Immutable Characteristics Research Articles

Redactable Blockchain From Decentralized Chameleon Hash Functions

Blockchain is a technology with decentralization and immutability features and has been employed for auditing by many applications. However, immutability sometimes limits the application of blockchain technology. For example, vulnerable smart contracts on blockchain cannot be redacted due to immutability. The existing redactable blockchain solutions either have a low efficiency or violate the decentralization feature. Moreover, those solutions lack mechanisms for tracing redaction history and checking block consistency. In this paper, we present an efficient redactable blockchain with traceability in the decentralized setting. Specifically, we propose a decentralized chameleon hash function for redactable blockchain that every redaction must be approved by multiple blockchain nodes. We also design a redactable blockchain structure that maintains all redactions of a block and encodes the redacted blocks into an RSA accumulator. Then, we propose an efficient block consistency check protocol based on the RSA accumulator. Finally, we conduct experiments and compare our scheme with another decentralized redactable blockchain to demonstrate that our solution is efficient in practice.

Blockchain-Empowered Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks: Opportunities, Challenges, and Solutions

The terrestrial networks face the challenges of severe cost inefficiency and low feasibility to provide seamless services anytime and anywhere, especially in the extreme or hotspot areas (e.g., disaster areas, mountains, and oceans) due to limited service coverage and capacity. The integration of multi-dimensional networks consisting of space, air, and ground layers is expected to provide solutions in delivering cost-effective and ubiquitous Internet of things (IoT) services for billions of users and interconnected smart devices. Autonomous data collection, exchange, and processing across different network segments with minimal human interventions in space-air-ground IoT (SAG-IoT) can bring great convenience to consumers, however, it also suffers new attacks from intruders. Severe privacy invasion, reliability issues, and security breaches of SAG-IoT can hinder its wide deployment. The emerging blockchain holds great potentials to address the security concerns in SAG-IoT, thanks to its prominent features of decentralization, transparency, immutability, traceability, and auditability. Despite of the benefits of blockchain-empowered SAG-IoT, there exist a series of fundamental challenges in terms of efficiency and regulation due to the intrinsic characteristics of SAG-IoT (e.g., heterogeneity, time-variability, and poor interoperability) and the limitations of existing blockchain approaches (e.g., capacity and scalability). This article presents a comprehensive survey of the integration of blockchain technologies for securing SAG-IoT applications. Specifically, we first discuss the architecture, characteristics, and security threats of SAG-IoT systems. Then, we concentrate on the promising blockchain-based solutions for SAG-IoT security. Next, we discuss the critical challenges when integrating blockchain in SAG-IoT security services and review the state-of-the-art solutions. We further investigate the opportunities of blockchain in artificial intelligence and beyond 5G networks and provide open research directions for building future blockchain-empowered SAG-IoT systems.

Developmental & Ecological Perspective on the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma & Violence

Abstract The focus of this essay is on understanding the development and maintenance of patterns of violent behavior for the purpose of identifying points of prevention and intervention. Close attention is paid to using person-centered language that does not conflate exhibiting violent behaviors with being a violent person. There is a meaningful perceptual difference between discussing the behaviors of a violent person versus discussing a person who engaged in violent behaviors: the former is more likely to be associated with immutable characteristics of a person and the latter is more likely to be associated with attempts at understanding social and contextual causes of the behavior.

The Development of the Modern Guitar Sonata

This article explores the directions of development of the guitar sonata after the year 1950. The development of any given form is a highly dynamic process with each period bringing a wide variety of, frequently contradictory, points of view. In this context, the author performed a formal analysis of four guitar sonatas representative of the period in question: Sonata in A major Op. 17 by F. Werthmüller, Sonata Op. 47 by A. Ginastera, The Blue Guitar by M. Tippett and Royal Winter Music by H.W. Henze. The criterion for selecting the works was to allow a thorough overview of the main trends and views on the sonata cycle form present in guitar music of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. During the research, an image of the sonata as a cycle emerged which presents the contemporary composers with tools that allow them to pur-sue their artistic vision while maintaining certain immutable features of the form in question. This article attempts to define this immutable identity of the sonata.

