A Blockchain-Based Audit Trail Mechanism: Design and Implementation

Audit logs are a critical component in today’s enterprise business systems as they provide several benefits such as records transparency and integrity and security of sensitive information by creating a layer of evidential support. However, current implementations are vulnerable to attacks on data integrity or availability. This paper presents a Blockchain-based audit trail mechanism that leverages the security features of Blockchain to enable secure and reliable audit trails and to address the aforementioned vulnerabilities. The architecture design and specific implementation are described in detail, resulting in a real prototype of a reliable, secure, and user-friendly audit trail mechanism.

Blockchain-Based Traceability System That Ensures Food Safety Measures to Protect Consumer Safety and COVID-19 Free Supply Chains

The world is facing an unprecedented socio-economic crisis caused by the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19). The virus is also spreading through the import and export food supply chains. The Chinese authorities have discovered the COVID-19 virus in various imported frozen meat packages. Traceability plays a vital role in food quality and food safety. The Internet of Things (IoT) provides solutions to overseeing environmental conditions, product quality, and product traceability. These solutions are traditionally based on a centralized architecture, which does not guarantee tamper-proof data sharing. The blockchain is an emerging technology that provides tamper-proof data sharing in real-time. This article presents a blockchain-enabled supply chain architecture to ensure the availability of a tamper-proof audit trail. This tamper-proof audit trail helps to make sure that all safety measures are undertaken to minimize the risk of COVID-19 and other bacteria, fungi, and parasites being present in the frozen meat supply chain.

EXPLORATORY STUDY ON MEDICAL GRADUATES WITH NONCLINICIANS CAREER

Background: Medical graduates have diverse career choices. Various factors trigger the motivation and interest of alumni to choose non-clinician careers. Research towards medical graduates who chose non-clinician careers was less than doctors with clinicians. This study aims to explore the reasons for choosing non-clinicians as careers for medical graduates. Methods: This research is a descriptive exploratory study. A total of 10 medical alumni subjects, batch 2011, were selected through purposive sampling. They were rich in information. We performed semi-structured interviews to collect qualitative data. Data were analyzed using content analysis. To ensure transferability and dependability of the data, we performed inter-raters meetings and an audit trail. Triangulation between three inter-raters was administered to get an inter-rater agreement. An external auditor performed an audit trail after the data analysis. Results: This study discussed the reasons for choosing non-clinician careers for medical graduates. Three main themes influence the graduates’ reasons: (1) motivation, (2) experiences, and (3) comparative factors between clinician and non-clinician careers. The motivation could be divided into internal and external motivation. Strong motivation, together with experiences, form a firm decision to take non-clinician careers. When comparing clinician and non-clinician careers, subjects mentioned the condition, including financial situation, risk factors, and seniority. Conclusion: The reasons for choosing non-clinician careers related closely to subjects’ motivation, experiences, and comparative factors between careers as clinicians versus non-clinicians. This research showed the importance of medical education to prepare students for mentorship, the risks factor of and the career choices of clinicians and non-clinicians

Devices for illuminating defended subjectivities in complex qualitative case interpretation: An example from recent BNIM practice

For a long time now, fairly central to what has emerged as ‘psychosocial studies’ has been the notion of psychosocietal ‘defendedness’. This is the psychoanalytic notion that people (not excluding social science researchers) must be understood in general as being ‘defended subjectivities’. This immediately raises the question of the ‘defended researcher’ being sensitive to – and having procedures for detecting and interpreting the working of – such ‘defensiveness’ in the interactions of their subjects and themselves. Biography-based research raises these issues particularly strongly. One such method, known as the ‘biographical narrative interpretative method’ (BNIM) of interviewing and case interpretation, has been used in the anglophone world for more than 20 years. While BNIM prescribes an audit trail for its interpretative practices, it is rare to discover a fully audited sequence of components, and rarer still to have access to illuminating free-associative fieldnotes that catalogue the researcher’s evolving subjectivity. This article discusses defendedness in a case interpretation within a BNIM-using PhD. We conclude that, to defeat the defensiveness of both researcher and peer-auditor (the co-authors of this article), several BNIM techniques need to be used systematically and that, in particular, a ‘private and confidential’ independent peer audit is valuable under certain conditions, and should be provided for in any research proposal. Through peer audit, the researcher can be (usually uncomfortably) sensitised to new possibilities about their otherwise inadequately understood defended processes and conclusions.

A Blockchain-Based Federated Learning

Conventional machine learning (ML) needs centralized training data to be present on a given machine or datacenter. The healthcare, finance, and other institutions where data sharing is prohibited require an approach for training ML models in secured architecture. Recently, techniques such as federated learning (FL), MIT Media Lab's Split Neural networks, blockchain, aim to address privacy and regulation of data. However, there are difference between the design principles of FL and the requirements of Institutions like healthcare, finance, etc., which needs blockchain-orchestrated FL having the following features: clients with their local data can define access policies to their data and define how updated weights are to be encrypted between the workers and the aggregator using blockchain technology and also prepares audit trail logs undertaken within network and it keeps actual list of participants hidden. This is expected to remove barriers in a range of sectors including healthcare, finance, security, logistics, governance, operations, and manufacturing.

The Research Audit Trail: Methodological Guidance for Application in Practice

The merits of qualitative research remain an issue of ongoing debate and investigation. Qualitative researchers emphasise issues such as credibility, dependability, and transferability in demonstrating the trustworthiness of their research outcomes. This refers to the extent to which the research outcomes are conceptually sound and serves as the basis for enabling other researchers to assess their value. Carcary (2009) proposed trustworthiness in qualitative inquiry could be established through developing a physical and intellectual research audit trail – a strategy that involves maintaining an audit of all key stages and theoretical, methodological, and analytical decisions, as well as documenting how a researcher’s thinking evolves throughout a research project. Since 2009, this publication has been cited in greater than 600 studies. The current paper provides an analysis of the use and value of the research audit trail, based on the author’s application of this strategy across diverse research projects in the field of Information Systems management over a ten year time period. Based on a critical reflection on insights gained through these projects, this paper provides an in‑depth discussion of a series of guidelines for developing and applying the research audit trail in practice. These guidelines advance existing thinking and provide practical recommendations in relation to maintaining a research audit trail throughout a research project. Based on these guidelines and the core issues that should be covered at a physical and intellectual research audit trail level, a checklist that can be tailored to each project’s context is provided to support novice researchers and those who are new to the research audit trail strategy. As such, this paper demonstrates commitment to rigor in qualitative research. It provides a practical contribution in terms of advancing guidelines and providing a supporting checklist for ensuring the quality and transparency of theoretical, methodological, and analytical processes in qualitative inquiry. Embedding these guidelines throughout the research process will promote critical reflection among researchers across all stages of qualitative research and, in tracing through the researcher’s logic, will provide the basis for enabling other researchers to independently assess whether the research findings can serve as a platform for further investigation.