During the production of agricultural commodities, an agricultural landscape is simultaneously being produced. In many regions, agriculture is no longer valued for just the production of food and fibre but also for the social, cultural and environmental amenities associated with the landscape. The paradigm of multifunctional agriculture has become concerned with the joint production of agricultural products and these rural amenities. The loss of agricultural land especially in areas around the urban-rural fringe has greatly affected the demand for these rural amenities. In response, governments and volunteer organizations have developed programs to preserve farmland. The Niagara Region is home to some of the best fruit growing land in Canada but has a long history of fighting to maintain its farmland. Drawing from the multifunctional paradigm, this study analyzes the preference for different rural amenities and farmland preservation in this unique region. Survey and interviews conducted with both the non-farm population and farmers indicated that demand exists for maintaining rural amenities and for farmland preservation. Consideration of these preferences will enhance the development of farmland preservation in the Niagara Fruit Belt.

Road safety has been drawing increasing attention in the public, and has been subject to extensive efforts from both industry and academia in mitigating the impact of traffic accidents. Recent advances in wireless technology promise new approaches to facilitating road safety and traffic management, where each vehicle (or referred to as On-board unit (OBU)) is allowed to communicate with each other as well as with Roadside units (RSUs), which are located in some critical sections of the road, such as a traffic light, an intersection, and a stop sign. With the OBUs and RSUs, a self-organized network, called Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET), can thus be formed. Unfortunately, VANETs have faced various security threats and privacy concerns, which would jeopardize the public safety and become the main barrier to the acceptance of such a new technology. Hence, addressing security and privacy issues is a prerequisite for a market-ready VANET. Although many studies have recently addressed a significant amount of efforts in solving the related problems, few of the studies has taken the scalability issues into consideration. When the traffic density is getting large, a vehicle may become unable to verify the authenticity of the messages sent by its neighbors in a timely manner, which may result in message loss so that public safety may be at risk. Communication overhead is another issue that has not been well addressed in previously reported studies. Many efforts have been made in recent years in achieving efficient broadcast source authentication and data integrity by using fast symmetric cryptography. However, the dynamic nature of VANETs makes it very challenging in the applicability of these symmetric cryptography-based protocols. In this research, we propose a novel Secure and Efficient RSU-aided Privacy Preservation Protocol, called SERP^3, in order to achieve efficient secure and privacy-preserving Inter-Vehicle Communications (IVCs). With the commitments of one-way key chains distributed to vehicles by RSUs, a vehicle can effectively authenticate any received message from vehicles nearby even in the presence of frequent change of its neighborship. Compared with previously reported public key infrastructure (PKI)-based packet authentication protocols for security and privacy, the proposed protocol not only retains the security and privacy preservation properties, but also has less packet loss ratio and lower communication overhead, especially when the road traffic is heavy. Therefore, the protocol solves the scalability and communication overhead issues, while maintaining acceptable packet latency. However, RSU may not exist in some situations, for example, in the early stage deployment phase of VANET, where unfortunately, SERP^3 is not suitable. Thus, we propose a complementary Efficient and Cooperative Message Validation Protocol, called ECMVP, where each vehicle probabilistically validates a certain percentage of its received messages based on its own computing capacity and then reports any invalid messages detected by it. Since the ultimate goal of designing VANET is to develop vehicle safety/non-safety related applications to improve road safety and facilitate traffic management, two vehicle applications are further proposed in the research to exploit the advantages of vehicular communications. First, a novel vehicle safety application for achieving a secure road traffic control system in VANETs is developed. The proposed application helps circumvent vehicles safely and securely through the areas in any abnormal situation, such as a car crash scene, while ensuring the security and privacy of the drivers from various threats. It not only enhances traveler safety but also minimizes capacity restrictions due to any unusual situation. Second, the dissertation investigates a novel mobile payment system for highway toll collection by way of vehicular communications, which addresses all the issues in the currently existing toll collection technologies.

