceeds (is less than) the outflow. Rather, people often use the correlation heuristic, concluding that a system's output is positively correlated with its inputs. Although many argue that system dynamics training will help, evidence is scant. This paper reports an experiment with MIT graduate students to assess the impact of an introductory system dynamics course on intuitive understanding of accumulation. Results show large, statistically significant improvements in overall performance and a reduction in the prevalence of the correlation heuristic. Modest exposure to stocks and flows improves understanding of accumulation, at least among these highly educated adults. However, a minority still show evidence of correlational reasoning. The discussion considers additional experiments to deepen our knowledge of the training required to develop people's intuitive understanding of accumulation
OLED microdisplays control cell behavior through optogenetics

M.C. Gather acknowledges funding from Marie Curie Career Integration Grant (PCIG45-GA-2012-334407), from the Scottish Funding Council (via SUPA), and from the RS Macdonald Charitable Trust.OLED microdisplays are introduced as a microscopic illumination platform for cell biology. The μm-scale dimensions of each pixel and the μm-thin encapsulation enable controlled light exposure of individual live cells. This breakthrough is facilitated by recent progress in ultrathin metal electrodes and by quality control via high resolution hyperspectral imaging.PostprintPeer reviewe
Optimizing the deposition rate of vacuum-grown n-octylphosphonic acid monolayer for low-voltage thin-film transistors

A self-assembled monolayer of n-octylphosphonic acid (C8PA) is prepared from vapor phase in vacuum. C8PA thickness corresponding to several monolayers is deposited on aluminum oxide (AlOx) and subsequently heated to leave a monolayer of chemisorbed molecules. The effect of C8PA deposition rate on a 15-nm-thick, bilayer AlOx/C8PA dielectric and low-voltage p-channel organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) is studied. The increase in the deposition rate from 0.1 to 7.0 Å/s leads to increase in the field-effect mobility from 0.039 to 0.061 cm2/Vs, while the threshold voltage remains around −1.55 V. At the same time, the off-current is reduced from 2.3 × 10−12 to 1.3 × 10−12A, the subthreshold slope is lowered from 100 to 89 mV/decade and the on/off current ratio is increased from ∼105 to ∼106. The leakage current density of AlOx is reduced from 1 × 10−7 to 4 × 10−8 A/cm2 at 3 V when C8PA monolayer is added on top of it. In addition, pentacene grain size on AlOx/C8PA is larger than that on AlOx. The overall performance of AlOx/C8PA OTFTs is superior to that of AlOx OTFTs
Communities of energy.

The call for social science to engage with energy infrastructures and users to enable low-carbon transitions that benefit the poor in the Global South is welcome, but its urgency risks epistemic distortion. The theme of “community” in the social studies of energy needs critical reflection, disambiguation, and interrogation with empirical case studies. This article explores dimensions of assumed homogeneity at local scales. In attending to similarities and difference in comparisons between case studies in Nicaragua and Nepal, the authors propose that a framework for understanding communities of interest and practice can be identified in selective resistance to and appropriation of energy technologies that highlight positions of marginality and common purpose in emerging social energy systems
Frontier financialization : urban infrastructure in the United Kingdom.

This article contributes to critical social scientific understanding of the significance of state power to the furtherance of the financialization of socioeconomic life. Drawing on the poststructural theories of power of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, the concepts of “diagram” and “dispositif” are developed to foreground how changes in modalities and relations of power are manifest in shifting governmental rationalities and contingent policy interventions that attempt to advance financialization processes. The article's conceptual claims are illustrated through an analysis of the financialization of urban infrastructure that focuses on the United Kingdom's first ever National Infrastructure Plan (NIP), enacted between 2010 and 2015. The NIP is shown to have marked a step‐change in the UK state's approach to the governing of ostensibly public urban infrastructure, one that sought to reconfigure privately owned, market‐operated, and privately financed infrastructures as a “new asset class” to be prospected for value by global investors. As the NIP problematized the private debt financing of urban infrastructure, it was through the diagram of governmental planning that the apparent limit points of financialization processes were identified and confronted, and through specific dispositif that attempts were made to extend the frontier of financialization
Using HTML5 to Prevent Detection of Drive-by-Download Web Malware

The web is experiencing an explosive growth in the last years. New
technologies are introduced at a very fast-pace with the aim of narrowing the
gap between web-based applications and traditional desktop applications. The
results are web applications that look and feel almost like desktop
applications while retaining the advantages of being originated from the web.
However, these advancements come at a price. The same technologies used to
build responsive, pleasant and fully-featured web applications, can also be
used to write web malware able to escape detection systems. In this article we
present new obfuscation techniques, based on some of the features of the
upcoming HTML5 standard, which can be used to deceive malware detection
systems. The proposed techniques have been experimented on a reference set of
obfuscated malware. Our results show that the malware rewritten using our
obfuscation techniques go undetected while being analyzed by a large number of
detection systems. The same detection systems were able to correctly identify
the same malware in its original unobfuscated form. We also provide some hints
about how the existing malware detection systems can be modified in order to
cope with these new techniques.Comment: This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the article: \emph{Using
  HTML5 to Prevent Detection of Drive-by-Download Web Malware}, which has been
  published in final form at \url{http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/sec.1077}. This
  article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley
  Terms and Conditions for Self-Archivin
A multilayer non-repudiation system: a Suite-B approach

