Reviewed by: The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics, 1790–1860 James H. Thomas (bio) The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics, 1790–1860, by Anthony Webster; pp. viii + 205. Woodbridge and Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2009, £50.00, $90.00. Within 205 pages and eight chapters, and drawing on an impressive range of sources, Anthony Webster sets out to examine and explain an important development—the East India Company's decline. His imaginative archival research has repaid handsome dividends. Between 1790 and 1860, the once-successful Company was in retreat. Webster analyses and scrutinises key players and developments, marking the emergence of new business interests and the 1793 Charter Act as the first steps in withdrawal. The struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France altered the Company's stance, while the 1813 Charter Act terminated its much-vaunted and jealously treasured monopoly of trade with India. The resultant liberalisation of trade with the subcontinent affected the British and Indian economies and British patterns of trade with Asia. Indicative of change, the Straits Settlements sought to be administered by the Colonial Office rather than by John Company's bureaucrats. The early 1830s saw economic crisis in India, removal of the Company's monopoly of trade with China, and a new pattern of commercial activity with both India and the Far East. Developments in agriculture, banking, and railways in the Indian subcontinent, while uneven, were rocked by a second crisis from 1847 to 1848. The Government of India Act of 1858 ended Company rule in India. Webster deals incisively with all of this and more. Using the legislation that underwrote and confirmed the once-great commercial enterprise's retreat, the author has made it easier for lay and professional readers to grasp and evaluate the crucial issues at stake. There are some instances of repetition, particularly with regard to opium's illicit passage to China, and some stylistic shortcomings. Rather than making reference to "the end of the 1810s," for instance, use of "by 1820" would have been neater (71). There are some proof-reading slips as well as some inconsistencies and infelicities in the references. While this may appear to cavil, such problems do detract slightly from the book's overall impact. Some elements, moreover, could have been explored further. The licensed private trade, or the "privilege trade" (25), merits closer examination given its financial and social significance in the context of both family and Company fortunes—as the careers of John Wordsworth and John Wyche ably demonstrate. Did this system, for example, work against Company fortunes? Was there any link between this practice and the abolition of the Company's trade monopoly in 1813? Similarly, Webster informs the reader of the rise of agency houses in the Company's three presidencies—Bombay, Madras, and Bengal—from the 1780s and that their sister agency houses in London had by the 1820s "become a powerful interest group within the East India Company's Courts of Proprietors and Directors" (26). Just how powerful, and how this power might be calibrated—by stock amounts, by connections, or a combination thereof—is not made apparent. Such elements are important if the Company's decline and demise is to be seen in its full and proper context. Webster is correct in stressing the significance of the changes between 1810 and 1830. Monopoly loss, the strain of prolonged war against France (with the Indian Ocean forming the key theatre of operations post-1805), acquisition of Singapore in February 1819, and the run-up to the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty were not without effect. [End Page 125] Similarly, the activities and influence of structures outside of the Company, including trade committees and John Palmer's abortive attempt to establish a Calcutta Chamber of Commerce, meant that by 1830 the structures and the neat and well-recorded dimensions of the Company's world were faltering. Strength, order, and unity of purpose were replaced by their very antitheses. The once-mighty Company, particularly in the financial context of the City of London, began to look like a shadow of its former self. By the...
Providing financial resources for public funds is difficult to effectuate and the central government and local government level. Since local budgets do not own income sufficient to ensure the financing of all expenditures on behalf of local collectivities, then the state budget provides funding for social, economic local destinations. Decentralization of public services is accompanied by financial descentralization. In this paper we present some aspects of VAT revenue from the state budget used to support certain activities at the local level, the evolution of these allocations in the context of current budgetary constraints due to financial crisis.
