It’s people like Anders Behring Breivik who give videogames a bad name.

The right-wing fanatic, who killed 77 people, mostly teenagers gathered in support of the Labor Party in Norway, claims that he spent 16 months playing Modern Warfare so he could learn how to use rifle sights.

He also spent an entire year solely playing World of Warcraft for 16 hours a day.

Breivik testified in court that while the Modern Warfare was in preparation for his planned act of terrorism, the World of Warcraft was all just for fun.

So, do videogames augment violent behavior? Research exists claiming that they do, and other research claims that they don’t.

Even if they do, we know plenty of people who play Modern Warfare and World of Warcraft that undeniably have no violent tendencies. Even so, maybe we should be a bit concerned when someone plays for 16 hours a day.

Keep in mind though, the man also had plans to decapitate the former prime minister, hailing back to a Europe of an earlier time, when chopping off heads was a common form of execution.

Do you think that video games may lead to or add to violent tendencies or fantasies?

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

DiffServ Assured Forwarded and Robust
Header Compression: Performance Analysis

Houcheng Lee

12:30pm Monday, 23 April 2012, ITE 201b

Performance analysis of network architecture and protocols can be done by using modeling and simulation or using emulation techniques. Modeling and simulation can be used to obtain qualitative results about a network protocol through building models of protocols under drastic abstractions. One major concern of the modeling approach is the fidelity of the results from a model simulation.

This dissertation presents detailed performance analyses of two major Internet standards using emulation techniques. The standards investigated are Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architecture and Robust Compression (ROHC) standard.

The DiffServ architecture was proposed to support quality of services (QoS) implementation in TCP/IP networks. In the first part of dissertation, a new and scalable approach to performance analysis of DiffServ architecture, based on fluid flow modeling approximation to TCP/UDP based traffic flows, is used to emulate millions of competing TCP and UDP flows across networks of various sizes, complexities and link speeds. The emulation involved real-world network constraints, including traffic prioritizations, limited buffers in routers, link congestion, active queue management (AQM) and packet drop policies on congested links. The results provided first quantitative understanding of the interactions of traffic with different drop precedencies in AF1 class traffic in a congested network.

The Robust Header Compression (ROHC) is proposed to implement efficient IP header compression on bandwidth constrained links in TCP/IP networks. In the second part of dissertation, an emulation tool, called CORE, developed at NRL is used to analyze the performance of ROHC. ROHC compresses packet headers at a sender side, and decompresses them at the receiver side to increase efficiency of a communication link. The results provided quantitative understanding of compression gains from using ROHC standard for compressing IPv4/UDP and IPv6/UDP traffic on links.

Committee:

• Dr. Deepinder Sidhu
• Dr. Yelena Yesha
• Dr. Konstantinos Kalpakis
• Dr. Ted M. Foster
• Dr. Edward Zieglar

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/22633568]Eric Dyer, associate professor of Visual Arts, has been awarded a 2012 fellowship for creative arts by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Professor Dyer is an artist, filmmaker, experimental animator, and educator whose award-winning films have screened internationally at numerous festivals, including the Chicago International Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, South by Southwest, and the Ottawa, Annecy, Melbourne, and London International Animation Festivals. His work has also been exhibited at the Exploratorium, the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art, Ars Electronica, and the Cairo and Venice Biennales.

Much of his recent work focuses on the zoetrope, as shown in the video clip above. Dyer comments, “I have dug up the zoetrope, a pre-cinema optical toy, and am using it to create and explore a visual language of loops and spirals. When spun, the complex circular sculptures, dubbed cinetropes, are a blur to the human eye but come to full animated life when viewed through shutter glasses or the lens of a fast-shutter video camera. This video is a compilation of film clips and behind-the-scenes footage from [my zoetropes] Copenhagen Cycles and The Bellows March.”

