In an interdisciplinary project, creative concepts for care robotics were developed. To explore the design space that these open up, we discussed them along the common differentiation of physical (effective) and social-emotional assistance. Trying to rate concepts on these dimensions frequently raised questions regarding the relation between the social-emotional and the physical, and highlighted gaps and a lack of conceptual clarity. We here present our design concepts, report on our discussion, and summarize our insights; in particular we suggest that the social and the physical dimension of care technologies should always be thought of and designed as interrelated.

Thesis advisor: Harold Petersen / Using insights from Hyman Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH), we develop a theoretical framework for how speculative bubbles may materialize in securities markets. Our model and empirical analysis show that agents place undue emphasis on recent experience of risk and returns when developing future expectations. We use the aggregate investor allocation to equities (aggregate total market capitalization of equities divided by the price of all real liabilities outstanding), Tobin’s Q (the aggregate market price of equities divided by the replacement cost of nonfinancial firms’ assets), Shiller Total Return Cyclically Adjusted Price to Earnings Ratio (TR CAPE), and Shiller Cyclically Adjusted Price to Earnings Ratio (CAPE) as proxy variables for bubbles. We find statistically significant, negative relationships between all four of these proxy variables and two dependent variables, Subsequent Ten-Year Annualized Cumulative Equity Market Returns (Nominal and Real), and also Subsequent 10-year Average Losses, thereby providing evidence against the Efficient Market Hypothesis and suggesting the possibility of speculative bubbles. / Thesis (BS) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Economics.

[pt] A pesquisa investiga o estatuto das fabulações na criação de transformações individuais e coletivas multiespécie no contexto da emergência climática (e suas interseccionalidades), com foco em histórias criadas por mulheres. Investiga-se um conjunto selecionado de criações artísticas que poderiam ser ditas simpoiéticas, nos termos de Donna Haraway, e que se mostram capazes de deslocar lógicas, disposições e sensibilidades arraigadamente em curso no contexto do Antropoceno. A investigação parte de um estudo do conto Estórias de Camille, do livro Ficar com o problema:fazer parentes no Chthuluceno, da própria Haraway, buscando em seguida ocasiões de cotejo e contágio entre essa história (em certo sentido inaugural) e duas outras fabulações: a obra de arte híbrida Proliferações, de Fabíola Fonseca, e o filme Teko Haxy: ser imperfeita, co-dirigido pela cineasta indígena Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy e pela antropóloga não indígena Sophia Pinheiro. Feito à luz do conceito de simpoiese, o exame conjunto das criações analisadas busca somar-se aos esforços contemporâneos de contraposição às narrativas antropocêntricas (falocêntricas, etnocêntricas, especistas), tanto em suas versões utópicas e salvacionistas, quanto em reações distópicas e apocalípticas. / [en] The research investigates the status of fabulations in the creation of multispecies individual and collective transformations in the context of the climate emergency (and their intersectionalities), focusing on stories created by women. A selected set of artistic creations is investigated that could be said to be sympoietic, in Donna Haraway s terms, and that are capable of displacing logics, dispositions and sensibilities that are deeply rooted in the context of the Anthropocene. The investigation starts from a study of the short story The Camille Stories, from the book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by Haraway herself, then looks for occasions of comparison and contagion between this story (in a certain sense, inaugural) and two others fabulations: the hybrid artwork Proliferações, by Fabíola Fonseca, and the film Teko Haxy: ser imperfeita, co-directed by indigenous filmmaker Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy and non-indigenous anthropologist Sophia Pinheiro. Made in light of the concept of sympoiesis, the joint examination of the analyzed creations seeks to add to contemporary efforts to oppose anthropocentric narratives (phallocentric, ethnocentric, speciesist), both in their utopian and salvationist versions, as well as in dystopian and apocalyptic reactions.

