Global Virtual Prosumer Framework for Secure Cross-Border Energy Transactions Using IoT, Multi-Agent Intelligence, and Blockchain Smart Contracts

The rapid urbanization of Sub-Saharan African cities is accompanied by the massive expansion of peri-urban areas, which are often characterized by limited access to hydraulic and sanitation infrastructure. In response, many households rely on individual or community boreholes to obtain water. However, these boreholes are frequently constructed under inadequate technical and regulatory conditions, raising doubts about whether the extracted water meets the standards of “potable water.” This article explores the conceptual distinction between “potable water” and “drinking water,” examines the technical shortcomings of boreholes in peri-urban contexts, and draws implications for water governance. Based on fieldwork conducted in N’Djamena’s 9th district (Gassina, thesis) and on literature concerning urban groundwater in Africa, the study highlights the need to consider water from unregulated boreholes as “drinking water” — that is, water consumed but not necessarily guaranteed as potable — in order to inform more realistic public policies.

There is increasing interest on re-use of outpatient healthcare data for research, as most medical diagnosis and treatment is provided in the ambulatory sector. One of the early projects to bring primary data from German ambulatory care into clinical research technically, organizationally and in compliance with legal demands has been the RADAR project, that is based on a broad consent and has used the then available practice information system's interfaces to extract and transfer data to a research repository. In course of the digital transformation of the German healthcare system, former standards are abandoned and new interoperability standards, interfaces and regulations on secondary use of patient data are defined, however with slow adoption by Health-IT systems. Therefore, it is of importance for all initiatives that aim at using ambulatory healthcare data for research, how to access this data in an efficient and effective way. Currently defined healthcare standards are compared regarding coverage of data relevant for research as defined by the RADAR project. We compare four architectural options to access ambulatory health data through different components of healthcare and health research data infrastructures along the technical, organizational and regulatory conditions, the timetable of dissemination and the researcher's perspective. A high-level comparison showed a high degree of semantic overlap in the information models used. Electronic patient records and practice information systems are alternative data sources for ambulatory health data - but differ strongly in data richness and accessibility. Considering the compared dimensions of architectural routes to access health data for secondary research use we conclude that data extraction from practice information systems is currently the most promising way due to data availability on a mid-term perspective. Integration of routine data into the national research data infrastructures might be enforced by convergence of to date different information models.

The digitalisation of business means that the related business functions and stakeholders will be at the forefront of its development, so IT solutions that serve the core business of the organisation will also be at the forefront.This trend, also boosted by Industry 4.0, is also fundamentally changing the field of management controlling and human performance management.This trend will enable new forms of collaboration between companies, suppliers, customers, and employees, leading to new product and service offerings.Just think of the emergence and proliferation of cross border service centres (SSCs).Here, we have seen global companies first start to provide services in the financial, economic, human resources and controlling areas, initially to their own consolidated subsidiaries, and then move out into the market and into the customer.I will describe the relevant legal environment, the actual functioning, the practical experience of the studies carried out, and the common HR and corporate governance platforms and methods used, thus indicating, and supporting my hypothesis that the existence of technical and regulatory conditions does not automatically imply the possibility of an effective and strategic application of the system.

Fusion reactors have the potential to be used for military purposes. This article provides quantitative estimates about weapon-relevant materials produced in future commercial fusion reactors and discusses how suitable such materials are for use in nuclear weapons. Whether states will consider such use in the future will depend on specific regulatory, political, economic, and technical boundary conditions. Based on expert interviews and the political science literature, we identify three of these conditions that could determine whether fusion power will have a military dimension in the second half of this century: first, the technological trajectory of global energy policies; second, the management of a peaceful power transition between rising and declining powers; and third, the overall acceptance of the nuclear normative order. Finally, the article discusses a few regulatory options that could be implemented by the time fusion reactors reach technological maturity and become commercially available; such research on fusion reactor safeguards should start as early as possible and accompany the current research on experimental fusion reactors.

NTT's advanced IN provides telecommunication services, management services, and service customization services. It also provides operations for advanced IN services. Each is executed by corresponding application software on a separate platform. We propose an integrated service creation environment (SCE) in which service logic programs for network control (SLP(N)s), service logic programs for customization (SLP(C)s), management logic programs (MLPs) and operation logic programs (OLPs) are specified and generated. Design concepts of the SCE are computer-aided graphical specification description, knowledge-based automatic specification conversion, 3-step verification, a verification support method based on reverse engineering, and a method of configuring individual creation environments by using a common platform. The SCE is an integration of individual application software creation environments. As an example of a creation environment, an SLP creation environment is described in detail. The SCE makes it possible to greatly reduce the amount of description and verification time.

HET-CAM test. Application to shampoos in developing countries