A family of core extensions for cooperative TU-games is introduced. These solution concepts are non-empty when applied to non-balanced games yet coincide with the core whenever the core is non-empty. The extensions suggest how an exogenous regulator can sustain a stable and efficient outcome, financing a subsidy via individual taxes. Economic and geometric properties of the solution concepts are studied. When taxes are proportional, the proportional prenucleolus is proposed as a single-valued selection device. An application of these concepts to the decentralization of a public goods economy is discussed.
The quasi-autonomous governmental organization (quago), for which an international definition is difficult to find, is an ubiquitous feature of modem public governance on the national and local levels. This paper, first, examines in general how the number of quagos has increased and what the main reasons are for the expansion. Second, it looks at why the number of quagos increased after Korea implemented the local autonomy system in 1995, when the central government's authority Was delegated to the local governments through political and administrative decentralization. Third, this paper discusses the socio-economic accountability behind the rapid growth of local quagos. It examines problems and solutions regarding administration and monitoring of quagos compatible with optimal control. The recommendations of this paper focus on under what conditions the local quagos perform best.
Martin Hoffmann, Michael Wittke, Jƶrg HƤhner, Christian MĆ¼ller-Schloer
We propose a decentralized, self-organizing system architecture for wireless networked smart cameras (SCs) with pan, tilt, and zoom abilities. Each SC communicates with its neighbors and independently calculates the optimal position for its field of view. Thereby, SCs autonomously organize themselves and spatially partition the area they observe. This is achieved by a decentralized algorithm that makes way for self-organization in SC systems. The system quickly adapts to new situations caused by joining and failing nodes. Simulations with hundreds of cameras show that scalability and reliability are achieved. We analyze the performance of different camera densities and show that optimal surveillance coverage is achieved in a short time (20 s) while maintaining low communication traffic using a simulated 350-node outdoor SC system.
This book analyzes political decentralization and fiscal federalism in Canada and Germany, both traditional federal countries, and in Spain, a unitarian country engaged in the last two decades in a process of decentralization. Three key issues required for a well designed financing system are analyzed in depth, namely: tax assignment, equalization grants ā i.e. redistribution of money from the wealthy regions or the national government to poorer regions, and the role of local governments in the administration of taxes.
This book analyzes political decentralization and fiscal federalism in Canada and Germany, both traditional federal countries, and in Spain, a unitarian country engaged in the last two decades in a process of decentralization. Three key issues required for a well designed financing system are analyzed in depth, namely: tax assignment, equalization grants ā i.e. redistribution of money from the wealthy regions or the national government to poorer regions, and the role of local governments in the administration of taxes.
This book analyzes political decentralization and fiscal federalism in Canada and Germany, both traditional federal countries, and in Spain, a unitarian country engaged in the last two decades in a process of decentralization. Three key issues required for a well designed financing system are analyzed in depth, namely: tax assignment, equalization grants ā i.e. redistribution of money from the wealthy regions or the national government to poorer regions, and the role of local governments in the administration of taxes.
This chapter discusses the emergence of underground movements and groups in the ghettos. Within weeks of the establishment of the Minsk ghetto, secret groups were formed in the ghetto, consisting mostly of Communists and some non-Communists whom they trusted. While many Communists and Komsomol members never participated in the underground in hopes of surviving the war without coming to the attention of the Germans, by August and September 1941, there were four secret groups in the ghetto. These groups eventually became aware of the existence of other underground groups and established contact with each other. During the same period, a similar process was taking place outside the ghetto. And through the fall of 1941, people hoping to engage in resistance began to reach out to like-minded people within the ghetto, within the Russian district, between the two areas, and between each of these areas and forests around Minsk, where partisans were forming. Sometime in October 1941, a Minsk-wide underground organization was established. After this citywide underground was formed, the formerly autonomous secret groups outside and inside the ghettos became part of the defined hierarchical structure. However, at the same time the Minsk underground retained much of its earlier spontaneous and decentralized character. The members of the secret groups who took the opportunities for sabotage, circulating propaganda, and saving the lives of Jews in the ghettos, initiated many of the projects that were sponsored and promoted by the underground leadership. These efforts involved underground members of various groups as well as non-members such as Byelorussians. This support and direction that the underground leadership provided made underground activity more extensive and effective. However, due to the quick growth of the underground group into a mass movement it became vulnerable to German attention and arrests. These arrests severely affected the Russian district but not the ghetto movement due to their rules of conspiracy. In the wake of the large-scale arrests of leading activists, the rank-and-file underground members played a crucial role in sustaining underground activity outside the ghettos and in maintaining connections between the ghetto and the Russian district.
