Blockchain technology has held numerous promises: for a better internet, for decentralization, for a critique of power â and maybe even a critique of capitalism. Until, that is, capitalism struck back and turned this new tech into a symptom rather than a solution. But is there still the potential to change trajectory? Wassim Alsindi talks to Simon Denny about the function of ideology in Web3 communities, the origin of seed phrases, and the role of art in enabling positive change.\nAn astrophysicist by education, Wassim explains why he started working at the crossroad of science, Web3 initiatives, and art. He talks about ...
THE MAJOR INTEREST in the recent literature on economies has lain in the results about but finite economies that have been derived from the results proved for economies. It is thus important to find simple yet general proofs for economies. In this article we wish to provide a simple yet general proof of the existence of a competitive equilibrium in an infinite, nonstandard economy with production. The simplicity of our proof comes from the fact that nonstandard analysis can deal with large and small quantities very much as ordinary analysis deals with finite quantities.2 As a result, it is possible to follow very closely the proof of existence for an economy with a finite number of traders, such as that in G. Debreu's classic Theory of Value [6]. In fact, if one is willing to believe that nonstandard analysis permits us to manipulate quantities as claimed above, then no further knowledge of nonstandard analysis is required in order to follow the proof. As examples of the simplicity of nonstandard analysis, it may be pointed out that no analogue of the Fatou-Schmeidler lemma [7, p. 69], a fairly difficult mathematical theorem, is required; nor is it necessary to prove separately that preserves upper-semicontinuity, a proof that Aumann [1] has recently simplified, because integration in the nonstandard model consists of an infinite summation, hence an appeal to 1.9.4 of Debreu [6] suffices to establish this point. As our main objective is to obtain results about but finite economies, it is a welcome bonus to find out that no further effort is needed to obtain these desired theorems. This arises because of the following property of nonstandard analysis. Consider a sequence of real numbers {an} which tends to zero. If we could extend this sequence to the integers, it would surely be a necessary property of the values of {an} at the integers that they are all infinitely close to zero. What makes nonstandard analysis powerful is that the above line of reasoning can be reversed, so to speak. Suppose we have a sequence which
SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH IN 1555, the Marian martyr Laurence Saunders condemned the highly ceremonial nature of the Roman Catholic religion. Even from the beginning, he declared, ceremonies had been invented and ordained for the rude infancy and weak infirmity of man. That the primitive had few ceremonies was proof of its greater perfection. By contrast, the many ceremonies of the late church papistical-partly blasphemous, partly unsavory, and unprofitable1-were evidence of its rudeness. Yet Saunders himself displayed a ritualistic pattern of behavior replete with ceremonial devices through much of his life. In study he was diligent and painful; in godly life he declared the fruits of a well exercised conscience; he prayed often and with great fervor; and in his prayers, as also at other times, he had his part of the spiritual exercises.... 2 Saunders was not alone. Many Marian martyrs prepared themselves for death in ways reminiscent of Catholic ceremony. They devised a compulsive ritual that they performed meticulously in exacting detail. This elaborate ceremony followed an inflexible pattern: a precise, self-disciplined daily existence, culminating in a ritualistic burning at the stake that duplicated the deaths of the pre-Nicean martyrs. Why did Saunders and his fellow reforming martyrs adopt a stylized pattern of behavior similar in many respects to the Catholic ritual they abhorred and believed ineffectual for salvation? By using the insights gleaned from psychological theory, it may be possible to shed some light on the phenomenon of Christian martyrdom and to understand why the most fervent and enigmatic of all religious types followed a rigid style of life and a ritualistic ceremony of death. Those insights suggest that the martyrs found it necessary to adopt an unbending form of ritualistic behavior to insulate themselves from the inner perturbations caused by their fear of martyrdom. Many were plagued by the suspicion that the actual motive in accepting martyrdom was suicide. Assuaging this fear required a
The organizational structure of the League of Nations' non-political workâon economic and financial matters, on communications and transit, on health, on narcotic drug control and certain other social problemsâwas essentially a centralized one, although each technical âorganizationâ enjoyed a considerable degree of independence. The Expert Committees in each organization reported to the League of Nations Council and were served by members of the League secretariat; and the work was financed from the budget of the League. That budget also financed the work of the International Labour Organization (ILO), which had been established, in accordance with Chapter 13 of the Treaty of Versailles, âat the seat of the League of Nations as part of the organisation of the Leagueâ. The proposals made in August 1939 by the Special Committee of the League of Nations on the Development of International Co-operation in Economic and Social Affairs (the Bruce Committee) would have replaced in this field the League Councilâa body consisting largely of Ministers for Foreign Affairs and concerned primarily with political issuesâby a Central Committee for Economic and Social Questions, composed in large part of ministers and high officials directly involved in such questions and in which non-Members of the League could participate on a basis of equality with Members. The Central Committee was to exercise, as the League Council had done, âdirection and controlâ over all the League's economic and social activities.
