Faculty of Humanities

The history of the Arabic language lexicography When the Arabic language had its own significance after the Islamic spread, traditional scholars started to investigate the language and normalize its usage. First, they differentiated between two broad domains, the naḥw that included syntax, morphology, morphophonology and some phonetics. The second theme was luġa, which involved the meaning of words, dialectal variations and strange usage of the language. Later, this division created other subthemes or domains, grammar and lexicography, which influenced the Arabic language heritage

This chapter presents the first of the four-fundamental-concepts-of-the-documentarian in three consecutive discussions, each of which relates to the configuration of the concept of Documentarian-Abstractness (DA). Borrowing from Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of the signified, the chapter’s three polemic observations seek not only to present intellectual potentialities for grasping the documentarian as an abstract discursive entity par excellence, but also to describe how these three polemical positions are inherently interdependent. Section 2.1 describes the Documentarian-as-Imago; section 2.2 shifts to the Documentarian-as-Crisis-Author and Waste and culminates in section 2.3 with the Ethical Disposition of the Documentarian. A fuller description of each third of this tripartite set of argumentative mediations is presented below.

2.1 The DocumenTarian as invisible imago of The DocumenTary screen For centuries, we have been-and still are-grappling with core concepts such as courage, love, beauty, knowledge, the good, justice, and friendship to name but a few, even though we believe, by the unaware tendencies of quotidian thinking that we truly understand what these concepts mean and perhaps more scandalously that they are obvious in themselves as they are obvious to us, much like the sun's warmth hits the earth in the midst of a summer day. Socrates, first among great philosophers, dedicated his life to, and was willing to die in the name of, the idea that humans are utterly wrong in pursuing the false belief that they know what they think they know. If there is even a shred of truth in the Socratic method, then there should be no wonder in the fact that such a historically young and agitating concept as the documentarian would sound familiar and resonate intelligibly to the hoi polloi while in the same breath remain discursively unresolvable and theoretically incomprehensible to the philosophical mind. The unbridgeable gap between Bill Nichols' tautological definition that documentarians are "…those who make or otherwise engage in the circulation of documentary films" (Nichols 1991, 14) and the critique that argues that by conforming to Nichols's cyclic mode of explanation (insofar as the definition he offers uses on the same word/root "documentary," to describe both the problem and its solution), we are distancing ourselves rather than advancing CHAPTER 2

The introductory chapter steadfastly endeavors to clarify the epistemic motives, methodical means, linguistic logic, and metaphysical presuppositions that concern my attempt to develop for the documentarian a philosophical project that, while basing its raison d’être on the archeology of 123 years of historical documentarianship, recognizes the urgency of moving on and developing new, semiotic and philosophical grounds. I introduce the distinctive functions of the four key disciplines that motivate, afford, and help conduct the book’s line of interrogation: philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and documentary theory. Each discipline (or subfield) receives a special explanatory treatment that elucidates the discipline’s distinctive presence in and explanatory relevance to the book.

To the question 'can ethics be taught?' Dan Geva's The Ethics Lab Guidebook delivers a master class, its target audience, film, television and digital media teachers, scholars and students. Boldly situating itself in a global discussion of human ethics, this brilliant book offers a compelling and practical pedagogy, beckoning those who would become ethical practitioners and leaders in the study and making of films. The Guidebook's práxis weaves together a fabric of scalable exercises that encourage self-scrutiny and awareness through an incremental practice of personal ethical inquiries, celebrating the value of the first-person voice to share ethical experiences and moral wisdom. A particular strength is the book's inclusive embrace, conjoining philosophic voices from eastern and western traditions, including a welcome emphasis on feminist moral philosophers. Additional heft is found in the rich bibliographies at the end of each chapter, a cache of riches on their own. With its more than 700 testimonies, searchable on The Ethics Lab website, the Guidebook makes a signal contribution to its field, extending a promise and beacon of hope in the face of our contemporary climate of post-truth and media fakery.

