Crop insurance is an essential risk management tool for America's agricultural producers because a single crop failure or disastrous year can eliminate the results of multiple years of profitability. Crop insurance is designed to provide financial protection to farmers; however, insurance managers who lack managerial underwriting strategies disrupt companies to the point of financial distress. Self-insurance and self-protection theory were the conceptual frameworks for this single-case study to explore successful strategies that insurance managers used to mitigate net underwriting losses. Four insurance and senior strategic managers from an insurance company in the midwestern United States were recruited through a purposeful sampling method to participate in semistructured interviews. Data gathered from these interviews and from the company's website and its public financial reports were analyzed through a reflective interpretation process, which was guided by the Van Kaam method. Five themes that emerged from this study, including disruptive technology, traditional underwriter vs. integrated profit-and-loss expert, streamlined applications by in-house technology or strategic alliances, opportunity assessment, and underwriting discipline. By implementing executive support for strategies to mitigate net underwriting losses, managers of crop insurance companies can overcome the challenges of net underwriting losses. The findings from this study may promote positive social change by lowering insurance premiums to the farm community and enabling managers to reduce risk to companies and farmers by distributing financial risk across a pool of participants thus enriching the stakeholders' investments.

This research focuses on the development and validation of an autonomic security management (ASM) framework to proactively protect distributed systems (DSs) from a wide range of cyber assaults with little or no human intervention. Multi-dimensional cyber attack taxonomy was developed to characterize cyber attack methods and tactics against both a Web application (Web-app) and an industrial control system (ICS) by accounting for their impacts on a set of system, network, and security features. Based on this taxonomy, a normal region of system performance is constructed, refined, and used to predict and identify abnormal system behavior with the help of forecasting modules and intrusion detection systems (IDS). Protection mechanisms are evaluated and implemented by a multi-criteria analysis controller (MAC) for their efficiency in eliminating and/or mitigating attacks, maintaining normal services, and minimizing operational costs and impacts. Causes and impacts of unknown attacks are first investigated by an ASM framework learning module. Attack signatures are then captured to update IDS detection algorithms and MAC protection mechanisms in near real-time. The ASM approach was validated within Web-app and ICS testbeds demonstrating the effectiveness of the self-protection capability. Experiments were conducted using realworld cyber attack tools and profiles. Experimental results show that DS security behavior is predicted, detected, and eliminated thus validating our original hypothesis concerning the self-protection core capability. One important benefit from the self-protection feature is the cost-effective elimination of malicious requests before they impede, intrude or compromise victim systems. The ASM framework can also be used as a decision support system. This feature is important especially when unknown attack signatures are ambiguous or when responses selected automatically are not efficient or are too risky to mitigate attacks. In this scenario, man-in-the-loop decisions are necessary to provide manual countermeasures and recovery operations. The ASM framework is resilient because its main modules are installed on a master controller virtual machine (MC-VM). This MC-VM is simple to use and configure for various platforms. The MC-VM is protected; thus, even if the internal network is compromised, the MC-VM can still maintain “normal” self-protection services thereby defending the host system from cyber attack on-thely.

Why do some communities experience more violence against civilians than others? This study argues that civilian communities embracing relationships that bridge salient group divides and norms of non-violence, will commit to actions of protection across those divides, which will in turn limit possibilities for armed actors to commit violence against civilians. On the other hand, communities that do not embrace bridging relationships and instead promote more violent norms, will commit to denunciation of other civilians during war. This will in turn create more opportunities for armed actors to commit violence against civilians. Through interview-based field research I test this theory on two communities in Kosovo. I compare the town of Prizren, largely spared from violence against civilians during the war of 1998-1999, to the town of Gjakova, which experienced higher levels of violence against civilians. The results show support for the theoretical argument. However, I cannot fully account for alternative explanations to the difference in violence. Research on civilian agency during the Kosovo war has been severely lacking, an empirical gap which I aim to partly fill through this research.

