Luzia Menegotto Frick de Moura, Daniela F. Brauner, Raquel Janissek-Muniz
RESUMO Objetivo a revisão sistemática desenvolvida neste artigo teve como objetivo apresentar as potenciais aplicações e consequências do uso da Blockchain para a administração pública. Método a partir da busca de artigos nas bases Scopus, Web of Science, SSRN e Science Direct, e seguindo o método PRISMA, foram selecionados 16 artigos que continham as temáticas: Blockchain, participação governamental direta ou como principal regulamentador, política pública. Resultados as principais aplicações encontradas foram referentes a: processamento de dados e segurança de dados públicos, novas propostas de regulamentação estatal e de organização institucional. Quanto aos impactos, destacam-se a melhoria na gestão dos dados, diminuição da burocracia e necessidade de afinar a relação entre Estado, sociedade e mercado. Conclusão a Blockchain apresenta-se como uma tecnologia capaz de renovar os processos de gestão, mas criando novos desafios à administração pública. Classificação JEL: O14, H83, L86.
Julie Cupples does geographers a great service by naming and analysing the effects of “geoscientisation,” a pattern of institutional reorganisation whereby former Departments or Institutes of Geography are brought together in larger academic units with physical science disciplines like geology, earth sciences or environmental sciences (Cupples, MS 1). Geoscientisation, Cupples argues, exacerbates the more general effects of the neoliberalization of higher education of which it is a part, and tends to marginalise, render invisible and/or delegitimate critical human geography in particular. “[A]sserting our right to analyse our working conditions,” as Cupples does with this paper, is simultaneously more difficult and more necessary than ever (Cupples, MS 10). My comments here are based on my own experiences and conversations with colleagues in North America and Europe. Much of the material I draw upon is very “grey”: snippets of conversations among others overheard in the hallway, brief comments in faculty meetings, sotto voce whisperings during lectures by visiting scholars, and the like. As critical human geographers know, these genres, marginal though they may seem, are the very stuff of what we hypostatize as “institutional culture.” And culture is the central question here. A second preliminary note is in order as well: many of the issues discussed below concern attitudes that largely remain latent, simmering beneath the surface of institutional culture. To the credit of many of my physical science colleagues, they only seldom break out into the open in ways that could do concrete harm. Nevertheless, their pervasive presence is in itself already a burden and a low-level threat that, as Cupples rightly insists, we ignore at our peril. In Germany, where I now work, it is not so much geoscientisation as a process but rather the condition of being in a geosciences unit that is the problem. Many institutes of geography in Germany have always been closely integrated with physical geosciences. At my university, the impacts of living in the geosciences are compounded by the fact that the geosciences are in turn located within a larger faculty composed also of chemistry and biology. Most importantly, it is at the faculty level that binding decisions on hiring or the awarding of postgraduate degrees are made. The often quite subtle forms of “epistemic erasure” attendant on geoscientisation are the product of a pervasive “lack of understanding of contemporary human geography” (Cupples, MS 4) on the part of most physical colleagues and of institutional and cultural power structures through which this ignorance is allowed to persist and even flourish. I would supplement the examples Cupples gives with a series of brief observations about this “epistemic erasure” and “lack of understanding.” Of course the degree of understanding—and the degree of openness to serious engagement with human-geographic scholarship—varies among colleagues on the natural science side. Nevertheless, beneath individual variation run some cultural issues that can be thought of as facets of a “style of thought” (Fleck, 1981 [1935]). First, a “lack of understanding of contemporary human geography” by itself is not necessarily a problem. Many human geographers do not understand large swathes of contemporary physical geography. Yet we do not typically (in my experience, ever) challenge the scientific value of physical subdiscipines or the judgement of our physical colleagues on matters within their range of professional competency. In other words, the issue here is whether our physical colleagues assume that human geographic subdisciplines or discourses about which they (often admittedly) know little or nothing are prima facie deserving of respect. The danger of having physical scientists involved in hiring decisions, and perhaps even more, decisions on the awarding of doctoral (and in Germany, Habilitation or “second doctorate”) degrees in human geography lies not just in the fact that these colleagues “lack the ability to properly evaluate performance” (Cupples, MS 6). It lies also in the fact that some of them do not believe it is important that they lack this ability. In this posture, everyday common sense plus untutored opinions are assumed to be an adequate basis at least for broad judgments on work in subfields of human geography. A second, closely related tendency is the dismissal or trivialization of specialised human geographic concepts and theories as “jargon.” Here, too, a surprisingly unscientific attitude holds sway: even where some physical colleagues are willing to admit that they know nothing of a particular debate or discourse, they may still assume that the burden of proof lies with human geographers to justify their specialised vocabularies