Popular support for military intervention and anti-establishment alternatives in Tunisia: Appraising outsider eclecticism

Popular attitudes in support of authoritarian alternatives and weak party systems constitute important threats to democratic consolidation and the stability of new democracies. This article explores popular alienation from established political actors in Tunisia. Under what conditions do citizens support alternatives to the elites in power and the institutional infrastructure of a new democracy? Drawing on an original, nationally representative survey in Tunisia administered in 2017, this article examines three categories of popular attitudes in support of political outsiders.Military interventionism appears in people’s preferences for anti-system politics—the most immediate challenge to the country’s stability and democratic transition. Anti-political establishment sentiments are shown in people’s preferences for an enhanced role of the country’s main trade union as a civil-society alternative to political party elites. Finally, outsider eclecticism is the seemingly incoherent phenomenon of concurrent support for a civil society actor and the military as an ‘authoritarian alternative.’ Anti-establishment sentiments will continue to be an important element in Tunisian post-authoritarian politics, evidenced by the rise to power of Kais Said in the 2019 presidential elections and his 2021 decision to dismiss parliament. In turn, popular support for military intervention may have implications for the country’s domestic security and peaceful transition

Protein composition and techno-functional properties of transgenic wheat with reduced α-gliadin content obtained by RNA interference

An RNA interference approach was applied to silence α-gliadin genes in hexaploid wheat. A 313 bp fragment from the 5’ coding region of an α-gliadin sequence was cloned into the “hairpin” (hpRNAi) constructs pGliaRNAiSpacer and transformed into winter wheat cv. Florida by biolistic transformation. The resulting transgenic lines were then analysed for their α-gliadin content by an extraction/RPHPLC method. Distinct differences of the α-gliadin content ranging from unaltered to strongly reduced were found. Kernels of two lines with strongly reduced α-gliadin content were mixed, milled to white fl our, analysed for quantitative protein composition and used for functional testing in comparison with the wild type fl our. Protein analysis revealed that the lack of α-gliadins was compensated by an increase of albumins/globulins, ω-gliadins, γ-gliadins and HMW glutenin subunits. Dough resistance and extensibility of wild type and transgenic lines were similar, whereas gluten resistance of the transgenic increased drastically and extensibility decreased slightly. 2D gel electrophoresis showed that the transgenic wheat #6/6 lacked at least 20 storage proteins, but other distinct proteins were more abundant compared with the wild type. Major reductions in the α-gliadins do not make discernable differences in micro-scale measurements of flour functionality and have only a slightly detrimental effect in micro-baking tests

Integrated Structure and Semantics for Reo Connectors and Petri Nets

In this paper, we present an integrated structural and behavioral model of Reo connectors and Petri nets, allowing a direct comparison of the two concurrency models. For this purpose, we introduce a notion of connectors which consist of a number of interconnected, user-defined primitives with fixed behavior. While the structure of connectors resembles hypergraphs, their semantics is given in terms of so-called port automata. We define both models in a categorical setting where composition operations can be elegantly defined and integrated. Specifically, we formalize structural gluings of connectors as pushouts, and joins of port automata as pullbacks. We then define a semantical functor from the connector to the port automata category which preserves this composition. We further show how to encode Reo connectors and Petri nets into this model and indicate applications to dynamic reconfigurations modeled using double pushout graph transformation

Measuring Dislocation Density in Aluminum with Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy

Dislocations in a material will, when present in enough numbers, change the speed of propagation of elastic waves. Consequently, two material samples, differing only in dislocation density, will have different elastic constants, a quantity that can be measured using Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy. Measurements of this effect on aluminum samples are reported. They compare well with the predictions of the theory.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

High-performance operation of single-mode terahertz quantum cascade lasers with metallic gratings

A periodic array of thin slits opened on a metallic surface can act as a one-dimensional photonic crystal for the propagation of surface-plasmon waves. We have used such structure for the implementation of distributed feedback resonators in quantum cascade lasers emitting near 2.5 THz. Single-mode emission, stable at all injection currents and operating temperatures, was achieved both in pulsed and continuous wave. The devices exhibited output powers of several milliwatts with low threshold current densities of ∼100 A cm2