Improving Halal Traceability Process in the Poultry Industry Utilizing Blockchain Technology: Use Case in Indonesia

Demand for Halal food has significantly increased with the growing Muslim population and society’s interest in sustainable food production. However, there has been an increase in concerns regarding the Halal food labeling transparency process, with misleading labels found across the world. Blockchain-based traceability systems are a potential solution for current limitations in monitoring the production process of food due to its inherent decentralization and immutable nature. The technology allows stakeholders, including consumers, to promote farm-to-fork transparency, where traceability is a core component. This paper will explore the blockchain-based traceability system use case implemented by the Indonesian poultry player PT Sreeya Sewu Indonesia Tbk. Utilizing a blockchain-based system as a foundation for traceability shows promising results: data throughout the process is recorded permanently and difficult to tamper. Although the system does not eliminate the possibility of incorrect information being recorded, the same immutability characteristics will keep the new knowledge of fraud permanent if found during the audit. This layer of accountability contributes to the transparency that benefits both the consumers and stakeholders of the value chain.

Study on the Intention of Foreign Trade Driven by Cross-Border E-Commerce Based on Blockchain Technology

Cross-border e-commerce is also facing the problems of cross-border goods selling counterfeit, long delivery time of cross-border logistics, and high cross-border payment fee in the process of development. Blockchain technology, with its characteristics of high trustworthiness, traceability, and information immutability, can be applied to the field of cross-border e-commerce, providing a new direction for cross-border e-commerce to solve these problems. At the present stage, scholars at home and abroad mainly study how blockchain technology is applied in cross-border e-commerce, explore the specific mode of combining blockchain technology with cross-border e-commerce, and lay the theoretical foundation for the application of blockchain technology in cross-border e-commerce, while less research is conducted on the application effect of blockchain technology in cross-border e-commerce. Based on this, this paper researches the influence mechanism of the application of blockchain technology in cross-border e-commerce on consumers’ willingness to purchase, explains the current situation of the application of blockchain technology in various fields of cross-border e-commerce, and on this basis, divides the quality of the blockchain system of cross-border e-commerce into three dimensions of commodity information quality, logistics service quality, and payment security.

An Artificial Neural Network Examination of the Intention to Implement Blockchain in the Supply Chains of SMEs in Tonga

The research intends to examine the impacts of the technology, organization, and environmental factors on the implementation of blockchain in the supply chains of SMEs in the Kingdom of Tonga. These include regulatory support, competitive pressure, cost, upper management support, complexity, and relative advantage. The research uses SEM-PLS to test the hypotheses and the Artificial Neural Network method to analyze and classify survey data from 201 SMEs. Findings show that relative advantage, cost, complexity, and competitive pressure significantly affect implementing blockchain in the supply chains. As SMEs frequently have limited capital to invest in technology but meets the same obligations to streamline business operations to optimize profits, blockchain provides a feasible choice for the firms’ sustainability with its characteristics of security, transparency, and immutability that are prospective to develop SMEs’ performance. Thus, the paper provides novel insight regarding the determinants of SMEs' intention to implement blockchain in their supply chains.

In Silico Studies of Bioactive Compounds from Hibiscus rosa-sinensis Against HER2 and ESR1 for Breast Cancer Treatment

