PIMMS (Portable Infrastructure for the Metafor Metadata System) provides institutions with tools to capture information about the workflow of running simulations from the design of experiments to the implementation of experiments via simulations running models. PIMMS uses the Metafor methodology for simulation documentation which consists of a common information model (CIM), a set of controlled vocabularies (CV) and software tools. PIMMS software tools provide for the creation and consumption of CIM content via a web infrastructure and portal.PIMMS will refactor the "CMIP5 questionnaire" metadata management tool, that is collecting climate model metadata for the CMIP5 model inter-comparison project, so that it can be more easily portable into stand alone installations within the university environment and customised to address the specific requirements of individual research groups. Initial model descriptions may take time to complete but once they have been cre ated the PIMMS infrastructure can be used to document subsequent variations by describing only those elements that are changed. An established PIMMS infrastructure will fit seamlessly into the research metadata workflow and significantly reduce subsequent documentation effort. The key to the customisation of PIMMS is in the modularity of its tools and the clear separation of structure (CIM) from content (CV). The PIMMS project will extend the CMIP5 controlled vocabulary to encompass descriptions of paleoclimate models and will also demonstrate how the CIM can be used to document an Integrated Assessment Model (IAM). This proof of concept prototype will create a new controlled vocabulary in collaboration with Ermitage and use it to reconfigure PIMMS to collect metadata in a different discipline. PIMMS will further explore how the CV that is used to configure PIMMS may be of further use to our stake holders and the wider JISC community through the development of the Uni versity of Cambridge chemicaltagger tool. PIMMS will provide a local portal so that research groups can view and search their own content, as well as publish their metadata content to institutional, national and international services. In addition PIMMS will also include data node software so that data documented with PIMMS can also be published to the web, both locally, and to national and international services.
Welcome to the special issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience (CCPE) journal. This special issue compiles a number of excellent technical contributions that significantly advance the state-of-the-art in autonomic cloud computing. Cloud computing 1, 2 is an emerging utility computing model that allows users to dynamically access, select, and configure a large pool of IT resources (virtual machine templates, storage, and networking elements) and deliver them as âcomputing utilitiesâ to consumers in a pay-as-you-go manner. Several vendors have emerged in this space including IBM, VMware, Microsoft, Manjrasoft, and Yahoo. This model of computing is quite attractive, especially for small and medium sized enterprises, as it allows them to focus on consuming or offering services on top of cloud infrastructure. At high-level, cloud computing might not seem radically different from the existing paradigms: World Wide Web, grid computing, and cluster computing. However, key differentiators of cloud computing are its technical characteristics such as on-demand resource pooling or rapid elasticity, self-service, almost infinite scalability, end-to-end virtualization support, and robust support of resource usage metering and billing. Additionally, nontechnical differentiators include services that are offered under pay-as-you-go-model, guaranteed Service Level Agreement (SLA), faster time to deployments, lower upfront costs, little or no maintenance overhead, and environment friendliness. Unpredictability is a fact in a distributed computing environment, and the Cloud is no exception. Performance unpredictability 3 in the Cloud is in fact a major issue for many users and it is coined as one of the major obstacles for cloud computing. For instance, researchers (biologists, physicists, finance analysts, etc.) expect guaranteed performance for their experiments, independent of the current workload and state 4 of IT resources of the Cloud, because this is key to repeatability of results. Other examples are small and medium sized enterprises (gaming company, web application providers) that want strict assurance on SLA; for example, an end-user request for a web page or multimedia content has to be served within the agreed time-limit. Hence, it is highly important for Cloud vendors that they have the ability to offer guaranteed SLAs based on performance metrics â such as response time and throughput. Interestingly, vendors seem to base their SLAs on availability of their offering, while completely ignoring response time and throughput. Hence, it is clear that dealing with performance unpredictability is critical to exploiting the full potential of clouds. In this special issue, we have tried to compile some high quality papers that exhaustively deal with some of the aforementioned issues. Next, we briefly describe the technical contributions, which were selected for publication in this special issue. All of the selected papers underwent a rigorous peer-review process. The end-to-end QoS negotiation for SLA establishment for composite services involves compound multiparty negotiations in which the composite service provider concurrently negotiates with multiple candidates for each atomic service, selecting the one that best satisfies the atomic service QoS preferences while ensuring that the end-to-end QoS requirements are also fulfilled. It is necessary to derive the atomic utility boundaries from the global utility boundary to be able to negotiate with potential candidates. Additionally, there has to be a mechanism for updating these boundaries in subsequent negotiation rounds based upon the individual negotiation outcomes. To counter these complexities, in paper 5 titled âEstablishing Composite SLAs through Concurrent QoS Negotiation with Surplus Redistributionâ, Richter et al. propose an algorithm for the decomposition of global utility boundary into atomic service utility boundaries, and the surplus redistribution from successful negotiation outcomes among the remaining negotiations. The proposed mechanism is a practical approach to efficiently coordinate concurrent service negotiations within complex workflows, enabling the iterative and interactive adjustment of the negotiation boundaries for each atomic service in a composition based on the performance of other atomic negotiations. They demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by evaluating it with some popular negotiation strategies using the Specialised Property Search Scenario. Many scientific workflows are data intensive where large volumes of intermediate data are generated during their execution. Some valuable intermediate data need to be stored for sharing or reuse. Traditionally, they are selectively stored according to the system storage capacity determined manually. As doing science in the Cloud has become popular nowadays, more intermediate data can be stored in scientific cloud workflows based on a pay-for-use model. In the paper in 6 titled âA data dependency based strategy for intermediate data storage in scientific cloud workflow systemsâ, Yuan et al. build an intermediate data dependency graph (IDG) from the data provenance in scientific workflows. With the IDG, deleted intermediate data can be regenerated, and as such they develop a novel intermediate data storage strategy that can reduce the cost of scientific cloud workflow systems by automatically storing appropriate intermediate data sets with one Cloud service provider. The strategy has significant research merits, that is, it achieves a cost-effective trade-off of computation cost and storage cost and is not strongly impacted by the forecasting inaccuracy of data setsâ usages. Meanwhile, the strategy also takes the usersâ tolerance of data accessing delay into consideration. Authors utilize Amazon's cost model and apply the strategy to general random and specific astrophysics pulsar searching scientific workflows for evaluation. The results show that our strategy can reduce the overall cost of scientific cloud workflow execution significantly. Recall that, one of the biggest premises of cloud computing is the flexibility of delivering IT resources and virtual appliances as an utility such as phone, electricity, gas, and water services. It enables users to have access to computing infrastructure, platform, and software as services over the Internet. To be competitive, however, Cloud providers need to be able to adapt to the dynamic loads from users, not only optimizing the local usage and costs but also engaging into agreements with other clouds to complement local capacity. The infrastructure in which competing clouds are able to cooperate to maximize their benefits is called a Federated Cloud. Just as clouds enable users to cope with unexpected demand loads, a Federated Cloud will enable individual clouds to cope with unforeseen variations of demand. The definition of the mechanism to ensure mutual benefits for the individual clouds composing the federation, however, is one of its main challenges. Gomes et al. in their paper 7 âPure exchange markets for resource sharing in federated cloudsâ propose and investigate the application of market-oriented mechanisms based on the General Equilibrium Theory of Microeconomics to coordinate the sharing of resources between the clouds in a Federated Cloud. Several research institutions and universities own computational capacity that is not effectively utilized, thereby providing an opportunity for such institutions to use such capacity to offer Cloud services (to both internal and external users). However, the unreliability and unpredictability of these resources mean that their use in the context of an SLA is high risk, leading to a reduction in reputation and economic penalties in case of SLA violation. To overcome these challenges, in the paper 8 titled âTowards autonomic management for Cloud services based upon volunteered resourcesâ, Caton and Rana propose a methodology that addresses the issues of unreliability and unpredictability such that Cloud software services could be hosted upon volunteered resources. To enable the harnessing of these resources, they rely on autonomic fault management techniques that allow such systems to independently adapt to the resources they use based upon their perception of individual resource reliability. Using the proposed approach they were able to scale out the backend infrastructure of the Cloud service elastically (minimum 30 s per worker), opportunistically, and autonomically. To summarize, the authors address two key questions in their paper: Can a campus volunteer infrastructure be used in Cloud provisioning? and What measures are necessary to ensure reliability at the resource level? To improve the hosting and delivery of applications through cloud-based IT resources, Champrasert et al. in the paper 9 titled âExploring self-optimization and self-stabilization properties in bio-inspired autonomic cloud computingâ, describe architecture to build self-optimizable and self-stabilizable applications. The design of the proposed architecture, SymbioticSphere, is inspired by key biological principles such as decentralization, evolution, and symbiosis. In SymbioticSphere, each cloud application consists of application services and middleware platforms. Each service and platform is designed as a biological entity, and implements biological behaviors such as energy exchange, migration, reproduction, and death. Each service/platform possesses behavior policies, as genes, each of which defines when and how to invoke a particular behavior. SymbioticSphere allows services and platforms to autonomously adapt to dynamic network conditions by optimizing their behavior policies with a multi-objective genetic algorithm. Moreover, SymbioticSphere allows services and platforms to autonomously seek stable adaptation decisions as equilibria (or symbiosis) between them with a game theoretic algorithm. This symbiosis augments evolutionary optimization to expedite the adaptation of agents and platforms. It also contributes to stable performance that contains a very limited amount of fluctuations. Simulation results demonstrate that agents and platforms successfully attain self-optimization and self-stabilization properties in their adaptation processes. We hope that the readers will find the articles of this special issue to be informative and useful.
