Blockchain Papers

Thon Ly, Miss Aquarius

Why a corpus that must be authoritative in its own language cannot normalise toward someone else's — and what that made of one man's work in Cambodia between 1929 and 1969. It is widely assumed, and rarely stated, that digitising a language is a tooling problem — better optical character recognition, better fonts, better models. This paper argues that for one class of corpus it is not, and that the constraint is upstream of any tool. We begin from a claim that turns out to be false: that a machine-readable corpus requires the language to have a standardised orthography. Swiss German and the Arabic dialects refute it. Both lack standardised spelling; both have substantial corpora, speech systems, machine translation and dedicated benchmarks. Corpora can be and are built for languages whose spelling is unsettled. What the refutation reveals is the mechanism by which those corpora are possible: they normalise toward a standard the variety itself does not have. Swiss German normalises to Standard German. Dialectal Arabic normalises to Modern Standard Arabic, or to a convention created for the purpose. The corpus is about the variety and encoded in a target borrowed from elsewhere. That move is available to most languages and unavailable to a specific and important minority: a corpus that must be authoritative in its own language cannot normalise toward another. A Khmer canonical text rendered in Thai orthography is not a Khmer witness to anything; it is a Thai rendering, and the distinction is the entire content of a critical apparatus. For such corpora, native standardisation is a genuine precondition, because the borrowing that substitutes for it is disqualified by what the corpus is for. We then examine the Cambodian case, which is unusual in that the precondition has a name, a date and a documented programme. Between the 1930s and 1967 Chuon Nath led the standardisation of Khmer orthography, compiled the dictionary that fixed its lexicon, and led the translation of the canon into it. ⭐ But the case also contains its own counterexample, and this is the paper's second contribution: standardisation is necessary and not sufficient. Khmer's orthographic layer was settled by the 1960s; its encoding layer was not, and the volumes this project transcribes carry five mutually incompatible legacy font encodings in a single book, one of them apparently custom and undocumented. Seventy years separate the solution of the first layer from the ongoing repair of the second. We state the claim in falsifiable form, name the comparison class against which it should be tested, and concede three limits — including that standardisation was contested, that its politics are not innocent, and that this paper is not an argument for it. --- Provenance. This paper is part of the THonly research corpus, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. The canonical version is at https://thonly.org/research/the-borrowable-standard. Its SHA-256 is a5774b3c66dc801f125d4f6712b054ee83d10c9e86b6ec3c35e7f3e0be4ba715, independently timestamped to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps and signed under RFC 3161 by three trust authorities, one of them eIDAS-qualified. AI co-authorship is disclosed. Miss Aquarius is the consistent name used for the AI collaboration across all venues.

Brian R. Cook, Nicholas Harrigan, Van Touch, Kirt Hainzer · 7 authors

ABSTRACT The arts are envisioned as able to help address the longstanding ‘implementation gap’ between research and realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For SDG2 (Zero Hunger), Forum Theatre offers a participatory alternative to top‐down interventions, yet its impacts have not been evaluated using rigorous, mixed‐methods that are attentive to both quantitative and qualitative data, to spillover effects, or to diffusion over time. This study analyses 13 performances in Northwest Cambodia, each attended by 50–150 people, with follow‐up interviews conducted with 66 attendees 1 year later. Results identify a replicable impact pathway: learning correlates with on‐farm behaviour change, which is predictive of knowledge‐sharing with non‐attendees, whereas recollection alone does not. By evidencing this process, the analysis provides rare empirical proof of theatre's effectiveness as a catalyst for change. More broadly, it evidences a replicable pathway for achieving the SDGs, but one that requires moving beyond information‐transfer models toward participatory interventions that foster dialogue, critical reflection, forum, and the collective diffusion of new practices. A short documentary and accompanying video of performances are available to illustrate the process and support others seeking to replicate or adapt the approach in different contexts.

Naomi Takeda

Scheme of the CBDC: Ueda and Hay state that the e-CNY issued by the People's Bank of China (PBOC) “adopts a similar two-tier system in which the PBOC issues e-CNY and retail banks distribute it through wallets set up by users … the PBOC admits e-CNY as its liability. Similarly, the NBC should admit the Bakong as its liability.” In reality, the e-CNY and the Bakong adopt contrasting schemes. With the e-CNY, while private banks provide user interfaces and wallets for retail users, money within such wallets is a liability of the PBOC—not of private banks backed by CB reserves, which is the case for the Bakong. Readers would benefit from learning that, here, the provider of the wallets differs from the issuer of money, that is, whose liability money is. Without recognizing this, one cannot fully grasp the typical two-tier system that provides a retail CBDC. Quasi-retail CBDC: Ueda and Hay's statement that “the NBC has been emphasizing that the Bakong is not a liability of the NBC, which is not true from the viewpoint of the underlying technology and economics” needs further clarification and consideration. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) accommodates various types of money on a common platform. It does not equate tokenized deposits with a CBDC or transform the nature of tokenized deposits into a CB liability. Furthermore, DLT adoption is neither a prerequisite nor a general feature of a retail CBDC. Economic researchers should be mindful of the differences between a retail CBDC (a CB liability) and a quasi-retail CBDC backed by CB reserves (not a CB liability), as the latter could carry risks that affect user behavior. Economics viewpoints vary depending on how we define economics; oversimplification should be avoided. Future course: Finally, Ueda and Hay argue that “[i]f the demand continues to be low like this for a few more years, the NBC should stop offering the retail Bakong … the government should not provide services that the private sector can provide.” To begin with, abolishing the retail Bakong and leaving retail payments in the hands of the private sector would not prevent dollarization and ensure efficient and stable retail payments in emerging economies. These policy objectives ought to be pursued by the public sector, not the private sector. Assessing the long-term effects of the Bakong today would be a prejudgment. It is not uncommon for payment infrastructures to become widely adopted with a lag due to existing conventions. Additional policy actions therefore may well likely be taken in the future. A conceivable future might involve continued efforts to establish network effects of the Bakong while proceeding with structural reforms and conducting sound fiscal and monetary policies so as to increase the credibility of the KHR, then shifting into KHR payments when deemed appropriate.

Tuckson, Michael

Support for integrated capacity building focusing on learning support for government organizations, communities, networks and small business is the most important contribution foreigners can make to local development.Excessive equipment and action assistance with minimal learning support, is more likely to create dependence.However learning support without locally financed working resources and improved motivation is hardly effective.Decentralization of authority requires decentralization of skills.Learning support focusing on specialist and management training without integrated courses for all staff limits organizational effectiveness.Aid/ cooperation should be much better integrated.This can only be achieved through deeper dialogue and better strategies.To seek a reasonable future for the region