(Figure 1) The 1996 AJN Patient Care Survey that ran in our March issue is expected to yield more than 10,000 responses from nurses across the country. Preliminary findings, based on the first 5,000 responses, substantiate the declining quality of health care and nursing dissatisfaction (see AJN Newsline, page 69).The survey results are emerging at a critical time, in the wake of the Institute of Medicine report, the NLRB decision, and growing public awareness of the "deskilling" of American hospitals. Whether through the New York State Nurses Association's television infomercials, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's investigative series on the use of unlicensed personnel to replace RNs, or Redbook magazine's article on consumer self-protection in hospitals, the public is beginning to realize that entering a hospital is risky business these days, and that the RN is their most vigilant advocate. For years, we have all been caught up in a game of verbal volleyball, with nurses alleging that fewer RNs at the bedside and hospital restructuring are shortsighted solutions geared to economic gain, with no assurance of quality care or safety. The opposing argument (as absurd as it seems to nurses) is that neither is there proof that more qualified personnel ensure better outcomes. Though anecdotal evidence and survey method continue to dominate the research, nursing's voice is growing louder and the reality we describe more explicit. The AJN survey contributes substantially to this evidence. As the public responds to our message, it becomes derelict to postpone action because of the absence of more formal research. (This is not to deny that a research agenda exists here.) Rather, our experience, credibility, and tradition of service speak volumes and deserve to be taken seriously. It is a ready criticism that nurses have a jaded perspective on health care reform, that eroding job security, and inevitable change have prompted negativism. The profession's historic response to personal jeopardy and privation doesn't support this thinking. Generations of labor organizers that have targeted staff nurses can verify that, given fair economic rewards, RNs will rarely speak out on their own behalf. Instead, they are best moved to militancy and action when the safety of their patients is at stake. Traditionally, they've had little to lose. There was always another job to be found, and nurses have been socialized in altruism and subservience. But more recent times are different and more painful, and many nurses have been reticent to speak out about patient safety. Intimidation and the threat of job loss are common. Vengeance falls hard on the shoulders of the single parent, the part-time student, the family breadwinner. The AJN survey preserves anonymity. Without fear of reprisal, respondents describe a workplace in which fewer RNs are caring for more patients (and these patients are more acutely ill than ever), working with more unlicensed assistive personnel, and with supervisory responsibility that should increase proportionately. The survey also reveals substantial losses among nurse-managers and executives, not unexpected given current business trends, but especially troubling to nurses who need a supportive environment to facilitate their practice. The absence of outcomes evidence becomes a myth as respondents document increases in consumer complaints, work-related injuries, patient complications, and incidents and accidents including medication errors, nosocomial infections, and skin breakdown. Most of these developments are byproducts of an unsafe environment, and they're becoming as significant to the informed consumer as they are to the concerned professional. Assistive personnel were introduced so that nurses could concentrate their time in the service of their patients. Yet, our survey respondents report that they have considerably less time to spend on direct care, interdisciplinary, collaboration, coordination of care, teaching, and comfort measures. Overwhelmingly, nurses deny that assistive personnel have improved the quality of care at their institutions. In fact, most claim that the quality of care being delivered does not meet their professional standards, a disturbing finding when you consider that job satisfaction is highly dependent on the ability to believe in the intrinsic value of the work you do. The AJN survey has given the nursing profession an opportunity to speak out with one strong voice, exposing the turmoil and pain the health care industry inflicts on the public when its priorities are poorly defined and its leaders choose to ignore the common sense and decency of those professionals most intimately involved in patient care.
Reviews the process of creating an economy dominated by the private sector, discussing the entry by new private business—particularly, the privatization of state-owned firms, farms, housing, and commercial real estate—and analyzing why different approaches to ownership change and divestiture can be associated with positive economic results. Different countries will launch privatization at different moments, but once adopted, firms and farms transitioning from central planning need major restructuring of their production and reorientation of their incentives. Entities that face strict financial discipline and competition and have clear ownership will most likely undertake the needed restructuring or exit, leaving room for new and better firms. In the short run, financial discipline can be fostered through stabilization and liberalization measures, but in the long run, decentralized—preferably private—property rights and supporting institutions need to sustain financial discipline, respond to market-oriented incentives, and provide alternative forms of corporate finance and governance.
