Based on Harn抯 digital signature scheme and zero-knowledge proof, an authentication access control scheme for information protection system is presented in this paper. The scheme is safer than previously proposed one. In the scheme, two-way authentication may be done between a user and the system without exposing their secret information, and their sharing secret is used for authenticating the requesting user not to illegitimatimately access the protected file. The scheme can perform the access operation in dynamic environments, such as change access privileges and insert /delete users or files without implicating any user抯 secret key.
A new multiple secrets sharing scheme, based on the intractability of the discrete logarithm (DL) and the RSA encryption algorithm is presented, in which the participants' shadows remain secret and can be reused, even if all subshadows are made public. Meanwhile, by using a zero-knowledge proof protocol, the validity verification of shadow and subshadow is also provided to prevent both dealer cheating and other participant cheating, and any freely given secrets without pre-computation by dealer can be reconstructed. The scheme can be applied to many areas such as conference key distribution, secure multi-part-computation, threshold signature etc.
In this paper we examine the role of Identification Protocols in the field of Cryptography. Firstly, the rationale behind the need for Identification Protocols is discussed. Secondly, we examine, in detail, challenge-response protocols, based upon zero-knowledge proofs, that form a subset of Identification Protocols in general. Thirdly, the mathematical tools necessary for the understanding of how these protocols work is given. Finally, we discuss four main Identification Protocols: Fiat-Shamir, Feige-Fiat-Shamir, Schnorr and Guillou- Quisquater. This discussion includes the theory, practical examples and the security aspects of each protocol.
T he National Education Program states that creating distance between private and public education is not its intention, nevertheless, the scheme it has adopted, inherited from previous governments, discriminates private higher education and has monopolized education surveillance through the Secretariat of Public Education. Such task must be in the hands of the civil society and in its capacity to accredit self-financed higher education institutions, with the same autonomy and scope as those of public universities, the relationship between the civil society and the government will remain unchanged in the Program. It will still perceive the public university as a decentralized entity created, financed and ruled by a Hegelian State and, at the same time, it will still see the private university as if it had a governmental concession to render a public service to be academically controlled by the State. This posture inhibits the undertaking of actions by universities because the Program has chosen not to analyze the prevailing behavior.
In this paper we analyze the optimal degree of centralization for the supply of public goods. We identify the reliance on an exclusion mechanism as a central feature of the decentralized provision of public goods. An exclusion mechanism induces a contest between users of the public goods who want to free ride and the providers who want to exclude free riding. This contest explains the costs of decentralization. A centralized contribution does not rely on an exclusion mechanism to finance the public goods but on taxation which induces different types of transaction costs. A comparison of the relevant distortions explains the optimal degree of centralization of the supply of public goods.
Vanesa Daza, Javier Herranz, Carles Padró, Germán Sáez
In [16], Naor, Pinkas and Reingold introduced schemes in which some groups of servers distribute keys among a set of users in a distributed way. They gave some specic proposals both in the unconditional and in the computational security framework. Their computationally secure scheme is based on the Decisional DiÆe-Hellman Assumption. This model assumes secure communication between users and servers. Furthermore it requires users to do some expensive computations in order to obtain a key. In this paper we modify the model introduced in [16], requiring au-thenticated channels instead of assuming the existence of secure channels. Our model makes the user's computations easier, because most compu-tations of the protocol are carried out by servers, keeping to a more re-alistic situation. We propose a basic scheme, that makes use of ElGamal cryptosystem, and that ts in with this model in the case of a passive ad-versary. We then add zero-knowledge proofs and veriable secret sharing to prevent from the action of an active adversary. We consider general structures (not only the threshold ones) for those subsets of servers that can provide a key to a user and for those tolerated subsets of servers that can be corrupted by the adversary. We nd necessary combinatorial conditions on these structures in order to provide security to our scheme. 1
Abstract. Artin’s braid groups currently provide a promising background for cryptographical applications, since the first cryptosystems using braids were introduced in [2, 3, 18] (see also [22]). A variety of key agreement protocols based on braids have been described, but few authentication or signature schemes have been proposed so far. We introduce three authentication schemes based on braids, two of them being zero-knowledge interactive proofs of knowledge. Then we discuss their possible implementations, involving normal forms or an alternative braid algorithm, called handle reduction, which can achieve good efficiency under specific requirements. 1.
