The rapid development of the network society is in sync with the current era's pace. In comparison to traditional criminal methods, the utilization of the internet for criminal activities has progressively emerged and become increasingly prevalent. Nonetheless, this also poses a challenge in characterizing the offender's behavior. The objective of the study is to reveal the inadequacies in existing laws, policies and practices, and clarifying the harm of assisting in cybercrime and the plight of victims will help develop more effective support services and coping strategies, thereby improving the efficiency and quality of assistance to victims. This study focuses on the identification disputes that arise during the adjudication process of practical cases, combined with the existing legal provisions of the data for qualitative and quantitative analysis, and carries out a type study on the identification of helping behavior of cybercrime. Although China has specified the crime of assisting information network criminal activities in Article 287 bis of the Criminal Law, it remains controversial in distinguishing this offense from other crimes in actual cases. The study found that the techniques and means of cybercrime continue to evolve, from simple scams to sophisticated cyberattacks and data breaches, indicating that perpetrators are adapting to technological developments and changes in security measures. Consequently, it is crucial to clearly elucidate the connection between various recognition schemes from the theoretical perspective of norm violation and legal interest infringement, in order to provide an effective solution for the resolution of identification disputes in actual cases.
Abstract This paper draws on a translated and adapted excerpt from the author's book, Marguerite Duras: La chambre noire de l'écriture (2021) (original title: 玛格丽特·杜拉斯:写作的暗房). Starting with Marguerite Duras's unpublished essay, "Les petits pieds de la Chine," written around 1950, this paper aims to reveal how childhood memories are generated and transformed into Duras's typical mode of writing about the self over time, which holds good for understanding and analyzing the five versions of lover(s) that Duras created from the 1940s to the early 1990s. The theme and destination of Duras's creation is not so much love as writing, which never stops generating "another possibility of returning to the original book."
Social triad—a group of three people—is one of the simplest and most fundamental social groups, which serves as the basis of social network analysis. Triadic closure, a closing process of an open triad, is a useful principle and model to understand and predict network evolution and community growth, which has been widely used in web mining and solving social issues like political movements, professional organizations and religious denominations. Extensive network and social theories have been developed to understand the triadic structure, for example, triadic closure facilitates cooperative behavior and "friend of my friends are my friends". However, over the course of a triadic closure—the transition from open triads to closed triads are much less well understood. Furthermore, the interaction dynamics in networks, particularly in a triad is still unclear. In order to fill the gap in triadic closure studies, in this thesis, we trace the whole process during and after triadic closure. Starting from open triads, we study the problem of group formation in online social networks and try to understand how closed triads are formed from open triads in dynamic networks. Secondly, we focus on triadic closure's influence on networks, especially its influence on tie strength dynamics of social relations. We investigate whether the new established third link will affect the tie strength dynamics of open triads after triadic closure. Employing a large microblogging network as the source in our study, we first focus on open triads closing process. By investigating the impact of different factors from three aspects: user demographics, network characteristics, and social perspectives, we find some interesting phenomena including: male, celebrity and gregarious users are more inclined to closing triads; structural hole spanners are eager to close open triads for more social resources, but they are also reluctant to have two disconnected friends to be linked together. Then, we examine triadic closure and its influence – tie strength dynamics of triads after closure, especially whether and how the formation of the third tie among three users in a triad affects the strengths of the existing two ties using two dynamic networks from Weibo and mobile communication. We find that the closure of 80% social triads weakens the strength of the first two ties. Surprisingly, we discover that although males are easier to get closed, the decrease in tie strength among three males is more sharp than that among females, and celebrities are more willing to form triadic closure. However, the tie strengths between celebrities are more likely to be weakened as the closure of a triad than those between ordinary people. We also demonstrate that while strong ties result in weakened relationships in open triads, they can promote the stronger ties in closed social triads. Further, we formalize a prediction problem to predict triadic closure. We propose a probabilistic graphical method to solve the triadic closure prediction problem by incorporating user demographics, network topology, and social information. With better instantiating attribute factors, we also extended our model with kernel density estimates. Unlike triadic closure prediction, the prediction for triadic tie strength dynamics is far more complicated when time dynamics is took into account. We further propose a dynamic probabilistic graphical to solve the problem of triadic tie strength dynamics prediction with the consideration of user demographics and temporal as well as structural correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model offers a greater predictability for both prediction tasks. We demonstrate that our methodology offers a better-than-82% potential predictability for inferring the dynamics status of social triads in both networks, and the leveraging of the kernel density estimate together with structural correlations enables our models to outperform baselines by up to 30% in terms of F1-score. The triadic closure and its influence studied in this thesis will be a good guide to practical applications, like friend recommendation and new friend invitation for online microblogging services.