The growth in the number of connected devices, in the volume of data traffic and of applications used has shown a significant increase in the complexity of today's networks, leaving the activity of management increasingly difficult for network and system administrators. Management aspects, such as the security of these systems has been a major challenge faced by the researchers, especially considering that, in parallel, there has been also a significant increase in the degree of sophistication of malicious activities. This scenario requires the development of sophisticated security systems also, in order to prevent or contain attacks increasingly destructive to systems, such as worm attacks. And the biological inspiration has been a main ally in this endeavor, bringing several concepts and new ways of thinking and solving these problems. This work used the bio-inspired concepts of Autonomic Networks (self-managing networks inspired by the functioning of the human nervous system)and Artificial Immune Systems (computer security systems inspired by the functioning of the human immune system), to define a management architecture for network self-protection, through the prediction of security attacks. This architecture incorporates the Danger Theory immune-inspired model and uses its Dendritic Cells algorithm to correlate events and detect anomalies. The architecture analysis was performed on an Early Warning System, which uses notifications received from worm already infected machines as additional information to identify the imminence of an infection in still vulnerable machines. In the experiments the gain in time obtained with this early identification was used in the Conficker worm propagation model and the results showed a reduction in the number of infected machines and, consequently, in the worm propagation across a network / O crescimento do número de dispositivos conectados, do volume de dados trafegados e das aplicações utilizadas tem evidenciado um aumento importante na complexidade das redes atuais, deixando a atividade de gerência cada vez mais difícil para os administradores de redes e sistemas. Aspectos de gerência, como a segurança desses sistemas tem sido um dos principais desafios enfrentados pelos pesquisadores, principalmente, considerando que, em paralelo, observa-se um também importante aumento no grau de sofisticação das atividades maliciosas. Tal cenário exige o desenvolvimento de sistemas de segurança igualmente sofisticados, com o intuito de impedir ou conter ataques cada vez mais destrutivos aos sistemas, como os ataques de worms. E a inspiração biológica tem sido uma das grandes aliadas nesta empreitada, trazendo diversos conceitos e novas formas de pensar e resolver esses problemas. Este trabalho utilizou os conceitos bio-inspirados das Redes Autonômicas (redes autogerenciáveis inspiradas nos funcionamento do sistema nervoso humano) e dos Sistemas Imunes Artificiais (sistemas de segurança computacional inspirados no funcionamento do sistema imunológico humano), para definir uma arquitetura de gerência para autoproteção de redes, através da predição de ataques de segurança. Tal arquitetura incorpora o modelo imuno-inspirado da Teoria do Perigo e utiliza o seu Algoritmo das Células Dendríticas para correlacionar eventos e detectar anomalias. A análise da arquitetura foi realizada em um Sistema de Alerta Antecipado, que usa notificações recebidas de máquinas já infectadas por worm como informação adicional para identificar a iminência de uma infecção em máquinas ainda vulneráveis. Nos experimentos o ganho de tempo obtido com essa identificação precoce foi utilizado no modelo de propagação do worm Conficker e os resultados apontaram uma redução no número de máquinas infectadas e, consequentemente, na propagação deste worm em uma rede

Fundação de Apoio a Pesquisa e à Inovação Tecnológica do Estado de Sergipe - FAPITEC/SE / The Internet of Things is a new paradigm of communication based on the ubiquitous presence of objects that, having unique address, they can cooperate with their peers to achieve a common goal. Applications in several areas can benefit from this new paradigm, but the Internet of Things is very vulnerable to attack. The large number of connected devices make an autonomic approach necessary and the small amount of resources requires the use of efficient techniques. This paper proposes a self-protection architecture for the Internet of Things using Artificial Neural Network and Dendritic Cells Algorithm, two bio-inspired techniques. The experiments of this paper show that the use of these two techniques is possible. The Artificial Neural Network implementation consume a small memory footprint, having a high accuracy rate and the Dendritic Cells Algorithm show to be interesting for it distributivity, allowing better use of network resources. / A Internet das Coisas é um novo paradigma de comunicação baseado na presença ubíqua de objetos que, através de endereçamento único, cooperam com seus pares para atingir um objetivo em comum. Aplicações em diversas áreas podem se beneficiar dos conceitos da Internet das Coisas, porém esta rede é muito vulnerável a ataques, seja pela possibilidade de ataque físico, pela alta conectividade dos dispositivos, a enorme quantidade de dispositivos conectados ou a baixa quantidade de recursos disponíveis. A grande quantidade de dispositivos conectados faz com que abordagens autonômicas sejam necessárias e a reduzida quantidade de recursos exige a utilização de técnicas eficientes. Este trabalho propõe uma arquitetura de autoproteção para a Internet das Coisas utilizando as técnicas de Rede Neural Artificial e Algoritmo de Células Dendríticas, duas técnicas bio-inspiradas que, através de experimentos, mostraram a possibilidade de serem utilizadas na Internet das Coisas. A implementação da Rede Neural Artificial utilizada consumiu poucos recursos de memória do dispositivo, mantendo uma alta taxa de acerto, comparável a trabalhos correlatos que não se preocuparam com o consumo de recursos. A utilização do Algoritmo de Células Dendríticas se mostrou interessante pela sua distributividade, permitindo uma melhor utilização dos recursos da rede, como um todo.

