이 논문에서는 지방교육재정분권의 개념을 정리하고, 세입과 세출 측면에서 현황을 간략하게 살펴본 뒤, 지방교육재정분권을 위한 향후 과제를 제안하였다. 재정분권화는 지방교육자치제도 발전을 위한 핵심요소로서 권한 및 재원의 지방 이양, 지방의 자율성 제고와 더불어 이에 상응하는 책임성이 요구된다. 한국의 지방교육재정은 세입분권 측면에서 이전재원중심의 불안정한 세입구 조를 보이고 있고, 세출분권 측면에서는 중앙의 통제권한과 국가사업수행을 위한 재정지출 과다, 재정운용의 자율성 취약의 특징을 보여준다. 앞으로 지방교육재정의 세입분권 강화를 위해서는 지방교육발전을 위해 필요한 재정 확충, 안정성 강화, 과세자주권 확보가 필요하다. 세출분권 강화를 위해서는 관련정책 결정 및 법령 제·개정시 참여 보장, 재정운용의 자율성 확대, 지방교육자치 제도의 강화가 요청된다. 그리고 책무성 확보를 위해서는 재정관리 역량의 강화와 협력적 거버넌 스의 확대가 병행되어야 한다.In this article, the concept of local education finance decentralization was summarized, and the present situation was briefly reviewed in terms of revenue and expenditure, and the future task for decentralization of local education was proposed. Fiscal decentralization is a key factor for the development of the local education autonomy, which requires the delegation of authority and financial resources, the improvement of local autonomy, and the corresponding accountability. In Korea, the local education finance shows the characteristics of the dependency of transferring resources and the unstable revenue structure in terms of revenue decentralization. And in terms of expenditure decentralization, there is excessive central government control and fiscal expenditure for national projects, and fiscal autonomy is weak. In order to strengthen the decentralization of local education finances, it is necessary to secure stable financial resources for the development of local education, to secure its own resources, to simplify the tax structure and to secure taxation autonomy. In order to strengthen the decentralization of expenditure, it is required to guarantee the participation in decision-making of related policies and regulations, the autonomy of financial management, and the strengthening of local education autonomy. In order to secure accountability, it is necessary to expand cooperative governance and enhance financial management capacity.
Blockchain is a highly popular paradigm for non-centralized applications, especially in finance and trade. Performance is a major challenge for blockchains, since consensus approaches are known not to scale. In this presentation we address blockchain performance, from the perspective of model-based prediction as well as benchmark-based assessment. We present research results about smart contracts in the Ethereum blockchain and discuss the requirements for generic benchmarks for blockchain performance. Benchmarking is a common approach to compare industry-class systems. As blockchain technologies mature, the role of reliable benchmarks will become increasingly important. However, definitions of benchmarks for blockchains are still in their infancy. We argue that there is a clear need for benchmarks, and that benchmarks should be based on the sound scientific principles of metrology [1]. A variety of important performance issues should be addressed, including the performance of the proof (be it work, stake, or other), transaction processing and block creation. Moreover, in all these situations, establishing energy consumption benchmarks is critical in determining if incentives are in place for miners to operate the blockchain system. A particularly interesting element in some blockchains is the mechanism of smart contracts. For instance, in Ethereum, the fees associated with executing contracts depend on the benchmarked performance of the operation code. In [2] it was demonstrated that uncertainty with respect to the correctness of the anticipated execution time impacts the decisions miners will take. We will discuss improved benchmarking approaches for operational code.