and theoretical perspectives, not upon those like themselves who have not read a single word of the relevant literatures. A third point also has to do with insufficient reflexivity. Cupples is entirely right to argue that another, related major negative effect of geoscientisation is the perpetuation of sexist and racist academic cultures. Part of this of course has to do with gendered and crypto-colonial aspects of the discourse of scientific “neutrality” and the “lack of bias” of scientific procedure, as well as with the blinkered notion that scientific communication has nothing to do with power but is reducible merely to the undistorted communication of facts. Additionally, the belief of some natural scientists that their casual impressions about human geographic work are sufficient goes hand in hand with a general attitude of annoyance or open hostility toward the foregrounding of racism, sexism and other forms of oppression as problems. These colleagues, including some women, “mean well” and do not knowingly engage in racist or sexist behaviours, and so they believe that they are not part of the problem. Despite most of them not having faced racism, or not necessarily having a stake in recognising the sexism around them, they nevertheless feel competent to pronounce ex cathedra that “political correctness” and respectful speech are inappropriate for addressing racism and sexism, and even harmful to scientific freedom. In Germany and some other European countries, this naïveté is inextricably bound up with the still very prevalent idealised subject-position of The Professor as a quasi-omniscient, rational being able to bracket “normative” or “emotional” factors. The colleagues who follow this pattern display a glaring gap in their understanding when they fancy themselves “objective” and “rational” even while visibly overcome, in exchanges about racism or sexism, by strong affects and emotions ranging from annoyance to outright rage. Much of this can readily be recognised as an expression of white (but also often mainstream masculine) “fragility,” and in Germany is unfortunately not entirely restricted to the physical sciences (DiAngelo, 2018). Like Cupples and the many colleagues she has consulted, I find dealing with these and other manifestations of cultural difference utterly draining. Despite my own position of compound intersectional privilege, it is a constant fight not to become completely discouraged at the effects of living in the geosciences (and natural sciences more generally). So I can fully appreciate the underlying logic of her argument, which pulls in the direction of advocating a sort of institutional “safe space” for critical human geography, even, if necessary, at the expense of splitting off from physical geography. I often yearn for such a safe space, or at least a space where I and my human geography colleagues can just get on with our research. Nevertheless, for those of us stuck in situations not likely to be alleviated anytime soon by the kind of favourable changes that have taken place at Macquarie, Monash, Wollongong or St. Andrews (Cupples MS 8–9), an exclusively separatist “politics of refusal” by itself will not solve our problems, and in some circumstances could worsen our institutional situation (Cupples MS 10). Cupples acknowledges the need for establishing some kind of constructive modus operandi in her decision to work with physical geography colleagues on specific projects. A more specific downside of too strong a separatist line, in my view, would be a tendency to relegate quantitative methods to the “bad” side of the divide (Cupples MS 3, 9). As Cupples rightly points out, critical human geographers working in a geosciences context are often pressed by physical colleagues to defend their critical stance toward a naïve positivist epistemology long consigned to the dustbin by philosophers of science (Cupples MS 8). But quantification does not equal naïve positivism, as evidenced by an already long tradition in human geography comprising critical quantification (e.g., Brown & Knopp, 2006; Dorling, 2015; Forest, 2012; Mattingly & Falconer-Al Hindi, 1995), “strategic positivism” (Hannah, 2001; Wyly, 2009), critical cartography and visualisation (e.g., Crampton, 2006; Krygier, 1997; Kwan, 1999) and related areas. Perhaps this is one area, along with, for example, critical approaches to climate change and the anthropocene, in which human geographers can embark on a more dialectical project of transforming the cultural discourses and practices of the geosciences from within.
With the popularization of intelligent terminals, especially current trends, such as “Industrie 4.0” and the Internet of Things, mobile crowdsensing is becoming one of the promising applications built on smart devices in mobile networks. However, the existing mobile crowdsensing models are mostly based on a centralized platform, which is not fully trusted in reality and results in the existence of fraud and other security problems. Furthermore, the data quality collected through crowdsensing is varied, and the location privacy is difficult to guarantee, especially at the worker selection stage. To solve these two problems, an effective blockchain-based location-privacy-preserving crowdsensing model, CrowdBLPS, is proposed in this article. First, the idea of a blockchain is introduced into this model. The decentralized structure and the consensus approach are applied to realize the nonrepudiation and nontampering of information. Second, to improve the data sensing quality and protect worker privacy, a two-stage approach, including the preregistration stage and the final selection stage, is proposed. Finally, we further implement a prototype on the Ethereum public testing network, and the experimental results show the feasibility, availability, and reliability of CrowdBLPS.
