STATE AID AND PARTICIPATION TO INTERNATIONAL TRADE FLOWS. ROMANIA'S CASE

This article focuses on the Romanian state aid and participation to the international trade flows. The purpose of this research was to determine whether the state aid offered takes into account the evolution and the requirements of the new market conditions generated by the economic and financial crisis. Our main conclusion was that regarding Romania's participation to the international trade flows, as the state aid measures focused mainly on sectors with high social impact, trade came second on the government's concern.state aid, trade flows, subsidies

Dileme etice in marketingul modern

Intr-o lume grabita si agitata, care pe zi ce trece devine tot mai greu de inteles, este important ca etica sa nu fie tratata drept ceva indepartat de viata reala, o disciplina care isi are locul doar in bibliotecile universitatilor. Etica vorbeste despre valori, despre bine si rau; atat oamenii cat si companiile neputand evita implicarea in acest domeniu, deoarece ceea ce facem si ceea ce nu facem poate fi oricand subiectul unei evaluari de natura etica. Din acest motiv, am optat pentru aceasta tema, considerand ca este extrem de important ca etica sa fie punctul de pornire al oricarei activitati de marketing.relatii publice, valori morale, promovare, managementul relatiilor cu clientii, responsabilitatea sociala a companiilor, globalizare, public relations, moral values, marketing promotions, customer relationship management, corporate social responsability, globalization

PISA 2009 - Expliquer l’écart entre les sexes en lecture à la lumière de l’engagement dans la lecture et des démarches d’apprentissage

Bien que le Canada se soit toujours classé dans le premier quart lors des évaluations du Programme international pour le suivi des acquis des élèves (PISA) en lecture et que les élèves du Canada fassent toujours partie des meilleurs lecteurs au monde, le programme relève un net écart entre les sexes. Les filles surpassent les garçons avec un écart qui correspond plus ou moins à la moitié d’un niveau de compétence en lecture, soit une année complète de scolarisation. Le présent document examine l’ensemble de données du PISA de 2009, dans le but de cerner les facteurs qui contribuent à expliquer l’écart entre les sexes au Canada

Comprehensive analysis of drugs to treat SARS‑CoV‑2 infection: Mechanistic insights into current COVID‑19 therapies (Review)

The major impact produced by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) focused many researchers attention to find treatments that can suppress transmission or ameliorate the disease. Despite the very fast and large flow of scientific data on possible treatment solutions, none have yet demonstrated unequivocal clinical utility against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19). This work represents an exhaustive and critical review of all available data on potential treatments for COVID‑19, highlighting their mechanistic characteristics and the strategy development rationale. Drug repurposing, also known as drug repositioning, and target based methods are the most used strategies to advance therapeutic solutions into clinical practice. Current in silico, in vitro and in vivo evidence regarding proposed treatments are summarized providing strong support for future research efforts

Anonymous, Timed and Revocable Proxy Signatures

A proxy signature enables a party to delegate her signing power to another. This is useful in practice to achieve goals related to robustness, crowd-sourcing, and workload sharing. Such applications usually require delegation to satisfy several properties, including time bounds, anonymity, revocability, and policy enforcement. Despite the large amount of work on proxy signatures in the literature, none of the existing schemes satisfy all these properties; even there is no unified formal notion that captures them. In this work, we close this gap and propose an anonymous, timed, and revocable proxy signature scheme. We achieve this in two steps: First, we introduce a tokenizable digital signature based on Schnorr signature allowing for secure distribution of signing tokens (which could be of independent interest). Second, we utilize a public bulletin board and timelock encryption to support: (1) one-time usage of the signing tokens by tracking tokens used so far based on unique values associated to them, (2) timed delegation so that a proxy signer cannot sign outside a given period, and (3) delegation revocation allowing the original signer to end a delegation earlier than provisioned. All of these are done in a decentralized and anonymous way; no trusted party is involved, and no one can tell that someone else signed on behalf of the original signer or even that a delegation took place. We define a formal notion for proxy signatures capturing all these properties, and prove that our construction realizes this notion. We also introduce several design considerations addressing issues related to deployment in practice

Dating Components of Human Atherosclerotic Plaques

Rationale: Atherosclerotic plaques that give rise to acute clinical symptoms are typically characterized by degradation of the connective tissue and plaque rupture. Experimental studies have shown that mechanisms to repair vulnerable lesions exist, but the rate of remodeling of human plaque tissue has not been studied. Objective: In the present study, we determined the biological age of different components of advanced human atherosclerotic plaques by analyzing tissue levels of (14)C released into the atmosphere during the nuclear weapons tests in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Methods and Results: Atherosclerotic plaques were obtained from 10 patients (age 46 to 80 years) undergoing carotid surgery. Different regions of the plaques were dissected and analyzed for (14)C content using accelerator mass spectrometry. At the time of surgery, the mean biological age of the cap region was 6.4+/-3.2 years, which was significantly lower than that of the shoulder region (12.9+/-3.0 years, P<0.01), the interface toward the media (12.4+/-3.3 years, P<0.01), and the core (9.8+/-4.5 years, P<0.05). Analysis of proliferative activity and rate of apoptosis showed no signs of increased cellular turnover in the cap, suggesting that the lower (14)C content reflected a more recent time of formation. Conclusions: These results show that the turnover time of human plaque tissue is very long and may explain why regression of atherosclerotic plaque size rarely is observed in cardiovascular intervention trials

Sectoral Mobility and Unemployment with Heterogeneous Moving Costs

A simple equilibrium model of sectoral reallocation is developed in order to study the impact of heterogeneous moving costs on unemployment. The model blends key elements of standard sectoral reallocation theory and the competitive search model. Heterogeneity in moving costs is introduced via mobile and immobile workers. The impact of mobile workers on the unemployment rates of mobile and immobile workers is of particular interest. The model shows that the share of mobile workers raises their unemployment rate. The model also shows that when labor mobility is driven by a sectoral level aggregate disturbance, mobile workers can have a non-monotonic, but globally negative impact on the unemployment rate of immobile workers. However, when labor mobility is driven by an idiosyncratic sector-worker match effect, the share of mobile workers raises the unemployment rate of immobile workers

On the (In)security of SNARKs in the Presence of Oracles

International audienceIn this work we study the feasibility of knowledge extraction for succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) in a scenario that, to the best of our knowledge, has not been analyzed before. While prior work focuses on the case of adversarial provers that may receive (statically generated) auxiliary information, here we consider the scenario where adversarial provers are given access to an oracle. For this setting we study if and under what assumptions such provers can admit an extractor. Our contribution is mainly threefold. First, we formalize the question of extraction in the presence of oracles by proposing a suitable proof of knowledge definition for this setting. We call SNARKs satisfying this definition O-SNARKs. Second, we show how to use O-SNARKs to obtain formal and intuitive security proofs for three applications (ho-momorphic signatures, succinct functional signatures, and SNARKs on authenticated data) where we recognize an issue while doing the proof under the standard proof of knowledge definition of SNARKs. Third, we study whether O-SNARKs exist, providing both negative and positive results. On the negative side, we show that, assuming one way functions, there do not exist O-SNARKs in the standard model for every signing oracle family (and thus for general oracle families as well). On the positive side, we show that when considering signature schemes with appropriate restrictions on the message length O-SNARKs for the corresponding signing oracles exist, based on classical SNARKs and assuming extraction with respect to specific distributions of auxiliary input. This article is based on an earlier article which appears in the proceedings of TCC 2016-B, c IACR 2016