&nbsp;Security provisioning is an essential part in the design of any communication systems, which becomes more critical for wireless systems. The consideration and comparisons of security algorithms in various Open Systems Interconnection layers is a difficult task, because there are many performance metrics involved. The aim of this novel research article is to present research results for the design of a wireless system revolving around the practical and low-cost implementation of Suite-B algorithms in different layers. Suite-B, promulgated by the National Security Agency, is a set of cryptographic algorithms, including non-repudiation. The end results include the deployment of Suite-B algorithms at the application, transport, and network layers and the protocol flow at each layer.<br /
A robust self-organized public key management for mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-organized wireless network where mobile nodes can communicate with each other without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. Trust establishment and management are essential for any security framework of MANETs. However, traditional solutions to key management through accessing trusted authorities or centralized servers are infeasible for MANETs due to the absence of infrastructure, frequent mobility, and wireless link instability. In this paper, we propose a robust self-organized, public key management for MANETs. The proposed scheme relies on establishing a small number of trust relations between neighboring nodes during the network initialization phase. Experiences gained as a result of successful communications and node mobility through the network enhance the formation of a web of trust between mobile nodes. The proposed scheme allows each user to create its public key and the corresponding private key, to issue certificates to neighboring nodes, and to perform public key authentication through at least two independent certificate chains without relying on any centralized authority. A measure of the communications cost of the key distribution process has been proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is robust and efficient in the mobility environment of MANET and against malicious node attacks
Security and efficiency analysis of the Hamming distance computation protocol based on oblivious transfer

Bringer et al. proposed two cryptographic protocols for the computation of Hamming distance. Their first scheme uses oblivious transfer and provides security in the semi-honest model. The other scheme uses committed oblivious transfer and is claimed to provide full security in the malicious case. The proposed protocols have direct implications to biometric authentication schemes between a prover and a verifier where the verifier has biometric data of the users in plain form. In this paper, we show that their protocol is not actually fully secure against malicious adversaries. More precisely, our attack breaks the soundness property of their protocol where a malicious user can compute a Hamming distance, which is different from the actual value. For biometric authentication systems, this attack allows a malicious adversary to pass the authentication without knowledge of the honest user's input with at most O(n) complexity instead of O(2n), where n is the input length. We propose an enhanced version of their protocol where this attack is eliminated. The security of our modified protocol is proven using the simulation-based paradigm. Furthermore, as for efficiency concerns, the modified protocol utilizes verifiable oblivious transfer, which does not require the commitments to outputs, which improves its efficiency significantly
Survey of Return-Oriented Programming Defense Mechanisms

A prominent software security violation-buffer overflow attack has taken various forms and poses serious threats until today. One such vulnerability is return-oriented programming attack. An return-oriented programming attack circumvents the dynamic execution prevention, which is employed in modern operating systems to prevent execution of data segments, and attempts to execute unintended instructions by overwriting the stack exploiting the buffer overflow vulnerability. Numerous defense mechanisms have been proposed in the past few years to mitigate/prevent the attack – compile time methods that add checking logic to the program code before compilation, dynamic methods that monitor the control-flow integrity during execution and randomization methods that aim at randomizing instruction locations. This paper discusses (i) these different static, dynamic, and randomization techniques proposed recently and (ii) compares the techniques based on their effectiveness and performances
MEDAPs: secure multi-entities delegated authentication protocols for mobile cloud computing

Since the technology of mobile cloud computing has brought a lot of benefits to information world, many applications in mobile devices based on cloud have emerged and boomed in the last years. According to the storage limitation, data owners would like to upload and further share the data through the cloud. Due to the safety requirements, mobile data owners are requested to provide credentials such as authentication tags along with the data. However, it is impossible to require mobile data owners to provide every authenticated computational results. The solution that signers’ privilege is outsourced to the cloud would be a promising way. To solve this problem, we propose three secure multi-entities delegated authentication protocols (MEDAPs) in mobile cloud computing, which enables the multiple mobile data owners to authorize a group designated cloud servers with the signing rights. The security of MEDAPs is constructed on three cryptographic primitive identity-based multi-proxy signature (IBMPS), identity-based proxy multi-signature (IBPMS), and identity-based multi-proxy multi-signature (IBMPMS), relied on the cubic residues, equaling to the integer factorization assumption. We also give the formal security proof under adaptively chosen message attacks and chosen identity/warrant attacks. Furthermore,compared with the pairing based protocol, MEDAPs are quite efficient and the communication overhead is nearly not a linear growth with the number of cloud servers. Copyright⃝c 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Identity‐based access control for pro‐active message's DTN

