This paper postulates a life cycle model of university entrepreneurialism at the national level. Based on the analysis, this paper identifies two fundamental sources of such entrepreneurialism: 1) the institutional anchoring of the university of a public-private hybrid form in organization and finance; 2) decentralization of the system in such a way as to encourage a high level of competition and differentiation. We hypothesize that when national university systems grow and exhibit signs of demand overload, political pressures for system homogenization increase; system homogenization weakens both sources of entrepreneurialism and leads to decline. The sources of decline are thus unintended consequences of policy choices to cope with the side effects of demand overload within national university systems. Implications for the ascendant Chinese university system are derived.
The performance of the public sector affects us all. There are at least three reasons why we should be interested in how well it functions: it is big; its outputs are special; and it is getting bigger. With all these, in Romania, the performance within the public sector represents a concept not so analyzed and rarely applied in practice. There is not the same situation in countries with a high developed economy, which represent an interest for us, along with the European integration. Internationally, since the 1970s processes of modernization and reorganization of public institution have been initiated in diverse countries in the world. The society has demanded greater efficiency in rendering of services, a better application of public resources and also questioned the effective bureaucratic model. In this context, the model of managing government institutions gains force, consistence and become more credible. Flexibility, decentralization, creativity, autonomy of management, and a management contract used as quantification instrument are basic characteristics of the management reforms that focus on results. Results determination within the public sector and the implementation of a system meant to measure the financing and non-financing performances need an exact definition of the objectives and purposes of each organization and constituent institution.
To understand what makes NP-complete problems so hard, I conduct my research through two approaches: construct problem instances and study how badly the solvers work. A simple way to construct SAT instances is to choose a random truth assignment A, and then choose clauses randomly from among those satisfied by A. However, this method tends to produce problems, since the majority of literals point toward the assignment A. Previously, we proposed a problem generator that cancels this effect by hiding both A and its complement A. While the resulting formulas appear to be just as for the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland (DPLL) algorithms as random 3-SAT formulas with no hidden assignment, they can be solved by WalkSAT in only polynomial time. Here we propose a new method to cancel the attraction to A, by choosing a clause with t > 0 literals satisfied by A with probability proportional to qt for some q < 1. By varying q, we can generate formulas whose variables have no bias, i.e., which are equally likely to be true or false; we can even cause the formula to deceptively point away from A. We present theoretical and experimental results suggesting that these formulas are exponentially both for DPLL algorithms and for incomplete algorithms such as WalkSAT.
Next, we introduce a new application for constructing hard to SAT instances: Negative Databases (NDBs), a strange type of database that only stores records not in the original database. NDBs offer the promise of preserving the confidentiality of the individual records in a database, while permitting certain restricted queries. NDBs have many applications in the field of data security. Constructing an NDB corresponding to a DB is equivalent to constructing a SAT formula with a set of satisfiable truth assignments as its only satisfiable truth assignments. We present a new approach to construct such formulas, and we are able to show that the formula can only be satisfied by the truth assignments that are very close to one of the hidden assignments. We then demonstrate experimentally that the formulas generated by our scheme are much harder to solve than the formulas generated by the previously suggested prefix algorithm and RNDB algorithm[27, 25], and they are indeed enough to ensure security. We hope that this new approach would create interest in constructing SAT formulas as a way to protect the confidentiality of databases.
Finally, to understand how badly the solvers work, we analyze the behavior of two natural variants of DPLL algorithm for Graph 3-Coloring on sparse random graphs G(n, p = c/n). First, we calculate analytically the probability Pc(0) that these algorithms find a 3-coloring with no backtracking at all, and show that it goes to zero faster than any analytic function as c → c* = 3.847... Then we show that even in the easy phase 1 0, including just above the emergence of the giant component, the expected number of backtracks is exponentially large with positive probability. To our knowledge this is the first rigorous proof that the running time of a natural backtracking algorithm has a heavy tail for graph coloring. In addition, we give experimental evidence and heuristic arguments that this tail takes the form Pc(b) ∼ b-1 up to an exponential cutoff.
The author argues that,in terms of policy,the establishment of China's public financial system laid the foundation for identifying and implementing the fiscal responsibility for compulsory education.Because compulsory education is a kind of pure public product,the government should completely bear the fiscal responsibility for it.We should integrate centralization with decentralization in labor-division among governments in different levels to realize a balanced development of compulsory education.The key for Beijing municipal government to implement the fiscal responsibility for compulsory education is to clarify the common responsibilities of city and local finance,and the municipal government should increase investment in compulsory education.
It is an important historical task to building new socialist countryside during the modernization process in China to accelerate rural development and achieve richness together.There were different fiscal policies for rural development with different methods and performances.Recently with the scientific outlook on development public finance system plays and important role in rural development,and public expenditure policies need to follow more giving,less getting and decentralizing to make public finance's sunshine all over the rural areas and guarantee building harmony society.
The decentralization of finance and politics enables local governments to deal with native affairs such as development mode and other public affairs.In the meantime,the evaluation on local governments' performance emphasizes on economic development,GDP growth,and employment rate.This system brings about a fierce irrational competition among local governments.This paper deals with the problem of how to bring the irrational competition back to a healthy one,and the effective way,the use of encouragement and restriction properly,is suggested.
