Since its creation in 2009, the electronic currency Bitcoin has generated volumes of online debate in the business press. While there have been plenty of economic arguments situating it as a financial bubble about to collapse including from Nobel Prize winning economists, its price value has proven to be more durable than many have predicted. To explain this durability, Karpikâs conception of market singularities is used to understand the Bitcoin phenomenon by outlining the beliefs that maintain Bitcoinâs status as a volatile financial asset. Market singularities are markets for particular kinds of goods and services that are of uncertain and incommensurable value. Singularities markets have communities of followers and a distinctive belief system that ascribes value to a particular product, service, or asset. Developing Karpikâs conception, the paper explores the libertarian political belief system that surrounds Bitcoinâs status as a financial asset. I also outline some political tensions within the electronic currency community concerning governance and centralisation.
Despite its increasing popularity, no official guidance on the financial reporting of Bitcoin transactions has been provided by standard setters, although tax accounting guidance began to appear in 2014. Designed as a decentralised currency, Bitcoin is not intended to become a reporting currency and will instead complement fiat money. We argue that in the case of Bitcoin the accounting principle of faithful representation requires interpretation of the economic substance for financial reporting that varies with reporting entity: trading firms recognise Bitcoin like a foreign currency and measure the revenue, or expense, at the equivalent amount of the reporting currency and digital currency exchanges recognise Bitcoin as goods in line with tax accounting treatment. An Economica paper by Radford (1945), which describes the use of cigarettes as commodity money in a prisoner of war camp alludes to this economic basis. This paper applies accounting principles to a practical issue and contributes to the process by which standard setters may issue an interpretation.
This chapter focuses on the modern forms of socialized health care common to Canada, Great Britain, and Sweden, followed by an examination of decentralized national health programs in Japan, Germany, and Mexico and former socialist systems in Russia and China. It evaluates socialized medicine. The chapter explains decentralized national health care programs. It also explains the reasons for the decline of socialist medicine. Socialized medicine refers to a system of health care delivery in which health care is provided in the form of a state-supported consumer service. Like the United States, physicians in Canada are generally private, self-employed, fee-for-service practitioners. Unlike the United States, doctors&s; fees are paid by government-sponsored national health insurance, known as Medicare. In 1948 the British government went much further and formed the National Health Service (NHS) by nationalizing and taking over the responsibility for the country&s;s health care. The Swedish National Health Service is financed through taxation.
This essay explores the discourse of law that constitutes the controversial apprehension of Cicero's issuing of the ultimate decree of the Senate (senatus consultum ultimum) in Catiline. The play juxtaposes the struggle of Cicero, whose moral character and legitimacy are at stake in regards to the extra-legal uses of espionage, with the supposedly mischievous Catilinarians who appear to observe legal procedures more carefully throughout their plot. To mitigate this ambivalence, the play defends Cicero's actions by depicting the way in which Cicero establishes the rhetoric of public counsel to convince the citizens of his legitimacy in his unprecedented dealing with Catiline. To understand the contemporaneousness of Catiline, I will explore the way the play integrates the early modern discourses of counsel and the legal maxim of âbetter to suffer an inconvenience than mischief,â suggesting Jonson's subtle sensibility towards King James's legal reformation which aimed to establish and deploy monarchical authority in the state of emergency (such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). The play's climactic trial scene highlights the display of the collected evidence, such as hand-written letters and the testimonies obtained through Cicero's spies, the Allbroges, as proof of Catiline's mischievous character. I argue that the tactical negotiating skills of the virtuous and vicious characters rely heavily on the effective use of rhetoric exemplified by both the political discourse of classical Rome and the legal discourse of Tudor and Jacobean England.
The debates on the devolution of powers to the panchayats since the last two decades received enormous attention because of the increasing role played by these institutions in planning and implementation of the development programmes in rural India. But it is observed that devolution agenda including the agenda of fiscal devolution and tax decentralization has not been taken up sincerely in many states including the states of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. Based on the review of secondary data, the present article critically examines the status of the fiscal devolution to the panchayats in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. This article argues that both the states need to strengthen the own revenue of panchayats based on the recommendations of the Finance Commissions of the respective states. In this context, the process of tax decentralization and principles of sharing the state taxes should receive paramount importance.