In the first chapter of this thesis, I use the smooth ambiguity model developed by Klibanoff, Marinacci, and Mukerji (2005) to define the concepts of ambiguity and uncertainty premia in a way analogous to what Pratt (1964) did in the risk theory literature. I show that these concepts may be useful to quantify the effect ambiguity has on the welfare of economic agents. I also define several other concepts such as the unambiguous probability equivalent or the ambiguous utility premium, provide local approximations of these different premia and show the link that exists between them when comparing different degrees of ambiguity aversion not only in the small, but also in the large. <p><p>In the second chapter, I analyze the effect of ambiguity on self-insurance and self-protection, that are tools used to deal with the uncertainty of facing a monetary loss when market insurance is not available (in the self-insurance model, the decision maker has the opportunity to furnish an effort to reduce the size of the loss occurring in the bad state of the world, while in the self-protection – or prevention – model, the effort reduces the probability of being in the bad state). <p>In a short note, in the context of a two-period model I first examine the links between risk-aversion, prudence and self-insurance/self-protection activities under risk. Contrary to the results obtained in the static one-period model, I show that the impacts of prudence and of risk-aversion go in the same direction and generate a higher level of prevention in the more usual situations. I also show that the results concerning self-insurance in a single period framework may be easily extended to a two-period context. <p>I then consider two-period self-insurance and self-protection models in the presence of ambiguity and analyze the effect of ambiguity aversion. I show that in most common situations, ambiguity prudence is a sufficient condition to observe an increase in the level of effort. I propose an interpretation of the model in the context of climate change, so that self-insurance and self-protection are respectively seen as adaptation and mitigation efforts a policy-maker should provide to deal with an uncertain catastrophic event, and interpret the results obtained as an expression of the Precautionary Principle. <p><p>In the third chapter, I introduce the economic theory developed to deal with ambiguity in the context of medical decision-making. I show that, under diagnostic uncertainty, an increase in ambiguity aversion always leads a physician whose goal is to act in the best interest of his patient, to choose a higher level of treatment. In the context of a dichotomic choice (treatment versus no treatment), this result implies that taking into account the attitude agents generally manifest towards ambiguity may induce a physician to change his decision by opting for treatment more often. I further show that under therapeutic uncertainty, the opposite happens, i.e. an ambiguity averse physician may eventually choose not to treat a patient who would have been treated under ambiguity neutrality. <p> / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

