The Eurasian Economic Union – more political, less economic. OSW Commentary Number 157/20.01.2015

The Eurasian Economic Union is undoubtedly the most comprehensive form of economic integration of the post-Soviet countries since the break-up of the Soviet Union. However, the way in which the integration process has been unfolding, as well as Russia’s aggressive policy over the last year, are indications that the EEU has become primarily a political project, and the importance of its economic aspects has eroded. This has triggered a change in the way Kazakhstan and Belarus treat the EEU. Initially, the two countries viewed integration as an opportunity for the development of genuine economic co-operation. However, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the conflict in Ukraine have revealed the real significance of the EEU project – as a tool to reinforce Russian influence in the post-Soviet area and isolate the post-Soviet countries from the West and China. While the Kremlin presents the EEU as the Eurasian equivalent of the European Union, the project is in reality an imitation of integration. The reasons for this include the nature of the political systems in the participating countries, which are authoritarian, prone to instrumentalise law, and affected by systemic corruption; the aggressive policy that Russia has been pursuing over the last year; and Russia’s dominant role in defining the shape of the EEU. The EEU appears to be based on forceful integration, and is becoming less and less economically attractive for its member countries other than Russia. Moreover, it is clearly assuming a political dimension that those other member countries perceive as dangerous. For these reasons, its functioning will depend on the power and position of Russia. In the longer term it is likely that the other member states will try to ‘sham’ and delay closer integration within the EEU. This means that if Russia becomes politically and economically weaker, the EEU may evolve into an increasingly dysfunctional organisation – a development that will be reinforced by the low standards of legal culture in its member states and their reluctance to integrate. Should Russia’s power increase, the EEU will become an effective instrument of Russian dominance in the area of the former USSR

A bottomless pit: the costs of Crimea’s annexation by Russia. OSW Commentary No. 143, 29.07.2014

The annexation of Crimea has brought the Russian authorities significant dividends, in particular on the domestic stage: it has resulted in an unprecedented social and political consolidation, and strengthened Vladimir Putin’s position after several years of decline in social support for him. It has provided Russia with strategic benefits, giving it broad access to the Black Sea and the military infrastructure on the peninsula, as well as access to natural gas and crude oil reserves. Russia has also taken over numerous assets (including the tourist infrastructure) previously owned by the Ukrainian state. However, the decision itself concerning Moscow’s annexation of Crimea was taken off the cuff, with no calculation of the costs of integrating it with the Russian legal, political and socio-economic space. Russia took over a region that required subsidies from the Ukrainian budget; moreover, the annexation struck at the most important industry of the Crimean economy – tourism. Crimea’s integration with Russia will be a complex process that entails high costs, financial, organisational and social, including multi-billion dollar investments in the modernisation and development of infrastructure, covering the region’s budget deficit, and paying out social benefits. For reasons of prestige and political significance, Moscow is treating Crimea as a showcase region. Russia is determined to prove that the Crimean incorporation will be beneficial for the region’s economy and will raise people’s living standards. However, the expenses triggered by Crimea’s integration will coincide with a deteriorating economic situation in Russia, aggravated by US and EU sanctions, and this may force Russia to postpone or even give up some of its ambitious investments in the peninsula. Some of the integration costs will have to be borne by other Russian regions, even though they already face serious financial problems that have forced them to reduce their own investment programs. Another issue that has come into question is the fulfilment of the Crimean people’s’ expectations concerning the improvement of their living standards, due to the tourist sector’s problems (small-scale tourist services used to be one of the local people’s main sources of income), the rising costs of maintenance, and finally, restrictions of civil rights after the introduction of the more restrictive Russian legislation

The mysterious provenance and uncommon repertoire of the music collection belonging to the Dominican Pius Hancke

Father Pius Hancke’s music collection includes numerous pieces written for harp. Its outstanding repertoire and provenance distinguishes it from other monastic collections. Hancke expanded it throughout his life and took it with him when moving home. He spent the last thirty years of his life in the Dominican monastery in Nysa. Music for the liturgy contained in his collection (masses, litanies) was certainly used there and is currently the only testimony of that monastery’s musical culture. Besides liturgical compositions, Hancke’s collection includes a number of instrumental pieces for harp with the accompaniment of other instruments and contrafacta of operatic arias. The latter often include parts arranged for harp, probably by Hancke himself. The scriptors’ names link this collection to a unique manuscript containing a Credo ascribed to Antonio Vivaldi

The mysterious provenance and uncommon repertoire of the music collection belonging to the Dominican Pius Hancke

Father Pius Hancke’s music collection includes numerous pieces written for harp. Its outstanding repertoire and provenance distinguishes it from other monastic collections. Hancke expanded it throughout his life and took it with him when moving home. He spent the last thirty years of his life in the Dominican monastery in Nysa. Music for the liturgy contained in his collection (masses, litanies) was certainly used there and is currently the only testimony of that monastery’s musical culture. Besides liturgical compositions, Hancke’s collection includes a number of instrumental pieces for harp with the accompaniment of other instruments and contrafacta of operatic arias. The latter often include parts arranged for harp, probably by Hancke himself. The scriptors’ names link this collection to a unique manuscript containing a Credo ascribed to Antonio Vivaldi

Eurasian integration. Russia's attempt at the economic unification of the post-Soviet area. OSW Study 44/2013