An interview with Gus Pagonis, Executive Vice President for Logistics, Sears Gus Pagonis: I am a strong believer in centralized control, decentralized execution. In the Gulf War, General Schwarzkopf made the US Army's 22nd Support Command responsible for logistics. He agreed that there had to be a single of point of contact (SPOC) for all issues related to logistics. At Sears, Arthur Martinez, Chairman and CEO, had a similar vision. He agreed that our logistics organization, the Sears Logistics Group, be the SPOC for all Sears logistics. Previously, each one of our businesses had portions of our present logistics organization. So these logistics operations were buried within various structures throughout Sears. It used to be extremely difficult to put your finger on a logistics problem, because no one executive had total responsibility. I believe Sam Walton was the first retailer to have the vision of centralizing the logistics function in one organization and bringing in a logistician into his top management group. What role do you play as a logistic ??? on the executive committee of ??? Martinez, like Schwarzkopf, wanted logistics to have a voice on the executive committee equal to that of the various Sears businesses. This also would ensure that all new ideas could be reviewed for their logistical impact. If for example, someone wanted to find out whether we could logistically support a concept, we would test it. We may find it was too costly in some markets, and unnecessary in others, all of this being done, of course, prior to making a national decision. The same goes for some of our seasonal items. Air shipping snow blowers or lawn mowers from one of our stores in one region to a store in another region to meet growing demand might seem to make a lot of retail sense, but when you examine the logistics cost and the gross margin it does not make economic sense. Having the Executive Vice President of Logistics with an equal vote on the CEO's Executive Committee allows all costs to be considered in the decision. We can also act on the logistics related issues much sooner. Take promotional items. We know six months in advance what items are going to be promoted, so we can take appropriate logistics related actions. Unlike in the military, where the enemy situation can suddenly change, here we have the opportunity to make more deliberate plans. For example, we need to be prepared for Christmas every December. The only downside is that while I used to enjoy Christmas in the past, I now begin worrying about it in May. How does the CEO know whether the logistics team is meeting its objectives? Just like we did with General Schwarzkopf in the Gulf War, every month we present Martinez and the other members of the executive committee with a single sheet of paper that contains all data on logistics performance - good and bad. This Logistics Situation Report (LOGSITREP), prepared by my finance department, has all the service and cost metrics for our various channels, including direct delivery (home deliveries), take with (merchandise customers can carry from our stores), and fashion - broken down to the level of per carton, per order, and per piece. All of these numbers are tied in with the company's financial numbers so the committee has a clear idea as to how much we are incurring in transportation, distribution, and delivery costs and how well we are managing our inventory, our vendors (in so far as recovering the costs of defective products), and even our home office expenses. This single piece of paper is probably the most universally used document within both our logistics organization and the businesses we support. How much of the old logistics organization have you retained? I have always tried to work with any existing organization I inherit since I don't want to lose the things that are working. Military training is good in that regard. …
Ivan Damgård, Torben Pryds Pedersen, Birgit Pfitzmann
<p>We present and compare definitions of the notion of "statistically<br />hiding" protocols, and we propose a novel statistically hiding commitment<br />scheme. Informally, a protocol statistically hides a secret if a<br />computationally unlimited adversary who conducts the protocol with<br />the owner of the secret learns almost nothing about it. One definition<br />is based on the L1-norm distance between probability distributions,<br />the other on information theory. We prove that the two definitions are<br />essentially equivalent. For completeness, we also show that statistical<br />counterparts of definitions of computational secrecy are essentially<br />equivalent to our main definitions. Commitment schemes are an important<br /> cryptologic primitive. Their purpose is to commit one party to a certain value,<br /> while hiding this value from the other party until some later time.<br /> We present a statistically<br />hiding commitment scheme allowing commitment to many<br />bits. The commitment and reveal protocols of this scheme are constant<br />round, and the size of a commitment is independent of the number of<br />bits committed to. This also holds for the total communication complexity,<br />except of course for the bits needed to send the secret when it<br />is revealed. The proof of the hiding property exploits the equivalence<br />of the two definitions.</p><p>Index terms -- Cryptology, Shannon theory, unconditional security,<br />statistically hiding, multi-bit commitment, similarity of ensembles<br />of distributions, zero-knowledge, protocols.</p><p> </p>
This article assesses the policy strategy for local management of schools in Victoria, Australia within the high involvement framework for creating high performance organizations. The high involvement framework as adapted to education hypothesizes that a decentralized strategy for improving educational performance requires decentralizing four key resources: power over the budget and personnel functions; information about revenues, expenditures, costs and best practices; knowledge and skills including both technical and business knowledge; and rewards including compensation and other incentives. The framework also includes an instructional guidance framework of curriculum standards and student assessment to those standards, and facilitative principal leadership. Based on two years of data collection at both the state and school levels, focusing on governance, management, finance, and curriculum and instruction, the study found that Victoria's Schools of the Future ranked high on all six variables, and that the decentralization process was working smoothly and major changes were being made in curriculum and instruction when school sites also ranked high on the six variables
