Blockchain Papers

Frederick H. Buttel, Michael E. Gertler

No abstract is available for this record.

Wolfgang Bibel

No abstract is available for this record.

Aroon Shenoy, D. R. Saini, V. M. Nadkarni

No abstract is available for this record.

Joan Nietz Althaus, Nancy McDonald Hardyck, Patricia Blair Pierce, Marilyn S. Rodgers

No abstract is available for this record.

H. Giesekus

No abstract is available for this record.

Peter Hooper, John Morton

No abstract is available for this record.

E. G. Coffman

No abstract is available for this record.

Doron Zeilberger

No abstract is available for this record.

Carl‐Johan Kleberg

Cultural policy in Sweden. During the ‘70’s, Sweden adopted a genuine cultural policy evolving along the following main criteria : major opportunities for self-expression, creative and community development, decentralization and financial efforts in favour of the underprivileged. Since State finance does not reach the local level, the implementation of such a policy remained within the exclusive terms of reference of local govemment. This accounts for wide discrepancies among boroughs. The 80ties witness a cut in public expenditure with serious effects on cultural policy which had not yet reached its full development and still lacked strong local structures. Therefore, future cultural policy is as yet uncertain. It will largely depend on societal options taken : privatization and commercialization or cultural welfare and creativity.

Michael Busko, A Saltzman

In the American governmental system, local governments have a fairly high degree of autonomy in their relations with state and federal governments. This is one reason that local governments play such an important role of financing and delivering human services. Moreover, the many agencies, both private and public, which deliver these services at the local level, have a high degree of autonomy in carrying out their missions and in relating to each other. In such a decentralized context, the working relations among human service agencies are critical to the effective delivery of the services they provide. The coordination of these organizations and their services is a complex and pervasive issues. This paper will describe and compare two complementary studies of the same substantive area, coordination of transportation provided by human service agencies in the United States.

Jane Sisk Willems, H. David Banta

Prologues: We live in an age of high technology, whether the subject is medicine, the exploration of space, or unraveling other mysteries of mankind. One small reflection of this reality is the presence on Capitol Hill of the Office of Technology Assessment, an arm of Congress created to assist legislators to better understand the relentless pace of technological change in our society. One of the pursuits of OTA involves a wide range of health related issues, which command the attention of a professional staff numbering about a dozen at any given time. David Banta, a board-certified specialist in preventive medicine, directs this work. One of his senior associates is Jane Willems, a Ph.D economist with a particular interest in technology. The thinking of Banta, as it relates to the appropriate role of government in monitoring technology, has changed in the seven years he has worked on Capitol Hill. Once a devout believer in strong regulation as the primary force to improve the use of technology, Banta has come around to thinking that a variety of instruments may be needed to undertake such tasks in the United States. Willems, on the other hand, has maintained a firm belief in the workings of the marketplace and in decentralized decisionmaking. The paper written by Banta and Willems reflects this tandem of thought. Three congressional committees in particular make use of the OTA 's health work: the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, the Senate Finance Committee, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Recent studies undertaken by the OTA include technology transfer at the National Institutes of Health, the role of technology in Medicare, alternatives to health and safety regulation in the work place, and technologies for handicapped people.

K. Bossong

No abstract is available for this record.

Maria Brenton

Abstract Social services in the Netherlands have traditionally been delivered by non-state agencies, in a climate of support for ‘private initiative’ and resistance to direct intervention by government. These agencies have, however, become almost totally dependent upon government finance, while operating virtually autonomously in a non-politicised sphere where services have become increasingly sophisticated and expensive. The power exercised over public resources and public services by these ‘private’ agencies, particularly at national level, and the lack of control over the welfare sector by government, has been the subject of growing criticism in recent years. The dysfunctions of a ‘voluntary’ system of social services have also become glaringly evident. This article traces the development of a relationship between state and ‘private enterprise’ in the social services which has developed from a strictly ‘separatist’ model to one where a high degree of inter-penetration has been reached. It also examines current efforts to extend this second ‘incorporated’ model of statutory-voluntary relationships by placing social welfare services under a greater measure of public control within a decentralized system of local political responsibility.

S. Ghon Rhee, Franklin L. McCarthy

Traditionally, financial management theory has emphasized the separation of the capital investment and financing decisions [2, pp. 81 and 176]. This separation assumes that the firm's financing decision is taken as given when the investment decision is made or that the two decisions are independent of each other. In reality, these decisionis are seldom independent. Mergers and acquisitions are typical examples of capital investments that make the investment/financing separation inappropriate. The tone of research on the interaction between investment and financing decisions was set by Myers [16]. Myers advanced the concept of Adjusted Present Value (APV), which permits an examination and evaluation of the consequences of interactions between the firm's financing and investment decisions. A new project's APV is defined as the sum of the present value of its net operating income assuming all-equity financing plus the value of any additional debt capacity to the firm contributed by the project. The definition of the new project's APV presented above represents a fairly simplified version. However, a closer look at the concept of APV brings up other potential issues relating to stock purchase decisions, dividend policy, and transaction costs associated with new sources of funding, etc. These are important financial management variables that have been considered in other research efforts [1, 3, 7, 17]. The second phase of the investment/financing interaction process was developed by Bower and Jenks (BJ) [1]. They used the simplified concept of APV in their effort to estima e divisional screening rates for decentralized investm nt decisions. After assuming that each investment project had its implicit optimal debt ratio, BJ used this implicit ratio to estimate the project's cut-off rate in the fr m work of the capital asset pricing model. While BJ's study does provide an important application of the APV concept, it does not go far enough: (a) It does not provide any theoretical basis for assessment of the implicit debt ratio of each project. Their analysis instead relies on average debt ratios of different industries observed on an ex post basis. (b) It assumes that the firm's debt capacity is increased by an amount equivalent to the project's debt capacity. Although the additivity of the firm's debt ca-