In 1936, 200 of the world's top medical scientists met in Brussels to address an emerging epidemic. Since the turn of the century, cancer had been steadily growing as a major cause of death. Naturally, researchers looked first to environmental factors, particularly agents of the Industrial Age, such as asbestos, road tar, ionizing radiation, and synthetic dyes. Since then, however, attention has been diverted away from such important environmental causes of cancer, especially where economic interests are at stake, according to Dr. Devra Davis in The Secret History of the War on Cancer (1). This expansive, ambitious book spans nearly a century and dozens of controversies, anecdotes, and personal stories. Davis devotes a chapter to describing the growth of the eugenics movement and Nazi medicine. Another chapter details the evolution of the nation's leading voluntary anticancer organization, from the grassroots anticancer advocacy of the American Society for the Control of Cancer's Women's Field Army to the corporate Lasker-era American Cancer Society. She describes how professional turf battles delayed the introduction of the Papanicolaou smear for over a decade. In subsequent chapters, she warns of the possible hazards to physician-researchers in working with novel compounds, the overselling of routine mammography, the role of paid experts in environmental tort litigation, the politics of establishing regulatory standards for environmental and occupational exposures, and the potential as-yet-unproven hazards of cell phones. A key theme running throughout the book is how financial interests, professional allegiances, and political ideology can manipulate the scientific process. Archives and court documents reveal how well-meaning scientists have at times become complicit in defending industrial interests at the expense of public health. There is no āsecret historyā here, however, as these histories are largely drawn from the work of other scholars. One exception is Davis's own study of the papers of Robert Kehoe, a key figure in the development of the occupational health field who conducted a wide range of toxicology research under contract for various industries. These documents provide a unique case study of how one academic laboratory functioned and interacted with its industry sponsors, and one wishes they were more fully explored here. Unsurprisingly, tobacco figures big in Davis's story. She touts German physician Franz H. MĆ¼ller's 1939 case-control study of lung cancer and smoking (previously described in Robert Proctor's The Nazi War on Cancer (2)) as āthe first irrefutable modern proof that smoking causes lung cancer in humansā (1, p. 61). This work was largely ignored by American and British researchers conducting their own case-control studies 10 years later. Davis faults these latecomers with failing to immediately denounce cigarettes, whereas MĆ¼ller had definitively declared tobacco to be āthe single most important cause of the rising incidence of lung cancerā (1, p. 53). Davis's argument here and repeated throughout the book is that, when the bar for medical proof is set too high, life-saving public health action is delayed. By the time of the 1964 Surgeon General's report (3), an unprecedented wealth of evidence had been amassed, including seven cohort studies and over 30 case-control studies implicating cigarettes as a cause of cancer. However, public health interventions often have to be taken on lesser evidence. Davis criticizes reliance on epidemiology as the āgold standard,ā demanding an alternative to āwaiting for enough bodies to drop or sicken before we decide we've got a problemā (1, pp. 399ā400). Yet how much and what kind of evidence should be required to act? Unfortunately, Davis stops short of proposing any concrete answers to this question. There are a number of factual and historical errors in the book that detract from its force. For example, Davis devotes a page to describing Clarence C. Little's tenure as āthe first Director of the fledgling National Cancer Instituteā (1, pp. 120ā121). In fact, he never held this post, although he did serve as one of six original members of the National Advisory Cancer Council. She claims that the Council for Tobacco Research gave money ādirectlyā to Wilhelm Hueper and Tom Mancuso to study the environmental and occupational causes of cancer. However, the document she cites for this makes it clear that funds were given to