Abstract We study transactions in which sellers fear being underpaid because their outside option is better known to the buyer. We rationalize various observed contracts as solutions to such smart buyer problems. Key to these solutions is granting the seller upside participation. In contrast, the lemons problem calls for granting the buyer downside protection. But, in either case, the seller (buyer) receives a convex (concave) claim. Thus, contracts usually associated with the lemons problem, such as debt or cash-equity offers, can be equally well manifestations of the smart buyer problem, although the two information asymmetries have opposite cross-sectional implications. Received December 23, 2014; accepted May 23, 2016 by Editor Uday Rajan.
Background: Health financing provided by the government greatly helps the implementation of health system in the decentralized era. General Allocation Fund and Local Revenue and Expenditure Budget are apparently inadequate to finance health service. Some efforts have been made to finance health service such as Community Health Insurance (Jamkesmas), Childbirth Insurance (Jampersal), and Health Operational Fund (Bantuan Operasional Kesehatan/BOK). These are meant to achieve Millennium Development Goals in 2015. The practice of coordination from planning to implementation and stakeholdersâ commitment can affect the process of maternal and child health service. Coordination is definitely needed to run the program policy and prevent the overlapping financing in order that the objective of the program can be achieved. Objective: To evaluate coordination of planning, implementation and stakeholdersâ commitment in relation to maternal and child health (MCH) service in Lombok Tengah District. Method: This was a descriptive-analytical study with a qualitative approach and a case-study design. Samples were taken purposively. The data were obtained through in-depth interview, observation and documentation analysis. Result: The planning coordination of MCH health financing had not been optimal, even despite the involvement of cross sector and program. However, the organizations of health professionals were not involved in program planning. The coordination of health financing implementation had not been optimal as well. Even though there was no overlapping financing from some different sources, in the policy implementation there was cost sharing for referral and drugs. Private sectors were not involved in the implementation of Jampersal. Stakeholdersâ commitment was relatively optimum as reflected from the policy and action in health development acceleration particularly MCH. The process of MCH service at both primary and secondary level could run well. Conclusion: Coordination of MCH financing implementation in Lombok Tengah District through BOK, Jampersal, Jamkesmas, Community Empowerment National Program of Healthy and Smart Generation and Local Revenue and Expenditure Budget had not been optimal; therefore, it needed to be improved to eliminate cost sharing. Professional organizations and private health providers were not yet involved in the program planning and implementation. Keywords: coordination, stakeholdersâ commitment, health financing, maternal and child health, program evaluation
A series of smart hydrogels based on dual stimuli responsive star-block copolymers responding to pH and temperature were prepared via atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) employing the core-first method. They consist of poly(2-(dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate) (PDMA) inner blocks and outer blocks comprised of poly(di(ethylene glycol) methyl ether methacrylate) (PDEGMA). The aggregation behavior of these block copolymer stars is analyzed by dependence on block length and arm number. The dual stimuli responsiveness of the stars is demonstrated by turbidity as well as dynamic light scattering on dilute aqueous solution, and the gelation behavior of concentrated aqueous solutions is studied by rheology. Above the transition temperature of the PDEGMA outer blocks the stars form flower-like aggregates in dilute solution or free-standing gels at higher concentrations. When the temperature is increased further above the transition temperature of the PDMA inner block, the aggregates start to contract and a weakening was observed for soft gels, whereas for strong gels no influence on the moduli was detected. The behavior is controlled by both concentration and pH value. In addition, we show that the minimum polymer concentration for gel formation can be lowered by quaternizing the inner block of the stars, but a second response to stimuli is lost during the procedure.