The most common type of cancer and the second biggest cause of death is breast cancer. The disease is the leading cause of death in women aged 45 to 55. It's a multi-stage disease in which viruses have a role in one stage. Breast cancer is an illness that affects the sufferer, their family, and the entire community all over the world. Breast cancer has no established cause, however specific risk factors have been found. Age, race, gender, and family history are all fixed and immutable characteristics. Other elements, such as social and familial support, can help to mitigate the harmful effects.The aim of the present study was to investigate the bioactive ligand for the breast cancer treatment against the HER2 and ESR1 proteins by molecular docking studies. HER2 is an oncogene and membrane tyrosine kinase that is overexpressed and gene amplified in about 20% of breast tumours. When active, it sends proliferative and anti-apoptotic signals to the cell. It is the most important factor in the genesis and progression of breast cancer tumours. To carry out this work protein structures were download from the PDB database and ligands three dimensional structures were downloaded from the PubChem database. The docking was performed by using the iGEMDOCK software suit. The binding energies of bioactive molecules from Hibiscus rosa-sinensis were found to be Rutin (-139.779, -102.743), Quercetin (-106.5, -99.7807), Kaempferol (-105.824, -92.5271), Myricetin (-111.913, -99.603) and Methotrexate (-140.69, -130.165) against HER2 and ESR1 proteins respectively. Lowest energy of Rutin compared to Methotrexate showed highest binding among the other bioactive molecules.The binding energies of the molecules are the sum of hydrogen bond, vanderwaal’s and electrostatic energies that inversely linked to protein-ligand interaction. From the result of the current study we can conclude that among the four bioactive molecule rutin has lowest binding energy so it could be used as an inhibitor of HER2 and ESR1 protein for the treatment of breast carcinoma in future.

After a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology: A Ten-Year Retrospective

After a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology: A Ten-Year Retrospective

Ahmet T. Kuru, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison

Reviewed by: Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison by Ahmet T. Kuru Eric Chaney Ahmet T. Kuru. Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 303 pp. Paper, $34.99. ISBN: 978-1108296892. Ahmet T. Kuru's Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment represents a balanced contribution to the debate on the links between Islam and underdevelopment. Kuru builds on a comprehensive reading of the secondary literature to argue that the Muslim-majority world's present-day underdevelopment originates from the emergence of an "ulema-state alliance" in the eleventh [End Page 484] century CE. According to Kuru, this political equilibrium undermined the previously ascendant bourgeoisie and knowledge elites and led to the economic and intellectual stagnation of Muslim societies (p. 193). The book occupies a middle ground between those who attribute the region's ills to the immutable characteristics of Islam and those who root these difficulties in the sins of Western colonialism (p. xv). For example, Kuru convincingly notes that Western colonialism should be viewed as the endogenous product of political and socioeconomic crises in the Muslim world. Similarly, he provides evidence that many of Islam's supposedly immutable tenets were imported from other cultures centuries after the death of the prophet Muhammad (e.g., p. 202). While these observations do not excuse the damage wrought by colonialism or by "quasi-Islamic" interpretations of Islam (p. 234), they root both phenomena in the emergence of the ulema-state alliance during the medieval period. Kuru provides considerable evidence that many of the Muslim-majority world's present-day difficulties can be traced to the institutional nexus that crystalized under the Seljuks (p. 4). Yet in his narrative these institutions arrive in a deus ex machina fashion, rapidly spreading across non-Seljuk regions and neatly explaining the transition from growth to centuries of stagnation. The actors underpinning these institutions (p. 64) are often unclear as are the causes behind the rapid diffusion and remarkable persistence of this institutional framework. Understanding why the Seljuks' reforms emerged and spread so quickly complicates Kuru's thesis, hinting that his ulema-state alliance was the ultimate reflection of societal changes that began long before the Seljuks arrived on the scene. For instance, an influential literature traces the militarization of governmental structures (p. 4) to the introduction of slave soldiers by the Caliph al-Mutasim (r. 833–42 CE). This practice spread rapidly across the Islamic world and is believed to have gradually undermined state structures through the predatory behavior of the military (p. 98). The weakening of state structures, in turn, led to the expansion of tribal forms of societal organization and empowered conservative religious leaders who came to perform many of the functions previously provided by the state. These developments created a weakly institutionalized environment in which the ulema wielded significant political power, thus preparing the ground for the institutional changes introduced by the Seljuks. Whatever the fundamental causes of the Seljuks' reforms, much of the post-Seljuk Islamic world seems to have been characterized by skeleton-like bureaucracies and tribal forms of societal organization (e.g., p. 170), not by the stifling state structures that Kuru often describes. These post-Seljuk arrangements differed from early Islamic bureaucracies and raise the possibility that [End Page 485] the collapse of these early bureaucratic structures is a more fundamental cause of the Muslim world's unique development challenges. The very different development trajectories followed by societies subject to the same ulema-state alliance are arguably related to these developments and further complicate Kuru's thesis. For example, while modern-day Turkey and much of south-eastern Europe were subject to the ulema-state alliance (p. 168), their development challenges today seem very different than other regions such as Libya, Somalia, or Afghanistan. The fact that the former group of countries was incorporated into the Islamic world centuries after the latter seem to explain their differences to a greater extent than Kuru's ulema-state alliance can. In particular, regions incorporated early into the Islamic world were affected by the medieval decline of bureaucratic state structures and the tribalization of society to a greater extent than those incorporated...