L’effet de la disponibilité des AAF sur le taux d’homicide est un sujet qui n’a jamais su faire consensus au sein du corpus scientifique. En tenant compte des réalités canadiennes relatives à l’utilisation d’une arme à feu dans les homicides, la présente étude évaluera la relation entre la disponibilité des armes à feu et le taux d’homicide au Canada, par le biais de séries chronologiques simples et multiples. Les données utilisées dans le cadre de la recherche proviennent de l’Enquête sur l’homicide effectuée par Statistiques Canada, du programme de la déclaration uniforme de la criminalité (DUC), des catalogues Juristats et des catalogues produits par Statistiques Canada sur les causes de décès au pays. Globalement, des relations positives et significatives sont observées entre les deux phénomènes au temps t. Au temps t-1 et t-2, des relations négatives sont observées entre la disponibilité des armes à feu et le taux d’homicide, tandis que des relations positives sont constatées entre le taux d’homicides et la disponibilité des armes à feu. Les résultats confirment que le taux d’homicide et la disponibilité des armes à feu sont des phénomènes qui s’influencent mutuellement dans le temps. En raison du niveau d’agrégation des données, il n’est pas possible de départager l’influence respective des deux phénomènes. Les résultats soutiennent toutefois davantage les thèses de l’autoprotection et de l’autodéfense. Enfin, les résultats montrent l’importance de développer des indices de disponibilité propres aux deux types d’armes à feu impliqués dans les homicides au Canada. / The debate surrounding the effects of gun availability on homicide rates have continuously been going on between scholars for the last decades. Relying on the Canadian context regarding the use of a firearm in homicides, this study evaluates the relationship between gun availability and homicide rates in Canada using pooled-time series analyses. Data used in this study comes from Statistics Canada’s Homicide Survey, the Uniform Crime Report Survey (UCR), Juristat’s catalogues and from catalogues produced by Statistics Canada on the causes of death in the country. Globally, results show positive and significant relationships between the two phenomena over time. Analyses at time t-1 and t-2 allow us to, on one hand notice negative and significant relationships between homicide rates and gun availability. One the other hand,positive and significant relationships were found between gun availability and homicide rates. Analyses suggest that there is a reciprocal relationship between homicide ratesand gun availability in Canada for the period under study. Additional studies using different aggregation levels are needed to pinpoint the specific effects of gun availability and homicide rates on each other. However, the present results tend to give greater support the selfprotection and defensive gun use hypotheses. Results also underline the importance of developing distinct proxies to capture the relationships between the availability of specific firearms and particular homicide rates in Canada

L’émergence de l’informatique dans les nuages met en avant de nombreux défis qui pourraient limiter l’adoption du paradigme Cloud. Tandis que la taille des données traitées par les applications Cloud augmente exponentiellement, un défi majeur porte sur la conception de solutions efficaces pour la gestion de données. Cette thèse a pour but de concevoir des mécanismes d’auto-adaptation pour des systèmes de gestion de données, afin qu’ils puissent répondre aux exigences des services de stockage Cloud en termes de passage à l’échelle, disponibilité et sécurité des données. De plus, nous nous proposons de concevoir un service de données qui soit à la fois compatible avec les interfaces Cloud standard dans et capable d’offrir un stockage de données à haut débit. Pour relever ces défis, nous avons proposé des mécanismes génériques pour l’auto-connaissance, l’auto-protection et l’auto-configuration des systèmes de gestion de données. Ensuite, nous les avons validés en les intégrant dans le logiciel BlobSeer, un système de stockage qui optimise les accès hautement concurrents aux données. Finalement, nous avons conçu et implémenté un système de fichiers s’appuyant sur BlobSeer, afin d’optimiser ce dernier pour servir efficacement comme support de stockage pour les services Cloud. Puis, nous l’avons intégré dans un environnement Cloud réel, la plate-forme Nimbus. Les avantages et les désavantages de l’utilisation du stockage dans le Cloud pour des applications réelles sont soulignés lors des évaluations effectuées sur Grid’5000. Elles incluent des applications à accès intensif aux données, comme MapReduce, et des applications fortement couplées, comme les simulations atmosphériques. / The emergence of Cloud computing brings forward many challenges that may limit the adoption rate of the Cloud paradigm. As data volumes processed by Cloud applications increase exponentially, designing efficient and secure solutions for data management emerges as a crucial requirement. The goal of this thesis is to enhance a distributed data-management system with self-management capabilities, so that it can meet the requirements of the Cloud storage services in terms of scalability, data availability, reliability and security. Furthermore, we aim at building a Cloud data service both compatible with state-of-the-art Cloud interfaces and able to deliver high-throughput data storage. To meet these goals, we proposed generic self-awareness, self-protection and self-configuration components targeted at distributed data-management systems. We validated them on top of BlobSeer, a large-scale data-management system designed to optimize highly-concurrent data accesses. Next, we devised and implemented a BlobSeer-based file system optimized to efficiently serve as a storage backend for Cloud services. We then integrated it within a real-world Cloud environment, the Nimbus platform. The benefits and drawbacks of using Cloud storage for real-life applications have been emphasized in evaluations that involved data-intensive MapReduce applications and tightly-coupled, high-performance computing applications.

