Blockchain Papers

H. Kopetz, A. Damm, C. Koza, M. Mulazzani · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

W.G. Wolters

The position of local and provincial elites in the Philippines has changed in character. At the beginning of the century the landed elite was relatively autonomous, keeping the state weak and using it to reinforce its position. Since the 1950s a new elite of mercantile entrepreneurs has emerged, dependent on state credit and political protection. Under the martial law regime in the 1970s the state ceased to be an extension of regional elites and acquired the features of a separate level of organization. The transition to the Aquino administration has led to some degree of decentralization. However, provincial politicians are more than ever interested in finding their slot in the central state apparatus.

Eric S.G. Shaqfeh, Ronald G. Larson, Glenn H. Fredrickson

No abstract is available for this record.

M.V. Tsebrenko, G.P. Danilova, A.Ya. Malkin

No abstract is available for this record.

M.A. Ioffe, Yu.M. Gershenzon, V.B. Rozenshtein, S.Ya. Umanskii

No abstract is available for this record.

Hirofumi Abe

Regional disparities in terms of income and employment showed marked decline under various regional policies during the Period of Rapid Economic Growth. However, the drastic changes in Japanese industries after the Oil Crises in 1970s have caused structural recessions in some regions which have been dependent on resourceand energy-intensive industries. Furthermore, the economic activities are rapidly concentrating in Tokyo Metropolitan Region under the internationalization of Japanese economy. Regional income disparities began to widen again since the early 1980s under these circumstances.This paper aims to examine the trend of industrial differences in Japanese regions in the postwar period, and to identify its current problems. Three analytical methods, namely the analysis of coefficient of variation, the rate-share analysis, and the shiftshare analysis are applied using employment data for the years 1955 to 1985.Major findings of the study are summarized as follows:(1) Manufacturing sector showed a clear decentralization of employment during the period 1960-1985, whereas the decentralization of tertiary sector was not very clear.(2) Marked decentralization was found in the high-tech machinery industry which have been rapidly concentrating in North and South Tohoku Regions. Despite the recession of manufacturing industries after the Oil Crises, these regions showed remarkable employment growth.(3) The shift-share analysis of manufacturing sector has showed low growth performance in the western part of Japan. These regions had been specialized in the heavy and petoro-chemical industries during the Period of Rapid Economic Growth, and suffered much damage in the Oil Crises.(4) Locational patterns of tertiary sector differ among industries. Finance, retail and wholesale industries have been concentrated in metropolitan regions, whereas local regions have been specialized in the service industry.(5) The shift-share analysis of tertiary sector has identified little difference of growth performance which comes from the industrial structure of each region. However, a marked difference has been found in the differential shift components between metropolitan and local regions, which indicates a clear gap of locational attractiveness among them.

John T. Foster

Hospitals came into the twentieth century as creations of local, usually altruistic, interests and wrestled with accelerating change throughout the decades. Their success brought third-party financing, employee health plans, and government guarantees for charity care. Success seemed to breed success, and they raced ahead with capital investment in bricks, mortar, and high technology, only to find themselves in increasing trouble as 1990 approached. Writing from the precarious perch of the year 2000, the author views the worsening hospital situation and raises questions about the contradictions of federal interventions, the efforts to create "systems," the plight of small hospitals, and the love-hate role of medical staffs. Offered for consideration is a scenario of a health care crisis in the early 1990s comparable to the savings and loan crisis of 1988. However, this time the federal intervention is not simply in dollars, but, instead, brings on a "health for all" program with national financing and decentralized "district health" management. As in other nations of the world, hospitals become an integral part of the commitment to attack the root causes of ill health.

Frederick van der Ploeg, A.J. de Zeeuw

No abstract is available for this record.

