Blockchain technology opportunities in Kurdistan, applications and challenges

Recently, the blockchain technology has received a vast popularity because it brought revolutionary changes to some industries due to the fact that this technology enables the implementation of secure, decentralized and trustworthy applications. Moreover, this technology has many advantages over centralized systems such as immutability and transparency. The most common application of the blockchain technology is the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, which provides a method of transferring money in a secure way without the involvement of a central authority. In addition to the Bitcoin, there are other applications based on the blockchain technology in a variety of sectors and industries such as governance, healthcare and supply chain. In this paper, we discuss blockchain applications that can be implemented in Kurdistan and we highlight their opportunities and challenges

For the love of metadata? : a functional approach to describing scholarly works

Repositories are springing up across institutions in the UK and worldwide. For institutional repositories there is a pressing need to fill them with content and to make those contents available through search interfaces, aggregators and other services. Speed and easy access are paramount both for depositors, who want to add their materials to the repository with minimum effort, and for researchers, who want to discover the quickest route to the full-text. Consistent, good quality metadata is needed to provide the signpost to full-texts, yet there is a resulting tension between the effort required to create, and share, metadata and the needs of depositors. Research and scholarly outputs are one of the main content types collected and managed by institutional repositories, in particular the research papers, or scholarly works, produced by academics and researchers1. In May 2006, the Joint Information Systems Committee JISC) engaged the Eduserv Foundation and UKOLN to produce an application profile for scholarly works that would facilitate the sharing of richer metadata between repositories and aggregators such as the newly-funded Intute search project. This article describes the development of the application profile

Security-voting structure and bidder screening

This paper analyzes how non-voting shares affect the takeover outcome in a single-bidder model with asymmetric information and private benefit extraction. In equilibrium, the target firm’s security-voting structure influences the bidder’s participation constraint and in response the shareholders’ conditional expectations about the post-takeover share value. Therefore, the structure can be chosen to discriminate among bidder types. Typically, the socially optimal structure deviates from one share - one vote to promote all and only value-increasing bids. As target shareholders ignore takeover costs, they prefer more takeovers and hence choose a smaller fraction of voting shares than is socially optimal. In either case, the optimal fraction of voting shares decreases with the quality of shareholder protection and increases with the incumbent manager’s ability. Finally, shareholder returns are higher when a given takeover probability is implemented by (more) non-voting shares rather than by (larger) private benefits

Consumer rapport to luxury : Analyzing complex and ambivalent attitudes

The very nature of luxury goods, the variety of consumption situations and the everlasting philosophical debate over luxury lead to particularly complex and ambivalent consumer attitudes, as evidenced by a first study based on the content analysis of in-depth interviews. A second study, based on surveys in twenty countries using finite mixture modeling, identifies three types of consumer rapport to luxury.luxury; ambiguity; attitude measurement; consumer behavior

Control at a distance as self-control: the renewal of the myth of control through technology

This paper draws on socio-institutional research on accounting technology. It underlines the ability of one type of accounting technology (performance measurement technology) to be a base for control at a distance since this technology links together discourse and calculation.accounting; technology; control at a distance

Stopping games: recent results

We survey recent results on the existence of the value in zero-sum stopping games with discrete and continuous time, and on the existence of e-equilibria in non zero-sum games with discrete time.stopping games; stochastic games; value

The (topo)logic of vagueness

Zeno's "dichotomy" paradox of the runner and the sorites paradox exhibit certain interesting similarities. Both of them involve a long series of steps, each of which seems legitimate, but which, taken together, apparently lead to an unacceptable conclusion. In this article, a particular interpretation of a common reply to Zeno's paradox is presented, which recognises that to defuse the paradox, it is necessary to assert that the number of stages that the runner has completed on Zeno's in nite sequence of times is not an appropriate measure of whether he nishes the race or not. Applying this style of reply to the sorites argument, one would reject the argument on the grounds of the inappropriateness of the number of hairs for reasoning about baldness. Such an attitude to the sorites argument implies a certain conception of the problem posed by vague terms, according to which the problem is to understand such relationships between terms as the appropriateness of one for reasoning about the other. Consequently, it poses a certain set of challenges to prospective theories of vagueness.Vagueness; theories of; problem of; sorites paradox; Zeno's paradox scale.