By using block chain technology, bitcoin has realized a real de centralization and point to point digital currency system, which effectively solved the problems of "double payment" and "curbing inflation". Bitcoin has the value and function of money, therefore, in practical application, we need to consider one problem --"malicious attack", whose success probability affects the basic security performance of the system. This paper is based on the mathematical derivation and analysis of the model and formula given by the "Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system" in the original paper of Satoshi Takemoto's paper. And verify the theoretical guarantee that the success of attack needs the following conditions: Mastering the calculation power of "50%".
Blockchain is still a big unknown, even for some professionals. Blockchain and the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) have been made infamous by Bitcoin, a digital payment and peer-to-peer monetary transaction system that bypasses banks and third party endorsements. But DLT and the Blockchain protocol can be used for other purposes.
Blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technological innovations are affecting all aspects of our societies and causing some profound changes in human resource (HR) practices in business and non-profit organizations. Critical to these high tech advances is how they will affect employment patterns and the way companies will hire their workforce, influencing HR practices and the way they will manage their employees. This paper, after a short introduction, consists of three parts. The first discusses how blockchain and AI are affecting HR practices. The second looks at hiring practices at firms, while the third discusses employment patterns in the emerging age of high-tech super-automation. There is also a concluding section, discussing the implications of the forthcoming AI on employment (or unemployment) and the inevitable income inequality that is bound to develop and affect our societies.
Blockchain can potentially be deployed in a wide range of applications due to its capability to ensure decentralization, transparency, and immutability. In this paper, we design a cryptographic membership authentication scheme (i.e., authenticating graph data) to support blockchain-based identity management systems (BIMS). Such a system is designed to bind a digital identity object to its real-world entity. Specifically, we introduce a new transitively closed undirected graph authentication (TCUGA) scheme, which only needs to use node signatures (e.g., certificates for identifying nodes). The trapdoor hash function used in our scheme allows the signer to efficiently update the certificates without the need to re-sign the nodes. In other words, our scheme is efficient even though the graph dynamically adds or deletes vertices and edges. Moreover, our proposal can efficiently provide a proof when the edge between two vertices does not exist, thus solving the existing intractability issue in transitive signature (the main tool for authenticating graph data). Finally, we prove the security of our proposed TCUGA in the standard model and evaluate its performance to show its feasibility for BIMS.
The scientific enterprise relies on a peer-review process to maintain the quality of academic discourse and to ensure researchers develop a valid and consistent cumulative body of knowledge. In recent years, it appears that the review capacity in the IS field has decreased, which indicates that the community’s hunger for publication accompanies only a modest appetite for providing the necessary support to sustain the consequent increase in peer-review load. The advent of blockchain technologies and the proliferation of cryptocurrencies presents an opportunity to develop a token-based peer-review payment system that can clear the congested review pipelines while also controlling for quality and spreading the equity that peer review generates in a fair fashion through market-regulation mechanisms. Despite the digital transformation of the publishing industry, little has been done thus far to address the chronic inefficiency of the review process. The typical review cycles, which are measured in years, suggest that something needs to change. Developing a token-based peer-review payment system may be an opportunity not only to address the apparent challenge in the peer-review process but also to assert our proclaimed role as stewards of the digital revolution.
The conventional electric power system is a unidirectional configuration that delivers electricity to the consumer in the power plant, but as the prosumers emerges, microgrid technology that enables bi-directional configuration has been developed. By applying the data distribution processing technology called the blockchain to the microgrid, time and cost can be saved compared with the conventional microgrid system. Through the related research, we analyze the structure of the microgrid and the utilization of the blockchain, study the pros and cons of applying the public blockchain and the private (consortium) blockchain, and propose the possible scenarios.
Caching and Content Delivery
Energy and Environmental Systems
Internet of Things and Social Network Interactions
The community of Don Juan-Jama was greatly affected by the earthquake of April 16, 2016. The earthquake and the subsequent process of slow recovery caused profound changes for the population in the social, political, economic, and infrastructural, between others. Don Juan in particular has received support for the reconstruction from governmental institutions and non-governmental organizations, however, these processes have not necessarily been accompanied by a mitigation plan to promote the development of adaptive capacities at the local level, yet necessary to give origin to a more resilient community. This paper presents a methodological framework for the case of Don Juan based on established models (see Cutter et al., 2008, Parsons et al., 2016, Ross, 2014) for the measurement of adaptive capacities, variables used in these studies to measure the levels of local resilience. Based on a qualitative field study, the main actions executed in the reconstruction process by NGOs and governmental institutions have been differentiated and analyzed. This presented and critically discussed methodological framework contributes to developing adaptive capacities for resilience at the community level and through public policies by the Autonomous Decentralized Government (GAD).