Advances in technology have resulted in a fast changing landscape for construction contracts. Lawyers struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation and the need to provide legal solutions and accommodate new approaches. Building Information Modelling (BIM) has become part of the common parlance in construction notwithstanding limited evidence of its impact on the ground... Intelligent contracts appear as a logical extension to BIM whereby the contractual performance itself becomes automated. However, intelligent contracts work best where they are short term or are of instantaneous effect. This is at odds with the complicated and long-running nature of construction projects. Further, storage constraints, compatibility and reliability issues together with confidentiality and the long term nature of distributed ledgers pose additional problems. The aim of this paper is to present the debate about what could be achieved in the construction industry by the adoption of intelligent contracts. An on-line forum provided the secondary data on which the discussion is based. The objectives are to introduce aspects of technological advancement within commerce generally and to discuss their application in construction. The hypothesis advanced is that certain aspects of the construction contract cannot be fully intelligent and the best that can be achieved in the short to medium term is a semi-automated position. Further, intelligent contracts should be viewed as part of the BIM-led revolution in construction and not separate from it. The recommendation is that incremental advances such as the coding of project management and contract administration data be targeted to provide improved operational efficiency and value savings.
GlyTouCan version 1.0 was released in 2015 as the international glycan structure repository, and a new sequence format called WURCS (Web3 Unique Representation of Carbohydrate Structures) was proposed during the early stages of the GlyTouCan project. GlyTouCan uses WURCS as its base representation for glycans because existing formats were insufficient in their flexibility to represent any and all glycans universally. Therefore, in order to obtain WURCS strings for existing or new glycan structures, conversion tools or glycan structure editors that can export WURCS became necessary. GlycanBuilder was an obvious choice to extend due to its wide usage by the community. However, GlycanBuilder was limited because it was originally developed to support mammalian glycans. It also did not support the newly proposed monosaccharide symbol standard called Symbol Nomenclature for Glycans (SNFG). Therefore in this work, we implemented a new version of GlycanBuilder to greatly increase its usability. The glycan rendering system was refactored so that cyclic glycans, nested repeating units, monosaccharide compositions and cross-linked glycan structures can be represented. Both import and export utilities for WURCS were also implemented and SNFG symbols were incorporated to allow glycans to be exported as graphics using the latest glycan symbol nomenclature. This new version of GlycanBuilder called "GlycanBuilder2", is able to support a wide variety of ambiguous glycans, including structures containing monosaccharides from bacteria and plants. These glycans can also be displayed using the new SNFG symbols. This tool can aid researchers in communicating about the complex, diverse, and ambiguous structures of glycans more rapidly. Moreover, the new GlycanBuilder can now easily output WURCS sequences from glycans drawn on the canvas. Most importantly, because GlyTouCan employs WURCS as the basic format for registration and searching of glycan information, a wider variety of glycans can now be readily registered and queried in GlyTouCan.
This paper discusses novel joint (intracell and intercell) resource allocation algorithms for self-organized interference coordination in multicarrier multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) small cell networks. The proposed algorithms enable interference coordination autonomously, over multiple degrees of freedom, such as base station transmit powers, transmit precoders, and user scheduling weights. A generic$\alpha$-fair utility maximization framework is considered to analyze performance-fairness tradeoff and to quantify the gains achievable in interference-limited networks. The proposed scheme involves limited inter-base station signaling in the form of two step (power and precoder) pricing. Based on this decentralized coordination, autonomous power and precoder update decision rules are considered, leading to algorithms with different characteristics in terms of user data rates, signaling load, and convergence speed. Simulation results in a practical setting show that the proposed pricing-based self-organization can achieve up to$100\%$improvement in cell-edge data rates when compared to baseline optimization strategies. Furthermore, the convergence of the proposed algorithms is also proved theoretically.
