The scale of modern surveillance and the debate surrounding its nature have become expansively complex. Consequently, the field of communication and surveillance studies represent a critical area of scholarship with interwoven academic, policy and social implications. This thesis, a critical ideological study of modern surveillance founded upon an empirical study, draws on participant observation, militant ethnography and semistructured interviews as research methods. From a participant insider perspective, it explores and interprets the experiences, meanings and views of counter-surveillance actors targeted by surveillance based on participant observation and militant ethnography conducted during the 2017 Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig and the 2019 Chaos Communication Camp in Mildenberg, Germany. Drawing on Jeffrey Juris’ militant ethnography and based on the participants’ own experiences in resisting modern surveillance, I focus on the lessons learned from those belonging to the third-wave of privacy activism. Through their personal experiences, this research reveals control strategies, lessons learned and views of privacy activists, hacktivists and civic-hackers on the state of modern surveillance. This thesis concludes that the current symbiotic nature of the state-corporate surveillance and disinformation nexus means any legislative solution to be unlikely.

Background: Postural instability is a prevalent and deleterious consequence of aging. It is unclear how the occurrence of chronic pain augments balance issues as age progresses. Research question: We investigated how postural stability is influenced by aging and chronic pain. Methods: Fifty-five participants with and without recent chronic pain balanced on one foot while performing three tasks, a standard balancing task with no challenge, a mental task in which participants answered arithmetic questions while balancing on one foot, and a knot-tying task in which participants tied knots in a ribbon while balancing on one foot. General linear models were used to assess the relationship between age, sex, BMI, and pain category for the three different balancing tasks. In addition, a multivariate analysis of variance was used to test the effect of age and pain category on Hurst exponents from all of three different balancing tasks. Results: Our results show that aging changes the control strategy of balancing from less persistent to more repetitive. The strong feedback elements intrinsic to healthy stability ensure quick reactions and strong capacity to compensate for balance checks; this reactive state changes into a less reactive and more predictable balance strategy with age while balancing on one foot. Mental tasks during balancing also decreased the feedback in balancing strategy. Balance strategy during the knot-tying task was correlated with age, but unaffected by chronic pain. Overall, the chronic pain group had a worse balance strategy while performing the mental task in comparison with healthy people, but were not differentiable from controls in the standard or knot-tying tasks. Significance: Scores from balancing while engaging in cognitive tasks may provide evidence of health decline, and contribute to our knowledge about how pain affects feedback mechanisms.

Objective: We quantified, via complexity analysis, the postural stability of healthy people from a wide age range. Approach: Thirty-five healthy people aged 18-72 performed three tasks while balancing on one foot on a force plate: standard balancing task, mental task (balancing while answering basic arithmetic questions), and knot-tying task (balancing while tying two knots in a piece of ribbon). Mediolateral force trajectories were analyzed to determine control strategy via Hurst exponents, Lyapunov exponents, Kolmogorov complexity, root mean square, and phase-space plots. Main results: We found increased pattern repetition in balancing with increased age, as evidenced by the emergence of a double attractor pattern in phase-space plots and the increase of Hurst exponents with age from approximately 0.3 to 0.8. Significance: As people age, they tend to develop strong feed-forward control strategies for balancing, and lose the complexity of micro movements intrinsic to young age. There is an open-loop control strategy for balancing that emerges in older adulthood, and there are attractors inherent to balancing which begin to develop in middle age.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(理学) / 甲第20901号 / 理博第4353号 / 新制||理||1625(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院理学研究科物理学・宇宙物理学専攻 / (主査)教授 川合 光, 教授 青木 慎也, 准教授 菅沼 秀夫 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Science / Kyoto University / DGAM

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We explore the dynamics of integrable and chaotic quantum many-body systems with a focus on universal structures known as caustics, which are a type of singularity categorized by catastrophe theory. Papers I and II study light cones in quantum spin chains, which we show are caustics and therefore inherits specific functional forms. For integrable systems, the edge of the cone is a fold catastrophe, making the wavefunction locally of Airy form. We also identify the cusp catastrophe in the XY model, thus the secondary light cone is a Pearcey function. Vortex pairs appear in the dynamics, are sensitive to phase transitions, and permit the extraction of critical scaling exponents. In paper II we use a Gaussian wavefront form to distinguish integrable and chaotic models. Writing the wavefront as exp[−m(x)(x − vt)2 + b(x)t], the scaling of coefficients m(x) and b(x) is the diagnostic. The local Airy function description in free models leads to a power-law ∼ x^{−n/3} scaling, while for the chaotic case the scaling is exponential ∼ e^{−cx}. In Paper III, we study the function Fn(t) = <(A(t)B)^n>, a generalization of the four-point out-of-time ordered correlator (OTOC) F2(t), for an integrable system and show that the function Fn(t) can be recast as the return amplitude of an effective time dependent chaotic system, exhibiting signals of chaos such as a positive Lyapunov exponent, spectral statistics consistent with random matrix theory, and relaxation. In Paper IV we perform a comprehensive investigation of caustics in many-body systems in (1+1)- and (2+1)-dimensional Fock space and time. We show how a hierarchy of caustics appear in the dynamics of many-body models, using two- and three-mode Bose-Hubbard models as guiding systems. We show that, in the case of the trimer, high dimensional caustics appear and are organized by the catastrophe X9. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Many important engineering phenomena such as turbulent flow, fluid-structure interactions, and climate diagnostics are chaotic and sensitivity analysis of such systems is a challenging problem. Computational methods have been proposed to accurately and efficiently estimate the sensitivity analysis of these systems which is of great scientific and engineering interest. In this thesis, a new approach is applied to compute the direct and adjoint sensitivities of time-averaged quantities defined from the chaotic response of the Lorenz system and the double pendulum system. A stabilized time-integrator with adaptive time-step control is used to maintain stability of the sensitivity calculations. A study of convergence of a quantity of interest and its square is presented. Results show that the approach computes accurate sensitivity values with a computational cost that is multiple orders-of-magnitude lower than competing approaches based on least-squares-shadowing approach.

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