This article discusses some needed changes to the functioning and management of the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO is unable to meet new challenges and needs reform. The Executive Board of WHO initiated an internal review in 1992 that led to a management-related focus, while informal groups within the agency tackled funding constraints. Some governments and nongovernmental groups have proposed reorganization of international health assistance. The authors urge that the public health sector and researchers join the reform effort. WHO was established in 1948 and was the sole global health agency. The demand for greater international health cooperation has increased over time. WHO is an association of sovereign states. WHO demonstrated success in eliminating smallpox, promotion of health policy, collection and dissemination of epidemiologic information, and establishment of standards in health care and medical ethics. WHO staff comprises about 5000 persons. The annual budget is too small at about US$900 million. In 1995 only 56% of receipts were collected. WHO's constitution mandates complete health for all, but there has been a widening gap between rich and poor and those with access to health services and those without. Absolute and relative poverty are the main determinants of premature mortality and ill health. The major challenge for health policy is this disparity; the focus of international collaboration should be on this issue. The machine metaphor of organizational structure no longer works in today's world. The authors propose that WHO limit functions in health development and create a full mandate for dealing with determinants of health. WHO should be participatory, open to constituents, autonomous, and flexible. Member states must be more powerful in policy formulation. Program implementation should occur in independent programs in a decentralized system.
The worldwide economic recession and the concomitant limited stock of finances have had an influence on the available money of every household and have also inhibited the improvement of socio-economic conditions and medicine. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) has the objective of improving the living conditions of the people with regard to housing, education, training and health care. The latter seems to be a major problem which has to be addressed with the emphasis on the preventive and promotional aspects of health care. A comprehensive health care system did not come into being property in the past because of the maldistribution of health care services, personnel and differences in culture and health care beliefs and values. The question that now arises, is how to render a quality health care service within the constraints of inadequate financing and resources. A comprehensive literature study has been done with reference to quality health care and financing followed by a survey of existing health services and finances. Recommendations are made about minimum requirements to be accepted if one were to adapt rather than die in terms of the provision of healthcare: the decentralization and rationalization of the administration of health care, the stress on and realization of effective and efficient primary health care, the acceptance of participative management in health providing organizations, the provision of financial management training for health care managers and the application of management accounting principles for the improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of management.
A. P. Jardine, Jayanth N. Kudva, Christopher A. Martin, Kari Appa
On high performance military aircraft, small changes in both wing twist and wing camber have the potential to provide substantial payoffs in terms of additional lift and enhanced maneuverability. To achieve the required wing shape, actuators made of smart materials are currently being studied under an ARPA/WL contract for a subscale model of a fighter aircraft. The use of the shape memory alloy TiNi for wing twist actuation was investigated using shape memory effect (SME) torque tube actuator configurations. The actuator configurations were sized to fit inside a 16% scale model of an aircraft wing and the torque's supplied to the wing were similarly calculated from full-scale requirements. The actuator systems were tested in a conventional laboratory setting. Design and calibration of the actuators for wing twist are discussed.
Jayanth N. Kudva, A. P. Jardine, Christopher Martin, Kari Appa
While the concept of an adaptive aircraft wing, i.e., a wing whose shape parameters such as camber, wing twist, and thickness can be varied to optimize the wing shape for various flight conditions, has been extensively studied, the complexity and weight penalty of the actuation mechanisms have precluded their practical implementation. Recent development of sensors and actuators using smart materials could potentially alleviate the shortcomings of prior designs, paving the way for a practical, `smart' adaptive wing which responds to changes in flight and environmental conditions by modifying its shape to provide optimal performance. This paper presents a summary of recent work done on adaptive wing designs under an on-going ARPA/WL contract entitled `Smart Structures and Materials Development--Smart Wing.' Specifically, the design, development and planned wind tunnel testing of a 16% model representative of a fighter aircraft wing and incorporating the following features, are discussed: (1) a composite wing torque box whose span-wise twist can be varied by activating built-in shape memory alloy (SMA) torque tubes to provide increased lift and enhanced maneuverability at multiple flight conditions, (2) trailing edge control surfaces deployed using composite SMA actuators to provide smooth, hingeless aerodynamic surfaces, and (3) a suite of fiber optic sensors integrated into the wing skin which provide real-time strain and pressure data to a feedback control system.
