This study is centered on two concepts of central and local government: cooperation-control, centralization-decentralization. Through the degree on the self autonomy in the Korean Participatory Government, this study analyzed the relationship between central and local government. Viewing from management perspective, especially focused on the ordinance, function, organization, financing, it is revealed that responsible autonomous foundation has not yet been laid out. In order to establish the decentralized cooperative relationship, it is necessary to eliminate the one way control system from central government to local government which is unsuitable to the vision of Participatory Government, and the interdependent horizontal relationship is needed. Also there is no doubt that central and local governments will play a stronger role in our society in the years ahead. On the issue of rebalancing the central-local relations, it is truly time for a change.
European patents on a number of therapeutic biopharmaceutical agents will expire in 2004 and 2005. These agents and others recently past patent expiry include recombinant human growth hormone, alpha and gamma interferons, streptokinase, interleukin (IL)-2, insulin, glucerase, plasminogen activator, granulocyte colony-stimulating factor, and erythropoietin. Patent expiry for these products opens the door for the development and marketing of generic versions of these drugs, also known as biosimilars or follow-on biologics. The successful introduction of biosimilars into the pharmaceutical market will depend on the establishment of regulatory guidelines that have been adapted for approval of these generic biopharmaceutical agents. Recombinant therapeutic proteins differ significantly from classic small drug molecules, such as diazepam and prednisone, in their size, molecular heterogeneity and complexity, and methods of manufacture. In contrast with classic drugs, it is currently impossible to fully predict the biological characteristics of therapeutic proteins using physicochemical methods. For these reasons, guidelines for demonstrating bioequivalence of biosimilars with approved innovative products must be specially tailored to the characteristics of these molecules. The criteria for regulatory approval of biosimilars differ from those used to evaluate follow-on versions of classic drugs. During the revision of European (EU) legislation concerning medicinal products, the controversial regulatory and patent issues for marketing of biosimilars led to revamping of the regulations by the European Parliament in May of 2004 [1,2]. The revised regulations provide a clearer and more expedient route for developing and testing generic products within the period of protected data exclusivity (8 years for the reference product), and guidance regarding when generics may be sold following expiration of the reference product patent. There is much at stake in establishing regulatory guidelines for approval of biosimilars in terms of the total potential market for these products (approximately US $20 billion, or 24 billion Euros, by 2005) [3]. In addition to the standard demonstration of safety and efficacy, development and marketing approval of biosimilars are complicated by several factors, including: the technically complex methods required to manufacture and characterize biopharmaceutical proteins; susceptibility of these proteins to physical and chemical degradation during and after manufacture; and the observed immunogenicity of several approved biologics such as recombinant streptokinase [4], interferon-beta [5], GM-CSF [6], hirudin, interleukin (IL)-2 [7] and, more recently, epoetin alfa [8], which can lead to neutralization of these biologic agents and lack of efficacy or sometimes severe, adverse reactions. Immunologic safety will be an increasingly important criterion for evaluating the safety of biosimilars, especially in light of the recently observed increase in cases of antibody (Ab)-mediated pure red cell aplasia (PRCA) [9,10]. These cases have been associated primarily with subcutaneous (SC) administration of epoetin alpha (Eprex®, Ortho Biologics LLC, Manati, Puerto Rico), which was reformulated in 1998. Establishing proper and comprehensive guidelines for biosimilars is further complicated by the absence of clear-cut criteria and methods for determining their potential immunogenicity. Preclinical in vitro or in vivo surrogate markers of immunogenicity are not always available or representative of immune responses in patients [11]. Therefore, the definitions for bioequivalence of biosimilars with approved products will likely differ from definitions used for bioequivalence of classic drugs [12,13]. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries have different viewpoints from generic drug manufacturers on what is required for evaluating the safety and efficacy of biosimilars for regulatory approval [14,15]. Innovator companies explain that the complexities of manufacture and process validation, the intrinsic heterogeneity of biopharmaceutic products, and the potential immunogenicity of products manufactured by different processes preclude reliance on in vitro surrogates of activity alone for evaluating substitutability of biosimilars [14]. For these reasons, innovator companies maintain that full-fledged clinical trials are required to demonstrate the substitutability and safety/efficacy of biosimilar products. In contrast, manufacturers of biogeneric products argue that surrogate in vitro or in vivo assays that mimic the absorption kinetics and dose–response of reference drugs may be sufficient to demonstrate bioequivalence of biosimilars. These assays can be performed in the absence of large, controlled clinical studies, which are required for approval of pioneer drugs [10,15]. The situation with demonstrating immunologic safety is more problematic, especially with products with a low incidence of immunogenicity. The European Committee for Human Medicinal Products (CHMP) states that the potential immunogenicity of biosimilar products should be evaluated at the preclinical and clinical stages using validated state-of-art techniques, including animal models, physicochemical methods, and computer algorithms [12,16]. However, the lack of standardization of assays for detecting Abs against therapeutic proteins is a major hurdle because of differences in procedure and calibration, assay sensitivity, and other factors [16]. For example, the potential immunogenicity of erythropoiesis-stimulating agents (ESAs), including epoetin, is confounded by the undefined mechanism of the Ab response to these recombinant proteins, with respect to contributing product characteristics or any predisposing patient factors. There is a need for an appropriate in vivo model to fully evaluate the immunogenicity of new ESAs or biosimilars because of the potential development of an immunopathology such as Ab-mediated PRCA [10]. Such a deleterious consequence of treatment underscores the need to unequivocally demonstrate immunologic safety for ESAs and their biosimilars in addition to the classic parameters of safety, efficacy, and bioequivalence [11]. The ultimate proof of immunologic safety of ESAs and other therapeutic proteins will come from results of clinical studies and post marketing analyses [10]. In conclusion, the development of Ab-mediated PRCA in patients receiving reformulated erythropoietin underscores the problems associated with maintaining safety and efficacy of approved products following changes in manufacture. Alterations in protein structure or stability can result in serious reactions in patients or loss of therapeutic efficacy. For these reasons, rigorous criteria must be established by the medical, manufacturing, and regulatory communities to protect patients from adverse immune responses to therapeutic recombinant proteins, in general, and biosimilars in particular. These same criteria will also help to establish standards of manufacture and process validation that can be used by all biopharmaceutical manufacturers. Ultimately, these criteria will ensure the safety and efficacy of biosimilars while reducing the potential for immune neutralization of therapeutic proteins or severe treatment-related complications.
Because classical Maxwellian electromagnetism has been one of the cornerstones of physics during the past century, experimental tests of its foundations are always of considerable interest. Within that context, one of the most important efforts of this type has historically been the search for a rest mass of the photon. The effects of a nonzero photon rest mass can be incorporated into electromagnetism straightforwardly through the Proca equations, which are the simplest relativistic generalization of Maxwell's equations. Using them, it is possible to consider some far-reaching implications of a massive photon, such as variation of the speed of light, deviations in the behaviour of static electromagnetic fields, longitudinal electromagnetic radiation and even questions of gravitational deflection. All of these have been studied carefully using a number of different approaches over the past several decades. This review attempts to assess the status of our current knowledge and understanding of the photon rest mass, with particular emphasis on a discussion of the various experimental methods that have been used to set upper limits on it. All such tests can be most easily categorized in terms of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial approaches, and the review classifies them as such. Up to now, there has been no conclusive evidence of a finite mass for the photon, with the results instead yielding ever more stringent upper bounds on the size of it, thus confirming the related aspects of Maxwellian electromagnetism with concomitant precision. Of course, failure to find a finite photon mass in any one experiment or class of experiments is not proof that it is identically zero and, even as the experimental limits move more closely towards the fundamental bounds of measurement uncertainty, new conceptual approaches to the task continue to appear. The intrinsic importance of the question and the lure of what might be revealed by attaining the next decimal place are as strong a draw on this question as they are in any other aspect of precise tests of physical laws.
