In this paper, we study the relationship between institutional ownership and capital structure. Based on the principle of minimizing financing cost, this paper firstly constructs a dynamic optimizing model of capital structure from the angle of institutional ownership. Then, it uses panel data of 539 China listed companies of manufacturing industry from 2005 to 2007 to make regression of fixed effects model. The results indicate that the percentage of institutional stock holdings has positive relation with capital structure, and the decentralized degree of institutional ownership is negatively related to capital structure. The robustness check agrees with these results. Finally, this paper points that developing institutional investors is one way to solve the current low debt ratio of China listed companies.
A secure web-based watermarking scheme is proposed to allow the publisher or information provider to mark their copyrighted materials and identify an illegal distributor through the World Wide Web (WWW). In our proposed scheme, multi-watermark techniques and double encryption method is applied to make the scheme available in e-transaction and secure against collusion attacks even if the third party is not trusted. And the basic idea of zero knowledge proof is also used to make verification of an illegal distributor without the disclosure of any watermark information. Furthermore, a multiparty transaction scenario is also introduced by using our scheme in this paper. The analysis results indicate that our design goals are successfully achieved and some improvements are made over previously proposed schemes.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Federica Paci, Elisa Bertino, Sam Kerr, Anna Squicciarini · 5 authors
Abstract — Users increasingly use their mobile devices to communicate, to conduct business transaction and access resources and services. In such a scenario, digital iden-tity management (DIM) technology is fundamental in cus-tomizing user experience, protecting privacy, underpinning accountability in business transactions, and in complying with regulatory controls. Users identity consists of data, referred to as identity attributes, that encode relevant-security properties of the clients. However, identity attributes can be target of several attacks: the loss or theft of mobile devices results in a exposure of identity attributes; identity attributes that are send over WI-FI or 3G networks can be easily inter-cepted; identity attributes can also be captured via Bluetooth connections without the user’s consent; and mobile viruses, worms and Trojan horses can access the identity attributes stored on mobile devices if this information is not protected by passwords or PIN numbers. Therefore, assuring privacy and security of identity attributes, as well as of any sensitive information stored on mobile devices is crucial. In this paper we address such problems by proposing an approach to manage user identity attributes by assuring their privacy-preserving usage. The approach is based on the concept of privacy preserving multi-factor authentication achieved by a new cryptographic primitive which uses aggregate signatures on commitments that are then used for aggregate zero-knowledge proof of knowledge (ZKPK) protocols. We present the implementation of such approach on Nokia NFC cellular phones and report performance evaluation results. Index Terms — digital identity management, identity at-tributes, privacy, mobile devices I.
After a century of political centralization in Colombia, the first public election of city mayors in 19861 began a decentralization trend, which was later reinforced by a constitutional reform in 1991. Subnational governments (departments and municipalities) were made responsible for the planning and management of social and economic development in their jurisdictions. Administrative and political reforms were accompanied by fiscal decentralization, including the transfer of central government revenues. Since 1991 the growth of fiscal transfers has accelerated. Departments and municipalities are now responsible for public health, education, water supply, and sanitation expenditures through earmarked transfers. Out of the total amount of central government expenditures (21.8 percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in 2008) almost one-quarter represent regional transfers (5 percent of GDP), which finance half of all regional expenditures (10.2 percent of GDP). The purpose of this paper is to describe the budget process reform implemented in Medellin, and to analyze its actual performance and evaluate its success. The reform is changing the way public resources are allocated and executed, while gradually institutionalizing supply and demand-side practices beyond the government's political cycles. This paper describes and analyzes how the Results-oriented budgeting (RoB) was designed and implemented, and the achievements of the system to date, in terms of resource allocation and the policy-making process.
