The work described in this thesis has been carried out in the ASCI graduate school. ASCI dissertation series number 282. i Acknowledgments My PhD would not have been possible without many people's contributions along the way. Let me take the opportunity to thank a few who have influenced me in their own fashion. Henk, I owe you a debt of gratitude for giving me the opportunity to do a PhD at TU...

According to the “Burson-Marsteller (2013) Check-up insight”, Social Media already became a powerful tool for enterprises across the globe, it showed that “the top 225 companies use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and for the first time, Google+, 65% of Latin America companies are now active on at least one Social Media platform..” It’s 2010 study showed that “of the Fortune Global 100 compan...

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks present an Internet-wide threat. Such attacks depend on large numbers of compromised machines, but solving the problem by completely securing every machine on the Internet is impossible. Solutions located near the victim are subject to congestion and are unable to differentiate between legitimate and attack traffic, while solutions at the source-end ...

Many studies have demonstrated that social relationships confer mental health benefits. This paper aims to identify whether and how reciprocity in social relationships predicts or is associated with mental health benefits as well as with continuity in elderly people's social relationships. The studies reviewed in this paper show that, among elders, being in a balanced or underbenefited reciproc...

Transportation networks are increasingly facing new security threats due to the vulnerabilities of cyber-physical components that support their operation. In this article, we aim to understand how the network operator (defender) should prioritize the investment in securing a set of facilities in order to limit the impact of a strategic adversary (attacker) who can target a facility to increase ...

Abstract: The long-lasting “guns versus butter” argument reflects the fact that China has been experiencing a difficult choice in terms of improving the defense and social welfare sectors, and thus achieving fiscal sustainability. The result, however, is controversial. The present paper therefore re-examines the relationship between defense and social welfare by employing continuous wavelet ana...

Abstract North Korea has made significant strides in its attempt to acquire a strategic nuclear deterrent. In 2017, it tested intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and completed series of test explosions. These may provide with the technical foundation deploy nuclear-armed ICBM capable striking United States. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) missile defense system is intended dete...