Mancuso but not to Hueper (1, p. 153). She has both R. A. Fisher and Nathan Mantel working ādirectlyā for the tobacco industry in 1967; this is unlikely as Fisher died in 1962 and Mantel was still at the National Cancer Institute (1, p. 189). Davis is at her strongest when telling her own story. She provides engaging, first-hand accounts of her early career in the 1980s as a junior epidemiologist tackling big issues, such as assessing the disease burden for victims of exposure to hazardous wastes and studying whether cancer rates were increasing. Davis began working on the latter question under the guidance of Abe Lilienfeld at The John Hopkins University. She found that the incidence of multiple myeloma and brain cancer in men over 45 years of age had grown by more than a third in less than two decades, and a resulting paper in the Lancet (4) drew major headlines. Davis describes an encounter with Richard Doll, in which he told her that she had made a ācolossal errorā and that her findings would be explained by improved diagnosis and record keeping for these particular cancers (1, p. 257). She held to her story and gathered the evidence to prove Doll's hypothesis wrong. She also incorporates personal stories and encounters with cancer, including her own brush with a suspicious mammography reading, her family's exposure to the legacy of environmental pollution in Pennsylvania, and the experiences of friends and colleagues facing difficult decisions and questions about treatment options. Throughout, she also raises questions about what might have been done differently to prevent these cancers. In the end, however, the book is frustrating for its lack of explicit conclusions or recommendations about how things should be done differently. After 480 pages describing many twists and turns in the politics of cancer research, there are no substantive conclusions to tie it all together. Davis offers broad statementsāāwe need to open a new frontā in the war against cancer (1, p. xviii)ābut she fails to offer concrete proposals. In the book's closing pages, she briefly suggests the need for an independent commission for the assessment of toxic hazards and medical monitoring programs for exposed populations, but these suggestions are not developed. āI am not smart enough,ā she claims, āto know what kind of system will best identify and address the preventable causes of cancer in our environmentā (1, p. 430). On this point, she is clearly wrong. As her own autobiographic accounts illustrate, there are few people privileged with the range of scientific and real-world policy experience Davis has to be in a better position to offer some potential solutions. Indeed, this is what makes her failure to do so, so disappointing. Conflict of interest: none declared.
ęåŗäŗäøē§ä»3č½®å ¬å¼ę·åøēåƹ任ä½NPčÆčØēčÆå®éŖčÆč é¶ē„čÆčÆęē³»ē»å°ēŗÆå ¬é„ęØ”åäø4č½®(č½®ęä¼)åƹåäøčÆčØēå ·ę并ååēę§ē并åé¶ē„čÆčÆęē³»ē».čÆ„č½¬åę¹ę³ęå¦äøä¼ē¹:1) å®åŖå¼čµ·O(1)(åøøę°äøŖ)é¢å¤ēęØ”ęę°čæē®,ēøęÆDi CrescenzoēäŗŗåØICALP 05äøęåŗēéč¦((n)äøŖé¢å¤ēęØ”ęę°čæē®ēč½¬åę¹ę³,čÆ„ē³»ē»åØęēäøęēę¬č“Øäøēęé«,čęéēå°é¾ę§åč®¾äøå;2) åØē¦»ę£åƹę°åč®¾äø,čÆ„č½¬åę¹ę³äŗ§ēäøäøŖå®ē¾é¶ē„čÆčÆęē³»ē».ę³Øęå°Di Crescenzoēäŗŗęåŗēē³»ē»åŖå ·ęč®”ē®é¶ē„čÆę§č“Ø.čÆ„č½¬åę¹ę³ä¾čµäŗäøäøŖē¹ę®ēåƹęæčÆŗäøēē¦»ę£åƹę°ē3č½®čÆå®éŖčÆč é¶ē„čÆēčÆęē³»ē».ęé äŗäø¤äøŖåŗäŗäøåęæčÆŗę¹ę”ēåŖéč¦åøøę°äøŖęØ”ęę°čæē®ēē³»ē»,čæē§ē³»ē»åÆč½ęēē¬ē«ä»·å¼.;This paper shows how to efficiently transform any 3-round public-coin honest verifier zero knowledge argument system for any language in NP into a 4 round (round-optimal) concurrent zero knowledge argument for the same language in the bare public-key model. The transformation has the following properties: 1) incurs only O(1) (small constant, about 20) additional modular exponentiations. Compared to the concurrent zero knowledge protocol proposed by Di Crescenzo and Visconti in ICALP 2005, in which their transformation requires an overhead of ((n), the protocol is significantly more efficient under the same intractability assumptions; 2) yields a perfect zero knowledge argument under DL assumption. Note that the Di Crescenzo, et al.'s argument system enjoys only computational zero knowledge property. The transformation relies on a specific 3-round honest verifier zero knowledge proof of knowledge for committed discrete log. Such protocols that require only O(1) modular exponentiations based on different kinds of commitment scheme are developed and they may be of independent interest.
