The Oceans Become Global

Aspects of ocean governance have ancient roots, including early anti-piracy campaigns and basic rules for maritime commerce. Sovereign rulers periodically attempted to control ocean space but usually lacked the means to do so. As Spain and Portugal mastered the art of long-range seafaring in the 15th century, however, they attempted to divide the world’s oceans between them, an effort that still stands as one of the most ambitious attempts to divide up the oceans. During that period, Portugal tried to exclude outsiders from the Indian Ocean and asserted the right to control all shipping in the area. Portuguese claims prompted objections from other European powers and set the stage for the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius to articulate the doctrine of a “free sea,” based on what he saw as the inherent nature of the oceans. While it faced several rebuttals, Grotius’s conception of the oceans mostly prevailed.

Adapting Railway Maintenance to Climate Change

Railway infrastructure is vulnerable to extreme weather events such as elevated temperature, flooding, storms, intense winds, sea level rise, poor visibility, etc. These events have extreme consequences for the dependability of railway infrastructure and the acceptable level of services by infrastructure managers and other stakeholders. It is quite complex and difficult to quantify the consequences of climate change on railway infrastructure because of the inherent nature of the railway itself. Hence, the main aim of this work is to qualitatively identify and assess the impact of climate change on railway infrastructure with associated risks and consequences. A qualitative research methodology is employed in the study using a questionnaire as a tool for information gathering from experts from several municipalities in Sweden, Swedish transport infrastructure managers, maintenance organizations, and train operators. The outcome of this questionnaire revealed that there was a lower level of awareness about the impact of climate change on the various facets of railway infrastructure. Furthermore, the work identifies the challenges and barriers for climate adaptation of railway infrastructure and suggests recommended actions to improve the resilience towards climate change. It also provides recommendations, including adaptation options to ensure an effective and efficient railway transport service.

ON SEVERAL RECURRENT THEMES AND CONCEPTS IN SCOTTISH BALLADS

The present article seeks to study the concepts of “love” and “homeland” from linguistic and cultural perspectives. Within the frames of the article an attempt is made to elucidate these concepts in Scottish ballads and media. The article also dwells upon the inherent nature of the aforementioned concepts as underlying units of Scottish culture since concepts as such reflect the mental activities of language speakers. The concepts of “love” and “homeland” embody crucial values and images common to any linguo-culture. The linguo-cultural analysis of factual data taken from folk texts (Scottish ballads) and media discourse (articles) sheds light upon not only the lexical actualization but also modern perception of the given concepts. The choice of the material is conditioned by the necessity to highlight their diachronic evolution and their importance in contemporary research. A special reference is made to the media coverage of the Scottish Independence referendum, which illustrates Scots’ attitude towards their ethnic identity and their country as a whole.

RPPUF: An Ultra-Lightweight Reconfigurable Pico-Physically Unclonable Function for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

With the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoTs) technology, security issues have received an increasing amount of attention. Since IoT devices are typically resource-limited, conventional security solutions, such as classical cryptography, are no longer applicable. A physically unclonable function (PUF) is a hardware-based, low-cost alternative solution to provide security for IoT devices. It utilizes the inherent nature of hardware to generate a random and unpredictable fingerprint to uniquely identify an IoT device. However, despite existing PUFs having exhibited a good performance, they are not suitable for effective application on resource-constrained IoT devices due to the limited number of challenge-response pairs (CRPs) generated per unit area and the large hardware resources overhead. To solve these problems, this article presents an ultra-lightweight reconfigurable PUF solution, which is named RPPUF. Our method is built on pico-PUF (PPUF). By incorporating configurable logics, one single RPPUF can be instantiated into multiple samples through configurable information K. We implement and verify our design on the Xilinx Spartan-6 field programmable gate array (FPGA) microboards. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared to previous work, our method increases the uniqueness, reliability and uniformity by up to 4.13%, 16.98% and 10.5%, respectively, while dramatically reducing the hardware resource overhead by 98.16% when a 128-bit PUF response is generated. Moreover, the bit per cost (BPC) metric of our proposed RPPUF increased by up to 28.5 and 53.37 times than that of PPUF and the improved butterfly PUF, respectively. This confirms that the proposed RPPUF is ultra-lightweight with a good performance, making it more appropriate and efficient to apply in FPGA-based IoT devices with constrained resources.

Review of key challenges in public-private partnership implementation

Although public-private partnership (PPP) is regarded as one of the key effective tools in the development of many countries, various challenges surrounding PPPs are not well understood. This paper explores nine key challenges in PPP implementation: (1) different organizational cultures and goals between the partners, (2) poor institutional environment and support, (3) weak political and legal frameworks, (4) unreliable mechanisms for sharing risk and responsibility, (5) inadequate procedures for the selection of PPP partners, (6) inconsistency between resource inputs and quality, (7) inadequate monitoring and evaluation of PPP processes, (8) lack of transparency, and (9) the inherent nature of PPPs. This paper aims to provide the perceptions in the existing literature on many of these challenges, as well as provide solutions to each challenge.

