26,111 research outputs found
Towards a Christian Philosophy
No full textAuthor did not sign the LAC Non-Exclusive License form.The relationship between philosophy and Christianity has, of course, a long history, as do the discussions of that relationship. My own position is not dissimilar to that of many of the early Church Fathers, though of course that position must be elaborated differently for various historical and personal reasons, and hopefully enriched by attention to the history of Western philosophy. As with all such relations, one's understanding of this relation has a lot to do with one's understanding of the terms involved. To promote the possibility of "Christian philosophy" is also to comment on that "and" which might be understood to relate two otherwise distinct and irreconcilable terms. In the end I claim this "and" must be understood as that "love" which defines philosophy as the "love of wisdom" (and finally, the wisdom of love), and does so in terms which (almost) merge-with the surprising assistance of such thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur-with those of the Church Fathers cited. On the one hand, I intend nothing but the historical, orthodox, and catholic understanding of Christianity, especially with regard to the central figure of Jesus the Christ, the Trinitarian God whom He embodies, represents, and reveals, and the Scriptures given as The Bible. On the other hand, I present the specifically philosophical pertinence of this unique Person as such emerges from the texts of the "philosophers" considered, and in a manner which I claim does not force the issue by reading into their texts what is not there. Attending to a (Christian) philosophical reflection on (Christian) philosophy also offers elaborations of inherited doctrines, both Christian and philosophical, including a way to read and think unique to the outcome. Such is the adventure of this current work
Statistical Approaches for Anomaly Detection
No full textComputer security is a growing problem. Over the last years, the number and variety of security attacks in IP-based network infrastructures have increasingly grown, leading to the need of developing new security architectures.
In this scenario, the use of intrusion detection systems (IDSs) has emerged as a key element, since it permits to
tackle security threats by masquerader, misfeasor, and clandestine users. In this paper, we address the problem
considering some new statistical techniques for detecting network anomalies. In more detail, the paper discusses the use of several statistical models to characterize the normal behavior of the network traffic running over TCP, so
that anomalies can be revealed as significant deviations from such behavior. Namely, our proposal is based on the
use of Markov chains, co-occurrence matrices, and compression algorithms, for modeling the TCP connections, in terms of statistical analysis of some of the packet header fields. The performance analysis, presented in this paper,
demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methods
The Christian Right and US Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century
Get PDFThe thesis discusses the role of the Christian Right in the US foreign policy decision making process. The research revealed that the Christian Right has long been fascinated with some international issues in general and US foreign policy in particular. The Christian Right’s interest in international issues increased markedly during years of the George W. Bush presidency. It successfully widened its activities from domestic social conservative issues to foreign policy issues by participating in, articulating and lobbying for its religious version of American foreign policy. In assessing the role of the Christian Right in US foreign policy making, this dissertation examines three aspects of US foreign policy, namely Israel, international religious freedom and global humanitarianism. Based on these aspects, the Christian Right is seen as skilled in framing and defining issues. The Christian Right seems effective in selecting and prioritizing international issues that have a reasonable chance of being selected by foreign policy decision makers, especially in Congress. Moreover, the Christian Right has shown its maturity in seeking engagement and cooperation with other organizations, secular and religious, in order to advance its international goals. Finally, in pursuing and conveying its international agenda, the Christian Right has adopted a more moderate and less overtly religious approach. Instead of using its traditional religious rhetoric, the Christian Right has successfully projected its foreign policy preferences into the conventional realist discourse of American foreign policy that is largely based on the objective of national interest and national security. Nevertheless, this study does not, in any way, conclude that the Christian Right was able to influence or determine the direction of US foreign policy and its outcomes; however, it does suggest that the Christian Right did contribute and have an impact on the formulation of some US foreign policy. As such, the research contends that the role of the Christian Right is similar to other interest group lobbies and that its perceived influence on US foreign policy should not be exaggerated. Finally, the research suggests that the emergence of the Christian Right as an actor in asserting its global agenda through US foreign policy can possibly provide an example of how religious beliefs and values can become a potential source of “soft power”. Together with the “climate of opinion” of the American public during the Bush administration, the “soft power” at domestic level could serve as a valuable new explanatory variable in understanding how the US foreign policy was formulated in the early 21st century
Sabbath, Psalms and Eucharist: Christopher Southgate considers Christian perspectives on the climate emergency
Get PDFThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Green Christian via the URL in this record In this brief article I want to explore what resources Christian thought might offer the
climate emergency, and those challenged by the slowness with which the generation
with the power (my own) are addressing the huge challenges that are ever more
evidently unfolding on our planet
Dare We Call it a Christian Business Division?