A wave of privatization is sweeping the globe, affecting about 100 countries and adding up to an average of more than $60 billion a year in business in the past decade. The challenge is to ensure that privatization yields clear benefits. Empirical studies suggest that ownership change by itself will often yield results, especially when it reduces government interference. But the regulation required in areas of natural monopoly can become overly intrusive and undermine progress. Real competition is required to generate sizable and lasting welfare improvements. But in infrastructure sectors, the introduction of competition is complicated by the existence of complex transport and communications networks. Debate about whether and how to introduce competition in network industries is sometimes heated. Certain questions recur: Will continuing regulation be needed? Whether and at what terms will private finance be forthcoming? The author argues that policymakers need to understand how competitive forces can be brought to bear in network industries. He explains the following: 1) common principles that are often lost in"technical"debates about specific sectors; 2) various methods for introducing competition in network industries; 3) competition for the market, and bidding for franchises; 4) options for competition for existing networks; 5) options for expanding competitive systems by decentralizing investment in new network capacity; 6) the option of allowing competition among multiple networks; and 7) the implications of these options for the sectors and for financing industry expansion. In case of doubt, he contends, policymakers should not restrict the entry of competitive firms in such networks. If they do, entry restrictions should be subject to an automatic test after a set period, and reviewed for costs and benefits.
Assume we are given a language $L$ with an honest verifier perfect zero-knowledge proof system. Assume also that the proof system is a $\leq 3$ move Arthur-Merlin game. The class of such languages includes all random self-reducible language, and also any language with a perfect zero-knowledge non-interactive proof. We show that such a language satisfies a certain closure property, namely that languages constructed from $L$ by applying certain monotone functions to statements on membership in $L$ have perfect zero-knowledge proof systems. The new set of languages we can build includes $L$ itself, but also for example languages consisting of $n$ words of which at least $t\leq n$ are in $L$. A similar closure property is shown to hold for the complement of $L$ and for statistical zero-knowledge. The property we need for the monotone functions used to build the new languages is that there are efficient secret sharing schemes for their associated access structures. This includes (but is not necessarily limited to) all monotone functions with polynomial size monotone formulas.
Examines six issues to decide whether total quality management (TQM) concepts can improve the effectiveness of company‐wide financial activities, i.e. the finance function. These issues address the basic role of a central finance department; TQM concepts in specific financial processes including capital budgeting and working capital management; competitive benchmarking; and personnel skills needed for the future. The finance function in most organizations has been pulled in many directions recently by downsizing, technology, ethical issues and, of course, TQM. The central finance office (CFO) needs to understand how TQM issues may not be a negative constraint on the finance process but actually assist in re‐engineering the finance process for the future. Defines the service role of the finance function and how it can be decentralized throughout the organization. Presents many issues in a question format which allows the finance manager to organize the implications of TQM in the total finance operation. Also investigates various financial processes such as capital budgeting and working‐capital management.
Reviewed by: Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire A. T. Kraabel Martin Goodman. Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. xiv 1 194. $39.95. Despite its sweeping title, this path-breaking volume is mainly about alleged Jewish missionary activity in the Roman world. (The author is successor to Geza Vermes as Reader in Jewish Studies at Oxford.) Thus chapter 5, “Mission in the Early Church,” is bracketed symmetrically by four chapters about Jews, specifically on their “attitudes to gentile paganism” and on “proselytes and proselytizing”: chapters 3–4 deal with the third century b.C.E. to the first century C.E., and 6–7 on the Talmudic period. The opening chapter is a clear statement about what is at stake. Goodman will not write an account of the phenomenon of conversion à la A. D. Nock, but raise a prior issue: was mission an inevitable component of religion, any religion, in the Greco-Roman world? Or does that idea rather “reflect an unconscious Christianization of the study of ancient religions”? (The second chapter will take up commonly cited examples of “mission” in the spread of pagan cults and philosophies in Roman times.) Goodman distinguishes four types of mission—informative, educational, apologetic, and proselytizing—but focuses on the last, the only one whose goal is conversion. He mentions a fifth briefly: forcible inclusion of a ruler’s subjects in a state religion seen as a unifying factor for that society. Under Goodman’s critical analysis the traditional picture of a “Jewish mission” evaporates. He separates the two pairs of chapters on Judaism