Blockchain Papers

K. Marton

No abstract is available for this record.

A Krolak

No abstract is available for this record.

Douglas Ault, Paul F. Dienemann, John B. Handy

This report discusses the benefits and applicability of Firm Fixed-Price, Fixed-Price Award Fee, Cost Plus Award Fee and Hybrid contracts for use in installation support service contracts. Impacts on the Commercial Activities and Small Business programs are discussed. Recommendations for specific actions to improve installation support contracts are presented.

Michael Mann

In this chapter I discuss the emergence and development of the two major decentralized civilizations of the first millennium b.c. , Phoenicia and Greece. I concentrate on Greece because it is considerably better documented: We can distinguish the principal phases of its dialectic of development. I argue that the massive contributions of both peoples to the development of social power is to be attributed to the decentralized, multi-level nature of their civilizations, appropriate for taking advantage of the geopolitical, military, and economic legacy of their region, especially that bequeathed by the Near Eastern empires of domination. I suggest that two principal dialectics can be discerned in the emergence of Phoenicia and Greece as “leading edges” of contemporary power. The first, discussed briefly and tentatively, concerns the possibility that these civilizations were part of a macro historical process. In this case, decentralized multi power-actor civilizations lying on the marches of established empires of domination exploited the success plus the institutional rigidity of those empires to “emerge interstitially” and establish their own autonomous power organizations. After a long, successful process of power development, however, their own organizations became institutionalized and rigid. Now they become vulnerable in their turn to new empires of domination lying on their marches. Such a process can be traced in the first millennium b.c. The extent to which it was, indeed, part of a macro historical process will be left to the concluding chapter. The second dialectic concerns that “middle period” of developmental success.

Andreas Floer

No abstract is available for this record.

Jan Pachl, Doron Rotem

No abstract is available for this record.

Wataru Minoshima, James L. White

No abstract is available for this record.

M. Werman, D. Zeilberger

No abstract is available for this record.

M. Artin

No abstract is available for this record.

Jay Brueggeman, Terrell C. Newby, R.A. Grotefendt

The North Pacific right whale population was hunted commercially between 1835 and 1935, at which time the species received protection. Commercial whalers harvested over 15,000 North Pacific right whales during this period, so reducing the population that today there are an estimated 100-200 right whales in the North Pacific. The American Pacific Whaling Company operated in the Gulf of Alaska and eastern Bering Sea during 1917-39. We report the distribution, sexes, and lengths of 20 right whales recorded in the company logbooks and ledgers. These records identify that right whale catches were widely distributed on the whaling grounds and tended to decrease over the May-October whaling season. Of the 17 whales for which sex and length data were documented, 11 were females. Their average length exceeded that of males. Lengths of the whales indicated that 41 percent of the catch were sexually mature; two females carried fetuses. Although the sample size is small, these results suggest that the North Pacific right whale population was inhabiting its historic summering grounds after the period of heavy exploitation in the 1800s, reproducing as late as 1926, and supporting a subadult cohort at least until the species was protected.Key words: right whale, North Pacific Ocean, Alaska, Distribution

A. T. Bharucha-Reid, M. Sambandham

No abstract is available for this record.

Stephen P. Dresch

No abstract is available for this record.

Lee Kimball

No abstract is available for this record.