The objective of the study was to analyze the status and explore the challenges to decentralization policy implementation in Nepal. Thirty seven key informants rich in experience and knowledge, seven focus group discussions, observation of six health facilities and analysis of about 25 key policy documents provided the data for this study. The study identified the challenges to the implementation of decentralization reforms in the public health sector as: (i) centralised and weak management and programming practices of the government; (ii) weak legal and institutional framework; (iii) conflicting policy objectives; (iv) lack of implementation strategy; (v) poor financial and human resource management system; (vi) lack of adequate preparation for managing the reform; (vii) weak capacity at all levels; (viii) political instability. It was revealed that the implementation of the policy in Nepal was extremely poor as many of the important policy measures were either never initiated or they were only partially implemented. The challenges lie both at - policy design and implementation phase. Clear policy objectives, appropriate structure, sound planning, financing and human resources policy, adequate capacity, responsive information system, defined service packages, active participation of stakeholders and a conducive socio-political environment are considered imperative for successful implementation of the policy. Preparation for managing reform implementation at national and district levels is prerequisite for decentralization to work. Pushing for decentralization in a politically fragile environment may rather lead to further fragmentation, instead of strengthening government legitimacy.
In this article, we introduce a Prover–Verifier model for analysing the computational complexity of a class of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) termed boolean binary constraint satisfaction problems (BBCSPs). BBCSPs represent an extremely general class of CSPs and find applications in a wide variety of domains including constraint programming, puzzle solving and program testing. The constraints in a BBCSP permit the combination of multiple theories as opposed to traditional constraint systems in which all constraints belong to the same theory. We establish that each instance of a BBCSP admits a coin-flipping Turing machine that halts in time polynomial in the size of the input. Furthermore, the algorithm is oblivious in that it never sees more than one constraint at a time. The prover, P, in the Prover–Verifier model is endowed with very limited powers. In particular, it has no memory and it can only pose restricted queries to the verifier. The verifier, on the other hand, is both omniscient in that it is cognisant of all the problem details and insincere in that it does not have to decide a priori on the intended proof. However, the verifier must stay consistent in its responses, i.e. it cannot rule out a certain possibility in one response to a query from the prover and then rule in the same possibility in response to a subsequent query. We note that the combination of the resources required by the prover and the type of certificate demanded of the verifier, determine the resources required by an algorithm. Inasmuch as our provers will be memoryless and our verifiers will be asked for extremely simple certificates, our work establishes the existence of a simple, randomised algorithm for BBCSPs. Our model itself serves as a basis for the design of zero-knowledge machine learning algorithms in that the prover ends up learning the proof desired by the verifier. Likewise, our work finds applications in the domain of certifying algorithm design, wherein the goal is to provide a proof of correctness of the algorithm on the input instance by providing an easily checkable certificate.
- This paper reviews main motivations behind the constitution of local councils partnerships as they serve to devise decentralization pitfalls in order to the optimal dimension of government. To this aim, the paper focuses on one of such partnership, namely Unione di Comune (UdC). Some stylized facts are derived with regard to dimension, functions and finalities of Italian UdC and structural characteristics of associated councils. The financing issue has been analyzed under the heading of both ensuring adequate funding to promote partnerships and avoiding pressure on the national government's budget and public finance in general. Theoretical considerations and empirical experience from abroad, such as inter communality in France, show that the assignment of an autonomous tax proves to be more efficient compared to una tantum or annual transfer or tax sharing. Finally, the paper offers an insight into the way UdC provides administrative functions and public services by mean of the Marche Region case study.
Self configuring VLSI technology architectures offer a new environment for creating novel security functions. Two such functions for physical security architectures are proposed to be generated autonomously as unknown/secret internal functions. A cell-based FPGA technology architecture is deployed for generating two classes of self-constructed one-way physical secret functions, one representing a hash function and the other a ciphering function. The Hash function is a non-invertible mapping, where the cipher function should be invertible. The two sample architectures of the functions are inspired from the programmable cell structure of the selected FPGA technology. As the functions are internally created, their mapping structures can be kept completely secret and even unknown to anybody. Such units could be efficiently deployed for a novel physical security even when nothing is known about their exact architecture and mapping functions. Several new attractive application scenarios are demonstrated including a type of zero-knowledge proof of identity and clone-resistant physical units as well as secured dependency functions. It is also shown that such security mechanisms can be kept operational for some useful applications even if the secret-unknown functions are allowed to evolve and develop additional time-dependent and individual properties. Such security functions became recently possible after self-configuring VLSI architectures are available as a part of real microelectronic systems. Keywords-Identification; secret unknown hardware functions; clone-resitant units; secret-unknown physicalcipher, secret unknown hash-functions. 1.
