A Wealth of Sub-Consensus Deterministic Objects

The consensus hierarchy classifies shared an object according to its consensus number, which is the maximum number of processes that can solve consensus wait-free using the object. The question of whether this hierarchy is precise enough to fully characterize the synchronization power of deterministic shared objects was open until 2016, when Afek et al. showed that there is an infinite hierarchy of deterministic objects, each weaker than the next, which is strictly between i and i+1-processors consensus, for i >= 2. For i=1, the question whether there exist a deterministic object whose power is strictly between read-write and 2-processors consensus, remained open. We resolve the question positively by exhibiting an infinite hierarchy of simple deterministic objects which are equivalent to set-consensus tasks, and thus are stronger than read-write registers, but they cannot implement consensus for two processes. Still our paper leaves a gap with open questions

LightChain: A DHT-based Blockchain for Resource Constrained Environments

As an append-only distributed database, blockchain is utilized in a vast variety of applications including the cryptocurrency and Internet-of-Things (IoT). The existing blockchain solutions have downsides in communication and storage efficiency, convergence to centralization, and consistency problems. In this paper, we propose LightChain, which is the first blockchain architecture that operates over a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) of participating peers. LightChain is a permissionless blockchain that provides addressable blocks and transactions within the network, which makes them efficiently accessible by all the peers. Each block and transaction is replicated within the DHT of peers and is retrieved in an on-demand manner. Hence, peers in LightChain are not required to retrieve or keep the entire blockchain. LightChain is fair as all of the participating peers have a uniform chance of being involved in the consensus regardless of their influence such as hashing power or stake. LightChain provides a deterministic fork-resolving strategy as well as a blacklisting mechanism, and it is secure against colluding adversarial peers attacking the availability and integrity of the system. We provide mathematical analysis and experimental results on scenarios involving 10K nodes to demonstrate the security and fairness of LightChain. As we experimentally show in this paper, compared to the mainstream blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, LightChain requires around 66 times less per node storage, and is around 380 times faster on bootstrapping a new node to the system, while each LightChain node is rewarded equally likely for participating in the protocol

Types and Systems of Actors in Regional Development: Their Function and Regulatory Potential

Differentiation of actors derives primarily from the distribution of power and wealth in a society, and thus it has always played an exceptionally significant role. However, as a consequence of the hierarchical organisation of the society this differentiation was noticeably asymmetrical. The non-equivalence of partial subjects/actors of regional development has led to the understandable domination of ‘deterministic’ relations and the plurality of interests and then to the dominance of ‘competitive’ relations. Only gradually do interactions of a cooperative kind successively break through the growth of mutual interconnections, linkages and necessity of social elements and partial systems, and thus the increasing of organic nature of (geo)societal systems. This will be finally illustrated through the difference between ‘symmetric’ systems of actors in developed countries and the ‘asymmetric’ global system

E-democracy as the frame of networked public discourse : information, consensus and complexity

The quest for democracy and the political reflection about its future are to be understood nowadays in the horizon of the networked information revolution. Hence, it seems difficult to speak of democracy without speaking of e-democracy, the key issue of which is the re-configuration of models of information production and concentration of attention, which are to be investigated both from a political and an epistemological standpoint. In this perspective, our paper aims at analyzing the multi-agent dimension of networked public discourse, by envisaging two competing models of structuring this discourse (those of dialogue and of claim) and by suggesting to endorse the epistemic idea of complementarity as a guidance principle for elaborating a form of partnership between traditional and electronic media

The Divine Action Project, 1988–2003

This article explores the state of the art in theories of special divine action by means of a study of the Divine Action Project (DAP) co-sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley. The basic aim is to introduce the DAP and to summarize its results, especially as these were compiled in the final “capstone” meeting of the DAP, and drawing on the published output of the project where possible. The subsidiary aim is to evaluate criticisms of theories of special divine action developed within the DAP.ye

TEI and LMF crosswalks

The present paper explores various arguments in favour of making the Text Encoding Initia-tive (TEI) guidelines an appropriate serialisation for ISO standard 24613:2008 (LMF, Lexi-cal Mark-up Framework) . It also identifies the issues that would have to be resolved in order to reach an appropriate implementation of these ideas, in particular in terms of infor-mational coverage. We show how the customisation facilities offered by the TEI guidelines can provide an adequate background, not only to cover missing components within the current Dictionary chapter of the TEI guidelines, but also to allow specific lexical projects to deal with local constraints. We expect this proposal to be a basis for a future ISO project in the context of the on going revision of LMF

Reciprocity as a foundation of financial economics

This paper argues that the subsistence of the fundamental theorem of contemporary financial mathematics is the ethical concept ‘reciprocity’. The argument is based on identifying an equivalence between the contemporary, and ostensibly ‘value neutral’, Fundamental Theory of Asset Pricing with theories of mathematical probability that emerged in the seventeenth century in the context of the ethical assessment of commercial contracts in a framework of Aristotelian ethics. This observation, the main claim of the paper, is justified on the basis of results from the Ultimatum Game and is analysed within a framework of Pragmatic philosophy. The analysis leads to the explanatory hypothesis that markets are centres of communicative action with reciprocity as a rule of discourse. The purpose of the paper is to reorientate financial economics to emphasise the objectives of cooperation and social cohesion and to this end, we offer specific policy advice