Self-Advocacy as Precariousness in University Education

Self-advocacy has arguably become one of the most centrally positioned priorities in Canadian post-secondary disability service-provision frameworks. It is widely understood to be an indispensable skill for disabled students working to implement academic accommodations at university, and it has become the focus of numerous efforts to prepare them for transition from high school settings. This article draws on findings from a doctoral study that explored the self- advocacy experiences of disabled students and their professors in three small liberal arts universities in Nova Scotia, Canada in order to theorize self-advocacy as precariousness. Detailed research findings are reported elsewhere, but this account offers a theoretical analysis of participant experiences in order to broaden understandings of self-advocacy as a relational access requirement that generates persistent uncertainty for disabled learners.

An efficient attribute-based hierarchical data access control scheme in cloud computing

Security issues in cloud computing have become a hot topic in academia and industry, and CP-ABE is an effective solution for managing and protecting data. When data is shared in cloud computing, they usually have multiple access structures that have hierarchical relationships. However, existing CP-ABE algorithms do not consider such relationships and just require data owners to generate multiple ciphertexts to meet the hierarchical access requirement, which would incur substantial computation overheads. To achieve fine-grained access control of multiple hierarchical files effectively, first we propose an efficient hierarchical CP-ABE algorithm whose access structure is linear secret sharing scheme. Moreover, we construct an attribute-based hierarchical access control scheme, namely AHAC. In our scheme, when a data visitor’s attributes match a part of the access control structure, he can decrypt the data that associate with this part. The experiments show that AHAC has good security and high performance. Furthermore, when the quantity of encrypted data files increases, the superiority of AHAC will be more significant.

Quality improvement measures for early detection of severe intravenous infiltration in infants

Intravenous infiltration is one of the most commonly seen morbidity in infants admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The risk of intravenous infiltration in preterm infants is probably due to prolonged peripheral intravenous access requirement for nutritional support and usage of other intravenous medications to support their growth. Infants are more likely to develop intravenous infiltrations due to the increased fragility of their blood vessels, deficient subcutaneous tissue and inability to express pain. As a result, the intravenous infiltrates in infants can rapidly progress to severe stage 3 and stage 4 infiltrates with necrosis if timely intervention is not provided. Also, factors obscuring to identify stage 1 and stage 2 infiltrates, may lead their progression to severe infiltration. Root cause analysis was performed following two severe intravenous infiltrates that required plastic surgery intervention in our level III NICU. Quality improvement measures were implemented. We developed a unique intravenous securing method, conducted educational programmes for NICU staff, increased intravenous site surveillance and ascertained to maintain the intravenous pump pressures in the reference range. The hospital NICU intravenous care policy was updated with quality improvement measures. Data were collected preintervention and postintervention. The incidence of intravenous infiltration in preterm infants varies widely in different places. This may be due to under-reporting of these relatively rare adverse events, but may also be due to the fact that the preterm infants represent a small portion of the patient population. The present study has shown that severe infiltration was associated with an increase in intravenous days. Following the quality improvement measures, there were no reported cases of severe intravenous infiltration. In conclusion, the awareness of the problem with evidence-based quality improvement measures may help in early detection of intravenous infiltrates and decrease the severe intravenous infiltration in infants.

Internalism and externalism in epistemology

The internalism/externalism debate in epistemology is primarily concerned with the conditions or factors by virtue of which beliefs acquire the status of being epistemically justified. Internalism holds that these justification-conferring factors must all be ‘internal’ to the subject’s perspective on the world. However, depending on how the notion of internal is understood, internalism ap-pears in different forms. Access internalism, the most common form of internalism, holds that the justification-conferring factors must be reflectively accessible to the subject, such that he is able to find, with regard to the beliefs he holds, whether they are justified. Internalism captures the pre-theoretic intuition that having justification for a belief is a matter of having good reasons for that belief. It also treats the problem of scepticism seriously and explains why it has its source in internalism. Internalism has, however, faced two important objections: (1) it has been objected that internalism fails to deliver a genuinely truth-conducive conception of justification; and (2) that no available account of the access requirement could provide it with a viable basis to realize its aspirations. In an externalist account of justification, some justification-conferring factors of a belief are per-mitted to fall outside the subject’s ken and beyond the reach of the subject’s reflective access. Externalism can plausibly explain why justified beliefs are likely to be true; but by losing sight of the subject’s perspective, externalism fails to appreciate the force of the sceptical challenge. Ex-ternalists have had a hard time explaining the widely shared intuition that beliefs formed in de-mon world scenarios enjoy as much justification as they do when formed in (phenomenologically identical) normal circumstances. In the face of such challenges, both the internalist and external-ist accounts have made significant compromises, in view of which a pluralistic approach to the question of epistemic justification has become a live option.

