Narrating Memory: Weighing up the Testimony

Memory is the ability to store, maintain and recall information and experiences. Although predominantly an individual attribute, memory coincides with the life-world, with consciousness and with the ability to define reality – all of which are shared with others. When analysing narratives the sociologist needs to situate individual memory within its broader context. The article follows the argument that individuals acquire their memories within a broader social context. They also recall and localise their memories within a broader social context. This article interprets a remarkable testimony: the story of a former political prisoner who circumcised a large number of young fellow inmates in the notorious prison on Robben Island, South Africa, during the period of Nelson Mandela‟s incarceration. The article relates the narrative in question to the life-world of the narrator and to his experiences whilst serving his 18-year prison sentence. It reflects on the epistemological questions regarding memories. Memory as recollection, as reconstruction of events and information, and as process of re-membering come under the spotlight. Narratives that are often repeated start taking on a life of their own – particularly in the case of trauma memories. When analysing these narratives, the sociologist needs to distinguish between objective markers and subjective interpretation. Memory does not constitute pure recall by the individual. The article illustrates the effect of intersubjective and collective factors on the process of remembering. It calls for a reflexive process to identify, re-interpret and unpack the process of remembering.

Vulnerability Selection for Remediation: An Empirical Analysis

Vulnerabilities are security flaws in software and network systems that criminal hackers can exploit to gain an asymmetric advantage. Cyber-Security Operations Centers must routinely triage and patch vulnerabilities in their system(s) to minimize external exposure to attackers. The personnel resources required to address vulnerability remediation tasks are limited and constrained, thus motivating the need for optimization approaches to improve the efficiency of the vulnerability selection process. This paper investigates two different approaches to vulnerability selection for mitigation through (a) Individual Attribute Value Optimization and (b) Multiple Attribute Value Optimization. The former approach presents a methodology that optimizes the selection of vulnerabilities for mitigation with respect to an individual attribute, while the latter approach considers multiple attributes in the vulnerability selection decision-making. Real scan data from a Cyber-Security Operations Center are used to compare the results between the two mathematical approaches. Furthermore, comparisons are made with the results obtained from (a) the actual (baseline) Cyber-Security Operations Center performance, and (b) a vulnerability prioritization algorithm called VULCON that appeared in recent literature.

The Terms of Ethnoracial Equality

This article initially accounts for the discussions concerning the notions ‘ethnic origin’ and ‘race’ that have taken place in the Swedish legislative context and places these within a wider European context. Next follows a mapping of the ways in which Swedish courts, in cases of alleged ethnic discrimination, read the notion of ‘ethnic affiliation’ – defined as ‘national or ethnic origin, skin colour, or other similar circumstance’ – and decide whether a statement or an act is related to it. The purpose, to borrow Michel Foucault’s words, is to ‘make visible precisely what is visible’. By bringing together, arranging and connecting what the courts have said about ‘ethnic affiliation’, the conclusions they have reached and the circumstances that they have ignored, three observations are made: (a) ethnic affiliation is treated as an authentic and stable personal individual attribute, (b) ethnic affiliation is seen as a question about body types and bloodlines solely and (c) discriminatory acts are connected to ‘ethnic affiliation’ only if related to visual appearance or accompanied by ‘incriminating words’. The article discusses and analyzes the significance and implications of these observations in engagement with theorists such as Barnor Hesse and David Theo Goldberg.

Information Gatekeepers – Aren't We All? A new perspective for looking at the Human Information Gatekeeper

In today's knowledge environment, individuals and groups who gather relevant information about the organization's external environment and distribute that information for use by their colleagues, receive increasing attention and are viewed with great importance. These individuals have been named Information Gatekeepers. Thus far, researchers have not established a unanimous and interdisciplinary definition regarding the human information gatekeeper. Nonetheless, a recurrent theme in previous papers regards gatekeepers as a select few throughout the organization. This approach creates two kinds of employees based on a specific set of criteria – those who are gatekeepers and those who are not. The main goal of this research is to examine whether gate keeping is an individual attribute that exists or does not exist within the organization, or whether gate keeping is a continuous attribute that exists within every member and throughout the organization in varying intensity subject to differences in personal characteristics and other factors. A revised version of this paper was published in Informing Science: the International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, Volume 18, 2015

Fuzzy Collaborative Clustering-Based Ranking Approach for Complex Objects

This paper makes a discussion on the ranking problem of complex objects where each object is composed of some patterns described by individual attribute information as well as the relational information between patterns. This paper presents a fuzzy collaborative clustering-based ranking approach for this kind of ranking problem. In this approach, a referential object is employed to guide the ranking process. To achieve the final ranking result, fuzzy collaborative clustering is carried on the patterns in the referential object by using the collaborative information obtained from each ranked object. Since the collaborative information of ranking objects is represented by cluster centers and/or partition matrices, we give two forms of the proposed approach. With the aid of fuzzy collaborative clustering, the ranking results can be obtained by comparing the difference of the referential object before and after collaboration with respect to ranking objects. One can find that this proposed ranking approach is totally different from the previous ranking methods because of its completely collaborative clustering mechanism. Moreover, some synthetic examples show that our proposed ranking algorithm is valid.

Information Gatekeepers – Aren't We All?

In today’s knowledge environment, individuals and groups who gather relevant information about the organization’s external environment and distribute that information for use by their colleagues receive increasing attention and are viewed with great importance. These individuals have been named Information Gatekeepers. Thus far, researchers have not established a unanimous and interdisciplinary definition regarding the human information gatekeeper. Nonetheless, a recurrent theme in previous papers regards gatekeepers as a select few throughout the organization. This approach creates two kinds of employees based on a specific set of criteria – those who are gatekeepers and those who are not. The main goal of this research is to examine whether gate keeping is an individual attribute that exists or does not exist within the organization, or whether gate keeping is a continuous attribute that exists within every member and throughout the organization in varying intensity subject to differences in personal characteristics and other factors. We find that evidence to the existence of latter approach is significant and suggest practical recommendations that arise from these findings.

Analysis of User Influence Using User Behavior and Random Walk

To improve the effect of user influence predicting in microblog, this paper proposed a new method of user influence analysis named UBRWR, based on user interactive behavior and the random walk method. UBRWR firstly used the behaviors between users to reconstruct the network topology, and then an improved PageRank algorithm was applied to predict the user influence, with quantized individual attribute features. The experimental in Weiba show that the UBRWR algorithm outperforms the PageRank algorithm and method using fans count in terms of ranking accuracy.