Morpheo is a transparent and secure machine learning platform collecting and analysing large datasets. It aims at building state-of-the art prediction models in various fields where data are sensitive. Indeed, it offers strong privacy of data and algorithm, by preventing anyone to read the data, apart from the owner and the chosen algorithms. Computations in Morpheo are orchestrated by a blockchain infrastructure, thus offering total traceability of operations. Morpheo aims at building an attractive economic ecosystem around data prediction by channelling crypto-money from prediction requests to useful data and algorithms providers. Morpheo is designed to handle multiple data sources in a transfer learning approach in order to mutualize knowledge acquired from large datasets for applications with smaller but similar datasets.
Disseminating medical data beyond the protected cloud of institutions poses severe risks to patientsâ privacy, as breaches push them to the point where they abstain from full disclosure of their condition. This situation negatively impacts the patient, scientific research, and all stakeholders. To address this challenge, we propose a blockchain-based data sharing framework that sufficiently addresses the access control challenges associated with sensitive data stored in the cloud using immutability and built-in autonomy properties of the blockchain. Our system is based on a permissioned blockchain which allows access to only invited, and hence verified users. As a result of this design, further accountability is guaranteed as all users are already known and a log of their actions is kept by the blockchain. The system permits users to request data from the shared pool after their identities and cryptographic keys are verified. The evidence from the system evaluation shows that our scheme is lightweight, scalable, and efficient.
There has been increasing interest in adopting BlockChain (BC), that underpins the crypto-currency Bitcoin, in Internet of Things (IoT) for security and privacy. However, BCs are computationally expensive and involve high bandwidth overhead and delays, which are not suitable for most IoT devices. This paper proposes a lightweight BC-based architecture for IoT that virtually eliminates the overheads of classic BC, while maintaining most of its security and privacy benefits. IoT devices benefit from a private immutable ledger, that acts similar to BC but is managed centrally, to optimize energy consumption. High resource devices create an overlay network to implement a publicly accessible distributed BC that ensures end-to-end security and privacy. The proposed architecture uses distributed trust to reduce the block validation processing time. We explore our approach in a smart home setting as a representative case study for broader IoT applications. Qualitative evaluation of the architecture under common threat models highlights its effectiveness in providing security and privacy for IoT applications. Simulations demonstrate that our method decreases packet and processing overhead significantly compared to the BC implementation used in Bitcoin.
Malte Möser, Kyle Soska, Ethan Heilman, Kevin Lee · 11 authors
Abstract Monero is a privacy-centric cryptocurrency that allows users to obscure their transactions by including chaff coins, called âmixins,â along with the actual coins they spend. In this paper, we empirically evaluate two weaknesses in Moneroâs mixin sampling strategy. First, about 62% of transaction inputs with one or more mixins are vulnerable to âchain-reactionâ analysis - that is, the real input can be deduced by elimination. Second, Monero mixins are sampled in such a way that they can be easily distinguished from the real coins by their age distribution; in short, the real input is usually the ânewestâ input. We estimate that this heuristic can be used to guess the real input with 80% accuracy over all transactions with 1 or more mixins. Next, we turn to the Monero ecosystem and study the importance of mining pools and the former anonymous marketplace AlphaBay on the transaction volume. We find that after removing mining pool activity, there remains a large amount of potentially privacy-sensitive transactions that are affected by these weaknesses. We propose and evaluate two countermeasures that can improve the privacy of future transactions.
Purpose This paper aims to examine the key regulatory challenges impacting blockchains, innovative distributed technologies, in the European Union (EU) and the USA. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative perspective underpins the study. This paper relies on primary data from applicable statutes and secondary data from the public domain including relevant case study insights. Findings The smart regulatory hands-off approach adopted in the EU and the USA to a large extent bodes well for future innovative contributions of blockchains in the financial services and related sectors and toward enhanced financial inclusiveness. Practical implications The paperâs findings provide support for blockchain technology to advance with minimum regulatory brakes for greater value-adding and efficiency advancement, especially for financial services, thereby expanding accessibility and therefore financial inclusiveness. Originality/value This paper helps to draw greater attention to the technology underpinning virtual currencies. It also highlights other economic potentials flowing from blockchain advancement.