By way of concluding the section of Lolita dedicated to her supposed “precursor” (9), narrator Humbert Humbert informs his reader, “I broke her spell by incarnating her in another” (15). In his own account of his primal scene of arrested sexual development, Humbert thus makes available yet another layer of the novel's thoroughgoing critique of Freudian psycho-sexuality. For by offering a childhood “precursor” and the consequent need to replace the object of thwarted desire, Nabokov's novel so perfectly conforms to a Freudian explanation for Humbert's adult perversion as to render the reductiveness of that model inescapable.1 Yet, the incarnation of a substitute object of desire suggests both the utopian possibility of the cinematic adaptation of a novel and its greatest danger. For the cinematic incarnation may substitute for the original object of desire but only at the cost of “breaking the spell” of that which it replaces. The controversy surrounding the recent film version of Lolita directed by Adrian Lyne reveals the anxiety attendant to cinematic adaptation as the danger, to use Humbert's terms, of “eclipsing” a fictional “prototype” (40). Moreover, as it mirrors the language of erotic attachment dramatized in Nabokov's novel, the popular discourse addressing Lyne's film offers an alternative model of cinematic adaptation premised on perversion, here understood as the conflation of the aesthetic with the erotic in the articulation of desire. In this way, popular discourse returns to the scholarly conversation about cinematic “fidelity” to a literary “precursor” which it has routinely repressed: the implicit eroticism of its model. What is being described in ekphrasis is both a miracle and a mirage: a miracle because a sequence of actions filled with befores and afters such as language alone can trace seems frozen into an instant's vision, but a mirage because only the illusion of such an impossible picture can be suggested by the poem's words, (xvi-xvii) Miracle and mirage, ekphrasis is an “instant's vision,” an ideal wherein words create a verbal equivalent of the visual image. In the adaptation of novel into film, on the other hand, the word has temporal and conceptual priority, as the word “adaptation” itself confirms. Yet if the adaptation of a novel into film requires precisely the opposite movement of ekphrasis, it is, too, a “miracle and a mirage.” For to follow Krieger, in the cinematic adaptation, images aspire precisely to the “time-ridden and paradox-ridden character of texts” that ekphrasis struggles against (xv), and the miracle of re-incarnating the fictional precursor “in another” is the celluloid mirage promulgated under the aegis of “fidelity.” Perhaps because of the ways it thus reverses traditions of image-word translation, scholarship on the cinematic adaptation of literature tends to concentrate more on the distinctiveness of the two genres than on the relationship between them.2 Writers hone in on the problems of point of view and description as the key sites of conflict in film adaptations of novels. Similarly, they pinpoint the problem that emerges when the novel is itself about language, as is clearly the case with Nabokov's Lolita. The popular appraisals of the cinematic adaptations of Nabokov's novel reflect these sentiments, affirming that what is “lost” in the translation to screen is specific to verbal artistry. More pointedly, however, the popular discourse echoes the language of fidelity used by scholarship to characterize the relationship between a literary “precursor” and its cinematic incarnation. Fidelity criticism depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a simple, correct ‘meaning’ which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some cases violated or tampered with…. That is, the critic who quibbles at failures of fidelity is really saying no more than: ‘This reading of the original does not tally with mine and in these and these ways.‘ (8-9) The dangers of fidelity criticism, McFarlane implies here, lie in its tendencies to naturalize an interpretation and to sacralize the novelistic text.3 And yet, while the “near fixation on the issue of fidelity” has certainly “inhibited and blurred” the study of adaptation (McFarlane 194), it has also remained an under-examined trope. For embedded in the conversation about faithfulness lies a more complex theory of adaptation belied in the terms of the fidelity argument itself. As foregrounded in the controversy surrounding the latest cinematic incarnation of Lolita, contemporary popular culture regards the relationship between the novel and its cinematic adaptation, between word and image, as an essentially erotic one, subject to the same scandals and ambiguous redemptions of movie-star romance. The pages of Louis Giannetti's popular Introduction to Film textbook make manifest the latent scandal of filmic adaptation as it is articulated in its full complexity in the popular press. Here, the film student comes across three types of relationships between novels and films: the loose, the faithful, and the literal (387). Although adaptations of plays come closest, Giannetti tells his students, the “literal” is largely impossible. “In each case,” he writes, “The cinematic form inevitably affects the content of the literary original” (389). Dismissing the “literal” as unceremoniously as does Giannetti, popular media locates its controversies in distinguishing the “loose” from the “faithful.” In those controversies, the