2 source records
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
This paper describes a case of a small start-up agency on intelligent, knowledgeable temporary staffs in Japanese mobile-phone industry as a new trend in the field of IT industry in Japan. In the rapid progress of technology and market, many enterprises in IT industry are facing to a serious shortage of knowledge/knowledgeable-employees on technology and market. For example, in the mobile-phone industry, the number of account customers has been so rapidly increased and varieties of services and technologies have also been so drastically increased that the employees inside mobile-phone enterprises cannot cover the whole service and technology. Therefore, outsourcing labor force like temporary staffs has become so important in the industry. However, the problem is that it is not easy to obtain appropriate labor force with sufficiently intelligent, knowledgeable for IT industry and market. The case analyzed here implies a clue to solve this problem by flexible, autonomous decentralized organization on temporary staff agency and effective self-education system. The characteristics of such a start-up enterprise and their manner of absorbing/sharing knowledge are discussed.
*Abhay Pethe is Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Mumbai. B. M. Misra is Adviser and Rakhe.P.B. is Research Officer, Department of Economic Analysis and Policy, Reserve Bank of India. The views expressed in this study are the authors ’ own and do not necessarily reflect views of the organizations to
We use an idea of linear representations of the symmetric group to reduce the number of communication rounds in the verification protocol, proposed in Crypto 2005 by Peng et al., of a shuffling. We assume Paillier encryption scheme with which we can apply some known zero-knowledge proofs following the same line of approaches of Peng et al. Incidence matrices of 1-subsets and 2-subsets of a finite set is intensively used for the implementation, and the idea of <TEX>$\lambda$</TEX>-designs is employed for the improvement of the computational complexity.
Argument The British Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, spent four months on a Scottish mountainside in 1774, making observations of zenith stars and coordinating a detailed survey of the size and shape of the mountain Schiehallion, in order to demonstrate and quantify what was known as “the attraction of mountains.” His endeavors were celebrated in London, where it was stated that he had given proof of the universality of Newtonian gravitation and allowed for a calculation of the relative densities of the earth as a whole and the earth near its surface. This paper argues that the “Schiehallion Experiment” was as much a trial of the precision of Maskelyne's instruments and their expert management as it was a trial of Newtonian theory. By tracing the biography of the key instrument used by Maskelyne, his zenith sector, we see how much personal credibility was a stake for him in Scotland. By considering the mountainside as a place to test and reveal the precision of astronomical instruments we see a link between the Scottish endeavors and Maskelyne's ambitions for the Greenwich Observatory.