Dear Sir, In science, it is not surprising to have exciting claims later refuted by hard evidence ā although it may even be harder to have them corrected in the same journal where they originally appeared (Don't challenge a winning paper: BƤr, 2006). One of the main reasons why false claims could pass through peer reviewing and eventually appear in print is (i) limited knowledge about certain genetic markers in a newly emerging field at the time of submission or (ii) insufficient screening of the published data for comparison and (iii) inadvertent documentation and analysis of the novel data underlying such claims. It may then take some years before the true causes for a particular finding would come to light. This apparently applies to the remarkable claim made by Holyoake et al. (2001) that the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations G9055A and G11719A would compromise the semen quality of those men who possess any of these mutations in their mtDNAs (leading to reduced sperm motility and/or low sperm count). This study won the 2nd Prize of the European Academy of Andrology in 2001 ā a winning paper, thus. The results of this study were aptly challenged by Montiel-Sosa et al. (2002), who (i) pointed to the fact that site 11719 determines a basal European mtDNA haplogroup (nowadays referred to R0), (ii) hinted at the peculiar frequency of the 11719 polymorphism as reported by Holyoake et al. (2001), and (iii) argued that ethnic origins of samples in a mixed population would matter and that 'the control and low sperm motility group could be non-homogenous'. Indeed, no reference to haplogroups, constituting the major branches of the mtDNA phylogeny, was made in the study by Holyoake et al. (2001), although it was submitted at a time (September 2000) where the role of the two particular (G9055A and G11719A) and other mutations was already quite well understood. Holyoake et al. (2002) in their reply to Montiel-Sosa et al. (2002) emphasized that they were only 'interested in single nucleotide substitutions in relationship to poor semen quality'. This popular 'allelic' approach gleaned from the analysis of the nuclear genome, however, is patently unsuitable for a deeply hierarchical genetic system such as mtDNA. First, the allelic view ignores the tight link between different mutations in the mtDNA phylogeny (as between G9055A and G11719A). Clusters of mutations would show up together and could then not serve as independent indicators of a disease phenotype. Second, disregard for the mtDNA phylogeny leaves out the option of phylogenetic proof-reading of obtained mtDNA results in regard to potential errors (Bandelt et al., 2005a). Not unexpectedly, the detailed haplogroup analysis of Pereira et al. (2005) for a large Portuguese sample did not support the notion that men carrying an mtDNA from a specific haplogroup overall had an increased or a reduced risk of infertility. These authors also warned that the observation by Ruiz-Pesini et al. (2000) that 'haplogroups H and K are significantly more abundant in nonasthenozoospermic and asthenozoospermic populations, respectively' may have been caused by population stratification. As long as patients and controls are not controlled for ethnic background, geographical matrilineal ancestry and social stratum (which certainly matters in countries with a considerable record of recent immigration), mere correlation of a mutation/haplogroup with a disease phenotype may be spurious and thus cannot provide sufficient evidence for an association. The complete mtDNA data of Ingman et al. (2000) as well as the RFLP-based analysis of West Eurasian mtDNAs of Macaulay et al. (1999) would have provided the necessary background information for the SSCP analysis aimed at by Holyoake et al. (2001). Curiously, the Ingman et al. (2000) study was referred to in a later article (Gemmell & Sin, 2002) by the same senior author (F. Y. T. Sin), but apparently without reappraising the findings of his former paper. If the data by Ingman et al. (2000) had been inspected at the time, then it would have become clear that the frequencies of the mutations observed by Holyoake et al. (2001) are mutually inconsistent and thus cannot realistically correspond to real-world data. To see this, take a preview of the worldwide mtDNA phylogeny as seen from the early Ingman et al. (2000) data, but now enriched with the up-to-date information about the nesting of the corresponding haplogroups, as displayed in Figure 1 of Bandelt et al. (2006). Nucleotide A at site 8860 is shared by virtually all mtDNAs worldwide that are not closest relatives of the revised Cambridge reference sequence (rCRS; Andrews et al., 1999). In Table 3 of Holyoake et al. (2001) the frequencies are recorded as 2/102 and 1/59 instead