In 2009 the Federal Highway Administration published a report regarding a Focus States Initiative that had been conducted with 11 states to discuss the development of national Traffic Incident Management (TIM) standards. Performance measures were defined, and a national TIM dashboard created, but very little data has been added to the dashboard since. In this research study, performance measures of the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) TIM program were analyzed. Data availability was first assessed to determine whether these performance measures could be calculated. It was determined that crash response data available from the Utah Highway Patrol (UHP) could be used to calculate the performance measures of Incident Management Teams (IMT) and UHP units; however, roadway clearance data were missing. UHP personnel agreed to collect additional data regarding crash roadway clearance for six months of the study. Performance measures of response time (RT), roadway clearance time (RCT), and incident clearance time (ICT) were calculated for responding units at 168 crashes. Using the crash response data from UHP and traffic speed, travel time, and volume data from UDOT databases, 83 of the 163 crashes that met additional criteria were evaluated to determine the volume of traffic affected (AV) by each incident and the associated user cost (EUC). Statistical analyses to determine relationships between different measures such as RT, RCT, ICT, AV, and EUC were conducted to assist UDOT in optimizing the allocation of their IMT resources.

In 2019, the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) funded a research study evaluating the performance measures of UDOT's expanded Incident Management Team (IMT) program. The number of IMTs patrolling Utah roadways increased from 13 to 25 between 2018 and 2020. Crash data were collected from the Utah Highway Patrol's Computer Aided Dispatch database and from the UDOT TransSuite database to compare IMT performance measures between the two years and to evaluate the benefits of the expanded IMT program. However, these data were compromised due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study collected data for 2022 using the same methodology as the Phase II study to compare IMT performance measures in 2022 with those of 2018 after traffic volumes had returned to a similar level as those of pre-pandemic levels. There were 283 and 307 incidents for the years of 2018 and 2022, respectively, that were analyzed for IMT performance measures which include response time, roadway clearance time, and incident clearance time. There were 172 and 236 incidents for the years of 2018 and 2022, respectively, that were analyzed for user impacts which were affected volume, excess travel time, and excess user costs. Results of the statistical analyses conducted on the 2018 and 2022 datasets show that IMTs can respond more quickly to incidents in a larger coverage area with significantly reduced user impacts. The expanded IMT program is also able to respond to more incidents, including those of high severity, while significantly decreasing congestion.

<p> </p><p><strong>Date: </strong>2008-10-06</p><p><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Level: </strong>Bachelor thesis within Information Technology and business economics, 15p, EIK021</p><p><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Authors:</strong> Anna Karlsson, akn05009@student.mdh.se</p><p>Lena-Maria Lindström, llm05002@student.mdh.se</p><p>Magnus Wretlund, mvd05001@student.se</p><p><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Tutor: </strong>Marie Mörndal</p><p> </p><p><strong>Title: </strong>Managing IT-incidents, a case study at ICAs IT department                            Operations</p><p><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> IT-incident management, IT-incident management process, IT-incident, ITIL, CCTA</p><p> </p><p><strong>Problem: </strong>An organization can benefit by having an established management process of handling IT-incidents. But how can this be achieved? Are there step-by-step procedures? What´s included in the management process of IT-incidents? Is the size of the organization relevant to which model is to be chosen? Can the work of the writers of this essay result in a recommendation of a specific model for IT-incident management? These questions lead to the following essay question; <strong>How are IT-incidents managed?</strong></p><p><strong>Purpose: </strong>The purpose of this thesis is to describe and discuss how IT incidents can be managed.</p><p><strong>Method:</strong> The writers of this essay have performed a case study at ICA, a Swedish food retail company. Eleven interviews with nine different persons have been carried out. The interviews are analyzed in the chapter called Resultat och analys.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>Our conclusion is that there are both similarities and differences in Dept. Operations´ management process for handling IT-incidents compared to what is stated in the CCTA-model. Another conclusion is that it is of highest importance for a business to implement a standard procedure for handling IT-incidents. The lack of such a model could result in e.g. financial losses.</p>

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Memory forensics is increasingly used to detect and analyze sophisticated malware. In the last decade, major advances in memory forensics have made analysis of kernel-level malware straightforward. Kernel-level malware has been favored by attackers because it essentially provides complete control over a machine. This has changed recently as operating systems vendors now routinely enforce driving signing and strategies for protecting kernel data, such as Patch Guard, have made userland attacks much more attractive to malware authors. In this thesis, new techniques for detecting userland malware written in Objective-C on Mac OS X are presented. As the thesis illustrates, Objective-C provides a rich set of APIs that malware uses to manipulate and steal data and to perform other malicious activities. The novel memory forensics techniques presented in this thesis deeply examine the state of the Objective-C runtime, identifying a number of suspicious activities, from keystroke logging to pointer swizzling.

