¿Un Spengler per a la postguerra freda?

Després de més de quaranta anys d’un treball acadèmic ingent en diversos àmbits de la politologia i de la sociologia, Samuel P. Huntington ha caigut finalment en la temptació de la simplificació. Aquesta és la hipòtesi de fons d’aquest article, en el que Pierre Hassner reconeix l’encert d’algunes de les aportacions del politòleg nord americà en alguns dels seus primers treballs, però en el que critica, sobretot, la simplificació, les esquerdes i els oblits massa patents en l’anàlisi huntingtoniana del xoc de civilitzacions

« Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change » : Réflexions sur les nouvelles dimensions de la crise atlantique

The atlantic crisis is as old as the Alliance itself, but is has now acquired a critical nature in that in affects deeply the relations of the two major countries : The United States and the Federal Republic of Germany.This crisis lies at the crossroads of an evolution in the international context which has stirred up doubts regarding American protection, and of a change in generation which expresses itself in different ways on either side of the Atlantic.The concepts of "comparative vulnerability" and of "mutual fear of decoupling" are used in an attempt to apprise the situation. A study of the search for a German and a European identity and of the Western responses to events in Poland has led the author to make a few recommendations regarding a new policy of the Atlantic Alliance towards Eastern Europe

Wide baseline stereo matching with convex bounded-distortion constraints

Finding correspondences in wide baseline setups is a challenging problem. Existing approaches have focused largely on developing better feature descriptors for correspondence and on accurate recovery of epipolar line constraints. This paper focuses on the challenging problem of finding correspondences once approximate epipolar constraints are given. We introduce a novel method that integrates a deformation model. Specifically, we formulate the problem as finding the largest number of corresponding points related by a bounded distortion map that obeys the given epipolar constraints. We show that, while the set of bounded distortion maps is not convex, the subset of maps that obey the epipolar line constraints is convex, allowing us to introduce an efficient algorithm for matching. We further utilize a robust cost function for matching and employ majorization-minimization for its optimization. Our experiments indicate that our method finds significantly more accurate maps than existing approaches