The treatment of alcoholism has had a unique historical development in the United States. This study provides a chronology of how the problem of alcoholism was defined and handled during various time periods in United States history. The process that evolved resulted in an abstinence based, comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to the treatment of alcoholism as a primary disease based on the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. This treatment modality, that developed outside of established medicine, is currently used by the majority of treatment providers. Seven individuals who have been actively involved in alcoholism treatment were interviewed. In addition to archival research, biographies and autobiographies were examined to gain a broad perspective. Because alcoholism is both a collective and an individual problem an effort was made to include a microsociological frame of reference within a broad sociological view. Alcoholism, or inebriety, was first perceived as a legal and moral problem. By the end of the 19th century, inebriety was recognized as an illness differing from mental illness, and separate asylums were established for its treatment. Alcoholism is currently accepted and treated as a primary disease by the majority of social institutions, but the legal and moral implications remain. National Prohibition in the early part of the 20th century targeted alcohol instead of the alcoholic delaying any progress toward treatment which was made in the 19th century. The advent of Alcoholics Anonymous brought the first widely accepted hope for alcoholics. The treatment process that developed utilized the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous in a setting of shared recovery which has been difficult to quantify. In 1970 the allocation of federal funds for treatment and research brought the involvement of new disciplines creating both conflicts and possibilities. Alcoholism recovery has elucidated the connection of mind, body, and spirit.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-10-13T14:10:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Andre De Nardi Senna Moraes.pdf: 1816835 bytes, checksum: 6d83444bab2cfd0094519c0dbb95f559 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-03-24 / This work aims to reflect upon the Anonymous net-activist and hacktivist moral identities in Brazil. It raises questions about how such identities can illustrate discourse disputes in the network politics environment. Our objective is to discuss the relations between Anonymous Brazil s hacker ethics and its political positions about freedom on the internet. The Anonymous are an idea, a collective of members, inspired by the archetypes of the hacker community to claim certain ideals of civilian rights, such as freedom of expression, free file sharing and the right to privacy. Similar to the political interactions in human nature, the relationship between Anonymous and the institutions they consider abusive are asymmetric and based on manifestations of power and counter power. To configure such relationship, this dissertation dedicates to contextualize power in human interactions, the formulation of a hacker subculture as an expression of resistance and how the ethical principal of these elements help to guide an Anonymous ideal of subversion. By means of critical discourse analysis, this work shall deconstruct Anonymous speeches about the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet. By such approach, this investigation identifies traces of moral ambivalences that unsteadily navigate between notions of collectivism and individualism, creation and destruction, freedom and regulation. / O presente trabalho busca uma reflexão sobre a identidade moral do net-ativismo e do hacktivismo Anonymous no Brasil. Questiona-se como tal reflexão ilustra as disputas discursivas no âmbito de políticas na rede. A investigação propõe ilustrar as relações entre a ética hacker do Anonymous Brasil e suas posições políticas sobre liberdade na internet. Os Anonymous tratam-se de uma ideia, um coletivo, que se inspiram nos arquétipos da comunidade hacker para reivindicar certos ideais de direitos civis tais como liberdade de expressão, livre compartilhamento de arquivos e direito à privacidade. Assim como as interações políticas da natureza humana, a relação do Anonymous com as instituições consideradas abusivas é assimétrica e pautada por manifestações de poder e contrapoder. Para configurar essa relação, nos dedicaremos a contextualizar o poder nas relações humanas, a formulação de uma subcultura hacker como manifestação de resistência e como os preceitos éticos destes elementos guiam o ideal Anonymous de subversão. A partir da metodologia de análise crítica do discurso, descontruiremos os manifestos do coletivo sobre o Marco Civil da Internet. Com efeito, identificaremos traços de ambivalências morais que navegam ebriamente entre coletivismo e individualismo, criação e destruição, liberdade e regulamentação.

This thesis investigates the effect that non-anonymity has upon student team-member evaluations; more specifically, it looked at how to create conditions of openness and honesty in which students will readily give and receive constructive criticism. The central hypothesis of this research is that if students are taught and prepared to properly give and receive constructive criticism, and have multiple opportunities to do so, non-anonymous feedback is the most effective and desirable. In order to gauge the effects of non-anonymity, eight specific hypotheses relating to different aspects of the feedback process were tested. Predictions were made as to the effects upon the self-awareness and defensiveness of those who received feedback, the honesty and candor of those who provided it, as well as the effect upon teams' levels of trust and unity, and levels of performance. The statistical analysis showed that non-anonymity had no significant effect upon self-awareness, trust and unity, and performance. Significant differences were observed for honesty and candor, as well as defensiveness. Although some of these differences were in favor, others were contrary to the assumptions that were made. One of the results showed that at the beginning of the procedure, non-anonymous ratings were more lenient, but at the end of the process there was no difference. This was as expected. In regards to the overall process, non-anonymous students perceived ratings to be less honest and candid. A second conclusion was that non-anonymous students were actually more defensive towards negative feedback. In the end, there was no strong evidence for or against non-anonymity, and thus it appears that there was no major treatment effect. There are two justifications as to why this may be the case. These are based upon insights gained from the free-response section of a follow-up survey which the participants took. First, if non-anonymous feedback does indeed produce positive outcomes it may take a longer period of time for these differences to be noticed. This process took place over only about a three-month period, and feedback was received only 3-4 weeks apart. Secondly, when teams are small (i.e., only 3-5 members), it is difficult to maintain anonymity, which essentially removes the treatment. From these observations, the final recommendation of this report is that for students working in small teams, non-anonymous feedback is preferable. This is because, as just noted, anonymity is difficult to maintain even if it is a required condition. It seems that pretending that anonymity exists, when in fact it does not, actually hinders transparency and trust. Also, it seems that giving feedback non-anonymously will more effectively prepare students for working on teams in their careers, as this is more reflective of the way that feedback will be provided in the workforce.