Applying blockchain for primary financial market: A survey

In financial market, especially primary market, it is very costly and difficult to make a deal due to discovery difficulty, information asymmetry, lack of trust, complicated trading process and low liquidity. Blockchain is an innovative technology enabling new business models of distributed data storage, point-to-point transaction and decentralized autonomous organizations via consensus. The unique features of blockchain, ‘decentralization, highly transparent, enhanced security and immutability of information’, make it a good solution candidate to meet the needs of private equity exchange. This article focuses on analysing the technical basis of the blockchain financial model and the typical application scenarios of the blockchain in the financial market. It discusses the importance of applying key blockchain technology to the financial market, especially in the primary market. Research has found that the development of blockchain technology, especially the maturity of stabilized token technology, makes it possible for blockchain to become a supporting technology to support the next generation of infrastructure in the future financial market. At present, blockchain technology has been concentrated in the issuance, registration, clearing, settlement and derivatives management of private equity and other over-the-counter securities. The use of blockchain to build a decentralized primary market has not received enough attention in research and practice, and the use of blockchain technology to establish a primary market with diverse distribution methods is still in its infancy. On this basis, this article further analyses the current problems and the possibility of solving these problems in the application of blockchain in the primary market and points out several interesting directions for future research in this field.

Predictors of incident viral symptoms ascertained in the era of COVID-19.

BackgroundIn the absence of universal testing, effective therapies, or vaccines, identifying risk factors for viral infection, particularly readily modifiable exposures and behaviors, is required to identify effective strategies against viral infection and transmission.MethodsWe conducted a world-wide mobile application-based prospective cohort study available to English speaking adults with a smartphone. We collected self-reported characteristics, exposures, and behaviors, as well as smartphone-based geolocation data. Our main outcome was incident symptoms of viral infection, defined as fevers and chills plus one other symptom previously shown to occur with SARS-CoV-2 infection, determined by daily surveys.FindingsAmong 14, 335 participants residing in all 50 US states and 93 different countries followed for a median 21 days (IQR 10–26 days), 424 (3%) developed incident viral symptoms. In pooled multivariable logistic regression models, female biological sex (odds ratio [OR] 1.75, 95% CI 1.39–2.20, p<0.001), anemia (OR 1.45, 95% CI 1.16–1.81, p = 0.001), hypertension (OR 1.35, 95% CI 1.08–1.68, p = 0.007), cigarette smoking in the last 30 days (OR 1.86, 95% CI 1.35–2.55, p<0.001), any viral symptoms among household members 6–12 days prior (OR 2.06, 95% CI 1.67–2.55, p<0.001), and the maximum number of individuals the participant interacted with within 6 feet in the past 6–12 days (OR 1.15, 95% CI 1.06–1.25, p<0.001) were each associated with a higher risk of developing viral symptoms. Conversely, a higher subjective social status (OR 0.87, 95% CI 0.83–0.93, p<0.001), at least weekly exercise (OR 0.57, 95% CI 0.47–0.70, p<0.001), and sanitizing one’s phone (OR 0.79, 95% CI 0.63–0.99, p = 0.037) were each associated with a lower risk of developing viral symptoms.InterpretationWhile several immutable characteristics were associated with the risk of developing viral symptoms, multiple immediately modifiable exposures and habits that influence risk were also observed, potentially identifying readily accessible strategies to mitigate risk in the COVID-19 era.

