Is Russia Still a BRIC?
Can Russia break its dependence on oil and diversify its economy (its so-called resource curse)? Aleksandr Gevorkyan argues that it has the potential and may be well on the way to doing so—that is, beating the curse and becoming a full-fledged global player again.
Modelling Russian outward FDI
Among emerging economies, the Russian Federation is the second largest outward investor, surpassed only by Hong Kong (China) but ahead of Brazil, China and India. This article analyses the main patterns of Russian outward foreign direct investment (OFDI), including its dynamics and geographical destinations. It also highlights the changing strategies of outward investing Russian firms: in the early 1990s, they were mostly privately-owned transnational corporations (TNCs), seeking 'safety nests' abroad to protect themselves from domestic uncertainty; these days, state-owned or -influenced TNCs dominate Russian capital exports, motivated by a desire to control the value chain of their products. There are, however, characteristics common to both periods, such as the predominance of natural resource-based firms among the largest Russian TNCs. Using those characteristics as a basis, the paper attempts to model formally Russian outward FDI. It tests the extent to which the mainstream theory (ownership and locational advantages) is applicable to the Russian context, as well as the role played by specific factors such as state ownership. Home-country factors seem to play a particularly important role in shaping Russian outward FDI. As for the motivations of FDI, in the CIS and developing countries, Russian TNCs seem to aim at controlling upstream natural resources, while in high-income countries they aim at controlling downstream markets.
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.