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In this thesis a novel Bayesian model is developed that is capable of predicting the probability of a range of eavesdropping techniques deployed, given an attacker's capability, opportunity and intent. Whilst limited attention by academia has focused on the cold war activities of Soviet bloc and Western allies' bugging of embassies, even less attention has been paid to the changing nature of the technology used for these eavesdropping events. This thesis makes four contributions: through the analysis of technical eavesdropping events over the last century, technological innovation is shown to have enriched the eavesdropping opportunities for a range of capabilities. The entry barrier for effective eavesdropping is lowered, while for the well resourced eavesdropper, the requirement for close access has been replaced by remote access opportunities. A new way to consider eavesdropping methods is presented through the expert elicitation of capability and opportunity requirements for a range of present-day eavesdropping techniques. Eavesdropping technology is shown to have life-cycle stages with the technology exploited by different capabilities at different times. Three case studies illustrate that yesterday’s secretive government method becomes today’s commodity. The significance of the egress transmission path is considered too. Finally, by using the expert elicitation information derived for capability, opportunity and life-cycle position, for a range of eavesdropping techniques, it is shown that it is possible to predict the probability of particular eavesdropping techniques being deployed. This novel Bayesian inferencing model enables scenarios with incomplete, uncertain or missing detail to be considered. The model is validated against the previously collated historic eavesdropping events. The development of this concept may be scaled with additional eavesdropping techniques to form the basis of a tool for security professionals or risk managers wishing to define eavesdropping threat advice or create eavesdropping policies based on the rigour of this technological study. Open Access

Part 4: CoCom and Comecon; International audience; Electrical calculating machines were designed and manufactured in Poland in small quantities during the 1950s. However, it soon become clear to the government that an autonomous advance in that cutting-edge discipline was simply impossible. Therefore, throughout the 1960s, Polish authorities established various channels of obtaining access to software solutions, transistors and especially integrated circuits that seem to become standard for years to come. The way of adopting IT by communist Poland did not differ much from how it was done in USSR – according to the model described by Mastanduno. It was a smart combination of legal measures like the use of trade agreements, official scientific-technical cooperation and illicit operations run with help of intelligence assets like bribing or blackmailing officials and employees, establishing fake intermediating companies for purchasing embargoed dual-use items. Therefore, medium and large-scale-integration-technology as well as specific types of computers like mainframes, minicomputers and later PCs along with peripheral devices came to the Polish People’s Republic through many routes. Moreover, Polish intelligence intensified its cooperation and information sharing with Soviet foreign intelligence service – like its counterparts in GDR, Hungary, etc. As a result, not only ties to the Western world were organized over and under the table, but also relationships with allies in Comecon were arranged in two dimensions. The case of Poland gives an excellent example of how schizophrenic the computer market under Comecon during the 1970s and 1980s was. This paper refers to the research project conducted by the author in the Institute of National Remembrance since 2011 and at the Jagiellonian University since 2018, entitled: “Scientific-technical intelligence of PPR: functions, organization, efficiency.” In this contribution the author presents the outcomes of the analysis of the Polish archival sources completing them by foreign archives and secondary sources.

Part 1: Eastern Europe; International audience; The aim of this case study is to provide a detailed description of the first university-level programming and computer science training in Hungary, which started in 1957 at the University of Szeged. The program began due to the strenuous efforts of Professor László Kalmár, who is considered to be “the father of computer science in Hungary”. The aim of this study is to add to the literature on Kalmár’s work, focusing on his activities in the field of computer science education, and at the same time, to add a detailed study from the Eastern Bloc to the history of computer science education.

Part 1: Eastern Europe; International audience; Armenia was one of the leading centers of Soviet electronic and computer industry. The first in the USSR semiconductor computer, Razdan-2, was designed and built in Armenia in 1960. Armenian computers of the Nairi series for a decade were one of the main calculating facilities of Soviet scientists and engineers. This article is about the first period of the development of Armenian computer technology.

Part 5: Analog Computing; International audience; This article is devoted to the rediscovery of a document by Israel Abraham Staffel (1814–1885), a prolific Polish inventor. It is a handwritten book in Russian and Polish that provides detailed information about one of the most famous of Staffel’s inventions, a 13-digit arithmometer, honored at the Great London Exhibition in 1851. The brief biography of Staffel, born into a Jewish family of meagre means who became famous in his time as an inventor, and a description of his developments are presented. Particular attention is paid to his mechanical calculating machines. In the Appendix, an English translation of the handwritten book by Staffel appears for the first time. Typical mechanical calculating machines by the end of the nineteenth century were based on Leibniz’s stepped drums. Staffel’s arithmometer was based on pinwheels. The content of the discovered book allows us to raise the question of the influence of Staffel’s invention on the arithmometer’s design. The paper, which also clarifies and complements certain facts about his life, activity and inventions, demonstrates the need for further archival research to confirm the currently accepted history of innovation.