L’effet de la disponibilité des AAF sur le taux d’homicide est un sujet qui n’a jamais su faire consensus au sein du corpus scientifique. En tenant compte des réalités canadiennes relatives à l’utilisation d’une arme à feu dans les homicides, la présente étude évaluera la relation entre la disponibilité des armes à feu et le taux d’homicide au Canada, par le biais de séries chronologiques simples et multiples. Les données utilisées dans le cadre de la recherche proviennent de l’Enquête sur l’homicide effectuée par Statistiques Canada, du programme de la déclaration uniforme de la criminalité (DUC), des catalogues Juristats et des catalogues produits par Statistiques Canada sur les causes de décès au pays. Globalement, des relations positives et significatives sont observées entre les deux phénomènes au temps t. Au temps t-1 et t-2, des relations négatives sont observées entre la disponibilité des armes à feu et le taux d’homicide, tandis que des relations positives sont constatées entre le taux d’homicides et la disponibilité des armes à feu. Les résultats confirment que le taux d’homicide et la disponibilité des armes à feu sont des phénomènes qui s’influencent mutuellement dans le temps. En raison du niveau d’agrégation des données, il n’est pas possible de départager l’influence respective des deux phénomènes. Les résultats soutiennent toutefois davantage les thèses de l’autoprotection et de l’autodéfense. Enfin, les résultats montrent l’importance de développer des indices de disponibilité propres aux deux types d’armes à feu impliqués dans les homicides au Canada. / The debate surrounding the effects of gun availability on homicide rates have continuously been going on between scholars for the last decades. Relying on the Canadian context regarding the use of a firearm in homicides, this study evaluates the relationship between gun availability and homicide rates in Canada using pooled-time series analyses. Data used in this study comes from Statistics Canada’s Homicide Survey, the Uniform Crime Report Survey (UCR), Juristat’s catalogues and from catalogues produced by Statistics Canada on the causes of death in the country. Globally, results show positive and significant relationships between the two phenomena over time. Analyses at time t-1 and t-2 allow us to, on one hand notice negative and significant relationships between homicide rates and gun availability. One the other hand,positive and significant relationships were found between gun availability and homicide rates. Analyses suggest that there is a reciprocal relationship between homicide ratesand gun availability in Canada for the period under study. Additional studies using different aggregation levels are needed to pinpoint the specific effects of gun availability and homicide rates on each other. However, the present results tend to give greater support the selfprotection and defensive gun use hypotheses. Results also underline the importance of developing distinct proxies to capture the relationships between the availability of specific firearms and particular homicide rates in Canada

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In Chapter 1, I describe social competence, task competence and self-protection in an organisational context. In Chapter 2, I review key self theories and relate them to the self-competence construct. In Chapter 3, I review the research on self-competence to show that there is a need for a construct of social competence and self-protection. I discuss the limitations of three self-competence theories: Bandura’s (1977) self-efficacy theory, Williams and Lillibridge’s (1992) self-competence theory and Tafarodi & Swann’s (1995) self-competence/self-liking theory. In Chapter 4, I present my selfcompetence model. I raise the research questions and specify my hypotheses. In Chapter 5, I describe the construction of Social and Task Competence Scale. I present evidence of the reliability and factor structure of the Social and Task Competence Scale. I concluded that scale revisions were needed. In Chapter 6, I present evidence of the reliability, factor structure and predictive validity of the revised Social and Task Competence Scale and Self-Protection Scale. I describe the results of an experiment that investigated the interaction of task setting, social competence, task competence and selfprotection. I concluded that the measures predicted performance. In Chapter 7, I investigate the factor structure and reliability of the revised Social and Task Competence Scale and revised Self-Protection Scale. I provide evidence of the convergent and discriminant validity of these measures with reliable measures of self-competence, selfesteem, self-monitoring, personality and social desirability. In Chapter 8, I investigate the factor structure and reliability of the Social and Task Competence Scale and Self-Protection Scale after final revisions and show that these measures are acceptable for use in scientific research. I present evidence of their convergent validity with a valid andreliable measure of emotional intelligence, and describe experimental results that supported the hypothesised relationships between perceived task difficulty, social competence, task competence and self-protection and task performance. In Chapter 9, I discuss the implications of my research for self-competence theory, self-regulation and self-esteem and the prediction of social and task performance in organisations.