Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis studies the relationship between subjective experience and social environment during recovery from alcoholism in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). As a result of participation in AA meetings, many alcoholics undergo healing transformations involving a sense of acceptance of themselves, others and the world. In early sobriety these experiences often remove an alcoholic’s desire to drink. Outside AA, however, alcoholics frequently experience subjective unravelling – a sense of conflict with themselves, others and the world. For many, this subjective state is associated with actual or potential craving for a drink. Regular participation in AA meetings alleviates these states. This thesis construes the relationship between subjective experience and immediate social environment in terms of ‘experiential stakes of relevance’. This conceptual category can be used to characterise both the structural properties of the social environment and the key attributes of the subjective experience of agents within this environment. Listening to stories at AA meetings results for many alcoholics in a radical change in ‘experiential stakes of relevance’. It is argued that the process of spontaneous re-connection with one’s past experiences during AA meetings is akin to the process of mobilisation of embodied dispositions as theorised by Bourdieu. Transformation in AA takes place in the space of a mere one and a half hours and involves processes of intensification of experience. These are analysed in terms of Bourdieu’s notion of ‘illusio’ and Chion’s notion of ‘rendu’. The healing experiences of acceptance presuppose a social environment free of interpersonal conflict. This thesis argues that the need to structurally eliminate conflict between alcoholics has turned AA into a social field which is sustained by the very healing subjective experiences that it facilitates. In the process, AA has developed structural elements which can best be understood as mechanisms inverting the social logic of competitive fields. The fieldwork entailed a detailed ethnographic study of one particular group of Alcoholics Anonymous in Sydney’s Lower North Shore as well as familiarisation with the more general culture of AA in Sydney. Methods of investigation included participant observations at AA meetings and interviews with a number of sober alcoholics in AA.

This thesis presents a study of how identification, according to Kenneth Burke's theory, can be observed in the media-related practices promoted by the cyber-activist collective Anonymous. Identification is the capacity of community-building through the use of shared interests. Burke affirms that, as human beings are essentially social, identification is the very aim of any human interaction. Cyber-activism deeply relies on this capacity to promote and legitimise its campaigns. In the case of Anonymous, the collective became extremely popular and is now a frequent presence even in street protests, usually organised online, around the world. Here, I argue that this power was possible through the use of identification, which helped attract a large number of individuals to the collective. Anonymous was particularly skilled in its capacity to create an ideology for each campaign, which worked well to set up a perfect enemy who should be fought against by any people, despite their demographic or social status. Other forms of identification were also present and important. Although it is impossible to measure how many people or what kind of people Anonymous has been attracting, the presence of identification as a strong phenomenon is undeniable, since the collective is now one of the most famous cyber-activist organisations.

Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANETs) has been a hot research topic in recent years. In this environment, each vehicle can broadcast messages to other vehicles and inform drivers to change their route right away in order to enhance the efficiency of driving and to avoid accidents. Since vehicles communicate through wireless tunnel, many malicious attacks may occur during the transmission of messages. Consequently, ensuring the correctness of receiving messages and verifying the authenticity of the sender is necessary. Besides, we also need to protect the real identities of vehicles from revealing to guarantee the privacy. To satisfy these security properties, many related researches have been proposed. However, they all have some drawbacks. For example: 1. The cost of the certificate management and the exposure problem of the certificate. 2. Waiting for RSU to verify the messages: Once more vehicles need RSU, RSU will have much more overhead and it can¡¦t achieve real-time authentication. In this thesis, we come up with an anonymous authentication and key agreement scheme based on chameleon hashing and ID-based cryptography in the vehicular communication environment. In our scheme, every vehicle can generate many different chameleon hash values to represent itself, and others can prove the ownership of chameleon hash value. Furthermore, unlike other pseudonymous authentication schemes, we also achieve one-to-one private communication via ID-based cryptography. Finally, we not only overcome some problems in previous works but also fulfill some necessary security requirements in vehicular communication environment.

Due to convenience and efficiency, electronic voting (e-voting) techniques gradually replace traditional paper-based voting activities in some developed countries. A secure anonymous e-voting system has to satisfy many properties, such as completeness, tally correctness, and uncoercibility, where the uncoercibility property is the most difficult one to be achieved. Since each voter can obtain a voting receipt in an electronic voting system, coercion and bribe (vote-buying and vote-selling are included) become more and more serious in electronic voting environments than traditional paper-based voting environments. Unfortunately, most of the solutions, like receipt-freeness or untappable channels, proposed in the literature, are impractical owing to lack of efficiency or too complicated to be implemented. It will make uncoercible e-voting systems unacceptable by the people. In order to cope with the drawbacks of the previous schemes, this thesis will present a generic idea, which is independent of the underlying cryptographic components, on electronic voting to achieve the uncoercibility property and other requirements. The proposed method is an efficient and quite practical solution to match the current environments of electronic voting.