We first study the module structure of the free Lie algebra $L(V)$ in characteristic zero under the action of the general linear group. Here we give a new, purely combinatorial, proof of Klyachko's celebrated theorem on Lie representations using the Kra\\'{s}kiewicz-Weyman theorem.\n\nWe then give a new factorisation of the Dynkin-Specht-Wever\nidempotent and use this to prove that $L_2(L_k(V))$ is a $KG$-module direct summand of $L_{2k}(V)$, for $G$ an arbitrary group, $K$ a field of characteristic $p \\nmid k$ and $V$ a $KG$-module. For finite-dimensional modules $V$, this follows immediately from the Decomposition Theorem of Bryant and Schocker. We consider a small example of this theorem, namely the sixth Lie power over a field of\ncharacteristic $3$. Here we show explicitly that $L_6(V)$ decomposes into a direct sum of the modules $L_3(L_2(V))$ and $L_2(V) \\otimes S_2(V) \\otimes S_2(V)$, where $S_2(V)$ denotes the symmetric square of $V$. We give a description, up to isomorphism, of the modules $B_{p^mk}$ occurring in the Decomposition Theorem.\n\nFinally, we apply our knowledge of Lie powers to a group theoretic problem. We show that the torsion subgroup $t_c$ of the quotient $\\gamma_c R/ [\\gamma_c R, F]$ is bounded as follows, for $c=2p^m$ or $c=3p^m$, where $p$ is an arbitrary prime, $m\\geq 0$:\n\n\\begin{eqnarray*}\n2t_{2p^m} = 0 \\;\\;\\;\\mbox{provided } G=F/R \\mbox{ has no 2-torsion and no p-torsion,}\\\\\n3t_{3p^m} = 0 \\;\\;\\;\\mbox{provided } G=F/R \\mbox{ has no 3-torsion\nand no p-torsion.}\n\\end{eqnarray*}\n\nThus, we have that $\\gamma_6 R/ [\\gamma_6 R, F]$ is torsion-free, provided that $G=F/R$ has no elements of order $2$ or $3$.
Japanese local bond system faced major challenge since the World WarⅡ. This paper shows accurately and widely as much as possible what the issue is, and investigates pros and cons to this from the viewpoint of finance. We argue that the change in last few years was fundamental rather than stopgap and it is the turning point since the US occupation period reform just after the Second World War. The driving forces for these reforms include three factors: decentralization, deregulation in financial sector and the deterioration of the financial conditions of the small local governments. We argue that the reform is basically advanced toward a preferable direction. However, it will take time for the local government and the institutional investor to become accustomed to new system as the player. Especially, small-scale municipalities with scarce fiscal resources would become disadvantageous as decentralization progresses.
Japanese local bond system faced major challenge since the World War‡U. This paper shows accurately and widely as much as possible what the issue is, and investigates pros and cons to this from the viewpoint of finance. We argue that the change in last few years was fundamental rather than stopgap and it is the turning point since the US occupation period reform just after the Second World War. The driving forces for these reforms include three factors: decentralization, deregulation in financial sector and the deterioration of the financial conditions of the small local governments. We argue that the reform is basically advanced toward a preferable direction. However, it will take time for the local government and the institutional investor to become accustomed to new system as the player. Especially, small-scale municipalities with scarce fiscal resources would become disadvantageous as decentralization progresses.
Since the ending of the cold war, many former military airbases have been converted for civilian use. This has caused the German airport network to become very dense. Nowadays airport catchment areas are overlapping and many airport-operators depend on state aid. Some lobbyists blame the decentralized provision of infrastructure for over-capacities and loss-making airport-operators. However, this paper shows that a shift of competences from the local to the federal level would breach the principles of public finance. Most essential is an imperative combination of provision and financing competences in order to avoid misleading incentives for local decision makers.
This paper has analyzed the reasonable compulsory education financial system arrangement under the public financial system,and the main question of the present compulsory education financial system in our country,In this foundation,this paper proposed the basic train of thought of further improving our country compulsory education finance system,that is: under the major premise of the moderate decentralization of compulsory education finance,besides increasing the financial transfer payment of a few poor counties,more importantly,the Central authorities and the province government should solute the drive insufficiency of county government in the compulsory education expenditure through the effective intervention mechanism.
We extend Percy++, an open source implementation of Goldberg’s multi-server information-theoretic private information retrieval (PIR) [1], with a suite of protocols for privacy-preserving electronic commerce. Our enhancements provide a stronger and more realistic model of PIR that enables e-commerce to coexist happily with strong privacy protection. Our first protocol adds support for single-payee priced symmetric private information retrieval (PSPIR) that supports a tiered pricing model and price lists with recordlevel granularity. In this model, users purchase database records using e-cash, without revealing the indices or prices of those records, while the seller may set the price of each individual record with respect to one or more different tiers of users; e.g., non-members may pay full price while members may receive a discounted rate. We then extend our tiered pricing construction to support group-based access control lists, which maintain the record-level granularity of the price lists; this lets the database servers set the access rights of each record with respect to each price tier, thus enabling a user to retrieve a record only if he belongs to a tier that has been explicitly granted authorization to access that record. Next, we show how to augment our protocols with some basic bookkeeping functionality to implement a novel top-K replication strategy that enables the servers to construct bestsellers lists, which facilitate faster retrieval for these most popular records. Finally, we build on our bookkeeping functionality to construct PSPIR with support for multiple payees, thus enabling several sellers to offer their digital goods through a common database while enabling the database servers to determine to what portion of revenues each seller is entitled. Our protocols maintain user anonymity in addition to query privacy; that is, queries do not leak information about the index or price of the record a user purchases, the price tier according to which the user pays, the user’s remaining balance, or even whether the user has ever queried the database before. No other priced PIR or oblivious transfer protocol supports tiered pricing, access control lists, multiple payees, or top-K replication, whereas ours supports all of these features while preserving PIR’s sublinear communication complexity. As a first step in building our protocols, we transform Goldberg’s PIR scheme into symmetric PIR (SPIR). The resulting SPIR scheme maintains the attractive tprivacy and v-Byzantine-robustness properties of the original scheme. To maintain efficiency, we also propose some new batch zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) that enable our protocols to scale to extremely large database sizes without becoming a bottleneck to performance. We believe that our SPIR construction and efficient ZKPs are of independent theoretical interest. Measurements from our implementation of these protocols indicate that they are practical for deployment in real-world e-commerce applications.
