Abstract. This paper presents a non-interactive verifiable secret sharing scheme (VSS) tolerating a dishonest majority based on data predistributed by a trusted authority. As an application of this VSS scheme we present very efficient unconditionally secure multiparty protocols based on pre-distributed data which generalize two-party computations based on linear pre-distributed bit commitments. The main results of this paper are a non-interactive VSS where the amount of data which needs to be pre-distributed to each player depends on the number of tolerable cheaters only, a simplified multiplication protocol for shared values based on pre-distributed random products, and non-interactive zero knowledge proofs for arbitrary polynomial relations. The security of the schemes are proved using the UC framework.
Combining the identification characteristics of zero-knowledge proof and blind watermark, an identity verification protocol is proposed. In this protocol, the public key encryption is used to encrypt the watermark and the watermarked data of the watermark embedding locations, and the verification of user's identity watermarking is achieved through estimating the relativity of them. Furthermore, a way which restricts the prover and verifierpsilas communication to a closed situation is put forward, and this way can resist such as brute force cheat-attack.
Cryptography and Data Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Financial globalization is an inherent feature of today’s economies. But the positive impact of financial globalization has been limited and some puzzling evidence has been found recently. To explain these puzzles, Stulz argued that finance is critically affected by Twin Agency Problems: firstly, the controlling shareholders can use their power for their own benefit but at the expense of outside investors. Secondly, the state rulers can use their power to improve their own welfare at the expense of all shareholders. When these agency problems worsen, diffuse ownership is inefficient and ownership concentration is the best choice. Ownership concentration inversely limits a country’s ability to benefit from financial globalization. On the basis of Stulz’s theory and remaining the central role of the Twin Agency Problems in fostering ownership concentration, this study relaxes some simplified assumptions in Stulz’s model and develops a more practical one. According to this developed model, the following solutions from the theoretical research are suggested for the government to solve the agency problems: improving the legal sense through education; increasing the expected profitability with active economic policies; strengthening the constraint on the expropriators through laws and regulations; implementing the above three strategies together; lastly, improving the investor protection during the development of financial market. This paper also makes an empirical investigation in China. On the basis of the data from 1481 Chinese companies listed in Shanghai, Shenzhen or New York, it is found that more than 70 % of the companies are ownership concentrated. More than halve of them are controlled by the state and nearly 20% are controlled by families. The average degree of ownership concentration in China is more than 30%, which is higher than most other Asian countries. It was argued that listing abroad can decrease the ownership concentration, but the evidence in China shows that the companies listed abroad are more concentrated than those listed only inland. The investigation of the profitability reveals that the companies listed abroad are not more profitable than those listed inland, but the difference of the profitability between these companies is much less, which means the companies listed abroad are more reliable as a whole, because bad companies are strictly forbidden to step into the market. The investigation of the relationship between capital scale and ownership concentration shows that the companies with greater capital scale are more concentrated and most of the giant companies are controlled by the government. Because in a country without advanced financial market the capital can be collected from the public is limited and the huge companies could only be financed by the state. The smaller companies are easier to become ownership dispersed. The research of the relationship between ownership concentration and profitability reveals that family held companies are more profitable than state held ones; the widely held companies have the lowest profitability. Although most of the dispersed companies have a poor performance, some of them are really good. The research of the ownership structures finds out that the companies with indirect dispersed structure or foundation held structure are more profitable and the deviation of profitability of these companies is much less than the pyramid structure. Another discovery is that most of the companies with indirect dispersed structure are held by hundreds of or even more than thousand of the employees of the listed company. The reasons why these companies are more profitable are the lower separation of voting rights from cash flow right and the more ownership encouragement. In the employee held companies, the ownership is dispersed to all the managers and almost all employees, and all of them are encouraged to do well and to act as monitors for each other. So, it is difficult for the top managers to steal from the company. Through all these empirical research the following suggestions to resolve the twin agency problems are obtained: not relying on foreign financial market but concentrating on the advancement of legal sense, laws and regulations inland; strictly examining the companies which apply to be listed on the exchange and prevent the bad companies from going into the market; beginning the decentralization of ownership with relative smaller companies; transforming the state holding company into employee holding dispersed company; eliminating or decreasing the separation of voting rights from cash flow rights; encouraging and supervising the managers by given more managers stocks or shares of the company.