By employing the methodology developed by the OECD the paper assesses the degree of revenue decentralization in Russia in comparison with other post-communist European countries. The paper provides theoretical arguments underpinning fiscal decentralization, analyzes the composition of subnational government revenues, the level of regional and local tax autonomy and types of intergovernmental fiscal transfers. The analysis presents the composition of revenues depending on the degree of subnational and local government control. In comparison with other transition countries fiscal decentralization in Russia is relatively low. It is concluded that Russia's public finance reform has not progressed towards providing greater fiscal autonomy for regional and local governments.
In this paper, we present a fair non-repudiation protocol as an early effort to achieve fairness in the wireless environment. We propose a pseudo-resilient channel to satisfy the common assumption of fair protocols. We also use the RSA-based convertible signature schemes and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs to reduce bandwidth and computation consumptions.
What is best strategy to reach the Millennium Development Goal of basic education for all will depend on the specific country context.This paper introduces an input-output method to estimate the financial inputs required to achieve the MDG for primary education and an additional target of enhancing access to secondary education. 1As such the approach followed here is not new, but the innovative element is combining educational demand and supply variables considering both cost dimensions and quality of services as measured among others through test scores (outcomes), quality of school inputs and the nature of delivery of services (privatepublic, centralized or decentralized).We take the following analytical steps: (i) define a production function for specific education outputs (enrolment), (ii) isolate the main determinants of such output (considering both demand and supply factors); (iii) estimate costs per unit of producing such output, and -based on estimated elasticity's and unit costs ensuing from the education production function -(iv) calculate the financing needs of reaching key education goals.We find that determinants of access to schooling are significantly different for urban and rural and for poor and non-poor children.Furthermore, the determinants also differ when referring to access to primary or secondary education.Quality of school inputs does matter in all cases though to varying degree.Particularly, class size, shares of trained teachers and greater school autonomy (in hiring teachers and managing schools) are relevant.Quality of education outcomes, i.e. test scores, while very poor in Ecuador does not seem to influence school enrolment.The upshot is that with a more cost-effective use of resources for primary education, the MDG target of 100% of net primary school enrolment in urban areas is within reach in a period of 4 to 5 years at virtually no additional budgetary cost.Meeting the target for the rural population seems more complicated.In secondary education, important progress can be made to reach a target of 70% net enrolment (with important expected positive externalities for economic growth) by enhancing the share of trained teachers, expand coverage of school demand subsidies and improve class infrastructure.This target is within reach for the poor and non-poor urban population by 2007 at an estimated additional cost of 1 Vos is with the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague and the Free University Amsterdam.Ponce is with FLACSO-Ecuador and is also a PhD candidate at ISS.
Vijayalakshmi Atluri, Soon Ae Chun, Pietro Mazzoleni
Workflow systems are gaining importance as an infrastructure for automating inter-organizational interactions, such as those in Electronic Commerce. In such an environment, a centralized Workflow Management System is not desirable because: (i) it can be a performance bottleneck, and (ii) the system s are inherently distributed, heterogeneous, and autonomous in nature. Decentralized execution of inter-organizational workflows may raise a number of security issues including those related to conflict-of-interest among competing organizations. In this paper, we first provide an approach to realize decentralized workflow execution, in which the workflow is divided into partitions, called self-describing workflows, and handled by a light weight workflow management component, called workflow stub, located at each organizational agent. Second, we identify the limitations of the traditional workflow model with respect to expressing the various types of join dependencies and extend the traditional workflow model suitably. Distinguishing the different types of dependencies among tasks is essential in the efficient execution of self-describing workflows. Finally, we recognize that placing the task execution agents that belong to the same conflict-of-interest class in one self-describing workflow may lead to unfair, and in some cases, undesirable results, akin to being on the wrong side of the Chinese wall. Therefore, to address the conflict-of-interest issues that arise in competitive business environments, we propose a decentralized workflow Chinese wall security model. We propose a restrictive partitioning solution to enforce the proposed model.