Samfattning   Bakgrund: I vår vardag världen över drabbas människor oavsett kön och ålder av olyckor, dödsfall och andra traumatiska händelser. Vissa yrken medför en större risk att utsättas för traumatiska händelser. Exempel på dessa är ambulans, räddningspersonal, polis och vårdpersonal inom främst akutsjukvård. Dessa händelser kan ibland bli personen övermäktigt. Ett sätt att motverka bl.a. utbrändhet och posttraumatiskt stressymptom (PTSD) hos vårdpersonalen är att genomföra debriefingsamtal. Detta genomförs med den vårdpersonal som varit delaktig i en traumatisk händelse.     Syfte: Syftet med denna studie var att beskriva erfarenheten av debriefing hos vårdpersonal inom akutsjukvården i samband med traumatiska händelser i sin yrkesutövning.   Metod: Litteraturstudie som totalt innehåller 10 vetenskapliga artiklar varav fem är kvalitativa och fem är kvantitativa.   Resultat: Studieresultatet påvisar att debriefing uppfattas som ett positiv redskap när det gäller avlastning efter en traumatisk händelse för vårdpersonalen inom akutsjukvården. De främsta faktorerna som lyfts i studien är tid och plats för debriefing, debriefingens inverkan på kommunikationen mellan vårdpersonalen, val av debriefingledare och behovet av väl utformade riktlinjer för debriefingen.   Slutsats: I föreliggande studie påvisas att debriefing bör betraktas som ett effektivt verktyg att motverka psykisk ohälsa hos vårdpersonalen och att debriefing även förstärker kommunikationen mellan de olika professionella yrkesgrupperna inom akutsjukvården. Studien visar även att det är viktigt med väl utformade riktlinjer för att debriefingens syfte skall uppnås. / Abstract Background: In our everyday lives worldwide, people are affected regardless of gender and age by accidents, deaths and other traumatic events. Some professions involve a greater risk of being exposed to traumatic events. Examples of these are ambulance, emergency personnel, police and health care personnel, primarily in emergency care. These events can sometimes become overpowering. One way to counteract burnout and post-traumatic stress symptom (PTSD) in healthcare professionals is to carry out debriefing talks. This is done with the healthcare staff who has participated in a traumatic event.   Aim: The purpose of this study was to describe the experience of debriefing in healthcare professionals in emergency care in connection with traumatic events in their professional practice.   Method: Literature study that contains a total of 10 scientific articles, five of which are qualitative and five are quantitative.   Results: The study results show that debriefing is perceived as a positive tool when it comes to unloading after a traumatic event for the healthcare staff in emergency care. The main factors raised in the study are time and place for debriefing, debriefing impact on the communication between the healthcare staff, the choice of debriefing leader and the need for well-designed guidelines for debriefing.   Conclusion: The present study demonstrates that debriefing should be regarded as an effective tool for counteracting mental illness in the healthcare staff and that debriefing also reinforces communication between the various professional occupational groups in emergency care. The study also shows that well-designed guidelines are important for achieving the purpose of the debriefing.

A tese de Doutorado analisa a proposta de criação de um incidente de inconstitucionalidade no âmbito do controle concreto brasileiro, lidando com o debate legislativo e doutrinário a respeito do tema. Tem por objetivo contextualizar a ferramenta na atual discussão da fiscalização de constitucionalidade, sendo examinadas as suas principais vantagens e críticas. Ademais, além da defesa da criação de um incidente de inconstitucionalidade como classe autônoma processada no Supremo Tribunal Federal por meio da inovação contida na Proposta de Emenda Constitucional nº 406/01, a tese propõe o surgimento de um Cadastro Nacional de Decisões de Inconstitucionalidade, de responsabilidade do Conselho Nacional de Justiça. Por fim, o trabalho de pesquisa defende a reunião de ambas as inovações como instrumentos capazes de gerar o aperfeiçoamento da singular pluralidade que caracteriza a Jurisdição Constitucional no Brasil. / This research analyzes the proposal to create an incident of unconstitutionality under Brazilian judicial review, dealing with legislative and doctrinal debate about the issue. It aims to understand the tool in the current discussion of judicial review, and explores its advantages and problems. Moreover, beyond the creation of an incident of unconstitutionality as a separate procedural class by Constitutional Amendment Project nº 406/01, this research proposes the development of a National Data of Unconstitutional Decisions, associated to the National Council of Justice. Finally, the study supports both innovations as tools to promote improvement of judicial review in Brazil and its natural plurality, which is a regular feature in Brazilian Constitutional framework.

