Blockchain Papers

F. auf der Meyer Heide, B. Oesterdiekhoff, R. Wanka

No abstract is available for this record.

Yvo Desmedt, Yair Frankel

No abstract is available for this record.

Janet K. Wanzek, F. Larry Leistritz

In the 1980's, in the US across the board, domestic manufacturers have have faced foreign competition with an increased disadvantage with imports. Domestic businesses, including those in rural areas, have had to struggle with restructuring their businesses, decentralizing them, outsourcing, relocating overseas, go out of business altogether or to reduce their business size or workforce numbers. Economic initiatives like 'Growing North Dakota' attempted to educate North Dakota citizens to the necessity of their state increasing it's growth in manufacturing and in ways they could help these industries grow such as financing these industries at favorable terms, aiding in the transfer of technology commercialization or assisting such technologies. By aiding the manufacturing sector this was deemed as aiding in the diversification of the North Dakota economy.

Olympia Icochea

The author studies Chile's educational reforms in the eighties, and assesses their successes and failures in terms of quality of teaching. The reforms rested principally on two aspects: decentralized administration (municipal authorities assuming responsibility) and the application of market economic mechanisms for financing schools. Chile's democratic government subsequently added a number of measures that the reforms lacked, such as increasing outlay to the sector and improving educational quality in subsidized schools. However, the success of these reforms is still uncertain.

S. M. Ageev

T. It is shown that any free action of a zero-dimensional compact group G on the О·-dimensional Menger compactum Mn is О·-universal for free actions, and that the orbit space MnjG is В«-classifying. Nonexistence of equivariant mappings between Mn+m and Mn implies that the orbit space R/Ap has infinite dimension, where R is any compact ANR-space with free action of the group Ap of p-adic integers. Knowledge of such nonexistence would then permit proof of the Hilbert-Smith conjecture under the assumption of finite dimensionality for the orbit space.

Robert Wangermée

Trends of Cultural Administration in Western Europe. In the last three decades, the ways and means of public intervention in cultural affairs have been multiplied and diversified following variable patterns in different countries. There has been an evolution in the levels of public intervention, which differ according to decentralization and federalism. There has also been an evolution of the means of intervention, because governments use new financing practices. Nowadays a new actor is emerging on the scene of cultural policy : the European Community.

Dominique de Waleffe, Jean-Jacques Quisquater

No abstract is available for this record.

Phoebe S. Liebig

The frail elderly have special multidimensional housing needs beyond affordability, including shelter that is more adaptive to reduced function and offers supportive services. Suitable housing for this population comprises three policy areas—housing, health care, and social services. In a federal system, development and implementation of policies in these areas involves participation of several levels of government and the nongovernmental sector. This paper uses federalism as a conceptual framework to examine and compare these policy areas in Canada and the United States. In both countries, general national housing policies—relying heavily on the nongovernmental sector and characterized by joint federal‐provincial programs in Canada and by important local government roles and age‐specific programs in the United States‐have benefited the elderly. The effects of such policies on the frail elderly, however, have been less positive because of the general lack of essential human services and, to a lesser degree, health care that enables them to live outside institutions. This is especially true in the United States, where health care policy is fragmented and is dominated by a private insurance system, partial federal financing of health insurance for the elderly, and tense federal‐state relations in financing health care for the poor. Although Canadian policies and programs operate autonomously and more uniformly within a national health plan, neither country has a universal, comprehensive long‐term care system. Geographically diverse patterns of social services, funded by grants to states and provinces and the nonprofit sector, are common to both countries. However, the United States has inadequately funded age‐specific programs and has relied on a growing commercial service provision. Housing outcomes for frail elders are moving in the right direction in both countries; however, Canada seems to be better positioned, largely because of its health care system. As increased decentralization continues to characterize the three policy areas that affect suitable housing for frail elders, the United States can learn from Canada's negotiated federalism approach to more uniform solutions to merging housing and long‐term care.

G.E. Mailloux, Rita Noumeir, R. Lemieux

It is shown that the MART (multiplicative algebraic reconstruction technique) algorithm can be derived by POCS. This gives MART a new theoretical interpretation and a proof of convergence to a stable solution even when other convex constraints are introduced. However, MART, as a multiplicative algorithm, depends on the initial solution. It is noted that, far from being a flaw, this property can be used to introduce further a priori knowledge about the image to be reconstructed, to maximize the entropy, to keep the ratio between the regions of the original image constant, or to set to zero the area outside the reconstruction volume. MART should be preferred to MENT (a maximum entropy algorithm) for entropy maximization, for it performs as well but is much faster. ART is much less influenced by the initial solution than MART.>

Kaoru Kurosawa

No abstract is available for this record.

Larry Peterson

No abstract is available for this record.

Rafail Ostrovsky, Ramarathnam Venkatesan, Moti Yung

No abstract is available for this record.

