Prof. Dr. Mehmet ŞİŞMAN, Doç. Dr. Selahattin TURAN
In the last two decades, educational policy makers and educational leaders have reemphasized the importance of decentralization in education and its critical role in democratization of education and society. Leading scholars in the field state that educational decentralization is a complex process that deals with different dimensions of educational reform efforts and changes about policy making, finance, curriculum and administration of local schools in education. The purpose of this study was to examine the literature concerning decentralization and democratization efforts in education to provide a brief guidelines for government officials, educational policy makers and those who are intended to lead Turkish education and public schools for the twenty first century.
In an effort to prevent tragic incidents like Columbine from recurring, bully-proofing programs are being implemented with the premise that bullies should be identified and an intervention program administered while victims are taught to defend themselves against bullies. However, our survey of middle school students showed that youth could be both bullies and victims at the same time and under variable conditions. The research results call into question the likelihood of success in bully-proofing programs. Instead, the results suggest that promoting positive youth development programs and creating a sense of safety in schools and neighborhoods may be more effective approaches.
Edward W. Hill, Billie K. Geyer, Claudette Robey, John F. Brennan · 5 authors
This paper investigates the transportation expenditure geographic pattern in Ohio from 1980 to 1988. It focuses on the location and spatial patterns of state transportation spending and finance. It then compares these variables with transportation need and demand indicators. The aim of the report is to ascertain whether or not the state's transportation money is being spent appropriately to meet the many challengers occurring today in metropolitan areas. Some of these challenges include traffic congestion, aging infrastructure, and decentralizing economic development.
We present the first complete problem for SZK, the class of promise problems possessing statistical zero-knowledge proofs (against an honest verifier). The problem, called Statistical Difference, is to decide whether two efficiently samplable distributions are either statistically close or far apart. This gives a new characterization of SZK that makes no reference to interaction or zero knowledge .We propose the use of complete problems to unify and extend the study of statistical zero knowledge. To this end, we examine several consequences of our Completeness Theorem and its proof, such as:---A way to make every (honest-verifier) statistical zero-knowledge proof very communication efficient, with the prover sending only one bit to the verifier (to achieve soundness error 1/2).---Simpler proofs of many of the previously known results about statistical zero knowledge, such as the Fortnow and Aiello--Hεstad upper bounds on the complexity of SZK and Okamoto's result that SZK is closed under complement.---Strong closure properties of SZK that amount to constructing statistical zero-knowledge proofs for complex assertions built out of simpler assertions already shown to be in SZK.---New results about the various measures of "knowledge complexity," including a collapse in the hierarchy corresponding to knowledge complexity in the "hint" sense.---Algorithms for manipulating the statistical difference between efficiently samplable distributions, including transformations that "polarize" and "reverse" the statistical relationship between a pair of distributions.
Nazmul Chaudhury, Jeffrey S. Hammer, Edmundo Murrugarra
This study examines the impact of a fee-waiver program for basic medical services on health care utilization in Armenia. Due to the reduction in public financing of health services and decentralization and increased privatization of health care provision, private out-of-pocket contributions are increasingly becoming a significant component of health costs in Armenia. To help poor families cope with this constraint, the Government of Armenia provided a free-of-charge basic package service to eligible individuals in vulnerable groups, such as the disabled and children from single parent households. Drawing upon the 1996 and 1998/99 Armenia Integrated Survey of Living Standards (AISLS), which allows the identification of eligible individuals under this program, we estimate the impact of the fee-waiver program on utilization of health services, particularly among the poor. Across the two survey rounds utilization rates have indeed declined despite comparable levels of income, and this decline has occurred among both the poor and the rich, with average utilization falling by 12 percent between the two surveys. However, families with four or more children, the largest beneficiary group under the "Vulnerable Population" program, have decreased their usage of health care services in a disproportionate manner -- 21 percent reduction in usage between the two survey rounds. This precipitous drop in health care usage by this vulnerable group despite being eligible for free medical services, suggests that the program just by itself was inadequate in stemming the decline in the usage of health services. We furthermore present evidence to suggest that the free-of-charge eligibility program is acting more like an income transfer mechanism, particularly to disabled individuals. Contents...