The print newspaper has been a fundamental part of liberal democracies since their inception. Its origin lies in the invention of the moveable-type printing press by Gutenberg in the mid-15th century but, as other technological communication tools were developed, especially in the 20th century, it gradually lost its share in the media landscape. This master’s thesis explores the materiality of the newspaper as it is being replaced by digital counterparts. What does this shift entail from an Interaction Design perspective? A literature review, semi-structured interviews, and a material-centred interaction design process are used to delve into this question. The result is a Speculative Design artefact made of wood veneers that vindicates Slow Technology Design as an approach for a meaningful news-reading experience. Additionally, it is suggested the consideration of a holistic approach from the humanities and Media Ecology to enrich the critical approach of Interaction Design towards technology.

This is a documentation of a programmatic design approach, moving through different levels of an established practice of grassroots activism. The text frames an open-ended, exploratory methodology, as four stages of investigation, trying to find possible ways to shape and increase understanding of, and facilitate a process, of co-designing a practice. It presents the experience of looking for opportunities for counter-narration, as contribution to an activist cause, and questioning the role, purpose and approach of a designer in a grassroots activist environment.

Memory corruption attacks have existed in C and C++ for more than 30 years, and over the years many defenses have been proposed. In addition to that, a new class of attacks, Spectre, has emerged that abuse speculative execution to leak secrets and sensitive data through micro-architectural side channels. Many defenses have been proposed to mitigate Spectre as well. However, with every new defense a new attack emerges, and then a new defense is proposed. This is an ongoing cycle between attackers and defenders. There exists many defenses for many different attack avenues. However, many suffer from either practicality or effectiveness issues, and security researchers need to balance out their compromises. Recently, many hardware vendors, such as Intel and ARM, have realized the extent of the issue of memory corruption attacks and have developed hardware security mechanisms that can be utilized to defend against these attacks. ARM, in particular, has released a mechanism called Pointer Authentication in which its main intended use is to protect the integrity of pointers by generating a Pointer Authentication Code (PAC) using a cryptographic hash function, as a Message Authentication Code (MAC), and placing it on the top unused bits of a 64-bit pointer. Placing the PAC on the top unused bits of the pointer changes its semantics and the pointer cannot be used unless it is properly authenticated. Hardware security features such as PAC are merely mechanisms not full fledged defences, and their effectiveness and practicality depends on how they are being utililzed. Naive use of these defenses doesn't alleviate the issues that exist in many state-of-the-art software defenses. The design of the defense that utilizes these hardware security features needs to have practicality and effectiveness in mind. Having both practicality and effectiveness is now a possible reality with these new hardware security features. This dissertation describes utilizing hardware security features, namely ARM PAC, to build effective and practical defense mechanisms. This dissertation first describes my past work called PACTight, a PAC based defense mechanism that defends against control-flow hijack- ing attacks. PACTight defines three security properties of a pointer such that, if achieved, prevent pointers from being tampered with. They are: 1) unforgeability: A pointer p should always point to its legitimate object; 2) non-copyability: A pointer p can only be used when it is at its specific legitimate location; 3) non-dangling: A pointer p cannot be used after it has been freed. PACTight tightly seals pointers and guarantees that a sealed pointer cannot be forged, copied, or dangling. PACTight protects all sensitive pointers, which are code pointers and pointers that point to code pointers. This completely prevents control-flow hijacking attacks, all while having low performance overhead. In addition to that, this dissertation proposes Scope-Type Integrity (STI), a new defense policy that enforces pointers to conform to the programmer's intended manner, by utilizing scope, type, and permission information. STI collects