Public cognition of the application of blockchain in food safety management—Data from China’s Zhihu platform

Food safety is a worldwide problem, mainly caused by environmental pollution, production and management of enterprises, government supervision failure and other reasons. Blockchain technology, as an emerging technology, has strong pertinency and applicability to food traceability due to its characteristics of decentralization, traceability and immutability. Therefore, it is expected to be effectively applied in food safety management and improve the guarantee level of food safety. However, for some reasons, blockchain has not been widely used in food safety management. So further study on the advantages and challenges of its application is beneficial to the sustainable development of food enterprises, consumers and the government. Its application can provide traceable information for food companies, consumers and governments. This can not only ensure the food safety of enterprises, but also improve the level of government supervision, so as to establish the trust between consumers, enterprises and the government, which improves the efficiency and level of food safety management. Based on the information adoption model, this study takes 202 text data related to blockchain and food safety on the Zhihu platform as the research object. On the basis of summarizing part of the public opinions, this paper puts forward the viewpoints of argument on the application of blockchain in food safety management. Then, Tobit regression is used to conduct a quantitative analysis on the influencing factors of the acceptance and adoption of relevant text content on Zhihu platform. Finally, it is found that four factors are significant at a confidence level of 0.1, specifically as follows. The two viewpoints of Advantages of Blockchain Technology and High Costs have significant promotion effects on the public’s recognition and adoption but two viewpoints of Promotion of National Policy Opinions and Blockchain Requires Supervision have significant negative effects on the public’s recognition and adoption. Based on the regression results and combined with the current technological level and development status of blockchain technology, this study provides relevant policy suggestions, which has a positive effect on improving food sustainability.

Terrified by Technology: How Systemic Bias Distorts U.S. Legal and Regulatory Responses to Emerging Technology

Americans are becoming increasingly aware of the systemic biases we possess and how those biases preclude us from collectively living out the true meaning of our national creed. But to fully understand systemic bias we must acknowledge that it is pervasive and extends beyond the contexts of race, privilege, and economic status. Understanding all forms of systemic bias helps us to better understand ourselves and our shortcomings. At first glance, a human bias against emerging technology caused by systemic risk misperception might seem uninteresting or unimportant. But this Article demonstrates how the presence of systemic bias anywhere, even in an area as unexpected as technology regulation, creates inefficiencies and inequalities that exact heavy costs in the form of human lives, standards of living, and lost economic opportunities. The decision to regulate or implement an emerging technology, like any other complex decision, naturally involves some form of cost-benefit or risk-reward analysis. However, in the context of emerging technology, that analysis is biased by systemic risk misperception. Immutable characteristics existing in emerging technology combine with interrelated characteristics in human decisionmakers and regulators to inflate perceptions of risks and depress perceptions of benefits. This artificial shifting of cost-benefit curves results in suboptimal legislative and regulatory responses to emerging technology, and ultimately, in the loss of American lives.

Scalable framework for blockchain-based shared manufacturing

Shared Manufacturing is a new mode of social manufacturing based on the principles of a sharing economy. This paper presents a scalable framework for blockchain-based Shared Manufacturing that preserves the transparency and immutability characteristics of transaction records, which is critical to building trust between entities in blockchain-based systems. We define a blockchain-based protocol for the service execution according to the design principles of the sharing economy. We present a scalable integration of blockchain technology into the concept of Shared Manufacturing by employing cross-chain solutions. We discuss existing cross chain technologies regarding the requirements of Shared Manufacturing and propose hybrid approach. We compare implementations of the proposed framework on two different blockchain networks: Ethereum public network and Xdai sidechain network. We conduct user-oriented test to explore the performance (cost and time) of the implementations in realistic situations in order to justify the use of the sidechain technology. Results indicate that the implementation on the sidechains provides greater scalability than the implementation on the public blockchain network.