Pascal Weibel, Miriam Ender, Jerzy Madon, Annelies S. Zinkernagel · 5 authors
Introducing PCR products into plasmids vectors is key for molecular techniques. Ideally cloning vectors are easy to construct, modify and propagate, neither require advanced techniques nor special equipment or reagents and efficiently incorporate PCR products at close to zero empty vector background. We provide an easy to engineer self-made cloning vector, neither requiring sophisticated tools or techniques nor advanced cloning knowledge. Through recombination we obtained the pUC18ccdB vector, carrying the ccdB suicide gene within the pUC18 backbone. When SmaI cleaved (within the ccdB) vector was T4 ligated with small (0.2 kbp) and intermediate (1.3 to 2.2 kbp) blunt end PCR-products and transformed into E. coli, the amount of clones with incorporated PCR product was comparable to commercial PCR-cloning kits and at a close to zero PCR product negative background. In conclusion we present a simple, versatile and cheap approach to an efficient âhome made â PCR-cloning vector that allows integration of crude blunt end PCR products at close to zero background.
The Fiat-Shamir paradigm was proposed as a way to remove interaction from 3-round proof of knowledge protocols and derive secure signature schemes. This generic transformation leads to very efficient schemes and has thus grown quite popular. However, this transformation is proven secure only in the random oracle model. In FOCS 2003, Goldwasser and Kalai showed that this transformation is provably insecure in the standard model by presenting a counterexample of a 3-round protocol, the Fiat-Shamir transformation of which is (although provably secure in the random oracle model) insecure in the standard model, thus showing that the random oracle is uninstantiable. In particular, for every hash function that is used to replace the random oracle, the resulting signature scheme is existentially forgeable. This result was shown by relying on the non-black-box techniques of Barak (FOCS 2001). An alternative to the Fiat-Shamir paradigm was proposed by Fischlin in Crypto 2005. Fischlinâs transformation can be applied to any so called 3-round âFiat-Shamir proof of knowledgeâ â and can be used to derive non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge as well as signature schemes. An attractive property of this transformation is that it provides online extractability (i.e., the extractor works without having to rewind the prover). Fischlin remarks that in comparison to the Fiat-Shamir transformation, his construction tries to
Due to the explosive development of global network structure, electronic commerce is increasingly playing an important role in many organizations and individual consumerâs daily life. It offers opportunities to significantly improve the way for businesses interactions between both customers and suppliers. More and more large scale and decentralized ecommerce mechanisms have emerged in industrial and commercial domains in a wide range. In particular, among all these applications, online auctions, which are flexible pricing mechanisms over internet, make the physical limitations of traditional auctions disappear. They gain their extra popularity in the daily life and attract globally dispersed users due to having the characteristics that âbargainingâ and ânegotiationâ besides all of the convenience. Thus, online auctions become one of the most widely studied and employed negotiation mechanisms today. Traditionally, in most current online auction applications, the traders are generally humans who operate all the behaviors to make transactions. These behaviors may involve observing the auctions, analyzing the auction information, and bidding the suitable price for the items. However, facing the increasingly demanding requirements and complexity of online trading, this kind of manual operation does not reveal the full potential of this new mode of commerce. Thus, in order to relieve the users and be more effective, exploring possible types and automating the behaviors in the online auction attract high interest. Now, in many studies, the agent-oriented auction mechanism, with its emphasis on autonomous actions and flexible interactions, arises as an effective and robust model for the dynamic and sensitive commerce environment. In such systems, the agent acts flexibly on behalf of its owner and is capable of local decision-making based on the environment information and pre-knowledge about the system. Among many different types of online auction, two of the most popular and studied types are Multiple Round English Auctions (MREA), which is single side auction, and Continuous Double Auction (CDA), which is double side auction. These auctions are newly emerged in e-commerce era based on the traditional auction types. They allow multiple agents to participate and one agent can deal with several auctions continuously or simultaneously, which are effective auction types to save time and relieve the users. Towards to these types, because there is no centralized system-wide control, the major challenge for automatic bidding strategies is to improve the degree of automation and optimize the agentâs bidding behavior in order to maximize the ownerâs profit. Most of the related researches have been conducted by using heuristic methods and fixed mathematical