We present "Gasper," a proof-of-stake-based consensus protocol, which is an idealized version of the proposed Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain. The protocol combines Casper FFG, a finality tool, with LMD GHOST, a fork-choice rule. We prove safety, plausible liveness, and probabilistic liveness under different sets of assumptions.
Ethereum, the largest blockchain for running smart contracts, charges the people who send transactions to deploy or invoke smart contracts for thwarting resource abuse. The amount of transaction fee depends on the size of that contract and the operations executed by that contract. Consequently, smart contracts with inefficient code will waste money. In this article, we propose and develop the first tool, namedGasChecker, for automatically identifying gas-inefficient code in smart contracts, and conduct the first empirical study on the prevalence of gas-inefficient code in the deployed smart contracts. More precisely, we first summarize ten gas-inefficient programming patterns and propose a new approach based on symbolic execution (SE) to detect them in the bytecode of smart contracts. To make our approach scalable to analyze millions of smart contracts, we parallelize SE by tailoring it to the MapReduce programming model, and propose a new feedback-based load balancing strategy to effectively utilize cloud resources. Extensive experiments show thatGasCheckerscales well with the increase of workers. The empirical study demonstrates that lots of real smart contracts contain various inefficient code. Manual investigation demonstrates that only 2.5 percent of discovered gas-inefficient instances are false positives.
Network traffic whitelisting has emerged as a dominant approach for securing consumer IoT devices. However, determining what the whitelisted behavior of an IoT device should be remains an open challenge. Proposals to date have relied on manufacturers and trusted parties to provide whitelists, but these proposals require manufacturer involvement or placing trust in an additional stakeholder. Alternatively, locally monitoring devices can allow building whitelists of observed behavior, but devices may not exhaust their functionality set during the observation period, or the behavior may change following a software update which requires re-training. This paper proposes a blockchain-based system for determining whether an IoT device is behaving like other devices of the same type. Our system (SERENIoT, pronounced Serenity) overcomes the challenge of initially determining the correct behavior for a device. Nodes in the SERENIoT public blockchain submit summaries of the network behavior observed for connected IoT devices and build whitelists of behavior observed by the majority of nodes. Changes in behavior through software updates are automatically whitelisted once the update is broadly deployed. Through a proof-of-concept implementation of SERENIoT on a small Raspberry Pi IoT network and a large-scale Amazon EC2 simulation, we evaluate the security, scalability, and performance of our system.
We consider a collection of derivatives that depend on the price of an underlying asset at expiration or maturity. The absence of arbitrage is equivalent to the existence of a risk-neutral probability distribution on the price; in particular, any risk neutral distribution can be interpreted as a certificate establishing that no arbitrage exists. We are interested in the case when there are multiple risk-neutral probabilities. We describe a number of convex optimization problems over the convex set of risk neutral price probabilities. These include computation of bounds on the cumulative distribution, VaR, CVaR, and other quantities, over the set of risk-neutral probabilities. After discretizing the underlying price, these problems become finite dimensional convex or quasiconvex optimization problems, and therefore are tractable. We illustrate our approach using real options and futures pricing data for the S&P 500 index and Bitcoin.
Scalability has been a bottleneck for major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Despite the significantly improved scalability claimed by several high-profile blockchain projects, there has been little effort to understand how their transactional throughput is being used. In this paper, we examine recent network traffic of three major high-scalability blockchains---EOSIO, Tezos and XRP Ledger (XRPL)---over a period of seven months. Our analysis reveals that only a small fraction of the transactions are used for value transfer purposes. In particular, 96% of the transactions on EOSIO were triggered by the airdrop of a currently valueless token; on Tezos, 76% of throughput was used for maintaining consensus; and over 94% of transactions on XRPL carried no economic value. We also identify a persisting airdrop on EOSIO as a DoS attack and detect a two-month-long spam attack on XRPL. The paper explores the different designs of the three blockchains and sheds light on how they could shape user behavior.