A gestão democrática, a autonomia e a participação popular nos processos decisórios são elementos que sintetizam as características das relações sociais que fundamentam um tipo de sociedade pautada em relações transparentes e solidárias. Nesse sentido, a escola pública é local privilegiado para o estabelecimento de relações sociais dessa natureza. A instituição de canais de participação e a oferta de condições institucionais, materiais e humanas para as escolas públicas são elementos indispensáveis para que isso se realize. A implementação de políticas públicas comprometidas com as classes trabalhadoras sugere que o Estado, por intermédio de suas instituições, se aproxime dos usuários dos bens e serviços públicos, provendo-lhes os meios necessários que garantam condições dignas para o exercício da cidadania. No caso das escolas públicas municipais de São Carlos, a regularidade na disponibilização de recursos financeiros para os gestores escolares foi uma forma de descentralização adotada pela Administração Municipal de São Carlos, no período 2001-2004 para garantir as condições materiais de funcionamento das escolas, com a participação popular. A análise dos dados demonstrou que essa política pública é um instrumento importante para atender as necessidades materiais e de serviços mais imediatos das escolas públicas. O desenvolvimento do trabalho mostrou que a prioridade dos gastos foi com a manutenção predial e aquisição de materiais pedagógicos, contudo as características históricosociais da cidade de São Carlos são elementos dificultadores para que as intenções democratizantes da gestão estudada, com a instituição de canais de participação popular e outros mecanismos de aproximação do Estado dos usuários dos bens e serviços públicos fossem apropriados. Como instrumento indutor da gestão democrática, a análise reafirmou o tecido social da cidade e mostrou que a organização interna, na maioria das escolas públicas, não tem favorecido a participação popular. Como proposta, o estudo sugeriu o aprimoramento dos critérios utilizados para a descentralização de recursos financeiros para as escolas municipais e o fomento às ações que possam contribuir para que haja a ruptura com práticas tutelantes.
David L. Roberts, Chris S. Elphick, J. Michael Reed
As species become very rare and approach extinction, purported sightings can stir controversy, especially when scarce management resources are at stake. We used quantitative methods to identify reports that do not fit prior sighting patterns. We also examined the effects of including records that meet different evidentiary standards on quantitative extinction assessments for four charismatic bird species that might be extinct: Eskimo Curlew (Numenius borealis), Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), Nukupu'u (Hemignathus lucidus), and O'ahu 'Alauahio (Paroreomyza maculata). For all four species the probability of there being a valid sighting today, given the past pattern of verified sightings, was estimated to be very low. The estimates of extinction dates and the chance of new sightings, however, differed considerably depending on the criteria used for data inclusion. When a historical sighting record lacked long periods without sightings, the likelihood of new sightings declined quickly with time since the last confirmed sighting. For species with this type of historical record, therefore, new reports should meet an especially high burden of proof to be acceptable. Such quantitative models could be incorporated into the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List criteria to set evidentiary standards required for unconfirmed sightings of "possibly extinct" species and to standardize extinction assessments across species.
Halpern, Moses and Tuttle presented a definition of interactive proofs using a notion they called practical knowledge, but left open the question of finding an epistemic formula that completely characterizes zero knowledge; that is, a formula that holds iff a proof is zero knowledge. We present such a formula, and show that it does characterize zero knowledge. Moreover, we show that variants of the formula characterize variants of zero knowledge such as concurrent zero knowledge [Dwork, Naor, and Sahai 2004] and proofs of knowledge [Feige, Fiat, and Shamir 1987; Tompa and Woll 1987].
In the wired world of coded connections, zeros and ones exert a daunting pictorial presence. From glamour glossies to public relations wars, from selling sex to the promises of noble sciences, to art as million-dollar kitsch, digital images endlessly spiral, circumnavigating the global sphere. As ‘signs in action’, what compelling narratives do they distinctly embed? Yet in media-driven societies engaged in and dependent on symbolic pictorialisations, how do these representations operate as part of a mutating cultural imaginary? One may consider the concept of the cultural imaginary as an over-arching term sinuously defined as ‘those vast networks interlinking discursive themes, images, motifs and narrative forms that are publicly available within a given culture at any one time, and articulate its psychic and social dimensions’ (Dawson 1994: 48). For cultural historian Graham Dawson ‘cultural imaginaries furnish public forms which both organise knowledge of the social world and give shape to fantasies within the apparently “internal” domain of psychic life’ (Dawson 1994: 48). In addition, these symbol sets can be termed critical fictions and may be located somewhere between illusion, proof and cognitive projection. Constituting a semblance of a ‘collective data-base’, the cultural imaginary traverses contested territories associated with either verifiable axioms or fanciful story telling. These visualising models, employed by artists, scientists, designers, corporate advertisers, journalists and/or