This research work is structured as provided by the Regulation of Academic Regime of the National University of Loja and the Guidelines of the Public Administration Career, has a review of literature that is divided into theoretical framework and referential framework, to support the study entitled Diagnosis of the work environment of public servants of the San Felipe de Ona Municipal Decentralized Autonomous Government, 2017 period.
To make this diagnosis, there was aa target population made up of all the public servants of the GADM, which are a total of 38 people, of whom 37 were surveyed to identify their perspective of the work environment as employees, however for determine the perspective as heads were interviewed to the maximum authority of the Canton and to the 6 departmental directors of the institution.
Once the research techniques were applied, the result was that in terms of physical, structural, interpersonal, personal and organizational behavior factors, all of them are in a satisfactory range, thus concluding with the determination of a satisfactory work environment for the public servants of the institution.
This work finishes with the respective recommendations for each conclusion obtained, emphasizing the variables of each factor that gave negative results, likewise a periodic evaluation of the work environment of the institution is suggested.
The present investigative work is related to the administrative management which implies different measures about the planning, organization, direction and control of the resources.
In addition to an efficient management that guarantees the institutional strengthening and effective performance of the employees; to achieve a series of objectives which have been proposed to improve the work performance of the administrative staff of the human talent area in the Municipal Autonomous Decentralized Government of Canton Caluma, Province of Bolivar.
This work is explorative, descriptive and explanatory, applied to a sample of 49 users and 20 administrative employees, for which the surveys were used based on a structured questionnaire where a series of conclusions were obtained: the administrative staff; who are not properly organized, or motivated and lack administrative strategies that allows to have better performance and work performance, lack of attention, outdated knowledge little communication and collaboration between colleagues, in addition to poor management of functions by employees.
The recommendations that were reached were: that the administrative staff should be trained in customer service, specialized knowledge, distribution and coordination of the charges according to the profiles and also on the manual functions.
We introduce FairSwap -- an efficient protocol for fair exchange of digital goods using smart contracts. A fair exchange protocol allows a sender S to sell a digital commodity x for a fixed price p to a receiver R. The protocol is said to be secure if R only pays if he receives the correct x. Our solution guarantees fairness by relying on smart contracts executed over decentralized cryptocurrencies, where the contract takes the role of an external judge that completes the exchange in case of disagreement. While in the past there have been several proposals for building fair exchange protocols over cryptocurrencies, our solution has two distinctive features that makes it particular attractive when users deal with large commodities. These advantages are: (1) minimizing the cost for running the smart contract on the blockchain, and (2) avoiding expensive cryptographic tools such as zero-knowledge proofs. In addition to our new protocols, we provide formal security definitions for smart contract based fair exchange, and prove security of our construction. Finally, we illustrate several applications of our basic protocol and evaluate practicality of our approach via a prototype implementation for fairly selling large files over the cryptocurrency Ethereum.
Non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs are fundamental to modern cryptography. Numerous NIZK constructions are known in both the random oracle and the common reference string (CRS) models. In the CRS model, there exist constructions from several classes of cryptographic assumptions such as trapdoor permutations, pairings, and indistinguishability obfuscation. However, at the time of the initial publication of this work, we did not have constructions of NIZKs from standard lattice assumptions. In this work, we take an initial step toward constructing multi-theorem NIZKs for general $$\mathsf {NP}$$ languages from standard lattice assumptions by considering a relaxation to the preprocessing model and a new model we call the designated-prover model. In the preprocessing model, a setup algorithm generates secret proving and verification keys for the prover and the verifier, respectively. In the designated-prover model, the proving key is secret, but the verification key is public. In both settings, the proving key is used to construct proofs and the verification key is used to check proofs. Finally, in the multi-theorem setting, both the proving and verification keys should be reusable for an unbounded number of theorems without compromising soundness or zero-knowledge. Previous constructions of NIZKs in the preprocessing model that rely on weaker assumptions like one-way functions or oblivious transfer are only secure in a single-theorem setting. Thus, constructing multi-theorem NIZKs in these relaxed models does not seem to be inherently easier than constructing them in the CRS model. In this work, we first construct a multi-theorem preprocessing NIZK argument from context-hiding homomorphic signatures. In fact, the construction is a designated-prover NIZK. We also show that using homomorphic commitments, we can get statistically sound proofs in the preprocessing and designated-prover models. Together with lattice-based instantiations of homomorphic signatures and commitments, we obtain the first multi-theorem NIZKs in the preprocessing and designated-prover models from standard lattice assumptions. Finally, we show how to generalize our construction to obtain a universally composable NIZK (UC-NIZK) in the preprocessing model from standard lattice assumptions. Our UC-NIZK relies on a simple preprocessing protocol based on a new primitive we call blind homomorphic signatures.