words “loose” and “faithful” recover the cultural connotations that Giannetti's film text suppresses. Like the “loose woman,” the loose film is a scandal, a violation or exploitation of the object of desire. Provocatively, what the debate surrounding Lyne's adaptation of Nabokov's novel makes visible is the stark differentiation popular culture draws between the exploitations of the “loose” and the desires that define the “perverse.” In the popular discourse, perversion is the mark of the faithful adaptation, while the scandal of the loose is identified in its pretensions to literally incarnate the precursor. Effectively, the false literal claim signals that erotic desires have distinguished themselves from aesthetic ones, and that they have taken priority over them. Nabokov's Lolita is, of course, no stranger to scandal. As the account of pedophile Humbert Humbert, Lolita has been called pornographic and censured as morally corrupt. Yet, for each of the charges against Lolita, there are equally emphatic defenses, both for its artistic and moral integrity. Much of the academic debate swirls around whether Humbert suffers a “moral development” in his story or not, around the seductive language of the novel, and around the confusion of ethics and aesthetics the novel presents to its readers.4 On the other hand, the cover of the most recent paperback version of Lolita still carries Vanity Fair's comment that the novel is “the only convincing love story of our century.” On the other side of the text of the novel, it includes Nabokov's anti-apologia for the novel. In it he playfully toes the decadent line, asserting that his novel should not to be mistaken for the “Literature of Ideas” but valued strictly for its attempt to achieve “aesthetic bliss” (314-315). Before the first page and after the last, then, Random House wraps the novel in the dual defense of love and art. While scholars present their elaborate analyses of Lolita's subtle morality, the marketers choose instead to let eros and art supercede questions of morality and ethical imperative. In this way, the packaging of the novel reproduces the conflation between aesthetic and erotic pleasure celebrated by Lolita's pedophiliac anti-hero. For, as one critic so aptly reminds Lolita's readers, Humbert's theory of art merges with his theory of perversion precisely in his explication of the “nymphet” (Wood 122). To identify the nymphet, one must have a particular aesthetic sensitivity. As Humbert details to his reader, “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently glowing in your subtle spine…, in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children” (17). “Artist,” “madman,” and aesthetically discerning observer, the “nympholept” confirms his perversion in the complete identification of his aesthetic with his erotic desire. Moreover, as Humbert places himself in the tradition of Dante, Virgil, Petrarch, and Poe, he implies that his perversion is not just evidence of his aesthetic sophistication but proof-perfect of his art (19). Ironically, then, insofar as Random House's paperback advertises Lolita as the fusion of eros and art, it recommends the book as an object of desire that conforms precisely to the definition of perversion provided by the pedophile in the body of the text. Echoing the marketing tactics of Random House, the pages of such journals as Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, and Premiere offer a popular discourse that implicitly theorizes cinematic adaptation as the successful blurring of aesthetic and erotic desires, that is, as perversion.5 Just as Random House reproduces and naturalizes the relations within the novel as relations between director and text, these journals faithfully reproduce the scandal over the novel's content as a scandal over the adaptation of the text: Lyne is to Humbert as the novel Lolita is to the character of the same name. Just as Lolita is the object of desire in Nabokov's novel, subject to Humbert's misinterpretation, so too, the novel is the innocent, if precocious, object of desire, vulnerable to the bumbling, misinterpretation, and exploitation of the cinematic medium. Like Humbert, Lyne is portrayed as an artist seeking to achieve “aesthetic bliss,” to remain “faithful” to his object of desire, to vindicate himself through his aesthetic prowess, and all the while, to occupy the position of the renegade, the free thinker, the smasher of taboos.6 Thus, as these journals defend and/or celebrate Lyne, they do so through their insistence that he “loves” the novel he seeks to incarnate in another form, and that such love legitimates and gives license to dissident nonconformity. Adrian is not by nature a literary type, but his feeling for the novel is exquisite. Any lover of Nabokov would naturally tremble before the notion of entrusting this most splendid of novels to the man who made Flashdance, and I did, too, when I first heard about the project. But I have long since stopped trembling. Adrian Lyne turns out to be a real artist. (Stringer-Hye 7) Here, while his “feeling for the novel is exquisite,” Adrian Lyne becomes a “real artist” not in spite of his Flashdance past but because of it; the artless erotica of Flashdance becomes art when combined with the “lover's” faithfulness to the object of desire. Premiere takes the identification of Lyne with Humbert to its logical conclusion. It is only because it renders the perversions of Humbert and Lyne as such perfect