The objective of this article is to analyze the tie between the financings of the Decentralized Financial System (DFS) and the agricultural growth in Senegal. We use a linear equation model. The survey covers the active period of 1999 to 2013. Results show that the Decentralized Financial System has a positive and significant impact on the agricultural GDP in Senegal.
С. А. Корольков, Alexander G. Losev, Vasily V. Tarakanov
This publication belongs to case category. The main task of the research is to formulate methods and algorithms of financial analysis and teaching process management at the university. It suggests designing financial mathematical model of budget financing for university structural units on the basis of teaching and financial plans of teaching programs. This model is based on per capita financing of educational institutions acting upon state order. The authors of the article have already designed and presented practical implementation of original algorithms for forming salary funds for lecturers from the chairs. The article presents the main principles of the model analyzing main outcomes of its implementation and formulates possible challenges and ways of solving then. There has been a significant economic effect of introducing the model, absence of legal limitations for its implementation, perspectives of its development in the field of prognosticating university structural units’ financial position, implementing effective contracts, network form of training and individual educational trajectories. Developed method of budgeting for structural units can be used at any university on the basis of curricula analysis and making teaching and financial plans. Its implementation eliminates discrepancies between principles of business support of educational activities in general and its individual structures (chairs); creates an opportunity for calculating the costs of curriculum modules and components; improves efficacy of teaching process organization; formation of financial mechanism for implementing individual educational trajectories by the students and network forms of training, basic chairs functioning, decentralization of financial and economic management and creation of prerequisites for acknowledging a chair as the center of financial responsibility. The model is original and is in fact a natural continuation of per capita financing of university educational activities.
Loss of control is a serious problem in aviation that primarily affects General Aviation. Technological advancements can help mitigate the problem, but the FAA certification process makes certain solutions economically unfeasible. This investigation presents the design of a generic adaptive autopilot that could potentially lead to a single certification for use in several makes and models of aircraft. The autopilot consists of a conventional controller connected in series with a robust direct adaptive model reference controller. In this architecture, the conventional controller is tuned once to provide outer-loop guidance and navigation to a reference model. The adaptive controller makes unknown aircraft behave like the reference model, allowing the conventional controller to successfully provide navigation without the need for retuning. A strong theoretical foundation is presented as an argument for the safety and stability of the controller. The stability proof of direct adaptive controllers require that the plant being controlled has no unstable transmission zeros and has a nonzero high frequency gain. Because most conventional aircraft do not readily meet these requirements, a process known as sensor blending was used. Sensor blending consists of using a linear combination of the plant’s outputs that has no unstable transmission zeros and has a nonzero high frequency gain to drive the adaptive controller. Although this method does not present a problem for regulators, it can lead to a steady state error in tracking applications. The sensor blending theory was expanded to take advantage of the system’s dynamics to allow for zero steady state error tracking. This method does not need knowledge of the specific system’s dynamics, but instead uses the structure of the A and B matrices to perform the blending for the general case. The generic adaptive autopilot was tested in two high-fidelity nonlinear simulators of two typical General Aviation aircraft. The results show that the autopilot was able to adapt appropriately to the different aircraft and was able to perform three-dimensional navigation and an ILS approach, without any modification to the controller. The autopilot was tested in moderate atmospheric turbulence, using consumer-grade sensors and actuators currently available in General Aviation aircraft. The generic adaptive autopilot was shown to be robust to atmospheric turbulence and sensor and actuator random noise. In both aircraft simulators, the autopilot adapted successfully to changes in airspeed, altitude, and configuration. This investigation proves the feasibility of a generic autopilot using direct adaptive controller. The autopilot does not need a priori information of the specific aircraft’s dynamics to maintain its safety and stability arguments. Real-time parameter estimation of the aircraft dynamics are not needed. Recommendations for future work are provided.
In this paper, we analyse the workings of commercial banks in a scenario where crypto-currencies are the mainstream bills of exchange. We start by explaining the concept of cryptocurrencies (also referred to as cryptocoins in this paper). Then we discuss the concept of Regulated and Sovereign Backed Cryptocurrencies (RSBCs). Later on, we envisage a scenario where cryptocoins are the main media of exchange. The banking aspects of Paper money, Bitcoins and RSBCs are then deliberated. We analyse the interplays between Banking and various currency formats. Finally, the paper concludes as to which currency is best suited to be the mainstream bill of exchange.