This installment of the AASHE Bulletin Sustainability Student Diary series features recent University of Michigan graduate Michelle Wai-Hon Lam's award-winning essay, "Seeing like a Planet: From Global Consciousness to Global Conscience." Lam won first place in online news source Earthzine's third annual College and University Student Essay and Blogging Contest, which asked students to consider ways that Earth observation can help build a more sustainable world. The below essay first appeared at Earthzine.org on Feb. 6, 2012. We hope to see questions and feedback in the comments area! Submit diary entries of your own for consideration to bulletin@aashe.org.

Seeing like a Planet: From Global Consciousness to Global Conscience

On December 7, 1972 – at 5:39 a.m. EST to be exact – astronauts on the Apollo 17 mission took a photograph that transformed how we saw our home, Earth. This was the first time we saw a planet, our planet. Fast-forward 50 years and technology has once again provided us with a transformative vision. With current and projected capabilities in Earth observation, the possibility of knowing our planet, in real time even, is not an impossible dream, but a rather straightforward one. The real challenge lies in what we do with this knowledge, how we apply it and to what end. Knowledge is transformative. The so-called Blue Marble image of 1972 was pivotal in driving awareness during early years of environmental activism. Looking ahead, the most exciting, not to mention crucial, transformation Earth observation can give us is to not only develop our knowledge of the Earth, but to help us cultivate an identity and conscience that encompasses the entire globe. Only then will we be truly moving toward a more sustainable world.

Knowledge is not neutral

For the title of this essay I have borrowed from James C. Scott’s seminal critique on high modernism, “Seeing Like a State.” One of his theses is that 19th century technological advances, including those in the production of statistical knowledge, allowed the “discovery of society as a reified object,”1 by the state, which made society “an object that the state might manage and transform with a view toward perfecting it.”2 Such a view on society and ambition of molding it may seem naïve with today’s post- modern hindsight. But Scott is right to caution the enthusiasm for technology that fuelled modernism’s hubris is very much present today, and I would like to draw a parallel caution toward how we develop and use Earth observation technologies going forward. Knowledge is inherently value-laden; what values do we want to frame our knowledge of Earth?

Can we have sustainability without equity?

Earth observation technologies have already allowed us to gather, analyze and share information about the Earth with unprecedented accuracy, breadth and timeliness. With the maturing of the consumer Internet and the advent of the Industrial Internet, the promise of what technology entrepreneur Larry Smarr calls “the sensor-aware planetary computer,” is not far off.3 The imperative driving recent investments thus far has been the quest for efficiency, especially energy efficiency. While this is central to tackling our environmental challenges – and in a way that could meet economic ones also – it risks eclipsing the distributional question of whose efficiency? Scott Campbell captured this succinctly with his “Planner’s Triangle”: in striving for sustainable development, we encounter the three conflicting priorities of environmental protection (resource efficiency), economic growth, and social justice.4 Such conflicts are ever present; from Occupy Wall Street to COP17, questions of equity and distribution are both invigorating and stymieing negotiations, discourse and the political process. We cannot move toward a more sustainable world without addressing them.

We have but one Earth

And this is why I am hopeful for what continued development of Earth observation technologies can bring. It will bring knowledge that is global; we can know our entire planet better. But in order to monitor and understand the full effects of human activity we will be forced to cross borders and see the Earth and mankind, holistically, as one. Global warming is a crisis we all face. Pollutants, be they in the air or water, recognize no boundaries. Choices we make in our everyday lives have an impact on others that we must be made aware of, and have factored into our decision-making. And we must find ways to work together.

In our bid to live sustainably, knowing is not enough. We cannot simply place our faith in science and technology to find our way out of our environmental challenges. To succeed, we need to develop a collective respect for the planet and all who inhabit it. Fortunately, the potential is here with Earth observation technologies to do just that, to develop both global consciousness and a global conscience.

1. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. p. 91

2. Ibid. p. 92

3. Lohr, Steve. (2011, December 17). The Internet gets Physical. The New York Times.

4. Campbell, Scott. “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities? Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable Development,” Journal of the American Planning Association, 62 (3) (Summer 1996), p. 296- 312