David Porush

Beckett’s Deconstruction of the Machine in The Lost Ones David Porush T HE POWER OF THE MACHINE IN LITERATURE lies in its ability to focus attention on one of our deeply-rooted beliefs. The machine is a universal symbol of our culture’s blind devotion to logical method, and has remained constant in this symbology through two-and-one-half centuries of literature. Even though the complexity of the machines that have inspired our metaphors have grown—from blocks of wood inscribed with letters and turned by cranks in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to the hyper-evolved computer of John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy—the tenor, the argument of these metaphors has remained the same. The machine is an invitation and a warning. It is simultaneously fas­ cinating and threatening. It is somehow both superior to and inferior to the punier humans who build, operate and sometimes are subjugated by it. Machines are tangible proof of the success of our scientific tech­ niques; as William Barrett suggests, they are “ embodied decision pro­ cedures.” At the same time, they testify to what is sadly diminished and insufficient in our blind faith that our techniques of discovery, our calculus and physics and biochemistry and cybernetics, will tell the whole story. While we may be ennobled by our grandiose fiction that the universe is a clockwork mechanism, there is also something inherently depressing about the vision of our spirits acting as mere cogs in that mechanism. To some behaviorists, logical positivists, artificial intelligence theo­ rists and sheer rationalists, the ghost in the machine is a delusion we’ve conjured to comfort ourselves with a superiority that cannot be proven. In their view, the human mind is just a brain, and its processes, though extraordinarily complex, will eventually be elucidated as surely as the atomic weights of different elements in the periodic table. But to others —some quantum physicists, artists, writers and phenomenologists, especially—there is room for doubt. The periodic table is a convenient model, but not a description, of the elusive mechanics of the atom, which has been subdivided into quarks and a host of even more intangible parVOL . XXVI, No. 4 87 L ’E s pr it C r éa te u r tides which wink in and out of existence depending upon your point of view. Artists have a special stake in drawing a line around some portion of the soul and proscribing its analysis: they naturally want to believe that the products of their labor manifest a freedom and uniqueness which lie above or below the level of mechanical description. And for writers who are alert to these phenomenological notions abroad in the culture, language is the fulcrum on which the argument see-saws. The periodic table, the cybernetic metaphor that the brain is a machine, etc., are metaphors. Yet, writers are the first to acknowledge the power of metaphors. Whatever its status as truth, a metaphor is “ a thrust at truth or a lie,” again “ depending upon your point of view,” as Thomas Pynchon remarks. And these machine metaphors in particular have taken root to such depth that they have become invisible.1They are resurrected only by fear—What is the machine doing to us?, or by a counter-metaphor—We are not-machines! Both tactics present an invitation to fiction, often in tandem, which many contemporary American authors have found irresistible, among them John Barth in Giles Goat-Boy, Donald Barthelme in several short stories, William Burroughs through his mythology, but especially in The Soft Machine and The Nova Express, Joseph McElroy in PLUS, the noted science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, especially in “ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” 2 What these postmodernists have in common is that they view litera­ ture as engaged in a battle, and effectively so, against the imperialism of the machine. They have several weapons in their armory: selfconsciousness , irony, a tacit distrust of language as an effective means of expression, and metaphors. They combine these weapons with a peculiar but singularly effective strategy: all the texts in this class are disguised as machines or the products o f machines. For instance, John Barth’s Giles Goat...

Bashir Omer M. Fadlalla

Despite a long history of decentralization, Sudan only truly introduced regionalization as a form of government in 1972 for the South and in 1980 for the North. Its introduction created at least three problems regarding the fiscal and financial relationship between the central government and its subordinate regional governments, viz. how to allocate funds efficiently, how to allocate taxing powers rationally and efficiently, and how to share revenue. A review of the central government's financial position reveals that it is hardly in a position to shoulder additional expenditure brought about by the creation of regional governments. On the other hand, a review of regional governments' financing also reveals their inability to raise sufficient funds locally. At present the regions depend rather heavily on the central government's meagre recurrent budget. However, the criteria for allocating funds from the centre to the regions are inefficient and inequitable, and there is no clear framework of regional planning and investment policies. The author suggests alternative criteria for the allocation of central funds to the regions. Bibliogr., notes.

John E. Parsons

No abstract is available for this record.

Bruno Dente

At the beginning of the nineteen eighties the observers of Italian local government system were divided between those who, looking at the unexpected social and economic development of the peripheral areas, labelled the situation as ‘neolocalism’ and those who, emphasizing the total dependence of the municipalities on the central government grants, spoke of ‘neocentralism’. The difficulty in assessing the centralized or decentralized nature of the Italian system—it is suggested in this paper—depends on the inadequacy of such concepts to cope with the complexities of contemporary political systems. From a reconstruction of the local finance reforms, which is able to show the possible objectives of such a policy, the outcomes of its implementation, as well as the actors of the process, their rationales, and their interactions, it is concluded that the intergovernmental relations have not been altered in favor of the central power and that the traditional fragmentation of the Italian political administrative system has been strenghtened. Conceptualizing intergovernmental relations as policies gives a much more realistic and promising way to depict the issue than does the simplistic zero-sum assumption implied in the traditional centralization-decentralization debate.