politicians, clarify, mislead, aggrandise, stimulate or document. In short, they are representations embedded in social structures, policy decisions and commercial ventures. As aesthetic devices they perform their semiotic function of activating thought and emotion through their powers of communication and circumscribed belief (Anker 2004). Visual representations and their attendant sign systems, however, are not necessarily self-evident and in some cases seeing is, in fact, not believing. Hoaxes, illusions, sleights of hand, all part of image manipulation, are constituent elements of visuality’s deceptive regime. In other circumstances, visual interpretation is compounded by complex degrees of connoisseurship associated with astute visual understanding, explicitly due to an image’s power to evoke audience response. Furthermore, the study of these symbolic entities requires an analysis and contextualisation historically anchored in the cultural imagination. Pictorial devices, composed of formal aesthetic elements such as line, colour, light, space, scale and texture are functionally ‘performative’ ingredients in picture-narration. In the interactive media arts these elements can be reconfigured in real-time thereby amplifying potential modes of visualisation, illustration and simulation. Each style of representation carries within its aesthetic domain a distinctive yet culturally grounded set of values. Empirically situated in a network of discovery, scientific images and their related research data, are currently being integrated into an aesthetic realm. A basic reading of scientific images in their historical contexts renders it evident that these visual tropes are products of scripted visual communication systems and networks of fluctuating and competing discourses. These visual knowledge-producing vehicles emerge out of an amalgam of semiotic, technological and stylistic variations nuanced by their co-evolving actuality. Highly sophisticated visualisation tools and techniques have become an integral part of the early twenty-first century scientific laboratories and their cultural milieu. State-ofthe-art images are created through the use of Photoshop filters, multidirectional lighting effects, re-calibrated colour contrasting and post-production editing. Perhaps more than any other contemporary technical device, digital images have become a lingua franca of communicating systems, and these extend to digital mammograms and in-utero foetal sonograms. Added to this mix of technological developments around imaging is the connective transport provided via the World Wide Web, through which images traverse silicon networks at astonishing speed, thus affecting our consciousness and ethical bearing. In the early twenty-first century, scientific images, like popular culture icons, are increasingly entering the public realm. This migratory manifestation of the visual has, for scholar W.J.T. Mitchell, created a ‘social field’ of images, which underscores the ‘pictorial turn across disciplines’ (Mitchell 2005: 76-89). As artists engage with scientific iconography within their aesthetic practices, scientists employ visual images to illustrate material processes and to improve evidential comprehension. While visual art’s expressive modes often rely on historically deterministic visual connections, picturing in scientific practice is more explicitly causal or mechanistically bounded. In short, coded images, in full-colour regalia, have become part of new media installations, art and fashion magazines, Hollywood films and special effects, as well as extensively servicing the corporate culture of contemporary science and the laboratory sciences themselves. Developments in ‘picture science’ are also attracting scholars to cross-disciplinary intersections. For example, the interdisciplinary research group investigating The World as Image at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities studies ‘visual representations of world concepts and the analysis of scientific representations and models’ (see www/bbaw.de). Images, within this context are looked at as vehicles of historically produced world views encompassing variegated disciplines such as: art history, social history, astronomy, cartography, philosophy, et al. The scholars in this group examine the limitations and functions of visual artefacts in terms of what they both express and deny about a given culture. For example, in the seventeenth century, a revision of the number of continents required that a world map be reconfigured to account for the European ‘discovery’ of additional land mass. This change in the number of landmasses had deep religious consequences since it posed the necessity for a reinterpretation of the relationship of ‘kings’ to ‘continents’. What this kind of research tells us is that, within symbolic world making, there are contingent psychological, philosophical and even cosmological assumptions requiring articulation.1
Most things are driven by money. A constant and recurring theme in hospitals is how the monies for medical equipment maintenance should be budgeted and managed. There are two main schools of thought. Distributed model: All charges are paid by the department that uses the services. This means that surgery would budget and pay for all surgery expenses, parts, and contracts. Centralized model: All costs are centralized into a single medical equipment maintenance budget, controlled by biomedical engineering. This budget includes all in-house costs, external costs, contracts, and all overhead for biomedical engineering department operations. In the decentralized model, finance allocates all expenses as closely as possible to the departments that generate the revenue. However, in order for product managers to set rates and manage expenses, they need to have ALL of the expense data to analyze. Missing such a large part like equipment maintenance costs would skew the break-even point and lead to incorrect pricing. The benefits to the centralized system include: 1. The biomedical manager or director is a service management professional. His or her job, training, and professional life have been spent in the maintenance, repair, and support of patient care equipment. Who in the hospital can better oversee contracts, parts, and outside maintenance? A surgery manager whose main focus is patient care, not equipment costs and performance, is not the optimal person to manage equipment costs. 