J. Michael Dash

B o o k R ev iew s that a capitalist bourgeois class was driven to overthrow a feudal aristocratic ruling class to which it was intrinsically opposed” (18). Rethinking the French Revolution provides a useful overview of both the revisionist historians whose work justifies that statement and of the classical historians whose work is under attack. Even casual inquiry into the French Revolution demands knowledge of the historiographical issues raised when historical facts are mentioned, and Comminel’s book is an informed and informative guide to the schools and debates with significant historiographical impact. But the book’s principal purpose is to give a Marxist response to what its subtitle identi­ fies as the revisionist challenge to Marxism, a challenge that is all the more pressing because of the long dominance of the Marxist concept of class struggle in Western understanding of the Revolution. Precisely because certain passages of The Communist Manifesto provide such handy summaries of traditional understanding of the Revolution’s underlying causes, the refusal of traditional views is—explicitly as often as implicitly—a refusal of the Marxist vision of the historical process in its entirety. As the violent eruption of a contradiction between the vital class interests of bourgeoisie and aristocracy, the French Revolution was an object lesson in Marxist thought. If no vital class interests were at stake, the violence becomes incomprehensible and the object lesson disappears. Comminel’s thesis is that the new consensus should not be understood as a challenge to Marxism because there never was a legitimately Marxist vision of the French Revolution as a struggle between bourgeoisie and aristocracy. That vision was in fact the self-conception of the bourgeoisie, first produced while the Revolution was in progress and then repeated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although Marx wrote much that shows him to have shared the dominant misconception, he did so only because he failed to submit bourgeois history to the same relentlessly materialist interrogation that allowed him to overturn bourgeois economics. According to Comminel, the long agreement between Marxist and non-Marxist historians of the French Revolution came not because Marx was right but because he was wrong. What was seen as the best proof of Marxist historiography was in fact its worst error: “ the theory of bourgeois revolution which [Marx and Engels] accepted was in fact a central expression of liberal bourgeois ideology, one which is intrin­ sically at odds with M arx’s own concepts of historical materialism” (50-51). Comminel sets himself the task of defending Marxism against Marx by establishing an authentically materialist approach to what could not have been the kind of Revolution Marx believed. He does so by contending that, because class struggle always entails the exploitation of one class by another and because the aristocracy in no way exploited the bourgeoisie in eighteenth-century France, the concept of class struggle is inapplicable to the conflicts between two hegemonic groups during the French Revolution. Comminel’s position is original and tightly argued. In combination with his survey of Revolutionary historiogra­ phy, it makes Rethinking the French Revolution a welcome contribution to bicentennial réévaluation of 1789 and its consequences. S a n d y P e t r e y SU N Y at Stony Brook Ronnie L. Scharfman. E n g a g e m e n t a n d t h e L a n g u a g e o f t h e S u b j e c t in t h e P o e t r y o f A im é C é s a ir e . Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1987. Pp. 133. $14.50. The divided self is one of the major preoccupations of Caribbean literature. The Carib­ bean writer is haunted by the darker implications of the polarities which divide master Prospero and slave Caliban, King Christophe and fool Hugonin, Castaway subject and cast-out other. The task of self-definition becomes the only valid response to a world made unintelligible by the coloniser’s signifying presence and traumatised by self doubt. As LéviVOL . XXIX, NO. 2 93 L ’E spr it C r éa te u r Strauss...

Brian Abel‐Smith, Andrew Creese

As a result of economic stagnation and international debt burdens many developing countries are encountering difficulties in financing the recurrent costs of their health services. In 1986 with support from the US Agency for International Development a study was initiated in Mali Jamaica and Costa Rica to 1) identify the nature extent and principal consequences of present and prospective recurrent budget shortages in publicly financed health care and 2) assess the feasibility and sustainability of alternative financing and resource allocation strategies to promote equity and efficiency in the provision of primary health care. The main source of health sector financing is direct payments from private households in Mali taxes in Jamaica and contributions by employers and employees in Costa Rica. Decentralization of control of local services local retention of revenue from user charges and the purchase of generic drugs by international tender represent the most feasible strategies for re-establishing poorly maintained and underutilized health facilities in Mali. In Jamaica where a fee-for-service system predominates a compulsory insurance scheme for those in regular employment is being considered but provisions must be made for the many indigent and near-indigent patients. In Costa Rica compulsory health insurance is able to make a substantial contribution to health care financing because a sizeable proportion of the population is employed; a shift to a system of paying doctors in primary care on a capitation basis seems feasible.

Susan Leigh Star

No abstract is available for this record.

STEVEN S. WITKIN, JAN JEREMIAS, WILLIAM J. LEDGER

No abstract is available for this record.

Peter Baumgartner, Sabine Payr

No abstract is available for this record.

Gilles Brassard, Claude Crépeau, Moti Yung

No abstract is available for this record.