We consider the following (promise) problem, denoted ED (for Entropy Difference): The input is a pair of circuits, and YES instances (resp., NO instances) are such pairs in which the first (resp., second) circuit generates a distribution with noticeably higher entropy. On one hand we show that any language having a (honest-verifier) statistical zero-knowledge proof is Karp-reducible to ED. On the other hand, we present a public-coin (honest-verifier) statistical zero-knowledge proof for ED. Thus, we obtain an alternative proof of Okamoto's result by which HVSZK: (i.e., honest-verifier statistical zero knowledge) equals public-coin HVSZK. The new proof is much simpler than the original one. The above also yields a trivial proof that HVSZK: is closed under complementation (since ED easily reduces to its complement). Among the new results obtained is an equivalence of a weak notion of statistical zero knowledge to the standard one.
Elections around the world have become a major international concern since the inception of modern democracy. It is a fact that the success of any democracy depends largely on its electoral process. In conducting a free and credible election, the process must be transparent to be adjudged credible. The electioneering process begins with the compilation of a voter register; this register contains the details of every eligible voter as stipulated by law or guild lines that guilds the electoral process. As part of what makes up, the guidelines are age restrictions for every intended voter. It is forbidding by law in most countries for a child to register as a voter, but this is not so in reality in most countries, especially in a developing nation. Because the age restriction is not obeyed, this has resulted in the incidences of underage voters and disputed election outcomes. This work provides an efficient and effective solution for the above concerns, using multiple digital solutions. The model will be integrating a deep learning Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), an Interplanetary File System (IPFS), and an Ethereum Smart Contract Blockchain. The role of the CNN is to detect any underage individual who intends to register as a voter. The CNN is built with a pretrained dataset, and it was trained with an age classifier that grouped the age on the images on the data set into eight distinct groups. This age grouping will help the age predictive algorithm estimate and place every image on the camera in a unique age group. This will only produce a binary result, which is "eligible to voter or not eligible to vote." This outcome is based on the preset threshold cut-off on the age group. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) will provide a large storage capacity that will allow for off-chain data storage and still provide the model with all the functionalities and benefits of the blockchain. It also provides a hashing function that will assign and identify every registered voter with a unique cryptographic Identity. This ID will prevent the storage of the same information into the database, in so doing, eliminating multiple voting. Finally, the blockchain will provide a voting platform where the model will be implemented. It will allow every registered voter with a unique ID to create an account and vote on the blockchain. The adapted CNN was tested and evaluated and shows 85.9% performance accuracy, and when compared against two other age predictive models, it recorded an increase of 1.2%. In comparison, the complete digital solution model recorded 95.3% in performance. We believe this model will perform even better when subjected to further research work.
Open access
Science, Technology, and Education in Latin America
Decentralized control methods are appealing in coordination of multiple vehicles due to their low demand for long-range communication and their robustness to single-point failures. In this paper we explore a decentralized approach to path generation for a group of vehicles in a battlefield scenario. The mission is to maneuver the vehicles to cover a target area while avoiding obstacles and threats during the maneuver. Each vehicle makes its moving decision by minimizing a potential function that encodes information about its neighbours, obstacles, threats and the target. Preliminary analysis of vehicle behaviors is conducted. Simulation has shown that this approach leads to interesting emergent behaviors, and the behaviors can be varied by adjusting the weighting coefficients of different potential function terms.
This thesis is written for the Swedish degree Licentiate ofScience, Teknisk Licentiat.It is a university degree, between that of master andthat of doctor.The main focus of the thesis is on the construction ofsecure protocols for comparing the underlying plain-texts inElGamal encryptions. The protocols make use of the malleabilityof the ElGamal encryption scheme. More specifically they usethe multiplicative homomorphic property of ElGamal.We present fully verifiable protocols for both thetwo-party setting and the multi-party setting. These protocolsare built on sub-protocols, which are specially constructed tofit the present setting. We also present full proofs forcompleteness, soundness, and zero-knowledge for all the givenprotocols, in the random oracle model.