Backgroud and the state of the art This research focuses on the development of content and teaching strategies that encourage the acquisition of Spoken Arabic. Because of the focus on a speech-oriented approach, interaction, listening, and comprehension are identified as key skills, as well as basics for building a command of Arabic in non-native speakers.
Neglecting all the above considerations, the majority of Arabic teachers introduce early on the study of the classical variant (or standard or formal), starting from elementary levels. They likely without notice commit a procedural and pragmatic mistake.
Ryding claimed that Arabic studies have been giving preference to a 'reverse privileging' in the variety of Arabic to teach. Priority has been given to the standard variant, which is used for the secondary functions of the language. We rather need to accord a privileged place to Spoken Arabic, for it is useful in familiar primary functions. Many scholars like Wahba, Younes, Palmer, and Chouairi have stated that teaching MSA does a disservice to students, in the sense it that does not equip them with basic tools for a minimal communicative competence. As a consequence, the instructors who refuse to adapt their practice to this new orientation , explicitly reject the achievement of pragmatic competence goals and do not abide by the requirements posed by the European Council, for example, in term of ?performance? and ?know how?.
Alosh invited to help students in achieving ?minimum performance standards?. This ?minimum? can be reached through precise planning, setting in advance a specific sequence to cover all the required aspects for skill development. Grammar is not addressed directly, but constitutes organizational criteria for the linguistic elements to be learned.
Instructional development and design (IDD) in general must give priority to training and exposure to the language at stake, which is constituted by a number of informal Arabics. Like native speakers, nonnatives too should begin to interact in a daily register, avoiding recurrence to the standard register (MSA). Then, with conversation and interaction becoming less concrete, they may experiment with the formal language, at a later stage.
This project takes into account the data collected in 2016 from a survey of students? opinion, as already mentioned. It emerged that instruction in Arabic begs a total renovation in the field. The profile of a student of Arabic corresponds to a person that in the near future will be employed in linguistic mediation with migrants, interpretation at city hospitals, or in tourism and leisure related sectors. Not one of the cited environments suggests that standard Arabic would be the more suitable variety used in interaction. In practice, the Arabic we come in contact with is the language found in informal specific micro-settings, and I am referring to the chances of practicing it in Europe or Western countries.
Job description: methodology and results Conceptually, the thesis is divided into two sections, one for theory and one for practice. The analysis starts with some fundamentals related to Arabic language and teaching (1), including the most prominent arguments (2) both for pro and against standard Arabic and spoken Arabic. The teaching of Arabic, specifically, is analyzed both in terms of needs (3), and teaching strategies and content (4). As a further proof of the my action-oriented approach, two chapters are dedicated to the gathering of information from students (5) about the teaching/learning of Arabic, and the presentation of some relevant findings (6). This data was obtained in 2016, by submitting a questionnaire to learners enrolled in four public universities (Sapienza, Cadiz, Florence, Leipzig) of three different countries.