at the latter part of the first century C.E.: the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple, the introduction of the fiscus Judaicus, and the beginning of the rabbinic movement. These years are his hinge for eight centuries of Jewish history. Earlier Jews had condemned any worship of pagan deities by Jews, but were tolerant of or disinterested in gentile paganism in the Diaspora. (Pagans in the land of Israel were a problem; the issue was ritual pollution.) Proselytizing had not been of interest either, contra Schürer, Juster, Jeremias, M. Stern, D. Georgi and a shelf-full of NT handbooks. Conversions to Judaism happened, in anticipation of marriage, sometimes at the point of a sword. But had there been missionary campaigns, had proselytizing been a priority, we would have heard much more about it both from Jews and from their detractors; the references would have been unmistakable. Goodman dismantles the proof-texts from Philo, Horace, and Cicero commonly used [End Page 114] to “prove” the contrary, and argues that Matt. 23.15 is not about making gentile proselytes but about Pharisees trying to persuade other Jews to follow Pharisaic halakha. And those Jews who wrote in Greek did so not in “outreach” to gentiles, but to reach their fellows and their offspring for whom Greek was their first language; the LXX itself is the parade example. In the Talmudic period large shifts occurred within Judaism, results of major historical change. To fuel its propaganda, the Flavian dynasty had transformed the destruction of Jerusalem from “the suppression of insurrection in a comparatively minor provincial backwater” into a mighty Roman victory. The fiscus Judaicus necessitated clearer distinctions between Jews and non-Jews. An important example for students of the early Christian mission to gentiles is the case of gentiles sympathetic to Judaism. Thus, pace Acts, there probably had been no “formal category of gentile Godfearers recognized as such by Jews in the 1st cent[ury].” But the famous Aphrodisias inscription suggests to Goodman a change in Jewish attitudes two centuries later. No review will do justice to the riches of this provocative monograph. This journal’s readers will want their own copies. While agreeing with the thesis and most of the argument, I would raise several points for consideration: 1. I would see even more diversity, especially in Diaspora Judaism, than Goodman does. We are just coming to realize the great variety present in pre-Constantinian Christianity. Judaism in the same time and space had a weaker network, no bishops preaching consensus...
OBJECTIVES: This paper reviews Russia's health crisis, financing, and organization and public health reform needs. METHODS: The structure, policy, supply of services, and health status indicators of Russia's health system are examined. RESULTS: Longevity is declining; mortality rates from cardiovascular diseases and trauma are high and rising; maternal and infant mortality are high. Vaccine-preventable diseases have reappeared in epidemic form. Nutrition status is problematic. CONCLUSIONS: The crisis relates to Russia's economic transition, but it also goes deep into the former Soviet health system. The epidemiologic transition from a predominance of infectious to noninfectious diseases was addressed by increasing the quantity of services. The health system lacked mechanisms for epidemiologic or economic analysis and accountability to the public. Policy and funding favored hospitals over ambulatory care and individual routine checkups over community-oriented preventive approaches. Reform since 1991 has centered on national health insurance and decentralized management of services. A national health strategy to address fundamental public health problems is recommended.
No AccessAnnual World Bank Conference on Development Economics (Global)1 Feb 2013Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 1995Authors/Editors: Michael Bruno, Boris PleskovicMichael Bruno, Boris Pleskovichttps://doi.org/10.1596/0-8213-3280-5SectionsAboutPDF (1.1 MB) ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Abstract:The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics provides a forum for debate and the exchange of ideas and information between World Bank staff and development researchers and practitioners from around the world. The 1995 conference addresses four themes: (1) where we stand on inequality, poverty, and growth; (2) demographic change and development; (3) aid and development; and (4) fiscal decentralization. The first theme centers around a book by Hollis Chenery, Redistribution With Growth, which discusses: (a) the constant elasticity of substitution production functions to economies of scale; (b) the complementarity and timing of investment decisions; (c) investment criteria and shadow pricing; (d) dynamic comparative advantages; and (e) issues of income distribution and growth. This book has made two important contributions to development economics: it has established the intellectual base for research and policy analysis at the Bank, and has changed the course of thinking on development, especially on how to help the poor. The second theme refers to government provision and regulation of economic support in old age, and new perspectives on women, work, and demographic change. The theme of aid and development focuses on incentives and guidelines for development, reasons behind multilateral lending, and whether or not growth in developing countries is beneficial to industrial countries. The fourth theme discusses efficiency, macroeconomics, conflicts, and dilemmas of fiscal federalism and decentralization, and presents a roundtable discussion on second-generation issues in transition economies. The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics has evolved over the years to become the single largest gathering of the development economics community in the world. The findings, interpretations and conclusions of the 1995 conference are highlighted in this publication. 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C.M. Rémillard, Benjamin G. Zifkin, Allan L. Sherwin, William Feindel