2. A central budget allows decisions to be made across departmental lines. The same type of equipment is owned and used by many different departments in the hospital. The decisions and choices made by a single department are often different than if the entire facility is considered. 3. Outside vendors will always be used to some extent. These vendors must be monitored and their work added to the comprehensive medical device record. Compliance and cooperation from the outside vendors cannot be attained except by the person responsible for paying for the service. 4. Unless the funds are in the biomedical department budget, they will not be closely watched and scrutinized. Clinical department managers do not focus on maintenance activities. But a biomedical manager who must meet budget and explain variances can more effectively manage a single cost center than try to manage the costs of 30 or 40 subaccounts scattered across the institution. 5. If hospitals are ever to consider less costly (and often more effective) service options than the original equipment manufacturer, the control and oversight must be given to the biomedical department. 6. As required by the Joint Commission, every biomedical department maintains a complete and upto-date medical equipment inventory. The software that keeps this inventory generally has the ability to track costs of every medical device and generate reports of labor and parts costs. These reports can be as granular as necessary, all the way to the device level, or summarized for each department. These reports can be the charge-back mechanism product line managers need to identify and manage their department costs. If a hospital is going to employ a professional manager of medical equipment service, that hospital must not tie his or her hands by removing the most powerful tool available—the money to negotiate and control costs and activities of outside companies and vendors. A centralized medical equipment maintenance budget in the hand of a professional biomedical manager is the best and cheapest way to care for your equipment. n
There are three reasons why land policies in Africa are attracting greater amounts of attention. First, it is recognized that enhancing smallholder productivity is critical for sustainable and broad-based growth as well as poverty reduction (World Bank 2007). However, land-related investment, technology adoption, establishment of processing, markets, and value chains, all are unlikely to come about unless land tenure is secure. Moreover, increased productivity will be capitalized in land values and unless explicit attention is devoted to traditional land rights and land access by weaker groups, in particular women, interventions aiming to increase agricultural productivity may have negative social consequences. This is particularly relevant in contexts where current interpretations of customary systems define women's rights only through their relationship with men and women are often unable to inherit land which is considered the property of their husband's lineage. Negative implications for productivity can be severe, in particular if, as almost everywhere, women make a major contribution to agricultural production and its management.Second, demand for land, and in many cases land prices, have vastly increased with population growth, urbanization, and overall economic development. While higher land values makes land registration more rewarding, leaving land rights undefined increases the risk of having them appropriated by outsiders in a way that may neither be consistent with principles of equity nor conducive to the most productive use of this resource.Third, in a decentralized setting, land administration can not only help provide public goods and improve government finance but also that are rural areas will not develop based on agriculture alone. Nonagricultural development will imply migration of households out of agriculture that requires secure land rights so as to allow transfer of land rights, either through rental on a temporary basis or through sale, to others who are able to make more effective use of it without the fear of losing it. In many cases, this is now complemented by demand for land by investors who want to use it for food production, bio-fuels, or in anticipation of carbon payments has increased significantly in the wake of recent commodity price booms. It has highlighted that, without clear processes to process requests or assign of land rights, land acquisition by outsiders may end up fostering corruption and leading to inequality and dispossession of traditional land users rather than as a positive force for growth.This paper examines the theories identifying channels through which land rights can affect socioeconomic outcomes, points to realities which often prevent such effects from materializing, summarizes quantitative evidence on the actual impact of land registration interventions to assess the validity of theoretical arguments, and derives conclusions that can help guide applied work in this area. An example from Ethiopia is used to illustrate the potentially far-reaching impacts of ‘new' models of formalizing land rights and a number of policy conclusions are drawn.