Get PDFThe author in this article explores the question: What, if anything, distinguishes a Christian business program from a secular program? The author answers the question by suggesting some areas he believes should be distinctive. His purpose is to open up a dialogue that has not occurred at the program level, not to claim all that could be said about this topic. Most discussion has focused on the macro picture of Christian colleges or the micro picture of how one’s faith might impact how one teaches a certain discipline. The article looks at themes or emphases in business programs that aspire to describe themselves as Christian
Distributed PCA-based anomaly detection in telephone networks through legitimate-user profiling
No full textIn this paper we present a distributed mechanism based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to profile the behavior of the legitimate users in telephone networks. The idea is to take advantage of probes distributed over the network to obtain a compact snapshot of the users they serve. A collector node effectively combines such information to gather the description of the legitimate-user behavior. Eventually, it distributes the profile to the probes, which perform anomaly detection. Experimental results on several weeks of phone data collected by a telecom operator show that our profiling mechanism is stable over time and allows an operator to decentralize the anomaly detection stage directly to its probes. Furthermore, when compared to a centralized-PCA approach, our technique has the advantage of preventing the creation of polluted profiles, since it avoids that widespread anomalies, which are localized within one (or few) probes, enter into the description of the legitimate-user behavior. © 2012 IEEE
Troubleshooting web sessions with CUSUM
No full textA variety of factors may lead users to a poor quality of experience in a web browsing session, experiencing a high page load time. Without a clear explanation this can be annoying. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm and a whole redesigned architecture to provide an answer to the question 'what's wrong with this web site?'. In more detail, we propose the design and the implementation of a probe, running a novel diagnosis algorithm based on the original use of 'classical' troubleshooting techniques merged together with statistical change point detection tools. Our proposed probe is able to correctly determine the root cause of poor web navigation experience, distinguishing, among the several portions of the network, the one responsible for the problem. The presented experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method
Bivariate non-parametric anomaly detection
No full textDetecting anomalous traffic with low false alarm rates is of primary interest in IP networks management. In this paper we propose a novel anomaly detection system, based on a combined use of sketches and of a novel bivariate non-parametric detection method. The latter allows us to simultaneously analyse two different traffic features so as to improve the performance of the "classical" detection systems, in terms of both detection rate and false alarm rate. The preliminary performance analysis, presented in this paper, demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed system
An information-theoretic method for the detection of anomalies in network traffic
Get PDFAnomaly-based Intrusion Detection is a key research topic in network security due to its ability to face unknown attacks and new security threats. For this reason, many works on the topic have been proposed in the last decade. Nonetheless, an ultimate solution, able to provide a high detection rate with an acceptable false alarm rate, has still to be identified. In this paper we propose a novel intrusion detection system that performs anomaly detection by studying the variation in the entropy associated to the network traffic. To this aim, the traffic is first aggregated by means of random data structures (namely three-dimension reversible sketches) and then the entropy of different traffic descriptors is computed by using several definitions. The experimental results obtained over the MAWILab dataset validate the system and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal for a proper set of entropy definitions
On the combined use of sketches and CUSUM for Anomaly Detection
No full textAnomaly-based Intrusion Detection is a key research topic in network security due to its ability to face unknown attacks and new security threats. Moreover, new solutions should cope with scalability issues derived from the growth of the Internet traffic. To this aim random aggregation through the use of sketches represents a powerful prefiltering stage that can be applied to backbone data traffic with a performance improvement wrt traditional static aggregations at subnet level. In the paper we apply the CUSUM algorithm at the bucket level to reveal the presence of anomalies in the current data and, in order to improve the detection rate, we correlate the data corresponding to traffic flows aggregation based on different fields of the network and transport level headers. As a side effect, the correlation procedure gives some hints on the typology of the intrusions since different attacks determine the variability of the statistics associated to specific header fields. The performance analysis, presented in this paper, demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach, confirming the goodness of CUSUM as a change-point detection algorithm
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