Hasil untuk "History of Eastern Europe"

Richard de Grijs

In the nineteenth century, the Dutch established time signals in their Atlantic colonies to synchronise maritime navigation with European standards. In Paramaribo (Suriname), a sophisticated sequence of apparatus -- including time balls, noon guns, discs and flags -- operated from 1851 until World War I. Naval officers aboard guard ships used sextants equipped with artificial horizons to determine local noon, thus integrating the colony into the global Greenwich-based cartographic system. This infrastructure was not merely technical; it became a civic ritual, with the daily noon gun structuring urban life and becoming a point of political negotiation between naval commanders and the colonial governor. In contrast, the Dutch Caribbean islands employed simpler, pragmatic systems. Curaçao used a daily time flag, a cost-effective solution suited to its climate and harbour scale, while smaller islands like Aruba and St. Eustatius relied on occasional noon guns. This diversity reflected a decentralised colonial administration that adapted technologies to local conditions and budgets. The history of these time signals reveals a process of hybrid adaptation, not simply replication of European models. They were shaped by environmental challenges, fiscal constraints and local politics, functioning simultaneously as navigational aids and civic landmarks. Their eventual decline, owing to budgetary pressures and new technologies like wireless telegraphy, underscores the fragile and negotiated nature of colonial scientific infrastructures.

Banafsheh Karimian, Alexis Guichemerre, Soufiane Belharbi et al.

Breast cancer remains a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Longitudinal mammography risk prediction models improve multi-year breast cancer risk prediction based on prior screening exams. However, in real-world clinical practice, longitudinal histories are often incomplete, irregular, or unavailable due to missed screenings, first-time examinations, heterogeneous acquisition schedules, or archival constraints. The absence of prior exams degrades the performance of longitudinal risk models and limits their practical applicability. While substantial longitudinal history is available during training, prior exams are commonly absent at test time. In this paper, we address missing history at inference time and propose a longitudinal risk prediction method that uses mammography history as privileged information during training and distills its prognostic value into a student model that only requires the current exam at inference time. The key idea is a privileged multi-teacher distillation scheme with horizon-specific teachers: each teacher is trained on the full longitudinal history to specialize in one prediction horizon, while the student receives only a reconstructed history derived from the current exam. This allows the student to inherit horizon-dependent longitudinal risk cues without requiring prior screening exams at deployment. Our new Privileged History Distillation (PHD) method is validated on a large longitudinal mammography dataset with multi-year cancer outcomes, CSAW-CC, comparing full-history and no-history baselines to their distilled counterparts. Using time-dependent AUC across horizons, our privileged history distillation method markedly improves the performance of long-horizon prediction over no-history models and is comparable to that of full-history models, while using only the current exam at inference time.

Yuan Huang

C. Bosco, U. Minora, D. de Rigo et al.

This paper presents a mixed-methodology to forecast illegal border crossings in Europe across five key migratory routes, with a one-year time horizon. The methodology integrates machine learning techniques with qualitative insights from migration experts. This approach aims at improving the predictive capacity of data-driven models through the inclusion of a human-assessed covariate, an innovation that addresses challenges posed by sudden shifts in migration patterns and limitations in traditional datasets. The proposed methodology responds directly to the forecasting needs outlined in the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, supporting the Asylum and Migration Management Regulation (AMMR). It is designed to provide policy-relevant forecasts that inform strategic decisions, early warning systems, and solidarity mechanisms among EU Member States. By joining data-driven modeling with expert judgment, this work aligns with existing academic recommendations and introduces a novel operational tool tailored for EU migration governance. The methodology is tested and validated with known data to demonstrate its applicability and reliability in migration-related policy context.

Yu Shi, Hao Li, Bram Adams et al.