>The translator into Hungarian of several of my writings on art theory recently sent me a catalog of the work of a young artist from her country, Ágnes Eperjesi.1 The translator—Eszter Babarczy—is a gifted critic in her own right, and I cannot do better than quote from her letter, which explains why she felt I would be especially interested in Eperjesi's art. She thought your ideas about transfiguration and the commonplace applied to her work, and she took inspiration from your essays. Hers is a remarkable and long journey from experimental photography to an absolutely unique venture of collecting wrappings of household products, and taking the humble sign language of ordinary household chores, and recreating them as objects of beauty and irony. The products, like dishwashers and vacuum cleaners—or underwear—were in all likelihood intended for export to countries anywhere in the world, which implies that they will fit into forms of life that must be much the same the world over. So the images must themselves belong to the sign language of globalism, necessarily universal in that they have to be legible to consumers who cannot be counted on to have a common language. The signs show what the consumers need to know about the products they have purchased—which side of a pair of underpants is front and which side is back, for example. In many, though not, all cases, they are pictograms or even isotypes—an acronym for “International System of Typographic Picture Education”—signs of a kind initially invented in 1936 by the Logical Positivist, Otto Neurath, who may have been influenced by Wittgenstein's so‐called picture theory of language. Neurath anticipated globalism in saying: “The visual method becomes the basis for a common cultural life and a common cultural relationship.”2 Just consider their international use in giving traffic directions to drivers who may or may not be able to read the language of the country in which they are traveling, or in guiding us through foreign airports. Isotypes are among the rare practical and positive contributions made by modern philosophy to the common life of humankind. When these pictograms are recycled—or transfigured—into works of art, their implied universality is elevated to a portrait of the society in which the products are to be used. I would not altogether follow Babarszy in calling Eperjesi's works beautiful and, in truth, I am somewhat at a loss to describe them aesthetically. But I can appreciate that in transfiguring the isotype into an artwork, an interesting reversal of Walter Benjamin's famous distinction has taken place: the art of mechanical reproduction has acquired, through transfiguration, an aura, and in virtue of that the images may acquire an aesthetic interest they heretofore lacked. At least, as art, we look at them as critics, and notice their aesthetic qualities, such as they are. Just knowing that an object is intended as a piece of fine art may trigger the sense that it must be beautiful. Or better, we use this standard term of aesthetic commendation in connection with them that we would hardly use in characterizing the pictograms on which they are based. The term ‘beautiful’ may simply be a compliment paid to art as art, without really being descriptive of the art at all. The goal of trans‐cultural communication may mean that features that imply ethnic differences will be erased—the persons are depicted neither as white nor black nor red nor yellow—leaving figures that are abstractly human, which in a way look quite “modern.” But is “looks modern” an aesthetic characterization or a stylistic one? Modernist design strove for a kind of simplification through its distaste for ornament, and this led to stylization in modernist pictography. This does not explain why the isotypical pictograms are stylized as they are, which comes, rather, from globalist imperatives—so “looks modern” is façon de parler. But in any case, the pictogram has undergone some sort of aesthetic transformation in the course of its artistic transfiguration, however we finally describe it. Eperjesi's aesthetic enhancement of workaday images is as distinctive as Andy Warhol's transformations of Polaroids into portraits. As to Eszter Bararcszy's description of the work as “ironic,” that is true—but it is due more to Eperjesi's titles—or perhaps they are captions—than to the images themselves: the covers of The New Yorker Magazine have titles, the cartoons have captions. Either way, the titles/captions express thoughts that the images alone do not. Eperjesi has often selected her images with the intention of using them to convey how women in contemporary Hungary regard themselves, and how they think about the housework for which the product designated by the image is intended to be used—usually by women as a matter of course. One of her images shows a man, a woman, and a child on bicycles. It is difficult to determine what product it stands for, though I would guess that it belongs to what we might think of as the secret life of women. The image could show a woman living a full active life, thanks to the product in question. Whatever its rhetorical aim, Eperjesi captions it this way: “My new boyfriend gets along fine with my daughter. I hope it's not just a show for now” (Figure 1). This is interesting because the woman is evidently a single mother, looking for a new relationship. The irony derives from the implication that while women in contemporary society have been greatly liberated, they remain in a disadvantageous position in relationship to men, as much so in Hungary as in America or western Europe. They are the ones left to do the housework, and to hope that men are not just out to exploit them sexually. Ágenes Eperjesi. The irony goes well beyond the power of isotypes. The three figures could, after all, just represent a family. Interestingly, most of the women are in Western clothing, which has become fairly isotypical: I imagine that the isotype on the door of women's' toilets, shown with a short flaring skirt, would be recognized in airports everywhere in the world, even by women who wear burkhas. In any case, the titles/captions have to be translated, as the artist has done, from Hungarian into the language of the country in which they are to be shown—English, for example, in the catalog I saw. English itself is not, for all it ubiquity, isotypical. Even if it were universally used, as Latin once was, there would be a distinction between pictures and words, which means that while isotypes may validate the picture theory of language, they do so in ways having nothing to do with natural languages as spoken or written. The semantics of sentences in a natural language differ from the semantic of a sentence used pictorially, as in a quotation. But even quotations have to be translated. Tempting as it is to dwell on the artistic semantics of Eperjesi's pictures, my immediate purpose in using her work has to do with its extreme contemporaneity, and to the way it illustrates the pluralistic structure that has increasingly come to define the production of contemporary art, especially since the 1960s when artists first began to explore the possibility of using vernacular imagery. I have already touched on the question of their indeterminate aesthetic qualities, but I want ultimately to discuss this with reference to the problems that artistic pluralism has raised for aesthetic theory, and especially for