51 research outputs found
Rethinking “democratic backsliding” in Central and Eastern Europe – looking beyond Hungary and Poland
This essay introduces contributions to a special issue of East European Politics on “Rethinking democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe”, which seeks to expand the study of democratic regression in CEE beyond the paradigmatic cases of Hungary and Poland. Reviewing these contributions, we identify several directions for research: 1) the need to critique “democratic backsliding”, not simply as a label, but also as an assumed regional trend; 2) a need to better integrate the role of illiberal socio-economic structures such as oligarchical structures or corrupt networks; and 3) a need to (re-)examine the trade-offs between democratic stability and democratic quality. We also note how insights developed researching post-communist regions such as Western Balkans or the post-Soviet space could usefully inform work on CEE backsliding. We conclude by calling for the study of CEE democracy to become more genuinely interdisciplinary, moving beyond some narrowly institutionalist comparative political science assumptions
Identities of the kauffman monoid K4 and of the Jones Monoid J4
Kauffman monoids Kn and Jones monoids Jn, n=2,3,…, are two families of monoids relevant in knot theory. We prove a somewhat counterintuitive result that the Kauffman monoids K3 and K4 satisfy exactly the same identities. This leads to a polynomial time algorithm to check whether a given identity holds in K4. As a byproduct, we also find a polynomial time algorithm for checking identities in the Jones monoid J4. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.M. V. Volkov—Supported by Ural Mathematical Center under agreement No. 075-02-2020-1537/1 with the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation
On the Joint Security of Encryption and Signature, Revisited
Abstract. We revisit the topic of joint security for combined public key schemes, wherein a single keypair is used for both encryption and signature primitives in a secure manner. While breaking the principle of key separation, such schemes have attractive properties and are sometimes used in practice. We give a general construction for a combined public key scheme having joint security that uses IBE as a component and that works in the standard model. We provide a more efficient direct construction, also in the standard model. We then consider the problem of how to build signcryption schemes from jointly secure combined public key schemes. We provide a construction that uses any such scheme to produce a triple of schemes – signature, encryption, and signcryption – that are jointly secure in an appropriate and strong security model.
Interaction of Temperature and Light in the Development of Freezing Tolerance in Plants
Abstract Freezing tolerance is the result of a wide range
of physical and biochemical processes, such as the induction
of antifreeze proteins, changes in membrane composition,
the accumulation of osmoprotectants, and changes
in the redox status, which allow plants to function at low
temperatures. Even in frost-tolerant species, a certain period
of growth at low but nonfreezing temperatures, known
as frost or cold hardening, is required for the development
of a high level of frost hardiness. It has long been known
that frost hardening at low temperature under low light
intensity is much less effective than under normal light
conditions; it has also been shown that elevated light
intensity at normal temperatures may partly replace the
cold-hardening period. Earlier results indicated that cold
acclimation reflects a response to a chloroplastic redox
signal while the effects of excitation pressure extend
beyond photosynthetic acclimation, influencing plant
morphology and the expression of certain nuclear genes
involved in cold acclimation. Recent results have shown
that not only are parameters closely linked to the photosynthetic
electron transport processes affected by light
during hardening at low temperature, but light may also
have an influence on the expression level of several other
cold-related genes; several cold-acclimation processes can
function efficiently only in the presence of light. The
present review provides an overview of mechanisms that
may explain how light improves the freezing tolerance of
plants during the cold-hardening period
Conserved Molecular Underpinnings and Characterization of a Role for Caveolin-1 in the Tumor Microenvironment of Mature T-Cell Lymphomas
Neoplasms of extra-thymic T-cell origin represent a rare and difficult population characterized by poor clinical outcome, aggressive presentation, and poorly defined molecular characteristics. Much work has been done to gain greater insights into distinguishing features among malignant subtypes, but there also exists a need to identify unifying characteristics to assist in rapid diagnosis and subsequent potential treatment. Herein, we investigated gene expression data of five different mature T-cell lymphoma subtypes (n = 187) and found 21 genes to be up- and down-regulated across all malignancies in comparison to healthy CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell controls (n = 52). From these results, we sought to characterize a role for caveolin-1 (CAV1), a gene with previous description in the progression of both solid and hematological tumors. Caveolin-1 was upregulated, albeit with a heterogeneous nature, across all mature T-cell lymphoma subtypes, a finding confirmed using immunohistochemical staining on an independent sampling of mature T-cell lymphoma biopsies (n = 65 cases). Further, stratifying malignant samples in accordance with high and low CAV1 expression revealed that higher expression of CAV1 in mature T-cell lymphomas is analogous with an enhanced inflammatory and invasive gene expression profile. Taken together, these results demonstrate a role for CAV1 in the tumor microenvironment of mature T-cell malignancies and point toward potential prognostic implications
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