Power, Governance, and Ideas in Chile’s Free Trade Agreement Policy

Why is Chile following such a proactive FTA policy and at the same time promoting the benefits of these type of agreements to other Latin American countries? There is a pre-dominance of economic explanations to analyze why countries pursue an active FTA policy. Yet within an FTA policy, understood as an essential component of a country’s foreign policy, strategic and ideational goals are also important. Without downgrading economic explanations, I argue in this article that Chile’s proactive FTA policy can also be understood using variables from “traditional” international relations such as power, governance, and ideas. A framework based on such political-economic strategic issues and value-based ideas provides a better understanding of the country’s motivations in implementing such a proactive FTA policy.FTAs, status, soft balancing, economic dependence, governance, ideas, Chile

Britain’s supersized cabinets are too expensive.

As the search for massive UK public expenditure cuts swings into intensive mode, Joachim Wehner finds a strong link in comparative work between the number of department heads sitting around a country’s cabinet table and the proportion of GDP absorbed in public spending.

Visual orientation performances of desert ants (Cataglyphis bicolor) toward astromenotactic directions and horizon landmarks

Experimental data, on the visual orientation of desert ants toward astromenotactic courses and horizon landmarks involving the cooperation of different direction finding systems, are given. Attempts were made to: (1) determine if the ants choose a compromise direction between astromenotactic angles and the direction toward horizon landmarks when both angles compete with each other or whether they decide alternatively; (2) analyze adaptations of the visual system to the special demands of direction finding by astromenotactic orientation or pattern recognition; and (3) determine parameters of visual learning behavior. Results show separate orientation mechanisms are responsible for the orientation of the ant toward astromenotactic angles and horizon landmarks. If both systems compete with each other, the ants switch over from one system to the other and do not perform a compromise direction

From Rivalry to Mutual Trust: The Othering Process between Bolivia and Chile

Bolivia and Chile live in a culture of rivalry as a consequence of the Nitrate War (1879-1883). In each country’s case, the construction of the other as a threat, a rival and/or inferior has shaped the discursive articulation of the bilateral relationship. Whereas the culture of rivalry is more evident in Bolivia because of its aspiration to alter the border, Chile’s statusquo position, which stresses that there are no pending issues with Bolivia, as well as its construction of itself as superior, also represents rivalrous behavior. The perception of Chile as a threat and rival became especially evident in Bolivia during these two countries’ bilateral negotiations to export gas to and through Chile (gas crisis from 2001-05). However, since Evo Morales and Michelle Bachelet took office in Bolivia (2006-present) and in Chile (2006-10), respectively, they have sought to change this culture of rivalry to one of friendship by constructing discursive articulations of self and other based on the principle of building mutual trust. Such a change in the form of othering is only possible to understand within the context of a crisis of meanings. The new approach of othering the counterpart as a friend has filled the void of meaning left by the crisis of discursive articulations of othering the counterpart as a rival, a threat and/or inferior.discourse, othering, identity, crisis, change, Bolivia, Chile

Dependence of a quantum mechanical system on its own initial state and the initial state of the environment it interacts with

We present a unifying framework to the understanding of when and how quantum mechanical systems become independent of their initial conditions and adapt macroscopic properties (like temperature) of the environment.By viewing this problem from an quantum information theory perspective, we are able to simplify it in a very natural and easy way. We first show that for any interaction between the system and the environment, and almost all initial states of the system, the question of how long the system retains memory of its initial conditions can be answered by studying the temporal evolution of just one special initial state. This special state thereby depends only on our knowledge of macroscopic parameters of the system. We provide a simple entropic inequality for this state that can be used to determine whether mosts states of the system have, or have not become independent of their initial conditions after time $t$. We discuss applications of our entropic criterion to thermalization times in systems with an effective light-cone and to quantum memories suffering depolarizing noise. We make a similar statement for almost all initial states of the environment, and finally provide a sufficient condition for which a system never thermalizes, but remains close to its initial state for all times.Comment: 9+4 pages, revtex. v2: minor changes in notation; v4: greatly rewritten, new title, new applications of main results, to appear in PR

Composable Security in the Bounded-Quantum-Storage Model

We present a simplified framework for proving sequential composability in the quantum setting. In particular, we give a new, simulation-based, definition for security in the bounded-quantum-storage model, and show that this definition allows for sequential composition of protocols. Damgard et al. (FOCS '05, CRYPTO '07) showed how to securely implement bit commitment and oblivious transfer in the bounded-quantum-storage model, where the adversary is only allowed to store a limited number of qubits. However, their security definitions did only apply to the standalone setting, and it was not clear if their protocols could be composed. Indeed, we first give a simple attack that shows that these protocols are not composable without a small refinement of the model. Finally, we prove the security of their randomized oblivious transfer protocol in our refined model. Secure implementations of oblivious transfer and bit commitment then follow easily by a (classical) reduction to randomized oblivious transfer.Comment: 21 page

More non-locality with less entanglement

We provide an explicit example of a Bell inequality with 3 settings and 2 outcomes per site for which the largest violation is not obtained by the maximally entangled state, even if its dimension is allowed to be arbitrarily large. This complements recent results by Junge and Palazuelos (arXiv:1007.3042) who show, employing tools from operator space theory, that such inequalities do exist. Our elementary example provides arguably the simplest setting in which it can be demonstrated that even an infinite supply of EPR pairs is not the strongest possible nonlocal resource.Comment: 9 pages; Added reference to arXiv:1012.151