Thesis (Postgraduate Certificate in Research Preparation (Humanities)--Macquarie University, Dept. of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, 2009. / This thesis presented as a partial fulfilment to the requirements for the Postgraduate Certificate in Research Preparation (Humanities). Bibliography: p. 47-55.

Thesis (D. Litt. et Phil.)--University of South Africa, 2003. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on May 1, 2006). Includes bibliographical references (p. 330-346).

In today's information era, the security of computer systems as resources of invaluable information is of crucial importance not just to security administrators but also to users of these systems. Access control is an information security process which guards protected resources against unauthorized access as specified by restrictions in security policies. One significant obstacle to regulate access in secure systems is the lack of formal semantics and specifications for the policy languages which are used in writing security policies. Expressing security policies that are implemented pursuant to required security goals and that accommodate security policy rules correctly is of high importance to the system's integrity, confidentiality, and availability. The semantics of the most widely used policy languages such as SELinux is expressed in a declarative manner using a colloquial natural language (e.g., English), which leads to ambiguity in the interpretation of the policy statements. For this reason, both the development and the analysis of security policies are generally imprecise and based on cognitive concepts; that is to say, they are not conducted in a mathematically-precise and verifiable way. Type Enforcement (TE) is a MAC (Mandatory Access Control) access control mechanism that is used in the SELinux security module. Type Enforcement (TE) is implemented based on the type/domain field of security contexts. TE allows the creation of different domains in the system by assigning subjects to domains and subsequently associating them with objects. TE mandates a central policy-driven approach to access control. We propose a small and certifiably correct TE policy language, TEpla, as an appropriate candidate for the primary access control feature of SELinux, Type Enforcement. TEpla can provide ease of use, analysis, and verification of its properties. TEpla is a certified policy language with formal semantics, exposing ease of reasoning and allowing verification. We use the Coq proof assistant to mechanize semantics and to machine-check the proofs of TEpla, ensuring correctness guarantees are provided. Having a certified semantics simplifies and fosters the development of certified tools for policy-related tasks such as automating various kind of policy analyses.

No description available.

What explains institutional change in authoritarian regimes presiding over fragmented societies? A popular assumption is that, because the state is so powerful, major institutional change takes place only when certain actors within the state system see such change as beneficial for their personal or collective interests. In other words, institutional changes are necessarily top-down and elitist in nature. Challenging that position, this thesis articulates a theory of gradual institutional change in authoritarian regimes, arguing that authoritarian institutions, as distributional instruments laden with power implications, are likely to be unstable and ambiguous, allowing social actors to advance their personal or collective interests through gradual institutional modifications. As these resistances accumulate, the costs for state actors to maintain their increasingly ineffective institutions rise to an unsustainable level, incentivising them to revise their core practices—and, by extension, sometimes expand existing rights or extend new ones to their citizens. This argument is supported by a systematic examination of the Chinese state’s historic attempts to promote the use of a standardised language form—putonghua—and simplified Chinese characters on a national scale, and a range of popular resistance efforts against them. Drawing upon newly available archival materials, survey data, and in-depth interviews, I conduct process-tracing case studies of three successive language management regimes—namely, top-down (from the 1950s to 1980s), incentivising (from the 1990s to mid-2000s), and selective (from the mid-2000s), demonstrating how they were challenged and gradually modified by their subjects. From this position I argue that the deployment of official language policy in the PRC is determined endogenously by the ambiguities of existing language institutions as well as exogenously by levels of economic development and communication technology. The casual arguments are then evaluated in light of evidence from the history of language management in the former Soviet Union and Tawian.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / John Hatcliff / With the increase in development of safety and security critical systems, it is important to have more sophisticated methods for engineering such systems. It can be difficult to understand and verify critical properties of these systems because of their ever growing size and complexity. Even a small error in a complex system may result in casualty or significant monetary loss. Consequently, there is a rise in the demand for scalable and accurate techniques to enable faster development and verification of high assurance systems. This thesis focuses on discovering dependencies between various parts of a system and leveraging that knowledge to infer information flow properties and to verify security policies specified for the system. The primary contribution of this thesis is a technique to build dependence graphs for languages which feature abstraction and refinement. Inter-procedural slicing and inter-procedural chopping are the techniques used to analyze the properties of the system statically. The approach outlined in this thesis provides a domain-specific language to query the information flow properties and to specify security policies for a critical system. The spec- ified policies can then be verified using existing static analysis techniques. All the above contributions are integrated with a development environment used to develop the critical system. The resulting software development tool helps programmers develop, infer, and verify safety and security systems in a single unified environment.

Recent language policy and planning research reveals how policy-makers endorse the interests of dominant social groups, marginalise minority languages and perpetuate systems of sociolinguistic inequality. In the Castilian-dominated Galician linguistic landscape, this study examines the rise of grassroots level actors or agents (i.e. parents, family members, and other speakers of minority Galician) who play a significant role in interpreting and implementing language policy on the ground. The primary focus of this study is to investigate the impact of top-down language policies inside home domain, it looks at how the individual linguistic practices and ideologies of Galician parents act as visible and/or invisible language planning measures influencing their children’s language learning. However, these individual linguistic ideologies and language management decisions are difficult to detect because they are implicit, subtle, informal, and often hidden from the public eye, and therefore, frequently overlooked by language policy researchers and policy makers. Drawing from multiple ethnographic research methods including observations, in-depth fieldwork interviews, focus group discussions and family language audits with thirty-two Galician parents, this study attempts to ascertain whether these parents can restore intergenerational transmission of Galician and if their grassroots level interrogation of the dominant discourse could lead to bottom-up language policies.

"Zugl.: Graz, Universität, Diss., 1997"--T.p. verso. / Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation conducts a comprehensive examination of the study of Asian languages in two Australian states, taking into consideration the broad range of people and variables which impact on the language-in-education ecology. These findings are intended to enhance the development of language-in-education policy, planning and implementation in Australia. In order to incorporate a number of perspectives in the language-in-education ecology, interviews were conducted with a range of stakeholders, school administrators, LOTE (Languages Other Than English) coordinators and LOTE teachers, from all three education systems – government, independent and Catholic (31 individuals), across two states – Victoria and New South Wales. Questionnaires were also completed by 464 senior secondary students who were studying an Asian language. Along with the use of supporting data (for example, government reports and newspaper discourse analysis), the interview and questionnaire data was analysed thematically, as well as through the use of descriptive statistics.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Victoria University of Wellington, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.