Kantian aesthetic theory, which more or less dominated discussion until the decade when pluralism became a driving force in art. I understand “Kantian” to mean the view that artistic excellence is one with aesthetic excellence, which is understood to be a matter of pleasure and value distinct from the pleasure of sensual gratification, and internally connected with an ideal of disinterested contemplation. It concerns what the classical aestheticians designated “taste,” and the main features of the theory are laid out in the section of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment titled “The Analytic of Taste,” which served as the great empowering text for aesthetic theory in modern times, especially, at least in America, in the critical thought and practice of Clement Greenberg. Immanuel Kant's initial interest was in natural beauty, which it was easy enough to relate to the visual arts, understood—the decorative arts apart, which were appraised in terms of “free beauty”—either as accurate representations of natural beauty, or else as beautified representations of natural objects that in reality fell short of beauty. For what would be the point of making pictures of aesthetically repellent or deficient motifs? Greenberg had no such interest, as far as I can tell, and his chief focus was on abstract painting, which could be treated in terms of “free” beauty. This had the advantage for him that he could treat even representationalist art as if abstract, and hence subject to formalist analysis. That is to say, he appreciated painting in terms of what we might call the aesthetics of medium, since painterly excellence is determined by what pertains to properties essential to that medium, namely, in Greenberg's view, relationships between flat forms, irrespective of what the forms may signify. Aesthetic value is what these forms convey to visual perception, in which all concepts are put out of play. Kant of the pleasure taken in an object of any For the alone with he or she may put for the in The of the artist was to from painting not the The was the production of beauty for The of Greenberg's modernist aesthetics on so‐called art in the was is is how pluralism have at all when the had all the power and in the at least so far as contemporary visual art was But for that an I am to the aesthetic began to way in the and became just when Greenberg his most in his The implied by in in the catalog for the at the of was to the between art and would have spoken of the between art and reality so far as were In artistic that the of giving to art out of of had become the it was was not when in the but the kind of aesthetic by the making for what one may think of as a pluralism of aesthetic for a aesthetic that is the of the kind of aesthetic excellence Kant and Greenberg took for It is the aesthetics of and as in he the and in which the work applied as it was used by to an object of use in connection with which and are in or as by what once as is the aesthetic of by and there is question that a for it can be and even by and to young with themselves through a of Kant's main was to what one might call a pluralism of by which I mean the common and somewhat view that beauty is in the of the and that differences in are to differences in Kant to show that beauty is and to be the same for all. This was a kind of aesthetic view that so‐called were simply aesthetically in their was the for the of Western in what to be Greenberg was that his critical practice was by Kant's Critique of Aesthetic which he often the on art. In truth, the of might have in the the remarkable of Greenberg's critical could be taken to have a of on Kant's abstract which a from a of painting hardly in his own of Kant's to Greenberg's which to aesthetic that in the New there was Kant's that of beauty are and that they are universally that they are in no sense Greenberg of beauty. interest was in what he in art, which that his could not be to the aesthetics of which would of course have been of interest to In Greenberg that in art can be neither nor by or alone in this the so to of Greenberg's view is that is what is Greenberg Kant for how it was to be or in of aesthetic not think one had to know of the kind that art concerns itself with in to be or about art. he that had the possibility of of art that we or art has nothing to do with once that though he about art, he would be able to out the or three in a They need not be by the by which themselves such but that was because they were by that had to do with aesthetic as he understood was to say, in front of a piece of art, beyond an But that in no sense that one was as Greenberg's in philosophy would have having come to the view that aesthetic is That it was, on the is by Greenberg's way of his and them when the work to be was in front of the as if a the had to to by way of was what aesthetic Greenberg's was through his in artistic in at a when there was on the of to abstract art as This would have art on the New at the New and at the New the to on abstract art, because they have not taken the to of it. enough to be able to the from the in abstract art, no one has the to be on this were who to with Greenberg on could I have been using for Greenberg was the New to in the that made The of his of had about it the of a It him as well as great power in the Greenberg and, more Kant was in their to that there is a of aesthetic qualities, that to be recognized when of language touched on the of aesthetics at about the same that Greenberg dominated critical in I have in an of much it is to be we could for a while about the beautiful and to the and the this in his in his for as this out the that we to use the of ordinary language some interesting were made by such as who to that aesthetic were not It would have been interesting to out if this was the for aesthetic as a for if not, what if there are. not in Greenberg's was But aesthetics took a in the decade to the philosophy of art, I am to say, with my “The which was by and to a by the work of and especially of the became the of art, and that has more or less been the for the philosophy of art was interesting was how a aesthetics in that as as the aesthetic in artistic production and in the increasingly art world, in the and but in and finally everywhere that art was to the The artists that were and the and the in work aesthetics was of since the of art had to with the and the in which aesthetic were at there was a question of aesthetics had really to do with art at all. This was a that from the it had that aesthetic pleasure was what art was all I was fairly about the of aesthetics for art. In my main work in the philosophy of art, The of the I with what I thought of as for a of art is about and hence and that an its which is what art I this by calling works of art In my The of I more or less that aesthetics is than had been and if there were not a namely, that to be a work of art, has to have some aesthetic not beauty, say, not I the that art need have any aesthetic at all. I a distinction between and beauty, and, by between and when stands for any aesthetic that may is what I by beauty. The beauty of an is when it to the I several of this from contemporary art, for the and in In a I thought a was the use that made of beauty in painting the of as beautiful in which like a from the The beauty of was like the beauty of and the of the painting was that for the who must the of this by