Introduction. Blockchain technology is becoming one of the main drivers of innovation in the global economy. Its adoption will have a huge impact on how businesses and governments operate and on the way people organize their everyday lives. Financial services industry is the one experiencing the biggest impact of the blockchain disruption so far, while financial institutions are among the first adopters of the technology. At the same time, being a relatively traditional industry, shipping has not yet seen many use cases with blockchain, but the technology is able to change this industry dramatically. Aim and tasks. As the industries of finance and shipping have huge potential in the blockchain space and often interact, determining how the blockchain technology adoption can influence the industries of finance and shipping in the future was the main purpose of this article. Research results. To fulfill this purpose, it was important to describe the origins of the blockchain technology, its main characteristics, functioning principles and consensus algorithms. Supported by the recent hype, cryptocurrencies are the biggest use case for blockchain so far, therefore, the article analyzes the largest of them, including Bitcoin, Ethereum and some others, as well as the cryptocurrency market as a whole. The level of worldwide adoption of blockchain and the overall market size are defined further in the article. Various applications in finance are also mentioned, paying particular attention to the insurance industry. Based on this information, the key areas in which blockchain can disrupt finance and insurance are identified. As the number of blockchain companies increases rapidly, the two main fundraising channels for such companies, venture capital and initial coin offering, are analyzed and compared. The ways in which blockchain may impact the shipping services industry are identified further. Conclusion. Afterwards, the article describes a number of blockchain consortia formed by public institutions and private entities to research and test possible applications of the technology across various industries and countries. While the potential of blockchain is still largely undiscovered, all the gathered information and performed research help to make a conclusion that the blockchain technology will have a big impact on many different industries, including financial and shipping services. The coming years will definitely see an exponentially growing interest in blockchain in academic and business fields, as the technology becomes more and more mainstream.
In this piece of provocation we focus on the words of people who we view as increasingly powerful institutional actors in the field of organization theory and what they signify about ‘what needs to be done’ and ‘how it needs to be done’ in order to rectify the many failings they identify. We suggest that their actions reflect a desire for an integrated, general theory of organizations and the conception of organization studies as a nomothetic science to which they (and perforce we) are philosophically and ideologically committed. These are seen to be intellectual and ideological forces at work on both sides of the Atlantic. We provide a critique of this emerging orthodoxy within contemporary organization theory, briefly drawing on Swift’s metaphor of Lilliputian ‘big enders’ and ‘little enders’ but also offer contemplation of the architectural metaphors of ‘cathedral’, ‘mystery house’ and ‘the tower of Babel’ (conceived of as ruination) to consider the alternative imaginary edifices that may influence the structure of our studies. Finally, we specify an alternative research agenda for organization theory which focuses upon ‘the organization of destruction’ rather than ‘the organization of production’ or ‘the organization of consumption’. Rather than seeing any contestation of intellectual traditions, analytical frameworks and methodological strategies as mental manacles and shackles which we need to ‘throw off’ to rediscover our true vocation as organization scientists, we contend that organization theory needs to reignite a fierce dialogue over ‘organization’ and its relation to order and disorder that has stretched over, at least, two millennia and still speaks to our lives today and tomorrow.
The review discusses the ideas presented in the book by D. Tapscott and A. Tapscott - specifically, the concept of distributed capitalism allowed for by blockchain technology. The blockchain era is characterized by development of a new institution of trust; disruption of financial intermediation; economic inclusion of hundreds of millions of citizens in developing countries; an increase in competition and a decrease in inequality. The authors see the blockchain revolution as a solution to the problem of discrimination against intellectual property creators, who have to hand over a large part of the value created to intermediaries. They consider the main opposition to distributed capitalism to stem from the feudal financial system which loses ground under new conditions, where economic agents may use alternative currencies and interact directly with each other without risk and high transaction costs.
Cryptocurrency is a form of money that is secured by cryptography, a technology that will keep safe any information from third parties, to pacify the transactions and to control its value over time. Cryptocurrency has no organization or institution who has authority to control it, which makes some people think that it is not safe. Many research has talking about cryptocurrency in its technological side. However, no study has ever been correlating this topic with economic growth. Using panel data regression, this thesis correlating BTC, as the most known and expedienced type of cryptocurrency with GDP as the variable that represent economic growth. It also has 3 other variables as the control variable that will make sure the result to be unbiassed. Those are capital (K), labor (L), and Technology (A), as in the Solow’s growth theory which reviewing growth through its supply side, the input production function. The sample are taken from 5 Asian countries with the highest number of Bitcoin usages (Japan, China, India, Singapore, Indonesia), with period that started from 2011 to 2016. KEYWORDS: Cryptocurrency, economic growth, solow growth model, bitcoin.