Cramer, Damgard, and Nielsen [CDN01] show how to construct an efficient secure multiparty computation scheme using a threshold homomorphic encryption scheme that has four properties i) a honest-verifier zero-knowledge proof of knowledge of encrypted values, ii) proving multiplications correct iii) threshold decryption and iv) trusted shared key setup. Naor and Nissim [NN01a] show how to construct secure multi-party protocols for a function f whose communication is proportional to the communication required to evaluate f without security, albeit at the cost of computation that might be exponential in the description of f . Gentry [Gen09a] shows how to combine both ideas with fully homomorphic encryption in order to construct secure multi-party protocol that allows evaluation of a function f using communication that is independent of the circuit description of f and computation that is polynomial in | f |. This paper addresses the major drawback’s of Gentry’s approach: we eliminate the use of non-black box methods that are inherent in Naor and Nissim’s compiler. To do this we show how to modify the fully homomorphic encryption construction of van Dijk et al. [vDGHV10] to be threshold fully homomorphic encryption schemes. We directly construct (information theoretically) secure protocols for sharing the secret key for our threshold scheme (thereby removing the setup assumptions) and for jointly decrypting a bit. All of these constructions are constant round and we thoroughly analyze their complexity; they address requirements (iii) and (iv). The fact that the encryption scheme is fully homomorphic addresses requirement (ii). To address the need for an honest-verifier zero-knowledge proof of knowledge of encrypted values, we instead argue that a weaker solution suffices. We provide a 2-round blackbox protocol that allows us to prove knowledge of encrypted bits. Our protocol is not zeroknowledge, but it provably does not release any information about the bit being discussed, and this is sufficient to prove the correctness of a simulation in a method similar to Cramer et al. Altogether, we construct the first black-box secure multi-party computation protocol that allows evaluation of a function f using communication that is independent of the circuit description of f .
Proof-carrying authorization (PCA) is one of the most popular approaches for the enforcement of access control policies. In a nutshell, the idea is to formalize a policy as a set of logical rules and to let the requester construct a formal proof showing that she has permissions to access the desired resource according to the provider’s policy. This policy may depend on logical formulas that are assumed by other principals in the system. The validity of these formulas is witnessed by digital signatures. The usage of digital signatures, however, has a serious drawback, i.e., sensitive data are leaked to the verifier, which severely limits the applicability of PCA. In this paper, we introduce the notion of privacy-aware proof-carrying authorization, an extension of PCA based on a powerful combination of digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge of such signatures. The former are used to witness the validity of logical formulas, the latter to selectively hide sensitive data. Our framework supports a variety of privacy properties, such as data secrecy and user anonymity. We conducted an experimental evaluation to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.
Die Gretchenfrage: Goethe and Philosophies of Religion around 1800 John H. Smith Already in the Urfaust version, Gretchen poses her eponymous question to Faust, raising the issue of belief in God: Margarete: Wie hast du’s mit der Religion? Du bist ein herzlich guter Mann, Allein ich glaub, du hältst nicht viel davon. Faust: Laß das, mein Kind! Du fühlst, ich bin dir gut; Für meine Lieben ließ’ ich Leib und Blut, Will niemand sein Gefühl und seine Kirche rauben. Margarete: Das ist nicht recht, man muß dran glauben! Faust: Muß man? (3415–22) He continues with his well-known tirade, or cunning seduction, or philosophical panegyric to Sturm und Drang anti-linguistic feeling, culminating with the exclamations: Nenn es dann, wie du willst, Nenn’s Glück! Herz ! Liebe! Gott! Ich habe keinen Namen Dafür! Gefühl ist alles; Name ist Schall und Rauch, Umnebelnd Himmelsglut. (3453–58) A very different view of the divine is expressed the opening Prologue in Heaven when the Lord himself speaks about the nature of things: Der Herr: Des Menschen Tätigkeit kann allzuleicht erschlaffen, Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh; Drum geb’ ich gern ihm den Gesellen zu, Der reizt und wirkt und muß als Teufel schaffen.— Doch ihr, die echten Göttersöhne, Erfreut euch der lebendig reichen Schöne! [End Page 183] Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt, Umfass’ euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken, Und was in schwankender Erscheinung schwebt, Befestiget mit dauernden Gedanken. (340–49) In the time these lines were written and published, the 1770s, 1790, around 1800, and 1808, major revolutions—a Kantian and a post-Kantian—took place in conceptions of nature, God, and religion. These two passages capture some of the rethinking that occurred during this period. In the first, especially in Faust’s “muß man?” we hear the question that motivates key debates, namely: is there a necessity behind faith? And in the second, we hear a new emphasis on human activity and a confidence in the ability to grasp in thought a God defined as “das Werdende.” One can highlight the relevant issues by varying Gretchen’s question slightly and having her ask more academically: “Was ist der Grund deines Glaubens?” or “Bist du atheistisch?” These were burning questions in the turn from Kant-Reinhold to Fichte to Schelling-Hegel between 1790 and 1815. One can think of the lasting echo of the debate about Spinoza and pantheism, the impact that Kant’s Critical Philosophy had on traditional proofs of the existence of God (as Reinhold stressed in his Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie), the Atheismusstreit around Fichte and Foberg in Jena in 1799, Schleiermacher’s lectures Über die Religion, and the exchange between Schelling and Jacobi in 1811–12.1 Although these incidents show that the Gretchenfrage was a dicey one, and that matters of religion and belief were central to the debates raging in those extraordinary decades from 1790–1815, they became less central in the literature dealing with the turn to idealism.2 This essay will argue that the intersection of Goethe and idealism needs to be considered in light of theological and religionsphilosophische motivations.3 Once we take them into account, it makes more sense that Goethe would have been in the thick of this philosophical transition. He had a stake—political, philosophical, and literary—in a conception of God, religion, and life that was different from both that of traditional Christianity and the one that emerged out of Kant’s critiques. That the answer Faust gave in the 1770s was insufficient by 1800 helps explain how his thought, including the reworking of Faust I, and that of his philosophical contemporaries developed in tandem as they sought to provide a fuller answer to this question. The reason for focusing on Faust is that it has a special relationship to idealism. As Rüdiger Scholz says of Schelling’s and Hegel’s interpretations: “Das Drama erscheint vom philosophischen System her gedeutet, und umgekehrt wird das philosophische Gebäude durch den Faust verständlich” (Scholz 11).4 The ideas that were being explored—What and why must...
