In the 1850s, visitors to the Earlswood Asylum, also known as the National Asylum for Idiots, in Reigate, Surrey, wrote about their experiences for publication. Frequently, these reports were presented as forms of travel writing, with the narrator recounting the customs of the asylum natives. The middle-class, sane and (one assumes) intelligent target audiences lived far beyond the asylums, in terms of identity if not geography. The asylum inhabitants, meanwhile, are resolutely ‘other’, subjected to the visitors’ inquisitive, evaluative gaze. This chapter draws on primary documents including works by Charles Dickens and asylum propagandists such as Joseph Parkinson, Cheyne Brady and the Reverend Edwin Sidney, as well as numerous anonymous pieces, to explore how these asylum travelogues, through their own representations of ‘idiocy’, helped shape ideas of idiocy and inform social policy that affected the lives of people identified as ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’ in the 1850s, 1860s and after.

IPTV is a method of delivering TV content to endusers that is growing in popularity. The implications of poor video quality may ultimately be a loss of revenue for the provider. Hence, it is vital to provide service assurance in these networks. This paper describes our experience of building an IPTV Software Defined Network testbed that can be used to develop and validate new approaches for service assurance in IPTV networks. The testbed is modular and many of the concepts detailed in this tutorial may be applied to the management of other end-to-end services. Keywords—Software Defined Networking, Monitoring, IPTV

Intellectual disability is an unstable concept, and its fundamental instability is magnified when we track its history and relation to other concepts. This introductory chapter explores some of the challenges of investigating the forces shaping the concept of intellectual disability in Europe and Britain across the centuries: not only those generated by shifting language and terminology, but also the demands imposed by the interdisciplinary nature of this project, which takes us through histories of literature, religion, law, education, philosophy, psychology and medicine, in addition to engaging with cultural and social history. Further, the fundamental slipperiness of the idea of intellectual disability raises the question of whether it could even be said to exist in forms similar to that which it assumes today. This introduction also includes a review of literature exploring the history of intellectual disability, and an overview of the chapters to follow.

In 1861, as the concept of ‘idiocy’, and authority over those designated ‘idiots’, was in the process of being transported into the medical sphere, the English physicians Martin Duncan and M. B. Lond lamented that ‘The terms used in the literature of idiocy complicate the first steps of practical inquiry greatly, and different writers, regardless of the necessity for unanimity, use the same words to describe various classes of idiots’.1 The fluid terminology that worried Duncan, Lond, and their peers has often appeared as both an obstacle to understanding idiocy (and related concepts), and as an indication of its universality. Edouard Séguin opens his 1846 Traitement Moral, Hygiène et Éducation des Idiots with a multi-linguistic and cross-cultural list of synonyms for ‘idiocy’, and his implication was clear: if everyone has a word for it – or indeed, many words – then ‘idiocy’ must be a universal condition that crosses time and culture. But at the same time, the slipperiness of the key terms noted by Duncan and Lond might equally point to an accompanying slipperiness of the concept itself, as well as to the struggles of medical and other professionals in the nascent ‘idiocy’ industry as they sought to define the object of their attention. Anyone exploring the history, or pre-history, of intellectual disability is faced immediately with a question similar to that which frustrated Duncan and Lond: what does the term ‘intellectual disability’ or, for that matter, ‘learning disability’ refer to? And what, glancing further back in time, of idiocy? Or folly? We can assume a smooth transhistorical continuity in which one term substitutes for another, but there is another possibility, one supported by critical historical research: that intellectual disability and related concepts are products of and contingent upon specific social and intellectual environments, and perform specific functions within those environments. The questions then become ‘How and why do these concepts form? How do they connect with