Scalability has been a bottleneck for major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Despite the significantly improved scalability claimed by several high--profile blockchain projects, there has been little effort to understand how their transactional throughput is being used. In this paper, we examine recent network traffic of three major high-scalability blockchains--EOSIO, Tezos and XRP Ledger (XRPL)--over a period of seven months. Our analysis reveals that only a small fraction of the transactions are used for value transfer purposes. In particular, 96% of the transactions on EOSIO were triggered by the airdrop of a currently valueless token; on Tezos, 76% of throughput was used for maintaining consensus; and over 94% of transactions on XRPL carried no economic value. We also identify a persisting airdrop on EOSIO as a DoS attack and detect a two-month-long spam attack on XRPL. The paper explores the different designs of the three blockchains and sheds light on how they could shape user behavior.
Recently, the application of blockchain to the setting, management, and trading of the energy system has formed an innovative technology and has attracted a lot of attention from industry, academia, and research. In this study, we use patent analysis technology to explore the development trends of the energy system with blockchain technology. During the patent analysis process, this study makes corresponding analysis charts, such as patent application numbers over time, patent application numbers for main leading countries, applicants, patent citations, international patent classification (IPC), and life cycle. Relative research and design (R&D) capability of the top ten applicants is estimated and the cluster map of the technology is obtained. The technical features of the top five IPC patent applications are related to the cluster map to show the development of energy blockchain technology. Through this paper, first, the basics of the blockchain and patent analysis are illustrated and, moreover, the reason why and how blockchain technology can be combined with the energy system is also briefly described and analyzed. The results of the patent analysis of energy blockchain technology indicate that the United States leads the way, accounting for more than half of the global total. It is also interesting to note that the participants are not from traditional specific fields, but included electric power manufacturers, computer software companies, e-commerce companies, and even many new companies devoted to blockchain technology. Walmart Apollo, LLC and International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) have the highest number of patent applications. However, Walmart Apollo, LLC ranks first with a greater number of inventors of 36, an activity year of 2 years, and a relative R&D capability of 100%. IBM ranks second with an activity year of 3 years and a research and development capability of 91%. Among various applicants, IBM and LO3 energy started earlier in this field, and their patent output is also more prominent. The IPC is mainly concentrated in G06Q 50/06, which belongs to the technical field of the setting and management of the energy system including electricity, gas, or water supply. Currently, most projects are in the early development stages, and research on key areas is still ongoing to improve the required scalability, decentralization, and security. Thus, energy blockchain technology is still in the growth period, and there is still considerable room for development of the patent in the later period. Moreover, it is suggested that the novel communication module such as the combination of the consortium blockchain and the private blockchain cold also provide their own advantages to achieve the purpose of improving system performance and efficiency.
A. A. Baev, V. S. Levina, Adriana Reut, Александр Александрович Свидлер · 6 authors
Over the past few years the popularity of blockchain technology has grown significantly. It is able to make change as the economic environment, as also identifying new approaches to business management. The paper is devoted to innovative aspects that appear and have a tendency to develop in the field of accounting and audit due to the blockchain technologies development. This technology can affect entire industries, and especially the financial sector. The decision to use blockchain in combination with appropriate data analytics can help in accounting processes, as well as in conducting daily transactions involved in the audit. The transition to a financial system with a significant element of the blockchain opens up many opportunities for the profession of an accountant and the skills of the auditor will be focused more on concerning issues of a higher level. The methodological base of the study includes the theory of accounting and auditing, as well as the principles of operation of blockchain technologies in the aspect of their application in finance. The study overviews the main trends in the development of blockchain technology in accounting and auditing based on foreign scientific studies, as well as reviews of blockchain practices in articles by various scientists. The result of this research is an analysis of blockchain technologies in the finance field. The study depicts conclusions about the degree of applicability of this technology in the Russian Federation, reflects the main problems, risks and benefits from the introduction of this technology. This paper may promote an interest to the current professionals in the accounting and auditing field, as well as to professionals working in the range of building data exchange systems between employees involved in working with finances.
The fundamental purpose of agri-food supply chain management is to restrict opportunism caused by information asymmetry. Traditional Chinese agri-food supply chain management introduces a contract mechanism and a trust mechanism to manage the uncertainty of the agri-food quasi-organization. However, it is almost impossible to improve the efficiency of transactions and maintain agri-food supply chain stability in the case of asymmetric information. Nowadays, blockchain, Internet of Things technology and big data drive the agri-food supply chain into a vast smart network which would break the information constraints. This paper analyzes the coupling between blockchain-based digital system and the agri-food supply chain. In addition, this paper presents two cases from China, indicating that the proposed blockchain-based system can achieve disruptive transformation in agri-food supply chain management.
