1,465 research outputs found
Brief Announcement: Grassroots Distributed Systems: Concept, Examples, Implementation and Applications
No full textInformally, a distributed system is grassroots if it is permissionless and can have autonomous, independently-deployed instances - geographically and over time - that may interoperate voluntarily once interconnected. More formally, in a grassroots system the set of all correct behaviors of a set of agents P is strictly included in the set of the correct behaviors of P when they are embedded within a larger set of agents P' ⊃ P.
Grassroots systems are potentially important as they may allow communities to conduct their social, economic, civic, and political lives in the digital realm solely using their members' networked computing devices (e.g., smartphones), free of third-party control, surveillance, manipulation, coercion, or rent seeking (e.g., by global digital platforms such as Facebook or Bitcoin).
Client-server/cloud computing systems are not grassroots, and neither are systems designed to have a single global instance (Bitcoin/Ethereum with hardwired seed miners/bootnodes), and systems that rely on a single global data structure (IPFS, DHTs). An example grassroots system would be a serverless smartphone-based social network supporting multiple independently-budding communities that can merge when a member of one community becomes also a member of another.
Here, we formalize the notion of grassroots distributed systems; describe a grassroots dissemination protocol for the model of asynchrony and argue its safety, liveness, and being grassroots; extend the implementation to mobile (address-changing) devices that communicate via an unreliable network (e.g. smartphones using UDP); and discuss how grassroots dissemination can realize grassroots social networking and grassroots cryptocurrencies. The mathematical construction employs distributed multiagent transition systems to define the notions of grassroots protocols, to specify the grassroots dissemination protocols, and to prove their correctness. The protocols use the blocklace - a distributed, partially-ordered counterpart of the replicated, totally-ordered blockchain
Shapiro, Karl : Elliston lecture number 9 : the greatest living author; April 9th, 1959
No full textDescription on Reel Box: Reel #1 Speed: 3 3/4
Elliston Poet 1959 - Karl Shapiro
Lecture #9 - April 9, 1959
"The Greatest Living Author"Contents:
Track 01 The Greatest Living Author [complete]Digital Projects SAN: Folder and disc location for wav file: 20120222/Box2/Disc 5. Folder and disc location for mp3 file: 20120222/Box2/Disc
Cordial Miners: Fast and Efficient Consensus for Every Eventuality
No full textCordial Miners are a family of efficient Byzantine Atomic Broadcast
protocols, with instances for asynchrony and eventual synchrony.
They improve the latency of state-of-the-art DAG-based protocols by almost 2X
and achieve optimal good-case complexity of O(n) by forgoing Reliable Broadcast
as a building block.
Rather, Cordial Miners use the blocklace -- a partially-ordered counterpart
of the totally-ordered blockchain data structure -- to implement the three
algorithmic components of consensus: Dissemination, equivocation-exclusion, and
ordering
The Role of Procedural Controls in OSHA's Ergonomics Rulemaking
No full textFew, if any, regulations over the past decade have received the publicity or engendered the controversy of OSHA’s ergonomics regulation. Some may see the ergonomics rule as the paradigmatic instance of procedural hurdles holding up and eventually destroying a regulation. The purpose of this article is to examine the role that procedure played in the ergonomics rulemaking. To draw lessons from the ergonomics rulemaking I have conducted analyses of the four publicly available versions and conducted interviews with seven high ranking officials at OSHA and the Small Business Administration. I find that of the procedural hurdles faced by OSHA, the notice and comment requirement had the largest impact on the final rule. OMB review and requirements to conduct a cost benefit analysis served largely as a fire alarm to political overseers and the required small business panel had largely symbolic effects. The more traditional control of Congressional budgetary oversight had the greatest effect by delaying the rule for three years which eventually doomed OSHA’s attempts to regulate.Peer reviewe
Defragmenting the Regulatory Process
No full textThe regulatory process is often criticized for being cumbersome and slow, much like a computer whose hard drive is fragmented by files no longer used or useful. Like such a computer, the regulatory process contains many requirement of dubious utility. These include the Paperwork Reduction Act, the Regulatory Flexibility Act, the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, and numerous executive orders. While other parts of the regulatory process such as notice and comment and cost-benefit analysis have received much more academic attention, these other parts of the process deserve examination as well. This paper argues that such an examination will reveal that these statutes and executive orders add little of value to the regulatory process while consuming agency resources. An improved requirement for cost-benefit analysis with distributional analysis could easily replace virtually all of these requirements and improve regulations while reducing the time needed to promulgate regulations.Peer reviewe
An Evaluation of the Bush Administration Reforms to the Regulatory Process
No full textThe Bush Administration has implemented more reforms to the regulatory process than any of its predecessors. These reforms are often stereotyped as anti-regulatory. This article examines the reforms as a whole and asks which interests have been empowered by the Bush Administration regulatory reforms. I believe this method is a more effective way of assessing the impact of the reforms. I find that in addition to adding potential costs to the regulatory process, the reforms are likely to empower powerful interest groups and the presidency. Whether the impact of these reforms is pro-regulation or anti-regulation will depend on how a future administration more dedicated to regulatory protections uses them. I also lay out a research agenda to better empirically assess the impact of these regulatory reforms.Peer reviewed"Issue published online: 11 APR 2007. Article first published online: 11 APR 2007"--Publisher website
Does the amount of participation matter? Public comments, agency responses and the time to finalize a regulation
No full textThe notice and comment rulemaking process is a fundamental part of how agencies write regulations. While this process is starting to receive more empirical attention, the question of how the number of comments that an agency receives affects its decision-making process has received little examination. This paper uses Boolean analysis to examine nine rules from two agencies at the Department of Health and Human Services and evaluates the impact of a high volume of comments on agency changes to proposed rules and the time an agency takes to finalize a proposed rule. These nine cases suggest that agencies are most likely to change their proposals when they receive a high volume of comments on highly complex rules that are not very politically salient. Highly complex rules are also likely to take a long time to finalize when there are many public comments however it is often other factors that cause a long delay between proposed and final rules.Peer reviewedThe final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11077-007-9051-
Park West Gallery sets the record straight
No full textMorris Shapiro, gallery director of Park West Galleries, writes this article asa rebuttal to the claims author David Phillips made about Park West Galleries in the November 2008 issue of Artist's Magazine. The allegations Phillips made about Park West are about the Dali Biblia Sacra prints
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