functions to compute the final optimal bidding price for the items or to compute how much should bid at each time step. Nevertheless, because auction environments are complicated and highly dynamic due to have many factors affecting each other, these approaches are not flexible enough for the dynamic environment, and there is no dominant strategy. Against this background, this thesis is concerned with developing the intelligence of autonomous agentâs bidding strategy in order to make the agent to be more efficient and competitive for agent-based online auction mechanisms, especially in MREA and CDA. In order to be more flexible and better exploit the market information, Genetic Network Programming (GNP) is firstly employed to the agentâs bidding strategy since its applicability and efficiency have been clarified in complex and dynamic problems in many other fields. GNP is one of the evolutionary optimization techniques developed as an extension of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Genetic Programming (GP), which uses compact directed graph structures as solutions. Basically speaking, in the proposed method, the GNP population represents the group of potential bidding strategies, and each individual uses the as-if/then decision-making functions to judge the auction information and guides the agent to take the suitable actions under different situations. Thus, it could be flexible and capable to adaptive to various auction situations. During the evolution, the GNP structure will be systematically organized, and finally, the individual which can obtain the highest profit is selected as the optimal bidding strategy at the end of training phase. In chapter 2, we introduced the conception of MREA and CDA in detail, which are the study environments in this thesis. The related researches are also introduced. In chapter 3, focusing on MREA, the bidding strategy for the auction agents in MREA is proposed using GNP. The performance of GNP-based agents is evaluated and studied in two situations: MREA is no time limit (NTL), and MREA is time limit (TL). Furthermore, according to the amount of the money each agent has, each situation is divided into 2 cases: general case and poorest case. All the participating agents in the simulations use GNP strategy. This chapter aims to study and analyze the capability and effectiveness of GNP for guiding bidding actions through the phenomenon of the simulations. The simulation results reveal that the agents using GNP strategy can understand various environments well through experiences and become smarter through evolution. In chapter 4, as an extension of the bidding strategy in chapter 3, in order to improving the agentâs intelligence and sensitivity, an enhanced bidding strategy for MREA is developed using GNP. Firstly, the GNP structure is modified to be able to judge more kinds of information and more situations at a time. Secondly, the strategy is improved to be able to consider the bidderâs attitude towards to each good, which makes the strategy to be more personalized for each bidder and could make the bidder more satisfied with the auction result and profit. The proposed strategy is compared with the previous GNP strategy and the other conventional strategies in the simulations. The simulation results demonstrated that the proposed method can outperform the previous one and is more competitive than the agents based on mathematical functions. In chapter 5, focusing on CDA, GNP with rectify nodes (GNP-RN) has been applied for CDA bidding strategy combined with proposed heuristic rules, which are derived based on the common believes for assisting agentâs bidding behavior. GNP-RN is developed aiming to guide the agent to be competitive under different CDA environments, and maximize the agentâs profit without losing chances for trading. Rectify Node (RN) is a newly proposed kind of nodes, which is used for bringing more flexible and various options for bidding action choices. 4 groups of simulations are designed to compare GNP-RN with conventional GNP and other strategies in CDA. In each simulation, the kinds of opponent agents are different in order to fully analyze the agentsâ performance. The simulation results show that the proposed method can outperform all the other strategies and achieve high success rate as well as high profit even when the situation is highly competitive. In chapter 6, as an extension of GNP-RN, GNP with adjusting parameters (GNP-AP) for developing bidding strategy in large-scale CDAs is proposed and studied. In large-scale CDAs, much more history information can be obtained than small-scale CDAs. In order to enhance the sensitivity for large-scale CDAs and the capability of judging abundant information, the parameters used by GNP-AP decision-making functions are adjusted during the evolution instead of being fixed in GNP-RN. Moreover, the structure of GNP-AP is designed to be more comprehensive that the number of branches of some kinds of nodes is increased to adapt to the complicated environment situations. The simulation results show that GNP-AP can obtain a good guidance for the large-scale CDAs and could be very efficient for the markets. In chapter 7, after giving the objectives and motivation of each research in this thesis, some conclusions about the proposed algorithms are described based on the simulation results.