The recent paper of Kleijkers et al. (2016) reported the results of a well-conducted randomized trial comparing two culture media systems and showed a significant difference in birth weight between embryos incubated in the two media. Like many results in assisted reproduction research it was likely to induce controversy given the emotive and commercial interests at stake. The subsequent debate in the pages of this journal (Kleijkers et al., 2017; Rieger, 2017; Sunde et al., 2017; Thompson et al., 2017) was of interest for its content and highlighted the urgent need for further research. It also highlighted deficiencies in how we as a community assess and interpret evidence from such trials. In this commentary we take that debate as an exemplar and look carefully at the evidence presented by Kleijkers et al. (2016) to highlight the areas where misleading interpretations have been suggested. This is not intended as a criticism of specific authors: the misinterpretations we identify are common across our literature and regularly encountered in the statistical review of papers submitted to this journal. However, this debate provides a rich source of collated examples. Although we comment on the previous articles and letters and refer the interested reader to those for more detail, this commentary is intended to stand alone and can be read without further reference to the original sources. In the vast majority of cases, a well-designed trial will have a pre-specified primary outcome, such that a statistical test of a single pre-specified hypothesis will retain the statistical properties of a valid test. There will usually be a number of pre-specified secondary hypotheses, and some care is needed in interpreting analyses of these results due to the number of comparisons potentially being considered. Here the pre-specification of hypotheses, with due consideration for the overall false positive rate (multiple testing), is the cornerstone of rigorous data analysis. The trial of Kleijkers et al. (2016) compared two specific culture media with a primary outcome of live birth. The result that sparked the debate was from a pre-specified secondary analysis of birth weight, where a difference between trial arms of 158 g (95% CI: 42â275 g; P = 0.008)âapproximately a 5% differenceâwas reported. This was one of seven pre-specified (and non-independent) secondary outcomes, so we have to be aware of the fact that when we make multiple hypothesis tests the chance of any one of these tests achieving a nominal significance level (here P < 0.05) is greater than the 5% for a single test. In this case the authors were careful to pre-specify a limited number of secondary outcomes and the finding of interest would attain conventional levels of statistical significance even with a conservative approach to multiple testing such as the Bonferroni adjustment. As discussed in a previous editorial commentary (Farland et al., 2016) we need to beware of over-emphasizing the dichotomy suggested by the P < 0.05 significance level. A result with P = 0.049 cannot be considered to differ in any substantive way from one with P = 0.051. Nevertheless, clear positive results that arise from such analyses in well-conducted studies merit careful consideration. Given an important and (by some at least) unexpected finding, it is sensible to consider alternative explanations. For example, were there chance imbalances between the randomized groups in characteristics of participants? Even within the context of a randomized comparison, chance imbalances of potentially confounding factors can lead to differences in outcomes beyond those achieved by treatment differences. This risk can be reduced by multifactorial analysis adjusting for measured baseline characteristics, which also increases the statistical power of treatment comparison. Such analyses were presented as sensitivity analyses in the trial report and show a somewhat reduced, but still statistically significant, effect of 116 (20â212) g and 100 (2â198) g for the two analyses presented. Statistical power is a study design consideration, estimating whether the design and sample size proposed has a reasonable chance of yielding a useful result. It is estimated, rather than calculated, using hypothetical values of outcomes yet to be observed, such as the standard deviation of a continuous outcome measure or the control group proportion of a binary (or dichotomous) outcome. Once the study has been conducted these values become known and statistical power plays no further role; the consideration of âpowerâ is replaced by the information contained in the confidence interval. The often levelled criticism, âthe study was not powered for this outcomeâ belies a misunderstanding of these concepts. For example Thompson et al. comment on this trial that âthe study was not powered for any conclusion about birth weightâ, implying this somehow invalidates the result. A P-value or a âstatistically significantâ result is just that, regardless of what the investigators anticipated prior to conducting the study. Statistical power is important in design because an under-powered study is likely to yield inconclusive results. If the results are conclusive the (likely mis-estimated) power is no longer relevant There are assumptions underpinning any randomized trial: that the allocation of participants to treatment is unpredictable and that there are no procedures post-randomization that can differentially affect the outcomes between arms. Secure concealment of the randomization schedule (Higgins et al., 2011) and blinding of appropriate personnel and participants are standard methods to ensure these conditions. In our example trial the randomization was undertaken using a central system and random block