Information technology has become an indispensable part of the U.S. banking industry. The industries commitment to evolving advantageous technology is evident in the growing financial commitment to distributed ledger or "blockchain" technology. The advancing technology is transforming the configuration of the U.S. banking industry model established with the passing of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. The present paper investigates the literature to provide an understanding of the transformation of the U.S. banking industry created by advancing technology.
July 22, 2016. A Florida state court dismisses a three-count information against a sole defendant in "a Miami money-laundering case that is being closely watched around the world." The defendant, a dealer of the virtual currency bitcoin, is free to go. He is also free to continue engaging in the sale of bitcoin. This "victory for bitcoin users" was the first state court case to address Bitcoin in the context of the money services business and anti-money laundering statutes. And on every front, the court got it wrong — while the world was watching. Federal and state prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and the Bitcoin community paid careful attention to the case. And although the opinion is not binding, it must be given its "proper regard." The Little Case That Could has effectively become the Little Case That Shouldn't. Two avenues must be pursued to correct the problems with the Espinoza court's findings. First, a Florida appellate court must overturn the decision on appeal. Second, the legal and financial communities must, as the Southern District of New York already has, disregard the Espinoza court's ineffective reasoning as they continue to develop the law of Bitcoin. Because while this Florida state case awaits appeal, and is not binding on any court, it remains persuasive authority in an area of law where few cases have directly analyzed the character of Bitcoin. As the law is in a constant state of growth, a trial court order opining on this topic has the possibility to cause damage. What exactly did the court do — and decline to do — when it dismissed the charges against Espinoza? And why is this state court dismissal of these charges against a sole defendant so potentially troubling across the world? To answer these questions, we first must turn to the currency (or is it?) at the center of the case: bitcoin. Part I of this article seeks to explain in largely non-technical terms the design of the Bitcoin network. Part II explains the guidance and administrative rulings provided by the United States Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network in relation to the issues in the Espinoza case. Additionally, Part II surveys different approaches taken by state legislatures and regulators in seeking to address decentralized virtual currencies, including bitcoin. Careful attention is paid to how the terms "monetary value" and "virtual currency" are defined, and how those definitions have been interpreted. Part II further explores the differences in the way the respective laws and guidelines treat different members of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Part III analyzes the Espinoza case, taking a critical look at the reasoning behind the dismissal of the criminal information, and suggests that the court's holdings are analytically unsound. Finally, we argue that the Espinoza case must not be allowed to stand and needs to be reversed on appeal.
Blockchains and Byzantine Fault Tolerance form the basis of decentralized currencies and ledgers such as Bitcoin, Ripple, ZeroCash, and Ethereum. A large slate of literature has focused on the currency aspects (e.g. anonymity, independence from central banks, etc.). We argue that, as-far-as Distributed Payment Transactions Networks (PTNs) are concerned, there are other, possibly more interesting, properties. This paper provides a systematic review of both traditional PTNs and their analogues in decentralized ledgers and associates different technological features to the corresponding business and financial requirements. We provide a conceptual classification of the key properties (value creation, payment promise, transaction fulfillment, and value preservation). We map existing (distributed) PTNs into the classification showing different alternatives are possible. Furthermore, the ideas behind distributed ledgers can be extended beyond payments and contracts. We illustrate the idea of derivatives-contracts-as-programs that are marked to market (or an account that is margined) automatically by computations run on, and whose ownership transitions are recorded, in a distributed payment network.
