On effectiveness of wiretap programs in mapping social networks

Snowball sampling methods are known to be a biased toward highly connected actors and consequently produce core-periphery networks when these may not necessarily be present. This leads to a biased perception of the underlying network which can have negative policy consequences, as in the identification of terrorist networks. When snowball sampling is used, the potential overload of the information collection system is a distinct problem due to the exponential growth of the number of suspects to be monitored. In this paper, we focus on evaluating the effectiveness of a wiretapping program in terms of its ability to map the rapidly evolving networks within a covert organization. By running a series of simulation-based experiments, we are able to evaluate a broad spectrum of information gathering regimes based on a consistent set of criteria. We conclude by proposing a set of information gathering programs that achieve higher effectiveness then snowball sampling, and at a lower cost. Maksim Tsvetovat is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Social Complexity and department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. He received his Ph.D. from the Computation, Organizations and Society program in the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation was centered on use of artificial intelligence techniques such as planning and semantic reasoning as a means of studying behavior and evolution of complex social networks, such as these of terrorist organizations. He received a Master of Science degree from University of Minnesota with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence and design of Multi-Agent Systems, and has also extensively studied organization theory and social science research methods. His research is centered on building high-fidelity simulations of social and organizational systems using concepts from distributed artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Other projects focus on social network analysis for mapping of internal corporate networks or study of covert and terrorist orgnaizations. Maksim’s vita and publications can be found on Kathleen M. Carley is a professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and the director of the center for Compuational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) which has over 25 members, both students and research staff. Her research combines cognitive science, social networks and computer science to address complex social and organizational problems. Her specific research areas are dynamic network analysis, computational social and organization theory, adaptation and evolution, text mining, and the impact of telecommunication technologies and policy on communication, information diffusion, disease contagion and response within and among groups particularly in disaster or crisis situations. She and her lab have developed infrastructure tools for analyzing large scale dynamic networks and various multi-agent simulation systems. The infrastructure tools include ORA, a statistical toolkit for analyzing and visualizing multi-dimensional networks. ORA results are organized into reports that meet various needs such as the management report, the mental model report, and the intelligence report. Another tool is AutoMap, a text-mining systems for extracting semantic networks from texts and then cross-classifying them using an organizational ontology into the underlying social, knowledge, resource and task networks. Her simulation models meld multi-agent technology with network dynamics and empirical data. Three of the large-scale multi-agent network models she and the CASOS group have developed in the counter-terrorism area are: BioWar a city-scale dynamic-network agent-based model for understanding the spread of disease and illness due to natural epidemics, chemical spills, and weaponized biological attacks; DyNet a model of the change in covert networks, naturally and in response to attacks, under varying levels of information uncertainty; and RTE a model for examining state failure and the escalation of conflict at the city, state, nation, and international as changes occur within and among red, blue, and green forces. She is the founding co-editor with Al. Wallace of the journal Computational Organization Theory and has co-edited several books and written over 100 articles in the computational organizations and dynamic network area. Her publications can be found at: http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/bios/carley/publications.php     

Polyaniline/12-phosphotungstic acid/V<Subscript>2</Subscript>O<Subscript>5</Subscript> nanocomposite and its platinum analog as oxygen reduction electrocatalysts

A guest-host nanocomposite based on electroconducting polyaniline doped with 12-phosphotungstic acid and V₂O₅ as well as its bifunctional analog containing not more than 5 mass% nanosized platinum were obtained. A study was carried out on the structure of these nanocomposites, their redox characteristics, and electrocatalytic activity in the reduction of oxygen. These nanocomposites were found to display catalytic properties in the electrochemical reduction of oxygen, while the presence of even a slight amount of nanosized platinum in the bifunctional composite leads to a significant increase in its electrocatalytic activity. __________ Translated from Teoreticheskaya i éksperimental’naya Khimiya, Vol. 43, No. 5, pp. 307–314, September–October, 2007.     