The relationships among transaction costs of lending and the size of borrower, capital market imperfections and economic development, and small enterprise financing and informal credit markets are described. Transaction costs include both administrative costs and default risk. Financial innovations reduce these costs and thus lower the costs of lending and borrowing and narrow the interest rate differential. In India, the Syndicate Bank has used financial innovations to compete with larger banks. The major feature of these innovations has been the creative adaptation of banking technology to suit local conditions, including recruitment and promotion policies, decentralized decision-making and avoidance of paper work, and innovative deposit schemes. The Syndicate Bank until 1965 was considered an unsophisticated rural bank, and the Central Bank did not like some of its innovations. However, since the 1969 nationalization of 14 major banks, the Central Bank has been induced to expand branches in rural areas. In forcing this emphasis on the widening and deepening of the geographical and functional scope of the banking system, the Syndicate Bank has been regarded by the Central Bank as a model bank. Tabular financial data are appended.
This paper presents a preliminary exploration of the design and deployment of solidarity primitives for Web3 social security, based on insights generated during Other Internet’s Web3 Work Forum held in July 2023. The paper proposes a modular framework to develop solidarity primitives addressing the three dimensions of security for DAO contributors: psychosocial stability, financial stability, and regulatory clarity. Additionally, it outlines a range of on-chain and off-chain mechanisms and improvement proposals specific to each dimension. Lastly, it discusses current challenges to implementation.\n
Aspects of the finnish administration. After a short historical introduction (before and after independence), the author describes the organization of central administration and decentralized units and presents some services : Finance, Education, National Defense. Reforms are under way or in the blueprint : they concern the administration of justice, deconcentration of some services, democratization of administrative life, departmental autonomy.
Research in Social Sciences
European Socioeconomic and Political Studies
Hungarian Social, Economic and Educational Studies
The reform of decentralization in Belgium Recent developments of the Belgian territorial administration reflect the constitutional problems that have arisen in Belgium since the 1970 reform which reorganized the State by setting up three autonomous regions according to the cultural duality of the country, viz Flanders, Wallonia, and the bilingual region of Brussels. The regionalization of the State is followed up by another reform movement which aims at strengthening the local administrative level of municipalities : the association and federation of communes. There are hence at present five administrative levels : State, region, province, association-federation of communes, commune. This reform, which is still provisional, allows for a complex administrative organization, at times rather incoherent, comprising too many levels of decision-making with often rather vague or ill-defined terms of reference. This has brought about a trend towards simplification of institutions leading some critics to advocate an increase in powers, according to relevant matters, either at the central (State or region) or at the local level. Without contesting the good reasons for such a criticism, the author is neverthe-less reluctant to endorse such a position which would imply that the existence of the intermediary administrative level (the traditional provinces) would be open to question, whereas he feels that it has a role to play in that this is the adequate level to handle a number of managerial tasks.
In 1971 the California Supreme Court opened the door to a major reform movement to restructure the present system of decentralized school finance. With the exception of Hawaii, elementary and secondary education in the United States is supported primarily by local property taxation supplemented in part by state funded grants-in-aid. The California Supreme Court, in the now famous Serrano rulings, declared the California system in violation of the state constitution's equal protection clause. Similar rulings have also been handed down by the New Jersey Supreme Court (Robinson vs. Cahill) and the Superior Court of Hartford, Connecticut (Horton vs. Meskill). In addition, ten states have recently enacted major reform bills, and legislation is under consideration in several others. The pressure for reform is strong and continuing. As a review of the recent reform proposals indicates, the legislative search for new means of financing local schools is not simply an incremental tinkering with existing laws.' Major changes, often court required, are at issue. Long-run outcomes are uncertain; each proposal has new winners and new losers. When planning a major reform of local school finance, therefore, past experience from incremental policymaking may not be an adequate guide to choice. Long-run general equilibrium predictive models and a clearly specified evaluation rule will be needed. It is the purpose of this paper to develop such a policy framework and to apply the analysis to one region currently in the midst of school reform, the New York metropolitan area. Six alternative reform proposals are considered: foundation aid, two district power equalization plans, property tax credits, expanded Title I assistance under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and centralized financing and spending controls. Preferred reforms are selected under utilitarian (promiddle class), Rawlsian (pro-poor), and equal school spending (Serrano) criteria.