The paper puts forward the theory of fiscal decentralization and the superiority of the basic point of view by illustrating the theoretical development of the financial decentralization of the sort sequence. China's financial system is at a critical stage of reform and development. Between central and local governments into financial terms and the exercise of reasonable design of the system still exist,issues such as lack of incentive mechanism. The West by studying the theory of fiscal decentralization at all levels of government will help improve the financial efficiency and effectiveness of behavior,and promote national economic and social development.
Debt financing is an important aspect of capital structure.The paper studies how China's reform of decentralization and government intervention affect the debt financing of state-owned enterprises through the method of combining normative research and empirical research with the help of China's listed company data.The empirical results show that the reform of decentralization at the provincial level is positively related to bank credit and government has more effect on bank credit.On the base the difference of the debt financing,additional evidence finds that when the reform of decentralization is at the provincial level,government has more effect on long-term loans than short-term loans.The results show that reform of decentralization affects the debt financing of State-Owned Enterprise,and the local government has strong incentives and power to compel commercial banks to provide state-owned enterprises with favorable bank credit.
Traditionally, the definition of zero-knowledge states that an interactive proof of x ∈ L provides zero (additional) knowledge if the view of any polynomial-time verifier can be reconstructed by a polynomial-time simulator. Since this definition only requires that the worst-case running-time of the verifier and simulator are polynomials, zero-knowledge becomes a worst-case notion. In STOC’06, Micali and Pass proposed a new notion of precise zero-knowledge, which captures the idea that the view of any verifier in every interaction can be reconstructed in (almost) the same time (i.e., the view can be “indistinguishably reconstructed”). This is the strongest notion among the known works towards precislization of the definition of zero-knowledge. However, as we know, there are two kinds of computational resources (i.e. time and space) that every algorithm consumes in computation. Although the view of a verifier in the interaction of a precise zero-knowledge protocol can be reconstructed in almost the same time, the simulator may run in very large space while at the same time the verifier only runs in very small space. In this case it is still doubtful to take indifference for the verifier to take part in the interaction or
The work paper highlights the evolution of the public financial decentralization in Romania, based on analysis of legislative changes that occurred after 1991.These changes have had an important impact on local budgets and on local government responsibilities. In the context of increasing local financial independence, local authorities had to demonstrate their ability to take on the tasks of local interest from central government powers. The effect is prompt and timely response to citizen needs.
The right to participation is the "the right of rights"--the basic right of people to have a say in how decisions that affect their lives are made. All legally binding international human rights treaties explicitly recognize the essential role of participation in realizing fundamental human rights. While the substance of the human right to health has been extensively developed, the right to participation as one of its components has remained largely unexplored. Should rights-based health advocacy focus on participation because there is a relationship between an individual's or a community's active involvement in health care decision-making and the highest attainable standard of health? In the context of the human right to health, does participation mean primarily political participation, or should we take the right to participation to mean more specifically the right of persons, individually and as a group, to shape health care policy for society and for themselves as patients? Decentralization of health care decision-making promises greater participation through citizen involvement in setting priorities, monitoring service provision, and finding new and creative ways to finance public health programs. Between 1999 and 2008, Indonesia decentralized health care funding and delivery to regional governments, resulting in substantial exclusion of its poor and uneducated citizens from the health care system while simultaneously expanding the opportunities for political participation for educated elites. This article explores the tension between the right to participation as an underlying determinant of health and as a political right by reviewing the experience of Indonesia ten years after its decision to decentralize health care provision. It is ultimately argued that rights-based advocates must be vigilant in retaining a unified perspective on human rights, resisting the persistent tendency to separate and prioritize the civil and political aspects of participation over its social component.