their the beauty is not in a work of art it which means that it in Kant's “free and In my was to from the aesthetic of and an aesthetics of It is at this point that one might that the distinction the of aesthetic to which and the ordinary language aestheticians in the us consider once In is a had just the that the work was When first the of in it was a for was so and and made so much he was to It was simply a world from my it was like a that In a from that on was the of a made of and from a Kantian to an as when he applied as his for the that they have the of aesthetic that they neither pleasure nor to the They were from the of of they were aesthetic from the that was to in the when aesthetic became an aesthetic to the of the and itself a matter of the way had been for one might say, an aesthetic of of the kind out of which Ágnes Eperjesi her art. It is not easy to describe this but it is easy enough to and it is due to the of itself due to the of making the images easy to read and to understand everywhere in the to a an recognized aesthetic in the images of the that Andy used in his first in in the of on They were the kind of that were on in for and like of the It is the aesthetics of by the need to the that would to the product But that aesthetic gets to be to the works made of as the aesthetics of images gets to be to the work Ágnes Eperjesi on of work show their and from this is not the of The of this is that the to the question of aesthetics into the of pluralism is and It is if we are of the aesthetic of and disinterested contemplation. It is if we are of the way in which aesthetic qualities, of them to as by Kant and are to the of works of art as In the of pluralism has to the of aesthetic far far than aesthetics was able to I would say, that of these aesthetic is as as Kant beauty is in the of the but in the way in which sense are in the of the just as they are. in in the he but this in no sense it from as and and all qualities, not in but in the The is the same with beauty and virtue and This however no more from the reality of the than from that of the were to in the would or be less or is a in the and of to all these the objects of art and and to have the on life and taken the matter to this I must some to view on works of art a in a section of the the of the that he his of The Kant of is not the Kant of Kantian which is on the of I it to to show how my are to his in this section of his the of which shows how Kant was the in that the of was from that alone was not the when it to of products of which we that they at least in as beautiful art, they are without we nothing to in them on the of he means of the and this he goes on to say, no than the of It is of Kant that he will a kind of in to for a when the one might say, is really is as it an that has been in the way it was used by it to what is to is is that he has that is to sense and we a through the than a or a or a Kant as an one of the which we are to that Kant is as a sort of the when in the its does that often one by The in the of ones life and without through the image of a beautiful This is a quite commonplace use of and has nothing to do with as Kant to it “The is one through as in irony or in that the in this Kant's is about the course of a as a way of about the course of a It is a beautiful which need have nothing to do with the beauty of the The just after from the visual is as an in its and as a as a with The power of is made through the that is not than can be a being of must have The image us more than is all alone the of power that an to the to itself a of representations that more thought than can be in a determined by It is in regard to the of that Kant of and of as from the of and as in reference to the of the This was much in the in the when he his In for example, a of for the of of which he was at the must have to the of an namely, that there are no in It in from this that we cannot the practice of painting on the of or on any of text with a to the of the to in full without and to use means for them from the that shows them the way to this or that of text a from the that his work to the of his work, but it a about art. art a and is not that can be ideas have nothing much to do with the aesthetics of and they are what is from Greenberg's who of in his of in art. In a which has to natural and beauty, has to do with art, which in was in the in of what were felt to be of classical beauty. is of that in his one these are hardly of ideal beauty. the of but I to for this work, in the de he for a to and is taken to be the of there is no using painting for of a to and to be in any Greenberg would have this as having nothing essential to do with art at all. was a term of critical in Greenberg's and in formalist own view is that the relationship of aesthetics to art was and The of pluralism has nothing in this But the theory of art as the of it how aesthetic can to the of the work that This I am is what when he at the of his on why artistic beauty is to natural beauty. It is because natural beauty is Kant could have since for him natural beauty is a of and us the sense that the world is not to for has a kind of as the has recently in his natural beauty, as in the of the was an to this kind of But its in works is to their beauty as art. 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L’article presente les predicteurs socio-economiques de l’etat de sante auto-evaluee ainsi que de la satisfaction envers les services medicaux dans cinq pays de l’Europe Centrale et Orientale: la Bulgarie, la Hongrie, la Pologne, la Roumanie et la Slovakie. L’analyse est fondee sur les micro-donnees fournies par le European Social Survey realise en 2006. Pour mieux saisir les differences existantes entre les systemes nationaux de sante, les auteures ont construit deux indices: l’index de l’ensemble des services medicaux et l’index de l’engagement gouvernemental pour les soins de sante. Les deux indices synthetisent les indicateurs macro, fournis par le World Health Report de 2007. Au niveau de la comparaison entre les pays, l’analyse temoigne d’une correspondance forte entre la probabilite de declarer une mauvaise sante, la satisfaction moyenne avec les services medicaux et l’engagement gouvernemental pour les soins de sante. Les performances des cinq pays etudies et particulierement de la Bulgarie, sont faibles sur toutes les dimensions de l’analyse, notemment en les comparant a la moyenne de l’EU-15. Le fait de declarer d’etre en mauvaise sante et d’etre insatisfait des soins de sante ont des determinants socio-economiques similaires. L’effet le plus important appartient au revenu du menage et a l’appartenance aux groupes discrimines. Introduction: Health Care Reforms and Health Status in CEE Countries During the first decade of transition, all Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries moved from centralised health care systems with universal coverage to insurance-based systems. They confronted the need to improve the quality of services, decentralize responsibilities related to health care, contract-out services and, at the same time, reduce public expenditures on health care. One of their main concerns was thus to limit the attributions of the state and introduce market forces in the health sector. The article is based on independent research carried out by the authors at CEPS/INSTEAD Luxembourg, within the framework of the IRISS research program financed by