Due to the flush development of academic research, a great deal research results have been published in conference proceedings and journals. However, these articles need to be inspected by some professionals in specific fields. It is the most important that fairness must be guaranteed during the entire process of reviewing. Nevertheless, the privacy of reviewers may be leaked out because that the reviewers must sign their comments on the reviewed papers. The leakage of the reviewers' privacy may affect the judgement of the reviewers on the papers. In addition, the authors of a paper have to show their names to the editor of a conference proceedings or a journal when submitting the paper, so that it may also affect the decision of the editor on this paper. The major reason of the above problems is that the privacy or anonymity of the reviewers and the authors is not protected well, such that the reviewers and the editor cannot perform the reviewing processes without disturbance. In order to cope with the problems, we deeply analyze the privacy issue in the paper review system and then propose a generic idea, which is independent of the underlying cryptographic components, to achieve the anonymity property and other key requirements in a secure paper review scheme.

In recent years – and especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic – online shopping has become a part of everyday life for many people. Yet, in contrast to buying at a traditional retail store, staying anonymous is at least difficult if not impossible when shopping online – in particular, when physical goods are to be delivered. From the customer perspective, reasons for seeking anonymity when shopping online can be manifold, for example some do not want anyone to know about their purchases, others do not want their data to be used by Big Data-enabled online retailers. From the point of view of online retailers, the prospect of anonymous online shopping should therefore not only be seen as a threat to their data-driven business models, but also as an opportunity to attract new customers. In this thesis we search and find support in the literature regarding the question whether there is indeed a demand for anonymous online shopping, and we discuss system architecture designs that were proposed by other authors for potentially realizing what we call All-Steps Anonymous Purchase Platforms (ASAPP). We propose a new architecture design that improves earlier work by realizing the concept of Separation of Data within a single platform: GhostBuy. We implement a working prototype of this platform that demonstrates not only the fundamental feasibility of the architecture but also that such a platform can be realized with a look-and-feel similar to that of common online shops. We also propose solutions for certain related aspects that are particularly important in the context of such a platform, as for example a guaranteed use of secure user passwords or application-level database encryption. We evaluate to what extent the proposed architecture and prototype preserve the customers’ anonymity/privacy, showing that the prototype provides it to the maximum possible extent that can be achieved based on the proposed architecture. We also show that the system provides 256-bit security against all but one considered cryptographic and mis-authentication attack vectors and discuss how this can also be achieved for the remaining attack vector. Closing our evaluation, we show how well the platform could presumably be deployed in the real world. Finally, limitations, possible improvements, and potential further future work are discussed and proposed.

Anonymous communications networks help to solve the real and important problem of enabling users to communicate privately over the Internet. However, by doing so, they also introduce an entirely new problem: How can service providers on the Internet---such as websites, IRC networks and mail servers---allow anonymous access while protecting themselves against abuse by misbehaving anonymous users? Recent research efforts have focused on using anonymous blacklisting systems (also known as anonymous revocation systems) to solve this problem. As opposed to revocable anonymity systems, which enable some trusted third party to deanonymize users, anonymous blacklisting systems provide a way for users to authenticate anonymously with a service provider, while enabling the service provider to revoke access from individual misbehaving anonymous users without revealing their identities. The literature contains several anonymous blacklisting systems, many of which are impractical for real-world deployment. In 2006, however, Tsang et al. proposed Nymble, which solves the anonymous blacklisting problem very efficiently using trusted third parties. Nymble has inspired a number of subsequent anonymous blacklisting systems. Some of these use fundamentally different approaches to accomplish what Nymble does without using third parties at all; so far, these proposals have all suffered from serious performance and scalability problems. Other systems build on the Nymble framework to reduce Nymble's trust assumptions while maintaining its highly efficient design. The primary contribution of this thesis is a new anonymous blacklisting system built on the Nymble framework---a nimbler version of Nymble---called Nymbler. We propose several enhancements to the Nymble framework that facilitate the construction of a scheme that minimizes trust in third parties. We then propose a new set of security and privacy properties that anonymous blacklisting systems should possess to protect: 1) users' privacy against malicious service providers and third parties (including other malicious users), and 2) service providers against abuse by malicious users. We also propose a set of performance requirements that anonymous blacklisting systems should meet to maximize their potential for real-world adoption, and formally define some optional features in the anonymous blacklisting systems literature. We then present Nymbler, which improves on existing Nymble-like systems by reducing the level of trust placed in third parties, while simultaneously providing stronger privacy guarantees and some new functionality. It avoids dependence on trusted hardware and unreasonable assumptions about non-collusion between trusted third parties. We have implemented all key components of Nymbler, and our measurements indicate that the system is highly practical. Our system solves several open problems in the anonymous blacklisting systems literature, and makes use of some new cryptographic constructions that are likely to be of independent theoretical interest.