Multi-hop Wireless Networks (MWNs) represent a class of networks where messages are forwarded through multiple hops of wireless transmission. Applications of this newly emerging communication paradigm include asset monitoring wireless sensor networks (WSNs), command communication mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), community- or campus-wide wireless mesh networks (WMNs), etc. Information security is one of the major barriers to the wide-scale deployment of MWNs but has received little attention so far. On the one hand, due to the open wireless channels and multi-hop wireless transmissions, MWNs are vulnerable to various information security threats such as eavesdropping, data injection/modification, node compromising, traffic analysis, and flow tracing. On the other hand, the characteristics of MWNs including the vulnerability of intermediate network nodes, multi-path packet forwarding, and limited computing capability and storage capacity make the existing information security schemes designed for the conventional wired networks or single-hop wireless networks unsuitable for MWNs. Therefore, newly designed schemes are highly desired to meet the stringent security and performance requirements for the information security of MWNs. In this research, we focus on three fundamental information security issues in MWNs: efficient privacy preservation for source anonymity, which is critical to the information security of MWNs; the traffic explosion issue, which targets at preventing denial of service (DoS) and enhancing system availability; and the cooperative peer-to-peer information exchange issue, which is critical to quickly achieve maximum data availability if the base station is temporarily unavailable or the service of the base station is intermittent. We have made the following three major contributions. Firstly, we identify the severe threats of traffic analysis/flow tracing attacks to the information security in network coding enabled MWNs. To prevent these attacks and achieve source anonymity in MWNs, we propose a network coding based privacy-preserving scheme. The unique “mixing” feature of network coding is exploited in the proposed scheme to confuse adversaries from conducting advanced privacy attacks, such as time correlation, size correlation, and message content correlation. With homomorphic encryption functions, the proposed scheme can achieve both privacy preservation and data confidentiality, which are two critical information security requirements. Secondly, to prevent traffic explosion and at the same time achieve source unobservability in MWNs, we propose a network coding based privacy-preserving scheme, called SUNC (Source Unobservability using Network Coding). Network coding is utilized in the scheme to automatically absorb dummy messages at intermediate network nodes, and thus, traffic explosion induced denial of service (DoS) can be naturally prevented to ensure the system availability. In addition to ensuring system availability and achieving source unobservability, SUNC can also thwart internal adversaries. Thirdly, to enhance the data availability when a base station is temporarily unavailable or the service of the base station is intermittent, we propose a cooperative peer-to-peer information exchange scheme based on network coding. The proposed scheme can quickly accomplish optimal information exchange in terms of throughput and transmission delay. For each research issue, detailed simulation results in terms of computational overhead, transmission efficiency, and communication overhead, are given to demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed solutions.

Improving road safety and traffic efficiency has been a long-term endeavor for the government, automobile industry and academia. Recently, the U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has allocated a 75 MHz spectrum at 5.9 GHz for vehicular communications, opening a new door to combat the road fatalities by letting vehicles communicate to each other on the roads. Those communicating vehicles form a huge Ad Hoc Network, namely Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET). In VANETs, a variety of applications ranging from the safety related (e.g. emergence report, collision warning) to the non-safety related (e.g., delay tolerant network, infortainment sharing) are enabled by vehicle-to-vehicle (V-2-V) and vehicle-to-roadside (V-2-I) communications. However, the flourish of VANETs still hinges on fully understanding and managing the challenging issues over which the public show concern, particularly, security and privacy preservation issues. If the traffic related messages are not authenticated and integrity-protected in VANETs, a single bogus and/or malicious message can potentially incur a terrible traffic accident. In addition, considering VANET is usually implemented in civilian scenarios where locations of vehicles are closely related to drivers, VANET cannot be widely accepted by the public if VANET discloses the privacy information of the drivers, i.e., identity privacy and location privacy. Therefore, security and privacy preservation must be well addressed prior to its wide acceptance. Over the past years, much research has been done on considering VANET's