Nebraska Legislative Planning Committee 2014 Report: Policy Briefs

The Nebraska Legislature\u27s Planning Committee was created in 2009 with the passage of LB 653 in order to help establish a process of long-term state planning with the Nebraska Legislature. The committee was created to assist state government in identifying emerging trends, assets and challenges of the state and the long-term implications of the decisions made by the Nebraska Legislature. Efforts during the first two years of the committee focused on the development of a database. The goals and benchmarks included in the database were developed and approved by the Legislature\u27s Planning Committee to present a common-sense and data-driven assessment of key areas important to Nebraskans\u27 quality of life. This database was a joint initiative with the Nebraska Legislature\u27s Planning Committee and the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s College of Public Affairs and Community Service. The database was presented in a report that consisted of the data and summaries of the data for each of the nine categories of benchmarks established by the Planning Committee. Each year, the Planning Committee is in charge of updating the data for all benchmarks in each category. It is hoped that this will be of instrumental assistance to Legislators and staff as they craft and debate legislation each Session. Beginning in 2012 the Planning Committee’s report included Policy Briefs. These Policy Briefs address some of the issues that were identified when reviewing the indicators presented in the database. The purpose of the Policy Briefs is to identify and explore in greater depth issues identified by the evidence presented. The Policy Briefs do not recommend specific policies but rather describe options and considerations that relate to the issues. The nine Policy Briefs contained in this report focus on a variety of areas: (1) two briefs focus on education, one on the impact of changing births on Nebraska’s school aged children and the other a program evaluation of a scholarship and mentoring program; (2) three briefs focus on government finance, one on the use of government debt, one on concerns about local government pensions and one on the uses of Nebraska Universal Service Funds; (3) three briefs focus on health‐related issues, one on adults with mental health disabilities and their caregivers, one on the impact of pediatric cancer on the survivors, their families and the state, and one on the impacts of food deserts and food insecurity; and (4) one brief focuses on the availability of public transit in rural Nebraska

High-Performance Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus Protocol

In response to new and innovating blockchain-based systems with Internet of Things (IoT), there is a need for consensus mechanisms that can provide high transaction throughput and security, despite varying network quality. Honeybadger was the first practical, asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol, achieving high scalability and robustness without making any timing assumptions regarding the network. To improve the current asynchronous consensus protocols, we designed Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (ABFT) consensus protocol through integrating threshold Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) signatures and optimization of erasure coding parameters, as well as additional implementation-level optimizations. We implement a prototype of ABFT, and evaluate its performance at scale in a global WAN network and a network affected by asymmetric network degradation. Our results show that ABFT provides considerably higher performance, significantly lower computational overhead, and greater scalability than its predecessors. ABFT can reach up to 38.700 transactions per second in throughput. Furthermore, we empirically show that ABFT is unaffected by asymmetric network degradation within the fault threshold.acceptedVersio

Simultaneous Bright- and Dark-Field X-ray Microscopy at X-ray Free Electron Lasers

The structures, strain fields, and defect distributions in solid materials underlie the mechanical and physical properties across numerous applications. Many modern microstructural microscopy tools characterize crystal grains, domains and defects required to map lattice distortions or deformation, but are limited to studies of the (near) surface. Generally speaking, such tools cannot probe the structural dynamics in a way that is representative of bulk behavior. Synchrotron X-ray diffraction based imaging has long mapped the deeply embedded structural elements, and with enhanced resolution, Dark Field X-ray Microscopy (DFXM) can now map those features with the requisite nm-resolution. However, these techniques still suffer from the required integration times due to limitations from the source and optics. This work extends DFXM to X-ray free electron lasers, showing how the $10^{12}$ photons per pulse available at these sources offer structural characterization down to 100 fs resolution (orders of magnitude faster than current synchrotron images). We introduce the XFEL DFXM setup with simultaneous bright field microscopy to probe density changes within the same volume. This work presents a comprehensive guide to the multi-modal ultrafast high-resolution X-ray microscope that we constructed and tested at two XFELs, and shows initial data demonstrating two timing strategies to study associated reversible or irreversible lattice dynamics