A Philosophical History of Documentary, 1960–1990 is the second book in a three-volume set. It offers a systematic hermeneutical reading of thirty definitions of Documentary from 1960 to 1990—by then a familiar, already used, and “abused” dialectical object of thought and practice. The book progresses chronologically through three decades of ongoing efforts by documentarians, theorists, historians, and philosophers to define Documentary, examining the philosophical foundations, ethical implications, and evolving documentarological sensibilities of these definitions. It also reassesses the intense ontological debates about Documentary, highlighting the discourse's expanding definitional landscape. Building on the first volume, which examined thirty definitions from 1895 to 1959, this work weaves an intricate hermeneutical network of interconnections among all sixty definitions. It further anticipates the third volume, which will analyze forty additional definitions of Documentary from 1991 to the present, offering a comprehensive philosophical history of the evolution of Documentary as both concept and practice.

Premised on the idea that self-knowledge is vital to humans' creative expression, The Ethics Lab Guidebook provides instructors with a powerful, practical pedagogy for teaching ethics through the process of personal reflection. Dan Geva has brilliantly devised a methodology for teaching ethics that involves the collection and use of audiovisual testimonies, in which film students, scholars, and practitioners from all over the world examine an intimate, actual moral dilemma. Geva's groundbreaking book is filled with practical tools and skills that instructors can readily appropriate to impart ethical education to their students by encouraging them to trust their feelings about a personal ethical impasse and use their intuitions to resolve them.

Group key agreement is a fundamental building block for secure peer group communication systems. Several group key management techniques were proposed in the last decade, all assuming the existence of an underlying group communication infrastructure to provide reliable and ordered message delivery as well as group membership information. Despite analysis, implementation, and deployment of some of these techniques, the actual costs associated with group key management have been poorly understood so far. This resulted in an undesirable tendency: on the one hand, adopting suboptimal security for reliable group communication, while, on the other hand, constructing excessively costly group key management protocols.This paper presents a thorough performance evaluation of five notable distributed key management techniques (for collaborative peer groups) integrated with a reliable group communication system. An in-depth comparison and analysis of the five techniques is presented based on ex...

Spread is highly configurable, allowing the user to tailor it to their needs. Spread can be configured to use a single daemon in the network or to use one daemon in every computer running group communication applications. Figure 1.1 presents a case where each computer executes ...

Group communication systems are proven tools upon which to build fault-tolerant systems. As the demands for fault-tolerance increase and more applications require reliable distributed computing over wide area networks, wide area group communication systems are becoming very useful. However, building a wide area group communication system is a challenge. This paper presents the design of the transport protocols of the Spread wide area group communication system. We focus on two aspects of the system. First, the value of using overlay networks for application level group communication services. Second, the requirements and design of effective low latency link protocols used to construct wide area group communication. We support our claims with the results of live experiments conducted over the Internet.

This paper presents the first hierarchical Byzantine tolerant replication architecture suitable to systems that span multiple wide area sites. The architecture confines the effects of any malicious replica to its local site, reduces message complexity of wide area communication, and allows read-only queries to be performed locally within a site for the price of additional hardware. A prototype implementation is evaluated over several network topologies and is compared with a flat Byzantine tolerant approach.

A fundamental challenge in database replication is to maintain a low cost of updates while assuring global system consistency. The difficulty of the problem is magnified for wide-area network settings due to the high latency and the increased likelihood of network partitions. As a consequence, most of the research in the area has focused either on improving the performance of local transaction execution or on replication models with weaker semantics, which rely on application knowledge to resolve potential conflicts. In this work we identify the performance bottleneck of the existing synchronous replication schemes as residing in the update synchronization algorithm. We compare the performance of several such synchronization algorithms and highlight the large performance gap between various methods. We design a generic, synchronous replication scheme that uses an enhanced synchronization algorithm and demonstrate its practicality by building a prototype that replicates a PostgreSQL database system. We claim that the use of an optimized synchronization engine is the key to building a practical synhronous replication system for wide-area network settings.