A new stochastic method of reconstructing porous media

We present a new stochastic method of reconstructing porous medium from limited morphological information obtained from two-dimensional micro- images of real porous medium. The method is similar to simulated annealing method in the capability of reconstructing both isotropic and anisotropic structures of multi-phase but differs from the latter in that voxels for exchange are not selected completely randomly as their neighborhood will also be checked and this new method is much simpler to implement and program. We applied it to reconstruct real sandstone utilizing morphological information contained in porosity, two-point probability function and linear-path function. Good agreement of those references verifies our developed method’s powerful capability. The existing isolated regions of both pore phase and matrix phase do quite minor harm to their good connectivity. The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is used to compute the permeability of the reconstructed system and the results show its good isotropy and conductivity. However, due to the disadvantage of this method that the connectivity of the reconstructed system’s pore space will decrease when porosity becomes small, we suggest the porosity of the system to be reconstructed be no less than 0.2 to ensure its connectivity and conductivity.     

Existence of Pulsating Roll-Waves for the Saint Venant System

The phenomenon of roll-waves occurs when shallow water flows down open inclined channels. This flow is described by the Saint Venant’s equations with a friction term due to Chezy. In the case of a flat bottom, their existence (as entropic and periodic travelling waves) follows from a classical work due to DRESSLER [6]. The aim of this paper is to prove the existence of roll-waves when the bottom is modulated by a small periodic perturbation. Following JIN and KATSOULAKIS [15], we first compute a Burgers-type equation which possesses “pulsating” roll-waves (the wave speed oscillates around an average velocity). We prove, in a mathematically rigorous fashion, the existence of these solutions.     

Radially symmetric wave maps from (1 + 2)-dimensional Minkowski space to general targets

Extending our previous work [5] on this subject we show global existence of smooth solutions to the Cauchy problem for wave maps from the (1 + 2)-dimensional Minkowski space to an arbitrary smooth, compact Riemannian manifold without boundary, for arbitrary smooth, radially symmetric data. Received: 14 December 2001 / Accepted: 1 March 2002 / Published online: 6 August 2002     

Nonvanishing derivatives and normal families

We consider the differential operators Ψ _k , defined by Ψ₁(y) =y and Ψ _k+1(y)=yΨ _k y+d/dz(Ψ _k (y)) fork ∈ ℕ fork∈ ℕ. We show that ifF is meromorphic in ℂ and Ψ _k F has no zeros for somek≥3, and if the residues at the simple poles ofF are not positive integers, thenF has the formF(z)=((k-1)z+a)/(z ²+β z+γ) orF(z)=1/(az+β) where α, β, γ ∈ ℂ. If the residues at the simple poles ofF are bounded away from zero, then this also holds fork=2. We further show that, under suitable additional conditions, a family of meromorphic functionsF is normal if each Ψ _k (F) has no zeros. These conditions are satisfied, in particular, if there exists δ>0 such that Re (Res(F, a)) <−δ for all polea of eachF in the family. Using the fact that Ψ _k (f ^′/f) =f ^(k)/f, we deduce in particular that iff andf ^(k) have no zeros for allf in some familyF of meromorphic functions, wherek≥2, then {f ^′/f :f ∈F} is normal. The first author is supported by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development G.I.F., G-643-117.6/1999, and INTAS-99-00089. The second author thanks the DAAD for supporting a visit to Kiel in June–July 2002. Both authors thank Günter Frank for helpful discussions.     

Elastic scattering of slow positrons on atoms

The results of calculations of the elastic scattering cross section of positrons on noble gas and alkali atoms are presented. The calculations are performed within the one-electron Hartree-Fock approximation with multielectron correlations in the so-called random phase approximation with exchange taken into account. Virtual positronium formation is taken into account and proved to be very important. Arguments are presented that the positron polarization potential is repulsive for alkali atoms. The results obtained are in a reasonable agreement with experiment and with some previously reported calculations.     

cos πρ theorems for δ-subharmonic functions

For ϕ a δ-subharmonic function, sharp results are obtained that connectA(r, ϕ), B(r, ϕ) andT(r, ϕ), whereA(r, ϕ)=inf_|z|=r ϕ(z),B(r, ϕ)=sup_|z|=r ϕ(z), andT(r, ϕ) is the Nevanlinna characteristics.