Blockchain Papers

Zahra Keshavarz Moraveji, Yunping Liang, Ursula Eicker, Tian Li

No abstract is available for this record.

Ervin Goci, Suzanne Harris-Brandts

Amidst a global surge in urban development foregrounding smart, sustainable, and now pandemic-proof design, new forms of longstanding hazard and health discourse are being deployed to justify dispossession, particularly in self-built districts. Looking at a case in Tirana, Albania, we examine how this discourse is being contemporized and paired with diverse digital media as it overlaps within a single project – the Tirana Riverside Project. As expressions of authoritative knowledge, architectural visualizations, social media posts, state-backed news broadcasts, and international design blogs work to validate this underlying ideology driving demolition. Such imagery and discourse, we contend, thus need to be read as artifacts of power that entrench government authority while substantiating mass dispossession. We argue that these processes are not only about the real estate profits demolition-based urban renewal generates but also – in Albania’s flawed democratic context – their ability to support the ruling elite. Using content analysis, we identify four hazard and health imaginaries overlapping within the project: 1) pandemic-proof design; 2) design for seismic emergencies; 3) zero-emission sustainable design; and 4) smart city technologies. We show how these imaginaries join longer traditions of normative discourse around hazard and health in urban renewal yet scrutinize their distinct contemporized and localized expressions.

Manuel Díáz, Enrique Soler, Luis Llopis, Joaquín Trillo

Safety-Critical Systems (SCSs) often manage sensible data that must be trustworthy, especially in many cases in which different actors participate whose interests may not coincide. Blockchain is a disruptive technology that has emerged to ensure the trustfulness of data. The nuclear industry incorporates many SCSs where blockchain can be applied. This paper focuses on the use of blockchain for the inspection of steam generators of a nuclear power plant. This is a critical process where different actors participate: plant property, external companies in charge of the inspection itself and different administrations. It typically consists of a number of processes that explore the state of different components of the plant in order to find any kind of failure or defect and it generates a great amount of data that must be verifiable and trustworthy. A distributed blockchain-based system is presented where all the nodes share the information and it cannot be altered. As a novelty, automatic inspection algorithms are stored in the blockchain itself by means of smart contracts. The benefits of blockchain are studied for the nuclear industry in general and for the inspection process in particular. In order to explore the possible drawbacks of a blockchain-based system for data management, a simulator has been implemented to recreate the scenario of an inspection. The results obtained show that blockchain architectures are a good alternative to traditional information repositories for nuclear power plant inspections.

Philip A. Ebert, Martin Smith, Ian Durbach

The notion of risk plays a central role in economics, finance, health, psychology, law and elsewhere, and is prevalent in managing challenges and resources in day-to-day life. In recent work, Duncan Pritchard (2015, 2016) has argued against the orthodox probabilistic conception of risk on which the risk of a hypothetical scenario is determined by how probable it is, and in favour of a modal conception on which the risk of a hypothetical scenario is determined by how modally close it is. In this article, we use Pritchard's discussion as a springboard for a more wide-ranging discussion of the notion of risk. We introduce three different conceptions of risk: the standard probabilistic conception, Pritchard's modal conception, and a normalcy conception that is new (though it has some precursors in the psychological literature on risk perception). Ultimately, we argue that the modal conception is ill-suited to the roles that a notion of risk is required to play and explore the prospects for a form of pluralism about risk, embracing both the probabilistic and the normalcy conceptions. We take the view that a risk judgment always implicates a body of evidence, which we refer to as the background evidence. In cases where the background evidence is not made explicit, we take it to be supplied by the context of utterance and, in typical cases, to be the evidence possessed by the one making the judgment. That is, we are inclined towards a contextualist semantics for utterances such as 3 and 4, on which their truth conditions feature an evidence parameter, the value of which is fixed by the context. The semantics of such utterances is not, however, our primary concern here. As well as making categorical risk judgments such as the above, we often make comparisons. While we may judge that the risk of a plane crash is very low, we may also judge that there is a higher risk of a car crash on the way to the airport. As well as judging that there's a high risk of food poisoning at a particular restaurant, we might also judge that there is a lower risk of food poisoning at the restaurant next door. Moreover, while we often speak about the riskiness of feared events, such as plane crashes, food poisoning, etc., we can also assess the risk of states of affairs. For instance, before drilling into the wall of a 1970s West Australian house, one might assess the risk that the wall contains asbestos, or jurors in a criminal trial, when contemplating a guilty verdict, might consider the risk that the defendant is innocent, or a mountaineer may ponder the risk that the snow conditions are unfavourable for a climb. Here, we treat propositions as the primary bearers of risk, with the riskiness of an event or state of affairs corresponding to the riskiness of the proposition that the event occurs, or the state of affairs obtains. As well as making judgments about the risk of specific events and states of affairs, people also assess the risk of activities or decisions, saying things like ‘Drilling into this wall is risky’, ‘It would be risky to attempt a climb under these conditions’. These judgments are important to understanding the connections between risk and decision making but we put them to one side here. According to the probabilistic of risk, the risk of a proposition is determined by the of higher the the higher the risk. this the risk of is higher the risk of in is more probable is. The be as the background evidence. 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Pierce Greenberg, Dylan Bugden