unique characteristics and addressed some security and privacy issues in VANETs; however, little of it has taken the social characteristics of VANET into consideration. In VANETs, vehicles are usually driven in a city environment, and thus we can envision that the mobility of vehicles directly reflects drivers' social preferences and daily tasks, for example, the places where they usually go for shopping or work. Due to these human factors in VANETs, not only the safety related applications but also the non-safety related applications will have some social characteristics. In this thesis, we emphasize VANET's social characteristics and introduce the concept of vehicular social network (VSN), where both the safety and non-safety related applications in VANETs are influenced by human factors including human mobility, human self-interest status, and human preferences. In particular, we carry on research on vehicular delay tolerant networks and infotainment sharing --- two important non-safety related applications of VSN, and address the challenging security and privacy issues related to them. The main contributions are, i) taking the human mobility into consideration, we first propose a novel social based privacy-preserving packet forwarding protocol, called SPRING, for vehicular delay tolerant network, which is characterized by deploying roadside units (RSUs) at high social intersections to assist in packet forwarding. With the help of high-social RSUs, the probability of packet drop is dramatically reduced and as a result high reliability of packet forwarding in vehicular delay tolerant network can be achieved. In addition, the SPRING protocol also achieves conditional privacy preservation and resist most attacks facing vehicular delay tolerant network, such as packet analysis attack, packet tracing attack, and black (grey) hole attacks. Furthermore, based on the ``Sacrificing the Plum Tree for the Peach Tree" --- one of the Thirty-Six Strategies of Ancient China, we also propose a socialspot-based packet forwarding (SPF) protocol for protecting receiver-location privacy, and present an effective pseudonyms changing at social spots strategy, called PCS, to facilitate vehicles to achieve high-level location privacy in vehicular social network; ii) to protect the human factor --- interest preference privacy in vehicular social networks, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving protocol, called FLIP, for vehicles to find like-mined ones on the road, which allows two vehicles sharing the common interest to identify each other and establish a shared session key, and at the same time, protects their interest privacy (IP) from other vehicles who do not share the same interest on the road. To generalize the FLIP protocol, we also propose a lightweight privacy-preserving scalar product computation (PPSPC) protocol, which, compared with the previously reported PPSPC protocols, is more efficient in terms of computation and communication overheads; and iii) to deal with the human factor -- self-interest issue in vehicular delay tolerant network, we propose a practical incentive protocol, called Pi, to stimulate self-interest vehicles to cooperate in forwarding bundle packets. Through the adoption of the proper incentive policies, the proposed Pi protocol can not only improve the whole vehicle delay tolerant network's performance in terms of high delivery ratio and low average delay, but also achieve the fairness among vehicles. The research results of the thesis should be useful to the implementation of secure and privacy-preserving vehicular social networks.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are instances of mobile ad hoc networks with the aim to enhance the safety and efficiency of road traffic. The basic idea is to allow arbitrary vehicles to broadcast ad hoc messages (e.g. traffic accidents) to other vehicles and remind drivers to change their route immediately or slow down to avoid dangers. However, some concerns of security and privacy are also raised in this environment. Messages should be signed and verified before they are trusted while the real identities of vehicles should not be revealed to guarantee the source privacy, but it still has to be traceable to prevent any abuse of VANETs (e.g. sending a fake message). Many related works have been presented in the literature so far. They can be generally divided into two constructions, where one is based on pseudonymous authentication and the other is based on group signatures. However, both of the two constructions have some drawbacks. Consequently, in this thesis, we come up with a provably secure and strong privacy preserving protocol based on the blind signature technique to guarantee privacy and fulfill other essential security requirements in the vehicular communication environment. Besides, compared with other similar works, we offer an efficient tracing mechanism to trace and revoke the vehicles abusing the VANETs. In addition, considering the real environment, we also provide simulation results to show that our scheme is more practical, efficient and suitable for VANETs under a real city street scenario with high vehicle density. Finally, we also demonstrate the security of the proposed protocol by formal proofs.