Here ends the section dedicated to theory. The second part is dedicated to teaching practice, and contains concrete proposals to be implemented during class activity, such as the definition of precise teaching techniques (7). These are separately detailed for the development of the various skills such as pronunciation, writing and reading, listening and understanding, conversation and interaction. With the aim of creating a feasible and credible proposal, I summarized in ?Teaching Observations? the most relevant didactic practices I observed in Texas (8) and Beirut (9). I included those observation in my thesis as an additional reference for further explanation of the orientation of my project. Finally, chapter 10 provides a detailed sequence for teaching and its contents, intended as requirements to meet for an effective instruction centered on spoken Arabic. It consists of four Syllabi corresponding to four urban variants of Arabic (Lebanese, Omani, Moroccan, Egyptian), each made of several modules (about 35). These modules, which also result from research in the field, exemplify both the contents and the mechanisms to be adopted in class in order to facilitate the so-called activation and fixation steps of the learning process. My primary concern was to create an instrument that could guide teacher activity, without binding their creativity too much. I preferred for this reason a schematic drafting, still subject to enrichment with additional materials on a case-by-case basis. The Syllabi are to be considered an essential guide, subject to re-negotiation after having received and evaluated a first feedback from the class. There is not a perfect receipt for an instructional design and development, yet taking practice as a reference and observing different teaching practices provides great insight both at the planning and implementation level.
This thesis ends with a concrete proposal for teaching: the four Syllabi. They represent the tangible conclusion of my investigation, moreso than any other discourse. The syllabi provide a precise instructional sequence and include the contents and linguistic structures to be addressed during class time, together with a selection of drills that trigger the activation and fixation of the target content. The methodology consists of many techniques: from the flipped-classroom to task-based learning; on one side; the trifold partition of every lesson into preparation-activation-fixation as well as the fish&feed method on the other. According to the structure of my dissertation, divided into two parts, the results are also separated into theory and practice.
On the theoretical level, I attempt to get out of ambiguity, taking a strong position in favor of the teaching of Spoken Arabic, as a priority. I provided many arguments and opinions to support this claim and to explain why spoken Arabic plays a crucial role since the first steps of teaching.
On the practical level, I elaborated the mentioned syllabi, one for each urban variant considered, to serve as a guide for the teacher.
My greatest aspiration remains to refine the techniques, methods, and contents for the teaching of Arabic, both with further research and occasions for discussion.
Backgroud and the state of the art This research focuses on the development of content and teaching strategies that encourage the acquisition of Spoken Arabic. Because of the focus on a speech-oriented approach, interaction, listening, and comprehension are identified as key skills, as well as basics for building a command of Arabic in non-native speakers.
Neglecting all the above considerations, the majority of Arabic teachers introduce early on the study of the classical variant (or standard or formal), starting from elementary levels. They likely without notice commit a procedural and pragmatic mistake.
Ryding claimed that Arabic studies have been giving preference to a 'reverse privileging' in the variety of Arabic to teach. Priority has been given to the standard variant, which is used for the secondary functions of the language. We rather need to accord a privileged place to Spoken Arabic, for it is useful in familiar primary functions. Many scholars like Wahba, Younes, Palmer, and Chouairi have stated that teaching MSA does a disservice to students, in the sense it that does not equip them with basic tools for a minimal communicative competence. As a consequence, the instructors who refuse to adapt their practice to this new orientation , explicitly reject the achievement of pragmatic competence goals and do not abide by the requirements posed by the European Council, for example, in term of ?performance? and ?know how?.
Alosh invited to help students in achieving ?minimum performance standards?. This ?minimum? can be reached through precise planning, setting in advance a specific sequence to cover all the required aspects for skill development. Grammar is not addressed directly, but constitutes organizational criteria for the linguistic elements to be learned.
Instructional development and design (IDD) in general must give priority to training and exposure to the language at stake, which is constituted by a number of informal Arabics. Like native speakers, nonnatives too should begin to interact in a daily register, avoiding recurrence to the standard register (MSA). Then, with conversation and interaction becoming less concrete, they may experiment with the formal language, at a later stage.
This project takes into account the data collected in 2016 from a survey of students? opinion, as already mentioned. It emerged that instruction in Arabic begs a total renovation in the field. The profile of a student of Arabic corresponds to a person that in the near future will be employed in linguistic mediation with migrants, interpretation at city hospitals, or in tourism and leisure related sectors. Not one of the cited environments suggests that standard Arabic would be the more suitable variety used in interaction. In practice, the Arabic we come in contact with is the language found in informal specific micro-settings, and I am referring to the chances of practicing it in Europe or Western countries.