The dissemination of textual personal information has become an important driver of innovation. However, due to the possible content of sensitive information, this data must be anonymized. A commonly-used technique to anonymize data is generalization. Nevertheless, its effectiveness can be hampered by the Value Generalization Hierarchies (VGHs) used as poorly-specified VGHs can decrease the usefulness of the resulting data. To tackle this problem, in our previous work we presented the Generalization Semantic Loss (GSL), a metric that captures the quality of categorical VGHs in terms of semantic consistency and taxonomic organization. We validated the accuracy of GSL using an intrinsic evaluation with respect to a gold standard ontology. In this paper, we extend our previous work by conducting an extrinsic evaluation of GSL with respect to the performance that VGHs have in anonymization (using data utility metrics). We show how GSL can be used to perform an a priori assessment of the VGHs' effectiveness for anonymization. In this manner, data publishers can quantitatively compare the quality of various VGHs and identify (before anonymization) those that better retain the semantics of the original data. Consequently, the utility of the anonymized datasets can be improved without sacrificing the privacy goal. Our results demonstrate the accuracy of GSL, as the quality of VGHs measured with GSL strongly correlates with the utility of the anonymized data. Results also show the benefits that an a priori VGH assessment strategy brings to the anonymization process in terms of time-savings and a reduction in the dependency on expert knowledge. Finally, GSL also proved to be lightweight in terms of computational resources.

In privacy-preserving data publishing, approaches using Value Generalization Hierarchies (VGHs) form an important class of anonymization algorithms. VGHs play a key role in the utility of published datasets as they dictate how the anonymization of the data occurs. For categorical attributes, it is imperative to preserve the semantics of the original data in order to achieve a higher utility. Despite this, semantics have not being formally considered in the specification of VGHs. Moreover, there are no methods that allow the users to assess the quality of their VGH. In this paper, we propose a measurement scheme, based on ontologies, to quantitatively evaluate the quality of VGHs, in terms of semantic consistency and taxonomic organization, with the aim of producing higher-quality anonymizations. We demonstrate, through a case study, how our evaluation scheme can be used to compare the quality of multiple VGHs and can help to identify faulty VGHs.

IPTV is a method of delivering TV content to endusers that is growing in popularity. It is a paid service, hence the implications of poor video quality may ultimately be a loss of revenue for the provider. Consequently, it is vital to provide service monitoring and reconfiguration mechanisms to ensure quality requirements set out in service level agreements are upheld. This paper describes our experience of building an IPTV Software Defined Network testbed that can be used to develop and validate new approaches for service assurance in IPTV networks. The testbed is modular and many of the concepts detailed in this tutorial may be applied to the management of other end-to-end services.

Microscopic vehicular simulations can be computationally intensive due to the sheer size of the road network and number of vehicles. One solution is to parallelize the simulation through distribution and concurrent execution of the scenario being simulated. To enable distributed simulation of an area, the partitioning of the map into different areas for parallel execution on different nodes is required. How the map is partitioned is also a critical factor for distributed simulation, as a poor partitioning can lead to a communication overhead and/or an imbalance of workload among the computing nodes. In this paper, we ask: Can traffic volume information improve the classical structural partitioning algorithms? In the context of improving distributed simulation in SUMO, we propose a modification to three existing mechanisms for road network partitioning, SParTSim, Smart Quadtrees and Quadtrees, with the aim of creating more balanced partitions (in terms of workload) derived from traffic volume data.

Dear reader, You are holding in your hands a volume of the series „Reports of the DLR-Institute of Transportation Systems“. We are publishing in this series fascinating, scientific topics from the Institute of Transportation Systems of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. - DLR) and from his environment. We are providing libraries with a part of the circulation. Outstanding scientific contributions and dissertations are here published as well as projects reports and proceedings of conferences in our house with different contributors from science, economy and politics. With this series we are pursuing the objective to enable a broad access to scientific works and results. We are using the series as well as to promote practically young researchers by the publication of the dissertation of our staff and external doctoral candidates, too. Publications are important milestones on the academic career path. With the series „Reports of the DLR-Institute of Transportation Systems / Berichte aus dem DLR-Institut fur Verkehrssystem¬technik“ we are widening the spectrum of possible publications with a bulding block. Beyond that we understand the communication of our scientific fields of research as a contribution to the national and international research landscape in the fiels of automotive, railway systems and traffic management. This volume contains the proceedings of the SUMO2014 – Modeling Mobility with Open Data, which was held from 15th to 16th May 2014 in Berlin-Adlershof, Germany. SUMO is a well established microscopic traffic simulation suite which has been available since 2002 and provides a wide range of traffic planning and simulation tools. The conference proceedings give a good overview of the applicability and usefulness of simulation tools like SUMO ranging from new methods in traffic control and vehicular communication to the simulation of complete cities. Another aspect of the tool suite, its universal extensibility due to the availability of the source code, is reflected in contributions covering parallelization and interfacing improvements to govern microscopic traffic simulation results. The major topic of this second edition of the SUMO conference is open data. Several articles cover the acquisition and refinement of traffic networks as one of the fundamental data sources. Subsequent specialized issues such as data models for emissions and Bluetooth simulation are targeted as well. The conference’s aim was bringing together the large international user community and exchanging experience in using SUMO, while presenting results or solutions obtained using the software or modeling mobility with open data. Let you inspire to try your next project with the SUMO suite. There are many new applications in your environment. Prof. Dr.-Ing. Karsten Lemmer