The objective of the study was to gain new insight into archival building documentation in the United States since 1933 focusing on Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) as a case study. It sought to help explain how individuals with different levels of involvement with the HABS program, and throughout its entire history, understood the development, current operational context, and future direction of HABS. Seven general philosophical and practical issues were explored: 1) how HABS documentation standards were understood and applied, 2) the relative values of the process and products of documentation, 3) the understanding and application of the objective and subjective natures of the documentation process, 4) whether the mission of the program had changed with changes in the operation of the program since its inception, 5) the role of technology in the process of HABS documentation and how it shapes the end products, 6) defining broader historical epochs with the goal of adding to existing understandings of the history of the program, and 7) the causes and effects of HABS drawing style changes over time.

This study is caused by the fact in the Information Management field that webs of enterprise database are hot, and the contribution of building webs concerning local culture cannot catch the spotlight. The author pursuits the master degree in the Department of Information Management in the National Sun Yat-Sen University for two years, and is handling the project of ¡¨Taiwan Caogong Web¡¨ which is a sub-project of Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA) about ¡¨ national digital reservation of national culture database ¡¨ in 2007, at the same time. It is the background of writing the paper of ¡¥Local Culture Web on Preservation and Reuse for Native Cultural Property - Case study by ¡§Taiwan Caogong Canal Web¡¨¡¦ . The author can foresee the grand influence potential for local culture caused by the Local Culture Web, and is adopting the academic theories to the real world. The author try to provide a new studying category for the scholars who emphasize the enterprise database web rather than culture properties area, and hope the people working in the Information Management area can find the blue sea by the local culture webs. The characteristic of ¡¨ Taiwan Caogong Web¡¨, not only Caogong Canal is the well-known of irrigate canal in Taiwan since Qing Dynasty¡Abut also Caogong Canal grows cultural properties in Kaohsiung Plains and make a greater contribution to the local development¡Ait's far-reaching influence does not have the other business to be possible to compared¡C This web present the drainage basin of Caogong Canal include five irrigation system¡]the Old Caogong Canal, the New Caogong Canal, the Fengshan Canal, the Daliao Canal, and the linyuan Canal.¡^where cultural properties is at¡CMake use of this paper approach a subject from different angles¡Ato find out the contribution of local culture web on preservation and reuse for native cultural property¡Ait's positive value is deserve commendation¡C

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-94).

Thesis (M.L.A.)--University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009. / Open access. Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-102).

This study implies a survey of a somewhat unexplored Cambrian carbonate formation in the Argentine Precordillera (AP) located in western Argentina, close to the city of San José de Jáchal. The carbonate platform of the AP is a unique piece of the South American geology and is in this study partly surveyed and compared with the Stephen Formation of northern Canada, a middle Cambrian unit renowned for its contents of exceptionally well preserved soft bodied fossils named the Burgess Shale biota. The investigated formation consists of an olistolith among the several Los Túneles Olistoliths at the Western Precordillera. The olistolith originates from the Cambrian Period and lies embedded in younger material with an age and history up for debate by several paleontologists and biostratigraphers. Shallow investigations have shown that these rocks may have similar properties to rocks of the Stephen Formation. There are only a few known rock assemblages on Earth showing Burgess Shale-type (BST) preservation and if the Los Túneles Olistolith proves to possess BST preservation it would be of great substance for the geological researchers of Argentina. The olistolith has in this study been explored by gathering samples in field and dissolving them in acid to investigate possible fossil content. The aim is thus to ascertain whether or not the Los Túneles Olistolith may contain especially well preserved fossils. This is the first study ever made of the microfauna in a middle Cambrian unit in the whole of South America, and hence it will tell if further investigations would be of interest. This