In the current discussions around Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, we find a lack of theory to conceptualize and understand application scenarios. In this paper we propose to conceptualize distributed ledger technologies as trust mechanisms. Whereas previously one had to rely on a trusted third party (e.g. notary), now one must trust a complex software system – the Blockchain and distributed ledger application– as well as the parties that host the software system and ensure its effectiveness. Based on theories of e-commerce, business networks, and trust, we explore relations between trust and Blockchain design. We analyze three case studies of Blockchain applications in the diamond industry. In each case we study two complementary research questions: (1) how does the blockchain application influence trust, and (2) how do trust based requirements affect the design of a blockchain application? We formulate two propositions and find dynamic interactions between trust requirements, blockchain application design, and transaction trust.
In emerging applications such as blockchains and collaborative data analytics, there are strong demands for data immutability, multi-version accesses, and tamper-evident controls. This leads to three new index structures for immutable data, namely Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT), Merkle Bucket Tree (MBT), and Pattern-Oriented-Split Tree (POS-Tree). Although these structures have been adopted in real applications, there is no systematic evaluation of their pros and cons in the literature. This makes it difficult for practitioners to choose the right index structure for their applications, as there is only a limited understanding of the characteristics of each index. To alleviate the above deficiency, we present a comprehensive analysis of the existing index structures for immutable data, evaluating both their asymptotic and empirical performance. Specifically, we show that MPT, MBT, and POS-Tree are all instances of a recently proposed framework, dubbed \my{Structurally Invariant and Reusable Indexes (SIRI)}. We propose to evaluate the SIRI instances based on five essential metrics: their efficiency for four index operations (i.e., lookup, update, comparison, and merge), as well as their \my{deduplication ratios} (i.e., the size of the index with deduplication over the size without deduplication). We establish the worst-case guarantees of each index in terms of these five metrics, and we experimentally evaluate all indexes in a large variety of settings. Based on our theoretical and empirical analysis, we conclude that POS-Tree is a favorable choice for indexing immutable data.
Pneumonia, the leading infectious killer of children under five, has been called a “forgotten killer,” “a neglected tragedy,” and a “global cause without champions.”1, 2 Despite causing 800 000 child deaths, more than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, pneumonia has never attracted the levels of support commensurate with its burden.3 Less than 5% of international Development Assistance for Health and just 3% of all infectious disease research spending, are allocated to pneumonia.4 While the Global Action Plan for Diarrhoea and Pneumonia (GAPPD)5 launched by World Health Organization and UNICEF in 2013 did set a global target of three child pneumonia deaths per 1000 live births by 2025, no government had developed a national strategy to achieve this target by 2019.a The lack of funding and planning have contributed to slow progress meeting the target and just two countries—Bangladesh and Indonesia—of the 20 with more than 10 000 annual child pneumonia deaths are on track to achieve the GAPPD pneumonia target.6 At current rates of progress, an estimated 6.3 million children will die from pneumonia by 2030 and many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) will fail to achieve the sustainable development goal for child survival. The solution is not another vertical program channeling billions of dollars to tackle a single disease. There would be little appetite from national governments or the global health and development community for such a mechanism, which might undermine efforts to expand the reach of integrated community case management (iCCM) and integrated management of childhood illness (IMCI) and strengthen primary health care services to deliver Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Experience suggests that further reductions in child mortality in LMICs will require approaches that are sensitive to the complex patterns of comorbidity between pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria and malnutrition, and cognizant of the rising challenges of rapid urbanization, vaccine hesitancy, air pollution, and the double burden of under and overnutrition. The case for harnessing existing mechanisms such as Gavi, the Global Fund, Unitaid, and the Global Financing Facility to better integrate vaccine delivery, nutrition, and community case management is increasingly compelling, and much more work is needed to align the efforts of international agencies engaged in child survival in the high-burden countries.7 The Every Breath Counts Coalition (EBCC; https://stoppneumonia.org/) was officially launched in November 2017 to provide a platform for governments and international health agencies to work together to achieve the GAPPD target. In an acknowledgment of the progress achieved by the Global Fund and Gavi, the 40 member EBCC is a public-private partnership with representation from UN agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), private foundations, pharmaceutical and medical technology companies, and universities. Each member has made a written commitment to support government efforts to accelerate reductions in child pneumonia deaths according to their capabilities along with the prevention, protection, diagnosis, and treatment continuum. EBCC works with governments to develop data-based pneumonia control strategies, delivered as part of national primary health care strengthening and UHC efforts. The EBCC has prioritized support to four large “transnational” clusters with large populations of children at heightened risk of death from pneumonia