Academic literature on the topic 'Forking Point'

This article focuses on the way blockchains construct time and the implications that has on governance, paying particular attention to the original Bitcoin network. Blockchains enforce succession through consensus, and for this reason, the philosopher Nick Land argues that “The Blockchain solves the problem of spacetime”. The article uses Land’s argument as a starting point for understanding the crucial role time plays in the governance of blockchain networks. It asks if the technology can, in fact, be understood to solve the problem of absolute succession, to investigate ways in which forking, both a byproduct of distributed consensus and the mechanism through which blockchains are upgraded, breaks the power concentrating around Land’s definite article Blockchain.

The Forking Paths, a project developed by the Research Center for Arts and Communication (CIAC), focuses on different types and models of interactive films, both from a theoretical and a practical perspective. The platform includes the films produced for the project: Cadavre Exquis (2019), Valsa (2016), The Book of the Dead (2015) and Haze (2014). The aim of this project is to conduct original research targeting the discovery of potential new knowledge, namely through practice and through the results of this practice. Having The Forking Paths project as a starting point, this paper endeavours to analyze the different models and levels of film interactivity. Through this analysis, we seek to trace possible evolutionary paths for audiovisual language and, simultaneously, we look for answers to an ultimate question: is there a true interaction between film and spectator?

The philosophic system of the founder of pragmatism Charles Sanders Peirce is rarely grasped from the point of view of its metaphoric usage. However, some of his most original yet often misunderstood and contested ideas such as those of ‘matter as effete mind’ and ‘the play of musement’ are metaphoric representations. In the present paper I am offering a new way to discuss the role of metaphors in Peirce’s philosophy by taking a twofold approach to the problem. On the one hand, metaphor itself becomes an object of inquiry. I touch upon the appearances of metaphoric thinking at the level of his classes of signs and metaphor’s relation to abductive inference. I trace those appearances in the process of their becoming from the spontaneity of Firstness towards the actuality of Secondness via the generalizing effects of Thirdness. Then I propose a flexible graphic model of metaphor that is parallel to Peirce’s inherent evolutionism. This model is seen as a “gentle” methodological tool for deriving meaning. To illustrate its applicability I include a playful nod to the literary works of Jorge Luis Borges to show how hard logical thought and aesthetic beauty complement each other.

Taking as its starting point the tension between the human condition as subject to the law of reason while belonging to the world of sense in establishing the categorical imperative as described by Kant, this article explores how belonging to the world of sense may be equated with randomness and the temporal as the presupposition for morality in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Borges's ‘The Garden of Forking Paths'. The article also discusses the two authors' views of time and eternity as expressed in their nonfiction.

Although the traditional P2P botnet has significant resilience against termination, its dependence on neighbor lists (NL) has left it vulnerable to infiltration and destruction. In addition, it is not sufficient in protecting the botmaster’s identity. To overcome these weaknesses, we proposed BlockchainBot, a botnet model that leveraged IoT devices as maintainers, and integrated blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology (DLT). The BlockchainBot was able to fully deploy bots on public blockchains. It was versatile for multiple botnet applications and eliminated the dependence on NL. In addition, we further introduced a novel method, the forking of a channel, to kick out spy nodes that infiltrate a botnet. To further enforce the resistance against a single point of failure (SPoF), we introduced bot-cluster dispersing to prevent clustering around full nodes and more evenly scatter bots to prevent hostile takeovers. The analysis of the security of BlockchainBot indicated that it had strong resilience against DDoS attacks, Sybil attacks, and forensic investigations. Furthermore, the security of the forking of the channel and bot-cluster dispersing were also shown to be effective. The robustness of the BlockchainBot against the Sybil attack was also briefly discussed. Experimental results authenticated the effectiveness and performance of the BlockchainBot, as compared to previous models.

Tian and Huang proposed a lattice-based CLS scheme based on the hardness of the SIS problem and proved, in the random oracle model, that the scheme is existentially unforgeable against strong adversaries. Their security proof uses the general forking lemma under the assumption that the underlying hash function H is a random oracle. We show that the hash function in the scheme is neither one-way nor collision-resistant in the view of a strong Type 1 adversary. We point out flaws in the security arguments and present attack algorithms that are successful in the strong Type 1 adversarial model using the weak properties of the hash function.