George A. Savoy was born in Cohoes, New York, in 1873. He left the U.S.A. in 1921 to manage the Canadian branch of a large manufacturer of ledgers and looseleaf registers. This company was asked to supply Professor Jasper's laboratory with rolls of plain unlined paper and it was George Savoy who later developed fanfolded and lined EEG paper, which was first used at the Montreal Neurological Institute. He also had personal contacts with Wilder Penfield concerning their mutual interest in the needs of patients with epilepsy. He was a successful industrialist involved with several charitable organizations funding programmes for people with epilepsy. He was opposed to the sectarianism then prevalent in Quebec, which was unfamiliar to him, and in reaction built his own institution, Dieppe House, a home for people with epilepsy, later renamed <<Foyer Savoy>>. It was to operate without regard to race, language or religion. In 1971, his son Harold and other generous donors decided to create a foundation to support research in epilepsy. The Foyer Savoy was sold in 1988 and the proceeds used to increase the endowment of the foundation. His grandson George M. Savoy is the current president. The fourth generation is also represented by Caroline Savoy, daughter of the president, who joined the board of directors in 1992. The foundation will distribute from $300,000 to $400,000 yearly to researchers from many different countries working in the field of epilepsy in universities and hospitals throughout Canada.
The wide applicability of zero-knowledge interactive proofs comes from the possibility of using these proofs as subroutines in cryptographic protocols. A basic question concerning this use is whether the (sequential and/or parallel) composition of zero-knowledge protocols is zero-knowledge too. We demonstrate the limitations of the composition of zero-knowledge protocols by proving that the original definition of zero-knowledge is not closed under sequential composition; and that even the strong formulations of zero-knowledge (e.g., black-box simulation) are not closed under parallel execution. We present lower bounds on the round complexity of zero-knowledge proofs, with significant implications for the parallelization of zero-knowledge protocols. We prove that three-round interactive proofs and constant-round Arthur-Merlin proofs that are black-box simulation zero-knowledge exist only for languages in BPP. In particular, it follows that the “parallel versions” of the first interactive proofs systems presented for quadratic residuosity, graph isomorphism, and any language in NP, are not black-box simulation zero-knowledge, unless the corresponding languages are in BPP Whether these parallel versions constitute zero-knowledge proofs was an intriguing open questions arising from the early works on zero-knowledge. Other consequences are a proof of optimality for the round complexity of various known zero-knowledge protocols and the necessity of using secret coins in the design of “parallelizable” constant-round zero-knowledge proofs.
We present a zero-knowledge proof system [19] for any NP language L, which<br />allows showing that x in L with error probability less than 2^−k using communication<br />corresponding to O(|x|^c) + k bit commitments, where c is a constant depending only<br />on L. The proof can be based on any bit commitment scheme with a particular set<br />of properties. We suggest an efficient implementation based on factoring.<br />We also present a 4-move perfect zero-knowledge interactive argument for any NP-language<br />L. On input x in L, the communication complexity is O(|x|^c) max(k; l)<br />bits, where l is the security parameter for the prover. Again, the protocol can be<br />based on any bit commitment scheme with a particular set of properties. We suggest<br />efficient implementations based on discrete logarithms or factoring.<br />We present an application of our techniques to multiparty computations, allowing<br />for example t committed oblivious transfers with error probability 2^−k to be done<br />simultaneously using O(t+k) commitments. Results for general computations follow<br />from this.<br />As a function of the security parameters, our protocols have the smallest known<br />asymptotic communication complexity among general proofs or arguments for NP.<br />Moreover, the constants involved are small enough for the protocols to be practical in<br />a realistic situation: both protocols are based on a Boolean formula Phi containing and-<br />, or- and not-operators which verifies an NP-witness of membership in L. Let n be<br />the number of times this formula reads an input variable. Then the communication<br />complexity of the protocols when using our concrete commitment schemes can be<br />more precisely stated as at most 4n + k + 1 commitments for the interactive proof<br />and at most 5nl +5l bits for the argument (assuming k <= l). Thus, if we use k = n,<br />the number of commitments required for the proof is linear in n.<br />Both protocols are also proofs of knowledge of an NP-witness of membership in<br />the language involved.