BACKGROUND: Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among teenagers. In 2007, 48 youth between the ages of 15 years and 19 years died in traffic crashes and almost 4,780 were injured in Minnesota. Of those killed, only 42.8% of teens were wearing their seat belt. The Drive Smart Challenge is a 4-week peer lead safety campaign with the goal to increase safe driving habits for high school age students. METHODS: The 4-week challenge begins with a seat belt check of teen drivers and their front seat passengers at the school's parking lot. Each school's student-leadership group then selected and implemented at least eight Smart Driving interventions from a manual they are provided. A post seat belt check is conducted at the conclusion of the challenge. RESULTS: In 2008, 11 schools agreed to participate in the challenge. More than 21,000 students were exposed to the safe driving messages through public address announcements, posters, mock car crashes, mothers against drunk driving car demonstrations, parent contracts, guest speakers, student developed videos, and web sites. In the end, all the schools documented an increase in seat belt use. The most improved school documented a 15% increase. CONCLUSION: The Drive Smart Challenge is an effective way to get teens involved in a safe driving campaign. Further studies should be done to determine how often teen drivers and their passengers need to be exposed to the messages of the Drive Smart Challenge in order for optimal effectiveness in behavior and attitude change.
Some health systems faced difficulties to ensuring equity and efficiency in resource allocation have generated processes reforms including decentralization policies. Argentina implemented: Decentralization of Public Hospitals, Strategy Primary Health Care, Plan Remediar and Provincial Health Insurance. The aim of this work is to analyze the decentralization policies since the economic and administrative approaches. The methodology included: a review of the conceptual framework of decentralization, historical analysis of decentralization in Argentina, description and conceptual analysis of public policies implemented in the ‘90s. In all cases involve policies transfer of administrative responsibilities to subnational levels with the incorporation of the processes, delegation and devolution. From the economic standpoint, the measures prioritized regional demands satisfaction, through the transfer of responsibilities for provision, financing and assurance of some goods and services.
The WS-BPEL specification focuses on business processes the activities of which are assumed to be interactions with Web services. However, WS-BPEL processes go beyond the orchestration of activities exposed as Web services. There are cases in which people must be considered as additional participants to the execution of a process. The inclusion of humans, in turn, requires solutions to support the specification and enforcement of authorizations to users for the execution of human activities while enforcing authorization constraints. In this paper, we extend RBAC-WS-BPEL, a role-based authorization framework for WS-BPEL processes with an identity attribute-based role provisioning approach that preserves the privacy of the users who claim the execution of human activities. Such approach is based on the notion of identity records and role provisioning policies, and uses Pedersen commitments, aggregated zero knowledge proof of knowledge, and Oblivious Commitment-Based Envelope protocols to achieve privacy of user identity information.
Abstract Globally, post-Alma Ata health care system reforms have included reorganization of government health agencies, establishment of rationalized, evidence-based systems of care, implementation of user charges for public services, and experiments with third party financing. Drawing on materials collected in the context of long-term ethnographic research in Mongolia, this chapter reveals that there is a mismatch between the economic rationality that underlies current health reform programs and the realities of the lived experiences of illness in poor communities. Coupled with decentralization and poor regulatory oversight, current health reform efforts can result in fragmentation of the health system, increasing opportunity costs for health care seeking by poor households, reduced access to essential drugs, and an overall increased risk for health-cost related impoverishment. The chapter concludes by arguing that ethnographic information on health care seeking in poor communities can inform health reform efforts through explaining how features of health reform produce health inequities.