analogues for one another that the article is able to equate Humbert's desire for redemption at the end of the novel with Lyne's struggle to get a distributor for his adaptation. The close of the Premiere article has Lyne paraphrasing Humbert's words as he confronts his nemesis and alter-ego Quilty near the end the novel: “'You stole my redemption,' he says ruefully, 'my chance at redemption'” (6). Just as Humbert is thwarted by Quilty, his more pornographic rival, Lyne is cheated of his redemption by the more exploitative commercial interests of the film industry. Thus, in his portrayal in the popular press, Lyne becomes a faithful artist as he is equated with Humbert and his adaptation of the novel with the art of perversion. Lyne, it turns out, agrees with the critics' first take: “Nabokov's screenplay is as bad as his novel is magnificent,” he says. “He murdered his book.” To rectify the crime, Lyne treated the novel as a holy text, searching high and low for a writer who could capture the fragile elegance of Nabokov's original prose. (Harold Pinter and David Mamet each gave it whirl, but the job ultimately went to New Yorker scribe Stephen Schiff.) He looked far and wide for the perfect actor to play Humbert, talking with everyone from Anthony Hopkins (“Too old,” he says) to Warren Beatty (“He was intrigued for about five minutes”) to Hugh Grant, who wasn't intrigued even that long: “The trouble is, that's my favorite book of all time— I didn't want anyone to make a film of it,” Grant explains. In the end Lyne chose an actor with vast experience playing dirty old men (see Irons in 1992's Damage or this summer's Stealing Beauty). That left the ultimate challenge: finding a real-life nymphet to fill Lolita's saddle shoes. Nearly 2,000 girls auditioned, though Lyne says many were “30-year-olds trying to be Lolita.” For her audition, Swain, a freshman at Malibu High, sent a video of herself reading from the novel. “One moment she looked 9 years old,” rhapsodizes Lyne. “The next you could sense her sexuality.” (1-2) The beginning of the passage portrays Lyne in the now familiar role of the faithful lover, romantically attached to his aesthetic object and protective of its treatment. At the same time he is the renegade hero. Lyne's attack on Nabokov's screenplay and Kubrick's film allows him to pose as the man against two systems at once: the system that declares Kubrick's film a classic, and the censors that declare his film unacceptable.8 Portrayed as a man with a vision and aesthetic principles, Lyne totes his project from writer to writer, actor to actor, “high and low” and “far and wide.” Ironically— or perhaps appropriately— it is with the intrusion of Hugh Grant's parenthetical self-righteousness, that Lyne shifts from Humbert the aesthetic genius and accomplished practitioner of the perverse to scandalous exploiter. Suddenly, in comparison to Grant's more absolute veneration of the text, Lyne is the violator of his own sacred scriptures. Directly after Grant's moral assertion, Lyne and his film fall into a debauchery revealed in false claims to literalness. Now, Humbert is to be played by “an actor with vast experience playing dirty old men” and Lolita by “a real-life nymphet.” Eschewing the idea that the nymphet is itself Humbert's aesthetic construction and not a phenomenon in the objective world, Lyne now fully becomes the “dirty old man” himself, “rhapsodizing” over a 15-year old girl's simulation of a 9-year old's sexuality.9 The fall from artist to exploiter, from the faithfulness of perversion to the scandal of the loose adaptation, is a short one, here in Entertainment Weekly, the slip occurring exactly where the director moves from his claims for “faithfulness” to his specious claims to a “literal” adaptation. The false literal, best represented by the search for a “real-life” nymphet, is, inevitably, a degeneration into the “loose.” As she articulates her goals in Interpreting Film, Janet Staiger describes the project of reception studies more generally. She writes, “Through the hyperbole and contradictions surrounding discussion of this film, I hope to indicate something of what is at stake in the consideration of widely divergent reactions to a moving picture and how discourse surrounding film can indicate, symptomatically and inadvertently, ideological and hegemonic notions…” (124). My study here similarly seeks to reveal “ideological and hegemonic notions” through its study of the “hyperbole and contradictions” surrounding the discussion of a film. More pointedly, however, this essay attempts to distill a theory of cinematic adaptation from a popular discourse, a theory that challenges and supplements the dominant perspectives of scholarship on the same issue. For by linking perversion with fidelity, popular discourse alters the definition of faithfulness, insisting not only on the erotic attachments implicit in fidelity but also on the aesthetic transformations necessary for the faithful adaptation. Contrary to McFarlane's complaint, the strength of the fidelity argument here ends up to be its subjective and impressionistic character, insofar as it admits the aesthetic interventions involved in the maintenance of erotic attachment. The controversy surrounding Lolita's translations from page to screen suggests that the true scandal of cinematic adaptation is not the perversion of the text, but the denial of perversion, the pretense of literally incarnating the fictional precursor in another form.