Determinants of Sukuk Issuers’ Financial Stability: Evidence from Malaysia

Financial stability and Sukuk expanded swiftly into the financial industry after the 2007-2008 global financial turmoil. Malaysia's Sukuk market is arguably the most prominent in Islamic finance globally, and its inherent nature gives it a better security on the premise of guaranteed firms’ financial stability and returns to investors. This study aims to explore the extent of the Malaysian firms’ financial stability are being influenced by the characteristics of Sukuk and also the firms’ characteristics. Sixty-one listed companies that have issued Sukuk from 1997 to 2017 have been selected for this study. The nave distance to default (DD) developed by Bharath and Shumway was used as a measure of the firms’ financial stability. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) was employed in this study, and the results confirmed that Sukuk could promote the firms’ financial stability. The variables related to the characteristics of Sukuk that were found to influence financial stability were the intensity of Sukuk and the proportion of Sukuk financing. The firm size, valuation, solvency, and profitability were the firms’ characteristics that have also affected the firms’ financial stability significantly. All these provide evidences that Malaysia should play more active role in promoting the development of Sukuk market, and at the same time should be aware that financial stability is a systematic element which involved many complex factors.

Facilitating Tacit Knowledge Construction

Design knowledge, for its most part, is tacit. The embedded and inherent nature of tacit knowledge implies that it is a cognitive and internal construct acquired through the design act of doing. However, it is also socially constructed through shared experiences, collaborations and interactions. The design studio is a dynamic, pedagogical site that facilitates the construction of tacit knowledge through its myriad of interactive spaces. Online and virtual platforms offer opportunities to extend the learning boundaries of its social realm. Studies in the influence of these spaces on tacit knowledge construction are currently insufficient. An interpretive study was conducted in different studio environments within the Environment and Interior Design discipline of the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University to further the understanding of tacit knowledge construction in blended learning environments.

End-user perceptions on information security

Information is a vital asset needed by many organizations to function effectively. However, this asset can easily be compromised thus its protection is crucial to the efficacy of an organization. A common information security breach used is social engineering. Social engineering is the use of manipulative and deceptive techniques against the inherent nature of human beings to access sensitive and confidential information to achieve an illicit action or omission of action. Through a qualitative inquiry, this article investigated the perceptions of employees concerning social engineering in the workplace to extract practical lessons from local businesses located in Gauteng Province, South Africa.The findings confirm that human beings should be at the forefront of defense against social engineering attacks and advocates for a multi-inter-trans-disciplinary social engineering protection model to practically assist organizations in developing a healthy and effective information security culture.

IMPLEMENTASI AHP-TOPSIS DAN NAÏVE BAYES DALAM SISTEM PENDUKUNG KEPUTUSAN PEMBERIAN BIMBINGAN KONSELING SISWA

Student development cannot be separated from the influence of the surrounding environment, be it physical, psychological, and social. The inherent nature of the environment is change, if change is difficult to predict, it will create behavioral gaps from students. For example, problems that are often experienced by students are difficulties in increasing grades so that the scores are relatively low, the level of class attendance is minimal, the learning environment in the classroom whether it supports students to be able to participate in learning activities or not, violations of school rules, and so on. The purpose of this study is to help provide decision recommendations for students who will be given priority in counseling guidance and counseling services. The method used for calculations on the SPK is a combination of AHP-TOPSIS and Naïve Bayes Classifier. AHP is used to find the weight value of each criterion, TOPSIS is used in the ranking process while Naïve Bayes is used to determine counseling services. The results of this study are in the form of a decision support system, which can facilitate the decision-making process, and can provide recommendations for students who are prioritized for counseling and counseling services

Three Perspectives on Changing Gender Stereotypes

Changing gender stereotypes is an essential topic among researchers since the 1970s. The debate on this subject continues in the twenty-first century. Some researchers argue that gender stereotypes have not changed, since it is supported by some solid theoretical foundations and its inherent nature of social interpretation. Moreover, there are gaps in the existing literature, regarding who gets the relative advantage on gender stereotype change and the different outcomes of changing gender stereotypes. Hence, this article reviews the changing gender stereotypes in three perspectives: whether it is prevalent in the whole contemporary world, who gets the relative advantage in gender stereotype change and the realities reflected by the outcomes of changing gender stereotypes. Before these three perspectives, we provide a comprehensive understanding of the definitions, origins and components of changing gender stereotypes. The lack of which may have been an underlying cause of confusion about the concept and its realities. Therefore, this article seeks to evaluate the changing gender stereotypes to provide insights into changing gender stereotypes in the contemporary world, the realities of changing gender stereotypes and directions for future researchers.