the European Commission and the ECHISERV research project financed by the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research through the grant CEEX 157/2006. The reforms of the health systems throughout post-socialist Europe had ambitious objectives and created high expectations which could hardly be met. The shift from a Beveridge-type universal, residence-based health care system to an insurance-based Bismarckian system was envisaged to improve the efficiency of the management of the public health care fund, and strengthen personal responsibility for the protection of one’s good health. However, contributions to the health care fund were difficult to collect and revenues were often scarce. This situation increased the demand for budget subsidies (Ringold, 1999). The burden of healthcare costs shifted to the patients as co-payments or informal payments in the public system, or as out-of-pockets expenditures in the private system. As compared to the OECD countries, where private sickness insurance accounts for around a quarter of total expenditures on health care, in post-socialist countries this share is negligible (OECD, 2004). The 2002 GVG study on the 13 candidate countries to EU accession emphasizes that the failure of health system reforms has multiple causes, but the most salient ones were either generated by the macroeconomic environment, or rooted in the design and the functioning of health insurance schemes. The reforming strategies did not overcome past deficiencies such as the excessive utilization of hospital care and the underdevelopment of primary care (GVG, 2002). In her analysis of the Hungarian healthcare reform, Ferge (1991) is highly critical with respect to lack of transparency in the decisions making process. The author states that the main actors of the reform (the government, the medical agencies and the high-status groups in the society) monopolized the public discourse and presented a unilateral perspective on the reform, highlighting the advantages (their advantages) and omitting the shortcomings. Their options have been convergent, leading to the implementation of a specific health insurance model. Arguments against modifying the structure of the healthcare system in Romania have been presented by Marginean (1995), who emphasized that one of the risks is the exclusion of certain categories of the population from public health care benefits. Other experts consider that the fragmented collection of funds hinders the efficiency of their administration (GVG, 2002). The quality of services remained low, and informal payments still constitute rather the rule than the exception (Rebeleanu, 2007). The access to health care services is uneven or limited although many non-contributing persons have the equivalent status of “insured”: family members, children, students, unemployed and beneficiaries of the Minimum Income Guarantee, who are covered by other social protection schemes. In 2000, when the new health insurance system actually started to work, 25% of the population was not covered by the health insurance (World Bank, 2003). The proportion was much higher among the Roma population, in rural areas, and in the case of low educated persons (World Bank, 2003). The financial crisis from the health care system is another recurrent concern of studies on the Romanian health care system (see Popescu, 2004; Rebeleanu, 2007). For all five CEE countries included in the present analysis, namely Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, expenditures on health care as percent of GDP were in 2004 below 8%, the average for OECD countries. In the case of Romania, the share was 5.1%, which is lower than in the case of the other EU accession countries (see Figure 1). Figure 1: The evolution of total expenditures on health as % of GDP in CEE countries
Bu tez Azerbaycan'da 1991 yilinda bagimsizlik kazanildiktan sonragerceklestirlien kamu yonetimi reformu konusundadir. Bu amaca ulasmak icin ilkonce genel olarak kamu yonetiminde degisim, reform, yonetimde reform vb.,konulardaki esas anlayis ve kavramlarin tanimlanmasina gidilmistir. 20. yuzyildanitibaren kamu yonetiminde reformun yapilmasinin esas yontemi gibi yonetimreformunun transferi (kamu politikalari turunden reform), onun sovyet ve kapitalistdunyadaki deneyimi, teorik altyapisi aciklanmaya calisilmistir. Bu anlamda birincibolumun sonunda kamu yonetiminde reformun siyasal ve teknik boyutlariarastirilmistir.kinci bolum ise modern Azerbaycan kamu yonetiminin tarihi hakkindadir.Burada Carlik Rusya'si, Azerbaycan Halk Cumhuriyeti ve Sovyetler Birligidonemindeki kamu yonetimi deneyimleri arastirilmis ve cagdas donem icin onemlisonuclar belirlenmistir. Ozellikle sovyetler doneminde federal merkeziyetcilikkonusuna, planlama orgutlenmesine, ademi merkeziyet ve isletme ozerkliklireformlar dikkat merkezine cekilmistir.Tezin sonuncu-ucuncu bolumunde SSCB'nin cokusu ile birliktebagimsizligini kazanan Azerbaycan'in ulusal kamu yonetimi yapilanmasiarastirilmistir. Ozellikle bu reformlarin nedenleri (amaci, sorunlari ve aktorleri) veboyutlari (yonetim hukuku, kurumsal yapi, planlama, mali yonetim ve kamu personelsistemi) merci altina alinmistir. Tez calismasinda reformlara farkli siyasaldusuncelerin bakislari, Sovyet kamu yonetimi, eski Sovyet sisteminden olanulkelerin reform deneyimleri, Turkiye kamu yonetimi reformu ile kiyaslamalar dayapilmistir. Bu calisma Azerbaycan kamu yonetimi tarihinin incelenmesi, Sovyetkamu yonetiminin cagdas kosullarda ve bilimsel olarak gozden gecirilmesi, kamuyonetiminde degisim sorunlarinin teorik altyapisinin daha da gelistirilmesi bakimina onemlidir.AbstractThis thesis is about holding reforms in Public Administration after gettingindependence in Azerbaijan in 1991. To gain the goal at first in general mainconception and analysis of terms under the topic of changes in PublicAdministration, reforms, administrative reforms had been given. Transfer of PublicAdministration reforms (as a sort of reforms of transfer of public policy, itsexperience in soviet and capitalist countries of the world and theoretical bases hadbeen explained. In this meaning at the end of first part political and technical aspectsof reforms in Public Administration had been investigated.But second part is about history of modern Azerbaijan Public Administration.Here public Administration Experience in Czar Russia, Azerbaijan Popular Republicand Soviet Union period were investigated and important results had beendetermined for modern period. Especially in soviet period subject of federalcentralism, making-decision plan, decentralizing and autonomy reforms inproduction had been the focus of attention.The end of thesis ? at the third part according to the collapse of USSRcoming independent Azerbaijan National Public Administration Building had beeninvestigated. Especially reasons of reforms (goal, problems and factors) and aspects(administrative law, structure, planning, managing finance and public service) hadbeen the focus of attention. In thesis views of different political thoughts to reform,Soviet Public Administration and reform experience of Soviet System Republics hadbeen compared with Turkish Public Administration Reform.This research is important from the improve of history of Azerbaijan PublicAdministration, visualizing Soviet Public Administration with modern supply and inscientific point of view, theoretical bases of change problems in Public Administration.
