Susan Roberta Curtis. / Originally presented as author's thesis (Ph. D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 1985. / Bibliography: p. 90-93. / Supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency monitored by ONR under contract no. N00014-81-K-0742 Supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant ECS-8407285

This dissertation situates eighteenth-century botany within the contexts of contemporary commercial culture and international networks of knowledge formation. I assess the connections between scholars, merchants and consumers in London and Paris between c. 1760 and c. 1815. I ask how individuals who made a commercial profit from selling science understood and related to the notion of a community of scientific practitioners. My aim is to expose the diversity of socio-intellectual configurations that existed in the late eighteenth century. I focus on the histories of two plant nurseries, one based in London and the other in Paris. Their commercial successes rested on their proprietors’ abilities both to serve the growing consumer demand for plants and to actively participate in the international scientific community. The first three chapters address how each participated in scientific and commercial networks, examining which groups composed these networks, the types of social relationships they formed, and how knowledge circulated between them. I highlight the role played by ‘gardener-botanists’ who acted as intermediaries between each of these groups. The final two chapters focus on the people who purchased and exchanged plants. I assess who comprised the ‘public’ that collected specimens and studied botany, and I examine how gardens in London and Paris formed part of an expanding space for science. I emphasise in particular the significance of the culture of connoisseurship to the history of botany, and discuss the range of different publics who collected plants and studied their science. My research is concerned with the interplay between knowledge, commerce and culture. Drawing from the notion that scientific knowledge is always socially and culturally situated, I aim to connect the history of the plant trade to the development of the science of botany, and to place these within a wider cultural context.

Background: This thesis examines the origins and early development of UK Biobank. This is a resource funded in 2002 by the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Department of Health and the Scottish Executive to gather genetic and lifestyle information from half a million participants aged 4069 years old in the UK and monitor their health for up to thirty years in order to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of major diseases. UK Biobank was set up following the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2001, and was one of many established at around the same time with the goal of translating the knowledge of the human genome sequence into practical benefits for human health. (National genetic databases were also set up or proposed in Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Singapore, Tonga, Spain, and the United States). They, and the Human Genome Project, had raised a number of important issues about access to and ownership of genetic information. Aims: The original aim of my PhD was to examine lay and professional understandings and responses to Biobank in the light of this background. However, UK Biobank took longer than expected to reach the stage of data collection, in part because of negotiations about its organisational structure. The aim therefore changed to address the question of how and why was UK Biobank initially configured in the manner it was. Organisational structure: UK Biobank was originally set up by the funders with a ‘hub’ and ‘spoke’ model, with calls for bids from UK Universities for a central ‘hub’ charged with financial management and overall control of data and samples, and ‘spokes’ who were responsible for recruitment and data collection through primary care. The selection of both was made through the procurement rules of the EU. The hub (Manchester), six regional spokes, and the CEO (from Oxford) were all appointed simultaneously in 2003 and subsequently a Board of Directors and a number of committees were appointed. The CEO resigned in late 2004, and a new CEO and Principal Investigator was appointed in 2005, after which there were significant changes to the organisational structure. Methods: I conducted 76 oral history interviews with academic scientists directly and indirectly involved in UK Biobank, representatives of all four funding bodies, and representatives of UK Biobank Limited (the company set up to manage UK Biobank). I also conducted archival analysis of the MRC’s official documents concerning the origins and development of UK Biobank. Findings: From its beginning UK Biobank was marked by tension between academic scientists on the one hand and representatives of the funding bodies and UK Biobank Limited on the other. Academic scientists criticised the funding bodies for establishing UK Biobank in a way that departed from what I have termed ‘standard academic scientific practice’. Spokes felt they should receive some privileged access to data they would contribute to collecting, and felt that the set up did not recognise the performance indicators driving scientists and universities. Lack of clarity over who was in control of UK Biobank contributed to these tensions as both spokes and funders felt that the other exerted undue influence. Some mistrust developed between academic scientists and representatives of the funding bodies and UK Biobank Limited. Discussion: The configuration of UK Biobank was difficult for academic scientists and representatives of both the funding bodies and UK Biobank alike. Organisational issues, typical of those confronting Big Science initiatives, were largely responsible for this difficult legacy. Issues of leadership, the hub and spoke model, the sequencing of funding decisions, appointment of groups and committees and protocol development, uncertainties about who was in control, and ambiguities within the organisational structure as a whole were the most significant issues in the origins and development of UK Biobank, as the organisational changes in 2005 testify.