Musgravian" externalities, formulated and illustrated by Musgrave in a 1966 paper on "social goods" are seen in this paper as one form of the interactions that occur between the components of a federation.The original formal apparatus is first exposed briefly.In that context, it is then considered whether and how alternative forms of federal structures are likely to achieve efficiency.Following suggestions from the literature, three such forms are dealt with: "planned", "cooperative" and "majority rule" federalisms.Next, the relevance of non cooperative equilibria is examined, in the light of an interpretation of them as "fall back" positions when disagreement occurs among members of a federation.Finally, the question is evoked of what economics and public finance may have to say on the limits to institutional decentralization, i.e. on the choice between federal, confederal and secessional structures.
From Introduction: "The first part of this paper describes the political changes, which induced technical and institutional evolutions of the RRD water-control systems, as the organization of the operation and even the technological nature of water-control systems, were influenced by national political choices. The second section describes the management framework and the financial organization of the RRD water-control systems. In-depth studies conducted at local level allow a better understanding of the present situation. Water management in the RRD appears to be strongly organized by the State into successive nested levels, from the central level of the Ministry of Agriculture to the local level of the cooperatives. This structure was challenged by the emergence of local pumping stations and water management practices, which superimposed themselves upon the officially existing structure. It is shown how the mismatch between administrative and hydraulic units adds to the complexity of the definition of both the financing and the management of hydraulic operations. The third and last section of the paper examines the financing of the different operators, the amount and the use of the water fees paid by farmers and questions the process of water management decentralization and privatization in the RRD."
War is hell, said General William T. Sherman at the end of the American Civil War. Nevertheless, war is alive and well, an unpleasant but faithful companion of the human species. But its face has changed. Modem technology offers new ways and means to conduct war, and new actors have entered the stage and pushed the traditional war between states into the background. Most importantly, however, wars will increasingly be fought under permanent global, and very public, scrutiny. My purpose here is to discuss some characteristics of future military operations as they emerged from personal experiences during the Kosovo air campaign. Under probable prevailing circumstances, military engagement and intervention to protect human beings will increasingly be done by coalitions rather than by individual countries. For the forseeable future, only the United States possesses the military capabilities needed to project power globally. Whether Washington will muster the political resolve to act alone or with allies can only be judged in light of the geopolitics when a crisis erupts. Moreover, the palpable reluctance in all Western nations to put their citizens into harm's way suggests that the hesitation to intervene will grow unless there is a clear and present danger or the national interest is clearly at stake. Experience over the last decade, however, suggests that regional as well as unilateral interventions will be viewed as illegal by many states and observers unless they are sanctioned by the United Nations or justified as legitimate self-defense. At the same time, a human rights culture is spreading inexorably. Some countries may be inclined to intervene and feel justified in doing so if blatant violations of human rights were met with indifference or, worse, a veto in the Security Council. The Gulf War was perhaps one of the first conflicts fought within a transformed world interconnected through almost instantaneous communications. Also, the domestic politicization of war in recent decades has intensified, and the war in Kosovo in 1999 marked the latest example of how military leaders are scrutinized and publicly held accountable for their actions. The air campaign is a case in point. In technical terms, the bombing in Kosovo was remarkably successful--so far, the most precise and lowest collateral damage air campaign in history. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) aircraft flew some 38,000 sorties without the loss of a single aircrew member in a seventy-eight-day campaign. Despite an efficient air defense system in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) and extremely unfavorable weather conditions more than half of the time, NATO lost only two aircraft. The Western alliance did not perform very well in its attacks against targets at the tactical level, but it achieved all strategic a nd operational objectives. The precision of the air strikes against most of the target categories at the strategic and operational level was superb. The fact that over 99 percent of all ordnance hit its target is clear proof for that claim. Nonetheless, it is highly questionable whether NATO could have successfully concluded the war if air power had been the only instrument. Yet the bombing campaign was harshly criticized by many so-called military experts--and the farther they were away from Europe, the harsher the criticism. The international family of pilots was quick to blame NATO for having forgotten the fundamentals--namely using military power decisively and relentlessly until a set political objective is achieved. One observer, retired Australian air marshal Roy Funnel, wrote, A much bolder and more concentrated use of military power was required, one that used massive force delivered from the air against targets of real significance to Milosevic, accompanied by public declaration--with associate ground forces mobilisation and deployments--that this was being done to prepare the way for a major ground offensive. …