Lance Fortnow

In 1985, Goldwasser, Micali and Rackoff formulated interactive proof systems as a tool for developing cryptographic protocols. Indeed, many exciting cryptographic results followed from studying interactive proof systems and the related concept of zero-knowledge. Interactive proof systems also have an important part in complexity theory merging the well established concepts of probabilistic and nondeterministic computation. This thesis will study the complexity of various models of interactive proof systems. A perfect zero-knowledge interactive protocol convinces a verifier that a string is in a language without revealing any additional knowledge in an information theoretic sense. This thesis will show that for any language that has a perfect zero-knowledge proof system, its complement has a short interactive protocol. This result implies that there are not any perfect zero-knowledge protocols for NP-complete languages unless the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses. Thus knowledge comp...

Joe Kilian, Silvio Micali, Rafail Ostrovsky

No abstract is available for this record.

David B. Lewis

No abstract is available for this record.

Joe Kilian, Silvio Micali, Rafail Ostrovsky

Several resources relating to zero-knowledge protocols are considered. They are the number of envelopes used in the protocol, the number of oblivious transfer protocols executed during the protocol, and the total amount of communication required by the protocol. It is shown that after a preprocessing stage consisting of O(k) executions of oblivious transfer, any polynomial number of NP-theorems of any polysize can be proved noninteractively and in zero knowledge, on the basis of the existence of any one-way function, so that the probability of accepting a false theorem is less than 1/2/sup k/.>

Miguel Ángel González-Block, René Leyva Flores, OSCAR ZAP ATA, Ricardo Loewe · 5 authors

This article provides a critique of decentralization of health care systems in underdeveloped countries, taking the Mexican case as an example. The formulation, implementation and interruption of integrative decentralization in the 1980s is analysed in the context of the interests served in Mexico by administrative centralization and institutional fragmentation. The short-term results of decentralization upon state-level politics, finance, planning and health service distribution and equity are analysed in their relationship to bureaucratic and political interests. Initially the most underdeveloped region of the country was selected for a special comparative study of the effects of decentralization upon health service planning and equity. One state of this region became decentralized, while the other underwent only minor changes. It was therefore possible to compare the specific effects of administrative changes in the two states. Decentralization was interrupted at the national level, with only 14 states actually undergoing administrative change. The policy was also short of its devolutionary intentions, actually becoming an attempt towards recentralizing power around a different administrative structure. Regional disparities in the distribution of health services were accentuated due to the privileges furthered by decentralization in the richer municipalities, and the fall in services in the poorer ones related to interinstitutional conflicts at the central level

Yoel Tikochinsky

By using a technique borrowed from the inverse problem for one-dimensional motion, the proof of Bertrand’s theorem concerning the possible central forces leading to closed orbits is considerably simplified.

Authors unavailable

No abstract is available for this record.

Frank J. Finn, Ron Higham

No abstract is available for this record.

Peter M. G. Apers

The problem of allocating the data of a database to the sites of a communication network is investigated. This problem deviates from the well-known file allocation problem in several aspects. First, the objects to be allocated are not known a priori; second, these objects are accessed by schedules that contain transmissions between objects to produce the result. A model that makes it possible to compare the cost of allocations is presented; the cost can be computed for different cost functions and for processing schedules produced by arbitrary query processing algorithms. For minimizing the total transmission cost, a method is proposed to determine the fragments to be allocated from the relations in the conceptual schema and the queries and updates executed by the users. For the same cost function, the complexity of the data allocation problem is investigated. Methods for obtaining optimal and heuristic solutions under various ways of computing the cost of an allocation are presented and compared. Two different approaches to the allocation management problem are presented and their merits are discussed.

Emmanuel Paqueo Jimenez

In the highly centralized system of the Philippines, local funding provides the only source of flexibility to meet specific and urgent needs. The government in Manila, which pays all teacher salaries, finds it easier politically in times of fiscal belt-tightening to cut recurrent costs. Although local funds are a relatively small percentage of the education budget, they make an important contribution to covering maintenence and operating costs. The total cost of education per student also appears to lower in schools with greater local financing. Administrators and teachers have greater incentive to be cost-effective when forced to consider the effect of their behavior on the people who live and work in the local community. The policy implications of these findings for the Philippines, as well as other developing countries, are important. They strongly suggest that decentralization will increase efficiency. Without an increase in local funding, the quality of primary education will suffer.