Socialist Economic Development in the 21st Century

Over a hundred years after the first socialist revolution broke the global monopoly of capitalism, a new class of socialist-oriented socioeconomic development is coming to the fore. Capitalism is still dominant worldwide, although its hegemony is no longer undisputed, and humankind is now faced with a key existential challenge. This book proposes an alternative path to overcoming the worldwide crisis of globalized capitalism. It offers a novel, balanced, and historically rooted interpretation of the successes and failures of socialist economic construction throughout the last century.

Modernism, Mysticism and the Pursuit of Freedom - Bringing the initial instinct of the Modernists to its fulfilment in the model of the Christian mystic

While one can certainly debate about the forms Modernism (in the artistic sense) manifested itself in and what actually qualified as Modernism, one cannot deny that the desire for freedom was one of its underlying tenets. In the 21st century it would seem however that the desire for freedom has not been satiated. In the following essay I will explore whether emancipating art from a moral authority achieved the freedom modernist artists so deeply desired and I will question whether severing himself from objective truth the artist was allowed to fully thrive. Comparing Modernist concept’s (Stream of consciousness, that art should reflect reality and the emphasis on subjectivity etc.) with the fundamentals of Christian mysticism (i.e. the interior life) and by reconciling subjective experience with objective truth through the use of St John Paul II’s philosophical anthropology – I hope to pose an alternative path to satiate, truly satiate, the Modernist’s thirst for freedom.

Repositioning Organizational Failure Through Active Acceptance

This paper considers the way organizations respond to failure by actively repositioning the failed outcome as success. When an organization fails to meet planned goals, they do not necessarily learn from the experience, automatically terminate the plan, or persist with the failing course of action. Instead, another response is to shift original aspirations by recasting what was achieved, acting as if the ensuing failure is positive, despite indicators suggesting otherwise. As a mode of organizational interpretation, this repositioning reformats the criteria for what is success in order to move forward, enabling organizations to continue failed outcomes and their tasks that are well past their use-by date. After detailing this adjustment, we model an active-acceptance protocol on failure, discussing whether organizational effectiveness is predictable from how firms respond to failure in this way. The paper fills a gap in dialogue specific to failing by opening an alternative path to understand how organizations frame failure differently.

Doing Hijrah Through Music: A Religious Phenomenon Among Indonesian Musician Community

This paper studies the variants of hijrah movements among Muslim youths in Bandung, Indonesia, in responding music. Hijrah (to migrate spiritually) was first interpreted as abandoning the past sinful life into the path of Islam. In its development, it is defined as leaving behind “un-Islamic” activities, including music. The latter meaning of hijrah conveys to ex-musicians performing hijrah to completely abandon music and even destroys their musical instruments. Among hijrah groups, Gerakan Pemuda Hijrah conveys the detrimental effects of music for Islamic morality and faith. For them, music will drive Muslims to the jāhilīyah (ignorance), shirk (polytheism) and bid‘ah (innovation/heresy). Amidst this situation, Komunitas Musisi Mengaji (KOMUJI) emerges to practicing hijrah by performing musical activities and even employing “musicking” as a way to attain the true path of Islam. This paper reveals the different views of those groups concerning music and hijrah, as well as shows an alternative path amid Islamism and globalization.

Design of captive portal LAN with redundancy connections

Captive portal networks are in great demand because users have privileged authentication in the form of usernames and passwords to enter the LAN network without having to share with other users. However, the captive portal network is difficult to implement redundant connection because it must be in the form of a ring topology and the application of a bridge network. Captive portal is a web page for the authentication process to enter the network where the authentication back end can use radius, kerberos, ldap with the AAA framework. Meanwhile, fault tolerance is a redundant connection mechanism as an alternative path provider if the main path is broken. Here there is a tiered mechanism so that fault tolerance can be implemented into the captive portal network. This study describes the process of designing a captive portal network starting from analyzing, conceptualizing and finally designing the network itself. The final result of this research is 2 pieces of redundancy connection network design to the captive portal framework.

Integrated routing system for wireless mesh networks

Recently Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has become popular especially for its low cost deployment in the areas of poor network infrastructure and terrain of difficult deployment. Although paths in WMN backbone network are stable, the access link contention can severely constrain the end-to-end throughput. We proposed an integrated routing system for WMN that exploits both paths through the backbone network and through the ad-hoc access network of mobile nodes. The ad-hoc path is considered as an alternative path and is used only when the primary backbone path is severely constrained due to access links contention. We have shown through simulation that alternative path is effective in delivering higher throughput in that situation. We also proposed a scheme for initiating the route discovery of the ad-hoc path. The main contributions of this thesis are two algorithms that allow the mobile node to evaluate the throughput of the backbone and ad-hoc paths, and to make a decision of taking one path. The proposed algorithms are implemented in OPNET simulator, and network performance is studied under variety of conditions.

Integrated routing system for wireless mesh networks

Recently Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has become popular especially for its low cost deployment in the areas of poor network infrastructure and terrain of difficult deployment. Although paths in WMN backbone network are stable, the access link contention can severely constrain the end-to-end throughput. We proposed an integrated routing system for WMN that exploits both paths through the backbone network and through the ad-hoc access network of mobile nodes. The ad-hoc path is considered as an alternative path and is used only when the primary backbone path is severely constrained due to access links contention. We have shown through simulation that alternative path is effective in delivering higher throughput in that situation. We also proposed a scheme for initiating the route discovery of the ad-hoc path. The main contributions of this thesis are two algorithms that allow the mobile node to evaluate the throughput of the backbone and ad-hoc paths, and to make a decision of taking one path. The proposed algorithms are implemented in OPNET simulator, and network performance is studied under variety of conditions.