This report describes the process of shrinkage as it has occurred within the city of Leipzig. It examines the reasons, dynamics and patterns of change as well as the consequences for different fields of urban development and planning. The period covered in the report runs from the 1980s to the present day; in particular cases, longer or shorter time periods are considered. Over this time, Leipzig has moved from a (more or less rapidly) shrinking city until the late 1990s to a point where ist population stabilized and even returned to a slight growth during the last few years. Today, Leipzig is no longer a shrinking city. When one looks only at the total population numbers, Leipzig represents one of a few large cities in eastern Germany that have undergone reurbanization processes (Haase, A. et al. 2010). However, urban shrinkage continues to be an important topic for the city. The city is still facing the consequences of long-term shrinkage and will have to cope with it during the years to come. At the same time, shrinkage still affects some parts of the city and will also do so in the future. Moreover, Leipzig awaits a new wave of shrinkage due to ageing and a decrease in households after 2015.
The proposed public-key managements of Ad hoc networks must take many nodes as service nodes,which run counter to the characters of Ad hoc networks,such as self-organized and centerless.They also take much traffic to create public-private key pairs and certificates,and they are poor in robustness.This paper proposed a novel fully self-organized public-key management system that took zero knowledge proofs into the process of certification and allowed users to generate their public-private key pairs,to issue certificates,and to perform authentication regardless of the network partitions and without any certralized services.The protocol analysis study and simulations prove that the public-key management system has low traffic,high reliability and robustness.
Based on ELGamal digital signature and zero-knowledge proof with the method of directed signature,a two-way identification scheme was proposed,which enabled two specific users to validate each other's identity without exposing one's own secret information.The scheme has higher security and lower computing complexity.
This paper describes the Brazilian health system, which includes a public sector covering almost 75% of the population and an expanding private sector offering health services to the rest of the population. The public sector is organized around the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) and it is financed with general taxes and social contributions collected by the three levels of government (federal, state and municipal). SUS provides health care through a decentralized network of clinics, hospitals and other establishments, as well as through contracts with private providers. SUS is also responsible for the coordination of the public sector. The private sector includes a system of insurance schemes known as Supplementary Health which is financed by employers and/or households: group medicine (companies and households), medical cooperatives, the so called Self-Administered Plans (companies) and individual insurance plans.The private sector also includes clinics, hospitals and laboratories offering services on out-of-pocket basis mostly used by the high-income population. This paper also describes the resources of the system, the stewardship activities developed by the Ministry of Health and other actors, and the most recent policy innovations implemented in Brazil, including the programs saúde da Familia and Mais Saúde.