No description available.

Project (D. Min.)--Iliff School of Theology, 2006. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-109).

Denna studie syftar till att undersöka hur gestaltningen kring nätaktivistgruppen Anonymous rapporterades kring i Dagens Nyheter, The New York Times, och The Guardian mellan 2008-01-16 och 2015-03-30. Studien bygger främst på en kvantitativ innehållsanalys men har även en mindre kvalitativ del där en exempeltext från varje tidning har analyserats. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur medier rapporterar kring, och gestaltar grupper som saknar traditionell hierarki. De frågeställningar som besvaras är följande: Hur tenderar artiklarna att gestaltas i form av språk och valens, och skiljer det sig mellan tidningarna? Vilka källor och aktörer tas med i artiklarna? Är artiklarna skrivna av egna reportrar eller externa nyhetsbyråer och skiljer det sig något mellan tidningarna? Studien utgår från den sociala konstruktionsteorin som Stuart Hall definierade den. Samt framingteorin med definitioner av Erving Goffman och Robert Entman. Den senare i samband med förklaringarna av Jostein Gripsrud, Stuart Hall, Martin Conboy, och Adam Shehata. I motsats till författarnas förförståelse visade studien att artiklarna var neutralt gestaltade. Språkbruket var likväl neutralt. Anonymous i koppling med andra var vanligast både som källa och aktör. Både The Guardian och Dagens Nyheter var neutrala i sina val av frames, men The New York Times var negativ i majoriteten av artiklarna. Nästan samtliga artiklar var helt eller delvis skrivna av en namngiven skribent, vilket tolkades som att de var skrivna av tidningarnas egna reportrar. Tidigare forskning pekar på att Anonymous aktiviteter går att klassa som civil olydnad, men studien visar att de tre utvalda tidningarna inte nödvändigtvis gestaltar dem på det sättet.

This thesis presents a study of how identification, according to Kenneth Burke's theory, can be observed in the media-related practices promoted by the cyber-activist collective Anonymous. Identification is the capacity of community-building through the use of shared interests. Burke affirms that, as human beings are essentially social, identification is the very aim of any human interaction. Cyber-activism deeply relies on this capacity to promote and legitimise its campaigns. In the case of Anonymous, the collective became extremely popular and is now a frequent presence even in street protests, usually organised online, around the world. Here, I argue that this power was possible through the use of identification, which helped attract a large number of individuals to the collective. Anonymous was particularly skilled in its capacity to create an ideology for each campaign, which worked well to set up a perfect enemy who should be fought against by any people, despite their demographic or social status. Other forms of identification were also present and important. Although it is impossible to measure how many people or what kind of people Anonymous has been attracting, the presence of identification as a strong phenomenon is undeniable, since the collective is now one of the most famous cyber-activist organisations.

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis studies the relationship between subjective experience and social environment during recovery from alcoholism in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). As a result of participation in AA meetings, many alcoholics undergo healing transformations involving a sense of acceptance of themselves, others and the world. In early sobriety these experiences often remove an alcoholic’s desire to drink. Outside AA, however, alcoholics frequently experience subjective unravelling – a sense of conflict with themselves, others and the world. For many, this subjective state is associated with actual or potential craving for a drink. Regular participation in AA meetings alleviates these states. This thesis construes the relationship between subjective experience and immediate social environment in terms of ‘experiential stakes of relevance’. This conceptual category can be used to characterise both the structural properties of the social environment and the key attributes of the subjective experience of agents within this environment. Listening to stories at AA meetings results for many alcoholics in a radical change in ‘experiential stakes of relevance’. It is argued that the process of spontaneous re-connection with one’s past experiences during AA meetings is akin to the process of mobilisation of embodied dispositions as theorised by Bourdieu. Transformation in AA takes place in the space of a mere one and a half hours and involves processes of intensification of experience. These are analysed in terms of Bourdieu’s notion of ‘illusio’ and Chion’s notion of ‘rendu’. The healing experiences of acceptance presuppose a social environment free of interpersonal conflict. This thesis argues that the need to structurally eliminate conflict between alcoholics has turned AA into a social field which is sustained by the very healing subjective experiences that it facilitates. In the process, AA has developed structural elements which can best be understood as mechanisms inverting the social logic of competitive fields. The fieldwork entailed a detailed ethnographic study of one particular group of Alcoholics Anonymous in Sydney’s Lower North Shore as well as familiarisation with the more general culture of AA in Sydney. Methods of investigation included participant observations at AA meetings and interviews with a number of sober alcoholics in AA.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2007. / Title from title page screen, viewed on March 11, 2008. Dissertation Committee: Susan M. Kim (chair), Susan M. Burt, K. Aaron Smith, Thomas Klein. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 318-326) and abstract. Also available in print.