In both query and communication complexity, we give separations between the class NISZK, containing those problems with non-interactive statistical zero knowledge proof systems, and the class UPP, containing those problems with randomized algorithms with unbounded error. These results significantly improve on earlier query separations of Vereschagin [Ver95] and Aaronson [Aar12] and earlier communication complexity separations of Klauck [Kla11] and Razborov and Sherstov [RS10]. In addition, our results imply an oracle relative to which the class NISZK is not contained in PP. This answers an open question of Watrous from 2002 [Aar]. The technical core of our result is a stronger hardness amplification theorem for approximate degree, which roughly says that composing the gapped-majority function with any function of high approximate degree yields a function with high threshold degree. Using our techniques, we also give oracles relative to which the following two separations hold: perfect zero knowledge (PZK) is not contained in its complement (coPZK), and SZK (indeed, even NISZK) is not contained in PZK (indeed, even HVPZK). Along the way, we show that HVPZK is contained in PP in a relativizing manner.
We prove a number of implications of these results, which may be of independent interest outside of structural complexity. Specifically, our oracle separation implies that certain parameters of the Polarization Lemma of Sahai and Vadhan [SV03] cannot be much improved in a black-box manner. Additionally, it implies new lower bounds for property testing algorithms with error probability arbitrarily close to 1/2. Finally, our results imply that two-message protocols in the streaming interactive proofs model of Cormode et al. [CTY11] are surprisingly powerful in the sense that, with just logarithmic cost, they can compute functions outside of UPP^CC.
Abstract The Naor–Yung paradigm [63] allows to generically boost security under chosen-plaintext attacks (CPA) to security against chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA) for public-key encryption (PKE) schemes. The main idea is to encrypt the plaintext twice (under independent public keys), and to append a non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proof that the two ciphertexts indeed encrypt the same message. Later work by Camenisch, Chandran, and Shoup [32] and Naor and Segev [ 28 , 30 ] established that the very same technique can also be used in the settings of key-dependent message (KDM) and key-leakage attacks (respectively). In this paper we study the conditions under which the two ciphertexts in the Naor–Yung construction can share the same random coins. We find that this is possible, provided that the underlying PKE scheme meets an additional simple property. The motivation for re-using the same random coins is that this allows to design much more efficient NIZK proofs. We showcase such an improvement in the random oracle model, under standard complexity assumptions including Decisional Diffie–Hellman, Quadratic Residuosity, and Subset Sum. The length of the resulting ciphertexts is reduced by 50%, yielding truly efficient PKE schemes achieving CCA security under KDM and key-leakage attacks. As an additional contribution, we design the first PKE scheme whose CPA security under KDM attacks can be directly reduced to (low-density instances of) the Subset Sum assumption. Our PKE scheme supports key-dependent messages computed via any affine function of the secret key.
Oriane Blondel, Patrícia Gonçalves, Marielle Simon
In this paper we prove the convergence to the stochastic Burgers equation from one-dimensional interacting particle systems, whose dynamics allow the degeneracy of the jump rates. To this aim, we provide a new proof of the second order Boltzmann-Gibbs principle introduced in [7]. The main technical difficulty is that our models exhibit configurations that do not evolve under the dynamics - the blocked configurations - and are locally non-ergodic. Our proof does not impose any knowledge on the spectral gap for the microscopic models. Instead, it relies on the fact that, under the equilibrium measure, the probability to find a blocked configuration in a finite box is exponentially small in the size of the box. Then, a dynamical mechanism allows to exchange particles even when the jump rate for the direct exchange is zero.
Esta nota se tratará el tema de Bitcoin, la criptomoneda líder que surge en el año 2009 como una alternativa a la moneda fiduciaria. Bitcoin ha crecido considerablemente, tanto en términos de valor como en la conciencia colectiva internacional; sin embargo, los anuncios y regulaciones exploradas afectarían a todas las monedas digitales en general. Primero, esta nota explica el concepto tecnológico y funcional detrás de Bitcoin en términos de fácil acceso para el usuario y proporciona una breve discusión teórica sobre la historia de la aparición del dinero en el comercio. Segundo, analiza algunos de los efectos que tendría la regulación de Bitcoin y otras criptomonedas empezando con un análisis de los anuncios creados por agencias y departamentos federales de los Estados Unidos, continúa con un análisis de las regulaciones estatales de California, Texas y Nueva York. Se examina los componentes más importantes y las implicaciones que puedan tener sobre el uso de Bitcoin. Además se exploran otras leyes que han sido promulgadas en América Latina por Bolivia, Brasil, Colombia y Ecuador para regular el uso de las monedas digitales.