No abstract is available for this record.

Mark J. Cherry

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights announces a significant array of welfare entitlements--to personal health and health care, medicine, nutrition, water, improved living conditions, environmental protection, and so forth--as well as corresponding governmental duties to provide for such public health measures, though the simple expedient of announcing that such entitlements are "basic human rights." The Universal Declaration provides no argument for the legitimacy of the sweeping governmental authority, taxation, and regulation to create and impose such "rights." As this paper explores that some action promotes a purported good, such as "health," does not thereby make the action morally permissible. Just as there are moral limits on legitimate personal actions, there are also moral limits on legitimate governmental actions to promote purported goods, including health. A core question of any governmental regulation, therefore, is whether it is a legitimate application of moral political authority or an unauthorized act of state coercion. Pace UNESCO's wide-ranging assertions, this paper argues that promoting health only falls within the legitimate authority of governments in very narrowly defined circumstances. As the paper critically explores, at stake are foundational moral and political questions concerning the limits of governmental authority to intervene in the consensual interaction of persons. Imposing such duties on others, including citizens of a state through regulatory activity and taxation, must be justified, nonarbitrary, and demonstrably within the limits of moral political authority. UNESCO's assertions do not meet this burden of proof.

Authors unavailable

The past decade has been a period of introspection in the radiological protection community. The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) has set out to produce a new set of recommendations; a draft document has been produced and made available on the ICRP web site. That draft has been widely reviewed and support for the proposed recommendations has been muted to say the least [1]. A subsequent draft is now being reviewed. As we wait for the final version it seems worthwhile to reaffirm the fundamental base for radiological protection as we practise it. The base is the set of three principles; justification, protection of the individual, and optimization of protection (the ALARA principle). Their importance seemed to be lost in the detail of the initial draft recommendations. I feel that without a clear statement of their primacy in the protection system we are in danger of the minutiae of the recommendations being applied in a far too arbitrary and restrictive way. There was a hint of this in the draft ICRP document on optimization that was available for review earlier this summer, in which it was argued that the so-called precautionary principle had been the driver for the evolution of the ICRP's thinking [2]. Some argue, correctly I believe, that this is not really a principle; it is more a poorly-defined and open-ended method of handling or reacting to uncertainties in our knowledge of risk. We see the precautionary principle rather loosely invoked in some risk management decisions as justifying arbitrary safety factors. `Applying the precautionary principle' sounds more substantial and scientific than just saying `to be on the safe side'. The influence of the principle is far more widespread though. The idea behind the precautionary principle originated in Germany in the 1960s but it was not until 1982 that it was endorsed internationally when the UN included it in the World Charter for Nature. It gained prominence in European treaties and was advocated by the UN Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992. Initially the idea was that `uncertainty does not justify inaction'. The idea evolved and precaution began to take the place of science-based risk assessment and management. By the late 1990s the idea was that uncertainty also required shifting the burden and standard of proof [3]. The principle became `When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context, the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.' [4,5] In other words, uncertain risk requires forbidding the potentially risky activity until the proponent of the activity demonstrates that it poses no (or acceptable) risk. We are all aware of the impossibility of proving a zero but this wording may sound reasonable provided that the parenthetic `or acceptable' is the operative qualifier. For many though, it is not. Adams has described what he calls the {\it environmentalist paradigm}, in which possibility replaces probability as a criterion for protection regulation, and any agent harmful at high doses is considered harmful at