School finance drives policy and practice in public education, yet most citizens and some practitioners know very little about how their schools are funded. The purpose of this article is to address the financial issues related to urban schools and the challenge of balancing expectations of higher levels of education with the values of equity, efficiency, and economic growth. Section 1 discusses the social context of school finance in the United States, including urban education issues. This section will discuss equity issues in the context of the history of school finance litigation in the United States. Section 1 will also show how the school funds are spent. Section 2 will discuss traditional funding structures and state funding policies. Section 3 will discuss decentralization and site-based budgeting, including the use of charters, vouchers, and contracts. The conclusion will explore how restructuring school budgeting can improve instruction and student performance.
We give a sufficient condition for a family of pseudoresolvents in a Banach algebra to be trivially zero. As an important consequence, we provide an alternate proof of the classical result that the spectrum of any linear bounded operator on a Banach space is nonempty. The proofs are elementary, requiring only a basic knowledge of real and complex analysis.
The authors examine the history of efforts to introduce fiscal discipline amongst the member countries of the European Union, both before and after the Stability and Growth Pact, and make recommendations as to issues that must be considered with regard to any measures taken to modify the provisions of the Pact. Key Words: European Union; European Council; European Central Bank; European Council for Social and Economic Affairs; EU Stability and Growth Pact; Maastricht Treaty; Fiscal Discipline. While the euro area's monetary policy is conducted by a single institution - the European Central Bank (ECB) - fiscal policy remains decentralized. When Europe's leaders agreed to form the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1989, they recognized the need for some form of fiscal coordination. Without coordination, the irresponsible policies of one member state could have a negative impact on the entire union, for example, by raising public debt. The Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), setting out regulations for the conduct of fiscal policy that reinforce the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty, was therefore agreed to by member states in 1997, nearly two years before stage three of the EMU, when exchange rates were locked together. The SGP consists of two regulations and a resolution agreed by the European Council to underpin the fiscal framework of the Maastricht Treaty. It combines discipline and flexibility by requiring countries to reach fiscal positions to balance or in surplus over the medium term (a reference to the underlying or structural fiscal position) and keep their actual deficits below 3 percent of GDP, except in the case of unusually large shocks. Member states submit annual plans - for public finances over the medium term. The Council offers opinions on them and, if necessary, delivers early warnings. Unless exceptional circumstances apply, the excessive-deficit procedure is initiated when a country's deficit exceeds 3 percent of GDR. The procedure starts with a recommendation to reduce the deficit, moves on to enhanced fiscal surveillance, and culminates in the imposition of financial sanctions. If no action is taken along the way, sanctions can be imposed within 10 months of the procedure being initiated. If excessive deficits persist, sanctions can be converted into fines after two years. But seven years later, the SGP is mired in controversy. Prance and Germany - the euro area's largest economies, founding members of the European Union (EU), and the main driving force behind the creation of EMU - arc likely to breach the pact's deficit ceiling of 3 percent of GDP for the third year in a row. In November 2003, the European Commission - the official guardian of the EU's treaties - recommended that both France and Germany be placed under enhanced fiscal surveillance, one step short of actual sanctions. However, the Council of Economic and Financial Affairs (ECOFIN) - the decision-making forum for the EU's ministers of finance and economics - suspended the excessive-deficit procedures against the two countries, effectively sidestepping the SGP's rules and leaving the pact in a legal limbo. As it was unclear by what authority the Council acted when it decided not to take action, the European Commission took the case to the European Court of Justice. Not surprisingly, the SGP is increasingly becoming a lightning rod for pundits debating its economic and political merits. Critics argue that besides being hard to enforce, the pact promotes procyclical fiscal policies (that is, it forces countries to reduce deficits during cyclical downturns) and lacks a rationale for its medium-term goal of bringing the underlying fiscal deficit close to balance or into surplus. Supporters, however, think the pact should be credited with controlling Europe's fiscal deficits. They also point to the countercyclical behavior of fiscal deficits since the introduction of the euro and note that most member countries have managed to live up to their commitments under the pact. …