Intellectual elites have been the collective agents responsible for many democratic transitions worldwide since the early twentieth century. Intellectuals, however, have also been blamed for the evils in modern times. Instead of engaging in abstract debates about who the intellectuals are and what they do, this project studies intellectuals and their ideas within historical contexts. More specifically, it examines the social forces behind the evolving political attitudes of Chinese intellectuals from the late 1970s to the present. Chinese politics has received an enormous amount of attention from social scientists, but intellectuals have been much less explored systematically in social sciences, despite their significant role in China’s political life. Chinese intellectuals have been more fully investigated in the humanities, but existing research either treats different “school of thought” as given, or gives insufficient attention to the division among the intellectuals. It should also be noted that many studies explicitly take sides by engaging in polemics. To date, little work has thoroughly addressed the diversity and evolution, let alone origins, of political ideas in post-Mao China. As a result, scholars unfamiliar with Chinese politics are often confused about the labels in the Chinese intelligentsia, such as the association of nationalism with the Left and human rights with the Right. More important, without considering how the ideas took shape, we would not adequately understand the political trajectory of communist China, where elite politics and local policies have been profoundly shaped by intellectual debates. This dissertation takes a relational approach to the intellectual debates in contemporary China by analyzing the formation of political ideas and crystallization of intellectual positions. It asks two questions: who are the Chinese liberals, and how were their distinctive bundles of political views formed? Drawing on 67 semi-structured interviews with Chinese intellectual elites across the ideological spectrum, as well as detailed historical and textual analyses, this dissertation examines the social forces that have shaped the political attitudes of liberal intellectuals in contemporary China. It argues against the prevailing attempts to define Chinese liberalism as a social category with a coherent ideology comparable to its Western counterpart; rather, as a community of discourse that contains a number of competing and contradictory discourses, it is embedded in China’s social reality as an authoritarian regime governed by a communist party, and contingent on China’s history straddling the Maoist and post-Mao eras. Rather than a monolithic or tight-knit group, Chinese liberals are comprised of an array of social actors, including scholars, journalists, lawyers, activists, and house church leaders. They are liberal not because of what they are for, but because of what they are against; more specifically, Chinese liberals are united by an anti-authoritarian mentality, which is a historical product of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. In addition to biographical factors, the views of Chinese liberals have been shaped by structural factors represented by the neoliberal reforms and the rise and growth of the intellectual field since the 1990s, as well as interactive factors manifested by the polar opposition between the liberals and the New Leftists. On the one hand, as state-driven capitalism unleashed China’s economic potential, China was well on its way to becoming a major player in the international community toward the end of the 1990s; on the other hand, the fusion of the free market and political power led to rampant corruption and social injustice. How to make sense of China’s crony capitalism became an important dividing line between the New Left and liberalism. As the intellectual debates were increasingly cast as part of global cultural production, how to appropriate Western thinkers and concepts became a site of contestation. While the dramatic expansion of higher education led to the growth of the intellectual field with its own logic and rules, in which both liberals and New Left intellectuals were struggling for symbolic power, the penetration of the political field remained, not only in terms of visible incentives and punishments, but also in terms of its subtle influence on the manner of problem construction and debate. Through combative interactions, the liberals and the New Leftists have defined themselves by reference to each other. In the process of binary opposition, the views of both sides have moved further and further apart with little overlap. This dissertation contributes to political sociology and the sociology of knowledge in three ways. First, departing from the conventional approach that takes political orientations for granted, it takes a relational approach by analyzing the dynamic processes of ideological formation and polarization. Second, it traces the process of ideological alignment and differentiation on three levels: structural, interactive, and biographical. Third, while it has been observed that intellectual elites have been the collective agents responsible for many democratic transitions worldwide since the early twentieth century, the internal division of the intellectuals has received much less attention. My work addresses this issue by analyzing how the Chinese intelligentsia has structuralized into binary opposition since the Tiananmen Square protests. In particular, I treat political ideas as historical contingencies, rather than fixed properties, that are internally shaped by “fractal distinctions.”

The increasing importance of the Internet as an integral part of contemporary society has stressed the need to formalize the process of response to security incidents that accompany it inseparably. Security teams of the CERT/CSIRT type are established at different levels for this purpose. These teams respond to reports from their constituency and cooperate with other teams. This thesis introduces the reader to the issues these teams deal with and analyzes their needs in resolving threats and problems related to DNS and its domains. Part of the work is an overview of the basic existing tools to support the work of CERT/CSIRT teams to solve problems with domains, the design of a tool Malicious Domain Manager and description of its implementation. The results of test run of this tool by CZ.NIC-CSIRT team show its contribution to security of DNS.

The Critical Incident Team (CIT) training program equips police officers with knowledge regarding mental illness and practical skills for effectively interacting with a mentally ill suspect. In addition to improving officer and suspect safety by decreasing the number of violent encounters between police and the mentally ill, CIT goals include reducing the number of mentally ill individuals who are arrested and providing them with assistance through community resources. However, there is a lack of empirical research on whether CIT training decreases arrest rates and increases diversion rates for mentally ill subjects. The purpose of this quantitative study was to measure the effects of CIT training on arrest and diversion rates of mentally ill subjects. The theoretical foundation for the study was evidence-based policing. Reports from a single police department in the southwestern United States were reviewed, and arrest and diversion incidents from 6-months pre and post CIT training for 30 police officers were collected. A paired-samples t test was used to analyze the data, which indicated that there was not a statistical difference in arrest rates or diversion rates between pre and post CIT training. Results corroborated the findings of other studies showing that arrest and diversion rates are not affected by CIT programs. Law enforcement agencies that currently have or are looking to implement a CIT program may find the study useful, as it reports an increase in resources being provided to mentally ill subjects following contact with a CIT officer. Recommendations include additional research into the effectiveness of the CIT program as well as the continuation of collaboration between community mental health organizations and police, both of which may lead to positive social change.