The Present and the Past of American Liberalism In Light of Slavery and Racial Injustice

Book review: Gajić S. 2020. From Slave to Citizen: The Struggle of African Americans for the Recognition of Humanity. Belgrade, CATENA MUNDI. 294 p. (In Serbian) [Гаjић С. Од роба до грађанина. Борба афроамериканаца за признање човечности

Accelerated expansion of NATO into the Balkans as a consequence of Euro-Atlantic Discord

The Balkans in general and post-Yugoslav countries in particular have been under significant geopolitical pressure of the political West since the end of the bipolar global order. From the beginning of the Yugoslav Civil War in 1991, followed by Western recognition of secessionist republics in 1992 and NATO attacks on Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1994-1995 and on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999, the US, NATO and EU have been actively involved in the Balkan crisis. It was in concordance with the logic of unipolarity, or the New World Order, proclaimed by George W.H. Bush, in which there is “no substitute for American leadership”.The year of 2008 marked the start of profound changes. The changes we are witnessing today are of the magnitude described by Paul Kennedy’s classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia crossed Russia’s red lines and exposed the latter’s ambitions to regain the superpower status; China symbolically showed the same ambition with the Olympics in Beijing; the crash of the US real-estate market triggered the global economic crisis; and the NATO-sponsored unilateral declaration of secession by Kosovo Albanians set a precedent and introduced uncertainty in international law and the entire system of United Nations. By the beginning of 2020, many problems had accumulated in the EU – against the background of the ongoing migration crisis, right-wing and nationalist movements became more active, and differences between members increased. Long before COVID-19, Brexit became a serious stress test for the economy and social structure of the European Union. Dramatic changes took place on the other side of the Atlantic too, resulting in the shocking victory of staunch anti-globalist Donald Trump. The rules established during the 1991-2008 unipolarity have thus been challenged. Subsequently, post-Cold War ideological consensus in the West has also been challenged even further by the growth of non-systemic political movements – many of them directed not only against the EU expansion, but also against the EU itself.The significance of all these events for the Balkans is somewhat surprising and paradoxical, as the mainstream forces that have been weakened in the West forcefully push for a stronger Atlantic integration of the remaining Balkan countries. At the height of the pandemic, on 27 March 2020 Northern Macedonia became the 30th member of the Alliance, having previously undergone a humiliating procedure of changing its own name for this purpose. Three years earlier, Montenegro was admitted to NATO, but its population did not have the opportunity to vote on this in a referendum. The negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina on ‘normalisation of relations’, continued pressures on the prerogatives of Republic Srpska, Croatian initiative for a new Intermarium and many other similar efforts are stages in the process of NATOisation of former Yugoslavia. Based on the analysis of a large body of narrative sources and recent literature, the article presents the main trends and possible prospects for developments in the Balkans, depending on the outcome of the ongoing ideological and political struggle within the West

AI MENTORING AS A FORM AKMEOLOGICHESKOJ ORIENTED PROFESSIONAL INTERACTION

Optimization of professional relationships in the "mentor- apprentice" promotes the formation of a professional orientation akmeologicheskoj both subjects interaction. On the one hand , mentoring is one of the oldest and most effective ways to acquire knowledge and skills of young employees of the company in the process of adapting to a new team . On the other - allows teacher to identify their professional and personal opportunities and consciously decide to choose the optimum time of interaction with the students, based on their individual characteristics, as well as improve their own skills.Оптимизация профессиональных взаимоотношений в системе «наставник – ученик» способствует формированию акмеологической профессиональной направленности у обоих субъектов взаимодействия. Наставничество является одним из самых старых и эффективных способов приобретения знаний и навыков молодыми сотрудниками предприятия в процессе их адаптации в новом коллективе; позволяет наставнику выявить свои профессионально-личностные возможности и осознанно определиться в выборе оптимального стажа взаимодействия с учениками, с учетом их индивидуальных особенностей, а также повысить уровень собственного мастерства

Underestimated risks of recurrent long-range ash dispersal from northern Pacific Arc volcanoes

Widespread ash dispersal poses a significant natural hazard to society, particularly in relation to disruption to aviation. Assessing the extent of the threat of far-travelled ash clouds on flight paths is substantially hindered by an incomplete volcanic history and an underestimation of the potential reach of distant eruptive centres. The risk of extensive ash clouds to aviation is thus poorly quantified. New evidence is presented of explosive Late Pleistocene eruptions in the Pacific Arc, currently undocumented in the proximal geological record, which dispersed ash up to 8000?km from source. Twelve microscopic ash deposits or cryptotephra, invisible to the naked eye, discovered within Greenland ice-cores, and ranging in age between 11.1 and 83.7 ka b2k, are compositionally matched to northern Pacific Arc sources including Japan, Kamchatka, Cascades and Alaska. Only two cryptotephra deposits are correlated to known high-magnitude eruptions (Towada-H, Japan, ca 15 ka BP and Mount St Helens Set M, ca 28 ka BP). For the remaining 10 deposits, there is no evidence of age- and compositionally-equivalent eruptive events in regional volcanic stratigraphies. This highlights the inherent problem of under-reporting eruptions and the dangers of underestimating the long-term risk of widespread ash dispersal for trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic flight route