Implementing the African Information Society Initiative (AISI), African Ministers of Planning and Economic Development identified the use of ICTs in central Government and local administration as one of the priority sectors for the entry of Africa into the information era and as a means to support Government’s administration and decentralization process, which is consistent with Vision 2020 in developing electronic information for development in the Gambia.
Responding to a request from the Hon. Secretary of State for Finance and Economic Affairs, of the Republic of The Gambia, The Executive Secretary of United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) sent a mission to the Gambia in November 2002 to carryout a preliminary assessment and discuss modalities for the design of e-Government Strategy for the Gambia with a view to start an e-Government pilot project between the Department of State for Finance and Economic Affairs and the Office of The President for the sharing of Financial and Economic Management data and information. It is envisaged that after the successful implementation of the pilot project, all the relevant institutions and services across the country will be subsequently interconnected electronically.
El mayor cambio que ha experimentado la sanidad española en las dos últimas décadas es probablemente el de la generalización de la transferencia a las CCAA que integran el Estado. Este hecho puede generar tensiones en el status quo. ¿Es compatible la descentralización sanitaria con un Servicio Nacional de Salud cohesionado? ¿Es la descentralización sanitaria parte del problema o de la solución? La generalización de las transferencias de una manera tan rápida como la experimentada en nuestro país (negociada en poco menos de 6 meses, con acuerdos financieros de mínimos, en ausencia de marcos legales explícitos en los ámbitos de la coordinación y del desarrollo de normativa básica, con un nuevo acuerdo de financiación autonómica general del que no se conocen aunque se intuyen algunas lagunas, etc.) ofrece un presente con interrogantes. Un posible mal uso de las amplias competencias transferidas por parte de las nuevas comunidades en ejercicio de sus poderes es fácilmente utilizable por parte de quienes añoran el centralismo preconstitucional, para levantar todo tipo de temores entre la población de resquebrajamiento de la sanidad pública en tanto pilar fundamental del Estado de bienestar. El trabajo se dirige de modo sucinto a los extremos anteriores. The greatest change experienced by the Spanish health system in the last two decades has probably been the devolution of power to the autonomous communities composing the Spanish state. This may generate tensions in the status quo and poses questions of whether decentralization of the health system is compatible with a cohesive national health system and whether this devolution of power is part of the problem of the health system or part of its solution. Generalized devolution occurring as rapidly as that produced in Spain (negotiated in slightly less than 6 months, with minimal financial agreements, without explicit legal frameworks in the areas of coordination and development of basic norms, and with a new agreement of general financing of the autonomous communities which possibly contains lacunae, etc.) presents an uncertain panorama. The possible misuse of the wide powers recently transferred to the autonomous communities could easily be used by those who would like to see a restoration of pre-democratic centralism to sow fear of the collapse of the health service as the cornerstone of the welfare state among the general public. The present article briefly addresses these questions.
Tertiary education in the U.S. requires large investments that are risky, lumpy, and well-timed. Tertiary education is also heavily subsidized. By making the risk of human capital investment more acceptable, especially to low wealth households, subsidies may increase investment in human capital, lower long-run inequality, and reduce aggregate precautionary savings. However, subsidies also encourage more poorly prepared students to attend and are usually financed via distortionary taxes. In this paper, we find that observed collegiate subsidies improve welfare substantially relative to the fully decentralized (zero subsidy) outcome. We show that subsidies help smooth consumption, lower skill premia, increase interest rates as precautionary savings fall, lower the inequality of both consumption and wealth, increase intergenerational income mobility and raise welfare, even when financed by distortionary taxes.