Anonymous communications networks help to solve the real and important problem of enabling users to communicate privately over the Internet. However, by doing so, they also introduce an entirely new problem: How can service providers on the Internet---such as websites, IRC networks and mail servers---allow anonymous access while protecting themselves against abuse by misbehaving anonymous users? Recent research efforts have focused on using anonymous blacklisting systems (also known as anonymous revocation systems) to solve this problem. As opposed to revocable anonymity systems, which enable some trusted third party to deanonymize users, anonymous blacklisting systems provide a way for users to authenticate anonymously with a service provider, while enabling the service provider to revoke access from individual misbehaving anonymous users without revealing their identities. The literature contains several anonymous blacklisting systems, many of which are impractical for real-world deployment. In 2006, however, Tsang et al. proposed Nymble, which solves the anonymous blacklisting problem very efficiently using trusted third parties. Nymble has inspired a number of subsequent anonymous blacklisting systems. Some of these use fundamentally different approaches to accomplish what Nymble does without using third parties at all; so far, these proposals have all suffered from serious performance and scalability problems. Other systems build on the Nymble framework to reduce Nymble's trust assumptions while maintaining its highly efficient design. The primary contribution of this thesis is a new anonymous blacklisting system built on the Nymble framework---a nimbler version of Nymble---called Nymbler. We propose several enhancements to the Nymble framework that facilitate the construction of a scheme that minimizes trust in third parties. We then propose a new set of security and privacy properties that anonymous blacklisting systems should possess to protect: 1) users' privacy against malicious service providers and third parties (including other malicious users), and 2) service providers against abuse by malicious users. We also propose a set of performance requirements that anonymous blacklisting systems should meet to maximize their potential for real-world adoption, and formally define some optional features in the anonymous blacklisting systems literature. We then present Nymbler, which improves on existing Nymble-like systems by reducing the level of trust placed in third parties, while simultaneously providing stronger privacy guarantees and some new functionality. It avoids dependence on trusted hardware and unreasonable assumptions about non-collusion between trusted third parties. We have implemented all key components of Nymbler, and our measurements indicate that the system is highly practical. Our system solves several open problems in the anonymous blacklisting systems literature, and makes use of some new cryptographic constructions that are likely to be of independent theoretical interest.

ABSTRACT The aim of this thesis is to explore the impact of treatment on male addicts who attend Narcotic Anonymous (NA) meeting between the ages of 45 to 60 years that have been free from drug addiction without relapse in 10 years. The interest is to really understand how the addicts have been impacted and what factors have contributed to their being able to remain free from drug abuse without relapse. The research is a qualitative study. Semi structured interviews based on interview guide that are made up of six open ended questions was used to generate information (Primary data) from eight interviewees. The data generated was analyzed using qualitative content analysis in hermeneutic perspective. Also, Maslow’s need hierarchy theory and early research was used to analyze the data that were generated. It was found that the former addicts experienced improvement in their psychological health identity and social situation. Furthermore, they were impacted by different treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy, environmental therapy and the NA 12-step program. The findings of the study also indicates that the interviewees gained job, education and driving license because of the drug abuse treatment they have undergone. In addition, having a partner, stable family and regular attendance of NA meeting have helped the interviewees to remain free from drug use in 10 years. Furthermore, from the findings, improved psychological health, improved changes in identity and social situation are themes found from the coding and categorization from qualitative content analysis method. The main theme found is getting new ways of gaining control of addiction in relation to improved psychological health, improved changes in identity and improved social situation.

My thesis will begin to examine alcoholism and recovery through the lens of moral injury, especially in relationship to the use of spirituality language and the often-invoked correlation between spirituality and sobriety. Through a literature review and interviews with abstaining alcoholics, I will unpack some of the implications of considering alcoholism through the lens of moral injury and begin to frame and examine some of the questions inherent in that consideration. By so doing, I hope to offer a fresh look into those aspects of recovery that fall within the Religious Studies purview.

No description available.