Office of the Children’s Commissioner: 'Don't make assumptions': Children's and young people's views of the child protection system and messages for change

"The aim of this research, commissioned by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner and carried out by a team from the University of East Anglia, was to seek children and young people’s views of the child protection system and to consider how those views might contribute to improving responses to abuse and neglect. It aimed to gather the views of children and young people living with their parents, who all had a child protection plan in place. The research is timely as it comes during a period when the child protection system in England is being reviewed. We hope that the findings will be of interest to children and families involved in child protection, as well as to professionals working with children and to policy makers." - Page 7

A New Relativistic Orthogonal States Quantum Key Distribution Protocol

We introduce a new relativistic orthogonal states quantum key distribution protocol which leverages the properties of both quantum mechanics and special relativity to securely encode multiple bits onto the spatio-temporal modes of a single photon. If the protocol is implemented using a single photon source, it can have a key generation rate faster than the repetition rate of the source, enabling faster secure communication than is possible with existing protocols. Further, we provide a proof that the protocol is secure and give a method of implementing the protocol using line-of-sight and fiber optic channels.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. To appear in QIC Vol. 14 No. 13 & 14, pp. 1081-108

Napredak u administrativnoj decentralizaciji zemalja u tranziciji – komparativna analiza

Decentralisation has an important meaning in the context of European integration, since a Europe composed of subsidiary spatial units is to be constructed and a ”Europe of regions” is on the agenda of many political discussions. From the early 1990s, the European Communities (EC), later the European Union (EU), promoted the idea of administrative decentralisation also in transformation countries. For EU accession, decentralisation was made one of the prerequisites. But it met centralistic traditions originating not only in the Communist era and could be partly enforced only with considerable difficulties. The paper investigates in a comparative way the efforts made and the results achieved so far in East-Central and Southeast European countries to establish local as well as regional self-government. A special focus is laid on the regional level, to which administrative powers have been devolved only later and partly insufficiently. Special attention is also paid to the correspondence of administrative regionalisation with historical regional and cultural identities.Decentralizacija ima važno značenje u kontekstu europskih integracija, s obzirom na nastojanje stvaranja ujedinjene Europe sastavljene od pomoćnih prostornih jedinica, a i „Europa regija” tema je mnogih političkih diskusija. Od ranih 1990-ih Europska zajednica, kasnije Europska unija, promiče ideju administrativne decentralizacije i u zemljama u tranziciji. Decentralizacija je i jedan od uvjeta pristupa Europskoj uniji, ali tom procesu suprotstavila se tradicija centralističkog uređenja koja svoje korijene dijelom vuče iz razdoblja komunističkog upravljanja i on se mogao sprovesti djelomično i uz poteškoće. U ovom članku uspoređuju se napori i do sad postignuti rezultati u zemljama istočne i jugoistočne Europe u formiranju lokalne i regionalne samouprave. Poseban naglasak stavljen je na regionalnu razinu na koju se prijenos centralne vlasti odvio kasnije i samo u manjoj mjeri. Također, naglasak je stavljen na analizu preklapanja administrativnih regija s povijesnim regionalnim i kulturnim identitetima

The Concept of the Cultural Region and the Importance of Coincidence between Administrative and Cultural Regions

After browsing the principal terms of geographical regions like structural and functional regions, the paper highlights the term “cultural region” as a manifestation of a certain culture in the landscape on the one hand and as a factor of shaping cultural identity on the other. The very point and message of the paper is to emphasize that it was an advantage, if administrative regions, i.e. a subtype of functional regions, would coincide with cultural regions, i.e. a subtype of structural regions. It offers several explanations for why this coincidence was favourable, hints at successful historical examples and recent attempts to achieve such a coincidence