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Bitcoin is an online communication protocol that facilitates the use of a virtual currency, including electronic payments. Bitcoin's rules were designed by engineers with no apparent influence from lawyers or regulators. Bitcoin is built on a transaction log that is distributed across a network of participating computers. It includes mechanisms to reward honest participation, to bootstrap acceptance by early adopters, and to guard against concentrations of power. Bitcoin's design allows for irreversible transactions, a prescribed path of money creation over time, and a public transaction history. Anyone can create a Bitcoin account, without charge and without any centralized vetting procedure—or even a requirement to provide a real name. Collectively, these rules yield a system that is understood to be more flexible, more private, and less amenable to regulatory oversight than other forms of payment—though as we discuss, all these benefits face important limits. Bitcoin is of interest to economists as a virtual currency with potential to disrupt existing payment systems and perhaps even monetary systems. This article presents the platform's design principles and properties for a nontechnical audience; reviews its past, present, and future uses; and points out risks and regulatory issues as Bitcoin interacts with the conventional financial system and the real economy.

Shadow short rate (SSR) estimates are generated regressors proposed as a proxy for policy interest rates during unconventional monetary policy (UMP) periods. However, using the Wu and Xia (2016) shadow/lower-bound model, I show that SSR estimates can be sensitive to minor choices in their estimation. Used subsequently in a small macroeconomic model, those sensitivities lead to wide variations in the inferred effects of UMP on inflation and unemployment outcomes. Therefore, it should not be presumed that any SSR series will necessarily be quantitatively useful. Vetting SSR series allows appropriate SSR series to be retained within the suite of UMP indicators.

Cryptocurrencies have attracted significant attention due to their high risk, extreme volatility, regulatory controversies, and scandals. Investors and policymakers are drawn to them for their potential to enhance diversification and deliver high returns. This study examines the impact of incorporating cryptocurrencies into investment portfolios, focusing on their ability to improve risk-adjusted returns and diversification. A rolling asset allocation strategy employing the maximum Sharpe Ratio within a Markowitz framework was applied to weekly data from 2018 to April 2024. The analysis compares two unconstrained portfolios and two constrained portfolios, which impose a concentration limit on cryptocurrency investments. Results reveal that in 70% of the rolling periods examined, portfolios with cryptocurrency allocations outperformed non-cryptocurrency portfolios in terms of Sharpe Ratios. However, the heightened volatility of cryptocurrencies significantly increased portfolio risk, with annualized weekly standard deviations ranging from 18% to 25%, compared to 12% to 15% for portfolios without cryptocurrency exposure. These findings illustrate the dual nature of cryptocurrencies: they can act as both a source of instability and an opportunity for diversification. The study underscores the necessity of a cautious and strategic approach to incorporating cryptocurrencies into investment plans, given their inherent risks and unpredictable behavior.

Abstract Recent research has begun to examine patterns of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) perpetrated by peacekeepers deployed in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations (PKOs). Yet, SEA makes up only a fraction of credible allegations of misconduct by peacekeepers. In this article we explore the contours of misconduct in UN PKOs beyond SEA allegations. We argue that the behavior of military forces in their own countries should easily predict their behavior when deployed as part of UN PKOs, which are typically set in fragile, postconflict countries where civilians have minimal protections or legal recourse. Using an original dataset of misconduct in PKOs from 2009 to 2016, we find the behavior of PKO contributor states toward their own populations strongly and consistently predicts the behavior of these states’ military forces in UN PKOs. These findings have implications for the vetting, supervision, and composition of PKOs.

PurposeThe dermatology service on the islands of Orkney, with a population of approximately 22,500, was taken over by National Health Service (NHS) Tayside in August 2018. This paper aims to provide an overview of the planning and review of a highly efficient and effective dermatology service for a rural island population.Design/methodology/approachThe service includes visiting dermatology consultants, enhanced electronic referral vetting, skin surgery services, a General Practice (GP) with extended role (GPwER) in dermatology, specialist virtual clinics, urgent advice for inpatients at the local district general hospital and remote systemic therapy monitoring. A new phototherapy service has been set up in an island GP practice.FindingsLocal GPs and consultant dermatologists find the enhanced vetting service useable, efficient and educational. Between August 2018 and November 2022, there have been 1,749 referrals. Of these referrals, 60% were seen in clinic or a GPwER surgery, with 40% managed remotely by providing advice back to the referring GP. The number of consultations performed by the GPwER has grown over the past 3 years, and in the last year, it accounted for more than 50% of patient appointments. The waiting time has been significantly reduced using this model.Originality/valueThis remote service uses an integrated approach of teledermatology (TD) whilst offering continual in-person services using local capabilities including a GPwER and island general surgeons. New treatment facilities are provided to the island population. Continual educational feedback to the primary care referrer is provided, and it enhances relationships that greatly aid the high-quality dermatology service provided.