Human nature and globalization’s discontents: What the antecedents of ideology tells us about the obstacles to greater global interconnectedness

In this paper, I show how a particular understanding of agency, focussed on psychological and physiological mechanisms, has the potential to provide an alternative appreciation of globalization, particularly the sources of its discontent. The argument draws on recent findings in political psychology, specifically research that explores the antecedents of ideology and the attitudinal pathways that form left and right sympathies. I show how the particular traits and mechanisms that correlate with ideological outcomes, for example negativity biases, also shed light on the globalization process, allowing for an improved appreciation of the variety of ways subjects experience accelerated levels of interconnectedness. The assumption that discontent is necessarily a by-product of the social inequities associated with the process is challenged, and the existence of a sceptical disposition, at least amongst some, posited. Given the basis of this scepticism, I point out that the validity of judging globalization is as a result, also rendered more complex; precisely because the ‘legitimacy’ of one’s stance becomes, according to this conceptualisation, a dependent variable, determined –in part- by immutable characteristics. Almost inadvertently, I suggest, the antecedent literature identifies a major barrier to greater global interconnectedness. This draws attention to a final substantive insight derived from the antecedent literature, that in light of the new political geography, ‘ineffectiveness’ is the norm: meaning the ‘the ensemble of needs, traits, and motives’ that underlie political stances, no longer ‘fit’ with the existing discursive (ideological) structures. This I suggest, represents a fundamental source of discontent, because the existing ideologies of left and right, in ignoring the importance of human nature, neglect the significance of ‘fit’ as they try to make sense of globalization.

Blockchain and Higher Education Diplomas.

Due to added mobility and the increase in international students worldwide, as well as the current problem regarding the counterfeiting of diplomas and the selling of fraudulent certificates, we propose a technological solution. Namely, to ally blockchain technology to higher education certificates and diplomas, to make the process of checking for academic qualifications more facilitated and transparent. Employers of graduates, as well as higher education institutions which evaluate course applicants, would benefit. Perhaps equally as important, students applying for international degree programs would have their lives simplified. There is an increased pressure to ensure the legitimacy and authenticity of certifications and diplomas—and preferably without the current “hassle” of getting diplomas recognized by official entities. New technological advances, with the development of blockchain and smart contracts, with their characteristics of immutability, decentralization, security, traceability, and consensus, may be considered an excellent match to implement a robust and reliable anti-fraud solution to issue digital diplomas. Radical innovations, such as linking blockchain and higher education diplomas, involve significant change and novelty. Linking blockchain and higher education diplomas could potentially positively impact and benefit millions of people worldwide, especially the younger generations. This study involved a literature review and the searching of the Scopus database (refereed publications) for the following concepts: blockchain and diploma. Existing literature is recent, with most articles (25) published between 2019 and 2020, with 4 in 2018 and only 1 in 2017. This was aligned with our expectations since the development of blockchain utilization outside financial and crypto-assets industries is recent, and it is known as “Blockchain 3.0”. We can additionally affirm that the topic is attracting attention and efforts from researchers worldwide and that some higher education institutions have already implemented ad hoc solutions. As it is, the sector lacks a unified response to the problem of automatic and reliable higher education diploma certification.

A Blockchain-Based Secret-Data Sharing Framework for Personal Health Records in Emergency Condition.