Post-Soviet Geopolitical Dynamics
Healthcare, Law, Governance, and Management Studies
In the present context of Romania, that of a transit market-economy, regional development policies aim at attaining equilibrium within the areas, by using certain programmes regarding investments and the allocation of resources in order to attain local economical development. The present Romanian law system tries an administrative decentralization aiming to decrease the involvement of central authorities in taking local decisions. Starting with the foresights of the Constitution and the 215/2001 law of local public administration, the local councils are empowered to adopt programs and prognoses for economical and social development and to pursuit their achievement at a high level of competence. The process of democratization of the Romanian society, the modernization of the economy and setting the grounds for a market economy are all conditioned by the reform in the local public administration, economical, social and cultural institutions, by the achievement of a local authority in coordination with the principles of the European Charta of Local Autonomy.
The context of transportation has changed significantly with the globalisation of supply chains, steeply rising fuel costs and further emphasis on environmental performance. Since transportation accounts for an ever larger share of costs, lead times and environmental im-pact, there are increased pressures for more efficient execution.Major tools for improving efficiency are the use of information and communication systems to better plan, monitor and control the transport activities. This calls for reliable data capture, storage, processing and communication. Here, recent hardware and software ad-vancements leading to technologies available at a reasonable price wait to be utilised for distributed decision-making.Road hauliers are currently the subjects of significant pressure to incorporate the new ap-plications into their operations from vehicle suppliers, the government and transport buyers; either directly or via their contracted logistics service providers. Hauliers are generally very small companies operating at a very small (if any) profit margin. They are often not able to employ or develop their own technical competence. Hence, they risk being forced to invest in several costly systems with overlapping functionality; each fulfilling certain needs of their strong counterparts rather than their own.This article takes the road hauliers’ perspective, with the purpose of identifying their need for information and communication support, while analyzing how they are matched with the current supply of technologies. The concept of Smart Freight Transport Systems (SFTS) is developed in a case study setting as a departure from the truck and haulier level. The rendering also departs from what is currently available on the market and what is likely to be available within a five-year timeframe rather than trying to define a highly futuristic view.
The relationship between regional imbalances and strengthening of the financial system is not simple though it may seem so at first sight, given that developing countries have less developed financial systems. In a national financial system as in Brazil this aspect deserves special treatment, particularly if we recognize that regional development policy cannot be studied without considering macroeconomic policy, fiscal mechanisms of public financing, the nature of fiscal federalism and the Fiscal Responsibility Law. 2 In this sense, the decentralization, the fiscal federalism as well as the autonomy of sub-national governments are crucial for articulating regional development policy in Brazil. In fact, the share of tax revenues and the autonomy of federative units are critical success factors for financing regional development. Therefore, the Constitutional Funds for regional development, created through the Constitution of 1988 in Brazil, as well as others regional development funds have an important role. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Increasing attention has been paid since the early 1990s to improving the quality of road networks in Latin America. The region has been broadly impacted by the new thinking on what constitutes good road management which gained currency at that time. The foundations of a regional approach towards implementing reforms were created under the PROVIAL program and a number of countries received advice and technical assistance. Since then varied progress has been made along five main dimensions: increasing funding for road conservation; reforming existing road management institutions; extending private sector participation; introducing new forms of contracting; and decentralizing road management. Some measurable progress has been made on network quality. Expenditure on roads is however less than it needs to be, shortfalls in public resources only partially offset by increased private sector flows, and there has been no clear shift from investment to maintenance. Countries have not generally followed PROVIAL recommendations on road user based funding for maintenance. Greater success has been achieved in implementing the recommendations on contracting with considerable progress in the employment of performance-based contracting and the development of a range of options from CREMA style long term concessions to micro-enterprises for routine maintenance. A challenge will be pursue decentralization more actively as a means to address lagging network quality at sub-national level. For the covering abstract see ITRD E139491.
The weakness of traditional financial management is obvious increasingly in network economy,such as management means backward comparatively,budget control system imperfect,capital control ineffective,which will restrict the optimization of resource allocation.Correspondingly,network technique provides guarantee for business groups to establish centralized management model in finance.i.e.business groups can adapt to the requirement of network economic development and realize the reform,innovation and maximum of total profit via transferring the model of financial management from decentralized to centralized,strengthening the functions of supervising agency,centralized management of capital and limitation of right to financial personnel.
This book, Financing cities, emphasized case studies on different topics to look at the interactions of a range of variables and factors and to see how they fit together. Rather than require each case to follow the same format, the authors have structured their papers around the issues that matter most from their perspective in addressing the topic in hand. The first part of this book presents case studies describing the framework established at the national level to promote urban infrastructure finance while ensuring fiscal discipline and reviewing recent experience as well as future challenges. The subjects covered include the impact of political and fiscal decentralization, limitations on borrowing, managing moral hazard, the role of the financial sector, the achieving of the right balance between stringent controls and encouragement of local governments taking responsibility for fiscal discipline coupled with market discipline. The cases featured include three of the world's largest decentralized nations; together the five countries featured in the conference account for nearly a third of the world's urban population. Part I includes case studies for each of the five countries featured in the conference: Brazil (Chapter 1), China (Chapter 2), India (Chapter 3), Poland (Chapter 4) and South Africa (Chapter 5). Part II then shifts from the frameworks for fiscal discipline to urban infrastructure investments and the strategies used to mobilize investment funding. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the financing strategies for urban infrastructure in Shanghai and Brazil respectively. The next two chapters focus on specialized intermediaries offering urban infrastructure finance in cities. One is a fully private venture in South Africa (Chapter 9) while the other, in Tamil Nadu, India (Chapter 8), is a spin-off of a government fund with minority private ownership. The final two chapters examine experiences with two other mechanisms for mobilizing funding for infrastructure investments from the private sector, land leasing and sales (Chapter 10) and private participation in infrastructure operations (Chapter 11).