Future Multimedia System

In future multimedia systems, seamless access to application services on different devices available to users in their vicinity, will be commonplace. The availability of these services will change as the mobile user moves. Current 3G multimedia systems do not support access to multiple applications operating on multiple different devices in context of a session or indeed seamless device session handover. Considering these requirements, the authors outline two multimedia communication platforms which potentially solve this problem. This paper describes a backward compatible architecture based on the widely adopted Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and also outlines a clean slate approach from ITU-T SG 16 called the Advanced Multimedia System (AMS). For each of these solutions the paper describes in terms of architecture, signalling, and capability negotiation, what are viewed as the most critical functions in future multimedia systems design. The result of this comparison displays the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and outlines solutions to satisfy challenges of current and future multimedia systems based on the service access requirement in ubiquitous environments. Furthermore, this comparison is used to suggest approaches that are best suited for future multimedia system design.

Engineering Design Based on GPON+WLAN

Now the existing access networks have not met the requirements of users, especially the increase of wireless access requirement. So the upgrade or reform of the existing access networks becomes very necessary. To begin with, the technology and network structure of GPON and WLAN are introduced in detail, and then how to combine GPON and WLAN in the engineer is also illustrated clearly. According to the common cases in the engineer, two access ways of GPON+WLAN are also shown. Finally, the summary about the GPON+WLAN is discussed in the paper.

Security Access of Power terminal on Trusted Computing in Smart Grid

With the development of interactive business for smart grid, for the security access requirement of kinds of business terminal, this paper proposed security access of power terminal on trusted network connection in power of things which combined with power of things and kinds of power terminals on the basis of trusted network connection. By discussing in detail security access architecture of power terminal and flow, the feasibility of program design is confirmed.

An Efficient Architecture of Forward Transforms and Quantization for H.264/AVC Codecs

Thanks to many novel coding tools, H.264/AVC has become the most efficient video compression standard providing much better performance than previous standards. However, this standard comes with an extraordinary computational complexity and a huge memory access requirement, which make the hardware architecture design much more difficult and costly, especially for realtime applications. In the framework of H.264 codec hardware architecture project, this paper presents an efficient architecture of Forward Transform and Quantization (FTQ) for H.264/AVC codecs in mobile applications. To reduce the hardware implementation overhead, the proposed design uses only one unified architecture of 1-D transform engine to perform all required transform processes, including discrete cosine transform and Walsh Hadamard transform. This design also enables to share the common parts among multipliers that have the same multiplicands. The performance of the design is taken into consideration and improved by using a fast architecture of the multiplier in the quantizer, the most critical component in the design. Experimental results show that our architecture can completely finish transform and quantization processes for a 4:2:0 macroblock in 228 clock cycles and the achieved throughput is 445Msamples/s at 250MHz operating frequency while the area overhead is very small, 147755μm2 (approximate 15KGates), with the 130nm TSMC CMOS technology.

Striping on Disks

Multimedia streams need continuous data supply. The aggregate data access requirement of many multimedia streams imposes very high demand on the access bandwidth of the storage servers. The disk striping or data striping methods spreads data over multiple disks to provide high aggregate disk throughput (Chua, Li, Ooi, & Tan, 1996; Hsieh, Lin, Liu, Du, & Ruwart, 1995). In addition to the popularity of multimedia objects that we have described in the last chapter, multimedia streams consume an object in a sequential manner. The striping methods make use of this access pattern to evenly spread the workload across disks. This can increase aggregate disk throughput so that high bandwidth streams can be delivered continuously. We first describe the simple striping method that places data stripes on a set of disks in the next section. After that, the staggered striping method that places data on a set of disks in a rotating manner is described. The pseudorandom placement method that stores data stripes on random disks is explained before we summarize this chapter.