António J. R. Cabral

The costs of the medical care needs of AIDS patients are well above the average per capita expenditure on health care in many sub-Saharan African countries. These costs may become completely unaffordable as specific anti-viral drugs come onto the market, and the burden will fall on health networks, whose present strained budgets show no real signs of increase. In addition, pilferage, mismanagement and inefficiency continue at the few existing hospitals. As the total number and percentage of hospitalized patients with AIDS increases, the hospital networks (and the health services as a whole) risk collapse. The risks are of the same magnitude for both rural and urban hospitals - the former will not be able to deliver the necessary minimum quality of clinical standards, the latter will be flooded by too many patients. Achieving reasonable standards of hospital management and decentralization of curative care are critical targets for at least avoiding the risk that donors may be unwilling to finance specific anti-HIV drugs for these poor (and high-prevalence) countries.

Jonathan Harris

In the winter of 1989-90 the unintended consequences of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's program of political and economic refonn had become obvious to all but his most optimistic spokesmen. The General Secretary's attempt to create a new ideology of perestroika by grafting "bourgeois" and "social democratic" concepts onto the conventional ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had divided the party, created immense ideological confusion, and led to the formation of non-Communist and anti-Communist political organizations. The attempt to shift authority from party officials to elected soviets on the union and republican levels had led to the emergence of separatist and nationalist movements in many of the USSR's republics, including the RSFSR. The decentralization of the state's administration of the economy and the encouragement of both private and cooperative economic activity had failed to reverse the deterioration of economic conditions. As anxiety swept through the CPSU, orthodox party leaders called for the establishment of an autonomous Communist Party for the RSFSR to counter Gorbachev's policies and to "save Soviet Russia" from destruction.

Serge Vaudenay

No abstract is available for this record.

Toshiya Itoh, Kouichi Sakurai, Hiroki Shizuya

No abstract is available for this record.

William A. Wulf, Alec Yasinsac, Katie S. Oliver, Ramesh Peri

Distributed systems have long relied on shared secrets to ensure the authenticity of principals. Public key systems and zero knowledge proofs of identity have reduced this reliance. We offer a method of remote authentication that can be used with no advance shared knowledge by parties, and that allows parties to increase their confidence in the authenticity of a suspicious party to an arbitrary level. Note: Abstract extracted from PDF text

Donald Beaver, Joan Feigenbaum, Rafail Ostrovsky, Victor Shoup

We define the notion of an instance-hiding proof system (ihps) for a function f ; informally, an ihps is a protocol in which a polynomial-time verifier interacts with one or more all-powerful provers and is convinced of the value of f(x) but does not reveal the input x to the provers. We show here that a function f has a multiprover ihps if and only if it is computable in FNEXP. We formalize the notion of zero-knowledge for ihps's and show that any function that has a multiprover ihps in fact has one that is perfect zero-knowledge. Under the assumption that one-way permutations exist, we show that f has a one-prover, zero-knowledge ihps if and only if it is in FPSPACE and has a one-oracle instance-hiding scheme (ihs). 1 Introduction In this paper, we show that every function that has a multiprover interactive proof system in fact has one in which the verifier does not learn the proof, and the provers do not learn what they are proving. Consider interactive protocols involving a proba...

Yongyout Kachondham, Somsak Chunharas

Over the past twenty years, Thailand has undergone rapid economic and health (demographic, epidemiological) transitions. While on the one hand the economic outlook is bright, even to the extent of Thailand's emerging status as a Newly Industrialized Country, persisting health development challenges remain as targets for future research and international support. This paper documents Thailand's current economic and health development situations, their transitions and challenges. Special reference is made towards emerging post-transitional health/epidemiological problems, reorientation of health services and the referral system, community participation, health care financing, public-private health care partnerships, decentralization of the health service system and essential national health research.

Jessica Tuttle, Robert V. Tauxe, William J. Ledger

No abstract is available for this record.

David Challis

In the United Kingdom, despite a stated commitment to community care, centralized planning and financing through the Social Security System, rather than the Social Services Department, resulted in a serious distortion in policy. Social Security funded care in residential and nursing homes, and not community care. As in the United States, central government expenditures for expensive institutional care rose dramatically in the 1980s as a result. By the end of the decade, changes were implemented to decentralize the provision and funding of social care. Several projects were undertaken to demonstrate effective means of applying the new policies. In each instance, case managers worked with relatively small caseloads of the frail elderly and were responsible for allocating funds to purchase the services needed within a fixed budget. In all settings, there was a reduction in the use of institutional care facilities; the quality of life of both the clients and their caregivers improved significantly; and these gains were achieved at no greater cost than for individuals receiving the traditional services without case management. Despite the fact that issues such as what happens to costs when the system is expanded to other target clienteles remain to be resolved, the success of the projects highlights the significant gains to be achieved with case managers who have control of both service selection and budgets.

Susumu Sato

No abstract is available for this record.

Yvo Desmedt, Mike Burmester

No abstract is available for this record.

Toshiya Itoh, Kouichi Sakurai

No abstract is available for this record.