Blockchain technology is the most trusted all-in-one cryptosystem that provides a framework for securing transactions over networks due to its irreversibility and immutability characteristics. Blockchain network, as a decentralized infrastructure, has drawn the attention of various startups, administrators, and developers. This system preserves transactions from tampering and provides a tracking tool for tracing past network operations. A personal health record (PHR) system permits patients to control and share data concerning their health conditions by particular peoples. In the case of an emergency, the patient is unable to approve the emergency staff access to the PHR. Furthermore, a history record management system of the patient’s PHR is required, which exhibits hugely private personal data (e.g., modification date, name of user, last health condition, etc.). In this paper, we suggest a healthcare management framework that employs blockchain technology to provide a tamper protection application by considering safe policies. These policies involve identifying extensible access control, auditing, and tamper resistance in an emergency scenario. Our experiments demonstrated that the proposed framework affords superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art healthcare systems concerning accessibility, privacy, emergency access control, and data auditing.

Advancing bipartisan decarbonization policies: Lessons from state-level successes and failures

U.S. political polarization is at a high point since the Civil War, and is a significant barrier to coordinated national action addressing climate change. Studies of intergroup conflict suggest that collaborations pursuing shared goals can reduce polarization (while advancing the goals). In this spirit, we comprehensively review and characterize successes and failures of recent state-level decarbonization legislation, focusing on opportunities for bipartisanship. We analyze 381 major state-government-enacted bills and 374 failed bills from 2015-2020, as well as the political contexts in which they were passed or defeated. We use bivariate analyses and regressions to explore correlations and partial correlations between the policy characteristics and political contexts of bills, and: their passage or failure, their bipartisanship, and vote shares they received. Key results include: (i) Nearly one third of these state-level decarbonization bills were passed by Republican-controlled governments. (ii) Bipartisan or Republican co-sponsors disproportionately passed voluntary Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs, financial incentives for renewable energy, and legislation that expands consumer or business choices in context of decarbonization goals; Democrat-only sponsors disproportionately passed mandatory Renewable Energy and Efficiency Portfolio Standards (REEPS) and emissions standards. (iii) Bills proposed in ‘purple’ states, and those lacking environmental justice components framed using academic social-justice jargon or non-neutrally with respect to immutable characteristics such as race, were disproportionately enacted and bipartisan. Bills that expand consumer or business choice were also enacted more often than those that restrict choice. Though climate change is a polarized issue, our results provide tangible insights for future bipartisan successes.

BZKP: Blockchain-based zero-knowledge proof model for enhancing healthcare security in Bahrain IoT smart cities and COVID-19 risk mitigation

Smart cities achieved digital transformation of patients’ health records through the use of new technology in IoT healthcare industry. Such technologies of using IoT and remote patient monitoring systems have become dramatically fundamental to reduce the movement of patients, and hence reducing the risk of spreading Covid-19 infection. The Ministry of Health in the Kingdom of Bahrain strives to achieve digital transformation in the healthcare industry, where the National Health Information System (I-SEHA) was launched to provide higher-quality health services. The system interconnects the public healthcare institutes, allowing access to patient’s data from any location without the hassle of moving the files physically. Digitization of medical data of patients and sharing some of the data with other institutions outside the protected networks may lead to major privacy and integrity concerns. This paper introduces Blockchain-based Zero-Knowledge Proof (BZKP) model, which is an IoT-based patient-centric model that fuses a zero-knowledge proof solution to be developed for protecting patient’s privacy, and ensures patients prior consent on any access to their data including their health status and account balance. The proposed model is developed to provide a robust and scalable architecture for data sharing, which protects the privacy of sensitive data while maintaining high availability. It also provides strong trust and integrity of data by using the immutability features of the blockchain. BZKP is based on pre-approved blockchain access tokens to address challenges of accountability and privacy in Bahrain smart cities. As a result, the model provides a secure and trusted access model between different stakeholders to share patient data while maintaining privacy, trust, and high availability. The zero-knowledge proof can be used with the smart contracts, which provides programmable actions that can be used for automating the prescriptions dispensation process for private pharmacies in a decentralized manner with high confidence. Finally, it recommends enhanced electronic key (eKey) procedures used by eGovernment of the Kingdom of Bahrain to update the smart card which stores the personal keys for protecting patient’s privacy and provide better consent.