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.
Parents and teachers seem increasingly alienated from their own schools. Here are two proposals for giving individual parents and teachers power to determine how small but significant portions of the school budget will be spent. I am convinced that we need much more experi mentation with true decentralized control over the spending of educational funds; not the creation of minidistricts or the adoption of school-site budget ing, but rather decision making at the individual teacher and individual family levels. I recognize the power of the entrenched bureaucracies: school boards and administrators on the one hand, teacher organizations on the other. For some time to come they will exercise hegemony over most public education dollars. But perhaps there is an oppor tunity for innovation at the margin. This opportuni ty is limited because there are few new public dollars available for education beyond those in evitably committed to cost-of-living increases in employee salaries. Yet this makes all the more important the desirability of trying out bold alterna tives with those funds. The past few years of experience with more centralized decision making with respect to new (or extra) money ? federal Title I funds and similar pots or large increases in general state aid brought about through school finance reform ? have shown us that this route typically results in either 1) in creases in employee salaries or 2) the hiring of more personnel ? either aides or specialists (usually read ing specialists), plus bureaucrats. In a few places these expenditures are thought to be educationally quite successful. If nothing else, they may be viewed as medium-scale public employment and guaran teed-wage programs or, to the extent that school volunteers are being converted into paid workers, an inventive income transfer scheme. Yet it is not clear
We study a two-level system having N local systems in the lower level subordinate to a central system in the higher one, such that both central and local systems have decision-making units. The central system is a coordinating agency and the local ones are semi-autonomous operating devisions. The basic principle of planning for this organization is that the central system allocates resources so as to optimize its own objective, while the local ones optimize their own objectives using the given resources. A local objective function, fn, is a function of the lower level decision variable vector x=(x1,ă»ă»ă», xN) and the higher level one a=(a1,ă»ă»ă», aN), where an is a resource vector allocated to the local system n. Since the functions â are mutually independent, the lower level composes a multi-objective system, in which the lower level decision-makers minimize a vector objective function f =(f1,ă»ă»ă»,fN) with respect to x in cooperation with each other. Thus, the lower level generates a set of noninferior (i.e. Pareto optimal) solutions â (a) being parametric with respect to a. The central decision-maker, then, chooses the optimal resource allocation aâ° and the best noninferior solution â â° corresponding to aâ° from among a set of â (a). The above problem becomes a decentralized two-level optimization, when the local system contains only its own variables (xn, an). Several theorems and iterative algorithms for the formulated problems are obtained by use of mathematical programming techniques.
We are concerned with a class of organizations composed of a coordinating central system and plural semi-autonomous subsystems, such that each of them has a decision-making unit. Such a problem is regarded as that of a decentralized two-level optimization. The basic principle of planning for this organization is that the central system allocates resources so as to optimize its own objective, while the subsystems optimize their own objectives using the given resources.Within this framework of decision making, we consider a transportation problem in which N transport agents transport their own commodity. Each transport agent n, n=1, âŠ, N, finds optimal flow patterns of the associated commodity n so that the transportation cost is minimized based on its own objective function under the arc capacity restriction imposed by the central agent. The coordinating central agent governs the transport agents through the way of allocating the arc capacity so that the optimality of whole network system is achieved. Here, the lower level problem is composed of a set of single commodity minimum cost flow problems of the transport agents, each of which can be easily solved separately by the subsystem.The decentralized optimization problem is solved in principle by a parametric approach. A feasible direction algorithm using directional derivative and application of a constraint simplex method are proposed to solve the formulated network flow problem.
December 1976, volume 21 In this study participativeness, centralization, and organizational autonomy were analyzed conceptually and operationally and subsequently related to five indicators of organizational effectiveness. The criteria of effectiveness included total production, decline in production, financial loss due to errors, morale and anxiety. The individual and joint effects of the influence variables on organizational effectiveness were very strong. Participative, decentralized, and autonomous organizations are more effective. The implications of these results are discussed.
Zero-field and high-field optical detection of magnetic resonance (ODMR), electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), and optical spectroscopy experiments have been performed on several systems in order to further basic knowledge of the structure, reactions, and response to radiation of atoms, molecules, and ions in their ground and/or excited electronic states. Particularly noteworthy results for the present contract year include the determination of the complete magnetic and optical properties of the lowest triplet states of 1-chloro, 1-bromo, and 1-iodonaphthalene, the development of a microscopic model for the intramolecular heavy-atom effect in the /sup 3/(..pi..,..pi..*) states of aromatic molecules, a detailed analysis of the angular dependence of the hyperfine and quadrupole structure in triplet 1-bromonaphthalene, observation of proton hyperfine structure in the hf ODMR spectra of short-lived triplet states, a definitive paper on the relative importance of spin delocalization and second-order spin-orbit coupling effects in /sup 3/(n,..pi..*) benzophenone (a phototype photochemical system), a detailed analysis of the level-anticrossing spectra of several triplet state benzophenones which exhibit hyperfine structure in the cross-relaxation region (thus permitting the determination of key magnetic parameters in the complete absence of perturbing microwave or radiofrequency fields), optical detection of ground-state NQR transitions in host crystal molecules, the observation of strong radiofrequency transitions near avoided crossing points in Zeeman energy level diagrams of photoexcited triplet states, the construction of zero-field ODMR, ODENDOR, and hf ODENDOR spectrometers, measurements of the activation parameters for ring interconversions of several free radicals containing five- and six-membered rings, and experimental proof that the triplet state of trimethylenemethane (a key reactive intermediate in organic chemistry) is the ground state.
Ethernet is a branching broadcast communication system for carrying digital data packets among locally distributed computing stations. The packet transport mechanism provided by Ethernet has been used to build systems which can be viewed as either local computer networks or loosely coupled multiprocessors. An Ethernet's shared communication facility, its Ether, is a passive broadcast medium with no central control. Coordination of access to the Ether for packet broadcasts is distributed among the contending transmitting stations using controlled statistical arbitration. Switching of packets to their destinations on the Ether is distributed among the receiving stations using packet address recognition. Design principles and implementation are described based on experience with an operating Ethernet of 100 nodes along a kilometer of coaxial cable. A model for estimating performance under heavy loads and a packet protocol for error controlled communication are included for completeness.