This thesis examines the development ofnatural history in the Spanish Empire (1750-1850). I explore why the Spanish Crown promoted scientific institutions and expeditions in the second halfofthe eighteenth century, and I situate Spanish engagement with natural history within an imperial context. One Spanish commentator, scrutinising the contents ofthe Real Gabinete de Historia Natural in 1788, gloried that 'we have seen form this immense collection of singularities ofnature, brought at considerable expense, not only from all regions ofEurope, but also from Asia, Africa and America; so that all parts ofthe world may contribute to forming the most complete treasure ofNatural History that exists in the Universe'. I suggest that Spain's capacity to procure and exhibit exotic natural treasures reflected the potency ofher imperial structures. I also address the social, religious and economic benefits associated with the classification, collection and cultivation of natural objects. I am especially interested in the part that Spanish Americans played in this process, and the ways in which the development ofthe natural sciences on the imperial periphery intersected with the evolution of creole patriotism in the late colonial period. I consider how the creation, legitimisation and dissemination of scientific knowledge reflected broader questions of imperial power and national identity. I examine the ambiguous position ofcreole naturalists, who were simultaneously anxious to secure European recognition for their work, to celebrate the natural wealth oftheir homelands and, in some cases, to vindicate local forms of knowledge against purportedly universal European systems such as Linnaean botany, and I extend this analysis beyond independence, asking whether political freedom fomented or compromised the pursuit of natural history in the former colonies.

Since 1962, a photographic invention by Gabriel Lippmann (1845-1921), his Nobel Prize winning interference colour photograph of 1891, has been cited by physicists as the antecedent of the three-dimensional hologram. However, Dennis Gabor (1900-1979) in his original publications on the hologram of 1948 and 1949 did not cite Lippmann’s work. This thesis explores how the hologram that featured in Gabor’s original theory, as an imaging technique to improve the electron-microscope, was significantly different from the hologram for which Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971. The citation of Lippmann’s work as the antecedent to the hologram confirmed that the hologram was to be seen as a three-dimensional photograph, and attempted to give the invention a progressive historical lineage that would conform to photography’s existing history. This popular narrative, as demonstrated in this text, could overlook the pursuit of the hologram for Cold War surveillance by researchers at the University of Michigan on behalf of the United States military. This technology was, from 1955, engaged with aerial radar image processing, a significant application that was classified and hidden from the public, and initially from Gabor himself. Two researchers at the University of Michigan, Emmett Leith (1927–) and Juris Upatnieks (1936–) attracted the attention of the popular press for their development of a three-dimensional laser hologram. This thesis reveals the fragmented nature of the new discipline at the peak of holography’s popularity. This analysis explores some of the historical traits between the two Nobel Prize winning inventions, the Lippmann photograph and the hologram, that were exploited to promote a new imaging medium to the public. In presenting these technologies as images the text also reviews devices and papers––some cited within the popular Lippmann-to Gabor historical narrative––by father and son Frederic (1856-1937) and Herbert Ives (1882-1953), that have competed to produce a three-dimensional full-colour image.

The ease of copying digital materials creates difficulty in detecting the theft of digital certificates. Uneducated users frequently fail to protect their digital certificate keys by not encrypting them, storing them in insecure places, and using them unwisely. In addition, there is no way to prove that protocols involving certificates are completely secure. This thesis introduces a system to ameliorate these problems by detecting the compromise of digital certificates. It leverages dual logging messages sent via side channels to a trusted third party. This third party correlates these messages and automatically detects when an imposter presents a certificate based on the collected evidence.

The aim of this master thesis is to convey an ellaborate overview of Secure Boot, the technology used for an authentization during a platfrom boot up. Overview is followed by a description of contemporary implementations of Secure Boot found in the operating systems based on the Linux kernel. Finally, we propose a new implemenation of Secure Boot support in the systemd-boot project.

Claudius Ptolemy composed his Geography in the city of Alexandria, one of the most prominent intellectual centres of the Roman Empire. His work offers a comprehensive description of the known world as well as insight into the practice of scholarly geography during the second century CE. Ptolemy’s most important innovation in this field was his use of geographical coordinates to create maps of the world, and his catalogue, with its latitudes and longitudes of thousands of localities, is one of our most valuable sources on the antique oikoumenē. Very little is known, however, about the sources and working methods that Ptolemy employed to produce his Geography. This book focuses on Ptolemy’s description of the Iberian peninsula and examines two problematic and interlinked topics relating to the origins of the catalogue of localities: Ptolemy’s sources and scientific methods on the one hand, and the textual transmission of the Geography, from Ptolemy to the extant manuscripts, on the other.

