Constraints on the Soft Power Efforts of Authoritarian States: The Case of the 2015 Military Parade in Beijing

Is it possible for authoritarian states such as China, Russia, and Iran to combine the soft power narratives directed primarily towards an international audience with the narratives directed primarily towards a domestic audience that are aimed at maintaining regime security? To investigate this question, this article analyses the 2015 military parade in Beijing, using this case to highlight and discuss the constraints on Chinese leaders’ efforts to project soft power. The key finding is that soft power will continue to be the weak link in China’s pursuit of a great power position and status as long as what continues to count as “Chinese” is defined in opposition to hostile “others” and the humiliation narrative continues to function as the central identity marker in the party-led construction of national identity (the “us”)

SZTAKI desktop grid: building a scalable, secure platform for desktop grid computing

In this paper we present a concept how separate desktop grids can be used as building blocks for larger scale grids by organizing them in a hierarchical tree. We describe an enhanced security model which satisfies the requirements of the hierarchical setup and is aimed for real-world deployment

La soviétisation culturelle de la Bessarabie: le cas de l'Union des écrivains moldaves à l'époque stalinienne

This article aims at tracing a model of cultural Sovietization of the territories incorporated by the USSR in 1940, based on the study of this process in Bessarabia, a former Romanian province which became in June 1940 a Soviet republic (the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic - MSSR) and more specifically on the case of the Moldovan Writers' Union. The history of this process dates back to the creation in 1924 on a small territory on the left bank of the Dniester of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR) within the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The author will therefore try to pursue the rather discontinuous and contradictory development of the creation of a cultural policy in the center of the Soviet Empire and implemented in a small Western Soviet republic, but no less important given its strategic position. This cultural policy is elaborated and applied in a tacit or explicit relationship of convergence or divergence with other integration models applied in other regions annexed in the same period (1940-1944), in an effort to consider local and regional specificities

SZTAKI desktop grid: a modular and scalable way of building large computing grids

So far BOINC based desktop grid systems have been applied at the global computing level. This paper describes an extended version of BOINC called SZTAKI desktop grid (SZDG) that aims at using desktop grids (DGs) at local (enterprise/institution) level. The novelty of SZDG is that it enables the hierarchical organisation of local DGs, i.e., clients of a DG can be DGs at a lower level that can take work units from their higher level DG server. More than that, even clusters can be connected at the client level and hence work units can contain complete MPI programs to be run on the client clusters. In order to easily create master/worker type DG applications a new API, called as the DC-API has been developed. SZDG and DC-API has been successfully applied both at the global and local level, both in academic institutions and in companies to solve problems requiring large computing power

EDGeS: a bridge between desktop grids and service grids

Desktop grids and service grids widely used by their different users communities as efficient solutions for making full use of computing power and achieving loads balances across Intranet or Internet. Nevertheless,little work has been done to combine these two grids technologies together to establish a seamless and vast grid resources pool. In this paper we will present a new European FP7 infrastructure project:EDGeS (enabling desktop grids for e-science), which aim to build technological bridges to facilitate interoperability between desktop grid and service grid. We give also a taxonomy of existing grid systems: desktop grids such as BONIC and XtremWeb, service grids such as EGEE. Then we describe furtherly our solution for identifying translation technologies for porting applications between desktop grids and service grids, and vice versa. There are three themes in our solution, which discuss actual popular bridging technologies, user access issues, and distributed data issues about deployment and application development

Census politics in deeply divided societies

Population censuses in societies that are deeply divided along ethnic, religious or linguistic lines can be sensitive affairs – particularly where political settlements seek to maintain peace through the proportional sharing of power between groups. This brief sets out some key findings from a research project investigating the relationship between census politics and the design of political institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya, Lebanon and Northern Ireland

The human keratins: biology and pathology

The keratins are the typical intermediate filament proteins of epithelia, showing an outstanding degree of molecular diversity. Heteropolymeric filaments are formed by pairing of type I and type II molecules. In humans 54 functional keratin genes exist. They are expressed in highly specific patterns related to the epithelial type and stage of cellular differentiation. About half of all keratins—including numerous keratins characterized only recently—are restricted to the various compartments of hair follicles. As part of the epithelial cytoskeleton, keratins are important for the mechanical stability and integrity of epithelial cells and tissues. Moreover, some keratins also have regulatory functions and are involved in intracellular signaling pathways, e.g. protection from stress, wound healing, and apoptosis. Applying the new consensus nomenclature, this article summarizes, for all human keratins, their cell type and tissue distribution and their functional significance in relation to transgenic mouse models and human hereditary keratin diseases. Furthermore, since keratins also exhibit characteristic expression patterns in human tumors, several of them (notably K5, K7, K8/K18, K19, and K20) have great importance in immunohistochemical tumor diagnosis of carcinomas, in particular of unclear metastases and in precise classification and subtyping. Future research might open further fields of clinical application for this remarkable protein family

Supporting MPI applications in P-GRADE portal

P-GRADE portal is a multi-grid portal that can support GT2, LCG and gLite based Grid systems. In order to enable MPI execution in a transparent way in any of these grids we have developed a generic MPI execution mechanism that can tolerate the lack of shared working directory and is able to work with local job managers unable to support MPI jobs. The solution can support both direct job submission to selected grid sites as well as broker-based job submission. In case of using the EGEE broker the developed method enables the access of remote files stored in storage elements even if the executable code can access only local files

GenWrapper: A generic wrapper for running legacy applications on desktop grids

Desktop grids represent an alternative trend in grid computing using the same software infrastructure as volunteer computing projects, such as BOINC. Applications to be deployed on a BOINC infrastructure need special preparations. However, there are many legacy applications, that have either no source code available or would require too much effort to port. For these applications BOINC provides a wrapper. This wrapper can handle the simple cases and it is configurable, but it can only be used to execute a list of legacy executables (tasks) one after the other. GenWrapper aims to provide a generic solution for wrapping and executing an arbitrary set of legacy applications by utilizing a POSIX like shell scripting environment to describe how the application is to be run and how the work unit should be processed. This is realized by an extended version of BusyBox providing the most common UNIX commands and a POSIX shell interpreter in a single executable with a special applet (BusyBox extension) to make BOINC API functions accessible from the shell on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X platforms. In this paper we present how GenWrapper works and how it can be used to port legacy applications to desktop grid systems