Automated program repair (APR) has recently shifted toward large language models and agent-based systems, yet most systems rely on local snapshot context, overlooking repository history. Prior work shows that repository history helps repair single-line bugs, since the last commit touching the buggy line is often the bug-introducing one. In this paper, we investigate whether repository history can also improve agentic APR systems at scale, especially for complex multi-hunk bugs. We present HAFixAgent, a History-Aware Bug-Fixing Agent that injects blame-derived repository heuristics into its repair loop. A preliminary study on 854 Defects4J (Java) and 501 BugsInPy (Python) bugs motivates our design, showing that bug-relevant history is widely available across both benchmarks. Using the same LLM (DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp) for all experiments, including replicated baselines, we show: (1) Effectiveness: HAFixAgent outperforms RepairAgent (+56.6\%) and BIRCH-feedback (+47.1\%) on Defects4J. Historical context further improves repair by +4.4\% on Defects4J and +38.6\% on BugsInPy, especially on single-file multi-hunk (SFMH) bugs. (2) Robustness: under noisy fault localization (+1/+3/+5 line shifts), history provides increasing resilience, maintaining 40 to 56\% success on SFMH bugs where the non-history baseline collapses to 0\%. (3) Efficiency: history does not significantly increase agent steps or token costs on either benchmark.

Aleksiun Natalia

The text contains answers to 5 questions concerning the use of Oral History in Holocaust research in Eastern Europe and the author’s opinions and experiences with the use of this method.

Tero Alstola, Paola Corò, Rocio Da Riva et al.

The aim of this article is to discuss several groups of sources which are of special interest regarding the question of Mesopotamian identities after 539 bce, towards the end of the use of cuneiform writing. In this late period, several languages and scripts were in use in Mesopotamia; therefore, groups of Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek, and Sumerian texts are discussed. The scripts used are Aramaic letters, cuneiform, and the Greek alphabet. A scholar who is interested in late Mesopotamian identities needs to take all these documents into account. This article aims at giving a brief overview on available textual material and where to find it. The topics of these texts vary from administrative documents to highly literary texts. The authors discuss Aramaic inscriptions, legal and administrative cuneiform texts, the astronomical diaries, the Seleucid Uruk scholarly texts, the late Babylonian priestly literature, Emesal cult-songs from the Hellenistic period, the Graeco-Babyloniaca (clay tablets containing cuneiform and Greek), and finally Greek inscriptions from Mesopotamia.

Vineet Gairola, Shubha Ranganathan

The state of Uttarakhand in India is referred to as dev bhūmi (Land of the Gods)  as it is home to several devī-devtās (local deities), sages, and ṛṣis whose presence renders the geography of this land a potent one. The soundscape of temples in Uttarakhand includes bells, chants, mantras, and ḍhol-damauñ, the latter referring to two rhythmic instruments which are used to facilitate divine possession. Kandara village is situated in Uttarakhand’s Rudraprayag district where there is a temple of a goddess named Rājrājeshwarī Devī who is said to be a form of goddess Durgā. During the times of Navrātri, the nine forms of goddess Durgā are worshiped. It is also one of the times where various religious practices in conjunction with worship take place in the Garhwal Himalayan region. As a result, an older idol of the devī was replaced by a newer one during this time in the Rājrājeshwarī Devī temple of Kandara village. Like in the case of the Rājrājeshwarī Devī, through her naur (representative/medium), the Rājrājeshwarī Devī engages with her devotees and ‘remembers’ their problems and conflicts which she attempts to resolve if asked. Through these transactions, a strong intimate bond at the level of everyday living is formed with a deity. This photo essay aims to provide a closer peek into the realm of lived practices and traditions from the Central Himalayas and to document such experiences which often lie in the zone of orality. The worship of the Rājrājeshwarī Devī holds not only a cathartic value but a protective function which she fulfills by ensuring good health and prosperity for the entire village.