University autonomous system guarantee in US is a highly decentralized management system of higher education. The principal part in such a system guarantee is made up of the micro management of higher education by government, the internal decision- making ofLegal Person- Board of Directorsin university and the supervision of social intermediary organizations. The management system of higher education in China can be reformed by learning from US experience, reasonable decentralizing, seeking balance of power, improving the president responsibility system under the leadership of the Party Committee, abolishing the executive levels and perfecting the accreditation body of China's higher education.
Based on the analysis of several typical zero-knowledge proof authentication protocols,this paper presents an authentication protocol with key-exchange function based on self-certified public key and zero-knowledge proof,which combines Girault's self-certified public key theory and the advantages of ECC.Analysis show that the scheme has higher security.Compared with the congeneric schemes,the proposed scheme is more efficient and has advantages in storage,communication overheads and computation cost.
Multi-prover zero-knowledge proof is an interesting proof in which a few provers synchronously prove validity of a statement to an verifier, however, the verifier will learn nothing beyond the fact that the statement is correct. We call multi-prover zero-knowledge proof as multi-prover zero-knowledge arguments if all provers are probabilistic polynomial-time participants. In this paper, we give the formal definition of multi-prover zero-knowledge argument and construct it based on discrete logarithm problem (DLP).
New Left-Wing Melancholy:Mark Tribe's "The Port Huron Project" and the Politics of Reenactment Paige Sarlin (bio) The journal October sent a questionnaire to artists, critics, and art historians in the summer of 2007. The central question, and the one they reprinted on the cover of the issue that contained all the responses, was: "In what ways have artists, academics, and cultural institutions responded to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq?" The questionnaire and the published responses served as an answer to the lack of attention to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that had marked the journal during the previous three years.1 A journal other than October might never have felt the need to address contemporary political conditions. But this journal had been founded with a strident statement of purpose. In 1978, the editors claimed the cultural arena as a site for political action, one in which philosophical and aesthetic questions were not pre-given but rather crucially important, with potential political consequences. Seen in that light, their gesture to justify and remedy an absence of cultural attention to the Iraq War simultaneously appears particularly significant. In one part of the questionnaire, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, the author, asked if the absence of the draft explained the difference between the character of the protests against the war in Vietnam and the protests against the war in Iraq.2 This question invoked a range of criticisms within the responses (including a criticism from me, as a member of the group 16Beaver).3 And so in the introduction to the special issue, Buchloh and coeditor Rachel Churner devoted a small section to defending themselves from the various objections and qualifications that were raised about their use of the comparison with Vietnam. They argued that the analogy that they drew upon was intended to "encourage action" through raising a generational question: What is it that we are doing that is different and how can the awareness of this difference be productive?4 Mark Tribe's "The Port Huron Project" was cited in a [End Page 139] footnote in this section, serving as an example of "how protest informs intellectual history and how significantly we have internalized the intellectual paradigms from that generation."5 Tribe's project both served as proof of the influence of historic protests on cultural producers and simultaneously validated Buchloh and Churner's use of the historical comparison in their questionnaire and analysis of the responses to the war in Iraq (figured as the "absence" of a mass movement). But what, one might ask, is the relation of "The Port Huron Project" to the history that it reenacts? And, more significant, what is at stake in the comparison of the contemporary response to the war and the left-wing political activity of the late 1960s that October and various other cultural institutions have invoked and explored over the last year, which was the fortieth anniversary of 1968? Tribe's project gives a blank form to the differences and the similarities between then and now, assuming a form of resonance and significance that the project then re-produces and amplifies. Without questioning the utility of the comparison, Tribe's project works to elaborate itself not in relation to the specificity of the past or the present, but somewhere in between, in relation to this structure of analogy. In this way, the project shares with October's questionnaire and special issue a lack of clarity about the specific ideological and political character of the social movements of the 1960s (and the American left more broadly). "The Port Huron Project" gestures toward a general sense of the politically radical character of the historical period that accompanied the escalation of the American war in Vietnam and the marked increase in the level of class and social justice struggles in the United States and on a global scale. This use of analogy trades on the association with this "radical" history, but it sidesteps the myriad of difficult questions that generic references to protest, the New Left, or social movements of the 1960s could raise with respect to the contemporary antiwar movement. October's questionnaire comes tantalizingly close to...