Moshe Babaioff, Shahar Dobzinski, Sigal Oren, Aviv Zohar
Many large decentralized systems rely on information propagation to ensure their proper function. We examine a common scenario in which only participants that are aware of the information can compete for some reward, and thus informed participants have an incentive not to propagate information to others. One recent example in which such tension arises is the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge (finding red balloons). We focus on another prominent example: Bitcoin, a decentralized electronic currency system. Bitcoin represents a radical new approach to monetary systems. It has been getting a large amount of public attention over the last year, both in policy discussions and in the popular press. Its cryptographic fundamentals have largely held up even as its usage has become increasingly widespread. We find, however, that it exhibits a fundamental problem of a different nature, based on how its incentives are structured. We propose a modification to the protocol that can eliminate this problem. Bitcoin relies on a peer-to-peer network to track transactions that are performed with the currency. For this purpose, every transaction a node learns about should be transmitted to its neighbors in the network. The current implemented protocol provides an incentive to nodes to not broadcast transactions they are aware of. Our solution is to augment the protocol with a scheme that rewards information propagation. Since clones are easy to create in the Bitcoin system, an important feature of our scheme is Sybil-proofness. We show that our proposed scheme succeeds in setting the correct incentives, that it is Sybil-proof, and that it requires only a small payment overhead, all this is achieved with iterated elimination of dominated strategies. We complement this result by showing that there are no reward schemes in which information propagation and no self-cloning is a dominant strategy.
R. Lilian E. Painter, Alejandra Alfonso DurĂĄn, E. MIRO
One of the central conservation debates over the last quarter of a century has been the effect of conservation initiatives on local livelihoods. Most recently, numerous negative evaluations have been made of both coercive top-down approaches to management of protected areas, which were dominant before the 1980s and focused on enforcement of protection, and efforts to decentralize governance and increase local participation in resource-management initiatives linked to markets. These critiques are subsets of the general criticism of neoliberal conservation, which is characterized by a lesser role for the public sector, privatization of natural resources, and a greater role for market forces (McCarthy & Prudham 2004; Igoe & Brockington 2007). When natural resources are treated as commodities and state control over them is reduced, local stakeholders in remote rural areas, in particular indigenous peoples, can lose access to critical resources for their livelihoods to economic elites with greater resources to respond to economic opportunities. In this essay, we discuss what conservation means for the indigenous peoples living next to Madidi and Pilon Lajas protected areas in the Bolivian Amazon, a region of high species diversity and levels of endemism, where the state, local stakeholders, and several nongovernmental organizations have implemented numerous projects focused on maintaining biological diversity and improving local livelihoods. These conservation initiatives have strengthened management of protected areas and buffer zones, promoted sustainable natural-resource-use projects, and strengthened mechanisms for local participation in management of natural resources and protected areas. In addition, governance conditions have enabled alliances between conservation organizations and indigenous peoples. Of particular importance, a strong indigenous political movement has established partnerships with conservation practitioners. These partnerships are based on the recognition of rights of indigenous peoples to develop their own representative organizations and secure legal property rights over their ancestral lands. In 1990, before most of the protected areas in Central and South America were established (UNEP-WCMC 2010), the indigenous peoples in the Bolivian Amazon mobilized to obtain legal recognition of their territorial rights. Hence, the importance of indigenous territories for the cultural survival and livelihoods of Amazonian groups, as well as their entitlement to maintain or develop organizational and representation structures and promote traditional practices of natural resource use, has been recognized since the creation of the national protected-area system in Bolivia. The majority of protected areas in Latin America were established after constitutional reforms recognized the multiple cultural and ethnic characteristics of their countries (Van Cott 2010). The principal focus of these reforms was the design and consolidation of democratic institutions, but indigenous movements capitalized on the reforms to demand political inclusion and minimization of the negative effects of development in their traditional lands. The reforms built on the global indigenous mobilization to obtain recognition of their rights through the International Labor Organization No. 169 Convention on Indigenous and Tribal People in 1989. Bolivia is in the heart of South America where the Andes, Amazon, and Chaco come together; thus, it is one of the most species-rich countries in the world (Ibisch & Merida 2003). This high species richness is accompanied by a high cultural diversity. The 30 different indigenous groups present in the country represent 66% of the population, the highest percentage in Latin America (Del Popolo & Oyarce 2005). Forty-four indigenous lands are linked to protected areas in Bolivia, 30 are in the buffer zones; 5 are entirely within a protected area, and 9 overlap partially with a protected area (Salinas 2007). The relation between biological and cultural diversity is exemplified in northwestern Bolivia, a region of exceptional species richness resulting from topographical and climatic diversity and where the Bolivian government established three protected areas: Madidi National Park and Natural Area of Integrated Management (1895750 ha), Apolobamba Natural Area of Integrated Management (483744 ha), and Pilon Lajas Biosphere Reserve and Indigenous Territory (400000 ha). Seven indigenous lands overlap or border these protected areas: the Lecos Apolo, Lecos Larecaja, San Jose de Uchupiamonas, Mosetene, Takana I, Takana II, and Pilon Lajas (Tâsimane Mosetene). The meaning of conservation, as used by contemporary conservation practitioners, in relation to these seven indigenous groups has evolved as a result of threats to biological diversity that also threaten indigenous lands and livelihoods, in particular illegal timber extraction, new settlements, and, more recently, large energy and infrastructure projects. These shared threats have brought together conservation and indigenous organizations in efforts to preserve biological diversity and develop sustainable economic activities, based in natural resource extraction and ecotourism, to improve indigenous livelihoods. There has been increasing consensus among Bolivian conservation practitioners that empowering local communities through the consolidation of their territorial rights establishes a strong constituency for maintaining protected areas. The Amazonian Bolivian indigenous movement worked for land reforms to establish indigenous lands as collective property which cannot be sold or divided. This has prevented land titling from opening up these areas to private markets and has led to strengthening access by indigenous communities to their traditional indigenous lands, including those overlapping protected areas. Under this approach the Bolivian Protected Area Service (SERNAP) and Wildlife Conservation Society have worked to support effective participation of the indigenous communities and their representative organizations in the land-titling process by developing their capacity to use spatial analyses to guide internal consensus and negotiations with nonindigenous neighbors. As a result, legal titles have been obtained for over 672941 ha of Takana, Lecos Apolo, and Lecos Larecaja indigenous lands. The Bolivian government has also recognized the San Jose de Uchupiamonas and Tâsimane Mosetene indigenous lands, which completely overlap with Madidi and Pilon Lajas protected areas. Parallel to the process of land titling, the indigenous organizations have received support from the Bolivian government and international and Bolivian nongovernmental organizations to develop and implement indigenous territorial plans (CIPTA 2002; CRTM-SERNAP 2007; CIPLA 