There is an absence of a theory explaining the non-structural institutional practice of autonomous regions in Indonesia, which is part of new public management form of decentralization. This has an effect on the increasingly unfamiliar role of civil society combined agencies and governmental elements in order to assist in the delivery of public services. Yet this relatively new institutional model, able to address the issue of substantial democracy in developing countries such as Indonesia, which affects the quality of development of a region. At the praxis level, the increasing variety of challenges both domestically and internationally and the demands of fast-paced and instant society make the central government institutions overwhelmed to answer the various policy issues. What is the role of nonstructural institutions in order to participate in local governance? This research analyzes the role of 3 non-structural institutional in Semarang City such as Semarang City Bureau Management Board, Sima Polder Management Board and Town Planning Development Board of Semarang in local governance through interview, literature study and a series of observations on activities in the three of non-structural institutions during November 2016 until November 2017. The results show that the role of non-structural institutions involving various stakeholders, both civil society elements and government elements, is able to accelerate the process of public participation in the framework of urban development, to present informal communication in the context of the effectiveness of public policy socialization, policy issues that are easily identified and able to present experts who comes from diverse educational backgrounds and experiences to take an active role in providing policy solutions and alternatives. Keyword : Functional decentralization, Substantial Democracy and Non Structural Organization
Davide Frey, Marc X. Makkes, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taı̈ani · 5 authors
Blockchains have a storage scalability issue. Their size is not bounded and they grow indefinitely as time passes. As of August 2017, the Bitcoin blockchain is about 120 GiB big while it was only 75 GiB in August 2016. To benefit from Bitcoin full security model, a bootstrapping node has to download and verify the entirety of the 120 GiB. This poses a challenge for low-resource devices such as smartphones. Thankfully, an alternative exists for such devices which consists of downloading and verifying just the header of each block. This partial block verification enables devices to reduce their bandwidth requirements from 120 GiB to 35 MiB. However, this drastic decrease comes with a safety cost implied by a partial block verification. In this work, we enable low-resource devices to fully verify subchains of blocks without having to pay the onerous price of a full chain download and verification; a few additional MiB of bandwidth suffice. To do so, we propose the design of diet nodes that can securely query full nodes for shards of the UTXO set, which is needed to perform full block verification and can otherwise only be built by sequentially parsing the chain.
This article presents the formal syntax and semantics for a large subset of the Solidity programming language developed for the Etheruem blockchain platform based on our resent work about developing a general, extensible, and reusable formal memory (GERM) framework and an extension of Curry-Howard isomorphism, denoted as execution-verification isomorphism (EVI). This subset is denoted as Lolisa, which, to our knowledge, is the first mechanized and validated formal syntax and semantics developed for Solidity. The formal syntax of Lolisa adopts a stronger static type system than Solidity for enhanced type safety. In addition, Lolisa not only includes nearly all the syntax components of Solidity, such as mapping, modifier, contract, and address types, but it also contains general-purpose programming language features, such as multiple return values, pointer arithmetic, struct, and field access. Therefore, the inherent compatibility of Lolisa allows Solidity programs to be directly translated into Lolisa with a line-by-line correspondence without rebuilding or abstracting, and, in addition, the inherent generality of Lolisa allows it to be extended to express other programming languages as well. To this end, we also present a preliminary scheme for extending Lolisa to other languages systematically.