In this thesis we present two new type systems for verifying the security of cryptographic protocol models expressed in a spi-calculus and, respectively, of protocol implementations expressed in a concurrent lambda calculus. In this thesis we present two new type systems for verifying the security of cryptographic protocol models expressed in a spi-calculus and, respectively, of protocol implementations expressed in a concurrent lambda calculus. The two type systems combine prior work on refinement types with union and intersection types and with the novel ability to reason statically about the disjointness of types. The increased expressivity enables the analysis of important protocol classes that were previously out of scope for the type-based analyses of cryptographic protocols. In particular, our type systems can statically analyze protocols that are based on zero-knowledge proofs, even in scenarios when certain protocol participants are compromised. The analysis is scalable and provides security proofs for an unbounded number of protocol executions. The two type systems come with mechanized proofs of correctness and efficient implementations.
When initializing cryptographic systems or running cryptographic protocols, the randomness of critical parameters, like keys or key components, is one of the most crucial aspects. But, randomly chosen parameters come with the intrinsic chance of duplicates, which finally may cause cryptographic systems including RSA, ElGamal and Zero-Knowledge proofs to become insecure. When concerning digital identifiers, we need uniqueness in order to correctly identify a specific action or object. Unfortunately we also need randomness here. Without randomness, actions become linkable to each other or to their initiatorâs digital identity. So ideally the employed (cryptographic) parameters should fulfill two potentially conflicting requirements simultaneously: randomness and uniqueness. This article proposes an efficient mechanism to provide both attributes at the same time without highly constraining the first one and never violating the second one. After defining five requirements on random number generators and discussing related work, we will describe the core concept of the generation mechanism. Subsequently we will prove the postulated properties (security, randomness, uniqueness, efficiency and privacy protection) and present some application scenarios including system-wide unique parameters, cryptographic keys and components, identifiers and digital pseudonyms.
JesĂșs Ruiz-Huerta Carbonell, Miguel Ăngel GarcĂa DĂaz
In Spain, as a consequence of the persistence of the economic crisis, the deficit and debt of the public administrations have become a main issue on the current economic and political debates In the case of a highly decentralized scenario, such it is the Spanish one, even if we recognize the principal role of Central GovernmentÂŽs debt, a large part of the increased Autonomous Communitiesâ deficit and indebtedness is explained by the difficulties they have to face in financing services they have to cover. The paper describes the main characteristics of public accountsâ disequilibria in Spain and the regulatory limits established to make use of public debt. Also, the article offers different explanations of those disequilibria, putting the emphasis on those linked to the crisis: i.e. the increasing weight of basic welfare services covered by the Autonomous Communities (such as public health and as education); as the expansive policies implemented to fight the initial effects of the crisis; as the existence of previous and large âextraordinaryâ resources coming from the housing sector and its consequent collapse; as growth of the debt of the autonomous-community quangos and as the lack of effective accountability mechanisms addressed to control the expenditures of the autonomous communities.