of the expected frequency of (nearly) 100%! The other frequencies in that table do not fare much better. Virtually all mtDNAs not belonging to the basal West Eurasian haplogroup R0 (which encompasses the sister haplogroups R0a and HV) bear the characteristic mutation G11719A. Assuming the frequency for this mutation in 'normozoospermic' men reported by Holyoake et al. (2001), one would be forced to conclude that all 80 control mtDNAs are members of haplogroup R0 (Table 1). Such a population sample has never been observed anywhere in the world. Moreover, this zero frequency is at odds with the other mutation frequencies recorded, as there is evidence that the other two basal West Eurasian haplogroups, JT and U (including K), were observed in both, the 'normozoospermic' and the 'subnormozoospermic' men (Table 1). The two frequencies of G11719A, on their own, are thus far apart from any realistic value, indicating that the recognition of G11719A via SSCP analysis must have been strongly hampered by technical problems. There is, by the way, little evidence that Polynesian mtDNAs played a noticeable role, because the vast majority of them would fall into a specific branch of haplogroup B. This haplogroup would be pinpointed by the 9 base-pair (bp) deletion, which, however, was found at a meagre 2.8% in the total sample. Note that the 9-bp deletion is also seen sporadically on many haplogroup backgrounds other than B. Furthermore, potential Sub-Saharan African mtDNA mutations (possibly C7789A) or (South-)East Asian mtDNA mutations (possibly G7853A) are present (if at all) at similarly minor frequencies; thus, in particular, the suggestion of considerable African mtDNA ancestry (Montiel-Sosa et al., 2002) receives no support from the data. Therefore, the vast majority (perhaps >95%) of mtDNAs analysed by Holyoake et al. (2001) must have been of European descent. Table 4 of Holyoake et al. (2001), which provides the full haplotype information, indicates further problems. Mutations that would be expected to be linked with other mutations in view of the above inequalities are not just absent but show up in unexpected combinations, almost random-like, which would rather suggest sample mix-up. Moreover, the haplogroup K mutation G9055A should always entail the mutation G11719A specific to non-R0 lineages, but according to that table, both mutations are rather unlinked. In the present Table 2, some haplotypes from Table 4 of Holyoake et al. (2001) are listed that combine at least two mutations. In three cases, all from the 'subnormozoospermic' group, one observes potentially mosaic patterns (Table 2). The best explanation for the odd frequency spectrum as well as the incomplete and mosaic haplotypes is, in the first place, massive failure of the SSCP analysis carried out by Holyoake et al. (2001). Such a mis-analysis is not an infrequent phenomenon in medical genetics (see e.g. Bandelt et al., 2005b). But why would have 'subnormozoospermia' triumphed over 'normozoospermia' e.g. in the screening of G11719A? And why would the 11719 polymorphism, if deemed crucial for 'subnormozoospermia', have only been analysed in a meagre 33 instead of, say, 131 patients? And what about G9055A? A normal mtDNA sample of predominantly mixed European descent would hardly show so few (<1%) haplogroup K members (Behar et al., 2006). The consistent trend in identifying mutations at frequencies that are far too low, especially for the 'normozoospermic' group, could suggest that the SSCP analysis was biased and effectively carried out only for a minority of the samples. It then seems that the number of fully screened mtDNAs was smaller for the 'normozoospermic' group than for the 'subnormozoospermic' group. In summary, there is no solid evidence that primary mtDNA substitutions other than recognized pathogenic mutations, mainly in heteroplasmic state, which usually cause complex disease phenotypes, influence sperm motility in any way. Therefore, it would be premature to accept all hypotheses and interpretations put forward by Gemmell & Sin (2002) and St. John et al. (2005), who took the results of Ruiz-Pesini et al. (2000) and Holyoake et al. (2001) at face value. Before far-reaching implications are discussed, the underlying data should come under scrutiny first. It would certainly be desirable to re-study the mtDNA samples employed by Holyoake et al. (2001) by performing highest quality sequencing. In any case, there is an urgent need for a new start of mtDNA analysis of samples from men with idiopathic infertility (or subfertility) by complete mtDNA sequencing in order to provide a solid database to which any subsequent case studies could get compared and evaluated. The most recent work of Pereira et al. (2007) is a promising first step in this direction.