The research carried out was intended to show the centrality of the financing model as a federative coordination mechanism in the process of institutionalization of the social assistance policy initiated after the implementation of the Unified Social Assistance System in the mid - 2000s. For this, a theoretical revision was made on the relations between federalism, decentralization and social policies, followed by stages of conceptual and documentary analysis about the decentralization process of social assistance policy and the construction of the current financing model; and quantitative and qualitative analysis of data on the institutionalization and operationalization of social assistance financing. In order to operationalize the hypotheses and analytical questions proposed, the research was based on the study of the case of the government of the State of Minas Gerais and municipalities, from 2005 to 2016. The results showed that the processes of institutional transformation of the social assistance policy financing model led to the installation of institutional capacity in the municipalities and the state of Minas Gerais. In the case of municipalities, institutional capacity was followed by the growth of resources in the sector, with gains even in relative importance compared to other public expenditures. In the case of the state government, the results found showed weaknesses in the process of assumption of federal responsibility, evidenced by the non-regularity of expenditures and the transfer of co-financing to municipalities and the low volume of resources executed. As for the model of co-financing, the sharing of resources among the municipalities of Minas Gerais generates an equitable and redistributive distribution, favoring the municipalities that concentrate the largest population in a situation of vulnerability. Thus, it is suggested that the financing model has contributed to the consolidation of the federative accountability process, and, ultimately, to the implementation of the decentralized Brazilian social security.
Adaptive tendril coiling of climbing plants has long inspired the artificial soft microsystem for actuation and morphing. The current bionic research efforts on tendril coiling focus on either the preparation of materials with the coiling geometry or the design of self-shaping materials. However, the realization of two key functional features of the tendril, the spring-like buffering connection and the axial contraction, remains elusive. Herein, we devise a conductive tendril by fusing conductive yarns into tendril configuration, bypassing the prevailing conductivity constraints and mechanical limitations. The conductive tendril not only inherits an electrophysiology buffering mechanics with exceptional conductance retention ability against extreme stretching but also exhibits excellent contractive actuation performance. The integrative design of the ultraelastic conductive tendril shows a combination of compliant mobility, actuation, and sensory capabilities. Such smart biomimetic material holds great prospects in the fields of ultrastretchable electronics, artificial muscles, and wearable bioelectronic therapeutics.
This article examines economic aspects of managing territorial development. Themain principles of interaction between central and local authorities which exist in modern Ukrainian society have been defined. Some approaches to ensuring economic territorial development are revealed. The normative legal framework, on the basis of which the implementation of management actions in separate territories is carried out, has been examined. The decentralization reform and the activities of unified territorial communities that manage territorial development are characterized. The disadvantages that exist in the sphere of administrative decision-making concerning territorial development are considered. Particular emphasis is placed on improving public policy in order to intensify the decentralization reform at the sub-regional level, to increase the level of financing of unified territorial communities and improve control over the use of their budgetary funds.
Clinical research and health information data sharing are but ripples in a growing wave of reimagined applications of distributed ledger technologies beyond the digital marketplace for which they were originally created. This paper explores the use of distributed ledger technologies to facilitate single institutional ethics review of multi-site, collaborative studies in the dataintensive sciences such as genetics and genomics. Immutable record-keeping, automatable protocol amendments and direct connectivity between stakeholders in the research enterprise (e.g., researchers, research ethics committees, institutions, funders and regulators) comprise several of the conceptual and technological advantages of distributed ledger technologies to research ethics review. This novel-use proposal dovetails recent policy reforms to research ethics review across North America that mandate a single ethics review for any study that takes place across more than one research site. Such reforms in the United States, Canada and Australia replace prior institution-by-institution approval mechanisms that contributed to significant research delays and duplicative procedures for collaborative research worldwide. While this paper centers on the Common Rule revision in the United States, the single ethics review mandate is a noteworthy example of regulation evolving in parallel with advances in the dataintensive sciences it governs. The informational exchange capacities of distributed ledger technologies align well with the procedural goals of streamlining the ethics review system under the new Common Rule ahead of its official implementation on January 19, 2020. The ethical, legal and social implications of applying such technologies to ethics review will be explored in this concept paper. Namely, the paper proposes how administrative data from research ethics committees (REC) could be protected and shared responsibly, as well as interinstitutional cooperation negotiated within a centralized network of research ethics committees using the blockchain. Keywords: Blockchain, Data Sharing, Ethics Review, Governance, IRB, Research, Single Mutual Recognition
Open access
Ethics in Clinical Research
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Gaoqi Liang, Steven R. Weller, Fengji Luo, Junhua Zhao · 5 authors
The cyber security of modern power systems has drawn increasing attention in both academia and industry. Many detection and defense methods for cyber-attacks have therefore been proposed to enhance robustness of modern power systems. In this paper, we propose a new, distributed blockchain-based protection framework to enhance the self-defensive capability of modern power systems against cyber-attacks. We present a comprehensive discussion on how blockchain technology can be used to enhance the robustness and security of the power grid, by using meters as nodes in a distributed network which encapsulates meter measurements as blocks. Effectiveness of the proposed protection framework is demonstrated via simulation experiments on the IEEE-118 benchmark system.