Sylvia Wenmackers

Problems with uniform probabilities on an infinite support show up in contemporary cosmology. This paper focuses on the context of inflation theory, where it complicates the assignment of a probability measure over pocket universes. The measure problem in cosmology, whereby it seems impossible to pick out a uniquely well-motivated measure, is associated with a paradox that occurs in standard probability theory and crucially involves uniformity on an infinite sample space. This problem has been discussed by physicists, albeit without reference to earlier work on this topic. The aim of this article is both to introduce philosophers of probability to these recent discussions in cosmology and to familiarize physicists and philosophers working on cosmology with relevant foundational work by Kolmogorov, de Finetti, Jaynes, and other probabilists. As such, the main goal is not to solve the measure problem, but to clarify the exact origin of some of the current obstacles. The analysis of the assumptions going into the paradox indicates that there exist multiple ways of dealing consistently with uniform probabilities on infinite sample spaces. Taking a pluralist stance towards the mathematical methods used in cosmology shows there is some room for progress with assigning probabilities in cosmological theories.

Hillen Aiko

The killing of up to 40,000–50,000 Jews in Bogdanovka in the winter of 1941–1942 represented one of the largest murder operations carried out during the Holocaust outside of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps. The massacre was the result of a cooperation between the German "Sonderkommando Russland" with the support of the "volksdeutscher Selbstschutz" as well as the Romanian gendarmes and their Ukrainian auxiliary forces. This article examines this massacre in three different aspects. The first part reconstructs how Transnistria was administered on a bilateral level between Nazi Germany and fascist Romania, and became a place of mass extermination. The second part of the article deals with the reconstruction of the massacre in a micro-historical perspective by using chiefly eyewitness interviews of local residents. The last part of this work, which is based on an organizational sociological approach, examines the mobilization and willingness to kill of those ethnic Germans who were recruited by the Sonderkommando Russland.

Mykola Kravchenko

У статті здійснено огляд участі вихідців з українського добровольчого руху у політичних процесах в Україні та розвитку української культури у другій половині 2010-х – на початку 2020-х років. Досліджено як вплив на комплектування депутатського корпусу, так і участь у творенні позапарламентського політичного порядку денного, вплив на формування державних інституцій (зокрема, на створення Міністерства у справах ветеранів України); долучення добровольців до художнього й музичного мистецтва, літературної діяльності (в тому числі й творення окремого літературного явища – добровольчої літератури), участь в організації нових осередків культурного життя країни (клубів, хабів тощо). З’ясовано характер та обсяги добровольчого впливу на українську політику і культуру досліджуваного часового проміжку та, виходячи з характеру й обсягів цього впливу, визначено роль українських добробатів у вітчизняній історії зазначеного періоду. Методологія дослідження передбачає застосування принципів історизму, цілісності вивчення історичних джерел та об’єктивності, використання методів опису, аналізу і синтезу, класифікації та систематизації. Наукову новизну зумовлює відсутність наукових досліджень з цієї тематики, адже до сьогодні академічні дослідження добровольчого руху стосувалися тільки ролі добробатів у бойових діях на Сході України та характеру їх взаємодії з силовими структурами країни та державними інституціями. Перспектива подальших досліджень полягає в тому, що через визначення рівня впливу вихідців з українських добробатів на політику та культуру в Україні можна розкрити роль добровольців в національній історії відповідного періоду загалом. Огляд характеру та обсягів впливу, здійсненого українським добровольчим рухом на політичні процеси в Україні та формування національної культури, дає підстави говорити про їх різноманітність та багатовекторність, що робить цілком можливим порівняння впливу добровольців на новітню національну історію із впливом козацтва на формування модерної української нації.