2010; PILCOL 2010). Indigenous communities have received support to control illegal timber extraction, wildlife hunting, and forest clearance by outside settlers. As a result, deforestation rates within the indigenous lands are similar to those in neighboring protected areas and are much lower than in unprotected areas in the region (Forrest et al. 2008). Monitoring of wild animals has shown that current hunting levels are sustainable, connectivity for movements of these animals between the protected areas and surrounding indigenous land is being maintained, and illegal hunting is being prevented (Chumacero et al. 2010; R. Wallace, private communication). Several community-based tourism, cacao, handicraft, coffee, and palm-management initiatives have been established with support from the protected-area service and nongovernmental organizations, and these provide increased family incomes and greater control of the land by indigenous peoples. For example, in 1992, no indigenous forestry-management organizations existed in this region and indigenous peoples were engaged in forestry as contract laborers under unfair terms. Today, there are over 20 indigenous, community-level forestry associations. Hence, conservation programs have favored devolution of natural resource management to the indigenous organizations and promoted both social justice and conservation. Democratization of decision making has replaced a system in which decisions were made by local nonindigenous elites. Indigenous communities have established internal consensus, developed their technical capacity, and then engaged other organizations from a position of strength. The last 25 years have marked a transition period for the valuation of indigenous culture and for indigenous peoplesâ leadership in the establishment of protected areas that are integrated with indigenous lands in landscapes managed for both improved indigenous livelihoods and conservation. The support of conservation organizations has been critical to the development of indigenous capacity to manage their land and resources and has avoided the problems associated with devolution of regulatory responsibility to local organizations without the necessary skills (McCarthy & Prudham 2004). The Bolivian experience supports the hypothesis that when indigenous peoples have recognized land rights, autonomy, and establish clear regulations about access to and use of natural resources, relatively large forest areas are less likely to be intensively exploited (Chhatre & Agrawal 2009). Indigenous organizations in Bolivia have exclusive land rights, and consolidating their organizational and technical capacity is critical to ensure they continue to protect the ecological integrity of their territories from expanding extraction of natural resources. In the next quarter century, indigenous organizations need to monitor the effectiveness of their territorial management plans and develop sustainable finance strategies to implement the plans that include the contributions of community natural resource management to the collective costs of territorial defense. They also need to develop incentives for maintaining vulnerable areas without human extractive uses (e.g., valuing environmental services). The external challenge to meeting indigenous demands for greater political and administrative autonomy is state development of road, mining, and energy projects throughout the Amazon. Conflicts with gold miners, loggers, and large development projects are intensifying and conservation professionals and indigenous peoples are allied to improve practices and governance of these projects. Traditionally, Amazonian indigenous institutions base decisions on consensus and encourage widespread participation. Accordingly, strengthening their capacity for conflict resolution could also help increase transparency and broaden citizen participation during the consultation processes associated with these projects. Two aspects have facilitated the alliance between conservation organizations and indigenous organizations in Bolivia. First, the political strength of indigenous organizations established a favorable legal framework for recognition of their territorial rights. Second, human population densities within Amazonian indigenous territories are relatively low, so there is still opportunity to achieve goals for improved livelihoods through natural resource use and conservation and to reconcile these two purposes. Indigenous peoples in Amazonia use a wide range of forest products that require sustainable management of large areas. Their capacity to articulate and defend their traditional rights on the basis of these requirements will determine the future of much of the Amazon. Conservation professionals have important roles to play in identifying critical connectivity requirements between strict protection cores and the surrounding matrix; identifying the area of indirect effect of development projects by modeling land use resulting from changes in economic drivers, political and regulatory conditions, and local topography; guiding implementation of actions to achieve no net loss of biological diversity and local livelihoods, as represented in indigenous territorial plans; and documenting the importance of territorial rights over natural areas for indigenous livelihoods and cultural survival. Lilian Painter is a Bolivian wildlife ecologist who has worked with the Wildlife Conservation Society in northern La Paz since 2001. She supports Takana, Lecos, Tâsimane, and Mosetene indigenous communities in land-use planning. Angel Duran is a Leco indigenous leader and ex Vice-President of the Lecos Apolo organization. He has led the land-titling and land-planning processes of the Leco communities and successful negotiations with nonindigenous neighbors, local authorities, and the protected-area service. Edwin Miro is the past president of the Tâsimane Mosetene Regional Council and has led the land-titling and land-planning processes of the communities in the Pilon Lajas Biosphere Reserve and Indigenous Territory. As a result Pilon Lajas is jointly managed by the indigenous organization and the Bolivian protected-area service. We thank K. Redford and E. Fleishman for their valuable comments on this essay.
Open access
Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management
In this paper we present a new 5-pass identification scheme with asymptotic\ncheating probability 1/2 based on the syndrome decoding problem. Our protocol\nis related to the Stern identification scheme but has a reduced communication\ncost compared to previous code-based zero-knowledge schemes, moreover our\nscheme permits to obtain a very low size of public key and secret key. The\ncontribution of this paper is twofold, first we propose a variation on the\nStern authentication scheme which permits to decrease asymptotically the\ncheating probability to 1/2 rather than 2/3 (and very close to 1/2 in practice)\nbut with less communication. Our solution is based on deriving new challenges\nfrom the secret key through cyclic shifts of the initial public key syndrome; a\nnew proof of soundness for this case is given Secondly we propose a new way to\ndeal with hashed commitments in zero-knowledge schemes based on Stern's scheme,\nso that in terms of communication, on the average, only one hash value is sent\nrather than two or three. Overall our new scheme has the good features of\nhaving a zero-knowledge security proof based on well known hard problem of\ncoding theory, a small size of secret and public key (a few hundred bits), a\nsmall calculation complexity, for an overall communication cost of 19kb for\nauthentication (for a $2^{16}$ security) and a signature of size of 93kb\n(11.5kB) (for security $2^{80}$), an improvement of 40% compared to previous\nschemes based on coding theory.\n
Rosemberg Silva, Pierre-Louis Cayrel, Richard Lindner
In this paper we propose a new 5-pass zero-knowledge identification scheme with soundness error close to 1/2. We use the hardness of the Inhomogeneous Small Integer Solution problem as security basis. Our protocol achieves lower communication costs compared with previous lattice-based zeroknowledge identification schemes. Besides, our construction allows smaller public and secret keys by applying the use of ideal lattices. We allow the prover to possess several pairs of secret and public keys, and choose randomly which pair is to be used in a given round of execution. We also dealt with nonces in zero-knowledge schemes in a new way, lowering the number of values exchanged between the prover and the verifier. Hence, our scheme has the good features of having a zero-knowledge security proof based on a well known hard problem of lattice theory, with worst to average-case reduction, and small size of secret and public keys.