exceedingly low doses [6]. Only zero risk is then acceptable when the precautionary principle is applied. This is a stultifying situation. Morris comments, in a broad-ranging critique, that the precautionary principle not only lacks any clear guidance on when and how it does apply, but perhaps more importantly it is devoid of any limitations of when it does apply [7]. Without such limitations, he notes, the precautionary principle will be a vacuum that can consume any and all products and technologies, since some risk and uncertainty is associated with every human activity. We could conclude that in radiological protection we would have no optimizing; no applying the ALARA principle. Radiation regulations based on the three fundamental ICRP principles have achieved an acceptable level of protection for decades. We should not abandon them to the arbitrariness of the precautionary principle when we have a sound basis for radiological protection in the clearly-enunciated principles of justification, individual dose limitation and optimization of protection. Radiological protection based on these principles includes elements of precaution. Why do we need a precautionary principle? This has been indirectly answered by asking: What if we were to apply the precautionary principle to itself? Its application carries the burden of untold risks and uncertainties. Thus, by its own definition, it should be abandoned [4]. This is not to argue that we should throw caution to the wind. The key is reasonableness. As Nilsson points out, though it is certainly better to be safe than sorry, it is important to distinguish unjustified precautionary action from justifiable precautionary action based on sound science and an appropriate assessment of the costs and benefits of taking action [8]. The precautionary principle fails to distinguish between the two, by elevating to the status of universal `principle' a notion that is only narrowly applicable. In Canada we are fortunate that we have sensible wording in the Federal Nuclear Safety and Control Act that provides the framework for many of the radiological protection regulations in Canada [9]. Part of its stated purpose is the limitation, to a reasonable level , of the risks to the health and safety of persons and the environment. The ICRP principle of dose limitation and the ALARA principle are coherent with this. Further, the Federal Government's Privy Council Office (PCO) has published guidance for its agencies on the application of precaution in science-based decision-making that reinforces the approach we have been taking in radiological protection and, in particular, emphasizes the importance of what is in essence the ALARA principle [10]. It notes that sound scientific information and its evaluation must be the basis for applying precaution. Peer review represents a concrete test for the practical application of precaution to decision making. A peer-review process can assess the soundness of the scientific evidence and its inherent credibility within the scientific community. Scientific advisors should give weight to peer-reviewed science and aim at sound and reasonable evidence on which to base their judgments. Moreover, the science function can be further supplemented by formal, structured and, where warranted, independent advisory processes that include widely recognized and credible individuals. I believe we can heartily subscribe to this. The guidance document lays out five principles that should guide the application of precautionary measures. They should be: Subject to reconsideration, on the basis of the evolution of science, technology and society's chosen level of protection. Proportional to the potential severity of the risk being addressed and to society's chosen level of protection. Non-discriminatory and consistent with measures taken in similar circumstances. Cost-effective, with the goal of generating an overall net benefit for society at least cost, and efficiency in the choice of measures. Finally, where more than one option reasonably meets the above characteristics, then the least trade-restrictive measure should be applied. We can see all three radiological protection principles reflected in this guidance. Particularly important is the emphasis on the link to scientific knowledge, rather than the whims of activist groups, together with the exhortation to assess the real and potential impacts of making a precautionary decision (whether to act or not to act), including social, economic and other relevant factors and risk-risk trade-offs. Apply the ALARA principle in other words. The guidance concludes with the expectation that Canadian agency officials will consider its guiding principles in decision-making and will work together in developing, in consultation with their stakeholders, guidance for the application of precaution in t