sizes to ensure concealment and stratified by site, age and use of ICSI to enhance balance on pre-randomization characteristics. Participants, clinicians and the assessors of birth weight were blinded to the allocation. Clinical decisions subsequent to randomization must therefore be understood as a consequence of developmental differences due to allocation. With standard statistical models it would always be inappropriate to adjust for post-randomization factors as this would introduce bias. The criticism by Thompson et al. concerning lack of adjustment for features such as number of transferred embryos is therefore baseless. Given the objective nature of the outcome it is difficult to perceive how any post-randomization process other than that associated with the intervention could affect the outcome measurement. In trials with more subjective outcomes and where trial personnel or assessors are unblinded (whether through compromised design or necessity) clearly the potential for bias is much higher. Any trial should be conducted according to a written protocol and the main details pre-registered. It has been found that even peer-reviewed academic trials do not necessarily maintain their âprimaryâ analysis from proposal through to publication (Chan et al., 2004) Whilst there can be legitimate reasons for changes prior to data unblinding, reasons should be explicit to prevent concerns of selective reporting, Our example trial was pre-registered with the specified outcomes presented in the publication. Whilst it is necessary to evaluate the trial rigour, it is also important to be wary of confirmation bias, which is the natural tendency to accept results that we anticipate and to be more rigorous critics of unexpected or inconvenient results. The intention to treat (ITT) principle, where the analysis considers all randomized patients according to the randomized allocation ensures that, given a positive finding, the only interpretations available are that this is a true consequence of allocation to the trial arms, or a chance event. For example, a 5% significance level is explicitly allowing a 5% chance of a false positiveâa significant result where the true effect is zero (a type I error). In this particular example it was possible to take a pure ITT approach as all participants provided outcome data. In other situations there may be concerns around the impact of missing data. As pointed out in the letter from Rieger (2017) the allocation of patients to different media systems necessitated other changes in laboratory procedures which led to potential exposures other than the media composition per se. The use of different culture media in this trial is a case of a complex intervention (Campbell et al., 2000) with patients randomized to the intervention âpackageâ. The comparison between trial arms cannot attribute cause to any specific component. However, in this example all other treatment differences were determined by the choice of media, so it would be disingenuous to argue that the effects were not, directly or indirectly, caused by the difference in media. In trials we often collect a substantial amount of supplementary dataâoften it has to be said without much thought as to purpose. This leads to numerous possible outcomes which were not intended to be formally analysed. Analysis of these data is by definition post-hoc, exploratory and should be considered to be hypothesis generating rather than definitive. There are a large and unknowable number of comparisons that could be made from which a small proportion, perceived as interesting after the other data have been seen, are actually performed or presented. Thus even if a formal statistical test meets the nominal significance level, it is not possible to allow for multiple testing. Whilst âfishingâ, âtrawlingâ or âdredgingâ for nominally significant associations amongst such data is to be discouraged (Farland et al., 2016) analyses of these data can be informative in understanding the pre-specified outcomes. Care is needed to interpret such data correctly without implicitly accepting results as conclusive. In the trial report, supplementary outcomes of fetal growth were presented (Kleijkers et al., 2016, Table VI), which might be expected to show similar effects to birth weight if the birth weight effect was real. These were not specified in the trial registration, so fall very clearly into the exploratory, post-hoc category. The differences in fetal growth between trial arms was, unsurprisingly, not statistically significant, but importantly show a magnitude of difference in estimated fetal weight (2â3% with 95% CI extending from a negative difference to 5â6%) which is actually consistent with the difference in birth weight. The confidence intervals around this estimate are wide, indicating that this would be very weak evidence for or against a difference in growth. Thompson et al. suggest that the lack of a statistically significant effect on this exploratory outcome casts doubt on the pre-specified comparison. There might be a reasonable concern if the effect estimates were wildly different with sufficiently small confidence intervals to suggest incompatibility, but the authors here have been misled by comparing statistical significance rather than effect sizes. The issue for subgroup analysis is very similar. As it is impossible to enumerate the potential subgroups that could be defined it is not possible to apply statistical adjustment for multiplicity. A classic analysis by astrological birth sign demonstrates the potential for spurious conclusions by post-hoc sub-grouping (ISIS-2, 1988). A second related pair of outcomes presented in the trial report is the birth weight in the (pre-specified) subsets of singleton and twin