Sebastian Ries, Marc Fischlin, Leonardo A. Martucci, Max Muuhlhauser
The topics of trust and privacy are more relevant to users of online communities than ever before. Trust models provide excellent means for supporting users in their decision making process. However, those models require an exchange of information between users, which can pose a threat to the users' privacy. In this paper, we present a novel approach for a privacy preserving computation of trust. Besides preserving the privacy of the recommenders by exchanging and aggregating recommendations under encryption, the proposed approach is the first that enables the trusting entities to learn about the trustworthiness of their recommenders at the same time. This is achieved by linking the minimum amount of information that is required for the learning process to the actual recommendation and by using zero-knowledge proofs for assuring the correctness of this additional information.
Experts predict that in the next 10 to 100 years scientists will succeed in creating human-level artificial general intelligence. While it is most likely that this task will be accomplished by a government agency or a large corporation, the possibility remains that it will be done by a single inventor or a small team of researchers. In this paper, we address the question of safeguarding a discovery which could without hesitation be said to be worth trillions of dollars. Specifically, we propose a method based on the combination of zero knowledge proofs and provably AI-complete CAPTCHA problems to show that a superintelligent system has been constructed without having to reveal the system itself.
Raluca Ada Popa, Andrew J. Blumberg, Hari Balakrishnan, Frank H. Li
A significant and growing class of location-based mobile applications aggregate position data from individual devices at a server and compute aggregate statistics over these position streams. Because these devices can be linked to the movement of individuals, there is significant danger that the aggregate computation will violate the location privacy of individuals. This paper develops and evaluates PrivStats, a system for computing aggregate statistics over location data that simultaneously achieves two properties: first, provable guarantees on location privacy even in the face of any side information about users known to the server, and second, privacy-preserving accountability (i.e., protection against abusive clients uploading large amounts of spurious data). PrivStats achieves these properties using a new protocol for uploading and aggregating data anonymously as well as an efficient zero-knowledge proof of knowledge protocol we developed from scratch for accountability. We implemented our system on Nexus One smartphones and commodity servers. Our experimental results demonstrate that PrivStats is a practical system: computing a common aggregate (e.g., count) over the data of 10,000 clients takes less than 0.46 s at the server and the protocol has modest latency (0.6 s) to upload data from a Nexus phone. We also validated our protocols on real driver traces from the CarTel project.
In this article, we compare and contrast the design and performance of China and Indiaâs intergovernmental fiscal systems. We find that there are remarkable similarities in the design and performance of China and Indiaâs intergovernmental fiscal systems. More specifically, both countries have highly decentralized expenditures assignments and highly centralized revenue assignments. As a result, sub-national governments in both countries must rely on fiscal transfers to finance their assigned functions. Finally, there is considerable off the books and hidden borrowing by sub-national governments in both countries. We also find that there are considerable and growing disparities in the rate of expenditure decentralization among sub-national governments within each country. Lack fiscal discipline and growing fiscal disparities among sub-national governments create risks to future economic growth and to social cohesion, absent policy reforms to address these issues.
Los estudios comparativos han sido el objetivo de los gobiernos y de\nlas organizaciones multilaterales, adquiriendo cada vez mĂĄs relieve en el\nactual proceso de globalizaciĂłn. En la evaluaciĂłn de las polĂticas, especialmente\nlas educativas, la comparaciĂłn se utiliza para delimitar los parĂĄmetros\nde calidad y los modelos de eficiencia. Este artĂculo tiene como objetivo\npresentar un estudio de las polĂticas en materia de formaciĂłn y\ndesarrollo profesional para profesores de enseñanza secundaria de España\ny Brasil, con las categorĂas de anĂĄlisis de la descentralizaciĂłn, la financiaciĂłn, la evaluaciĂłn y \ncambios del perfil del profesor, bajo la influencia\nde los procesos de globalizaciĂłn y reforma del Estado en la educaciĂłn,\ncon el fin de identificar las tendencias en curso.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) shows increasing sensitivity to issues of nondiscrimination andâas Carmelo Danisi rightly notes in his article1âthe scope of the prohibition of discrimination contained in article 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) has definitely been extended. Not only is the number of cases decided on the grounds (or also on the grounds) of the principle of nondiscrimination growing, butâmore significantlyâthe class of cases based on the aforementioned provision reveals that whenever a highly controversial, delicate, or questionable issue is brought before the Court, the principle of nondiscrimination is always reserved a major role in the judicial reasoning. Undoubtedly, the ECtHR is adopting a more proactive role in the fight against any kind of discrimination, and this new attitude is in part influenced by the EU institutions and other international bodies. The survey of the European jurisprudence provided by Danisi presents a self-confident Court applying severe standards even at the cost of narrowing the margin of appreciation that the ECHR accords to member states. The only notable exception is the case of same-sex marriages. On the basis of the account offered by Danisiâs article, I would like to inquire into the reasons for the expanding role of nondiscrimination in the ECtHRâs case law. I will argue that this expansion is intertwined with the liberal ideal of protecting everybodyâs right to the freedom of choice on a neutral basis. Considered in this light, the case law of the ECtHR appears to be more problematic than in the picture portrayed by Danisi. Sometimes the Courtâs attitude seems inconsistent and leads to unpredictable results. However, it is more important to notice that nondiscrimination judgments intrinsically lack the neutrality that is often ascribed to them. Many good reasons account for the prominence of nondiscrimination in contemporary European jurisprudence. One of these, and not a minor one, is related to the perception that prima facie nondiscrimination is a commonly shared, non-negotiable principle because it provides a neutral ground on which to settle the most hotly debated controversies of our postmodern society: gender issues, reproductive rights, bioethical problems, the notion and role of the family, law and religion, the protection of ethnic minorities in multicultural contexts, and so on. No matter what oneâs personal opinion regarding these disputes may be, the solution should not result in the discrimination of any group. In a way, when a debate touches on the point of nondiscrimination, the tone changes from a judgmental to a neutral one. Whereas controversies about rights and their limitations require difficult balance among competing values and are deeply divisive, nondiscrimination is perceived as a common, undisputed goal. A good example showing the âneutralizing effectâ of nondiscrimination is S.H. v. Austria,2 a recent case regarding medically assisted procreation. The case has its origin in an aspects of Austrian legislation which limits access to techniques of artificial procreation that involve the use of ova and sperm from donors. The reasons for these restrictionsâas explained by the Austrian institutions and shared by other European statesâwere based on public values and interests competing with the individual desire to have a child, such as the protection of the biological identity of the children, the prevention of eugenic reproduction, the exploitation of women, and the commercialization of maternity. The European Court does not enter into a discussion about the legitimacy and the justification of the limitations imposed on individual rights by the national legislation. Instead, it takes a different approach: if the right to privacy encompasses âthe right of a couple to conceive a child and to make use of medically assisted procreation for that end,â it must be guaranteed without discrimination, the Court says. Therefore, following the Courtâs reasoning, all restrictions on medically assisted procreation should be banned because every regulation may have the effect of denying some couples the possibility of having a baby, ultimately amounting to discrimination. The issue that was brought before the Court was a veritable conundrum and did not have any easy solution. However, no matter how disputable any alternative option would be, in this case, it was clear that the arguments based on nondiscrimination worked as a discussion stopper, thanks to its aura of neutrality. As a matter of fact, according to liberal ideals, law is to be neutral in order for all personal choices to be allowed and respected. The liberal ideal wants each person to decide