Japanese regional systems of government are expected to undergo great reform. Regional autonomy laws have been enforced since 2000. A law to promote decentralization reform was approved to enact new regional autonomy laws in December 2006 and the decentralization reform promotion committee started in April 2007. In addition, a new local financial reform was also done though local financial reforms executed in terms of finances between the 2004 fiscal year and 2006 fiscal year. A scale reduction in the tax money allocated to local governments was one local financial reform. From April 2007, a new tax allocation was executed for simplification of the delivery standard. Fiscal resources were decreased by the local financial reforms, so local governments were requested to improve the physical conditions of their cities, towns and villages. Therefore, a large number of municipality mergers of the ‘ Heisei' Era are advancing now.Introduction of the ‘ Do-Shu' system is being discussed as a system for not only the city, town and village governments but also for the administrative prefectural governments. In addition, the Act for Comprehensive Development of the National Land was revised by the Japan Development & Construction Co., Ltd. Plan based on the past Act for Comprehensive Development of the National Land of 2005, and the name changed to the Country Formation Plan. A variety of local system reforms have been continuously carried out since the 1990's.In this paper, the following three points are clarified. 1. Finances in Japan lacked financial moderation in the 1990's and this caused the need for modulation. 2. Problems were caused by local public finance trying to carry out measures to boost the economy of the local government in the 1990's. 3. Problems have increased with local financial reforms being executed before the problems of the local public finances are corrected. A new problem has occurred in Japanese regional finances because of the introduction of decentralization and the Do-Shu system.The central government faced a fiscal deficit in the 1990's. The local governments then experienced a fiscal deficit because the central government made the local governments subrogate the deficit. Therefore, the central and local governments need a fiscal reform. The central government hands over their work to the local governments to decrease their own fiscal deficit, and has reduced the local tax allocation distributed to the local governments. The central government is planning to further decrease the local tax allocation by introducing the ‘ Do-Syu' system in the future.JEL Classification: H62, R51, R58
Population should be in the central focus of local community institutions and the local community may constitute its population policy which will supplement state population policy measures, considering the local specific various traditions, values and models of living. The paper's basic goal is to critically perceive the characteristics, significance and role of local self-governments in the current population policy of Serbia. Social situation and social policy characteristics in Serbia are analyzed in the context of the population policy. It is pointed out that poverty, unemployment, the economic crisis, the process of privatization, the issue of system decentralization and social expectations of the population, as current expressions of transition, all have a consequence on the demographic development and population policy. A critical estimation of the activities in the field of population policies which are carried out by local and provincial self-governments in Serbia in the last decade are brought into focus, with a special review to the activities of provincial and local governments in the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina. As a result of the analysis it is pointed out that the population and social policy measures have been separated since the year 2000 and that they have been directed only to stimulating births and not child raising and that solutions regarding maternity leave brought improvements, however shortened maternity leave for the third child. The new conception of the population policy brought a whole series of restrictions such as: suspension of aid for newborn essentials; discontinuance of the right to maternity allowance; abolishing of compensation for preschool expenses for the third child; children?s allowance lost its population measures character along with considerable tightening of the census and decreasing of amount; the activities of preschool facilities have been reduced only to an educational function, and the terms for realizing rights to preschool education for children without parents and children with special needs have been tightened. The authors point out to the values and principles on which a contemporary population policy of local self-governments in Serbia should be established, such as: stability of established measures, a clear message on the needs of society, compatibility and not uniformity with measures of other bodies, compassion and uniformity with aspirations of couples and individuals, respect for the rights and freedom of man, information availability, equality of birth and raising children in measures. The establishment of population policy municipality funds is suggested and that local population policy measures are both material and non-material type, as well as in the form of organizational measures which could use the existing resources in a better way. The municipal assembly should create organizational suppositions by appointing a Population Policy Commission as its permanent body. The Commission would propose to the Municipal Assembly to adopt a strategic document - the Population Policy Strategy in the municipality. The Municipality Assembly should adopt the Action Plan for carrying out of the population policy every year, which would define the measures, bearers, terms and methods of evaluating measures with a plan for the following year. The population policy of the local self-government should be a constant process which manages, follows and evaluates, which is public and which understands the engagement of competent people, participation of citizens-volunteers and civil organizations.
Published in: Jorge Martinez Vazquez. Local Finance in Latin America in <em>Local government finance : the challenges of the 21st century : second global report on decentralization and local democracy : GOLD II 2010 / United Cities and Local Governments</em>. 191-229. Cheltenham, UK ; Northampton, MA : Edward Elgar, 2011. (c) United Cities and Local Governments, published by <a href="http://www.e-elgar.co.uk/">Edward Elgar Publisher</a>. Posted with the permission of the publisher for personal use only.
Based on analyses on the usage and sources of the loans of local government-backed financing vehicles, this paper discusses the challenges of public capital financing that local governments in China face. Recently rapid increase of the loans of local government-backed financing vehicles could induce serious risk to local governments’ fiscal stability. The authors argue that the traditional thoughts focusing on inappropriate fiscal decentralization might not bring to light the core problems concerning local government-backed financing vehicles. This paper suggests that the problems indeed reflect the deficiencies of the public capital financing and investment system of local governments in China. Currently, a comprehensive solution is needed in order to establish a sustainable public capital financing system. The authors insist that a public capital financing system based on municipal bonds would be more efficient. Meanwhile, a rigorous public capital budget constraint would be indispensable to maintain local governments’ fiscal sustainability.