AbstractInterpretation of ice-core records requires accurate knowledge of the past and present surface topography and stress–strain fields. The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) drilling site (75.0025° S, 0.0684° E; 2891.7 m) in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica, is located in the immediate vicinity of a transient and forking ice divide. A digital elevation model is determined from the combination of kinematic GPS measurements with the GLAS12 datasets from the ICESat. Based on a network of stakes, surveyed with static GPS, the velocity field around the drilling site is calculated. The annual mean velocity magnitude of 12 survey points amounts to 0.74 m a–1. Flow directions mainly vary according to their distance from the ice divide. Surface strain rates are determined from a pentagonshaped stake network with one center point close to the drilling site. The strain field is characterized by along-flow compression, lateral dilatation and vertical layer thinning.

Siphlonurus dongxi Li & Tong, sp. nov. from Shangri-La City, Yunnan Province, China, is described based on egg, nymph, and winged stages. The new species is closely related to S. davidi (Navás, 1932), and can be distinguished by the colour of the imago, the forking point of MP, the penis, posterolateral spines of tergum IX of imagoes, and first abdominal terga nymph, as well as the structure of the egg. The new species and S. davidi have the same morphological and structural characteristics, such as the long cubital area with many intercalaries, cross veins between C, Sc, RA, and RSa1 surrounded with distinct pigments, the strong curvature of vein CuP in the forewing, the broad expansion of the hindwing, the membranous penis lobes fused without teeth, supporting the proposition of a new species complex, the Siphlonurus davidi group. The structures of the penis and the egg of the new species could help understand the origin and evolution of the genus Siphlonurus.

AbstractDoes innovation proceed from the top down or the bottom up? This is a crucial question for those who think about the sources of economic growth and especially for those who think about policies and institutions to promote innovation. The answer lies in part with the structure of the existing system of production and the array of assets that an innovation would displace, especially on the extent of complementarity and modularity in that structure. But it also depends on institutions. This paper argues for the centrality of decision rights to the process of innovation. Especially if it takes place in a systemic, non-modular way, innovation may require unified decision rights, often implying integrated control of complementary stages of production, in order to overcome the dynamic transaction costs of change. But the processes of subdivision, differentiation, and learning – the processes of fission, forking, and fine tuning – may also require changes in decision rights in order to overcome dynamic transaction costs. I illustrate these points with a case study of three generations of an American family of inventor-entrepreneurs in electricity and electronics.

In this computer era, we all live in a place where the demand for data and computing is increasing day by day. Since the need for faster data retrieval and faster computation brings us a reliability as the solution, we need more more data storage points or computation units. Motivated by scalability, availability, and reliability, there has been a paradigm shift from centralized storage (computation) at a large supercomputer to distributed storage (computing) on a large cluster of regular servers to handle complex tasks. In distributed storage setting, a single file is divided into smaller number of subfiles, which are then stored across multiple nodes, and the file requests are handled by the storage cluster. Similarly, in dis- tributed compute setting, a single task is fragmented into a smaller number of subtasks, and processed by the compute cluster. File request time (task completion time) is limited by the slowest execution time of the parallel subtasks. The lagging subfile requests (subtasks) are referred to as stragglers, and they delay the entire file retrieval (task execution). Straggling servers is one of the challenges in distributed storage and compute systems. Redundancy has emerged as a popular technique to mitigate the impact of stragglers. Redundant subfile requests (compute subtasks) can be sent to a larger set of storage (compute) nodes, such that a smaller subset suffices for the file (task) completion. This approach can be used for straggler mitigation in the face of uncertainty in file retrieval (task execution) times at the storage (compute) nodes. Coding theoretic techniques can be employed to systematically control the redundancy in storage and compute systems. The effective reliable strategies can be either replication coding or maximum distance separable (MDS) coding. Our work introduces new analytical bounds and approximation techniques for the latency-redundancy tradeoff for a range of system loads and a class of symmetric redundancy schemes, under the assumption of Poisson arrivals, exponential service-rates, and fork-join scheduling policy. The proposed approach can be employed to efficiently approximate the latency distribution of a queueing system at equilibrium. We also establish the stability region in terms of arrival rates for redundant systems with certain symmetries, which offers selection guidelines for design parameters to provide latency guarantees based on the proposed approximations. We observe that redundancy can mitigate the impact of stragglers, however, it comes at the cost of additional server nodes working on redundant coded subfiles (subtasks). This cost can be measured by the amount of work done by all server nodes, called aggregate server utilization. In a proactive mitigation approach, we attempt to show that server utilization can be reduced by dynamic coded redundancy, where the number of redundant servers available to a file (task) changes with time. We are interested in dynamic coded redundancy for a single-file (single-compute task) with coded-subfiles (coded-subtasks). In dynamic coded redundancy, additional redundant coded subfiles (subtasks) are spawned on individual server nodes, adaptively over time. The instants at which coded subfiles (subtasks) are spawned are referred to as forking points. We are interested in optimal adaptive strategy such that a linear combination of the mean file retrieval time (mean task completion time) and the mean server utilization is minimized. Specifically, we address the following two interdependent questions: How should we select the forking points? How many coded subfiles (subtasks) should be initiated at each forking point? For this flexible forking strategy with multiple parameters, we analyze the mean of two performance metrics when the random service completion time at each node is independent and distributed identically (i.i.d.) to a shifted exponential. From this study, we find a tradeoff between the metrics which provides insights into the parameter choices. Experiments on Intel DevCloud illustrate that the shifted exponential distribution adequately captures the random coded subtask completion times, and our derived insights continue to hold.

