From crisis to crisis: the high cost of the post-soviet institutional lock-in

In this contribution, we shall try to characterise the Russian growth model the way it appears to have emerged in the 2000s, which we believe useful to explain the country's macroeconomic successes at an earlier stage as well as the severe problems it has to face now. We shall begin by presenting the macroeconomic indicators of the Russian Federation between the 1998 crash and up to the recent 2008 crisis, showing their very significant improvements in practically every area (part 1). However, the qualitative aspects of the economic growth suggest asking whether one the main reasons of Russia's economic success (high commodity prices) did not make it seriously sick with the “Dutch disease” (part 2). We shall further show that the impressive growth before the 2008 crisis was followed by a yet more impressive shock hitting the economy to the extent that very few analysts had imagined (part 3). We believe that the propagation of the crisis was amplified by the specific features of the capitalist system that emerged in Russia in the 2000s, particularly its “international regime” (part 4). We conclude our contribution by saying that the Russian model in the 2000 appeared to be intrinsically unstable before suggesting possible scenarios of finding paths to a sustainable growth model.Russia - diversity of Capitalism - exportism - dutch disease - resource curse - post-soviet transformation

Anatomical success rate of pars plana vitrectomy for treatment of complex rhegmatogenous retinal detachment

BACKGROUND: Pars plana vitrectomy (PPV) is preferred surgical procedure for the management of complex rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the anatomical results of primary PPV for the treatment of primary complex RRD and to determine the influence of lens status, tamponading agent, preoperative proliferative vitreoretinopathy (PVR) and axial length (AL) of the eye upon the anatomical outcome. METHODS: A retrospective consecutive chart analysis was performed on 117 eyes from 117 patients with complex RRD managed with PPV. Fifty-nine eyes were phakic and 58 pseudophakic eyes. All patients had a minimum follow-up period of 12 months. Eyes were classified into groups using independent variables (first classification based upon lens status and tamponade used, second classification based upon lens and PVR status and third classification based upon AL of the eye). The groups were compared for anatomical outcomes (dependent variables) using nonparametric- or, in case of normally distributed data, parametric- statistical tests. RESULTS: Retinal reattachment rate in phakic eyes was 94.9% compared to 93.1% in pseudophakic, with no statistically significant difference between the two. The overall retinal reattachment rate with single surgery was 94.0%. Final reattachment rate was 97.4%. In case of established PVR >/= C1, the reattachment rate was not statistically different (92.6%) from eyes with no PVR (91.1%) irrespective of lens status. A statistically significant difference was found between redetachment rates only between phakic eyes with gas tamponade compared to silicon oil (SO) (p = 0.001). Reattachment rate proved to be similar in both AL groups ( 24 mm). CONCLUSIONS: High anatomical success rate of primary vitrectomy for complex RRD with either gas or SO tamponade was achieved in phakic as well as pseudophakic eyes irrespective of AL of the eye

Evaluating degrees of tenant isolation in multitenancy patterns : a case study of cloud-hosted Version Control System (VCS)

One of the key concerns of implementing multitenancy (i.e., serving multiple tenants with a single instance of an application) on the cloud is how to enable the required degree of isolation between tenants, so that the required performance of one tenant does not affect other tenants. There is little research which provides empirical evidence on the required degree of isolation between tenants under different cloud deployment conditions. This paper applies COMITRE (COmponent-based approach to Multitenancy Isolation Through request RE-routing) to empirically evaluate the degree of isolation between tenants enabled by multitenancy patterns for cloud-hosted Version Control System (VCS). We implemented three multitenancy patterns (i.e., shared component, tenant-isolated component, and dedicated component) by developing a multitenant component using the FileSystem SCM plugin integrated within Hudson. The study revealed that dedicated component provides the highest degree of isolation between tenants (compared to shared component and tenant-isolated component) in terms of error% (i.e., the percentage of errors with unacceptably slow response times) and throughput. System load of tenants showed no variability, and hence did not influence the degree of tenant isolation for all the three multitenancy patterns. We also provide some recommendations to guide an architect in implementing multitenancy isolation on similar VCS tools like Subversion and CVS