Sovereign Wealth Funds as Tools of National Strategy: Singapore’s Approach

Across the globe - from the port of New Jersey to the copper mines in trans-Sahel Africa - governments are wrestling with the issue of foreign financial influence and national security. This becomes even more acute in states that are trying to transition from conflict to stability: When should states allow or encourage other countries to invest in them, and what industries should they allow foreign companies to own or build? Should states allow foreign investment funds to build infrastructure, extract rare minerals, and operate ports? How does this support or undermine the legitimacy and authority of the state? Successful IW practitioners need to understand and be able to account for third-party influence in its many varieties.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/ciwag-case-studies/1008/thumbnail.jp

Efficient Synchronous Byzantine Consensus

We present new protocols for Byzantine state machine replication and Byzantine agreement in the synchronous and authenticated setting. The celebrated PBFT state machine replication protocol tolerates $f$ Byzantine faults in an asynchronous setting using $3f+1$ replicas, and has since been studied or deployed by numerous works. In this work, we improve the Byzantine fault tolerance threshold to $n=2f+1$ by utilizing a relaxed synchrony assumption. We present a synchronous state machine replication protocol that commits a decision every 3 rounds in the common case. The key challenge is to ensure quorum intersection at one honest replica. Our solution is to rely on the synchrony assumption to form a post-commit quorum of size $2f+1$, which intersects at $f+1$ replicas with any pre-commit quorums of size $f+1$. Our protocol also solves synchronous authenticated Byzantine agreement in expected 8 rounds. The best previous solution (Katz and Koo, 2006) requires expected 24 rounds. Our protocols may be applied to build Byzantine fault tolerant systems or improve cryptographic protocols such as cryptocurrencies when synchrony can be assumed

A Critical Review of Qualitative Research Methods in Evaluating Nursing Curriculum Models: Implication for Nursing Education in the Arab World

Aim: The purpose of this critical literature review was to examine qualitative studies done on innovative nursing curriculums in order to determine which qualitative methods have been most effective in investigating the effectiveness of the curriculum and which would be most appropriate in an Arab Islamic country. Data Sources: At least 25 studies from major countries in the world were evaluated. To select the required studies, an exhaustive search was conducted in MEDLINE, CINAHL, Academic Search Premier, ERIC, ProQuest, Education Research Complete and Professional Development Collection. Review Methods: The articles were critically reviewed based on the research methodology selected, the theoretical frameworks that support the methodology and the data collection methods used to collect data. Discussions: Among the research methodologies examined, phenomenology in its descriptive form has been extensively used. The second most common design seen was grounded theory and this was appropriate as the phenomenon of innovative nursing curriculum in the Arab region being in its infancy, nurse researchers were interested in generating theory related to the phenomenon of interest. Of the research methodologies scrutinized, semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews, emerged as the most commonly used data collection tool. Conclusion: Qualitative research studies have contributed to a great extend to our understanding of innovative nursing curriculum designs. However there is an acute paucity of nursing education and nursing curriculum studies from the Arab world which need to be addressed soon. Keywords: Nursing Education, Nursing curriculum, Qualitative research, Qualitative research design and methodolog

Knowledge Flow Analysis for Security Protocols

Knowledge flow analysis offers a simple and flexible way to find flaws in security protocols. A protocol is described by a collection of rules constraining the propagation of knowledge amongst principals. Because this characterization corresponds closely to informal descriptions of protocols, it allows a succinct and natural formalization; because it abstracts away message ordering, and handles communications between principals and applications of cryptographic primitives uniformly, it is readily represented in a standard logic. A generic framework in the Alloy modelling language is presented, and instantiated for two standard protocols, and a new key management scheme.Comment: 20 page