Jonathan D. Moreno

In 1986, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck published the first edition of his book, Risk Society.1 Beck's book has attained wide popularity, especially in Europe, for his analysis of the distance between scientific expertise and popular opinion in the understanding of potential harms. Time and again, Beck points out, the public complains that there is a harmful process at work, while the scientists who are appointed by authorities to assess the complaints conclude that there is no objective basis for concern. Too often, though, the scientific conclusions are advanced without involving the public and without taking into account conditions outside of the laboratory. Subsequent experiences, such as the Mad Cow disaster in British livestock, have only reinforced the problem. Public skepticism about genetically modified organisms and the food supply can be traced to the same roots. On both sides of the Atlantic, the example of HIV in the blood supply, the halting management of the crisis, and the resulting loss of public confidence in the system, constitute an all-too-familiar case for readers of this journal. These kinds of examples and the conditions that Beck describes and explicates helped lead to the development of a policy standard, again especially in Europe, called the precautionary principle. In a 1992 statement, the European Environment Agency gave a succinct statement of the principle: [I]n order to protect the environment, a precautionary approach should be widely applied, meaning that where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage to the environment, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation. Further, The precautionary principle permits a lower level of proof of harm to be used in policy-making whenever the consequences of waiting for higher levels of proof may be very costly and/or irreversible (emphasis added).2 Paradoxically, technologic advancement itself is the source of the risks that concern us. In other words, scientific expertise has created the very conditions that society now doubts the experts fully appreciate. In Risk Society, Beck defines risk as “a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself.” He goes on, “Risks, as opposed to older dangers, are consequences which relate to the threatening force of modernization and to its globalization of doubt.” The social and political conditions that affect current issues in transfusion medicine are thus part of a much larger “globalization of doubt” about expertise. Although he does not allude to transfusion medicine per se, it is a paradigm case of risk in the sense that Beck writes about, for it has been a modernizing development in medical care and the risks it brings about would not exist without that modernization. The tensions within a “risk society” are brought to the surface when a new incident reignites doubt, such as concerns about West Nile virus in the summer of 2002. Sensitized by previous failures to satisfy public concern, responsible officials leap into action, often shifting their attention and energy away from known and measurable risks to persuade society that the unknown and often nonmeasurable risk is being taken seriously. This reaction, while understandable in light of the critique leveled by Beck and many others, should give us pause. Along with policies intended to drastically reduce risk, it is an example of the way that the precautionary principle has been both transformed into a dogma and taken out of its original context. I call these tendencies “creeping precautionism” because the adoption of a precautionary stance may not even be noticed until it is too late, and because a reasonable principle can easily be turned into a self-defeating ideology. Consider two recent policies that public health and blood industry experts have cited in conversation as examples that might reflect creeping precautionism: p24 antigen testing for HIV, which may have prevented one case per year at a cost of tens of millions a year; and deferral of donors who have been European residents, when the risk of CJD risk remains highly theoretical with no documented case of transmission, and hundreds of thousands of units have been lost as a result. I am no authority on the complex medical and public health issues involved, but suppose for the sake of argument that these policies raise valid questions. How did they come to pass? Clearly many elements came into play in these policy decisions. One that has not previously been identified is the fact that, as these policies were being formed, the precautionary principle came to have a great deal of influence in environmental health circles. In fact, I believe that we live in a period in which the principle has, without argument and often without conscious awareness, both been taken out of context, applied to problems other than catastrophic health concerns, and misinterpreted. The original context was environmentalism, where ecologic complexities and uncertainties present risks that, for all intents and purposes, may truly be inestimable and irreversible. Those conditions may not apply in other policy contexts. The misinterpretation has been to suppose that precautionism requires that only zero risk is acceptable, or at least something quite close to zero risk. Even advocates of the principle would recognize these subtle shifts in thinking as errors. In particular, it is clear that no action or inaction is risk free, and that any decision has opportunity costs. The opportunity costs of precautionism in the blood industry are, among others, the loss of many usable units of blood and the alienation of potential donors. I am not arguing that the policies in question are without merit nor that they should be repealed. Rather, I urge that a discussion begin in the blood services community about whether unwarranted precautionism has in fact crept into policymaking. This discussion should also take into account the peculiar stresses upon the role of expertise in a modern democracy. To step back for a moment, it is useful to recall the classical origins of the idea of expertise. In his seminal work, The Republic, Plato uses