survey determines that the Los Túneles Olistolith actually consists of three olistoliths encased in matrix, do not contain BST preservation and that further studies are not probable to show otherwise. The fossil findings, such as Chancelloriidae Chancelloria, Hexactinellida Recticulosa and Mollusca Hyolitha establish that the three Los Túneles Olistoliths originate from middle Cambrian while the matrix surrounding the olistolith is determined to be of Devonian age. / Den här studien är den första undersökningen någonsin som fokuserar på mikrofauna i sedimentära avlagringar från mellersta kambrium i Sydamerika. Studien utreder en tidigare bara ytligt utforskad kalkstensformation i västra Argentina, nära staden San José de Jáchal, i den argentinska precordilleran. Formationen, med namnet Los Sombreros Formationen, innehåller olistoliter från kambrium som undersökts och jämförts med den välkända Stephen Formation från norra Kanada, en formation som är känd för att innehålla exceptionellt välbevarade mjukdelar av fossil, kallat the Burgess Shale Biota. Syftet med studien är att fastställa huruvida Los Túneles Olistoliterna har potential att innehålla välbevarade fossil samt att utreda ifall ytterligare undersökningar är av intresse eller ej.                       Studien fokuserar på vad som tidigare trotts vara en av olistoliterna bland Los Túneles Olistoliterna, som är en del av Los Sombreros Formationen, men som i denna studie visat sig egentligen vara tre olika olistoliter som avsatts intill varandra. Tidigare ytliga undersökningar har visat att dessa olistoliter skulle kunna innehålla liknande fossil som the Stephen Formation. Det finns bara ett fåtal platser i världen där så pass exceptionellt välbevarade fossil tidigare hittats och om Los Túneles Olistoliterna skulle visa sig vara ett nytt fynd skulle det vara av betydelse för den fortsatta geologiska forskningen i Argentina. Genom insamling av prover som upplösts i syra och sedan undersökts i mikroskop har slutsatsen dragits att Los Túneles Olistoliterna inte innehåller Burgess Shale Biota och att ytterligare undersökningar förmodligen inte kommer visa annorlunda resultat. Fossilfynden som har gjorts, så som Chancelloriidae Chancelloria, Hexactinellida Recticulosa och Mollusca Hyolitha fastställer att de tre Los Túneles Olistoliterna härstammar från mellersta kambrium medan omkringliggande material kommer från Devon. / Este estudio se enfoca en un área poco explorada de una formación que aloja olistolitos carbonaticos del Cámbrico y Ordovícico situado en la Precordillera de Argentina en el oeste del país, cerca de San José de Jáchal, Provincia de San Juan. La plataforma carbonatada de la precordillera es una parte única de la geología de Sudamérica y es en esta investigación parcialmente estudiada y comparada con la Formación Stephen en el norte de Canadá, una unidad del Cámbrico Medio famosa por su contenido de fósiles excepcionalmente bien preservados llamado the Burgess Shale biota.                       La investigación se ha enfocado en un olistolito entre los varios que aparecen en el sector Los Túneles en el norte de la Precordillera de San Juan, oeste de Argentina. De este olistolito sa ha recuperado macrofauna indicativa del período Cámbrico. Este olistolito está alojado en rocas clásticas cuya una edad que es todavía un tema de debate entre paleontólogos y bioestratigrafos. Investigaciones superficiales han mostrado que estas rocas pueden tener los mismos atributos que las rocas de la Formación Stephen. Solo hay unas pocas formaciones sedimentarias en la Tierra que mantienen preservación del tipo de Burgess Shale (BST) y si el olistolito de estudio de la sección de Los Túneles presenta preservación de BST va a tener gran importancia para la Geología de Argentina. El estudio ha incluido un muestreo de campo de varios olistolitos, posterior tratamiento químico (desagregación física y química de las calizas en ácido para investigar possible contenido de microfósiles), y finalmente”picking” bajo lupa binocular para rescatar micropiezas fósiles. El objetivo de este es comprobar si el olistolito de la sección de Los Túneles puede tener fósiles especialmente bien preservados. Este estudio es el primer estudio de la micro fauna del Cámbrico medio en el conjunto de Sudamérica y de ahí que lo indicará si estudios adicionales serían de interés.                       Este investigación determina que el olistolito en Los Túneles Olistolitos en realidad consiste en tres olistolitos encerrados en matriz, contiene fósiles sin una preservación BST y por tanto estudios adicionales no son requeridos para demostrar lo contrario. Los hallazgos fósiles, por ejemplo Chancelloriidae Chancelloria, Hexactinellida Recticulosa y Mollusca Hyolitha, establezca que los tres olistolitos de Los Túneles Olistolitos son de Cámbrico Medio y la matriz que rodea a los olistolitos de periódo Devónico.