In the standard definition of a commitment scheme, the sender commits to a message and immediately sends the commitment to the recipient interested in it. However the sender may not always know at the time of commitment who will become interested in it. Further, when the interested party does emerge, it could be critical to establish when the commitment was made. Employing a proof of work protocol at commitment time will later allow anyone to carbon date when the commitment was made, approximately, without trusting any external parties. We present CommitCoin, an instantiation of this approach that harnesses the existing computational power of the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network; a network used to mint and trade digital cash.
The present paper aims at analyzing those challenges that public Spanish universities face nowadays. Hence, we will deal with the concept of «dilemma in governance» as used by Larsen et al. (2009) as well as by Lazerson (2010). The present paper breaks down into four: dilemma between representative democracy and organizational effectiveness, dilemma between integrated management structures and dual management structures; dilemma between external and internal influence in institutional decision making; dilemma between centralization and decentralization in more autonomous universities. The research has been conducted by means of qualitative methods: survey and focus-group. The survey has targeted 23 respondents, selected from four public Spanish universities, made up of: university managers; governmental and higher educational management experts; administrative personnel and counselors. After this phase, a focus-group with experts was conducted. The results obtained show that experts prefer autonomy of regulations and less control from the state representatives. Moreover, the model applies taking into account the fact that didactic activity temporarily implies counseling and managerial tasks which may create confusion between the two organizational focuses. The didactic activity that nowadays carries out managerial functions views the current model as the most appropriate to higher educational Spanish system and, despite several drawbacks in the model, it is still observed by representatives. Finally the results show that representatives of the centralized bodies are reluctant to share and disseminate power among peripheral organizational structures such as departments and faculties for whom autonomy is still debatable. Summarizing we can consider that the four dilemmas reflect the current challenges that Spanish universities have to face.
Online Creation Communities (OCCs) can be defined as networks of
individuals that communicate, interact and collaborate; in several forms and degrees of
participation which are eco-systemically integrated; mainly via a platform of participation
on the Internet, on which they depend; and aiming at knowledge-making and sharing. This
article analyses the conception of participation and the organizational logic of participation
in OCCs. Participation in OCCs does not follow a dichotomize approach, but function more
as an eco-system. The more significant characteristic of participation in OCCs are: 1) What
is important is that the system is open to participation, but it is not expected that everybody
participate and contribute equally; 2) Participation has multiple forms and degrees which are
integrated. A critical mass of active developers is essential to initiate the project and maintain
the content; weak cooperation enriches the system and facilitates reaching larger fields of
information resources; and lurker or non-participants provide value as audience or though
unintended participation that improve the system; 3) Participation is decentralized and
asynchronous; 4) Participation is in public; 5) Participation is autonomous in the sense that
each person decides which level of commitment they want to adopt and on what aspects they
want to contribute. 6) Participation is not only deliberation but implementation. To conclude,
an analysis of the governance conditions under which the resulting outcome could be defined
as a digital commons is included. Furthermore, a reflection on the political implications of
CCOs is also provided. The analysis is developed over the case studies of a platform provided
by the European Social Forum, Flickr, Wikihow and Wikipedia. The main empirical methods
are interviews, virtual ethnography and content analysis.
David Bernhard, Véronique Cortier, Olivier Pereira, Ben Smyth · 5 authors
Abstract. Recent results show that the current implementation of He-lios, a practical e-voting protocol, does not ensure independence of the cast votes, and demonstrate the impact of this lack of independence on vote privacy. Some simple fixes seem to be available and security of the revised scheme has been studied with respect to symbolic models. In this paper we study the security of Helios using computational models. Our first contribution is a model for the property known as ballot privacy that generalizes and extends several existing ones. Using this model, we investigate an abstract voting scheme (of which the revised Helios is an instantiation) built from an arbitrary encryp-tion scheme with certain functional properties. We prove, generically, that whenever this encryption scheme falls in the class of voting-friendly schemes that we define, the resulting voting scheme provably satisfies ballot privacy. We explain how our general result yields cryptographic security guaran-tees for the revised version of Helios (albeit from non-standard assump-tions). Furthermore, we show (by giving two distinct constructions) that it is possible to construct voting-friendly encryption, and therefore voting schemes, using only standard cryptographic tools. We detail an instan-tiation based on ElGamal encryption and Fiat-Shamir non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs that closely resembles Helios and which provably satisfies ballot privacy. 1
This paper proposes a zero-knowledge proof scheme of possessing a DSA digital signature,in which the prover does not directly give the DSA signature of the message,but gives a zero-knowledge proof of possessing the DSA signature.Preventing the signature from being copied at discretion,the scheme can be used in copyright protection.