International audience; This paper explores the interchanges between Andrew Booth, an early British computer pioneer and contemporary US and other pioneers. The paper records how funding from the US Rockefeller Foundation supported Andrew Booth’s research work in the UK and allowed him to refine his ideas on computer design by visiting US pioneers each year from 1946 to 1948. This led to the construction of an electronic drum, the world’s first successful demonstration of a rotating storage device connected to a computer, to his pioneering work on natural language processing and finally and most notably to his invention of the Booth hardware multiplier which is the basis of the multiplier used in billions of chips each year.

International audience; This paper is devoted to forgotten Russian scholar Semen Korsakov and describes his life and scientific activity. The particular attention is paid to Korsakov’s main achievement – invention of five “intellectual machines”. These machines could be considered as the very first attempt to design a mechanical device capable to perform such intellectual operations as data analysis, comparison, and selection.

International audience; Monash University, Australia developed an in-house local area network called MONET during the 1980s to meet the needs of the university’s computer users. The Monash University Computer Centre team created and installed an economical computer access network across an extensive campus with distributed computer installations and a large numbers of users. MONET was an early implementation of a Local Area Network (LAN) at a time when LAN concepts were evolving and specific hardware and software for the purpose did not yet exist. MONET became a successful large scale system that was in development and then operation to support all the University’s computer services for over a decade. It was also commercialized and used by various other organizations.

International audience; Between the 1970s and 1990s, Los Alamos National Laboratory built and utilized a largely custom computer network for the Lab’s supercomputers. Designed to support the unusual performance, storage, and security requirements of an American weapons lab, the Los Alamos Integrated Computer Network, as the focus of historical study, complicates and enriches the history of computer networking development, exploring the approaches and contributions to computer networking of an institution outside the better-known worlds of industry, academia, and the military. For example, the Lab’s reticence to adopt TCP/IP due to performance and security concerns further complicates the narrative of the ARPANET/Internet protocol suite’s adoption among advanced networking sites in the 1980s and 90s.

International audience; The 1956 Dartmouth conference is often considered as the cradle of artificial intelligence. There is a controversy on its origin. Some historians of computing believe that Turing or Zuse were the fathers of machine intelligence. However, the first working chess-playing automaton was developed by Torres Quevedo by 1912. Moreover, there was a large and important (but forgotten) European conference on computing and human thinking in Paris in 1951.

International audience; The Austrian engineer Curt Herzstark invented the world-renowned mechanical pocket calculator Curta. The books and the papers on the history of computing mention two models, Curta 1 and Curta 2. In November 2015 original drawings and patent documents on a multiple Curta were discovered in Switzerland. This device is supposed to be the world’s smallest mechanical parallel calculator.