The ESRDF, one of the biggest projects funded by the World Bank in Ethiopia, was established on 13 February 1996. It was designed to provide financial and technical support to poor, mainly rural and women communities and community groups, to construct or rehabilitate and maintain basic economic and social infrastructure and services, as well as environmental conservation actions that they prioritized and in which they are willing to invest. In its technical support ESRDF was envisaged to give greater emphasis on strengthening community capacity in project identification, implementation and maintenance. ESRDF is a semi autonomous office and was organized on a decentralized basis. It has a central office and eleven regional offices, including Addis Ababa. The organizational structure employed at all levels is very slim and the staffing consists of a few qualified technical specialists. ESRDF has been operational for the last six years (1996-2002), and the theme of this paper is to go over its success towards achieving one of its top objectives, i.e. community empowerment, by taking ESRDF-Addis Ababa Regional Office as a case study. The ESRDF – Addis Ababa RO has assisted a total of 191 community-initiated projects technically and financially. They have focused on primary education, primary health care, environmental sanitation and development, capacity building and training and income generation. The paper is thus primarily focusing on the extent to which the office’s intervention brings about the enabling environment for communities to decide what their priorities are, to enable them to form their internal committees and elect representatives accountable to them, to participate actively in planning, implementation, management and maintenance of their projects, and to have considerable women’s participation in the decision-making process of communities’ actions in general and activities directly affecting their lives in particular. In order to give life to the discussion in the paper, facts about sub-projects that are relevant to the discussed topics will be demonstrated and presented. At the end of the paper, concluding remarks and recommendations concerning policy implications of community empowerment to the realization of poverty reduction strategy programs in Addis Ababa will be drawn.
This special report on the theme of interculturality brings together a number of contributions by researchers from different specialisations (information and communications sciences, history, sociology, literature, cinema, etc) and different parts of the world (Germany, Spain, United States, France, Greece, Poland). In terms of research and university teaching in Europe and elsewhere in the western world, there has been considerable development in this field since 1980 within the multitude of disciplines of which it is, in part, a result. As Jacques Demorgon states, although interculturality has "always formed part of the human condition, it has only been placed in perspective [] [so] recently" that it offers a large number of definitions and consequently a large body of authors, work and publications, as the object being studied -culture -is still just as wideranging. Thus interculturality may be compared to a vast building site where work is constantly in progress, to which anyone -whether a scientist or not -may contribute. An illustration of this is provided by a recent issue of Communication et Organisation (2002) on this topic, in which a number of authors each broach, in turn, the complexity and diversity of the field. While Dominique Desjeux (2002: 88; 95) notes in it that "culture is both a structure and a dynamic [] which makes its analysis and observation [] difficult, [] and that it may be just as much a key to functioning better with other people as a means of avoiding them", we shall emphasis that culture is an integral part of the human being and of the affiliations to which he/she is linked, whether deliberately or not (family unit and history; educational, professional, militant, associational circles; places for living and geographical, historical, political places, etc). Further proof of what is as stake in this topic is provided by the publication of the quarterly review En Temps Rel (2003), which
The paper addresses the development of higher education in the Czech Republic after 1989, with special emphasis on the relevant legislation, institutional settings, financing, & enrollment. Czech higher education has changed profoundly since 1989. Universities were granted almost full autonomy as early as in 1990. They have reformed their curricula, expanded programs in the humanities & social sciences, & eliminated political criteria from admissions policies, both for faculty & students. However, the structural changes were not as quick & profound as obtaining & mastering the freedom was. The most significant structural changes in the Czech tertiary educational system addressed in the paper are decentralization & diversification. With regard to financing, the authors argue that universities have remained dependent on the state to a high degree. Several attempts to expand multi-source financing by introducing cost-sharing features (tuition fees, loans, student allowances) failed. The reliance on the public budget led to a severe financial crisis in public universities. As far as enrollment is concerned, the authors demonstrate that, although the number of students rose by almost 60% between 1989 & 2001, the offer of educational opportunities was too low to meet the steeply rising demand for tertiary education. The chance of being admitted hovered around 50%. Owing to the combined effect of a drop in the size of the relevant age cohort & the growing proportion of students admitted to bachelor programs, the chance of enrollment started to increase in 2001. In spite of this recent change, the transition from secondary to tertiary education still remains the most critical moment in an educational career.