including, (a) Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Mali, (b) Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, (c) Ethiopia and Somalia, and (d) Pakistan and Afghanistan, the ambition of which is to support the development of bespoke pneumonia control strategies in each country. At the global level, three EBCC teams drive progress towards specific childhood pneumonia “global public goods” including: The development of routine indicators to measure access to pneumonia diagnosis and treatment; a set of agreed research priorities; and robust advocacy and communications activities. As Nigeria has the largest population of children at greatest risk of death from pneumonia, the EBCC supported the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Health (FMoH) to develop a pneumonia control strategy between January 2019 and 2020. Coalition members including USAID, the Nigerian offices of Dalberg, Save the Children, UNICEF, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) joined forces to support the process. To better understand the barriers preventing faster progress on reducing child pneumonia deaths in Nigeria, the Family Health Department within the FMoH invited 75 participants to a strategy workshop in Abuja in January 2019. Following this workshop, approximately 40 interviews with national and global stakeholders, supplemented by desk research and analysis of state-level policies and data on the burden of pneumonia deaths, were conducted by the strategy firm Dalberg on behalf of the FMoH. By early March 2019, the FMoH and the EBCC had developed a draft pneumonia control strategy, and the FMoH invited 30 partners to meet in Abuja in April 2019 to review the strategy and align the contents with the RMNCAH+N Strategy. EBCC and the FMoH then worked together to develop a more detailed implementation plan and an estimation of the financial resources needed to implement the strategy. Less than 7 months after the process began, a final workshop to validate the strategy took place in Abuja in July 2019. In October 2019, the Minister of Health officially approved the strategy and the strategy was officially launched in Nigeria on January 2020. This strategy development process generated several key lessons. The pneumonia control strategy development process elevated the status of childhood pneumonia as a key public health challenge in Nigeria. Bringing together a range of public (eg, Federal and State Ministries of Health and donor government missions), private (eg, manufacturers of vaccines, medical devices, and antibiotics), faith-based organizations, and civil society actors demonstrated an appetite for a greater focus on pneumonia and drew attention to the gaps and barriers in pneumonia control that were impeding progress to Nigeria's child survival target. Despite many competing priorities in health, stakeholders involved in the process became champions for pneumonia control. Two NGOs, Save the Children and CHAI even decided to integrate parts of the pneumonia control strategy into their own newborn and child health programming. The pneumonia control strategy development process also showed that it is possible to focus on a specific cause of child death, while promoting integrated case management of childhood illnesses at community and facility levels (ie, iCCM and IMCI). By emphasizing that pneumonia should be accorded a level of attention commensurate with its disease burden, the FMoH and EBCC were able to reposition and prioritize pneumonia as a major killer, deserving of at least the same levels of investment as other leading but much better resourced killers (eg, malaria). The process to develop the pneumonia control strategy enhanced cross-sectoral and interministerial collaboration across all levels of government in Nigeria. Effective pneumonia control depends on the coordinated actions of different federal, state, and local government agencies to prevent, diagnose, and treat pneumonia at all levels of the health care system. The Nigerian FMoH had to work closely with the Agriculture, Energy, and Environment Ministries to prevent pneumonia by improving vaccination, nutrition, and clean air. In addition, the FMoH must find ways to influence State and Local Government health actors to improve the diagnosis and treatment of childhood pneumonia in primary health care and hospital services, as these are decentralized responsibilities. The FMoH and EBCC were able to bring these various government actors together for the first time to talk about pneumonia control and offer the support of private and nonprofit sector partners. Lastly, and critically, the experience in Nigeria highlights the importance of taking a data-driven approach that puts the most vulnerable populations of children first. While it is still challenging to map child pneumonia deaths at national and subnational levels, data are improving rapidly and governments have new tools to identify childhood pneumonia “hotspots” where deaths concentrate.8 In Nigeria, the subnational child pneumonia maps released by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in 2019 revealed “hotspots” in several northern states. Targeting pneumonia control efforts to these children represents the most cost-effective path to reduce pneumonia deaths and achieve the GAPPD target. The EBCC is committed to sharing these new tools with governments so that they can help direct scarce resources in ways that maximize the number of child pneumonia deaths prevented. These maps not only enable governments to prioritize the most vulnerable children but also to require their international health and development partners to do the same. Nigeria is pioneering a new approach to achieving the GAPPD target. Its pneumonia control strategy will need to be monitored and evaluated over the next 5 years to assess results, to ensure that partners are held accountable for delivering on their commitments and to capture learnings that can inform other governments. If successful, the Nigerian pneumonia control strategy could become a blueprint for other countries struggling with heavy burdens of child pneumonia deaths to achieve the GAPPD target and strengthen integrated newborn and child health policies and programs.