Job description: methodology and results Conceptually, the thesis is divided into two sections, one for theory and one for practice. The analysis starts with some fundamentals related to Arabic language and teaching (1), including the most prominent arguments (2) both for pro and against standard Arabic and spoken Arabic. The teaching of Arabic, specifically, is analyzed both in terms of needs (3), and teaching strategies and content (4). As a further proof of the my action-oriented approach, two chapters are dedicated to the gathering of information from students (5) about the teaching/learning of Arabic, and the presentation of some relevant findings (6). This data was obtained in 2016, by submitting a questionnaire to learners enrolled in four public universities (Sapienza, Cadiz, Florence, Leipzig) of three different countries.
Here ends the section dedicated to theory. The second part is dedicated to teaching practice, and contains concrete proposals to be implemented during class activity, such as the definition of precise teaching techniques (7). These are separately detailed for the development of the various skills such as pronunciation, writing and reading, listening and understanding, conversation and interaction. With the aim of creating a feasible and credible proposal, I summarized in ?Teaching Observations? the most relevant didactic practices I observed in Texas (8) and Beirut (9). I included those observation in my thesis as an additional reference for further explanation of the orientation of my project. Finally, chapter 10 provides a detailed sequence for teaching and its contents, intended as requirements to meet for an effective instruction centered on spoken Arabic. It consists of four Syllabi corresponding to four urban variants of Arabic (Lebanese, Omani, Moroccan, Egyptian), each made of several modules (about 35). These modules, which also result from research in the field, exemplify both the contents and the mechanisms to be adopted in class in order to facilitate the so-called activation and fixation steps of the learning process. My primary concern was to create an instrument that could guide teacher activity, without binding their creativity too much. I preferred for this reason a schematic drafting, still subject to enrichment with additional materials on a case-by-case basis. The Syllabi are to be considered an essential guide, subject to re-negotiation after having received and evaluated a first feedback from the class. There is not a perfect receipt for an instructional design and development, yet taking practice as a reference and observing different teaching practices provides great insight both at the planning and implementation level.
This thesis ends with a concrete proposal for teaching: the four Syllabi. They represent the tangible conclusion of my investigation, moreso than any other discourse. The syllabi provide a precise instructional sequence and include the contents and linguistic structures to be addressed during class time, together with a selection of drills that trigger the activation and fixation of the target content. The methodology consists of many techniques: from the flipped-classroom to task-based learning; on one side; the trifold partition of every lesson into preparation-activation-fixation as well as the fish&feed method on the other. According to the structure of my dissertation, divided into two parts, the results are also separated into theory and practice.
On the theoretical level, I attempt to get out of ambiguity, taking a strong position in favor of the teaching of Spoken Arabic, as a priority. I provided many arguments and opinions to support this claim and to explain why spoken Arabic plays a crucial role since the first steps of teaching.
On the practical level, I elaborated the mentioned syllabi, one for each urban variant considered, to serve as a guide for the teacher.
My greatest aspiration remains to refine the techniques, methods, and contents for the teaching of Arabic, both with further research and occasions for discussion.
Do We need a Turing Test for Activist Art in a Bare Art World? Gregory Sholette (bio) Repetition and doubling—themselves an uncanny pair which double and repeat each other—seem to be at the heart of every "uncanny" phenomena. —Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (2017)1 In its simplest form, the Turing Test involves a human evaluator physically separated by a wall or other barrier from two participants so that all communication between the three of them must take place through a keyboard device. The evaluator knows that one hidden participant is human and one is a machine, though which is which remains unknown. The evaluator is tasked with trying to identify who is the person and which is the imitation person. Simultaneously, both participants try to convince the evaluator they are human. At the moment the evaluator becomes genuinely uncertain which participant is machine and which is human, the machine has successfully passed Turing's Test. You're in an art gallery. Toward the back of the space you spot a weird, ill-fitting emergency door. A question arises silently: is it a work of art or not? Just above your head is a rusted valve jutting out from a faded metal sign encased in white paint. Same question: Art? Not art? What about that awkwardly bent length of drainage pipe running alongside the track lights above the exhibition? Does anyone else see this? Should you refocus your attention exclusively on those objects with wall labels? Moments later, a dozen people enter the space singing, shouting, making