births. Thompson et al. comment on the difference (again based on statistical significance) between singleton and twins in birth weight, suggesting that a lack of effect in the twins casts doubt on the birth weight effect, but they base this statement on an invalid comparison of P-values between the subgroups. In fact the data presented in the paper suggest that the estimate of the weight difference in twins would have 95% CI of approximately â270 to 270 g which is entirely consistent with the difference in singletons (or indeed an effect of the same magnitude in the opposite direction). A more legitimate comparison between singletons and twins would have to be based on a formal interaction test. Although this was not given in the paper, there is sufficient data presented to indicate that this would not approach statistical significance. A similar issue arises in the discussions looking at other trials that compare media types. This is not an essential argument in the context of our example, as a lack of a difference between other media combinations cannot logically detract from the important proof of principle established in this trial. Nevertheless if there was evidence of differences in birth weight between other media types it would add to the concerns raised by this result, and it is legitimate for the commentators to consider these trials. However, we note that the trials of other media types conducted thus far produce effect size estimates with wide confidence intervals which do not rule out clinically important effects or effects of the magnitude seen in the trial of Kleijkers et al. (2016). The absence of evidence in these preceding trials does not logically imply evidence of an absence of effect (Altman and Bland, 1995). In this sense these studies could be considered, possibly in retrospect, underpowered. Again we have to look at the confidence intervals rather than statistical power or the P-values. If we have a large and a smaller study with identical treatment effects (e.g. difference in birth weight between arms) it will often be the case that the large study will have a small P-value and be considered âsignificantâ whilst the smaller study will fail to achieve the magic threshold (Farland et al., 2016). It would be a nonsense to consider these studies as having âconflicting resultsâ based on which side of the P < 0.05 cut-off they lie. It is certainly true that unexpected results should be carefully scrutinized and ancillary evidence interrogated to ascertain plausibility and consistency in the ways outlined above. A significant P-value is never the end of the story (Farland et al., 2016). Exceptional effects with no scientifically plausible mechanism (such as homoeopathy) do require exceptional evidence. On the other hand good science requires we be careful not to dismiss results which are incompatible with our preconceptions or wishes. In the present case we have an unexpected finding for which there is a plausible (but unproven) mechanism and weak evidence from observational studies. A careful evaluation cannot permit us to dismiss the result, although it is perfectly possible (and the type I error rate of 5% quantifies this risk) that a single result in a single study can be a chance finding. The correct response to a potentially deleterious effect on health has to be to undertake more research to confirm or refute the association. An oft-neglected cornerstone of good science is the replication of results (Baker, 2016). The Kleijkers et al. trial raises important concerns and larger, adequately powered randomized trials are clearly needed to confirm or refute the effects discussed here. Standard power calculations would indicate that sample sizes of at least 500 live births per arm would be required to reliably detect large differences in birth weight of around 100 g (based on a standard deviation of 550 g and 80% power) which would require recruitment of around 1300 patients per arm (assuming ~40% live birth rate); this is the sample size one would need to detect an approximate five percentage point uplift in live birth rate. Given the large numbers required and the large numbers of patients treated there is clearly still a role for large scale observational and surveillance studies. In the specific example discussed here, a careful evaluation of the trial would have to tentatively conclude that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the use of these two different culture media systems may lead to differences in birth weight. The mechanism is unknown, but must be directly related to either the media composition or ancillary changes necessitated by the use of these media in accordance with recommended practice. An âunluckyâ chance finding is the only alternative explanation. Therefore, until there is compelling direct evidence to the contrary, we have to take the possibility of differential effects of culture conditions on neonatal and long-term health seriously and observe due vigilance. We would reiterate the call for more RCTs and for the routine collection of culture media use and formulation. In conclusion, the debate about this potentially important finding has illustrated the need for careful interpretation of trial results and exemplified errors in interpretation which are not uncommon elsewhere. Most of these relate to over-reliance on P-values and failure to properly consider effect sizes and confidence intervals (Farland et al., 2016). Although the statistical principles underpinning this have been popularized and disseminated for several decades (Gardner and Altman, 1988) it is clear as a community we still have much to learn. S.A.R. is a statistical editor for Human Reproduction; A.V. is an editor of the Cochrane Gynaecology and Fertility Group.