Keeping religion and politics apart is an idea with a history. That history is a Christian one, however, rooted in the experience of European Christendom and made possible because Christians, virtually from the beginning, viewed church and state as conceptually separate entities, with different jurisdictions and powers and even a different logic.1 It may be, as Mark Lilla recently argued, that the complex picture of the Christian triune God is inextricably caught up in this story.2 Divided sovereignty is more compatible with the picture of a divided God than a unified one. Other religious traditions may have different resources, however, enabling them to embrace or even stumble into the separation of religion and state. In the case of religions framed around legal traditions, pictures of the divine law are as important as pictures of God.3 Is the law imagined as a comprehensive system uniting all aspects of life under a single sacred framework, thus leaving no room for a separate political domain? Is the law imagined as primarily political, a blueprint for government; or as exquisitely ethical, taking into account only the rights of individuals and not societal needs or a collective such as the state? If so, what law regulates social need? Is there a universal law that has an origin outside of itself on which it can draw even in an internal context? These pictures of the divine law vary over time and among groups within the tradition, just as do pictures of secular law. Certain pictures of law, however, may assume mythic proportions over time, especially in the popular imagination, and this can be a potent obstacle to retrieving from within the tradition alternative images of the law more congenial to a separation of religion and state. It is in this spirit that two intellectual retrieval projects, both responding to the rise of modern nation-states in the Middle East, are taking place today. Muslim and Jewish thinkers are looking back on a wide variety of legal doctrines and theories, as well as historical experiences, in order to engage the question whether there are authentic warrants from within their respective traditions for separating religion and state. These two legal traditions begin with strong original visions of a unified religious polity in which the political authority both is subject to and enforces the divine law. 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The education financing in Brazil is conditioned by its federalist political organization which involves three autonomous spheres of government: the Union, the States and the Municipalities. Due to the diversity of economical, political and social conditions of regions and states, the Union takes over, according to the Federal Constitution of, the supplying and redistributing functions in relation to the other federal units. Nevertheless, in the sit was observed a growing centralization in the process for the definition of education financing policies by the federal government, resulting in decentralization of responsibilities, in a context facing the advance of the minimalist conceptions of State. This article considers the education financing policies in the scope of the federative relations in Brazil, taking into consideration the scenery where the educational policies have been developed after the and the contradictions which have resulted from the countryās political organization model.
This annual progress report reviews the joint staff advisory note on Burkina Fasoās Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). IMF staff highlights the importance of increasing public revenue mobilization and strengthening expenditure management and efficiency, and securing financing in the form of grants, which would create space for an increase in pro-poor spending. Increasing spending on basic services and enhancing the management and efficiency of public expenditure in health and education, and continued progress on decentralization are critical to achieve the PRS public service delivery targets.
Two papers in this volume focus on public finance and decentralization as central to resolving India's systemic public health crisis. However, some states and districts have achieved success despite serious financial and administrative deficits; this suggests that factors such as political commitment, community participation, human resource management, women's empowerment, and governance may be as or more important. The success of the National Rural Health Mission will depend on state and local institutional capacity, including strong partnerships with civil society organizations and private-sector actors. Increased resources and decentralization will not be sufficient by themselves.
Jungha Woo, Abhilasha Bhargav-Spantzel, Anna Squicciarini, Elisa Bertino
A main challenge in mobile commerce is to make it possible for users to manage their transaction histories from both online e-commerce transactions and in-person transactions. Such histories are typically useful to build credit or to establish trust based on past transactions. In this paper we propose an approach to manage electronic receipts on cellular devices by assuring their secure and privacy-preserving usage. We provide a comprehensive notion of transactions history including both on-line transaction and in-person transactions. We apply cryptographic protocols, such as secret sharing and zero knowledge proofs, in a potentially vulnerable and constrained setting. Specifically, our approach supports flexible strategies based on Shamir's secret sharing to cater to different user requirements and architectural constraints. In addition, aggregate zero knowledge proofs are used to efficiently support proofs of various receipt attributes. We have implemented the system on Nokia NFC cellular phones and report in the paper performance evaluation results.
In this paper the problems of health services in China and India are related to some structural features of the two economies. Some similarities and differences exist across these two countries in terms of political economy, with differential results. Both countries have experienced remarkable economic growth during the past quarter-century, but this has not always translated into improvements in health for the poor. Although China used to have an egalitarian basic public health service, the system has become quite inegalitarian during the past quarter-century, with the disintegration of the communes and adoption of fee-based services under a system of decentralized public finance. India's health system has remained inegalitarian throughout.
