Law plays an essential role in shaping natural resource and environmental policy, but unfortunately, many environmental laws were developed around the prevailing scientific understanding that there was a “balance of nature” that could be managed and sustained. This view assumes that natural resource managers have the capacity to predict the behavior of ecological systems, know what its importan...

The paper investigates different approaches of transcendence in the sense of spiritual experience as predictors for general psychological resilience. This issue is based on the theoretical assumption that resilience does play a role for physical health. Furthermore, there is a lack of empirical evidence about the extent to which spirituality does play a role for resilience. As potential predict...

In this paper, we present an efficient k-out-of-n secret sharing scheme, which can identify up to t rushing cheaters, with probability at least 1 − , where 0 < < 1/2, provided t < k/2. This is the optimal number of cheaters that can be tolerated in the setting of public cheater identification, on which we focus in this work. In our scheme, the set of all possible shares Vi satisfies the conditi...

‘‘Evolvability’’ is a concept normally associated with biology or ecology, but recent work on control of interdependent critical infrastructures reveals that network informatics systems can be designed to enable artificial, human systems to ‘‘evolve’’. To explicate this finding, we draw on an analogy between disruptive behavior and stable variation in the history of science and the adaptive pat...

Many definitions of resilience have been proffered for natural and engineered ecosystems, but a conceptual consensus on resilience in microbial communities is still lacking. We argue that the disconnect largely results from the wide variance in microbial community complexity, which range from compositionally simple synthetic consortia to complex natural communities, and divergence between the t...

Ensuring resilience of large data stores in the cloud is a challenging engineering issue. It requires the development techniques that allow the designers to predict the main resilience characteristics — fault tolerance and performance — at the early design stages. In this paper, we experiment with integrating Event-B modelling with discreteevent simulation. Event-B allows us to reason about cor...

Resilience and robustness are system concepts applicable to structural engineering as well as other areas such as social sciences and economics. This paper explores these two concepts with particular reference to structural systems. Robustness is a structural performance requirement in most structural design codes but there is no method of verification. Resilience is a ̳work in progress‘ concep...