Since the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also known as Daesh and ISIL) in 2014, antiquities have been a widely publicized source of funding for what has become one of the most technologically savvy terrorist organizations of the modern era. The globalization of technology and rise of popularity in cryptocurrencies has changed the face of black-market trade and the actors that carry out these crimes. While art and antiquities have long served as a market with susceptibilities to laundering, the emergence of Dark Web markets, identification-masking software, and untraceable cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have opened new doors to potential vulnerabilities. The anonymity that is offered by these technologies acts as a roadblock for authorities, while attracting the likes of terrorists and transnational criminals. Investigative research using cyber security platforms to identify digital artifacts connected to potential traffickers provides the opportunity to unmask the seemingly untraceable actors behind these activities. The evidence of illicit antiquities trafficking on the Dark Web displayed in this article can generate a new discussion on how and where to study black-market antiquities to gain needed insight into combating the illicit trade online and the transnational criminal groups it may finance.
Peng Jiang, Fuchun Guo, Willy Susilo, Man Ho Au · 6 authors
A procurement protocol is a protocol for a buyer to purchase digital goods at their prices from a vendor. A procurement protocol with privacy preservation can be achieved by priced oblivious transfer (POT). POT allows the buyer to obliviously procure items one by one. An adaptive POT protocol only consumes O(1) communication cost in each transaction, where all items are committed and encrypted before transactions. However, we found that the state-of-the-art adaptive POT protocol proposed by Rial et al. is less practical and does not meet real-world needs. It has to restrict to the one-buyer setting where all items are encrypted associated with one buyer's public key. For multiple buyers, the vendor must respectively encrypt all the same items for each buyer. Besides, it has to employ computationally expensive primitives such as zero-knowledge proof which imply inefficient computation operations. It is therefore unscalable and unsuitable in large-scale applications. In this paper, we propose an efficient adaptive priced oblivious transfer protocol to address the aforementioned problems. The proposed adaptive POT is built on top of a new cryptographic primitive, namely, adaptive set membership encryption (ASME). In our proposed protocol, all items are encrypted without the use of buyers' public keys and hence they can be used for universal buyers. Our protocol significantly reduces the transaction cost compared to existing schemes. For example, the communication in each transaction costs only 6 group elements compared to at least 141 group elements in Rial et al.'s protocol. The implementation shows that our protocol is efficient in terms of bandwidth and computational cost.
This paper presents a method for a decentralised peer-to-peer software license validation system using cryptocurrency blockchain technology to ameliorate software piracy, and to provide a mechanism for software developers to protect copyrighted works. Protecting software copyright has been an issue since the late 1970's and software license validation has been a primary method employed in an attempt to minimise software piracy and protect software copyright. The method described creates an ecosystem in which the rights and privileges of participants are observed.