boisterous declarations: "I Can't Breathe"; "De-Colonize this Place"; "Not My President"; "Respect Workers Rights in the UAE." Before leaving, the group hands out photocopied flyers and performs an Occupy Wall Street General Assembly in the middle of the gallery, complete with a Human Microphone. [End Page 221] When they do exit, the space returns to its muted, white-cube status. But you do not return to normal. Not completely. A string of questions follows: Was that a genuine, spontaneous activist intervention, or was it a carefully rehearsed performance of an activist intervention, and therefore a work of art? Then again, if something appears exactly the same as what it appears to be—if it stirs the same emotions in us and carries out the same task of raising social awareness—then does it really matter if we are uncertain about what it actually is in some fundamental, ontological way? What if this event was both at the same time: art and life, mimicry and authentic protest, fiction and fact, all doubled up and coexisting on a single continuous surface, sort of like a Möbius strip reality? Marcel Duchamp once proposed what he termed a "Reciprocal Readymade," in which a work of art is converted to an object of everyday use.2 Perhaps what you just witnessed was that thought experiment put into practice?3 The questions do not leave you alone. They return, repeat, becoming obsessional, even addictive. You find yourself wondering how and when things got so disorderly—and you wonder what it might take to tidy them up again. It's not only your unease that seems at stake here. How many times have you overheard an art historian, critic, or even fellow artist demand to know "is it art or activism?"4 Remember how they sought some type of epistemological solace such as providing empirical evidence that demonstrates activist art's effective social outcome? Yet what that proof, should it be made, assures the mainstream art historian is that these practices subordinate aesthetics to utility, allowing for a return to business as usual. It pissed you off. But it also led you to suppress your own need for certitude with a faint-hearted swagger. And contrarily, the same questioning demand arises from community activists troubled by what they perceived to be the enfeebling effects of aestheticized politics. This is when you ask yourself only half-sardonically: does contemporary art, especially art activism, require its own version of Turing's thought experiment? Though even as you consider this, you can't help but suspect that if this test were given today, nothing would change...
Reviewed by: Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century ed. by Jeremy A. Greene, Flurin Condrau, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins Dominique Tobbell Jeremy A. Greene, Flurin Condrau, and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, eds. Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 320 pp. $110.00 (978-0-226-39073-4). “The practice of medicine in 1980 looked quite a bit different than it had in 1930,” write Jeremy Greene, Elizabeth Watkins, and Flurin Condrau, in the introduction to Therapeutic Revolutions (p. 8). A major component of the transformation of medicine in these decades was the massive expansion of pharmaceutical research and development that led to the introduction of scores of new prescription drugs, including antibiotics, corticosteroids, minor and major tranquilizers, oral contraceptives, and the first drugs to treat hypertension. This period of transformation has been termed by physicians, the pharmaceutical industry, policy makers, patients, and some medical historians alike as a therapeutic revolution. But as [End Page 224] Charles Rosenberg noted forty years ago in his seminal essay, “The Therapeutic Revolution,” claims of therapeutic efficacy—and thus the basis of therapeutic revolution—are both historically contingent and locally specific.1 This impressive collection of essays by leading scholars in the history and anthropology of pharmaceuticals builds on Rosenberg’s earlier analysis to problematize the concept of a twentieth-century pharmacotherapeutic revolution. By examining the intersections of pharmaceutical innovation and social transformation in North America, Western Europe, and Africa, the essays underscore the historical contingency and geographic specificity of any such revolution, and reveal what was at stake politically, economically, and culturally for the various historical actors that have mobilized the language of therapeutic revolution. The volume can be broken into four sections. The first section, with chapters by Scott Podolsky and Anne Kveim Lie, Elizabeth Watkins, and Nicolas Henckes, considers three classes of drugs held as emblematic of the mid-twentieth-century therapeutic revolution—antibiotics, oral contraceptives, and antipsychotics, respectively—and examines the degree to which these drugs were revolutionary and the political, economic, and social gains made by those who mobilized the rhetoric of revolution. The second section interrogates the measures by which pharmaceuticals introduced in the mid-twentieth century were considered revolutionary: pharmaceutical consumption and statistical measurements of therapeutic efficacy. Using pharmaceutical sales data from IMS Health, Nils Kessel and Christian Bonah show that it was older drug products like analgesics, hypnotics, and sedatives, rather than “revolutionary medicines” like antibiotics and cardiovascular drugs, that dominated the West German pharmaceutical market in the 1960s and 1970s. In their