Studying the expression of productivity and immunity genes of chickens under the influence of feed glyphosate using the RNA-seq method

The aim of the study was to study the effect of different concentrations of glyphosate on meat productivity and differential expression of genes for immunity and broiler productivity. Broilers were divided into groups: Control I, who received a diet without the introduction of glyphosate, Experimental II, who received a diet with the addition of glyphosate at a dose of 10 mg/kg of feed (0.5 MPC for food); Experimental III, who received a diet with the addition of glyphosate at a dose of 20 mg/kg of feed (1 MPC); Experimental IV, who received a diet with the addition of glyphosate at a dose of 100 mg/kg of feed (5 MPC). Transcriptome analysis was performed by RNA-seq on the Illumina Miseq platform, using the TruSeq Stranded mRNA kit (Illumina, USA). In the 22-28-day period of broiler rearing, a decrease in live weight gain (83 g less) was observed in Experimental group III compared to Control I (P≤0.05). It has been shown that glyphosate at the level of 1 and 5 MPC for food causes activation (P≤0.05) of the proinflammatory response genes (IL15, IL1B, IL34, IL22) and apoptosis (Casp1, Casp2, Casp6, Casp7, Casp8, Casp9) up to 31.1 times, which probably leads to the redistribution of nutrients in in the body towards the immune system, reducing the functions of absorption in the intestine. In parallel, there is an inhibition (P≤0.05) of the expression of genes that have a direct effect on growth and development, which ultimately leads to a decrease in poultry meat productivity. Exposure to glyphosate is an important but unaccounted-for risk factor for reducing meat productivity in birds, acting through a change in gene expression

Development of Intelligent Interface to Input and Edit Meteorological Data

The paper presents the method of development of user interface for the hydrometeorological data acquisition system. This research includes some basic principles of creating hydrometeorological messages according to code KN-01 SYNOP. This code allows creating messages as a set of code groups. Every group keeps values of definite meteorological properties. The result of studies was implemented in creating of the user interface for the software that allows working with hydrometeorological data. The KN-01 code defines the class hierarchy of this software. The studies have shown that this method of software development is especially effective for visualization of the meteorological telegrams on devices with small display

Atomistic simulations of self-trapped exciton formation in silicon nanostructures: The transition from quantum dots to nanowires

Using an approximate time-dependent density functional theory method, we calculate the absorption and luminescence spectra for hydrogen passivated silicon nanoscale structures with large aspect ratio. The effect of electron confinement in axial and radial directions is systematically investigated. Excited state relaxation leads to significant Stokes shifts for short nanorods with lengths less than 2 nm, but has little effect on the luminescence intensity. The formation of self-trapped excitons is likewise observed for short nanostructures only; longer wires exhibit fully delocalized excitons with neglible geometrical distortion at the excited state minimum.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Unadapted and adapted to starvation Acholeplasma laidlawii cells induce different responses of Oryza sativa, as determined by proteome analysis

For the first time, we studied the phytopathogenicity toward Oryza sativa L. of unadapted and adapted to unfavorable environment (starvation) cells of Acholeplasma laidlawii PG8 - ubiquitous mycoplasma found in the soil, waste waters, tissues of the highest eukaryotes and being the basic contaminant of cell cultures and a causative agent of phytomycoplasmoses. The features of morphology, ultrastructural organization and proteomes of unadapted and adapted cells of the mycoplasma and infected plants were presented. Using 2D-DIGE and MS, 43 proteins of O. sativa L. that were differentially expressed in the leaves of plants cultivated in media with A. laidlawii PG8 were identified. The qualitative and quantitative responses of the plant proteome toward adapted and unadapted mycoplasma cells differed. That may be explained by differences in the virulence of the corresponding bacterial cells. Using 2D-DIGE and MS, 82 proteins that were differentially expressed in adapted and unadapted mycoplasma cells were detected. In adapted cells of the mycoplasma, in comparison with unadapted ones, a significant increase in the expression of PNPase - a global regulator of virulence in phytopathogenic bacteria occurred; there was also decreased expression of 40 proteins including 14 involved in bacterial virulence and the expression of 31 proteins including 5 involved in virulence was not detected. We propose that differences in the phytopathogenicity of adapted and unadapted A. laidlawii PG8 cells may be related to features of their proteomes and membrane vesicles. © 2011 Elsevier B.V