The pandemic and the crisis of democracy in Brazil

Some claim that an erosion of democracy is occurring worldwide. There are also questions on the scope of the crisis, which countries are affected, and how to reverse it. The Covid-19 pandemic may have fostered disagreements, deepened rifts, and contributed to the definitive crystallisation of the crisis, but it may also have engendered more moderate and compliant attitudes given the need to unify around the response to common threat. We explore the current dilemmas of democracy in the Brazilian case, focusing on how regime legitimacy, authoritarian attitudes, and support for a populist, authoritarian leader interact and are affected by the pandemic, using public opinion data from 2018 to 2020

Quantum Steganography via Coherent and Fock State Encoding in an Optical Medium

Steganography is an alternative to cryptography, where information is protected by secrecy -- being disguised as innocent communication or noise -- rather than being scrambled. In this work we develop schemes for steganographic communication using Fock and coherent states in optical channels based on disguising the communications as thermal noise. We derive bounds on their efficiency in the case of an all-powerful eavesdropper, and provide explicit methods of encoding and error correction for the noiseless channel case.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

10292 Abstracts Collection and Summary -- Resilience Assessment and Evaluation

From July 18 to July 23, 2010 the Dagstuhl Seminar 10292 ``Resilience Assessment and Evaluation \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Democracia, escala y participación. Reflexiones desde las instituciones participativas brasileñas

A generalized approach in democratic theory exists, especially in participatory theory, in which the smaller the scale (defined as size of territory or administrative level), the more chance there is to develop better quality participatory processes. In response to this perspective, we will compare two types of Participating Institutions in Brazil (Councils and National Conferences) in municipalities of different sizes and administrative levels. The hypothesis of this paper is that intermediate levels are those of higher democratic quality.<br><br>Existe un planteamiento generalizado dentro de la teoría democrática, especialmente en la teoría participativa, según el cual, a menor escala (entendida como tamaño del territorio o nivel administrativo), mayores posibilidades de desarrollar procesos participativos de mayor calidad. Para contestar dicha perspectiva, comparamos dos tipos de Instituciones Participativas en Brasil (Consejos y Conferencias Nacionales) en municipios de diferente tamaño y en diferentes niveles administrativos. La hipótesis del texto es que son los niveles intermedios los que presentan una mayor calidad democrática