Publisher Summary
This chapter presents the several case studies related to the burden of proof. The first case deals with “In re Winship.” The requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt has a vital role the criminal procedure for cogent reasons. The accused during a criminal prosecution has at stake interests of immense importance, both because of the possibility that he may lose his liberty upon conviction and because of the certainty that he would be stigmatized by the conviction. The other case presented in the chapter is of Victor versus Nebraska and State versus Eichelberger. The Victor case discusses several aspects of “reasonable doubt”. The Eichelberger versus State (Ohio) case discusses the evidence of an affirmative defense and preponderance of the evidence. The Ohio Code provides that every person accused of an offense is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and the burden of proof for all elements of the offense is upon the prosecution.
As well illustrated by the litigation in Brown v. Board of Education, it is incumbent on the Supreme Court to identify the empirical frame of reference it uses to evaluate the constitutionality of some challenged action. In Brown, this required the Court to determine whether the proper frame of reference through which to measure constitutionality were the general effects of segregation, or whether constitutionality had to be assessed based on segregation's effects on the children involved in the specific cases before the Court. The Court chose the general frame, thus invalidating school segregation generally. This framing problem occurs throughout constitutional law, though the Court has given it little attention. Indeed, in the one context in which the Court has considered the matter, it has largely misunderstood what was at stake.\nSpecifically, the Court has signaled that it considers facial challenges to be highly unusual and suspect and that the more appropriate form of constitutional litigation is through as-applied challenges. Thus, the Court has sometimes stated a presumption in favor of individual adjudication, rather than the at-large form that occurred in Brown. Inherent in this approach is the Court's apparent belief that the constitutional issues presented in facial challenges are the same as those presented in as-applied challenges, just many times more numerous. But this is demonstrably not so, since the form of proof differs fundamentally in the two. The form of proof inevitably affects the substantive outcomes in constitutional cases. This Article argues that the decision regarding what empirical frame of reference to be used in constitutional cases should be an explicit component of constitutional interpretation. It describes the factors that should be considered in making that determination.
Table 1 shows the key country’s health related demographic and socio-economic indicators. Ethiopia is a democracy with a federal system of government comprising 9 regions and two administrative councils. These are further subdivided into 62 zones and 523 districts or woredas (in Amharic). In the mid 1990s, the Ethiopia People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) took power promising a democratic environment. In 1993 the government published the country’s first health policy in 50 years setting the vision for the healthcare sector development for the next two decades. The policy tried to reorganize the health services delivery system with the objective of contributing positively to the overall socio-economic development effort of the country. Major aspects of this policy focus on fiscal and political decentralization, expanding the primary health care system, and encouraging partnerships and the participation of nongovernmental actors. To implement the policy, the Health Sector Development Program (HSDP) was developed in 1997/98, and a healthcare and financing strategy in 1998. The program under HSDP-I covered the first five years (1997/98–2001/02) and prioritized disease prevention and decentralizing health services delivery. The targets set in HSDP-I were not met and a new strategy, HSDP-II (2002/03– 2004/05), was developed with an added aim of including NGOs in the implementation of a basic health package. In pursuant of the health policy goals of improving the health status of the Ethiopian population using the cycle of the fiveyear term health strategy framework, HSDP-III was developed in 2005 to run through 2005/06– 2009/10. This latest strategy stresses the need
