Governing others: Anomaly and the algorithmic subject of security

As digital technologies and algorithmic rationalities have increasingly reconfigured security practices, critical scholars have drawn attention to their performative effects on the temporality of law, notions of rights, and understandings of subjectivity. This article proposes to explore how the ‘other’ is made knowable in massive amounts of data and how the boundary between self and other is drawn algorithmically. It argues that algorithmic security practices and Big Data technologies have transformed self/other relations. Rather than the enemy or the risky abnormal, the ‘other’ is algorithmically produced as anomaly. Although anomaly has often been used interchangeably with abnormality and pathology, a brief genealogical reading of the concept shows that it works as a supplementary term, which reconfigures the dichotomies of normality/abnormality, friend/enemy, and identity/difference. By engaging with key practices of anomaly detection by intelligence and security agencies, the article analyses the materialisation of anomalies as specific spatial ‘dots’, temporal ‘spikes’, and topological ‘nodes’. We argue that anomaly is not simply indicative of more heterogeneous modes of othering in times of Big Data, but represents a mutation in the logics of security that challenge our extant analytical and critical vocabularies.

A New Model for the Equation Describing the Cavitation Mean Depth Erosion Rate Curve

Paper present a new relation describing the curve MDER(t) which mediates the experimentally obtained values of the mean depth erosion rates. These curves are used to characterize the cavitation erosion behavioor of materials tested in the Cavitation Laboratory of Timisoara Polytechnic University. Practically the new relation is an improvement of the analytical model established in 2004 by Bordeasu and coworkers, by introducing a supplementary element, which take into consideration the shape of the zone in where the cavitation erosion rate became stable and has linear variation. These addition allow increasing the approximation of the experimental values and also putting into evidence the tiny differences between different materials (various types of stainless steels, highly alloyed bronzes etc.) which till now were considered with similar resistance. Thus, the supplementary term allow a better differentiation resulting from the chemical composition, the structure and the mechanical properties.

Electromigration Force on a Proton with a Bound State

The driving force on an ion in a metal due to an applied electric field, called the electromigration force, is built up out of two contributions, a wind force and a direct force. The wind force is due to the scattering of the current carrying electrons off the ion. The direct force works on the effective charge of the ion. In the present work we concentrate on the direct force on a migrating proton embedded in an electron gas. For this force a sign change is obtained as soon as a bound state is formed. In recent calculations hardly a sign change was seen, although a bound state was found in a self-consistent-potential for lower electron densities. Here we show that a supplementary term shows up, as soon as one accounts for the bound state explicitly. By this the problem has been solved regarding a possible lack of completeness of the published formalism. The results presented are based on square-well model potentials. By using different depths it is possible to show results for potentials without a bound state and accommodating one bound state.