information offline about the type, scope, and permission (read/write) of every pointer in the program. This information can then be used at runtime to ensure that pointers comply with their intended purpose. This allows STI to defeat advanced pointer attacks since these attacks typically violate either the scope, type, or permission. We present Runtime Scope-Type Integrity (RSTI). RSTI leverages ARM Pointer Authentication (PA) to generate Pointer Authentication Codes (PACs), based on the information from STI, and place these PACs at the top bits of the pointer. At runtime, the PACs are then checked to ensure pointer usage complies with STI. RSTI overcomes two drawbacks that were present in PACTight: 1) PACTight relied on a large external metadata for protection, whereas RSTI uses very little metadata. 2) PACTight only protected a subset of pointers, whereas RSTI protects all pointers in a program. RSTI has large coverage with relatively low overhead. Also, this dissertation proposes sPACtre, a new and novel defense mechanism that aims to prevent Spectre control-flow attacks on existing hardware. sPACtre is an ARM-based defense mechanism that prevents Spectre control-flow attacks by relying on ARM's Pointer Authentication hardware security feature, annotations added to the program on the secrets that need to be protected from leakage and a dynamic tag-based bounds checking mechanism for arrays. We show that sPACtre can defend against these attacks. We evaluate sPACtre on a variety of cryptographic libraries with several cryptographic algorithms, as well as a synthetic benchmark, and show that it is efficient and has low performance overhead Finally, this dissertation explains a new direction for utilizing hardware security features to protect energy harvesting devices from checkpoint-recovery errors and malicious attackers. / Doctor of Philosophy / In recent years, cyber-threats against computer systems have become more and more preva- lent. In spite of many recent advancements in defenses, these attacks are becoming more threatening. However, many of these defenses are not implemented in the real-world. This is due to their high performance overhead. This limited efficiency is not acceptable in the real-world. In addition to that, many of these defenses have limited coverage and do not cover a wide variety of attacks. This makes the performance tradeoff even less convincing. Thus, there is a need for effective and practical defenses that can cover a wide variety of attacks. This dissertation first provides a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art and most dangerous attacks. More specifically, three types of attacks are examined. First, control-flow hijacking attacks, which are attacks that divert the proper execution of a pro- gram to a malicious execution. Second, data oriented attacks. These are attacks that leak sensitive data in a program. Third, Spectre attacks, which are attacks that rely on sup- posedly hidden processor features to leak sensitive data. These "hidden" features are not entirely hidden. This dissertation explains these attacks in detail and the corresponding state-of-the-art defenses that have been proposed by the security research community to mitigate them. This dissertation then discusses effective and practical defense mechanisms that can mitigate these attacks. The dissertation discusses past work, PACTight, as well as its contributions, RSTI and sPACtre, presenting the full design, threat model, implementation, security eval- uation and performance evaluation of each one of these mechanisms. The dissertation relies on insights derived from the nature of the attack and compiler techniques. A compiler is a tool that transforms human-written code into machine code that is understandable by the computer. The compiler can be modified and used to make programs more secure with compiler techniques. The past work, PACTight, is a defense mechanism that defends against the first type of attacks, control-flow hijacking attacks, by preventing an attacker from abusing specific code in the program to divert the program to a malicious execution. Then, this dissertation presents RSTI, a new defense mechanism that overcomes the limitations of PACTight and extends it to cover data oriented attacks and prevent attackers from leaking sensitive data from the program. In addition to that, this dissertation presents sPACtre, a novel defesnse mechanism that defends against Spectre attacks, and prevents an attacker from abusing a processor's hidden features. Finally, this dissertation briefly discusses a possible future direction to protect a different class of devices, referred to as energy-harvesting devices, from attackers.