Gartner has for some time been reporting the potential for virtual world technology to become the next wave of the Internet, delivering what is known as the Web3.D environment. This is characterised by a high level of user participation through immersion in the virtual world. Gartner has predicted that by 2011, 80% of internet users will be regular users of Web3.D technology.\n\nProject LifeLink was initiated to discover what opportunities for Telecom might exist in the growth of business and consumer interest in virtual worlds. This has focused on a number of technologies, in particular Second Life, OpenSimulator (OpenSIM) and JAIN SLEE. The project has been run by Telecom with coordination and support from MediaLab, and with researchers at Canterbury and Otago Universities. This report describes the work undertaken at Otago University to implement a gateway to enable demonstration of communications between an object in Second Life and the JAIN SLEE environment in order to interoperate with external network services.
The collapse or perilous crumbling of our infrastructures, the basic building blocks of the nation's economy, underscores the investment and fiscal policies that confront the nation's leaders as well as the nation's cities' leaders. In this article, the authors focus on one key dimension of the āinfrastructure crisis,ā namely, the critical issues surrounding the financing of city infrastructure and a proposed set of sustainable options available to policy makers, particularly examining trends toward decentralization and fragmentation of governmental and financial institutions and toward market-based and consumer- or customer-oriented policies. Urban policy makers today find themselves in the position of negotiating with neighboring communities, competitive markets, and citizens in a fragmented governance system. What appears to be little more than organized chaos has evolved over decades into the complex, if not always rational, system of infrastructure finance and governance in which cities and other local governments find themselves today.
This study investigated the development process of Japanese national land policies and evaluated the achievements. In Japan, the Nationwide comprehensive plan had begun in 1962. Since 1962, it had been made in 5times. It made a consistent subject,āmade the development which is balance of the countryā. but, The 5th plan(21C National Grand Design) had changed the goal of regional policy,āthe Regional characteristic developmentā. In aspects of ?the population decentralization?, ?income difference relaxation? and ?the industrial decentralization?, as a result,āthe Nationwide comprehensive planā failed. First, in case of ?the population decentralization?, Population concentration of Tokyo was deepened. Second, ?income difference relaxation? was relaxed gradually. But, When consideringāthe tendency of Tokyo's population concentrationā, also failed. ?The industrial decentralization? got results. but be placed in an situation,āChange of industrial structureā. Balanced regional development policy in Japan is propelled centralization. so, resultantly, brought about the national finance charge and region of dependency augmentation, deepening the pole concentration of Tokyo, the magnification of the metropolis etc.
Joachim von zur Gathen, Oded Goldreich, Madhu Sudan
The workshop Complexity Theory was organized by Joachim von zur Gathen (UniversitƤt Bonn), Oded Goldreich (Weizmann Institute), and Madhu Sudan (MIT). The workshop was held on June 24thā30th 2007, and attended by approximately 50 participants spanning a wide range of interests within the field of Computational Complexity. The plenary program, attended by all participants, featured eight long lectures as well as short (10-minute) reports by almost all participants. In addition, extensive interaction took place in smaller groups. The Oberwolfach Meeting on Complexity Theory is marked by a long tradition and a continuous transformation. Originally starting with a focus on algebraic and Boolean complexity, the meeting has continuously evolved to cover a wide variety of areas, most of which were not even in existence at the time of the first meeting (in 1972). While inviting many of the most prominent researchers in the field, the organizers try to identify and invite a fair number of promising young researchers. Computational complexity (a.k.a. complexity theory) is a central field of computer science with a remarkable list of celebrated achievements as well as a vibrant research activity. The field is concerned with the study of the intrinsic complexity of computational tasks, and this study tends to aim at generality : it focuses on natural computational resources, and considers the effect of limiting these resources on the class of problems that can be solved. Computational complexity is related to and has substantial interaction with other areas of mathematics such as number theory, algebra, combinatorics, coding theory, and optimization. The workshop focused on several sub-areas of complexity theory and its nature may be best illustrated by a brief survey of some of the meeting's highlights. Connections to the Theory of Error-Correcting Codes. The interplay between coding theory and complexity theory first emerged in the context of āhardness amplificationā (almost two decades ago) and other connections are less than a decade old (e.g., the connection to probabilistic checking of proofs and extraction of pure randomness). Several applications of the known connections were presented in the current meeting, and in addition a new connection to algebraic complexity was presented. While previous