One of the problems sensor networks face is adversaries corrupting nodes along the path to the base station. One way to reduce the effect of these attacks is multipath routing. This introduces some intrusion-tolerance in the network by way of redundancy but at the cost of a higher power consumption by the sensor nodes. Erasure coding can be applied to this scenario in which the base station can receive a subset of the total data sent and reconstruct the entire message packet at its end. This thesis uses two commonly used encodings and compares their performance with respect to power consumed for unencoded data in multipath routing. It is found that using encoding with multipath routing reduces the power consumption and at the same time enables the user to send reasonably large data sizes. The experiments in this thesis were performed on the Tiny OS platform with the simulations done in TOSSIM and the power measurements were taken in PowerTOSSIM. They were performed on the simple radio model and the lossy radio model provided by Tiny OS. The lossy radio model was simulated with distances of 10 feet, 15 feet and 20 feet between nodes. It was found that by using erasure encoding, double or triple the data size can be sent at the same power consumption rate as unencoded data. All the experiments were performed with the radio set at a normal transmit power, and later a high transmit power.

In 2018-2019, 35.5% of people with a Dangerous Offender designation were Indigenous (Public Safety Canada, 2020, p. 117). While the disproportionate number of Indigenous people with the designation corresponds to the broader trend of overincarceration of Indigenous people in Canada, very little research has addressed the use of the designation on Indigenous people. This thesis provides a critical discourse analysis of 15 case law reports of Dangerous Offender designation hearings guided by settler colonial theory to examine why the designation disproportionately targets Indigenous people. I specifically examine the ways in which discourse enables the erasure of settler colonialism, and at time Indigeneity, in the decision-making process of Dangerous Offender designation hearings. The analysis found that the juridical framework for the application of the Dangerous Offender designation does not allow the courts to consider the impacts of settler colonialism at the designation stage. As such, the social locations of the individuals that demonstrate how settler colonialism may have contributed to their offending are not discussed in the decision-making process thereby creating a form of erasure of settler colonialism in the designation process. Additionally, the juridical framework gives psych experts much authority in the decision-making process. Thus, risk discourse dominates much of the case law reports and the impacts of settler colonialism as thereby translated in individual risk factors. Many of the risk factors that justify the application of the designation are in fact symptoms of settler colonialism. In sum, I conclude that the juridical framework of the Dangerous Offender designation is designed in a way that contributes to disproportionately targeting Indigenous people because their unique experience of settler colonialism and the role in played in their offending is erased or translated in risk which makes them more of a target.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) that use tiny wireless devices capable of communicating, processing, and sensing promise to have applications in virtually all fields. Smart homes and smart cities are just few of the examples that WSNs can enable. Despite their potential, WSNs suffer from reliability and energy limitations. In this study, we address the problem of designing Distributed Data Storage Systems (DDSSs) for WSNs using decentralized erasure codes. A unique aspect of WSNs is that their data is inherently decentralized. This calls for a decentralized mechanism for encoding and decoding. We propose a distributed data storage framework to increase data survivability in WSNs. The framework utilizes Decentralized Erasure Codes for Data Survivability (DEC-DS) which allow for determining the amount of redundancy required in both hardware and data to allow sensed data to survive failures in the network. To address the energy limitations, we show two approaches to implement the proposed solution in an energy efficient manner. The two approaches employ Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) to exploit coding opportunities in order to save energy and in turn prolong network life. A routing based scheme, called DEC Encode-and-Forward (DEC-EaF), applies to networks with routing capability, while the second, DEC Encode-and-Disseminate (DEC-EaD), uses a variation of random walk to build the target code in a decentralized fashion. We also introduce a new decentralized approach to implement Luby Transform (LT)-Codes based DDSSs. The scheme is called Decentralized Robust Soliton Storage (DRSS) and it operates in a decentralized fashion and requires no coordination between sensor nodes. The schemes are tested through extensive simulations to evaluate their performance. We also compare the proposed schemes to similar schemes in the literature. The comparison considers energy efficiency as well as coding related aspects. Using the proposed schemes can greatly improve the reliability of WSNs especially under harsh working conditions. / Thesis (Ph.D, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2013-09-30 22:43:04.509

Since the introduction of film to Japan in the 1890s, Japanese cinema has been continually influenced by transnational processes of film production, distribution, promotion, and reception. This has led inevitably to questions about the inherent nationality of Japan's film culture, despite the fact that Japanese cinema has often been subjected to analyses of its fundamental ‘Japaneseness'. This study seeks to make an original contribution to the field of Japanese film studies by investigating the contradictory ways in which Japan has functioned as a global cinematic brand in the period 2000 to 2010, and how this is interrelated with modes of promotion and reception in the English-speaking markets of the UK and the USA. Through textual and empirical analyses of seven films from the selected period and the non-Japanese consumption of them, this thesis argues that contemporary film exports are culturally-decentred in regards to their industrial and, to some extent, aesthetic dimensions. This results from contradictory modes of ‘cultural erasure' and ‘cultural performance' in the production of certain films, whereby aesthetic traces of cultural specificity are concealed or emphasised in relation to external commercial interests. Despite strategies of cultural erasure, explicit cinematic representations of cultural specificity remain highly valued as export commodities. Moreover, in the case of contemporary Japanese film exports, there are significant issues of ‘cultural ownership' to be accounted for given the extent to which non-national industrial consortia (film producers, financers, DVD distributors, film festivals) have invested in the promotion and in some cases the production of Japanese films. Thus, both in relation to the aesthetic erasure of Japaneseness and their non-Japanese commercial identities, recent film exports can be viewed as non-national cultural products that have a commercial and cinematic identity connected to external influences as much as internal ones.

With the unprecedented growth of data and the use of low commodity drives in local disk-based storage systems and remote cloud-based servers has increased the risk of data loss and an overall increase in the user perceived system latency. To guarantee high reliability, replication has been the most popular choice for decades, because of simplicity in data management. With the high volume of data being generated every day, the storage cost of replication is very high and is no longer a viable approach. Erasure coding is another approach of adding redundancy in storage systems, which provides high reliability at a fraction of the cost of replication. However, the choice of erasure codes being used affects the storage efficiency, reliability, and overall system performance. At the same time, the performance and interoperability are adversely affected by the slower device components and complex central management systems and operations. To address the problems encountered in various layers of the erasure coded storage system, in this dissertation, we explore the different aspects of storage and design several techniques to improve the reliability, performance, and interoperability. These techniques range from the comprehensive evaluation of erasure codes, application of erasure codes for highly reliable and high-performance SSD system, to the design of new erasure coding and caching schemes for Hadoop Distributed File System, which is one of the central management systems for distributed storage. Detailed evaluation and results are also provided in this dissertation.