Military and Defense Studies
European and Russian Geopolitical Military Strategies
AttheBorders oftheHuman.Beasts, Bodies andNatural Philosophy intheEarlyModern Period. Ed. by ERICA FUDGE, RUTH GILBERT, and SUSAN WISEMAN. Basingstoke: Macmillan;New York:St Martin'sPress. I999. xii + 369 pp. ?42.50. Perceiving Animals:HumansandBeastsin EarlyModernEnglish Culture.By ERICAFUDGE. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press. 1999. x + 232 pp. ?42.5o. Arguably, a mark of a good conference is the 'buzz' effect, by which every paper (including, naturally,one's own) seems linked in dynamic ways to every other, an amazing number of illuminating connections are made between sessions and papers, and no defence is needed for the conference theme, its statusbeing so selfevidentlybeyond doubt. All of which goes to prove exactly how importanta topic it is and how right one was to go along. With luck, such satisfyingeuphoria lasts one out of the conferencevenue and at leasthalfan hourinto thejourney home. Perhaps a collection of essaysthat requiressimilarconnective skillsof its readers should be effective likewise, but while it is possible to make links between the various contributionsto AttheBorders oftheHuman, I am less confidentof a resultantbuzz. According to the preface, this collection investigatesdefinitionsof 'the human' in the early modern period, focusing on three particular areas where the borders between human and non-human are most challenged: human/animal; organism/ machine; physical/non-physical. This is a wide and, it transpires, diffuse remit, resulting in a lack of conviction for the collection and a lurkingsuspicion that the attempt to bring several trendy but disparatetopics under the same umbrella has proved too much. A diffuse whole does not preclude good individual elements, however:therearecertainlysome good thingshere and some intriguingassociations for the reader to make. Brian Cummings reveals the flounderingat the borders of what is mental and what isphysical,exposed by discussionsof shame, which trouble the distinctionsbetween man and beast or Spaniard and Indian. Margaret Healy offers an interesting discussion of human/inhuman behaviour which reveals the porous natureof the body, liable to invasionby devilsor (ifone isverylucky)angels, but ends at the point where fuller discussion of effortsto control these boundaries would be appropriate.The resultantsense of curtailmentis also felt when reading Alan Stewart'sandJulie Sanders'scontributions.Stewart'sdiscussionof intellectual pursuit ('the humanities') as proof of proper human status, as opposed to the nobility's preferredpursuit of hunting, contains an interestingenough description of the one-upmanshipbetween Erasmusand Bude over poverty,but failsto develop its relation to the collection's theme. Sanders's piece on the role of the midwife suffers doubly. Not only it is abbreviated, but it also seems oddly out of place. Clearly there is something worthwhile to be said about the sleight of hand of Jonson's TheMagnetic Lady,by which the substitutionsof female control of the birth chamber and literal substitutionof children can be read as a commentary on the role of midwives and suspicion of male denigration of that role, but Sanders has neither the space not the context to develop it here and I was left wishing for the differentarenathatthisparticularpiece seems to deserve. Bacon's emphasison visualproof tenuouslylinksSanders'spiece to the restof the collection and is again exploited by Erica Fudge on vivisection, and Ruth Gilbert, who declares a focus on the anatomy/erotics boundary, but in fact more simply brings together a selection of hermaphroditetexts as viewing becomes voyeurism. Peter, the Wild Boy, is also subject to a gaze that hovers between voyeurism and scientific scrutinyas Michael Newton intelligentlypresents Defoe's intriguingand generallyoverlookedAlereNATUREDelineated and the questionof where the human begins is raised. SusanW^iseman and Mary Peace furtherexplore this topic in their 264 Reviews YES, 32, 2002 discussionsof apes and women respectively,both of which left me unsure.I am not convinced that for Tyson the 'fragileborders'and 'temporallyalterablegradations' between human and ape are 'at stake' exactly. There is clearly a fascination here, but confidence in mankind'sposition at the summit of the process emanates from Tyson and denies the phrase 'at stake'.In this the early modern outlooks seem free of the paranoia of the late twentieth century. When it comes to women, of course, there is an unease, which Peace traces in terms of sentimental discourse, but while her concluding assertionthatwomen can be regardedas bestial is credible, it is not secure and is untouched in the...