Armando Arredondo, Emanuel Orozco, Gerardo Mora, René Ramos · 5 authors
Abstract The main objective of this study was to identify trends and results associated with health financing and governance indicators in the context of health systems reform. Evaluative research integrating qualitative and quantitative analysis was performed. The three Latin American countries of Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru were selected as the universe of study. The research methodology had two main phases. In the first phase, the study referred to secondary sources of data and documents to obtain information about the following variables: type of decentralization implemented, source of finance, funds of financing, providers, final use of resources and mechanisms for resource allocation. In the second phase, the study referred to primary data collected in a survey of key personnel from the health sectors of each country. Results showed that evidence reported in all five financing and governance indicators may identify the major weaknesses and strengths in health financing. In addition, there was a lack of human resources trained in health economics who can implement changes, a lack of financial resources independence between the local and central levels, negative behavior of the main macro-economic variables, and difficulty in developing new financing alternatives. However, other results showed that there was a sharing between the central and local government levels in the financing health services, the implementation of new organizational structures for the follow-up of financial changes at the local level, the development and implementation of new financial allocation mechanisms taking into account efficiency and equity principles, new technique of a per-capita adjustment factor corrected at the local health needs, and the increase of financing contributions from households and local levels of government. Introduction New health financing policies and changes in health financing indicators after decentralization are the principal elements of health sector reform in a number of countries. It has increasingly been recognized, at both national and international levels, that management, financing, planning, and policy functions in the health sector may be carried out more efficiently and effectively if they are decentralized, transferring responsibility to a local level. However, there is growing concern that decentralization has failed to achieve the objectives for which it was introduced and can indeed have effects that limit health sector development (Hurley, 1995; Arredondo, 2000, 2005). The relationship between decentralization and financial changes in the process of health care reform in Latin American countries is complex. Analysis of recent attempts at decentralization and financial changes requires an understanding of the contradictory forces at work within the political systems, particularly, bureaucracies of Latin American countries (De Souza et al, 2002). In these countries strong centralizing tendencies coexist with particular forms of bureaucratic decentralization (Arredondo, 1997). Centralizing tendencies remain predominant, with decentralizing forces both being caused by and serving to reinforce them. The type and degree of decentralization is strongly influenced by dynamic financial aspects, including sources of finance, agents, providers, final destination and mechanisms of financial allocation at the local, regional and national level. Local governments usually have authority to levy taxes. However, in developing countries, much of the national revenue comes from indirect taxes, especially customs and excise revenues, while buoyant local sources of revenue are hard to find (Collins, 1994; Abel-Smith, 1988). The local governments in these countries are often by necessity heavily dependent on grants from the central government. In addition, governments often retain central control over finance in order to promote geographical equity. The sources for financing local government may therefore not differ significantly from those of local offices of central ministries, though the way the grant is made is likely to differ (Quentin, 2004). …
Efficient general secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols were previously proposed, and the combination with the efficient auction circuits achieves the efficient sealed-bid auctions with the full privacy and correctness. However, the combination requires that each bidder submits ciphertexts of bits representing his bid, and their zero-knowledge proofs. This cost amounts to about 80.multi-exponentiations in usual case that the bid size is 20 bits (i.e. about 1,000,000 bid prices). This paper proposes sealed-bid auction protocols based on the efficient MPC protocols, where a bidder can submit only a single ciphertext. The bidder's cost is a few multi-exponentiations, and thus the proposed protocols are suitable for mobile bidders. A novel technique for the realization is a bit-slicing conversion by multiple servers, where a single ciphertext for a bid is securely converted into ciphertexts of bits representing the bid.