In this paper we identify a major security vulnerability in distributed systems: compromised clients under adversarial control can use the system within their authorized access rights and authenticated channels to deliberately insert incorrect data. A significant problem is that when a malicious client insider is discovered, it is hard to quickly assess the scope of the damage, and identify corrupt and suspected updates. We propose Accountability Graph, a mechanism that can assist applications in coping and recovering from such attacks. The tool provides accountability enforcement and causality tracking of updates and their dependencies. Upon detection of incorrect data (e.g. by an external intrusion detection mechanism or human assessment), the Accountability Graph will quickly classify all updates in the system as either corrupted, suspected or not affected. The practicality and usefulness of the approach is demonstrated based on the requirements of three different applications: an open source software development project, a military common operation picture application, and a national emergency response system. The Accountability Graph can also be used for risk assessment and vulnerability analysis with respect to the above attack.

I n the local elections system of the municipality of "Wiredville", 1 several computers were used to establish an electronic town hall. The computers were linked by a network. When an issue was put to a vote, voters could manually feed their votes into any of the computers, which replicated the updates to all of the other computers. Whenever the current tally was desired, any computer could be used to supply an up-to-the-moment count. On the night of an important election, a room with one of the computers became crowded with lobbyists and politicians. Unexpectedly, someone accidentally stepped on the network wire, cutting communication between two parts of the network. The vote counting stopped until the network was repaired, and the entire tally had to be restarted from scratch. This would not have happened if the vote-counting system had been built with partitions in mind. After the unexpected severance, vote counting could have continued at all the computers, and merged appropriately when the network was repaired. The "Wiredville" story illustrates some of the finer points that motivated our work in the Transis project [1], a large-scale multicast service designed with the following goals: 64

This paper presents the first hierarchical Byzantine fault-tolerant replication architecture suitable to systems that span multiple wide area sites. The architecture confines the effects of any malicious replica to its local site, reduces message complexity of wide area communication, and allows read-only queries to be performed locally within a site for the price of additional standard hardware. We present proofs that our algorithm provides safety and liveness properties. A prototype implementation is evaluated over several network topologies and is compared with a flat Byzantine fault-tolerant approach. The experimental results show considerable improvement over flat Byzantine replication algorithms, bringing the performance of Byzantine replication closer to existing benign fault-tolerant replication techniques over wide area networks.

Group communication systems are high-availability distributed systems providing reliable and ordered message delivery as well as a membership service, to group-oriented applications. Many such systems are built using a distributed client-server architecture where a relatively small set of servers provide service to numerous clients. In this work, we show how group communication systems can be enhanced with security services without sacrificing robustness and performance. More specifically, we propose several integrated security architectures for distributed client-server group communication systems. In an integrated architecture, security services are implemented in servers, in contrast to a layered architecture where the same services are implemented in clients. We discuss performance and accompanying trust issues of each proposed architecture and present experimental results that demonstrate the superior scalability of an integrated architecture.

The cost savings and novel features associated with Voice over IP (VoIP) are driving its adoption by service providers. Unfortunately, the Internet's best effort service model provides no quality of service guarantees. Because low latency and jitter is the key requirement for supporting high quality interactive conversations, VoIP applications use UDP to transfer data, thereby subjecting themselves to quality degradations caused by packet loss and network failures. In this paper we describe an architecture to improve the performance of such VoIP applications. Two protocols are used for localized packet loss recovery and rapid rerouting in the event of network failures. The protocols are deployed on the nodes of an application-level overlay network and require no changes to the underlying infrastructure. Experimental results indicate that the architecture and protocols can be combined to yield voice quality on par with the PSTN.

Contributory group key agreement protocols generate group keys based on contributions of all group members. Particularly appropriate for relatively small collaborative peer groups, these protocols are resilient to many types of attacks. Unlike most group key distribution protocols, contributory group key agreement protocols offer strong security properties, such as key independence and perfect forward secrecy. This paper presents the first robust contributory key agreement protocol resilient to any sequence of group changes. The protocol, based on the Group Diffie-Hellman contributory key agreement, uses the services of a group communication system supporting Virtual Synchrony semantics. We prove that it provides both Virtual Synchrony and the security properties of Group Diffie-Hellman, in the presence of any sequence of (potentially cascading) node failures, recoveries, network partitions and heals. We implemented a secure group communication service, Secure Spread, based on our robust key agreement protocol and Spread group communication system. To illustrate its practicality, we compare the costs of establishing a secure group with the proposed protocol and a protocol based on centralized ¡