The Italian general government expenditure is empirically modeled by considering demand-side, supply-side, and institutional factors. The authors estimate a long-run relationship with government expenditure driven by the demand-side and supply-side effects of domestic income and bureaucratic power, respectively, as well as by an institutional factor, namely, the decentralization of public expenditure. The disequilibrium error positively affects income growth and local spending, implying that when government expenditure is above its equilibrium level, both economic growth and local governments benefit. However, tighter government spending within the European Monetary Union environment suggests that local governments will have to become more efficient to find additional resources for their financing.
This paper addresses the decentralization of health services financed by the Unified Health System (SUS) in the city of Natal initiated in the mid 90s. This decentralization primarily involved the transference of health services financed by SUS, which had previously been developed by the state of Rio Grande do Norte, to the city government of Natal. Based on the data gathered mainly from SUS¿ Ambulatory Information System (SIS/SUS), the authors attempted to verify to what extent this decentralization of health services provided by SUS in the city of Natal had improved public access to health services or, on the contrary, had resulted in a privatization process, implying more difficult access to those services.
Based on the reliability mechanism of biological system, the design theories and methods of high reliabe power electronic system, includingautonomous decentralized control,redundancy design, intelligent design, self-reproducion and self-repair, self-adaptive and self-organization control, are firstly described in detail. The research results show that the reliabi1ity of complex power electronic systems is improved markedly in these bionic methods. The power electronics technology can draw some research inspiration from living being. And bionics will have wide applications in the field of power electronics. As a concept Autonomous Cell (AC) and Autonomous Decentralized Power Electric System (ADPES) are defined. It is pointed that AC is autonomous controllable and autonomous cooperative. Based on AC, ADPES is built.A novel autonomous decentralized single-phase inverter of high reliability is inverstigated in the method of bionic. Bionic design methods of power electronics system are original from methodological point of view in this paper. Theresearch in this paper is a practical guide to the applications of bionics on power electronics, especial on design of high reliable power electronics systems.
The price system is widely regarded as an efficient way to use decentralized information, and some authors have argued that a market for vote would make voting more efficient by allowing intensities of preferences to be expressed. We develop a model of vote trading equilibrium to show that when individual preferences are correlated to some privately observed signals the existence of a market for votes can be socially harmful (thereby justifying secret ballots). Although the market is an efficient mechanism to aggregate private information about individual welfare, voting is an efficient mechanism to aggregate private information about collective welfare, and using both mechanisms at the same time when both types of decentralized information are to be aggregated can result into the destruction of the second type of information. This provides some justification for secret ballots and public subsidies to political campaigns. Erreur ! Argument de commutateur inconnu. Section 1 : Introduction. The market mechanism has been viewed for a long time as an efficient way to aggregate decentralized information: in the Arrow-Debreu model, individual agents only need to know their own preferences and to observe the equilibrium price system, and the resulting allocation cannot be (Pareto-)improved even if a single agent knew everybody's preferences at the same time. The voting mechanism constitutes another commonly used mechanism to allocate ressources, whose efficiency properties are usually questionned by economists and other social theorists. Unsurprisingly, several authors have thought of using the market mechanism to mitigate the presumed inefficiency of the voting mechanism: the basic argument is that a market for votes would allow the intensity of preferences to be expressed; that is, a majority may prefer x to y although everybody could be better off if y was implemented and the proponents of y could compensate the proponents of x by buying their votes. However all modern democraties have secret ballots, implying that vote trading contracts are in effect impossible to enforce, and many reasonnable people hold strong views against the idea of a market for votes. This paper attempts to explain why vote trading can indeed be socially The view that the problem of economic organization consists essentially of finding efficient mechanisms to use decentralized information, and in particular that the price system provides us with such a mechanism, dates back at least to Hayek(1945). E.g., Mostly in the public choice tradition, starting with Buchanan and Tullock(1962). Voting processes within parliaments often don't entail secret ballots, presumably because this is the only way voters can monitor their representative. In effect, this typically leads to massive vote-trading (although lobbying does not usually take the form of direct vote-trading contracts, the effects are similar; see section 4 for an application to such quasi-vote-trading Erreur ! Argument de commutateur inconnu. harmful in a world of decentralized information, and by doing so gives some new insights regarding the informational conditions under which voting and the market constitute efficient mechanisms. To understand our basic argument, it may be useful to recall that of Condorcet's Jury Theorem: assume all individuals (say, in a jury) share common values (if the state of nature s=0 