Enduring intolerable suffering, an essential eligibility criterion in Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in Canada and elsewhere, is a contradiction in terms, in that suffering must be tolerable to be endured. Cases of people who were approved for MAiD but who elected to die naturally, thus tolerating their suffering, bear out the unreliability of this central safeguard. The clinical assessment of intolerable suffering may be strengthened by adopting a definition of intolerable suffering centred on clinically evidenced physical and psychological decompensation. This argument also raises important questions about the risks of MAiD clinicians subjectively defining, approving and providing MAiD in ways that deviate from accepted legal and clinical concepts and ethics. Examples show some prolific clinicians describe MAiD in terminology that differs from such norms, as a personal mission, as personally pleasurable, and as a rights-based service. These alternative views are explored for their risks in assessing and providing MAiD for intolerable suffering. This further demonstrates the need for conceptual clarity in legislation, improved vetting and monitoring of clinicians, and a different assessment process to protect patients and clinicians.

This article clarifies the origins of the field of transitional justice and its preliminary conceptual boundaries. I argue that the field began to emerge in the late 1980s, as a consequence of new practical conditions that human rights activists faced in countries such as Argentina, where authoritarian regimes had been replaced by more democratic ones. The turn away from \"naming and shaming\" and toward accountability for past abuse among human rights activists was taken up at the international level, where the focus on political change as \"transition to democracy\" helped to legitimate those claims to justice that prioritized legal-institutional reforms and responses--such as punishing leaders, vetting abusive security forces, and replacing state secrecy with truth and transparency--over other claims to justice that were oriented toward social justice and redistribution. I end by discussing the many ways in which these initial conceptual boundaries have since been tested and expanded.

One key frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability to comprehend research articles and validate their findings, posing a magnanimous problem for AI systems to compete with human intelligence and intuition. As a benchmark of research validation, the existing peer-review system still stands strong despite being criticized at times by many. However, the paper vetting system has been severely strained due to an influx of research paper submissions and increased conferences/journals. As a result, problems, including having insufficient reviewers, finding the right experts, and maintaining review quality, are steadily and strongly surfacing. To ease the workload of the stakeholders associated with the peer-review process, we probed into what an AI-powered review system would look like. In this work, we leverage the interaction between the paper’s full text and the corresponding peer-review text to predict the overall recommendation score and final decision. We do not envisage AI reviewing papers in the near future. Still, we intend to explore the possibility of a human–AI collaboration in the decision-making process to make the current system FAIR. The idea is to have an assistive decision-making tool for the chairs/editors to help them with an additional layer of confidence, especially with borderline and contrastive reviews. We use a deep attention network between the review text and paper to learn the interactions and predict the overall recommendation score and final decision. We also use sentiment information encoded within peer-review texts to guide the outcome further. Our proposed model outperforms the recent state-of-the-art competitive baselines. We release the code of our implementation here: https://github.com/PrabhatkrBharti/PEERRec.git.

Transitional justice encompasses a variety of measures devised to overcome legacies of gross human rights violations and other historical injustices. The spread of international criminal tribunals, truth commissions, inclusive alternatives to purges, and apologies represents one of the most fascinating intellectual developments in legal and social studies. What do we know about the social efficacy of transitional justice measures? This article reviews 25 studies that provided quantitative evidence about the effects of transitional justice gathered at the individual‐level analysis and situates them in the context of other studies on major transitional justice interventions: truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, lustration (vetting), reparation, and apologies. The article concludes that (1) transitional justice matters in dealing with the past; (2) justice is understood as a social‐political category rather than a legal category; (3) past experiences affect attitudes to transitional justice as well as its outcomes; (4) different victims have needs for different transitional justice measures; (5) the outcomes of transitional justice depend on its context and implementation; (6) truth‐sharing may produce both positive and negative effects; and (7) reconciliatory measures may produce positive social effects.

While a number of significant campaigns since the early 1990s have resulted in bans of particular weapons, at least as many equivalent systems have gone unscrutinized and uncondemned by transnational campaigners. How can this variation be explained? Focusing on the issue area of arms control advocacy, this article argues that an important influence on the advocacy agenda within transnational networks is the decision-making process not of norm entrepreneurs nor of states but of highly connected organizations within a given network. The argument is illustrated through a comparison between existing norms against landmines and blinding laser weapons, and the absence of serious current consideration of such norms against depleted uranium and autonomous weapons. Thus, the process of organizational issue selection within nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations (IOs) most central to particular advocacy networks, rather than the existence of transnational networks around an issue per se, should be a closer focus of attention for scholars interested in norm creation in world politics.