This paper discuss the smoke sensor and the relay control in the smart home.STM32 is used as the central part of the whole system and LwIP protocol is also applied to transfer data. The system uses the MQ-2 smoke sensor detect the concentration of combustible gases in air, and uses the SRD-05VDC-SL-C to close and cut off the circuit. The paper also discuss the sensitivity characteristics and the temperature and humidity effect of the smoke sensor. At the end of the paper, it is given the C code in the KEIL MDK environment.
The smart grid is widely considered as an efficient and intelligent power system. With the aid of communication technologies, the smart grid can enhance the efficiency and reliability of the grid system through intelligent energy management. However, with the development of new energy sources, storage and transmission technologies together with the heterogeneous architecture of the grid network, several new features have been incorporated into the smart grid. These features make the energy trading more complex and pose a significant challenge on designing efficient trading schemes. Based on this motivation, in this paper, we present a comprehensive review of several typical economic incentive approaches adopted in the energy-trading control mechanisms. We focus on the technologies that address the challenges specific to the new features of the smart grid. Furthermore, we investigate the energy trading in a new cloud-based vehicle-to-vehicle energy exchange scenario. We propose an optimal contract-based electricity trading scheme, which efficiently increases the generated profit.
Although indispensable and in daily use, money and more specifically money creation in our two-layered fractional reserve banking system is still poorly recognized by social science at large. Its main features are outlined in order to identify (a) money’s double nature to be private and public at once and (b) inflation and speculative excess as two of its inherent dangers. Bitcoin and sovereign money are discussed as prominent examples of, on the one hand, private or libertarian and, on the other hand state-oriented or social-democratic monetary reforms, each intended to solve one of the two systemic problems our currency order. The new money’s respective advantages notwithstanding, it is shown that neither Bitcoin nor sovereign money can overcome money’s double nature or realize the dream of an eventually neutral money.
Sebastiaan de Hoogh, Berry Schoenmakers, Meilof Veeningen
For many applications of secure multiparty computation it is natural to demand that the output of the protocol is verifiable. Verifiability should ensure that incorrect outputs are always rejected, even if all parties executing the secure computation collude. Since the inputs to a secure computation are private, and potentially the outputs are private as well, adding verifiability is in general hard and costly. In this paper we focus on privacy-preserving linear programming as a typical and practically relevant case for verifiable secure multiparty computation. We introduce certificate validation as an effective technique for achieving verifiable linear programming. Rather than verifying the computation proper, which involves many iterations of the simplex algorithm, we extend the output of the secure computation with a certificate. The certificate allows for efficient and direct validation of the correctness of the output. The overhead incurred by the computation of the certificate is marginal. For the validation of a certificate we design particularly efficient distributed-prover zero-knowledge proofs, fully exploiting the fact that we can use ElGamal encryption for this purpose, hence avoiding the use of more elaborate cryptosystems such as Paillier encryption. We also formulate appropriate security definitions for our approach, and prove security for our protocols in this model, paying special attention to ensuring properties such as input independence. By means of several experiments performed in a real multi-cloud-provider environment, we show that the overall performance for verifiable linear programming is very competitive, incurring minimal overhead compared to protocols providing no correctness guarantees at all.
Fiscal decentralization and intergovernmental fiscal relations reform have become nearly ubiquitous in developing countries. Performance, however, has often been disappointing in terms of both policy formulation and outcomes. The dynamics underlying these results have been poorly researched. Available literature focuses heavily on policy and institutional design concerns framed by public finance, fiscal federalism, and public management principles. The literature tends to explain unsatisfactory outcomes largely as a result of some combination of flawed design and management of intergovernmental fiscal systems, insufficient capacity, and lack of political will. These factors are important, but there is room to broaden the analysis in at least two potentially valuable ways. First, much can be learned by more robustly examining how national and local political and bureaucratic forces shape the policy space, providing opportunities for and placing constraints on effective and sustainable reform. Second, the analysis would benefit from moving beyond design to considering how to implement reform more strategically.