Chapter 5 outlines the community of developers who have contributed to Bitcoin’s source code. Drawing from ethnographic data and existing political economy theorisations of cryptocurrencies, the governance of the Bitcoin codebase is understood through obligatory passage points found among key individuals and groups involved in the creation of Bitcoin. The consensus model for making changes to the Bitcoin software shows how code is bound up with political tensions that arise through coordinating geographies of production. Pressures between different stakeholders are exposed to show how a stagnation of decision-making in code development and the increased likeliness of the project forking as it scales demands degrees of centralisation at the architectural level of cryptocurrency design so actions can be resolved and implemented. The overall political framework for altering Bitcoin’s code is described as senatorial governance: a (de)centralised model where bureaucratic parties compete to change the monetary policy (codified rules) of the protocol.

This chapter addresses Sasha Sokolov's first novel, A School for Fools (Shkola dlia durakov, 1976). Although School contains fewer of the explicit references to James Joyce found in his predecessors' works, the chapter stresses that Sokolov's style suggests a potent Joycean presence. Points of comparison include style (particularly stream of consciousness), structural play, and “forking characters” with fluid identities. While A School for Fools continues to draw on modernist models and Sokolov engages with Ulysses and Dubliners (1914), plot and character are dissolved almost entirely, much as in the protean Finnegans Wake. The chapter also illustrates how Sokolov's transformation of the Joycean model involves a disappearance into texture. The protagonist's story is less about his coming into his own as an artist through a revision of the past than it is about how language, style, and the novel's very structure supersede the artist as hero, in essence carrying Joyce's project to a new level.

Online learning requires a clear structure to enhance learning, particularly for those with little background in the subject. Structurally, the design of online learning may involve branching and merging, forking and joining of multiple branches, and other combinations of branching, for a learner or learners. Instructional branching is a tool that enables the achievement of multiple objectives. These include the following: (1) An Adaptive Curriculum: Adapting a richer curriculum to reflect the complex realities of a field and the real world; (2) Learner Support: Accommodating learners, who often have diverse needs based on their capabilities, ambitions, areas of study, and needs; (3) Learner Collaboration Support: Promoting the building of learning teams for the acquisition of collaboration, co-learning, and co-design skills; (4) Respect for Learner Decision-Making: Respecting the decision-making of learners, particularly in scenarios of simulations, games, problem solving, case studies and analysis, microsite presentations, slideshows and lecture captures, design, and innovation; (5) Maximizing In-World Opportunities: Taking advantage of opportunities in the environment such as the availability of a guest speaker, the co-funding of a shared learning endeavor, a partnership with a business entity, fieldtrip options, and/or other created opportunities. This chapter addresses various known branching designs on two levels: (1) course curriculums and (2) Digital Learning Objects (DLOs). It offers a typology of branching at the course curriculum level. Further, it covers branching in the DLO level based on specific cases. It analyzes the various points at which a curriculum converges and when it diverges (branches). Finally, the chapter includes a section on the mindful design of branching: design of the branching, the transitions, and proper learning assessments.