espanolEn este articulo analizamos los retos a los que se enfrenta el sistema de gobierno de las universidades publicas espanolas. Para ello tomamos el concepto de «dilemas de gobierno» utilizado por Larsen et al. (2009) y por Lazerson (2010). Concretamente se abordan los dilemas entre: la democracia representativa y la eficacia organizacional, los modelos de estructuras integradas y matriciales; las influencias externas o internas en la toma de decisiones y, entre la centralizacion y la descentralizacion en el contexto de la autonomia universitaria. Optamos por una metodologia cualitativa en la que aplicamos entrevistas y grupo focal de discusion. Las entrevistas se realizaron a veintitres informantes de cuatro universidades publicas espanolas triangulandose tres perfiles diferenciados de informantes: academicos que ejercen funciones de direccion; expertos analistas del gobierno y gestion de la educacion superior y personal de administracion y apoyo al academico-gestor. Tras ellas organizamos un grupo focal de discusion con expertos. Los resultados obtenidos indican que los expertos defienden una mayor autonomia para los directivos y un menor control por parte de organos colegiados de representacion estamental. Por otro lado, la estructura matricial se aplica sabiendo que el profesorado asume temporalmente tareas de direccion y gestion, lo que puede confundir los limites entre ambos focos organizativos. El profesorado que ejerce en la actualidad funciones directivas considera que el modelo vigente es el mas adecuado a las particularidades del sistema universitario espanol y, aunque se reconocen ciertas disfunciones en el modelo de representacion estamental, lo defienden ante un posible modelo de profesionalizacion externa. Concluimos que el modelo de analisis basado en los cuatro dilemas es capaz de reflejar los principales retos que debe asumir la universidad espanola en la actualidad. EnglishThe present paper aims at analyzing those challenges that public Spanish universities face nowadays. Hence, we will deal with the concept of «dilemma in governance» as used by Larsen et al. (2009) as well as by Lazerson (2010). The present paper breaks down into four: dilemma between representative democracy and organizational effectiveness, dilemma between integrated management structures and dual management structures; dilemma between external and internal influence in institutional decision making; dilemma between centralization and decentralization in more autonomous universities. The research has been conducted by means of qualitative methods: survey and focus-group. The survey has targeted 23 respondents, selected from four public Spanish universities, made up of: university managers; governmental and higher educational management experts; administrative personnel and counselors. After this phase, a focus-group with experts was conducted. The results obtained show that experts prefer autonomy of regulations and less control from the state representatives. Moreover, the model applies taking into account the fact that didactic activity temporarily implies counseling and managerial tasks which may create confusion between the two organizational focuses. The didactic activity that nowadays carries out managerial functions views the current model as the most appropriate to higher educational Spanish system and, despite several drawbacks in the model, it is still observed by representatives. Finally the results show that representatives of the centralized bodies are reluctant to share and disseminate power among peripheral organizational structures such as departments and faculties for whom autonomy is still debatable. Summarizing we can consider that the four dilemmas reflect the current challenges that Spanish universities have to face.
Ivan Damgård, Jakob Funder, Jesper Buus Nielsen, Louis Salvail
Attacks on classical cryptographic protocols are usually modeled by allowing an adversary to ask queries from an oracle. Security is then defined by requiring that as long as the queries satisfy some constraint, there is some problem the adversary cannot solve, such as compute a certain piece of information. In this paper, we introduce a fundamentally new model of quantum attacks on classical cryptographic protocols, where the adversary is allowed to ask several classical queries in quantum superposition. This is a strictly stronger attack than the standard one, and we consider the security of several primitives in this model. We show that a secret-sharing scheme that is secure with threshold $t$ in the standard model is secure against superposition attacks if and only if the threshold is lowered to $t/2$. We use this result to give zero-knowledge proofs for all of NP in the common reference string model. While our protocol is classical, it is sound against a cheating unbounded quantum prover and computational zero-knowledge even if the verifier is allowed a superposition attack. Finally, we consider multiparty computation and show that for the most general type of attack, simulation based security is not possible. However, putting a natural constraint on the adversary, we show a non-trivial example of a protocol that can indeed be simulated.