Austin D. Swanson

well established in the United States. With few exceptions, states are paying a larger share of total education costs and, increasingly, states are setting limits on how much or how little school districts may spend for educational services. While generally acknowledged as inevitable, the movement has raised fears that the viability of local control is threatened and that the advantages of decentralized policy making are soon to be lost. The fear is summed up in the adage, He who pays the piper calls the tune. That is a possibility, but it need not be. There is much to be learned in this respect from the experience of England. The English have developed a system of schooling whereby approximately twothirds of the costs are borne by the central government while local educational authorities exercise a greater degree of discretion than enjoyed by their counterparts in the United States especially at the school building level. The purpose of this paper is to describe the relationship between central and local government in England and to draw implications for practice in the United States with specific reference to education.

Philip A. Bernstein, Nathan Goodman, Eugene Wong, Christopher L. Reeve · 5 authors

This paper describes the techniques used to optimize relational queries in the SDD-1 distributed database system. Queries are submitted to SDD-1 in a high-level procedural language called Datalanguage. Optimization begins by translating each Datalanguage query into a relational calculus form called an envelope , which is essentially an aggregate-free QUEL query. This paper is primarily concerned with the optimization of envelopes. Envelopes are processed in two phases. The first phase executes relational operations at various sites of the distributed database in order to delimit a subset of the database that contains all data relevant to the envelope. This subset is called a reduction of the database. The second phase transmits the reduction to one designated site, and the query is executed locally at that site. The critical optimization problem is to perform the reduction phase efficiently. Success depends on designing a good repertoire of operators to use during this phase, and an effective algorithm for deciding which of these operators to use in processing a given envelope against a given database. The principal reduction operator that we employ is called a semijoin . In this paper we define the semijoin operator, explain why semijoin is an effective reduction operator, and present an algorithm that constructs a cost-effective program of semijoins, given an envelope and a database.

J E Compston, S Vedi, J E Ledger, A Webb · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

B.W. Wetherilt

This thesis is an attempt to generalise to the odd orthogonal group Γ_K, over an Infinite field K not of characteristic two, the work of Schur [S], and more recently Green [G], on the general linear group G_K using the approach of Weyl [W] in characteristic zero. The special feature here is that we treat Γ_K as merely a group of matrices defined by the vanishing of polynomials in its coefficients (the classical view) rather than a group generated by elements derived from an associated Lie algebra, the approach used initially by Chevalley and adopted by most authors in recent times.
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\nAfter generalising Green's [G] Schur algebra for G_K to Γ_K in §0 we prove in §1 Chevalley's famous theorem on the 'Big Cell' in G_K and then, by an easy extension, prove it for the Big Cell in Γ_K. Chevalley's original proof uses representations of Lie algebras, ours requires nothing but a little knowledge of the coordinate ring K_+[G] of all 'polynomial' functions on G_K . We define K[Γ], the coordinate ring of Γ_K, to be the space of all polynomial functions on G_K restricted to Γ_K and in §2 give a generating set of the kernel of the restriction map ψ_K:K_+ [G]→K[Γ]. This generalises Weyl's result in characteristic zero. In §3 we use this result to show that the family, or 'scheme', of rings K[Γ] (K varying over all infinite fields not of characteristic two) is 'defined over Z' ; in fact K[Γ] is naturally isomorphic to K θ Z[Γ_Q], where Z[Γ_Q] is the subring of Q[Γ] spanned by 'monomial' functions. This enables us to formulate a 'modular' representation theory for Γ which connects polynomial representations of Γ_Q with those of Γ_K.
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\nIn §4 we investigate the Schur algebras of Γ_Q following Weyl [W] and in §5 find a complete set of irreducibles for each of them, once again following the lead of Weyl. In §6 we attempt to 'reduce' these modules modulo p to obtain 'Weyl' modules for Γ_K, a task only partially completed.

Kurt Schlichting

A bstract . The fiscal crisis of particular central cities has been primarily caused by social and economic decentralization within metropolitan regions. This hypothesis is examined through a case study of the Bridgeport, Connecticut metropolitan region. Middle and upper income groups have moved from the central city of Bridgeport to its suburbs while the poor remain. Business and industry have also decentralized. These factors weaken the capacity of the central city to generate sufficient revenue from its declining share of the region's taxable resources. The central city must fund a wide range of services and faces, as all local governments do, increased costs. Because of these fundamental social and economic changes , the central city cannot meet its service commitments. Unless the existing system of public finance is altered, continued decline is inevitable.

Michael J. Zimmer

The required Third National Energy Plan NEP-III offers the Reagan administration an opportunity to assess cogeneration. The Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, increasing energy prices, capital-intensive industrial investments in energy efficiency, utility financing problems, opportunities for decentralized energy systems, stabilizing gas supplies, and the economics of energy efficiency combined to make cogeneration attractive to a wide range of energy producers and users. US energy policy will be reassessing several issues, among them the roles of utilities, states, and the Federal government in cogeneration and the appropriate financial and legal incentives to ensure certainty for those developing cogeneration facilities. (DCK)

Philip A. Bernstein, Nathan Goodman

No abstract is available for this record.

Atsuyoshi Ohno, Tohru Shio, Hiroyuki Yamamoto, Shinzaburo Oka

No abstract is available for this record.

K. M. Chandy, J. Misra

No abstract is available for this record.

Paivi Tripp

No abstract is available for this record.