Agricultural commodities experienced substantial increases in prices over the most recent decade with major surges in both 2007-08 and again in 2010-11. These price movements coincided with sharp rises in energy prices, in particular crude oil. Sharp increases in agricultural prices were not uncommon, but it is the short period between the recent two price surges that has drawn concerns and raised questions. What were the causes of the increase in world agricultural prices and what are the prospects for future price movements? Were the trend driven by fundamental changes in global agricultural supply and demand relationships that may bring about a different outcome? What are its implication on global food security and sustainability? Several authors have discussed the factors lying behind the sharp food price increases over the period 2007-11 though no consensus has been reached on the cause of these phenomena. Rapid economic growth in China and other Asian emerging economies, decades of underinvestment in agriculture, low inventory levels, poor harvests, depreciation of the U.S. dollar, and financializiation and speculative influences are among the factors cited as leading to high levels of commodity prices. The diversion of food crops as bio-fuels stands out as an important and new factor that many have seen as accountable for the food price spikes. The price spikes were also associated with increased price volatility in commodity prices. The sudden and unexpected rise in world food prices in recent decade has drawn the attention of policy makers to agriculture and this has led to the debate about the future reliability of world markets as a source for food. Increasing volatility has been a concern for most agricultural producers and for other agents along the food chain as it renders planning very difficult for all market participants. Price volatility can have a long run impact on the incomes of many producers and the trading positions of countries and can make planning on production more difficult. The fear of further spells of volatility in food prices has prompted efforts in designing and proposing price stabilizing mechanisms both at international and national levels. This fear has been driven by the recognition that a new set of forces may be driving drive food prices and their volatility trend. These forces emerge from linkages between the agricultural and the energy markets, the role of financial and currency markets, collectively with the wider macroeconomy, which together, render agricultural markets much more exposed to shocks. The first chapter examines food and energy commodity price volatility over the past decade. The objective of this chapter is to analyse the evolution of this relationship considering the role played by biofuels. It aims at verifying whether the increased grains-crude correlations has led to greater grains volatility as shocks from the crude oil markets are transmitted into the grains market. It focuses on two main issues. Firstly, it establishes whether food and energy commodity markets have become more volatile in recent times. Secondly, it analyses the nature of relationship between food and crude oil prices. In particular, it investigates whether the volatility in food commodities is now driven by the transmission of shocks from the crude oil market as a result of increased biofuel production and consumption. The second chapter focuses on the structural changes in food and energy prices and price relationships given the role of biofuels and biofuel policies in the United States. Increases in energy prices, the boom in biofuel production and government policy interventions have led to questions in relation to the stability in the long run relationships between food and energy commodity prices. This chapter investigates the assertion that the advent of biofuels has altered the nature of the relationship between energy and agricultural markets. The main hypothesis of this second chapter is that recent market and policy events may have induced changes in the relationship between food and energy markets. The third chapter quantitatively assesses households’ welfare dynamics in the recent years. Given the recent international shocks and market related shocks, the objective of this chapter is to quantitatively assess poverty and vulnerability dynamics in Tanzania between 2008 and 2012.

Though cotton only represents a very small share in world merchandise trade, it is an indispensable commodity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Productivity and profitability of cotton production and processing are key determinants of growth in cotton producing countries. This study analyses the SSA cotton sector. The first section will use value chain analysis to trace the value creation process from the raw material stage to final retail products. The second section analyses the sector from an industrial organizational perspective, highlighting how the sector’s specific features have influenced reforms outcomes and comparing experiences to other reformed SSA crop sectors. The purpose of section three is to shed light on Research and Development in cotton in SSA, framed in a broader picture of agricultural research in SSA. The final section analyses the issue of quality in cotton and tests the assertion that fully implemented reforms have undermined quality performance of the cotton sector in SSA. Keywords sub-Saharan Africa Cotton Sector, Cotton Liberalization, Cotton R&D, Cotton Quality

Despite the great efforts scholars have devoted to the study of migration a unified and coherent theory of international migration does not yet exist. Particularly, only in recent years, scholars have developed models of labor mobility to take into account social interaction across agents. Similarly, empirical analysis lacks an adequate approach to social interaction in migration, often using very rough measures as, for example, the stock of compatriots in the receiving country. The aim of this dissertation is to examine economic migrants decision to migrate, focusing specifically on potential migrants who can choose if and where to migrate, and which conditions facilitate their migration. It investigates how wealth, social networks and education interact in determining households’ migration strategies and the aggregate dimension and composition of migration flows. Household income maximization strategy evaluates migration as a possible, but costly investment. In a context of underdeveloped financial and insurance markets, budget constraints play a key role in determining migration behavior. Poorer households have higher incentives, but fewer opportunities to migrate, whereas better-off households have fewer incentives, but greater possibilities of migrating. Social networks, reducing costs and risks of migration and thus counterbalancing budget constraints, mitigate this effect and allow new social strata to migrate. In the empirical analysis we examine Mexican migration to the U.S., proposing two new tools to apply in empirical analysis and showing that household and community networks act as complements in the probability of migration, and as substitutes in the optimal number of migrants. We also examine migration to the U.S. from five Central American countries, comparing findings with those obtained for Mexico.