history and ethnography of tuberculosis treatment, Janina Kehr and Flurin Condrau show the ways in which clinical trials data documenting the efficacy of streptomycin to treat tuberculosis in the 1950s was mobilized as “proof of the universal effectiveness of antibiotics regardless of social situation,” even as antibiotic resistance undermined treatment efforts and tuberculosis persisted as a global health concern (p. 135). This “statistical modeling of success” (p. 135), Kehr and Condrau argue, “transformed tuberculosis from a subject of cutting-edge biomedical research into a disease that physicians considered ‘boring’ . . . until it reemerged in the late twentieth century as multidrug resistant tuberculosis and extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, and thus a subject of renewed biomedical excitement” (p. 12). The third section shifts focus from the United States and Western Europe to the Global South and examines the intersections of pharmaceutical innovation, international development, and global public health, highlighting the spatial-temporal character and political economy of the therapeutic revolution. Jeremy Greene analyzes the ways in which American lawmakers, physicians, patients, regulators, and pharmaceutical companies mobilized arguments about the [End Page 225] cause of and potential solutions to geographic disparities in pharmaceutical access during the 1960s and 1970s in an attempt to shape both domestic health policy and international development agendas. Paul Farmer, Matthew Basilico, and Luke Messac revisit the debate, ignited by Thomas McKeown in the 1960s, over the role of medicine in public health. Their analysis of recent economic, ethnographic, and epidemiological data makes clear that despite the persistent problem of uneven access, pharmaceuticals have contributed to a significant population-level mortality decline in the Global South. Julie Livingston’s history and ethnography...
The characteristics of the "blockchain" technology and especially its decentralized nature lead to the notion of neutrality, censorship resistance, and absolute truths, which makes the concept interesting for many different domains, such as finance, supply chain management, or the energy sector - of course also for the healthcare area (eHealth). Blockchains also offer the possibility for well-known access points for a distributed system with easy to use and simple to integrate programming interfaces, which makes it interesting as a central point for electronic healthcare data exchange in a distributed environment. This paper presents a concept for integrating and sharing distributed personal healthcare records based on smart contracts implemented on an Ethereum blockchain.
The Cuban government has implemented a series of agricultural transformations since 2007 to increase the country’s agricultural self-sufficiency and reduce its dependence on food imports. These include the transfer in usufruct, i.e. use rights only, of State-owned land to non-State producers (i.e. cooperatives and private farmers), moderate price reforms, the decentralization of decision making, and the gradual relaxation of existing forms of agricultural commercialization. As a result of these measures, the area planted, as well as physical output and agricultural yields (in selected non-sugar crop categories) have shown mixed results, and still remain below desired levels. There are three fundamental unresolved issues that have prevented Cuba’s agricultural sector from achieving desired levels: (1) the need to achieve the “realization of property”; (2) recognition and acceptance of the market as a complementary economy in coordination with a planning mechanism; and (3) absence of a systemic focus to achieve the successful completion of the agricultural production cycle (i.e. the value chain). These unresolved issues should be addressed through: (1) consolidating markets for inputs, where producers can obtain essential inputs at prices that correspond to the prices they can obtain for their output; (2) granting greater autonomy to agricultural producers to allow them to decide when, where, and to whom they can sell their output, after social contracts have been fulfilled; (3) diversifying types of agricultural commercialization to permit greater participation by non-State economic actors; (4) allowing agricultural producers to freely hire the labor necessary to sustain and increase production; and (5) providing agricultural producers with needed financing and technical assistance. Please refer to Supplementary Materials, Full text Spanish version of this article, for a full text Spanish version of this article.
Although the smart contract as the new product in the era of block chain contract shall not be only limited to the property-related agreements stipulated by the Contract Law of People's Republic of China, the Chinese contract provisions shall be perfected accordingly due to its contract attribute. In order to promote the formation and validity of the smart contract, the full capacity requirements for civil conduct of the parties to the property-related contract as well as the formulation of "Withdrawal Provisions" and the connotation of social public interests shall attract legislators' attention. But in view of two major features of smart contract, on the one hand, the legislators shall consider distinguishing the remedies of continuous contract and instant contract; on the other hand, the legislators shall perfect the remedy system for the "Alteration" of smart contracts in the process of waiting for verification.