Blockchain, the rapid developing technology behind Bitcoin, is increasingly becoming popular. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that distributes digital transactions peer-to-peer to a decentralized network of nodes that verify the transactions and keep a cryptographic secured copy of the entire history of transactions. The network automatically reaches consensus about the correct history of records, which makes the database transparent and immutable. This consensus role makes it possible to take away the third party in certain processes, such as the bank or the notary. Blockchain also enables digital payments and smart contracts. Smart contracts are digital contracts that can be executed automatically by the blockchain. This enables digital registration of for example identity, birth certificates and votes. But smart contracts have many more automation applications that can be coded in computer code, which has the potential of making many processes in both the public as the private sector more efficient and less costly. Governmental services are especially applicable for blockchain, as they could become more efficient and can even be made obsolete in some cases. <br/><br/>Project teams that develop blockchain powered smart contract applications have to work with nascent tools and technology, and a lack of real life use cases. This leads to a lack of empirical knowledge on how to implement smart contracts in governmental services. An overview of guidelines that assist developing project teams is non-existent, which slows down the implementation process. Blockchain technology is not well-researched and smart contract implementation research is even more scarce. A comprehensive overview that shows design phases, design principles and design dilemmas is non-existent, but could greatly assist project teams that implement smart contract applications. Such an overview would speed up the implementation process and can lead to an acceleration of use cases. Therefore, this research focused on answering the main research question: “How can blockchain powered smart contracts be implemented in governmental services?”. <br/><br/>We used the design science approach in order to answer the main research question. The design science approach allowed us for using several sub methods. We started with a literature review and desk research to understand and analyze blockchain technology and smart contracts, followed by a literature review in order to draft the first version of design principles. These were improved by conducting four case studies. With the second version of the design principles, we built the first version of the design framework. These were assessed by six experts, which allowed us to refine the design principles and design framework into a final version. <br/><br/>The 36 design principles are guidelines to aid project teams that implement smart contracts in governmental services. We incorporated these design principles in a framework, that shows which design principles are applicable in the following five phases of smart contract implementation: exploration, conceptualization, testing, implementation and expansion. Each of these phases has its own results and applicable design principles, which is comprehensively indicated in the framework. However, various pairs of principles affect each other, which we call design dilemmas.
Daniël Vos, Leon Overweel, Wouter Raateland, Jelle Vos · 7 authors
Millions of shipping containers filled with goods move around the world every day. Before such a container may enter a trade bloc, the customs agency of the goods' destination country must ensure that it does not contain illegal or mislabeled goods. Due to the high volume of containers, customs agencies make a selection of containers to audit through a risk analysis procedure. Customs agencies perform risk analysis using data sourced from a centralized system that is potentially vulnerable to manipulation and malpractice. Therefore we propose an alternative: DEFenD, a decentralized system that stores data about goods and containers in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. In our system, economic operators make claims to the network about goods they insert into or remove from containers, and encrypt these claims so that they can only be read by the destination country's customs agency. Economic operators also make unencrypted claims about containers with which they interact. Unencrypted claims can be validated by the entire network of customs agencies. Our key contribution is a data partitioning scheme and several protocols that enable such a system to utilize blockchain and its powerful validation principle, while also preserving the privacy of the involved economic operators. Using our protocol, customs agencies can improve their risk analysis and economic operators can get through customs with less delay. We also present a reference implementation built with Hyperledger Fabric and analyze to what extent our implementation meets the requirements in terms of privacy-preservation, security, scalability, and decentralization.
There is no doubt that Cryptocurrency is a word that provokes a very strong response these days. On one hand, Team Crypto proclaimers the arena as the next big thing as they speak in blue sky terms about the future of this new form of currency that takes digital shape and is beyond restriction. In direct opposition is Team Tradition that warns of the perils of decentralization and fraud around pure digital currency. Indeed, there was nothing short of a frenzy around trading on the CBOE Bitcoin futures a few days ago, while the day after reports detailed a large digital heist surrounding Ethereum. Doomsday sentiment around this new area of tech convergence with thaof the financial spectrum is plentiful. Just why is there so much fear around the area of cryptocurrency, and what will 2018 mean for this pioneering area, particularly as we move to a general cashless society that is easily driven and adopted by the massive Millennial demographic?