for oneself what one values and how one is going to live oneâs life in the light of these values; one must be entitled to a set of âdeliberative freedoms,â allowing one to live following oneâs personal preferences. Nondiscrimination is a prominent tool for securing these deliberative freedoms3: when nondiscrimination is respected, everybody can freely accede to one of the options at stake, regardless of color, sex, race, or preferences. Liberal ideals affirm that people should not have to factor certain traits of their identity into their deliberations. Nondiscrimination is essential to the liberal project because it urges the removal of all hindrances to free choice. Although in the past liberty and equality were considered competing values, in the current postmodern liberal society freedom of choice and nondiscrimination reinforce one another: they are the twin cornerstones of contemporary legal order. Their intimate kinship is mirrored by the frequent use, in the cases brought before the ECtHR, of article 14 of the ECHR on nondiscrimination in conjunction with article 8 on the right to privacyâthe very origin of the right to free choice. The interaction between nondiscrimination and freedom of choice has the ambition of squaring the circle by protecting diversity without creating inequality: differences in reality should not matter in the legal realm because nondiscrimination aims at correcting reality.4 Seen through the lens of nondiscrimination, all differences become indifferent before the law. In this perspective, nondiscrimination has a neutralizing effect; it serves the aspiration of liberal society to neutrality.5 I would like to put to the test whether or not the principle of nondiscrimination maintains its promise of neutrality in the practice of the ECtHR by looking at the examples examined by Danisi and other scholars. In the overview of the cases I will focus solely on the issue of neutrality: I am not interested here in discussing the merits of the decisions. Whether or not I agree with the results of the decisions taken into consideration is not relevant to the purpose of the present discussion. According to Danisiâs narrative, the ECtHR is increasingly developing the principle of nondiscrimination, with the relevant exception of same-sex marriages. At first sight, all recent evolution in European jurisprudence fits into Danisiâs analysis, but on closer examination the ECtHRâs case law appears to be more âunprincipled.â It is true that in numerous recent cases discrimination is given prominent attention; however, it seems occasionally to be overshadowed by other prevalent concerns, depending on the factual situation and on a case by case basis. For example, in Opuz v. Turkey,6 a case concerning domestic violence in Turkey, the discrimination issue is intentionally brought into the spotlight by the Court. The decision condemns Turkey for violating articles 2 and 3 of the ECHR because the national authorities failed to take adequate measures to prevent an aggressor from carrying out his threats against the physical integrity and the life of the victims. The Court could have stopped there, as it happens in many cases where the violation of a plurality of rights and of articles of the Convention is alleged by the plaintiffs. In the Opuz case, however, the Court went on to examine the issue of nondiscrimination and reiterated the condemnation of Turkey also on the basis of article 14. The result of the decision in this specific case was not affected by the Courtâs further statement, because the violation of the right to life and personal integrity is of paramount gravity; but the insistence on the non discrimination issue gave the Court the opportunity to draw attention to the status of women in Turkey and to the many forms of discrimination to which they are subjected. To put it bluntly: the Court wanted to make a case against the discrimination of women in that society. Let us now consider the following case dealing with discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. Santos Couto v. Portugal7 is a decision concerning a man convicted for homosexual relations with adolescents. Since the Portuguese criminal code has two different provisions for heterosexual and homosexual relations with adolescents, the second being more severe than the first, the applicant argued that his conviction was discriminatory and based on his sexual orientation. Notwithstanding a relevant precedent,8 in which a request similar to that filed by the applicant was granted, the ECtHR issued a finding of nonviolation. Focusing on the concrete circumstances of the case, the Court showed that the man would have been convicted even on the narrower grounds of the provision envisaged for heterosexuals. Consequently, in this case, his sexual orientation was not considered a relevant feature to be taken into account. By contrast, in Kozak v. Poland,9 as Danisi says, the European Court attached great importance to the argument of sexual orientation. Despite the unclear nature and duration of the relationship between the two partners, in the Courtâs opinion âthe relevant element was not the question of the applicantâs residence in the flat or the emotional, economic or other quality of his relationship with [his partner] but the homosexual nature of that relationship.â Had the Court used the same âtest of resistanceâ that was used in the previous caseâi.e., had the Court inquired whether or not in that particular case the right of succession to the tenancy would have been denied even if the applicant had been in a heterosexual relationshipâthe result might have been different. At the same time, in the Santos Couto case, should the Court have stressed that the Portuguese criminal code had stricter rules applying to homosexual relations with minors, the decision might have been the opposite. Not only is the nondiscrimination clause susceptible to being applied inconsistently by judges, but, in most cases, the very structure of the discrimination test as such is responsible for the unpredictable outcomes of the controversies. Nondiscrimination is one of the most valuable principles of our legal civilization, one which has significantly contributed to advancing the legal treatment of vulnerable groups and to the redressing of wrongs which occurred in the past; and yet it is not, and cannot be, a neutral principle. As a matter of fact, judging nondiscrimination implies drawing a comparison between different persons and situations. Comparing people is not a mechanical activity but requires the highlighting of a specific relevant feature which has to be taken into consideration for the comparison. The trouble with determining nondiscrimination is that no two people are alike in every respect and, at the same time, all people are alike in some respect. Consequently, statements of nondiscrimination entail comparisons of two persons by reference to some criteria that determine the relevant aspect in which those persons are alike or different. The choice of the ârelevant feature of comparisonâ governs the outcome of the judgment. Let us return to the case of Orsus v. Croatia,10 examined by Danisi, regarding Roma students who complained about being assigned to separate classes.11 Were they assigned to special classes because they lacked a sufficient command of Croatian, as the First Section decided in its judgment of July 17, 2008?12 Or were they victims of racial discrimination, as the Grand Chamber eventually decided? The choice of the comparator determined the results of the two decisions. Who are the âlikeâ students to be compared with in this case? If the linguistic skills were the relevant feature to be taken into account, then the result would be a finding of nonviolation; if, instead, the question of race were to prevail in the analysis, then the Court would reach the opposite result. The hazy character of nondiscrimination judgments is particularly salient in cases concerning the status of the family, same-sex couples, and other types of relationship, which have frequently been brought to the attention of courts in recent years.13 Most of them involve homosexual couples claiming the same rights and privileges as those accorded to married couples. According to Schalk and Kopf v. Austria,14 European states are not obliged to extend marriage license to same-sex couples, since article 12 of the ECHR provides men and women with the right to marry and to found a family. Nevertheless, the Court says that the notion of âfamily lifeâ under article 8 applies to same-sex and other de facto unions. Consequently, different forms of protection are considered consistent with the European Convention. In many European countries, but not in all of them, registered partnerships have gradually extended to same-sex couples a certain number of benefits and privileges that used to be limited to married couples. Differences between marriage and union partnership can be acceptable, says the Court, especially as far as parental rights are concerned. Moreover, at the opposite ends of the spectrum, some countries recognize same-sex marriage while others envisage neither marriage nor legal partnership for same-sex couples. Is this diversity in the domain of family life a matter of nondiscrimination, or does it have to do with the difference in values that each society attaches to marriage and family ties? The ambivalence of these controversies is made clear by an awkward request brought before the Court in the case of Burden v. United Kingdom.15 Two aged sisters, having lived together their whole life, claimed the same inheritance