an allegory to characterize the situation of the truly knowledgeable person. He spins a tale about a group of slaves bound to their places since birth, unable to turn their heads, and only able to view a wall in front of them. Behind them are carried ordinary objects, whose shadows fall upon the wall. Knowing nothing better, the slaves assume that the shadows are the real objects. Now suppose, Plato continues, a slave manages to break his bonds and escape to the mouth of the cave. Unaccustomed to the light, he will at first be blinded by the sun, then realize to his horror that all his life what he has thought was reality was merely illusion. He tries to enlighten (pun intended) his comrades, but they mock him as mad. Discouraged, he takes his place among the slaves again. The allegory implies that knowledge is painful, hard to achieve, and subject to ridicule by the ignorant. This is the uncomfortable position of the expert. The problem is especially grave in medicine, whose practitioners are supposed to be sensitive to the uninitiated. Yet, too much sensitivity is incompatible with the detachment and decorum that the physician requires to be effective. Sir William Osler, generally regarded as the father of internal medicine, commented on this dilemma of the health care expert over a century ago. Imperturbability. . . . It is the quality which is most appreciated by the laity though often misunderstood by them; and the physician who has the misfortune to be without it, who betrays indecision and worry, and who shows that he is flustered and flurried in ordinary emergencies, loses rapidly the confidence of his patients.3 I write as a product and professor of the bioethical revolution in medicine, which is characterized by a deep suspicion of expertise, manifested as the insistence on informed consent and truth telling by doctors. This revolution is only about 30 years old in practice and would have shocked my father, a 1917 graduate of the University of Vienna medical school. The emergence of bioethics in the 1970s (my father died in 1974, too soon to experience the sweeping changes in medical ethics) is of a piece with the appearance of the precautionary principle of the 1980s. Both are rooted in skepticism of professional authority, and both have advocated lay involvement in medical decisions. I do not advocate repudiating the new medical ethics. As the Yale University psychiatrist and law professor Jay Katz has long pointed out, the doctor-patient relationship was for eons characterized by a doctor-dominated paradigm that is best left behind. Yet, I worry that the critique of modernism, of expertise, has swung too far. In the clinical setting, I have seen this phenomenon manifested as the reluctance of physicians to give advice to patients who are facing a complex treatment decision. Often I hear complaints that doctors respond to patients’ requests for guidance with the demurrer that it is their decision, that they must exercise their self-determination. This is a case of turning patient autonomy into a shield behind which doctors can hide. The ethical principle of autonomy should not be an excuse for abandoning the counseling that patients crave. Similarly, in the long run I think it is bad for the profession to give up the moral authority that comes with expertise. Perhaps those with expertise in public health and blood should open a conversation about whether they have succumbed to creeping protectionism in an honest attempt to learn from the horrors of the HIV experience. I cannot say whether this is the case, only that the signs point to this possibility. On the importance of a philosophical view of scientific expertise, consider Osler again. A rare and precious gift is the Art of Detachment, by which a man may so separate himself from a life-long environment as to take a panoramic view of the conditions under which he has lived and moved: it frees him from Plato's den long enough to see the realities as they are, the shadows as they appear. Could a physician attain to such an art he would find in the state of his profession a theme calling as well for the exercise of the highest faculties of description and imagination as for the deepest philosophic insight.4 In our time, scientists have learned about the pitfalls of an aristocratic attitude. The challenge is to balance those lessons with society's continuing need for unshackled expertise. To this end, efforts should be made to develop evidence that quantifies, or at least aids in prioritizing risks, with the goal of evidence-based risk assessment. Scientists and physicians should then recognize their social obligation to participate in policy debates in which their expert opinions can help the public balance imminent and more remote risks and evaluate the costs associated with risk-minimizing initiatives. In this way, perhaps we can all meet the Platonic challenge of doing science in a democracy.

Carrie L. Hull

This paper is centred around a debate taking place among environmental scientists. One camp argues that proof of a causal connection between a chemical and a biological anomaly must be demonstrated in the laboratory. The other contends that actual damage is underestimated in the lab, and that it is therefore necessary to conduct supplemental ecoepidemiological research in order to determine the full impact of toxic chemicals. Members of the former contingent – claiming to be defending scientific rigour – sometimes accuse their peers of practising an inferior science. This paper argues that this contention is supported by a philosophical tradition tending to favour abstract and formal analysis over the close examination of material detail. To the extent that this preference has been adopted by the media, industry, policy analysts, and regulatory bodies, more is at stake than an intellectual squabble. The paper provides a brief overview of the history of the formalist tendency in philosophy, followed by an illustration of the ways in which advocates of a strict laboratory methodology implicitly rely on this foundation. The work and ideas of contemporary ecoepidemiologists are then compared to this imposing edifice of traditional science.