Pro‐active message's delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are based on the usage of mobile code to obtain messages that contain their own routing code. This architecture allows applications to use the same network in different ways. The keystone of this type of heterogeneous network is a collection of contextual and application‐related information that it is stored in every node and accessed by the messages' routing code. Access to that information must be protected in order to make the whole architecture feasible; the operation of the network has to be secure, and attacks of information poisoning have to be avoided. We propose an identity‐based access control system for pro‐active message's DTN based on tools that are available in DTN networks, like symmetric key encryption and hashes. Our system grants confidentiality and integrity to the contextual information and solves the question of messages needing to use distributed information stored in nodes to route properly. The proof of concept of identity‐based access control in a certain kind of application demonstrates the feasibility of the proposal. The comparison between our proposal and other access control systems shows that identity‐based access control is the only system that fits well with the special characteristics of pro‐active message's DTN. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
A key management architecture and protocols for secure smart grid communications

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Providing encrypted communications among power grid components is expected to be a basic requirement of smart grid systems in the future. Here, we propose a key management architecture and associated protocols tailored to support encrypted smart grid communications. The architecture consists of two levels structured around the grid control system hierarchy. At the top level, which consist of control centers and regional coordinators, a bottom-up key structure is adopted using hash chaining and a logical key hierarchy. The lower level of the architecture consists of the regional coordinators (i.e., substations and distribution systems) and remote ends (e.g., meters and pole-top sensors) and utilizes a top-down key management approach built on an inverse element method. The proposed key management schema supports the hierarchical structure of the smart grid control mechanisms, and it takes the resource and electronic/physical security differences of the control levels into account. We define a set of protocols utilizing the architecture to provide secure unicast, multicast, and broadcast communications. Furthermore, we illustrate how the architecture is flexible enough to easily handle power grid nodes joining and leaving the system at the different levels. Lastly, we compare the proposed schema with existing ones and show that our architecture can achieve efficient key management to provide secure communications. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
CA-ARBAC: privacy preserving using context-aware role-based access control on Android permission system

Existing mobile platforms are based on manual way of granting and revoking permissions to applications. Once the user grants a given permission to an application, the application can use it without limit, unless the user manually revokes the permission. This has become the reason for many privacy problems because of the fact that a permission that is harmless at some occasion may be very dangerous at another condition. One of the promising solutions for this problem is context-aware access control at permission level that allows dynamic granting and denying of permissions based on some predefined context. However, dealing with policy configuration at permission level becomes very complex for the user as the number of policies to configure will become very large. For instance, if there are A applications, P permissions, and C contexts, the user may have to deal with A × P × C number of policy configurations. Therefore, we propose a context-aware role-based access control model that can provide dynamic permission granting and revoking while keeping the number of policies as small as possible. Although our model can be used for all mobile platforms, we use Android platform to demonstrate our system. In our model, Android applications are assigned roles where roles contain a set of permissions and contexts are associated with permissions. Permissions are activated and deactivated for the containing role based on the associated contexts. Our approach is unique in that our system associates contexts with permissions as opposed to existing similar works that associate contexts with roles. As a proof of concept, we have developed a prototype application called context-aware Android role-based access control. We have also performed various tests using our application, and the result shows that our model is working as desired
Connectivity jamming game for physical layer attack in peer to peer
  networks

Because of the open access nature of wireless communications, wireless
networks can suffer from malicious activity, such as jamming attacks, aimed at
undermining the network's ability to sustain communication links and acceptable
throughput. One important consideration when designing networks is to
appropriately tune the network topology and its connectivity so as to support
the communication needs of those participating in the network. This paper
examines the problem of interference attacks that are intended to harm
connectivity and throughput, and illustrates the method of mapping network
performance parameters into the metric of topographic connectivity.
Specifically, this paper arrives at anti-jamming strategies aimed at coping
with interference attacks through a unified stochastic game. In such a
framework, an entity trying to protect a network faces a dilemma: (i) the
underlying motivations for the adversary can be quite varied, which depends
largely on the network's characteristics such as power and distance; (ii) the
metrics for such an attack can be incomparable (e.g., network connectivity and
total throughput). To deal with the problem of such incomparable metrics, this
paper proposes using the attack's expected duration as a unifying metric to
compare distinct attack metrics because a longer-duration of unsuccessful
attack assumes a higher cost. Based on this common metric, a mechanism of
maxmin selection for an attack prevention strategy is suggested
Real-time support for HCCA function in IEEE 802.11e networks: a performance evaluation

The IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless networks has been recently enhanced with the IEEE 802.11e amendment which introduces Quality of Service support. It provides differentiation mechanisms at the Medium Access Control layer, using two additional access functions: the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) function and the HCF Controlled Channel Access (HCCA) function. Only the HCCA mechanism is suitable for serving traffic streams with real-time requirements such as multimedia applications and Voice Over IP. The IEEE 802.11e standard does not specify a mandatory HCCA scheduling algorithm, but it offers a reference scheduler as the guideline in the resources scheduling design.In this paper we analyze four HCCA alternative schedulers to the reference one. They offer real-time guarantees proposing different solutions to the request of QoS and real-time support expressed by the increasing diffusion of multimedia applications. A performance evaluation is conducted to show the main differences between the considered schedulers, including the reference one.The results show that under several scenarios there is not a unique best scheduler, but there exists a variety of solutions depending on the specified requirements. The conclusions of the paper offer some guidelines in the choice of the scheduler tailored for a particular scenario of interest