The increasing ecological impact of textiles and textile overproduction creates both local and global environmental concerns. Through the theoretical framework of speculative realism and the concept of alienation this paper investigates how textile art can be used to discuss the dark emotions connected to climate change. The project uses a method of material exploration to find new life to waste material from textile industry in Sweden. Through the zombie metaphor the life and death of waste is discussed. The paper finds that by giving material new life, creating zombie weaves; the darkness within the topic can be reached. The tactile qualities of the work bridges to counteract the alienation created from the lack of insight and understanding of material values. The project finds that embracing the darkness and getting to know the monster can make room for new solutions to the ecological crisis.

My dissertation examines four Black speculative novels from the turn of the twentieth century, published between 1892-1904. Texts from this tradition tend to be grouped under an umbrella of “proto-Afrofuturism” or “proto-science fiction” and considered as early, surprising instances of a speculative mode that would only fully emerge several decades later. This categorization, while accurate in some respects, flattens out the diversity of the Black speculative imagination at the turn of the century. Therefore, I prioritize demonstrating the uniqueness of each author’s vision. At the same time, I argue that these texts share a fundamental similarity in their approach: they anticipate Arthur Schomburg’s famous injunction that the “Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” They use the affordances of the speculative mode to experiment with a shared Black history and explore the possibilities and limitations of that history for a viable and desirable Black future. The authors that I examine challenge the conclusions of racial science that were used to justify a racially stratified society. In doing so, these authors speculate about the imminent future of Black Americans. But even though the perspective of these texts is the imminent future, their central preoccupation is actually Black history. Each of these texts experiment with a different possible shared history with which Black Americans can anchor a collective political identity. This approach is in distinct contrast to the typical approach of turn of the century utopian texts. If we can say axiomatically that white utopian texts, though they often extrapolate and project a distant future, actually function to estrange the present moment; then we can say, in contrast, that Black utopian texts from this era, although they are concerned about an imminent future, more fundamentally estrange the past. / English

The research question addressed by this thesis is: To what degree the results of the statistical analysis will corroborate the main theoretical assumptions of the proposed theoretical model of new authentic transformatory cultural tourism experience as transmodern phenomenon of equality of two Cartesian levels of reality, material (objective authenticity) and experiential (constructive authenticity) in informing the intrapersonal existential authenticity as outcome transformatory tourist experience. The main reason for undertaking this study is to resolve the evident crisis of postmodern authenticity discourse arising from a failure of postmodern theoretical framework to integrate three social authenticity theories into a coherent authenticity discourse. The research design adopted in the study is theory-testing theory-building paradigm which incorporates both deductive and inductive logic and was applied in three successive phases. In the first phase the new theoretical model of transformatory cultural tourism experience was proposed, underpinned by transmodern flat ontology and philosophy of the Speculative Realism. In the second phase the main theoretical assumptions of equal contribution of objective and constructive authenticity as independent variables in informing the transformatory experience as dependent variable were empirically tested by standard multiple regression analysis. In the last deductive phase the results of all empirical tests were inferred onto initial theoretical assumptions of the original model and new modified model of transformatory cultural tourism experience has been proposed with an addition of two newly identified transmodern experiential constructs, epistemological and ontological authenticity. For a primary data collection the instrument was a self-administered questionnaire and the sampling strategy was a non-probability sampling. The data was collected during the period 01st and 18 April 2011 at two sites, Constitution Hill and Hector Peterson Memorial in Johannesburg. The sample size from two sites was N=406. The scales of measurements were already developed in the earlier questionnaire and the confirmatory factor analysis was used to confirm the variables contained in each factor, namely objective and constructive authenticity as independent variables and transformatory experience as the dependent variable. The results of a standard multiple regression analysis confirmed the importance of the model as independent variables explained 30.7% of the variances (R2=.307) in the model. An unexpected result was that objective authenticity explained 34.5% of the variance in the model (β = .345) which is significantly higher than 30.5% of variance explained by constructive authenticity (β = .305). The results of standard multiple regression analysis confirmed the main theoretical assumption of the model of equality of material and experiential levels of Cartesian duality in informing the new transformatory experience regarded as a transmodern phenomenon. The standard, stepwise and hierarchical multiple regression tests were further conducted to establish if any moderating variables should be added into the original model containing two independent variables. The tests included five demographic variables (gender, place of residence, connection with culture, and two items of education (pre-tertiary education and Bachelors degree) and none of the variables explained a level of variability which warranted their inclusion into the model. Consequently, the results of the retests of the model did not change its initial conceptualisation. Finally, the t-test and Mann-Whitney U tests identified a significant difference between the two groups in the level of authenticity of their experience derived from two sites. A group having stronger inclination for authenticity is identified as Cultural Creatives, who are known as the forerunners of transmodernism. Based on the results of all statistical tests the final model was modified to reflect the important theoretical findings pertaining to two new types of transmodern authenticity. Epistemological authenticity denotes combined effects of objective and constructive authenticity in feeding the ontological authenticity of transformatory experience. The ontological authenticity is further identified as a confirmation of authentic-self which is required by Cultural Creatives. With proposition of new modified model the theory-testing theory-building research design came to its conclusion. The importance of research findings presented in this study lies not only in resolving the current crises of authenticity discourse in tourism but in the proposed New theoretical and conceptual model of transformatory cultural tourism experience underpinned by objective ·and constructive authenticity which will open a whole new field in tourism research arising from new transmodern experiential paradigm. / PhD (Tourism Management), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

