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Since the demise of socialism, countries of Central and Eastern Europe have experienced intense negotiations over access and property. This article uses four case studies on struggles over forest in Albania and Romania to examine how these negotiations intersect with processes constituting authority. The cases demonstrate significant variations in the configurations of property and authority regarding forest, but they also reflect the influence of national politics in the two countries. In Albania, custom not only competes with the state as an institution sanctioning rights to forest but actually emerges as an alternative politico-legal institution contesting state authority more broadly. In Romania, local struggles over forests play out the contestations between personalized and law-based exercises of state authority at the national level. These insights suggest that due to their radical nature and simultaneous occurrence, negotiations over property and authority have challenged the position of post-socialist states as primary politico-legal institutions and have generated different exercises of state authority.

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Dynamic images, a sequence of static images displayed in rapid succession and perceived as a continuous motion by the human eye, are widely used in medicine. One of the primary objectives of telemedicine is the transmission of such images to a distant location to manage clinical problems remotely. A broad variety of methods is available to acquire, store, transmit, and display these images. However, the context of the clinical problem determines which of these methods can be deployed in a telemedicine solution. This paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the different technologies and presents an example of a teleconferencing system for interventional cardiology. This system acquires cardiac angiography and intravascular ultrasound images and transmits them over an existing Internet connection to a distant location. It is specifically optimized for clinical conferencing, where time is limited for each case presentation during the conference, compared to the relatively long time available for the conference preparation. The system takes advantage of this characteristic by transmitting the images well in advance of the clinical conference and displaying them synchronously in both locations during the conference. This allows for the preservation of the original image quality.