Developments observed in many countries have served to place concerns about the quality of local democracy on the political and academic agendas of many observers and commentators in recent years. Declining electoral participation and party membership, difficulties in finding people who are willing to stand for elected political office, and indications of declining confidence and trust in polit...

Software upgrades are one of the leading causes of downtime in IT infrastructures. Long running datamigration processes require intensive up-front preparation, extended maintenance windows and close monitoring, and they impose a significant burden on the system administrators. Even worse, major upgrades sometimes fail due to complex, hidden dependencies within the system, causing unplanned down...

"At the end of the day, the book should be judged not so much as an academic discourse but as a political brick that was hurled through the windows of various establishments that had it coming to them. "The retreat from theory is over, and the politicization of crime and criminology is imminent. Close reading of the classical social theorists reveals a basic agreement; the abolition of crime is...

The tasks carried out by modern information workers become increasingly complex and time-consuming. They often require to evaluate, interpret, and compare information from different sources presented in multiple application windows. With large, high resolution displays, multiple application windows can be arranged in a way so that a large amount of information is visible simultaneously. However...

The nondeterministic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky ~KS! equation is solved numerically in 211 dimensions. The simulations reveal the presence of early and late scaling regimes. The initial-time values for the growth exponent b, the roughness exponent a, and the dynamic exponent z are found to be 0.22–0.25, 0.75–0.80, and 3.0–4.0, respectively. For long times, the scaling exponents are notably less than ...

String theory is a leading candidate for the quantum theory of gravitation and is the only serious unified theory of all the forces of physics. Additionally, string theory seems to be mathematically unique, and it is possible that all the parameters of physics could be determined by the dynamics of string theory. However, there are two intertwined problems. First is that string theory requires ...

Medium Access Protocol (MAC) for wireless networks plays a very crucial role in the network performance. Wireless links have a smaller bandwidth compared to wire-line links, they are also more susceptible to interference than wire-line links. In this paper, we propose a MAC protocol for cellular networks. We assume two different types of traffic (real-time audio and regular computer traffic) ea...

Many real applications consume data that is intrinsically uncertain and error-prone. An uncertain data series is a series whose point values are uncertain. An uncertain data stream is a data stream whose tuples are existentially uncertain and/or have an uncertain value. Typical sources of uncertainty in data series and data streams include sensor data, data synopses, privacy-preserving transfor...

After reviewing energy functionals for 1-dimensional knots and links, we deene a family of MM obius invariant energy functionals E s for surfaces embedded in R n. These functionals are all nite for smoothly embedded compact surfaces and innnite for self-intersecting immersed surfaces. They treat disconnected surfaces and connected sums of surfaces correctly. For suuciently negative s, E s is no...