The research question addressed by this thesis is: To what degree the results of the statistical analysis will corroborate the main theoretical assumptions of the proposed theoretical model of new authentic transformatory cultural tourism experience as transmodern phenomenon of equality of two Cartesian levels of reality, material (objective authenticity) and experiential (constructive authenticity) in informing the intrapersonal existential authenticity as outcome transformatory tourist experience. The main reason for undertaking this study is to resolve the evident crisis of postmodern authenticity discourse arising from a failure of postmodern theoretical framework to integrate three social authenticity theories into a coherent authenticity discourse. The research design adopted in the study is theory-testing theory-building paradigm which incorporates both deductive and inductive logic and was applied in three successive phases. In the first phase the new theoretical model of transformatory cultural tourism experience was proposed, underpinned by transmodern flat ontology and philosophy of the Speculative Realism. In the second phase the main theoretical assumptions of equal contribution of objective and constructive authenticity as independent variables in informing the transformatory experience as dependent variable were empirically tested by standard multiple regression analysis. In the last deductive phase the results of all empirical tests were inferred onto initial theoretical assumptions of the original model and new modified model of transformatory cultural tourism experience has been proposed with an addition of two newly identified transmodern experiential constructs, epistemological and ontological authenticity. For a primary data collection the instrument was a self-administered questionnaire and the sampling strategy was a non-probability sampling. The data was collected during the period 01st and 18 April 2011 at two sites, Constitution Hill and Hector Peterson Memorial in Johannesburg. The sample size from two sites was N=406. The scales of measurements were already developed in the earlier questionnaire and the confirmatory factor analysis was used to confirm the variables contained in each factor, namely objective and constructive authenticity as independent variables and transformatory experience as the dependent variable. The results of a standard multiple regression analysis confirmed the importance of the model as independent variables explained 30.7% of the variances (R2=.307) in the model. An unexpected result was that objective authenticity explained 34.5% of the variance in the model (β = .345) which is significantly higher than 30.5% of variance explained by constructive authenticity (β = .305). The results of standard multiple regression analysis confirmed the main theoretical assumption of the model of equality of material and experiential levels of Cartesian duality in informing the new transformatory experience regarded as a transmodern phenomenon. The standard, stepwise and hierarchical multiple regression tests were further conducted to establish if any moderating variables should be added into the original model containing two independent variables. The tests included five demographic variables (gender, place of residence, connection with culture, and two items of education (pre-tertiary education and Bachelors degree) and none of the variables explained a level of variability which warranted their inclusion into the model. Consequently, the results of the retests of the model did not change its initial conceptualisation. Finally, the t-test and Mann-Whitney U tests identified a significant difference between the two groups in the level of authenticity of their experience derived from two sites. A group having stronger inclination for authenticity is identified as Cultural Creatives, who are known as the forerunners of transmodernism. Based on the results of all statistical tests the final model was modified to reflect the important theoretical findings pertaining to two new types of transmodern authenticity. Epistemological authenticity denotes combined effects of objective and constructive authenticity in feeding the ontological authenticity of transformatory experience. The ontological authenticity is further identified as a confirmation of authentic-self which is required by Cultural Creatives. With proposition of new modified model the theory-testing theory-building research design came to its conclusion. The importance of research findings presented in this study lies not only in resolving the current crises of authenticity discourse in tourism but in the proposed New theoretical and conceptual model of transformatory cultural tourism experience underpinned by objective ·and constructive authenticity which will open a whole new field in tourism research arising from new transmodern experiential paradigm. / PhD (Tourism Management), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014