This article discusses the importance of the Colombian decentralization process in recent decades as a central axis bearing the tax side: revenues and expenditures of central government and the local authorities. The author makes it clear that despite the advantages of this system in Colombia are multiple problems due to gaps in the regulation of various aspects of reality and especially in the field of finance, taxation and spending. In recent decades, decentralization has brought the phenomenon of overflow discharges from local authorities based on an unlimited autonomy, so the National Government, together with the Congress, has issued various rules to clean up finances at the central, regional and local levels.
Konstantin Sonin, Centre for Economic Policy Research (United Kingdom)
In a federal state, political leaders of constituent units might protect their enterprises from the federal center (e.g., allowing them not to pay federal taxes). The effectiveness of such protection depends crucially on the ability of local authorities to extract rents from enterprises. They can easily do so, if there are a small number of enterprises with large employment, and local monopolies can be effectively sustained. They cannot do it so easily if regional industry is competitive, political opposition is strong, and the federal center has enough means to enforce payment of taxes. We build a simple model to argue that it is the industrial structure of constituent units that determines political relations between them and the federal centre. The theory is supported by the recent experience of Russia, China, and Argentina.
In Inside Appellate Courts: The Impact of Court Organization on Judicial Decision Making in The United States Courts of Appeals (Michigan 2002), Jonathan Matthew Cohen, a sociologist and practicing attorney, asks a question that has received scant attention in the academic commentary on appellate judging: If we accept the dominant conception of appellate court judging as a process of atomistic contemplation, how do federal circuit court judges continue to maintain high quality opinions in the face of pervasively growing judicial dockets? Cohen advances the provocative thesis that increasing workloads have not prevented appellate judges from producing high quality outputs, but rather, that the dominant image of appellate judging as an isolated contemplative task is conceptually flawed. A better approach, Cohen argues, is to compare the task of appellate court judging to production within a multi-divisional private firm. While Cohen recognizes the inherent limits of his analogy, and in particular, that unlike private firms, circuit courts lack a central coordinating authority, he nonetheless contends that it is more fruitful to consider the judges in the manner of workers in a complex organization than as autonomous actors reflecting in isolation on the legal issues presented on appeal. In this review essay, Stearns considers three complementary methodologies for analyzing appellate courts that yield insights of particular interest to lawyers and legal scholars. Such questions include how appellate courts transform preferences into doctrine; the nature of cases that are likely susceptible to further appellate process through en banc, mini-en banc, or Supreme Court review; and how best to evaluate appellate court opinions. While organizational theory provides a useful starting point, Stearns contends that insights drawn from other methodologies, including economics (demonstrating how decentralized informational processes can provide more meaningful data), probability analysis (demonstrating the quality of data drawn from subsets of a larger group), and social choice (demonstrating the nature and limits of group decision making), might prove more fruitful in evaluating at least some of these questions. Stearns concludes that a comprehensive understanding of federal appellate judging requires not only an understanding of the circuit courts' internal organizational structure, but also an analysis of the edifice of circuit court decision making from inside and out.
Sam Chema, E. Gilbert, Johannes Roseboom, Chema, Sam · 6 authors
This study reviews the ongoing reforms of national agricultural research systems (NARS) in sub-Saharan Africa. The study not only takes stock of the principal reform themes (i.e., a redefinition of the role of government, decentralization, stakeholder participation, new financing mechanisms, and system linkages), but also highlights the underlying ideas and concepts that shape the present NARS reform agenda. NARS reform details are illustrated and discussed in seven case-study countries: Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda. While there is considerable consensus about the main trends, there are major differences and disputes on specific aspects of the reform agenda. Moreover, NARS reforms alone will not close the technological divide between Africa and the rest of the world—they are to be seen as part of a far broader modernization agenda.