David L. Ammerman, E. Wayne Carp

American political culture and military necessity were at odds during the War for American Independence, as demonstrated this interpretation of Continental army administration. E. Wayne Carp shows that at every level of authority -- congressional, state, and county -- a localistic world-view, a deferential political order, and adherence to republican ideology impeded the task of supplying the army, even though independence demanded military strength. Placing military history within the context of colonial and revolutionary historiography, Carp finds that the colonial American belief that authority and political power should be decentralized deeply influenced Congress's approach to the task of supplying the army. Furthermore, most Congressmen had neither military experience nor any idea of how to administer an army, while local governments constantly thwarted the army's efforts to obtain supplies -- they blocked impressment and interfered with the movement of food and clothing. Carp shows that political leaders eventually adjusted their ideals to the imperatives of winning the war. He offers a revisionist analysis of the origins of the Nationalist movement of 1780-83 that was begun by army officers and state legislators fearing the imminent failure of the Revolution. Lacking unity and blinded by republican ideology, the Nationalists did not markedly improve the administration of the army. Instead, it was largely through the efforts of Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris, the cooperation of the French, and sheer luck that the British were ultimately defeated. Carp concludes that the Americans won the Revolution in spite of, rather than because of, their political beliefs.

R. Keith Semple, Milford B. Green, Diane Martz

This paper investigates corporate headquarters relocation in the United States for the period 1957-1980. Corporate relocations are one explanatory element in the overall spatial process of headquarters evolution within post industrial urban systems. All major corporate relocations, mergers, bankruptcies, and new incorporations that effectively transfer corporate decision making to or from any metropolitan area are recorded for the five major sectors of the economy. A series of cartograms and bargraphs provide a summary of corporate headquarters relocations for the resource, manufacturing, and service, as well as utility and financial sectors of the economy. The cartographs indicate the magnitude and direction of all headquarters relocations as well as the location of major bankruptcies and new incorporations. The bargraphs indicate the relative gains and losses through move and merger activity for all members of the urban system. The findings indicate that, in contrast to other Western economies, the dominant national center, New York, is in absolute decline as a home for corporate headquarters. This decline and decentralization is seen as a response to the general maturation of the American urban system and emergence of an entire system of urban centers rapidly acquiring large corporate headquarters status. The decentralization process is evident in all sectors of the economy except finance.

James Warner Björkman

With health care a major component of the contemporary welfare state, arrangements for planning, financing, operating, and evaluating health services have become political issues throughout the industrialized western world. The range, provision, and utilization of health services are influenced by the activities of interest groups and professional associations, competition among rival ideologies, and partisan appeals for electoral support. But in the end, there remains the constant struggle to win control over decision-making. From a physician's examining room to legislative chambers, and from hospital corridors to administrative offices, questions of health care reveal the drama of human beings attempting to use

John Nellis

Abstract The Tunisian government has long admitted that its excessively centralized administrative and political systems have generated heavy costs in terms of inefficiency and citizen alienation. A major decentralizing reform effort was launched in the mid‐1970s, the most important parts of which dealt with changes in local taxation powers, and in the sources and size of grants and loans which Tunisian communes receive from national sources. The result to date has been a modest increase in communal revenues from the new or increased taxes, and a more significant increase in central government grants to local governments. Smaller and more rural communes are heavily dependent on grants to undertake development actions, their tax base being negligible. The revised systefn generates more revenue, and distributes resources more equitably, than the previous arrangements. In theory, it gives a greatly increased latitude to elected communal councils. Nonetheless, the local governments‐and the communes in particular‐remain severely constrained by central government authorities. The conclusion is that the decentralization reform has been partial and halting, and will in all probability continue in the same manner.

Chaim Fershtman

No abstract is available for this record.

Uffe Haagerup

No abstract is available for this record.

Vladimir Plotkin, JovanE. Howe

No abstract is available for this record.