The US-Russia Relations after the 'Reset': Pragmatism or a New Confrontation?
The US-Russia relations are entering a new political season in a shape which is far from being perfect. The “reset” is over, and throughout the years 2011 and especially 2012 the relations have worsened again. Political leadership of both countries is irritated and disappointed with each other. Unlike the last four years, neither Russia nor the US will invest much political capital in their relations improvement, and their relative priority will decrease in both countries’ foreign policies. The share of contradictions in the relations surpasses that of positive cooperation again. Yet, the paper argues, a new worsening of the US-Russia relations or their new stagnation over the next years is in neither side’s interests. The US and Russia still do have an important positive agenda to work on, which is crucial for both sides’ vital national interests. It includes, above all, Afghanistan and the Asia Pacific. The major impediment of progress on both dimensions, the author claims, will be in the near- and middle term future a lack of political will on both sides to move the relations forward.
View from Russia
Abstract The Soviet leadership had no idea of the potential repercussions when it took its momentous decision to construct the Krasnoyarsk radar in violation of the Anti‐Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. In this article, the internal Soviet politics behind the Krasnoyarsk installation are discussed for the first time. The economic rationale operated in favor of construction at Krasnoyarsk. In addition, a radar deployed in the area would have provided more comprehensive coverage of the northeast direction. Taken together, all this created a strong temptation to circumvent the ban imposed by the ABM Treaty. The Soviets were forced to react when they saw that the Krasnoyarsk case provided the United States with the opportunity for a perfectly legal withdrawal from the treaty.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.