Johanna Etner, Meglena Jeleva, Pierre‐André Jouvet
This article study the impact of risk perception on environmental policy. The environmental quality is uncertain and can be improved by voluntary contributions. We introduce then an heterogeneity in individuals' risk perceptions. In this context, the social optimum can be decentralized by tax financed government subsidies to private provision. We distinguish the case of a government who represents perfectly agents' preferences from the case of a government with its own risk preferences. In the two cases, we show that neutrality still holds
OBJECTIVE: To assess the equity and fairness of the Mexican health system reform that occurred in the late 1990's. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The Mexican reform process was evaluated using the benchmark-system designed by Daniels et al. This benchmark system was adapted to the Mexican setting by adding specific indicators. A documentary review of the Mexican reform process was conducted to score its performance for each benchmark. RESULTS: Except for housing and nutrition components, the reform included few actions related to health determinants. For health care, the main reform initiatives were those related to extending the coverage of essential health services and decentralizing health care provision to the states. Reform initiatives included few activities related to fair financing, tiering, emphasis on second and third level care, accountability, and transparency. CONCLUSIONS: The late nineties reform of the Mexican health system had some positive effect on access of the poor to health care and administrative efficiency, but little impact on fair financing, quality of care, and democratic governance. The English version of this paper is available at: http://www.insp.mx/salud/index.html.
For a variety of reasons, many developing countries especially since the 1990s have embarked on programmes of democratic decentralization that are aimed at creating local self-governing systems that are democratic, relatively autonomous and effective in delivering services.Finding independent sources of financing for these emerging, locally based organs of governance has been one of the central challenges that confront these efforts in most countries.The literature suggests that sources of independent local government revenue are few in poor countries.As a result, most countries design decentralization programmes that depend heavily on intergovernmental transfers from national to local governments.Given widespread poverty that exists in most developing countries, this is a crucial strategy.However, the problem is that many central governments are engulfed in a systemic financial crisis and are desperately exploring strategies for reducing their expenditure commitments.One outcome is that revenue transfers are often irregular or fall much below the levels of expenditure decentralization, leading to serious fiscal gaps at the local level.Even where transfers are adequate and reliable, a fiscal regime which compels local actors to depend so heavily on central financial arrangements for practically all of their expenditure requirements undermines the development of lateral (local state-citizen) rather than vertical (central-local state) relations within the state, with serious implications for public participation and effective accountability.In the meantime, cities of developing countries continue to grow phenomenally in a way that makes conventional strategies for financing urban infrastructures unsustainable.Many analysts view this rapid urbanization as fatally aggravating the problem of urban/local governance.This paper suggests a different and more positive view.It reviews the literature which concedes that property taxation remains largely untapped and might indeed be progressive in developing countries.This literature highlights mainly the technical constraints to progress-assessment, valuation and collection.In contrast, this paper contends that the tax suffers from a combination of political and technical factors where the latter are dependent not independent variables.The paper undertakes an analysis of the key stakeholders in implementing successful property taxation policies based on research conducted in four countries-India, Nigeria, Republic of South Africa and Zimbabwe in the early 1990s.The paper suggests that willingness, opportunity and capacity remain critical factors and demonstrates how opposition to the tax can be overcome by strategic partnerships between central and local governments, public and private and domestic and external actors.