applications of the aforementioned connections went in the direction of coding theory to complexity theory, a recent result reported by Venkat Guruswami goes in the opposite direction. This work, by Guruswami and his graduate student (Rudra), resolves a decades-old central problem in coding theory by presenting an explicit error-correcting code of constant-size alphabet that approaches the capacity bound (under worst-case errors, using list decoding). Extracting randomness. Extracting almost-perfect randomness from weak sources of (imperfect) randomness is crucial for the actual use of randomized procedures. Typical analyses of randomized procedures assume that the procedures have access to a perfect random source. However, in reality one only has access to sources of weak randomness (e.g., having constant entropy rate). Indeed, the problem has attracted a lot of attention in the last couple of decades. In the meeting, Chris Umans has presented recent work with Guruswami and Vadhan, which utilizes recent algebraic and coding theoretic techniques to the construction of (single-source) randomness extractors. This construction meets (and actually improves) the best known parameters for the problem (which are almost optimal), but does so by a relatively simple construction rather than by a complex combination of numerous constructs (as done in prior work). Furthermore, the new work introduces improved constructions for an intermediate primitive (called randomness condenser), which is of independent interest. While single-source randomness extractors must utilize an auxiliary random seed (which may be very short), some applications do not allow for such a seed. In this case, extraction from several (e.g., two) independent sources of weak randomness is called for. An important step in the study of this direction was made by Anup Rao, and presented by him in the meeting. Algebraic complexity and modular polynomial composition. An important task in algebraic computation is modular polynomial composition; that is, given three univariate polynomials f,g and h , one is required to obtain the coefficients of the polynomial f \circ g \bmod h . This task has many applications, most notably as an ingredient in algorithms for polynomial factorization. The previously best algorithm was presented 30 years ago and uses O(n^{1.7}) arithmetic operations, where n denotes the maximum degree of the polynomials. In the meeting, Chris Umans presented significant progress on this celebrated open problem in the form of an almost linear-time algorithm that works for fields of small characteristic. This major progress on a purely algebraic problem is essentially based on methods that were introduced into coding theory by Guruswami and Rudra, and then applied to complexity theory in the context of randomness extractors (see foregoing paragraphs). All three results, which are major achievements in their respective areas, were presented at the meeting. Cryptography and Zero-Knowledge. Zero-knowledge proofs are fascinating concepts and extremely useful constructs. Their fascinating nature is due to their seemingly contradictory definition that mandates that they be convincing and yet yield nothing beyond the validity of the assertion being proved. Their applicability in the domain of cryptography is vast; they are typically used to force malicious parties to behave according to a predetermined protocol. In addition to their direct applicability in cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs serve as a good bench-mark for the study of various problems regarding cryptographic protocols. Zero-knowledge proofs come in many flavors, and it is of great theoretical and practical importance to investigate the relationship among them. A central problem in this area, which has been open since 1986, refers to the gap between the known results regarding two dual notions: the notion of general zero-knowledge proofs (in which the secrecy condition holds with respect to feasible adversaries) and the notion of statistical zero-knowledge arguments (in which the soundness condition holds with respect to feasible adversaries). This gap was bridged in a recent work of Salil Vadhan, jointly with his graduate students (Nguyen and Ong), and was presented by Vadhan in this meeting. A problem related to both cryptography and coding theory is the problem of constructing private information retrieval schemes and/or locally decodable codes. In the context of error-correcting codes, such schemes should allow the recovery of any bit in the original message based on a constant number (e.g., three) probes to the corrupted codeword. For more than a decade it was believed that the length of such codewords must be (weakly) exponential in the length of the message. In the meeting, Sergey Yekhanin (PhD student) presented his recent result that refutes this belief. Delegating your work to an untrusted entities. Needless to say, it is nice to delegate your work to others, but what if you don't trust the others? The very definition of a proof system refers to such a possibility ā the hard task of finding a proof is delegated to the outside while you make sure that the proof is valid by performing the easier task of verification. However, facilitating verification may mean making the task of finding adequate proofs even harder. In the context of program checking this phenomenon is explicitly disallowed: wishing to solve some problem you may use an untrusted program that supposedly solves this problem (but not a program that solve more complex problems). Needless to say, the aim is allowing the delegator, called a checker, to use significantly few