Gamze Gürsoy, Charlotte M. Brannon, Eric Ni, Sarah Wagner · 6 authors
Abstract The genomic characterization of individuals promises to be immensely useful for biomedical research and healthcare. However, a critical barrier to expanding personal genome sequencing is achieving secure, high-integrity storage of raw data. While cloud storage offers solutions to access such data from any place and device, the vulnerabilities of centralized storage in relation to security, data integrity, and robustness, such as single points of failure, have not yet been addressed. Blockchain is a potential alternative to these storage modes. However, storing large-scale data on blockchain can be challenging due to slow transaction speeds, the potential for chains to reach large sizes, and limitations on querying data stored on-chain. Currently, several genomic storage applications incorporate blockchain, but likely because of these challenges, many use blockchain only to facilitate and log data-access transactions, rather than to store raw genomic data on-chain. While this secures the process of data access, it does not secure the data itself, which is often stored off-chain (i.e. in a cloud or file-hosting services). Here, we developed a novel method of storing reference-aligned reads on-chain in a private blockchain network. We also developed tools for accessing and analyzing the on-chain data. We addressed the challenges of on-chain data storage by minimizing the data inserted to the chain using reference-based data compression techniques and by binning the on-chain data by genomic location to reduce retrieval times. Our tools provide open-source blockchain-based storage and access for advanced genomic analyses such as variant calling.
Abstract Blockchain, as one of the most promising technology, has attracted tremendous attention. The interesting characteristics of blockchain are decentralized ledger and strong security, while non-repudiation is the important property of information security in blockchain. A digital signature scheme is an effective approach to achieve non-repudiation. In this paper, the characteristics of blockchain and the digital signature to guarantee information non-repudiation are firstly discussed. Secondly, the typical digital signature schemes in blockchain are classified and analyzed, and then the state-of-the-art digital signatures are investigated and compared in terms of application fields, methods, security, and performance. Lastly, the conclusions are given, and some future works are suggested to stir research efforts in this field. Our works will facilitate to design efficient and secure digital signature algorithms in blockchain.
Graph algorithms enormously contribute to the domains such as blockchains, social networks, biological networks, telecommunication networks, and several others. The ever-increasing demand of data-volume, as well as speed of such applications, have essentially transported these applications from their comfort zone: static setting, to a challenging territory of dynamic updates. At the same time, mainstreaming of multi-core processors have entailed that the dynamic applications should be able to exploit concurrency as soon as parallelization gets inhibited. Thus, the design and implementation of efficient concurrent dynamic graph algorithms have become significant. This paper reports a novel library of concurrent shared-memory algorithms for breadth-first search (BFS), single-source shortest-path (SSSP), and betweenness centrality (BC) in a dynamic graph. The presented algorithms are provably non-blocking and linearizable. We extensively evaluate C++ implementations of the algorithms through several micro-benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate the scalability with the number of threads. Our experiments also highlight the limitations of static graph analytics methods in a dynamic setting.
Com o surgimento das Criptomoedas os debates sobre sua regulamentação jurídica e sua confiabilidade vêm se destacando no âmbito jurídico. Este presente trabalho tem o objetivo de contribuir, sobre o que são Criptomoedas, como funcionam e a possibilidade ou impossibilidade de sua regulamentação. Com base em diversas obras de autores em várias áreas de conhecimento, explora-se a Criptomoeda em um âmbito mais geral, além do principal foco, que e a viabilidade de incidência desse ativo no imposto de renda. Ademais, a questão da natureza tributária da Criptomoeda. O desenvolvimento deste trabalho inicia conceituando com o contexto histórico da moeda, conceituando Criptomoedas assim como a mais conhecida delas, chamada Bitcoin e seus desdobramentos, com uma analise jurídica do tema, estudando a necessidade/possibilidade de sua regulamentação.
In recent days, the technologies referred to as Block-chain and Bitcoin have gained much interest from society. These activities are increasing relevancy in the era of digitization and which forms a digital economy in the United States and all over the world. Currently, the automation of IT has deployed the use of technology atomization process through robotics hence machine production, the development of the framework of artificial intelligence, the Block-chain, and Bitcoin referred to as the open systems, the concepts of big data, algorithms of software, and the neural networks. In the implementation of enterprise, it is not easy to access the possibilities of assessing adequately and the consequences, which includes the opportunities of a qualitative change. In the last century, the invention of the essential ingredients that are key in the cryptography and its use in the hash functions have been underway and have also included the sensitivities that will enable Block-chain and Bitcoin to be successful. In recent years, technology has become available for the systems of payment, and other applications that revolve around bold issues, and the contracts are smart. The essay will discuss the automation trends and consequences of Block-chain and Bitcoin in the various sectors of the economy, including the industries. The paper will also comment on the analogies associated with the payments that may lead to a deeper understanding of the properties of Block-chain and Bitcoin.