AbstractDisasters occur almost daily in the world. Because emergencies frequently have no precedent, are highly uncertain, and can be very destructive, improving a country's resilience is an efficient way to reduce risk. In this article, we collected more than 20,000 historical data points from disasters from 207 countries to enable us to calculate the severity of disasters and the danger they pose to countries. In addition, 6 primary indices (disaster, personal attribute, infrastructure, economics, education, and occupation) including 38 secondary influencing factors are considered in analyzing the resilience of countries. Using these data, we obtained the danger, expected number of deaths, and resilience of all 207 countries. We found that a country covering a large area is more likely to have a low resilience score. Through sensitivity analysis of all secondary indices, we found that population density, frequency of disasters, and GDP are the three most critical factors affecting resilience. Based on broad‐spectrum resilience analysis of the different continents, Oceania and South America have the highest resilience, while Asia has the lowest. Over the past 50 years, the resilience of many countries has been improved sharply, especially in developing countries. Based on our results, we analyze the comprehensive resilience and provide some optimal suggestions to efficiently improve resilience.
This article proposes the modified logistic mortality model as a potential moderation of current models. The fitting and forecasting effects of the proposed modified logistic mortality model are efficient for the mortality data of the United States, Japan, England and Wales, and the modified logistic model provides the best forecasting for persons older than age 30 years under MAPE criterion. In addition, this study considers how to use longevity bonds to manage longevity risk. We apply the proposed modified logistic mortality model to price the bond, and to improve the attractiveness of that bond, we design it to encompass more than one tranche, according to the concept of collateral debt obligation. This design offers investors more choices pertaining to their different risk preferences.
AbstractUpper echelons theory (UET) proposes that organizational outcomes are directly affected by the experiences, personalities, and values of individuals who occupy critical managerial roles within an organization. Using the lens of UET, this study investigates how governors' characteristics affect the management level of major road accidents (MLMRA). The empirical work is based on fixed effects regression models that are applied to Chinese provincial panel data from 2008 to 2017. This study uncovers that the MLMRA is associated with governors' tenure, central background, and Confucian values. We further document that the effect of Confucianism on the MLMRA is stronger when traffic regulation pressure is high. This study has the potential to advance our understanding of the impact of leaders' characteristics on organizational outcomes in the public sector.
Taiwan is home to a rapidly growing aging population as life expectancy rates increase and birth rates go down in this island. The government of Taiwan opted to bring in migrant workers to care for the elderly following a shortage in adequate domestic manpower who were willing to take on the positions of caregivers for the elderly. In time, eldercare in Taiwan switched hands: from the actual families of the elderly to migrant workers coming in from across the Southeast Asian region. Questions have arisen in light of this development. Is the government policy that allows for Southeast Asian migrants to care for the elderly in Taiwan a good one, or a bad one? Who benefits most from this deal: the elderly, their families or the migrant care workers? Is providing care for the elderly in their own homes by just one caregiver the only option? And can such a policy help both ends: the elderly person who requires safer care, and the migrant care worker whose labor rights require full protection? This paper, drafted out following the review of relevant literature and the conducting of interviews by Hong-Ming Huang and Jenn-Jaw Soon, analyzes the political-economic aspects of this policy and offers certain recommendations and conclusions. One conclusion is the fact that Southeast Asian workers take better care of the elderly in Taiwan when eldercare is provided through institutions, rather than if the care was provided by just one foreign caregiver engaged directly by families of the elderly. The positive effects of 'institution-style' workers are reflected in the work performance, life quality and management as well as labor rights protection.
AbstractMany real‐world systems use mission aborts to enhance their survivability. Specifically, a mission can be aborted when a certain malfunction condition is met and a risk of a system loss in the case of a mission continuation becomes too high. Usually, the rescue or recovery procedure is initiated upon the mission abort. Previous works have discussed a setting when only one attempt to complete a mission is allowed and this attempt can be aborted. However, missions with a possibility of multiple attempts can occur in different real‐world settings when accomplishing a mission is really important and the cost‐related and the time‐wise restrictions for this are not very severe. The probabilistic model for the multiattempt case is suggested and the tradeoff between the overall mission success probability (MSP) and a system loss probability is discussed. The corresponding optimization problems are formulated. For the considered illustrative example, a detailed sensitivity analysis is performed that shows specifically that even when the system's survival is not so important, mission aborting can be used to maximize the multiattempt MSP.
AbstractEmpowered by virtualization technology, service requests from cloud users can be honored through creating and running virtual machines. Virtual machines established for different users may be allocated to the same physical server, making the cloud vulnerable to co‐residence attacks where a malicious attacker can steal a user's data through co‐residing their virtual machines on the same server. For protecting data against the theft, the data partition technique is applied to divide the user's data into multiple blocks with each being handled by a separate virtual machine. Moreover, early warning agents (EWAs) are deployed to possibly detect and prevent co‐residence attacks at a nascent stage. This article models and analyzes the attack success probability (complement of data security) in cloud systems subject to competing attack detection process (by EWAs) and data theft process (by co‐residence attackers). Based on the suggested probabilistic model, the optimal data partition and protection policy is determined with the objective of minimizing the user's cost subject to providing a desired level of data security. Examples are presented to illustrate effects of different model parameters (attack rate, number of cloud servers, number of data blocks, attack detection time, and data theft time distribution parameters) on the attack success probability and optimization solutions.