tax exemptions as married and civil partnership couples. They asserted to be in an analogous position to married couples or civil union partners, and affirmed that the different, unfavorable treatment applied to their situation was discriminatory. The ECtHR, of course, rejected their request. What is interesting for the purpose of our discussion is the Courtâs reasoning. The Fourth Section16 justified tax exemption and its scope by evoking the peculiar value that societies attach to marriage and which, in many cases, they extend to civil partnerships: national legislation can legitimately limit fiscal benefits to the relationships most valued in that society. The Grand Chamber, on the other hand, focused on the analogy and differences between two siblings cohabiting for many years and married or union registered couples. The outcome was the same, but, in my view, the legal arguments in the reasoning of the Grand Chamber were weaker and ultimately concealed the real question under debate, namely the interests pursued by the legislature by means of the fiscal policy. It is not difficult to foresee that the Court will be called on again very soon to take sides with respect to different attitudes adopted by national legislatures towards family life, and the question to ask is whether nondiscrimination is the only appropriate grounds on which to settle these disputes. The trouble is that in these cases nondiscrimination is no more neutral than rights-oriented arguments, and it might end up concealing the value choices made. The principle of nondiscrimination proves to be a flexible and fluid benchmark whose shape derives, as we have seen in this quick overview, from the rights at stake and the class of the rights holders involved, the factual circumstances of the case, and the social and political background. In many cases discrimination assessments involve value choices to no lesser extent than any other decision concerning the scope, content, and limitations of rights. If this is true, some consequences should be taken into account by the Court. These include: (a) The burden of proof: a widespread bias about nondiscrimination was pointed out years ago by Isaiah Berlin: âthe assumption is that uniformity, regularity, similarity, symmetry ⊠need not be specially accounted for, whereas differences, unsystematic behavior, change in conduct, need explanation and as a rule, justification.â17 In legal terms, this bias translates into a general presumption in favor of equal treatment: whenever a difference in treatment is to be applied, the burden of proof shifts onto the advocates of the differenceâin the cases before the ECtHR, usually onto the defendant government. This presumption, and the consequent shift in the burden of proof, must be questioned if we agree that the weight of the nondiscrimination argument needs to be modulated according to the rights and the rights holders involved in each particular case. (b) The margin of appreciation: as Danisi points out, the expansion of nondiscrimination issues has the effect of constraining the margin of appreciation of Member States to the point of rendering it meaningless. However, nondiscrimination does not necessarily imply uniformity of national legislation, as other experiences demonstrate. It can be plainly said in relation to the system of the European Convention that âthe default value is autonomy of political and moral identity [of its members] which requires justification only if purposely abused.â18 This is true in all cases, and the margin of appreciation is not necessarily to be ruled out when nondiscrimination comes into play.
In this paper we present a new 5-pass identification scheme with asymptotic cheating probability 1/2 based on the syndrome decoding problem. Our protocol is related to the Stern identification scheme but has a reduced communication cost compared to previous code-based zero-knowledge schemes, moreover our scheme permits to obtain a very low size of public key and secret key. The contribution of this paper is twofold, first we propose a variation on the Stern authentication scheme which permits to decrease asymptotically the cheating probability to 1/2 rather than 2/3 (and very close to 1/2 in practice) but with less communication. Our solution is based on deriving new challenges from the secret key through cyclic shifts of the initial public key syndrome; a new proof of soundness for this case is given Secondly we propose a new way to deal with hashed commitments in zero-knowledge schemes based on Stern's scheme, so that in terms of communication, on the average, only one hash value is sent rather than two or three. Overall our new scheme has the good features of having a zero-knowledge security proof based on well known hard problem of coding theory, a small size of secret and public key (a few hundred bits), a small calculation complexity, for an overall communication cost of 19kb for authentication (for a $2^{16}$ security) and a signature of size of 93kb (11.5kB) (for security $2^{80}$), an improvement of 40% compared to previous schemes based on coding theory.
Vote validity proof and verification is an efficiency bottleneck and privacy drawback in homomorphic e-voting. The existing vote validity proof technique is inefficient and only achieves honest-verifier zero knowledge. In this paper, an efficient proof and verification technique is proposed to guarantee vote validity in homomorphic e-voting. The new proof technique is mainly based on hash function operations that only need a very small number of costly public key cryptographic operations. It can handle untrusted verifiers and achieve stronger zero knowledge privacy. As a result, the efficiency and privacy of homomorphic e-voting applications will be significantly improved.
For anyone interested in the philosophy of riskâbenefit analysis, a two-part paper in this issue makes stimulating reading [1, 2]. The authors describe an effect of antidepressants on fetal neuronal development. Maternal exposure to both tricyclic antidepressants and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) during pregnancy was associated with a 10-fold increase in laxative use in children. The findings illustrate how safety issues can remain undetected late in the life cycle of a drug, despite millions of patients being exposed for decades. Clinical pharmacology research, as with any science, needs to define questions that summarize the hypotheses to be tested. The efficacy of medicines can be defined by questions that are easy to formulate and are addressed by clinical trials. Even so, the efficacy of antidepressant medication is contentious, given the high placebo response, failure to prevent suicide and selective reporting of results [3, 4]. For safety issues, the key questions are usually not known until the data are collected. With myriad potential safety questions, it is important that all the available basic pharmacology is reviewed and that this knowledge is used to direct a search for specific clinical safety signals. The Groningen group have adopted this approach with a detailed literature review to form a hypothesis that maternal antidepressant use might influence fetal enteric nervous system development [1]. In a second study, they use epidemiology to assess paediatric laxative use as a potential marker of a specific teratogenic signal associated with the maternal use of antidepressants [2]. The starting point for this work was the linking of a small signal of infantile hypertrophic pyloric stenosis cases to the maternal use of fluoxetine in a northern Netherlands birth defect registry. This association is rational, because fluoxetine crosses the bloodâbrain barrier and serotonin contributes to the development of enteric neurons. A serotonin-based mechanism could also explain an increased use of laxatives by the children of mothers who had taken an SSRI. When a drug first comes to market, the assessment of the risk-to-benefit ratio is an educated guess. Efficacy can be defined by objective clinical trials, where predefined end-points are quantified. That the efficacy data are invariably adequate at the time of marketing is supported by the rarity of withdrawals of medicines because of later proof of a lack of efficacy. But safety cannot usually be quantified objectively; thus, many parameters might show a signal which can neither be confirmed or ignored [5]. To define fully the safety profile of a medicine at the time of marketing would be so expensive that new drug development would halt if this were a requirement. As a compromise, the subjective assessment of safety data is based on international guidance on minimal requirements, summarized by the International Conference on Harmonisation's guideline, ICHE1 [6]. This sets a reasonable minimal exposure for medicines for non-life-threatening diseases of about 1500 people, of whom some 300â600 should be exposed for 6 months and at least 100 are exposed for 1 year. Though a reasonable requirement for drug development, the limitations of ICHE1 and the importance of postmarketing data are highlighted by the number of drugs that are withdrawn from the market for previously undetected safety problems. The ICHE1 safety population may prove inadequate to detect major concerns. Sometimes major safety concerns are only evident with larger and longer population exposure, for example, clofibrate. Here an early data set, considerably larger than the ICHE1 requirement, initially showed a favourable riskâbenefit ratio [7]. But eventually, a clinical trial of some 200 000 patient-years showed a significant increase in mortality [8]. But not all important safety signals require large numbers of patients treated for many years. A safety signal might occur in only a small subpopulation, which at the time of licensing has either not been studied or has been studied in limited numbers. Ever since the thalidomide disaster revolutionized medicines regulation, the prime subpopulation of concern has been the fetus. The number of pregnancies exposed to a new drug at the time of licensing is invariably small or zero. When the drug is likely to be worth the risk of prescribing in pregnancy, it may take decades before the risks are quantified, for example, with anti-epileptic therapy [9]. With the increasing use of antidepressants during pregnancy in recent years, now about 2% of all pregnant women in some countries, it is time to consider how safe such prescribing might be. The labelling information of antidepressants has numerous safety warnings and always recommends caution in pregnancy, but statements that âneonates should be observedâ raises the question of what form this observation should take. Without control groups, it is often impossible to separate the risk of the disease, the risk of the therapy and the background incidence of developmental abnormality. Some adverse events only become apparent indirectly through the presence of a cofactor, a proxy or a challenge test. Supressing eosinophils may seem safe until a parasitic infection is encountered; grapefruit juice seems innocuous until a drug solely metabolized by CYP3A4 is co-administered. In the present study, the group used a pharmacy prescription database to detect the use of diarrhoea and constipation medication as a marker of enteric nervous system development. What is commendable in this approach is that basic pharmacology has been reviewed to develop a hypothesis that is then tested with epidemiology. Antidepressants can modify monoamine synaptic transmission of serotonin, noradrenaline or dopamine. The pharmacology of noradrenaline and dopamine is well established. Serotonin may affect anger, aggression, arousal, body temperature, mood, sleep, vomiting, sexuality and appetite and may even modify social decision making [10]. The pharmacology of serotonin has been sufficiently studied that it is possible to define safety questions that need to be answered in clinical studies of a new molecule that affects serotoninergic pathways. These include whether there is an effect on the following parameters: pulmonary hypertension; pulmonary hypertension in the fetus; heart valve abnormalities; chronotropic/inotropic effects via receptors in atria or ventricles; mood changes or suicidality; platelet aggregation; vasoconstriction; QT effects similar to cisapride; the incidence of serotonin syndrome alone or in combination; and bone resorption [11]. But there is more to the monoamines than neurotransmission. Knockout mouse models show the importance of the serotonin re-uptake transporter (SERT) and the noradrenaline transporter (NET) in neuronal development. SERT-deficient mice are susceptible to both diarrhoea and constipation in adult life. A careful review of the literature by the Groningen authors discusses evidence that modification of 5-HT2B receptors, SERT and NET may each adversely affect enteric nervous system development [1]. The safety analysis of medicines is more complex than the assessment of efficacy. Though antidepressants are taken by about 10% of Americans (they are the most commonly used prescription drug class in the USA), they continue to come up with surprises. If proved, the current findings are a major concern. Antidepressants have to cross the bloodâbrain barrier and affect neuronal function in order to work. This makes them likely to cross the placenta and access the neural crest and neural tube. If these commonly used drugs affect enteric nervous system development, then it is difficult to guarantee the safe development of other tissues. We cannot yet be reassured about potential central nervous system effects on children who have been exposed in utero, nor is there much certainty about long-term effects on the increasing number of children and adolescents exposed to antidepressants during their youth [12, 13]. The approach by the Groningen group, of using pharmacology to define an appropriate safety question, is exemplary. Only when such questions are formulated can sense be made of much of the mass of postmarketing pharmacovigilance data. Finding signals in these huge databases is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Defining a question based on the pharmacology to probe the data and using co-medication usage as a marker is analogous to using a magnet to search for such a valuable needle. The author is a pharmaceutical industry consultant and advises a range of companies on pharmaceutical development. The content of this article does not promote a particular commercial interest.
Open access
Pharmacological Effects and Toxicity Studies
Intestinal Malrotation and Obstruction Disorders
Maternal Mental Health During Pregnancy and Postpartum
OBJECTIVE: Scaling up antiretroviral treatment (ART) through decentralization of HIV care is increasingly recommended as a strategy toward ensuring equitable access to treatment. However, there have been hitherto few attempts to empirically examine the performance of this policy, and particularly its role in protecting against the risk of catastrophic health expenditures (CHE). This article therefore seeks to assess whether HIV care decentralization has a protective effect against the risk of CHE associated with HIV infection. DATA SOURCE AND STUDY DESIGN: We use primary data from the cross-sectional EVAL-ANRS 12-116 survey, conducted in 2006-2007 among a random sample of 3,151 HIV-infected outpatients followed up in 27 hospitals in Cameroon. DATA COLLECTION AND METHODS: Data collected contain sociodemographic, economic, and clinical information on patients as well as health care supply-related characteristics. We assess the determinants of CHE among the ART-treated patients using a hierarchical logistic model (n = 2,412), designed to adequately investigate the separate effects of patients and supply-related characteristics. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Expenditures for HIV care exceed 17 percent of household income for 50 percent of the study population. After adjusting for individual characteristics and technological level, decentralization of HIV services emerges as the main health system factor explaining interclass variance, with a protective effect on the risk of CHE. CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that HIV care decentralization is likely to enhance equity in access to ART. Decentralization appears, however, to be a necessary but insufficient condition to fully remove the risk of CHE, unless other innovative reforms in health financing are introduced.
Abstract Distributed applications are difficult to program reliably and securely. Dependently typed functional languages promise to prevent broad classes of errors and vulnerabilities, and to enable program verification to proceed side-by-side with development. However, as recursion, effects, and rich libraries are added, using types to reason about programs, specifications, and proofs becomes challenging. We present F*, a full-fledged design and implementation of a new dependently typed language for secure distributed programming. Our language provides arbitrary recursion while maintaining a logically consistent core; it enables modular reasoning about state and other effects using affine types; and it supports proofs of refinement properties using a mixture of cryptographic evidence and logical proof terms. The key mechanism is a new kind system that tracks several sub-languages within F* and controls their interaction. F* subsumes two previous languages, F7 and Fine. We prove type soundness (with proofs mechanized in Coq) and logical consistency for F*. We have implemented a compiler that translates F* to .NET bytecode, based on a prototype for Fine. F* provides access to libraries for concurrency, networking, cryptography, and interoperability with C#, F#, and the other .NET languages. The compiler produces verifiable binaries with 60% code size overhead for proofs and types, as much as a 45x improvement over the Fine compiler, while still enabling efficient bytecode verification. We have programmed and verified nearly 50,000 lines of F* including new schemes for multi-party sessions; a zero-knowledge privacy-preserving payment protocol; a provenance-aware curated database; a suite of web-browser extensions verified for authorization properties; a cloud-hosted multi-tier web application with a verified reference monitor; the core F* typechecker itself; and programs translated to F* from other languages such as F7 and JavaScript.
Part of Regional Otonomy in financeĂ is giving local governmentĂ to arrange regional receipt to purchase expenses bugget. Government genuine Receipt is one regional receipt that shows how stronger local goverment finance can handled all the expenditure, not only depend on Central Government. Metro and Lampung Timur same with another local government in Indonesia, wants the higher regional otonomy espescialy in finance. The higher decentralization indicate higher ability on local government to fulfill all expenditure. In can be analized from share of Government Genuine Receipt and Tax and non Tax Share compare Total Regional Receipt and Total Regional Expenditure. Higher fiscal Desentralization needed by Metro and Lampung Timur to get higher Regional otonomy.