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the utility of publicly released urban data-sets and, more specifically, to detail how our analysis was undertaken and to demonstrate the interesting insights regarding vehicular traffic that can be gained from this analysis. This paper uses a data-set provided by Dublin City Council from their Travel-time Reporting and Integrated Performance System (TRIPS). Data from all 45 routes covered by TRIPS was continually collected over the course of a number of months for analysis. From these routes, 4 were selected for detailed analysis. It can be observed that while the routes themselves exhibit some levels of self- similarity, when compared to each other, in some cases their behaviors are distinct. These behaviors are assessed from a number of different aspects to gain insights. Finally, to highlight how data related to vehicular traffic can be used to aid the public, an outline of an application which provides recommendations to commuters is provided. The purpose of this application is to utilise the previously discussed data and analysis to help minimise an individual's commuting time.

In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of the recently standardized Opus codec used in a VoIP context. Opus operates in both narrow and wideband modes, similar to Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR). Through the use of the Wideband Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (WB-PESQ) metric, we have conducted an extensive set of experiments using multiple audio samples encoded at different bit-rates, to investigate the impact of packet loss on resulting speech quality. Using these results, fitting functions for each bit-rate were computed to provide a straightforward manner of evaluating speech quality when given a specified packet loss rate. Using ns-2, a simulation analysis was conducted to evaluate the effect of background traffic on transmitted Opus streams. We observed that, when using different levels of background traffic, the observed packet loss rates varied heavily depending on the stream bit-rate. By correlating this information with the fitting functions derived previously, we were able to define switching thresholds. These are points where the speech quality of a lower bit-rate stream is greater than that of a higher bit-rate stream for the same levels of link bandwidth saturation.

Increasing and variable traffic demands due to triple play services pose significant Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) resource management challenges for service providers. Managing subscriber expectations via consolidated IPTV quality reporting will play a crucial role in guaranteeing return-on-investment for players in the increasingly competitive IPTV delivery ecosystem. We propose a fault diagnosis and problem isolation solution that addresses the IPTV monitoring challenge and recommends problem-specific remedial action. IPTV delivery-specific metrics are collected at various points in the delivery topology, the residential gateway and the Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer through to the video Head-End. They are then pre-processed using new metric rules. A semantic uplift engine takes these raw metric logs; it then transforms them into World Wide Web Consortium’s standard Resource Description Framework for knowledge representation and annotates them with expert knowledge from the IPTV domain. This system is then integrated with a monitoring visualization framework that displays monitoring events, alarms, and recommends solutions. A suite of IPTV fault scenarios is presented and used to evaluate the feasibility of the solution. We demonstrate that professional service providers can provide timely reports on the quality of IPTV service delivery using this system.

The vast amount of data being collected about individuals has brought new challenges in protecting their privacy when this data is disseminated. As a result, Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing has become an active research area, in which multiple anonymization algorithms have been proposed. However, given the large number of algorithms available and limited information regarding their performance, it is difficult to identify and select the most appropriate algorithm given a particular publishing scenario, especially for practitioners. In this paper, we perform a systematic comparison of three well-known k-anonymization algorithms to measure their efficiency (in terms of resources usage) and their effectiveness (in terms of data utility). We extend the scope of their original evaluation by employing a more comprehensive set of scenarios: different parameters, metrics and datasets. Using publicly available implementations of those algorithms, we conduct a series of experiments and a comprehensive analysis to identify the factors that influence their performance, in order to guide practitioners in the selection of an algorithm. We demonstrate through experimental evaluation, the conditions in which one algorithm outperforms the others for a particular metric, depending on the input dataset and privacy requirements. Our findings motivate the necessity of creating methodologies that provide recommendations about the best algorithm given a particular publishing scenario.