05/pdfs/A00677-00773.pdf 2 ENCIENDE Report, 2011, Page 25.elective teaching hours each one.If we take into account all compulsory secondary (including the fourth year) students who do not choose to take elective science on the last year, their science background will only be a 14% of the total hours 3 .Science in post-compulsory education is present specifically in the two years of Bachillerato, the upper secondary education addressed to higher education studies.In this post-compulsory courses, science education is part of two of the four available branches, that of Science and Technology.Post-compulsory science subjects also included in some of the specific branches of the intermediate vocational training (Ciclos formativos), for instance in those related with health or chemical industry. Mathematics educationThe curriculum includes the aim of 'applying mathematics in real life contexts', with emphasis on using what is familiar to students as a reference to learning contexts.Activities such as reflection, establishing a working plan, adapting it, generating a hypothesis and verifying the validity of the solution are also included in the core part of the curriculum.At primary level, 'problem-solving processes' are one of the central themes of mathematical activity and they should be the source and principal support for mathematical learning throughout primary education' 4 .The mathematics curriculum in compulsory secondary education also refers specifically to problem solving as a basic topic of the curriculum 5 , and mathematical content is adjusted so that it engages students and helps prepare them for adult life.Mathematics in primary education covers around 16 % of the national core curriculum, with a total of 535 hours 6 .Mathematics is also obligatory from the first to the fourth year of lower secondary education, with a total of 385 hours within the four years, which is about the 14% of the curriculum.Mathematics in post-compulsory education is present specifically in the two years of Bachillerato, the upper secondary education addressed to higher education studies.In this post-compulsory courses, mathematics education is part of three of the four available branches, that of Science, Technology and Social Studies, although in this last one mathematics has a different approach, as it is related to economics and other social studies' subjects.Post-compulsory mathematical subjects are also included in some of the specific branches of the intermediate vocational training (Ciclos formativos), for instance in those related with economics or business. The Catalan educational system: regional focus of Spanish TRACES projectThe TRACES project in Spain will be restricted to the Autonomous Community of Catalonia (Catalunya).This decision takes into account the complexity of the partially decentralized educational system in Spain, where different regions have different curriculums and school organization under a general
George Danezis, Markulf Kohlweiss, Benjamin Livshits, Alfredo Rial
Abstract. Nowadays, service providers gather fine-grained data about users to deliver personalized services, for example, through the use of third-party cookies or social network profiles. This poses a threat both to privacy, since the amount of information obtained is excessive for the purpose of customization, and authenticity, because those methods employed to gather data can be blocked and fooled. In this paper we propose privacy-preserving profiling techniques, in which users perform the profiling task locally, reveal to service providers the result and prove its correctness. We address how our approach applies to tasks of both classification and pattern recognition. For the former, we describe client-side profiling based on random forests, where users, based on certified input data representing their activity, resolve a random forest and reveal the classification result to service providers. For the latter, we show how to match a stream of user activity to a regular expression, or how to assign it a probability using a hidden Markov model. Our techniques, based on the use of zero-knowledge proofs, can be composed with other protocols as part of the certification of a larger computation. 1
Both national equity in healthcare and the county councilsâ local autonomy are important values supported by Swedish law. Politically it is a balancing act; how much freedom should the county councils have and to what extent should healthcare be equal throughout the country? The general aim of this dissertation, concerning political governance in Swedish healthcare, is to investigate the tensional values of national equity and local autonomy in the light of current trends in healthcare governance in Sweden. How is this tension manifested? Four studies are included in the dissertation. These studies show that the Swedish state is becoming more active in governing and regulating healthcare, for example by the use of informative governance and legislation, which increasingly rely on monitoring and evaluation of results that are made public. The findings show that the tension between national equity and local autonomy is manifested in increasing emphasis on national equity â or rather national equivalence â which is interpreted in terms of Swedish healthcare being recentralized. Delivery and financing of healthcare are still the responsibilities of the county councils. Planning and arranging â the setting of the regulatory framework â is increasingly taken over by the central state. Although power seems to be transferred from local level to central level, the county councilsâ autonomy is only partially restricted, which means Swedish healthcare is still decentralized. However, if the recentralization process proceeds further, the county councilsÂŽ autonomy may be seriously challenged. Another challenge is to maintain or strengthen the procedures for democratic legitimacy through citizen participation at the local level. When local autonomy looses ground, it becomes more difficult to tailor healthcare according to local needs and conditions in the county councils, and decisions are taken at greater distance from the citizens.