This paper examines the concept and practice of community participation in World Bank-supported health sector reforms in Asia, and how far such participation has strengthened accountability with regard to provision of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services. It argues that the envisaged scope of community participation within a majority of reforms in Asia has been limited to programme management and service delivery, and it is occurring within the boundaries of priorities that are defined through non-participatory processes. Setting up of community health structures, decentralization and community financing are three important strategies used for promoting participation and accountability within reforms. The scant evidence on the impact of these strategies suggests that marginalized groups and sexual and reproductive rights based groups are poorly represented in the forums for participation, and that hierarchies of power between and amongst health personnel and the public play out in these forums. Community financing has not lead to enhanced service accountability. As a result of the above limitations, community participation in health sector reforms has rarely strengthened accountability with respect to provision of comprehensive SRH services. In this context, rights (including sexual and reproductive) based groups and researchers need to engage with design, monitoring and evaluation of health sector reforms, both from inside as participants and outside as pressure groups. Participation contracts enhancing powers of civil society representatives, quotas for participation (for women, other marginalized groups and rights-based organizations), and investment in capacity building of these stakeholders on leadership and sexual reproductive rights and health are pre-requisites if participation is to lead to health and SRH service accountability. Community participation and service accountability hence requires more and not less investment of resources by the state.
Advocates of health system reform are calling for, among other things, decentralized, autonomous managerial and financial control, use of contracting and incentives, and a greater reliance on market mechanisms in the delivery of health services. The family planning and sexual health (FP&SH) sector already has experience of these. In this paper, we set forth three typical means of service provision within the FP&SH sector since the mid-1900s: independent not-for-profit providers, vertical government programmes and social marketing programmes. In each case, we present the context within which the service delivery mechanism evolved, the management techniques that characterize it and the lessons learned in FP&SH that are applicable to the wider debate about improving health sector management. We conclude that the FP&SH sector can provide both positive and negative lessons in the areas of autonomous management, use of incentives to providers and acceptors, balancing of centralization against decentralization, and employing private sector marketing and distribution techniques for delivering health services. This experience has not been adequately acknowledged in the debates about how to improve the quality and quantity of health services for the poor in developing countries. Health sector reform advocates and FP&SH advocates should collaborate within countries and regions to apply these management lessons.
Standard watermarking schemes suffer from a major problem: They require to reveal security critical information to potentially untrusted parties, when proving the presence of a watermark to these parties. Zero-knowledge watermark detection is a promising means to overcome this problem and to improve the security of digital watermarking schemes in the context of various applications: it allows to cryptographically conceal the information required for the detection of a watermark and to prove the presence of the hidden watermark by efficient zero-knowledge proof systems.However, concealing the watermark prevents the verifying party from performing additional checks on the watermark, e.g., on its probability distribution, which may be required for certain applications. This is a limitation in the use of zero-knowledge watermark detection and we present several strategies to overcome this issue.Furthermore, we propose concrete and practical protocols, which pursue two promising strategies: the first strategy is to prove in zero-knowledge that a concealed watermark suffices a certain desired distribution, whereas the second strategy is to interactively and verifiably generate watermarks that suffice the desired distribution.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Smart play-out is a powerful technique for executing live sequence charts (LSCs). It uses verification techniques to help run a program, rather than to prove properties thereof. We extend smart play-out to cover a larger set of the LSC language features and to deal more efficiently with larger models. The extensions cover two key features of the rich version of LSCs, namely, time and forbidden elements. The former is crucial for systems with time constraints and/or time-driven behavior, and the latter allows specifying invariants and contracts on behavior. Forbidden elements can also help reduce the state space considered, thus enabling smart play-out to handle larger models.
This study attempts to provide some applications for local government decentralization under the circumstance of public reform. Traditionally the innovation of government focused on to develop some new techniques and criteria but it is more important thing to divide the power between central and local government for the developed national system. Although the need for decentralization of government had prevailed in Korea for long time, we are witness of the unchanged system. In spite of its desirability of decentralization of structure, staffing and financing etc., changing for decentralization is not easy. Now I think it is necessary we have to prepare the way of decentralization by way of compariso with the nations which had overcame the diffioulties for decentralization. Italy is an advanced one had achieved decentralization with lots of innate d especially its decentralized regional development strategy may apply to us. Last I'd like to say that decentralization itself is political change. So before advance of political system, decentralization can not go up anymore.