Jan Mendling, Ingo Weber, Wil M. P. van der Aalst, Jan vom Brocke · 32 authors
Blockchain technology offers a sizable promise to rethink the way interorganizational business processes are managed because of its potential to realize execution without a central party serving as a single point of trust (and failure). To stimulate research on this promise and the limits thereof, in this article, we outline the challenges and opportunities of blockchain for business process management (BPM). We first reflect how blockchains could be used in the context of the established BPM lifecycle and second how they might become relevant beyond. We conclude our discourse with a summary of seven research directions for investigating the application of blockchain technology in the context of BPM.
The Magnificent Qurâan, the Muslimsâ sacred and the most authentic Book, was revealed in Arabic the most immense language all over the world. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) upon who this book was reveled in twenty three (23) years make complete arrangements for its authenticity by transferring Allahâs message to His Companions through reciting exact word by word preserving the accurate order. Nowadays with huge advancement in information technology (IT) the preferences are given to the new advance and smart devices for reading, reciting and memorizing the Quran instead of Printed copy of the Holy Quran that is considered more reliable and authentic. No doubt this advancement has make it easy to access the Quran anytime, anywhere for everyone but has open a real threat in the authenticity of digital Quran. In the past a lot of work has been done to define a proper mechanism for authenticity of digital Quran/online Quran, This paper is a step forward to the same process. It introduces the Centralised mechanism using blended approach of Digital signature and Zero-watermarking technique authentication of digital Quran. The skills to control the authenticity of digital Quran with the help of scholars can be challenging in the current situation. Now a days it is the big challenge for the users to identify the valid copy of digital (online) Quran .The Muslims everywhere in the world are facing deficiency of attentiveness in distribution of fake digital versions of Quran without acknowledgment of approved Muslims scholars. Muslims around the world individuals as well as groups have been putting huge effort to detect and eradicate illegal copies of Holy Quran. There should be one committee of Muslims scholars and IT experts which has both type of technological and Islamic knowledge about Quran. We therefore are going to propose digital Quran centralized authentication system by using latest authentication approach. The system is aimed to combining sophisticated knowledge of our outstanding Muslim scholars and extraordinary technological experts to provide the authentic, valid and error proof digital Quran to every Muslim.
Yaghoob Omran, Michael Henke, Roger Heines, Erik Hofmann
The main objective of this article is to develop a conceptual framework for blockchain-driven supply chain finance (SCF) solutions. The frame of reference intends to foster the coordination in buyer-supplier relations and eliminates existing inefficiencies in the execution of discrete SCF-instruments, such as reverse factoring and dynamic discounting. Moreover, we introduce value drivers for blockchain technology (BCT) to elaborate unique characteristics for its application in the field of SCF. While BCT is considered as one of the most disruptive enablers in financial technology (FinTech), it received only little attention within the emerging field of SCF. Therefore, the results contribute to future developments of appropriate SCF-solutions based on the newest technology innovations.