Teaching Applications and Implications of Blockchain via Project-Based Learning: A Case Study

This paper presents student projects analyzing or using blockchain technologies, created by students enrolled in courses dedicated to teaching blockchain, at two different universities during the 2018-2019 academic year. Students explored perceptions related to storing private healthcare information on a blockchain, managing the security of Internet of Things devices, maintaining public governmental records, and creating smart contracts. The course designs, which were centered around project-based learning, include self-regulated learning and peer feedback as ways to improve student learning. Students either wrote a research paper or worked in teams on a programming project to build and deploy a blockchain-based application using Solidity, a programming language for writing smart contracts on various blockchain platforms. For select student papers, this case study describes research methods and outcomes and how students worked together or made use of peer feedback to improve upon drafts of research questions and abstracts. For a development project in Solidity, this study presents the issues at hand along with interview results that guided the implementation. Teams shared lessons learned with other teams through a weekly status report to the whole class. While available support for the Solidity teams was not ideal, students learned to use available online resources for creating and testing smart contracts. Our findings suggest that a project-based learning approach is an effective way for students to expand and develop their knowledge of emerging technologies, like blockchain, and apply it in a variety of industrie

Towards a Decentralized Publication System: A Proposal Using Blockchain and P2P Technologies

Science publication and peer review raises concerns about fairness, quality, performance, cost or accuracy. The Open Access movements has been unable to fulfill all its promises, and middlemen publishers can still impose policies and concentrate profits. This work, using emerging distributed technologies such as Blockchain and IPFS, proposes a decentralized publication system for open science called Decentralized Science1 . It provides transparent governance, a distributed reviewer reputation system, and open access by-design

Gaming Self-Contained Provably Fair Smart Contract Casinos

This paper discusses the game theory behind self-contained smart contract provably fair casinos, how they can be gamed by attackers with a large amount of money and computing power, as well as what are the necessary conditions to assure the system cannot be taken advantage of under various configurations

Data, Debt & Daemons: Systemic Asymmetries on Spaceship Earth

Day by day, the rate at which we create new data increases exponentially. Our capacity to learn cannot keep up. We are tiny members of a vast universal network, incapable of discerning cause and effect. Instead, we develop simplified narratives, leaving ourselves misguided yet complacent. The information management trade of both physical and intellectual property has become more vital to global economies than ever, replacing physical resources and manufacturing. Through our deepening reliance on specialization, we forfeit agency over our own homes while accruing unprecedented debt. Housing costs have risen dramatically compared to wages, despite reportedly successful economies. Citizens were supposed to have the ability to participate in financial markets using their property as collateral. This seduced many into the ideologies of unregulated capitalism. However, by the 21st century, these systems had become unrecognizable mutilations of their intended designs. The momentum we have gathered in the past century has thrust us on an unsustainable trajectory we have little hope of predicting. We laid the foundation for Western economic dominance with technology, monetary policy, and globalization, but we did so using incentive structures that exacerbated wealth inequality. These systems integrate digital technology into both our physical and virtual spaces, operating on invisible planes that bypass our senses. The radical novelty of computers has entangled us in niche engineered concepts that few understand. They create a lack of accountability in Big Tech that policy-makers are ill-prepared for. We cannot ensure an equitable distribution of the leverage or stakes when we entrust brokers, politicians, traders, and captains of industry to make complex decisions for us without bearing the risks of their consequences. Our long-term welfare, including our future habitation on this planet, is not visceral enough to force effective reform. Both our physical and our digital spaces are designed, built, evaluated, and monitored on asymmetric principles, causing disasters that future generations and the least fortunate always pay for. How did we normalize this moral hazard? How can digital systems born out of frustration with modern policy combat these issues, without disrupting the benefits of a techno-utopia? How can they promote efficiency, security, and transparency in the spaces we call home

Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the Cyber Domain

Unmanned Aircraft Systems are an integral part of the US national critical infrastructure. The authors have endeavored to bring a breadth and quality of information to the reader that is unparalleled in the unclassified sphere. This textbook will fully immerse and engage the reader / student in the cyber-security considerations of this rapidly emerging technology that we know as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). The first edition topics covered National Airspace (NAS) policy issues, information security (INFOSEC), UAS vulnerabilities in key systems (Sense and Avoid / SCADA), navigation and collision avoidance systems, stealth design, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms; weapons systems security; electronic warfare considerations; data-links, jamming, operational vulnerabilities and still-emerging political scenarios that affect US military / commercial decisions. This second edition discusses state-of-the-art technology issues facing US UAS designers. It focuses on counter unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS) – especially research designed to mitigate and terminate threats by SWARMS. Topics include high-altitude platforms (HAPS) for wireless communications; C-UAS and large scale threats; acoustic countermeasures against SWARMS and building an Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) acoustic library; updates to the legal / regulatory landscape; UAS proliferation along the Chinese New Silk Road Sea / Land routes; and ethics in this new age of autonomous systems and artificial intelligence (AI).https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1027/thumbnail.jp