Land title to the tiller. Why it’s not enough and how it’s sometimes worse

Mainstream adherence to land titling as a strategy to address rural poverty has gained even more sway against the backdrop of the contemporary phenomenon of large-scale farmland acquisitions, known to some as “global land grabbing”. The orthodox narrative, embraced in toto by organisations such as the World Bank, is that formal property rights mitigate the risks of these land acquisitions and allow the poor to access the benefits of these acquisitions. This paper attempts to critically investigate this narrative by problematising the land titling–land grabbing nexus under the lens of adverse incorporation. Situating the study in a bio-ethanol plantation in Isabela province, Philippines, the research compared two groups of small-holder farmers: one group with titles and another without titles. Initial findings show, firstly, that land titles do not neutralise the risks of adverse incorporation for farmers in highly-asymmetrical agrarian societies or protect against the market pressures that bear upon these farmers and secondly, that titles may, in fact, have a lubricating rather than insulating function—drawing title-holders into the global value chain and compromising their prospects for more equitable, pro-poor outcomes. In conclusion, the paper proposes a recasting of the land titling paradigm: viewing land titles not as apparatuses with invariant outcomes, but as contested tools for truly meaningful rights assertions

A method for constructing permutations, involutions and orthomorphisms with strong cryptographic properties

S-Boxes are crucial components in the design of many symmetric ciphers. To construct permutations having strong cryptographic properties is not a trivial task. In this work, we propose a new scheme based on the well-known Lai-Massey structure for generating permutations of dimension n = 2к, к 2. The main cores of our constructions are: the inversion in GF(2k), an arbitrary к-bit non-bijective function (which has no pre-image for 0) and any к-bit permutation. Combining these components with the finite field multiplication, we provide new 8-bit permutations without fixed points possessing a very good combination for nonlinearity, differential uniformity and minimum degree — (104; 6; 7) which can be described by a system of polynomial equations with degree 3. Also, we show that our approach can be used for constructing involutions and orthomorphisms with strong cryptographic properties

Modified spinning black holes

In the context of f(R) modified gravity theories we determine that the black holes existence is determined by the sign of a parameter dependent of the mass, the charge, the spin and the scalar curvature. We obtain the different astrophysical objects derived from the presence of different horizons. Thermodynamics for this kind of black holes is studied for negative values of the curvature, revealing that we can distinguish between two kinds of BH: fast and slow.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, Contribution to the ERE2011 Spanish Relativity Meeting, Madrid 201