Christine BrandstÀtt, Gert Brunekreeft, Nele Friedrichsen
Smart contracts based on voluntary participation and optionality can be a low transaction cost solution to implement locational signals in distribution networks and thereby avoid network investment. This paper examines the efficiency properties of smart contracts. Based on a three-node example network we show that cases exist in which smart contracts can achieve a pareto-improvement compared to the status-quo even with voluntary participation. With the pareto improvement at least one party is better of under a smart contract without worsening the situation for anyone else. We note that this requirement is very restrictive and leaves significant potential for efficiency improvements by smart contracts untapped. We then discuss the implementation of smart contracts with incentive regulation. There are two main tasks for the regulator: allowing network operators flexibility to offer such contracts and incentivizing network operators to do so.
In many countries the decentralization of spending responsibilities has outpaced the decentralization of revenue powers. Sub-national governments have then to rely on transfers from the center and borrowing to finance their spending. When this occurs, we find that the overall fiscal deficit tends to increase. This result is based on cross-country econometric evidence from OECD countries, and is particularly strong in the presence of regional disparities. Fiscal discipline can be strengthened by ensuring that sub-national taxing powers are adequate to meet spending obligations.
Jorge F. Chåvez, Roberto F. Iunes, Hector Conroy, Johanna Ramos · 7 authors
This evaluation examines the IDB's Country Program with Colombia for the 2007-2011 period. The evaluation found social investment and decentralization as two areas in which the IDB maintained presence and relevance during this period. In social investment, the IDB was consolidated as a stable partner to Colombia in the creation and operation of a long-term social safety net. In regards to decentralization, cooperation was crosscutting, as the IDB worked with subnational institutions in diverse sectors, such as transportation, business development, housing, and modernization of the State. The IDB also continued its long-term work with Colombia to modernize and improve the efficiency of oversight agencies and the judicial branch, helping the country to obtain sizeable savings. To continue to improve the strategy with Colombia, OVE recommends that the IDB should: (i) increase its efforts to lower the transaction costs of IDB's cooperation with the country; (ii) improve the evaluability, monitoring and evaluation of the Country Strategy and the projects financed by the IDB; (iii) identify and strengthen the IDB's capacity in the areas and sectors in which the country will concentrate its demand for financial cooperation; and (iv) identify international development experiences that have been successful and present them to Colombia.
INTRODUCTION: In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) sound planning is required as interest increases in the decentralization of healthcare financing and the implementation of a sector-wide approach to health care. For this, improved knowledge of national morbidity and mortality is essential. Data from remote areas of SSA are needed to ensure that public health priority-setting and actions reflect the situation in all regions, not just those easily accessed and readily researched. In order to understand the causes, circumstances and changes over time of death in a remote and underserved region, this study sought information on all deaths in a district hospital over a 17 year period. METHODS: The study design was a retrospective review of the hospital records (in registers) of all patients hospitalized in Kolofata District Hospital, a rural public hospital in the Far North Region of Cameroon, 1 January 1993 to 31 December 2009. A line listing was extracted of all 1281 inpatient deaths, and this included dates of admission and death; patient name, address, sex and ethnic group; presenting complaint; duration of symptoms; summary of physical examination; and the diagnosis presumed to be the cause of death. RESULTS: Children under the age of 15 years and males comprised the majority of deaths (63.9% and 56.0%, respectively). Causes of death were related to the seasons. Infectious diseases including acute lower respiratory tract infection, malaria and diarrhoeal diseases were the leading causes of death; AIDS caused most adult deaths. A total of 67% of patients presented within 1 week of symptom onset, and 56.8% of deaths occurred on or before the day after admission. Deaths due to AIDS, malaria and complications of pregnancy increased over time. Among Kolofata District residents, death from vaccine-preventable measles and neonatal tetanus were rare, particularly in the later study years. The proportion of deaths attributed to non-communicable diseases did not increase in the 17 year period. CONCLUSIONS: To reduce mortality in this world region, priority should be given to the prevention and management of lower respiratory tract infections, malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, AIDS, and the complications of pregnancy. The planning of health resources and activities should take into account seasonal variations in the causes of death. Improvements to emergency services and community education that emphasises the need for earlier presentation when ill should reduce deaths that occur soon after hospital admission. Death due to measles and neonatal tetanus has become rare, a reflection of the effectiveness in this area of the national vaccination program.
For the general problem of minimizing a convex function over a compact convex domain, we will investigate a simple iterative approximation algorithm based on the method by Frank & Wolfe 1956, that does not need projection steps in order to stay inside the optimization domain. Instead of a projection step, the linearized problem defined by a current subgradient is solved, which gives a step direction that will naturally stay in the domain. Our framework generalizes the sparse greedy algorithm of Frank & Wolfe and its primal-dual analysis by Clarkson 2010 (and the low-rank SDP approach by Hazan 2008) to arbitrary convex domains. We give a convergence proof guaranteeing Δ-small duality gap after O(1/Δ) iterations. The method allows us to understand the sparsity of approximate solutions for any l1-regularized convex optimization problem (and for optimization over the simplex), expressed as a function of the approximation quality. We obtain matching upper and lower bounds of Î(1/Δ) for the sparsity for l1-problems. The same bounds apply to low-rank semidefinite optimization with bounded trace, showing that rank O(1/Δ) is best possible here as well. As another application, we obtain sparse matrices of O(1/Δ) non-zero entries as Δ-approximate solutions when optimizing any convex function over a class of diagonally dominant symmetric matrices. We show that our proposed first-order method also applies to nuclear norm and max-norm matrix optimization problems. For nuclear norm regularized optimization, such as matrix completion and low-rank recovery, we demonstrate the practical efficiency and scalability of our algorithm for large matrix problems, as e.g. the Netflix dataset. For general convex optimization over bounded matrix max-norm, our algorithm is the first with a convergence guarantee, to the best of our knowledge.
UN listing of al Qaeda and Taliban affiliates under the Security Council resolution 1267 system has been controversial, in large measure because of the absence of due process and the secrecy surrounding the decisions made by the sanctioning committee. There have been a number of successful domestic challenges to the implementation of this system at the national and supranational level. If domestic and supranational courts continue to invalidate domestic implementation of 1267 listings, there will be a disconnect between the global 1267 list and certain domestic lists. The 1267 process may be able to survive some domestic challenges and exemptions, but criticisms by domestic judges will erode support for the 1267 system. This may not in itself be a bad development, as 1267 listing, with its focus on al Qaeda and the Taliban, is only a partial response to international terrorism. Even apart from the human rights implications of listing, it is not clear that listing and related terrorism financing and travel ban interventions are particularly effective means to combat todayâs decentralized and often homegrown terrorism. Listing may be an example of fighting the last war against al Qaeda rather than deploying tools to forestall the next form of terrorism.This Article explores these issues in four parts. In Part I, we provide a brief overview of the 1267 system and its origins and operations. In Part II, we examine the substantive international law that may apply to the Security Council as well as the jurisdictional basis for (and possible constraints on) the 1267 system. The focus here is on the possibility of applying due process protections derived from various forms of international law to the 1267 listing process. In Part III, we examine some of the âdualistâ defenses of due process, examining domestic and supranational court decisions in the European Union, the United States, and Canada. In Part IV, we discuss some of the lessons that can be drawn from both international and domestic attempts to increase the fairness of terrorist listing processes. This includes the common and difficult challenge in both the international and domestic realms of providing for adversarial challenges to secret intelligence that is said to justify listing. Finally, we reflect on the implications of these challenges to the sustainability of listing processes, terrorism financing, and judicial review of counterterrorism actions in general.