The term Autonomic Communication (AC) refers to self-managing systems which are capable of supporting self-configuration, self-healing and self-optimization. However, information reflection and collection, lack of centralized control, non-cooperation and so on are just some of the challenges within AC systems. Since many self-* properties (e.g. selfconfiguration, self-optimization, self-healing, and self-protecting) are achieved by a group of autonomous entities that coordinate in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion, it has opened the door to migrating research techniques from P2P systems. P2P’s meaning can be better understood with a set of key characteristics similar to AC: Decentralized organization, Self-organizing nature (i.e. adaptability), Resource sharing and aggregation, and Fault-tolerance. However, not all P2P systems are compatible with AC. Unstructured systems are designed more specifically than structured systems for the heterogeneous Internet environment, where the nodes’ persistence and availability are not guaranteed. Motivated by the challenges in AC and based on comprehensive analysis of popular P2P applications, three correlative standards for evaluating the compatibility of a P2P system with AC are presented in this chapter. According to these standards, a novel Efficient, Scalable and Robust (ESR) P2P overlay is proposed. Differing from current structured and unstructured, or meshed and tree-like P2P overlay, the ESR is a whole new three dimensional structure to improve the efficiency of routing, while information exchanges take in immediate neighbors with local information to make the system scalable and fault-tolerant. Furthermore, rather than a complex game theory or incentive mechanism, asimple but effective punish mechanism has been presented based on a new ID structure which can guarantee the continuity of each node’s record in order to discourage negative behavior on an autonomous environment as AC.
This article proposes a secondary analysis of data collected on four French cities as part of an European research project, entitled "Rescaling Social Welfare Policies. A Comparative Study on the Path towards Multi-level Governance in Europe". The field-work provided a profusion of data on the so-called "2nd wave of decentralization" (2004-2005) that hardly fit into the standardized frame designed for international comparisons. It appears that this territorial re-organization combines opposite movements depending on the point of view adopted (bottom-up or top-down) and the type of public action considered (planning, funding, defining eligibility criteria etc.). The rescaling processes that occurred within the four field-sites have ambiguous effects as regards regulation. On the one hand, theoretically speaking, they turn market competition into an attractive model. But, on the other hand, they have practical implications (limited market size and lack of expertise within local governments for example) which prevent this autonomous mechanism of regulation from achieving efficiency. This finally induces constant bargaining which leads case managers to using informal procedures in the selection of beneficiaries within the official target population and give rise to disparities in access to welfare programs across the four field-sites but also within each site depending on the institutional entry point.
In articles about literacy there obviously seems to be an inclination to focus on contextual information, programs, proposals, methods, contents and participants. However, much less information about the monitoring and evaluation of these projects is published, and this has lasting effects. Scarcely documented, as well, are the strengths and weaknesses of cooperation with the respective national services for literacy and non-formal education and their national or local agencies. The consequences of decentralization are rarely brought up for discussion. This article considers the 'literate environment' and looks at literacy and sustainability, and decentralisation and financing.
Present-day governments are experiencing a shift towards supplying demand-driven and personalized electronic services. This often requires that government organizations collaborate with each other and their services and processes need to be integrated to act in a coherent manner. In this paper, we take the diversity of government agencies as a starting point and focus on the development of a shared ontology to enable interoperability among heterogeneous business process and services of public agencies. This framework contributes to understanding the key concepts and relations that form the basis for coordinating the activities necessary for integrated public service delivery. The ontology is aimed at capturing the main elements to enable communication among and integration of the activities of decentralized and autonomous agencies. The ontology has been interactively developed by studying organizational processes, by conducting interviews and literature study. The proposed ontology can provide a foundation for an architecture blueprint that can enable demand-driven integrated service delivery in practice without having to pose detailed requirements on organizations. As autonomy is fostered, this research can potentially enable the integration of private organizations.