In 2009, Vladimir Putin, the then Russian prime minister, gave impetus to the establishment of closer relations within what was then a still narrow group of three countries: Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus. Russia was determined in embarking on the implementation of the principles of the Customs Union among these three states and, since 2012, within the Common Economic Space as well. This process of integration is intended to bring about the introduction of ‘four freedoms’ in this area: the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour. From Moscow’s point of view, building up such integration structures is especially necessary in order to counteract the economic expansion of the European Union and China. It also feels it is important to take measures against the loosening of the bonds between the CIS countries and Russia. At the same time, close co-operation is expected to guarantee for Russia that the strong politico-economic influences in this area will be maintained. Despite the numerous limitations of the integration process, such as the small number of the participating states or limited progress in implementing the CES, this is still the most advanced integration programme in the region seen since the collapse of the USSR. Progress in putting the rules of the Customs Union into practice can be seen as a success for Moscow. In turn, the formation of the CES is still at an early stage, and it is difficult to determine at this point to what extent the three countries will harmonise their markets

Chronic granulomatous disease: the European experience.

CGD is an immunodeficiency caused by deletions or mutations in genes that encode subunits of the leukocyte NADPH oxidase complex. Normally, assembly of the NADPH oxidase complex in phagosomes of certain phagocytic cells leads to a "respiratory burst", essential for the clearance of phagocytosed micro-organisms. CGD patients lack this mechanism, which leads to life-threatening infections and granuloma formation. However, a clear picture of the clinical course of CGD is hampered by its low prevalence (approximately 1:250,000). Therefore, extensive clinical data from 429 European patients were collected and analyzed. Of these patients 351 were males and 78 were females. X-linked (XL) CGD (gp91(phox) deficient) accounted for 67% of the cases, autosomal recessive (AR) inheritance for 33%. AR-CGD was diagnosed later in life, and the mean survival time was significantly better in AR patients (49.6 years) than in XL CGD (37.8 years), suggesting a milder disease course in AR patients. The disease manifested itself most frequently in the lungs (66% of patients), skin (53%), lymph nodes (50%), gastrointestinal tract (48%) and liver (32%). The most frequently cultured micro-organisms per episode were Staphylococcus aureus (30%), Aspergillus spp. (26%), and Salmonella spp. (16%). Surprisingly, Pseudomonas spp. (2%) and Burkholderia cepacia (<1%) were found only sporadically. Lesions induced by inoculation with BCG occurred in 8% of the patients. Only 71% of the patients received antibiotic maintenance therapy, and 53% antifungal prophylaxis. 33% were treated with gamma-interferon. 24 patients (6%) had received a stem cell transplantation. The most prominent reason of death was pneumonia and pulmonary abscess (18/84 cases), septicemia (16/84) and brain abscess (4/84). These data provide further insight in the clinical course of CGD in Europe and hopefully can help to increase awareness and optimize the treatment of these patients

Scalable Bias-Resistant Distributed Randomness

Bias-resistant public randomness is a critical component in many (distributed) protocols. Existing solutions do not scale to hundreds or thousands of participants, as is needed in many decentralized systems. We propose two large-scale distributed protocols, RandHound and RandHerd, which provide publicly-verifiable, unpredictable, and unbiasable randomness against Byzantine adversaries. RandHound relies on an untrusted client to divide a set of randomness servers into groups for scalability, and it depends on the pigeonhole principle to ensure output integrity, even for non-random, adversarial group choices. RandHerd implements an efficient, decentralized randomness beacon. RandHerd is structurally similar to a BFT protocol, but uses RandHound in a one-time setup to arrange participants into verifiably unbiased random secret-sharing groups, which then repeatedly produce random output at predefined intervals. Our prototype demonstrates that RandHound and RandHerd achieve good performance across hundreds of participants while retaining a low failure probability by properly selecting protocol parameters, such as a group size and secret-sharing threshold. For example, when sharding 512 nodes into groups of 32, our experiments show that RandHound can produce fresh random output after 240 seconds. RandHerd, after a setup phase of 260 seconds, is able to generate fresh random output in intervals of approximately 6 seconds. For this configuration, both protocols operate at a failure probability of at most 0.08% against a Byzantine adversary

COLOSS B-RAP expert evaluation of beekeeping advice from ChatGPT, part 1

The advanced language model ChatGPT is capable of understanding and generating human-like text. It can be integrated into various services, ranging from customer support to educational platforms, providing personalized assistance, information and guidance. For straightforward, low-complexity medical quest­ions, ChatGPT has been shown to have potential as an AI-assisted decision support tool in medicine (Harskamp & De Clercq, Citation2024). In apiculture, hive management is an important factor in maintaining healthy and productive honey bee colonies (Sperandio et al., Citation2019; Steinhauer et al., Citation2021). Artificial intelligence-based linguistic models could provide an easy-to-access advisory service in countries where no advisory services are available or to relieve advisors. At a workshop of the COLOSS core project B-RAP (Fabricius Kristiansen et al., Citation2022) held in Olomouc, Czechia, in February 2024, we, therefore, tested the ability of ChatGPT3.5 to deal with some common questions in beekeeping. The question formulation always included rough information on location and date and formulated the beekeeping-related problem as a question allowing an open answer. The panel of 13 experts present (researchers, beekeeping advisors, veterinarians), many of them beekeepers themselves, evaluated the answers