Open access
Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life
Cloud computing is an emerging evolutionary computing model that provides highly scalable services over high-speed Internet on a pay-as-usage model. However, cloud-based solutions still have not been widely deployed in some sensitive areas, such as banking and healthcare. The lack of widespread development is related to usersâ concern that their confidential data or privacy would leak out in the cloudâs outsourced environment. To address this problem, we propose a novel active data-centric framework to ultimately improve the transparency and accountability of actual usage of the usersâ data in cloud. Our data-centric framework emphasizes âactiveâ feature which packages the raw data with active properties that enforce data usage with active defending and protection capability. To achieve the active scheme, we devise the Triggerable Data File Structure (TDFS). Moreover, we employ the zero-knowledge proof scheme to verify the requestâs identification without revealing any vital information. Our experimental outcomes demonstrate the efficiency, dependability, and scalability of our framework.
Abstract. We study the probability that two or more agents can attain common knowledge of nontrivial events when the size of the state space grows large. We adopt the standard epistemic model where the knowledge of an agent is represented by a partition of the state space. Each agent is endowed with a partition generated by a random scheme consistent with his cognitive capacity. Assuming that agents â partitions are independently distributed, we prove that the asymptotic probability of nontrivial common knowledge undergoes a phase transition. Regardless of the number of agents, when their cognitive capacity is sufficiently large, the probability goes to one; and when it is small, it goes to zero. Our proofs rely on a graph-theoretic characterization of common knowledge that has independent interest.
Background: The degree of Maternal and Child Health (MCH) is still a major problem in health development in Indonesia. One factor that may be an obstacle in solving this problem is the limited cost. In this context, planning and cost utilization are essential to improve so that they can produce a great impact for the improvement of MCH. Therefore, in-depth information about the MCH financing situation in regions as an input to develop efficient activities in improving MCH status is needed. Objective: To analyze health financing situation of MCH program in 2010 which sourced from government and to make policy recommendations related to the program in Sabu Raijua District, East Nusa Tenggara Province. The situation in question is availability, budget planning process, expenditure accuracy, and fund flow rate. Method: This was a descriptive research with a case study strategy. Result: The total cost of MCH program was IDR 450,787,500. It was not sufficient to provide basic health services for pregnant women from early pregnancy until postpartum period. The budget proportion from the central, provincial, and district governments amounted to 79.63%, 3.56%, and 16.78%, respectively. Cost allocation of the district budget was 0.80%. Planning activities of MCH program was from the district budget through the development planning meeting (Musrenbang). Proposed activities in Musrenbang were dominated by physical activities. The cost of MCH program was spent more on direct activities and operational cost in villages and sub districts. The implementation of the activities was not supported by facilities and adequate human resources. The MCH fund disbursement from the central government was conducted in October- November while from the provincial and district governments were in July to August. Conclusion: The governmentâs commitment was still low in financing MCH program as a priority program due to budget decentralization. Musrenbang activities had not demonstrated significant impacts on quality activities improvement and budget allocations from the district budget. Availability of personnel and health facilities greatly affected the performance of MCH program. Delays in funds disbursement disrupted the implementation of activities and provided opportunities for corruption. Therefore, the supervision function must be improved both internal and external. Keywords: financing, maternal and child health program, health account, budget, government.
It examines the meanings defined in the creation of the Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology, it is inquiring about its direction and established organizational mechanism to achieve it. The procedure is a political appraisement of this transformation, based on Figueiredo and Figueiredo (1986) and Arretche (1998) and making use of legislation and government plans founders, analyzed by content type âinductive-constructiveâ. It was found that the Institutes are dedicated to the development understood as much as economic stability, the central ârestrictive institutional conventionâ, as income generation opportunities, indicator of the âneo-developmentalist convention.â The medium for this is, mainly, the provision of professional education courses and toplevel defined as the potential local and regional decentralized units of autonomous organizations. Thus, what drives the creation of Institutes is the link between qualification of handiwork and development, now anchored in the idea of growing productivity and attitudes such as entrepreneurship and cooperative system.