O surgimento e a popularização de arquiteturas de software que fornecem suporte à programação distribuída orientada a objetos, como CORBA, .NET e Java EE, gerou uma demanda por infra-estruturas de segurança eficientes, capazes de proteger os recursos dos sistemas de ataques maliciosos. Essa proteção começa pela identificação dos usuários que interagem com os sistemas, processo conhecido como autenticação. Entretanto, a autenticação por si só não é suficiente para garantir a segurança dos recursos, uma vez que a autenticação não determina quais ações os usuários estão autorizados a executar depois de autenticados. Em outras palavras, um mecanismo de autorização, que faz valer as políticas de controle de acesso aos recursos definidas pelos administradores de sistemas, se faz necessário. Neste trabalho estudamos mecanismos de controle de acesso baseado em papéis e a aplicabilidade dos certificados de atributos X.509 como estrutura de armazenamento desses papéis em um ambiente Java EE. Em particular, estendemos a infra-estrutura de segurança do servidor de aplicações JBoss, de modo que ela passasse a comportar os certificados de atributos X.509. Além disso, analisamos as vantagens e desvantagens do uso de tais certificados e avaliamos o desempenho da extensão desenvolvida em relação a outras alternativas que são oferecidas pelo JBoss para o armazenamento de papéis dos usuários. / The popularization of software architectures that provide support for distributed object-oriented programming, like CORBA, .NET, and Java EE, revealed the need for efficient security infrastructures to protect the resources of enterprise systems from malicious attacks. This protection usually begins with the identification of the users that interact with the systems, a process known as authentication. However, authentication alone is not enough to guarantee the protection of the resources, as it cannot determine what actions a particular user is allowed to execute on a given resource. In other words, an authorization mechanism is needed in order to enforce the access control policies as defined by the system administrators. In this dissertation we studied role-based access control mechanisms and the use of X.509 attribute certificates as data structures that store the users roles in a Java EE environment. Particularly, we added X.509 attribute certificates support to the existing JBoss application server security infrastructure. Furthermore, we evaluated the pros and cons of using these certificates, and compared the performance of the developed extension to the performance of the existing solutions provided by JBoss to store the users roles.

O surgimento e a popularização de arquiteturas de software que fornecem suporte à programação distribuída orientada a objetos, como CORBA, .NET e Java EE, gerou uma demanda por infra-estruturas de segurança eficientes, capazes de proteger os recursos dos sistemas de ataques maliciosos. Essa proteção começa pela identificação dos usuários que interagem com os sistemas, processo conhecido como autenticação. Entretanto, a autenticação por si só não é suficiente para garantir a segurança dos recursos, uma vez que a autenticação não determina quais ações os usuários estão autorizados a executar depois de autenticados. Em outras palavras, um mecanismo de autorização, que faz valer as políticas de controle de acesso aos recursos definidas pelos administradores de sistemas, se faz necessário. Neste trabalho estudamos mecanismos de controle de acesso baseado em papéis e a aplicabilidade dos certificados de atributos X.509 como estrutura de armazenamento desses papéis em um ambiente Java EE. Em particular, estendemos a infra-estrutura de segurança do servidor de aplicações JBoss, de modo que ela passasse a comportar os certificados de atributos X.509. Além disso, analisamos as vantagens e desvantagens do uso de tais certificados e avaliamos o desempenho da extensão desenvolvida em relação a outras alternativas que são oferecidas pelo JBoss para o armazenamento de papéis dos usuários. / The popularization of software architectures that provide support for distributed object-oriented programming, like CORBA, .NET, and Java EE, revealed the need for efficient security infrastructures to protect the resources of enterprise systems from malicious attacks. This protection usually begins with the identification of the users that interact with the systems, a process known as authentication. However, authentication alone is not enough to guarantee the protection of the resources, as it cannot determine what actions a particular user is allowed to execute on a given resource. In other words, an authorization mechanism is needed in order to enforce the access control policies as defined by the system administrators. In this dissertation we studied role-based access control mechanisms and the use of X.509 attribute certificates as data structures that store the users roles in a Java EE environment. Particularly, we added X.509 attribute certificates support to the existing JBoss application server security infrastructure. Furthermore, we evaluated the pros and cons of using these certificates, and compared the performance of the developed extension to the performance of the existing solutions provided by JBoss to store the users roles.