they all prefer x to y, if s=1 they all prefer y to x), that they all receive a signal about s, and that the true signal is delivered with probability q>1/2; then nobody wants to be the dictator and everybody wants to delegate the decision-making power to the majority (so as to benefit from information pooling). Now consider the more realistic situation where there is at the same time some decentralized information of the kind described by Condorcet (some voters receive some signals which are of positive value to other voters as well) and some decentralized information about the individual intensity of preferences (different voters have different intensity of preferences). Then the usual benefits of decentralized vote trading (in terms of using efficientely private information about individual preferences by allowing high-valuation agents to vote more by compensating low-valuation agents) can be overwhelmed by the destruction of socially useful signals: typically, some agents can receive a socially-useful signal but still be so uncertain that selling seems privately profitable while some other agents are sufficientely certain about their own preferences that they are ready to buy; in that case a transaction will take place although all uncertain voters (and society as a whole) may be better off if everybody was forced to vote. The key deficiency of the price system is its imperfect informativeness: the same equilibrium processes). Surprisingly enough, this transparent result does not seem to be as well known as Condorcet's majority cycles story, although both are extremely complementary: voting is an efficient mechanism to aggregate information in a common-values world, but results quickly into troubles (majority cycles) if it is used to aggregate conflicting interests. Erreur ! Argument de commutateur inconnu. price for votes prevails for completely different distribution of signals, so that uncertain voters don't get to learn what they should be fighting for. Therefore it may be socially desirable to forbid vote trading altogether. There exists very few analysis of the efficiency properties of vote trading in decentralized equilibrium. Most of the literature deals with non-equilibirum behavior, pointing out various kinds of equilibrium non-existence, in general for majority-cycles and related reasons or because it is assumed that the distribution of individual preferences is known with certainty (so that the probabilities of being decisive are certain, which implies that there will always be an excess supply of votes at any positive price and an excess demand at price 0; see Philipson and Snyder(1992) and subsequent references). The basic point that a market for votes cannot operate like a normal market has been made several times, but it is important to realize that the fact a vote-trading contract always involves external effects on othe r agents does not imply per se that allowing vote trading is socially harmful; what this implies is only that the equilibirum will not in general first-best efficient; we explain in section 3 why vote trading, by transferring voting rights to highvaluation agents and compensating low-valuation agents, is very likely to generate positive (though not maximal) Pareto-improvements as long as individual valuations are certain. One needs to invoke uncertain preferences and privately-observed, socially-useful signals to make a robust case against vote trading: even if market power could be regulated there would still exist good reasons for keeping the market out of politics. See in particular the free-riding argument of Grossman and Hart(1980) and the subsequent literature. For example by supporting the formation of large coalitions of voters with small individual stakes. Erreur ! Argument de commutateur inconnu. Our point is also related to Hirshman(1971)'s argument about the limited compatibility between and exit: Hirshman argues that the introduction of exit (the competitive mechanism) into a situation where was the primary regulatory mechanism can be socially harmful since it may induce agents who can most effectively to exit. If one interprets as a direct information-aggregation mechanism through communication (of which voting is a simple example), then we also suggest that the private regulation of individual weights within a voice club can be socially harmful. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 defines a competitive, rationalexpectations equilibrium concept for vote trading; section 3 applies it to show why competitive vote trading can result into substantial destruction of socially useful information; section 4 applies these same ideas to the financing of political campaigns; section 5 gives concluding comments. Section 2 : A Model of Equilibrium Vote Trading. A finite set of agents I=(1;...;n) has to choose between two possible collective decisions x and y . The preferences of agent i are represented by Ui = Ui(x,s) + ti if x is implemented The main difference with Hirshman's argument, apart from the formal modelling we offer, is that in our model there are prices for votes that could in principle undo this ineficiency by transmitting information (this strenghthens the argument).
Magdi El-Soudani, Heba S. El-Refaey, Hebat-Allah M. Mourad
Zero knowledge proofs form an important category in the public key identification protocols, they are depending on number theory. In 1989, Stern announced his protocol which is based on syndrome-decoding problem, he also studied the attacks against this type of problems. In this paper, we propose a broadcasting variant based on the Stern’ s Identification scheme. Broadcasting is applied when there are one prover and many verifiers. In the proposed broadcasting scheme, the prover is communicating with verifiers through a broadcasting channel so he is running the identification session once, which minimizes the time and the communication complexity. We have developed Stern basic scheme to be adequate for broadcasting applications, but the underlying hard problem that the security of Stern identification scheme depends on, is used as it is.