We have established that a relatively new market of cryptocurrency is the subject of great interest for research under the current conditions of financial innovations in payment services. Our findings have revealed objective prerequisites for creating cryptocurrency as an innovative means of information-based payment. Cryptocurrency poses a challenge to the financial system of Ukraine since both the central bank and other state regulators can not control its emission and circulation. They show the growth dynamics in cryptocurrency market capitalization where Bitcoin predominates. Although cryptocurrency is not included in the National Register of payment systems and it is officially prohibited for circulation in Ukraine, our country ranks among the world’s top five countries by number of users of different bitcoin-wallets.
 We have examined the strengths of Bitcoin that have made this cryptocurrency a convenient means of international payment with a high investment potential. The results show disadvantages to using cryptocurrency for both the whole country in general and ordinary consumers in particular. We have defined main threats that national governments can face in case of an unregulated spread of cryptocurrency. Also this study, based on the works of leading foreign scientists and financial market experts, systematizes factors that influence the price of Bitcoin. It substantiates opportunities and prospects for the cryptocurrency market development in Ukraine.
 The study has shown that cryptocurrencies have their own niche in payment systems; they are quite competitive and reliable financial instruments. The growth dynamics of cryptocurrency market capitalization in the world makes Bitcoin the most successful example of the use of virtual currency in the information economy. As the modern society is being inevitably virtualized, our country’s economy should follow the path of innovations by finding solutions to a number of technical, economic and legal issues on the cryptocurrency market development in Ukraine through involving the experience of the leading European countries.
N. Pantielieieva, Н. В. Рогова, Serhii Braichenko, S. DZHOLOS · 5 authors
The article is devoted to the analysis of transformation of economic relations due to the emergence of such phenomenon as cryptocurrency. It is substantiated that its appearance is connected with the development of the information society, the formation of the virtual economy and the spread of digitization processes in all spheres of economic activity. It is proved that despite the innovative nature of the revolutionary character and the considerable potential for stimulating radical changes in the sphere of economic relations and economic model of modern society, the cryptocurrency is a confirmation of the evolution of money. From the point of view of the theory of money, the ability of cryptocurrency to perform the functions of money (measures of value, means of payment and medium of exchange, accumulation, world money), as well as new specific functions — social, regulatory, indicative and others, — have been proved.
 Analysis of the practice of cryptocurrencies spread gave the opportunity to reveal their characteristic features on grounds of the format of money, unit of account, legal status, money creation, stability of payment, mechanism of exchange, regulation and supervision, risks, etc. In addition, the positive properties of cryptocurrencies and their possible negative effects are identified.
 It is emphasized that the adoption and active spread of cryptocurrencies leads to the transformation of economic relations, and more precisely, the objective formation of a new system of economic relations as a compensator of the negative manifestations of a modern economic society, which, at the same time, has exacerbated to some extent the threats to the traditional monetary system. This is confirmed by the tendencies of the development of the cryptocurrency market, changes in the position of the central banks of the countries of the world from rigid rejection to the development of national cryptocurrencies, including in Ukraine.
 The problematic aspects of determining the legal status of cryptocurrencies in the regulation of cryptocurrency in Ukraine from the point of view of civil-law relations and relatively criminal-law context have been identified. It is concluded that it is necessary to determine the legal status of cryptocurrency in Ukraine, taking into account the position of the leading countries of the world.
The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) brought innovation along with unprecedented benefits of convenience and efficacy in many operations that were otherwise very cumbersome. This innovation explosion has surfaced a new dimension of vulnerability and physical threat to the data integrity of IoT networks. Implementing conventional cryptographic algorithms on IoT devices is not future-proof as these devices are constrained in terms of computational power, performance, and memory. In this paper, we are proposing a novel framework, a unique model that integrates IoT networks with a blockchain to address potential privacy and security threats for data integrity. Smart contracts are instrumental in this integration process and they are used to handle device authentication, authorization and access-control, and data management. We further share a new design model for interfaces to integrate both platforms while highlighting its performance results over the existing models. With the incorporation of off-chain data storage into the framework, overall scalability of the system can be increased. Finally, our research concludes how the proposed framework can be fused virtually into any existing IoT applications with minimal modifications.