A currently popular systems research project is to explore the possibilities and problems for computer system organization that arise from the rapidly falling cost of computing hardware. Interconnecting fleets of mini- or micro-computers and putting intelligence in terminals and concentrators to produce so-called "distributed systems " has recently been a booming development activity. While these efforts range from ingenious to misguided, many seem to miss a most important aspect of the revolution in hardware costs: that more than any other factor, the en_ ~ cost of acquiring and operating a free-standing, complete computer system has dropped and continues to drop rapidly. Where a decade ago the capital outlay required to install a computer system ranged from $150,000 up into the millions, today the low end of that range is below $15,000 and dropping. The consequence of this particular observation for system structure comes from the next level of analysis. In most organizations, decisions to make capital acquisitions tend to be more centralized for larger capita] amounts,
Abstract Rural development activities are frequently more important than isolated health care interventions in maximizing improvements in rural health status. In addition, integrated socio-economic development of rural areas ensures availability of local resources to finance health schemes, encourages community involvement in development and reforms and strengthens management capacity for health programme implementation and development. Public health services provide in turn an entry point for directly productive development activities. In designing, implementing and operating health components of rural development projects in developing countries, the most serious obstacles are almost invariably the following: (i) how to strengthen the managerial capacity of the health administration from the national to the local level and how to execute integrated programmes through decentralized and uncoordinated agencies; (ii) how to ensure adequate recurrent cost financing and contribution of beneficiaries to operating cost; and (iii) how to achieve active involvement of rural communities in decision-making and services delivery when projects are large and planned and executed by government authorities. In discussing these issues the paper will cite the World Bankâs experiences in a number of African, Asian and Latin American countries.
We study the following two related questions:\n- What are the minimal computational resources required for general secure multiparty computation in the presence of an honest majority?\n- What are the minimal resources required for two-party primitives such as zero-knowledge proofs and general secure two-party computation?\nWe obtain a nearly tight answer to the first question by presenting a perfectly secure protocol which allows n players to evaluate an arithmetic circuit of size s by performing a total of O(s log s log2 n) arithmetic operations, plus an additive term which depends (polynomially) on n and the circuit depth, but only logarithmically on s. Thus, for typical large-scale computations whose circuit width is much bigger than their depth and the number of players, the amortized overhead is just polylogarithmic in n and s. The protocol provides perfect security with guaranteed output delivery in the presence of an active, adaptive adversary corrupting a (1/3 Âż ") fraction of the players, for an arbitrary constant Âż > 0 and succiently large n. The best previous protocols in this setting could only offer computational security with a computational overhead of poly(k; log n; log s), where k is a computational security parameter, or perfect security with a computational overhead of O(n log n). We then apply the above result towards making progress on the second question. Concretely, under standard cryptographic assumptions, we obtain zero-knowledge proofs for circuit satisfiability with 2 -k soundness error in which the amortized computational overhead per gate is only polylogarithmic in k, improving over the Âż(k) overhead of the best previous protocols. Under stronger cryptographic assumptions, we obtain similar results for general secure two-party computation.
Formalization of personnel procedures in 229 city, country, and state finance agencies is a function of era of origin and subsequent effects of the environment. Whereas origins and the environment account for the extent of formal personnel procedures, formalization in turn gives rise to multitier hierarchies and hierarchy to decentralized decision making. The effects of origins are due to greater openness to environmental pressures at the time of formation than later on.
In this paper, we argue that discussion of worker participation in decisionâmaking is very limited in its usefulness unless the analysis looks at the structure of decisionâmaking, particularly in terms of centralization, in the organization concerned. The issues of worker participation are not instructive per se . If there is decentralization, it may assist the effectiveness of participation structures at lower levels, but the problem remains of the degree to which the costs of some decentralization are tradedâoff by the âdominantâcoalitionâ in the corporation against the benefits of centralization of decisionâmaking in the areas of finance and senior personnel.
DETAILS ARE GIVEN OF THE CLASSIFICATION OF ROADS, FINANCING (ESSENTIALLY DECENTRALIZED) OF THE CONSTRUCTION WORK. FIGURES ARE GIVEN, WHICH CHARACTERIZE THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROAD NETWORK IN THE 15 REPUBLICS OF THE USSR. THESE FIGURES READ IN CONNECTION WITH THE DEMOGRAPHIC RATE OF GROWTH AND REGIONAL PLANNING SHOW THAT IN 30 YEARS THE PERCENTAGE OF SURFACED OR METALLED ROADS HAS GONE FROM 10 TO 40% OF THE NETWORK RECORDED, WHICH IS APPROXIMATELY 1,5 MILLION KM. AFTER GIVING A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE STRUCTURE OF THE ORGANIZATIONS AND SERVICES OF BRIDGES AND HIGHWAYS IN THE USSR, THE AUTHOR OUTLINES THE ORGANIZATION OF EDUCATION, RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT. FUTURE TRENDS IN ROAD POLICY ARE BRIEFLY MENTIONED.