Abstract: Cryptography is an important tool in the design and implementation of electronic voting schemes for it provides the property of verifiability, which is not provided in the traditional voting. But in the real life, neither can most voters understand the profound theory of cryptographic e-voting nor can they perform the complicated cryptographic computation. An e-voting system is presented in this paper to leverage the use of cryptography between theory and practice. It combines the advantages of Moran-Naor’s voting scheme and voting schemes based on homomorphic encryption. It makes use of cryptographic techniques, but it hides the details of cryptographic computation from voters. Voters can be convinced that the ballot is cast as intended. The tally can be verified in public. Compared with Moran-Naor’s voting scheme, the new system has three advantages: the ballots can be recovered when the voting machine breaks down, the costly cut-and-choose zero-knowledge proofs for shuffling votes made by the voting machine are avoided and the partial tally result in each voting machine is kept secret. Key words: electronic voting, homomorphic commitment, homomorphic encryption, threshold decryption 1.
2 source records
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This dissertation presents a System-Level Timing Analysis (SLTA) methodology and a micro-architectural optimization framework for use within hardware compilation. As the EDA abstraction layer of preference is raised to Electronic System Level (ESL), the focus is on describing systems using Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) [CG03, Pas02, Ede06], which is amenable to high-level synthesis. The proposed SLTA methodology and ESL optimization framework is designed to complement TLM-based synthesis flows by analyzing the sequential dependency behavior of system-level transactions. Using this knowledge, control-path-altering, micro-architecture optimizations are applied iteratively on a well-defined hardware Intermediate Representation (IR). There are two over-arching contributions in this dissertation.
First, we describe an Intermediate Representation (IR) as a valuable addition to the infrastructure of a hardware compiler. The IR captures data/control dependencies in the source program as well as resource dependencies of the underlying circuit architecture. The IR is an abstraction of transaction events in the TLM but is also linked to the RTL control-path signals that implement the TLM specification and communication protocols. By analyzing the properties of the IR, a set of timing entities is produced that characterize system-level performance. The goal of these timing entities is to characterize the system's sequential execution attributes. This is defined by cycle time [Bur91, NK94, IP95, Das04], or initiation interval [RG81, Lairn88], which specifies the time interval between successive iterations of hardware execution. Instead of representing system-level timing as a solitary number (cycle time), we propose using a set of fine-grained building blocks that describe various aspects of system-level timing. The primary building block is slack, which is defined as the time difference between the firing of a given event and when the event is used in a transaction downstream. Using slack, we define the Global Critical Path. (GCP) of the system as the longest path of zero slack (or critical) events. The GCP, in essence, traces the hardware events that directly contribute to the system-wide cycle time. A third entity, global slack, a derivative of both slack and the GCP, specifies how early an event is produced before it is used in a GCP transaction downstream. All three entities are recorded as annotations on the proposed IR, which enables the hardware compiler to easily make value judgments regarding the costs and benefits of local circuit transformations.
Second, we describe an ESL optimization framework built on top of the proposed IR. The framework is designed to support optimizations that apply IR-to-IR transformations. We also describe a fast update function that can re-compute changes to the system-level timing entities when a given IR-to-IR transformation is applied. This enables the development of optimization algorithms and design exploration tools that can scan the design space by iteratively applying a series of quality-enhancing local transformations. The main benefit of this approach is that it separates high-level synthesis from high-level optimizations. Thus, the hardware compiler can evaluate different circuit architectures before committing to one that will be synthesized. Since the GCP, slack and global slack are excellent indicators of system-level performance, they help in focusing the optimization and/or exploration effort toward circuit sub-systems that are most critical for performance (or to sub-systems that are most non-critical if the objective is power/area minimization). A key ingredient that makes this framework practical and scalable is the ability to efficiently update the timing entities in response to structural changes introduced by optimizations. The proposed linear-time update forms the glue that allows the re-use of the timing entities without having to re-analyze system-level performance.
The dissertation makes the following claims: (1) slack and GCP sufficiently and accurately model a fine-grained representation of cycle time; (2) computing the changes in cycle time after applying a circuit transformation is linear in the size of the design; (3) several existing circuit optimizations can be re-formulated to use this methodology, resulting in the development of efficient, quadratic-time, heuristic algorithms to solve hard optimization problems.
We present a proof of concept by embedding the SLTA methodology and ESL, optimization framework within CASH (Compiler for Application Specific Hardware), a hardware compiler that synthesizes asynchronous circuit implementations from C programs. Three pipeline optimizations were applied in series to improve energy efficiency: slack matching, operation chaining and hybrid latch synthesis. Experimental results from using the SLTA framework to optimize several media processing kernels using these transformations reveal that the average energy-delay and energy-delay-area products improve by about 1.44x and 2x respectively, with peak improvements of 5.3x and 18.5x respectively. Further, using the timing update algorithm instead of a complete timing re-analysis between optimizations reduces the total optimization loop runtime from several hours down to a few seconds with a duality degradation of less than 1% in terms of energy-delay, area and performance.