This dissertation addresses the empirical issues pertaining to technology adoption decisions, agricultural commodity price volatility and the effects of remittances on recipient households combined with the motivation of migration decisions in low-income countries such as Nepal under the theories of incomplete and imperfect markets. This dissertation contains three substantive essays applying a number of econometric models to test a number of the hypotheses using both panel and cross-section data from the Ne-pal Living Standard Surveys and time series data for commodity prices and farm yields. Summaries of these essays are presented as follows. The first paper examines factors affecting the adoption of improved seeds and in-organic fertilizers. I consider the adoptions of both these technologies as a joint decision and estimate over two repeated cross-section data from NLSSs. Both probit GMM with the moment restrictions and Linear Probability Models for period 2 (2004) combined with reduced form probit models for both periods and Tobit models were applied to con-trol for plot level, household characteristics, and other factors. The result weakly favours the hypothesis of joint decision. The results show significant effects on adoption decisions for farm technologies from four variables: the factor markets for credit and for labour, agricultural extension services, and household labour endowment. Proximity to road transport and access to markets also increase the adoption rate of improved seeds and inorganic fertilizers. Positive effects were associated with the increasing age and education of household heads with some exceptions. The results from Tobit models were also consistent with the reduced form and structural models with some exceptions. Well-functioning factor markets and well-developed infrastructure emerge as the precondition for agricultural-led growth in Nepal. The second paper explores how price shocks affect the stability of farmers’ in-come at different levels across different regions of Nepal, using a recent theoretical model that allows examination of the household income variance through combination of household data sets with price and yield time series under the scenarios of actual, full and no exposure to Indian markets. Agricultural income variability is found to be higher among the farmers with higher share of agricultural products (more than 65 percent) in the total household income, followed by 30 to 65 percent share of agricultural products. The results show relatively high income variability in the poor than the non-poor farm households, but their difference is low. The increased income variability of agricultural households, observed in almost all belts and regions, and at all income levels, is attributable to the domestic shocks. In general, the degree of market integration with Indian prices seems to be widely affected by the geographical heterogeneity in Nepal. Granger-causality tests show a higher integration between border markets of both countries, revealing that Nepalese commodity prices follow Indian prices with the exception of some commodities in some border markets. Finally, the third paper analyses the effect of remittance income on the hours of work in remittance-receiving households using panel data from the Nepal Living Standard Surveys. The study applies a number of econometric models to explain the impact of remittance income on the hours of work in different sectors (i.e. on-farm, self-employment, off-farm and hired labour) taking into account various methodological is-sues (endogeneity and selection bias) for migration decision and remittances. I first use a Zero Inflated Poisson model to examine the factors motivating migration. I then apply random effects model and instrumental variable Tobit models for estimating the impact of remittances on the household work hours both for different sectors and separately for working age men and women. Evidence shows that rural people with larger family size and higher per capita income without remittances have higher probability to go migrate. Remittances decrease work hours in a number of sectors, but increases work hours of hired labour in remittance-receiving households. Remittance income seems to be a substitute of non-labour income for remittance-receiving households. No significant effects on off-farm and self-employment activities were observed in the sample households. In contrast, non labour income appears to increase work hours of household members. Moreover, demographic characteristics seem to be an influential factor for the allocation of household work hours, implying that higher family size leads to higher work hours, and a larger number of children leads to a reduction of work hours of females, but not of males. Educated people are also more likely to increase their work hours.

This dissertation investigates the way in which potential and actual shocks influence economic conditions and choices of the Indonesian rural households. The analysis focuses on three main issues. First, we explore which strategies are chosen for different types of shocks. Second, we investigate which are the specific mechanisms adopted in the face of the most common shock (crop loss), and the consequences on consumption. Finally, we analyze the consequences of risk and shocks on a particularly important household decision: how much to invest in children education. Three sets of main conclusions emerge from this dissertation. First, we have learned that when facing a shock, households choose risk coping strategies by comparing responses with each other rather than with a common benchmark. In such a situation of non-exclusive and dependent multiple responses, the widely used Marginal Logit Model (MLM) suffers from a number of limitations. The two models we developed to take into account these specificities appear to outperform the MLM in describing these type of choices. The second main conclusion relates to the evidence that the choices between different coping strategies markedly differ between poor and non-poor households. In the face of shocks, the former appear to behave in a very different way. In general, rich households smooth consumption relative to income, whereas the need to accumulate savings to both build a buffer stock of assets and self-finance profitable investments leads poor people to rely more on ex post income smoothing strategies (taking an extra job) and to use part of this extra labour income to preserve their level of assets, even reducing consumption if necessary. Finally, it is necessary to deepen our knowledge of the long-run consequences of shocks, particularly with respect to the human capital formation of children. We found that the impact of uncertainty on schooling decisions is more subtle than suggested by much of the existing development literature. Taking into account that withdrawal from school is an absorbing state, that is children cannot re-enroll once they stop going to school, temporary interruptions in child schooling have long term impacts on the child human capital. Given irreversibility of withdrawal from school, in the face of household income variability parents are more likely to send children to school to give them the option to continue with higher schooling levels in the future (and hence earn higher earnings when they become adults).