Juozas Banionis

In raising the issue of Lithuania’s freedom the political diaspora of Lithuanians understood that seeking to maintain the relevance of this problem on the international plane it is important not only to further strengthen relations with other Balts of a similar fate but also to establish contacts with the emigrants of other Eastern European nations which live in dependence of the Soviet Union and by communicating with them to seek for concerted actions in the joint liberation activity. Developing relations between the Lithuanian diaspora and the Ukrainian one became one of the directions of such cooperation. The Diplomatic Service of the Republic of Lithuania followed the principle according to which close relations linking only the Baltic States were possible, excluding Belarus and Ukraine which were in the composition of the Soviet Union before World War II; this fact definitely confirmed the international recognition of the statehood of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. However, taking into consideration the emerging movement of the United States of Europe whose germs dated back to the period before World War II, and which promoted the idea of uniting the states of Eastern and Western Europe, including also Ukraine, the principles which were becoming predominant changed. Supporting the idea of unification, the Ukrainian side, at the beginning offered to apply this model in Eastern Europe, which, seeking to achieve liberation should strive for unity, come together and play an active part beginning with a smaller nucleus. The block formed on the basis of the region (the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea) was seen in which, apart from Ukraine, there should be Belarus (often referred to as Belorussia), Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and Poland – as an ally of the block. Therefore, approving of nonrecognition of Lithuania’s and other Baltic countries’ joining the USSR, it became important to support liberation of other nations under Soviet domination, including that of Ukrainians. Main factors of the Lithuanian diaspora – the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania or VLIK, the Lithuanian Freedom Committee (LLK), and later (from the 1960s) the Lithuanian World Community, in cooperation with the Lithuanian American Community – became engaged in a search for political relations with the Ukrainians who did not deny historical links and supported the idea of liberation. They expressed the expectations of their Motherland – Ukraine – in the West through the following organisations: the Ukrainian National Council (UNR), the Ukrainians World Congress, the Ukrainian American Congress. Raising the issue of independence of Vilnius and Lvov brough the positions of both the Lithuanian and Ukrainian diasporas closer together. Hence, it can be stated that since the end of the 1940s, Lithuanian political factors, in establishing contacts with the above-mentioned Ukrainian leaders in the West, spoke for promoting cooperation between themselves in the context of Eastern Europe. The course of the process itself was planned until full independence of Lithuania and Ukraine had been achieved, and after freedom for the nations had been regained, it was assured that cooperation would not be withheld and their historical friendship, which had become a tradition, would continue: cultural, political links would further be developed and strengthened and relations between both states would be fostered in the spirit of partnership that had been formed. It is very important that both Lithuania’s and Ukraine’s aspirations towards emancipation from the iron grip of Communism were professed while the diasporas of both nations conducted public anti-Soviet campaigns in the West. The Helsinki process that started in 1975 provided the movement of liberation of Eastern European nations, including Lithuanians and Ukrainians, with the new impetus. New forces that joined the movement did their utmost to strengthen relations between both nations and the dissidents who arrived in the West expanded their cooperation underlying the importance of a unified fight against the communist regime. At the same time the expectations and conviction of the Eastern European nations that Western democracy could be the best example of governance to that part of the old Continent were expressed.

Rui Wang, Jiahui Chen, Guo-Wei Wei

The importance of understanding SARS-CoV-2 evolution cannot be overemphasized. Recent studies confirm that natural selection is the dominating mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 evolution, which favors mutations that strengthen viral infectivity. We demonstrate that vaccine-breakthrough or antibody-resistant mutations provide a new mechanism of viral evolution. Specifically, vaccine-resistant mutation Y449S in the spike (S) protein receptor-bonding domain (RBD), which occurred in co-mutation [Y449S, N501Y], has reduced infectivity compared to the original SARS-CoV-2 but can disrupt existing antibodies that neutralize the virus. By tracing the evolutionary trajectories of vaccine-resistant mutations in over 1.9 million SARS-CoV-2 genomes, we reveal that the occurrence and frequency of vaccine-resistant mutations correlate strongly with the vaccination rates in Europe and America. We anticipate that as a complementary transmission pathway, vaccine-resistant mutations will become a dominating mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 evolution when most of the world's population is vaccinated. Our study sheds light on SARS-CoV-2 evolution and transmission and enables the design of the next-generation mutation-proof vaccines and antibody drugs.

Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Alexander Ly

The Jeffreys-Lindley paradox exposes a rift between Bayesian and frequentist hypothesis testing that strikes at the heart of statistical inference. Contrary to what most current literature suggests, the paradox was central to the Bayesian testing methodology developed by Sir Harold Jeffreys in the late 1930s. Jeffreys showed that the evidence against a point-null hypothesis $\mathcal{H}_0$ scales with $\sqrt{n}$ and repeatedly argued that it would therefore be mistaken to set a threshold for rejecting $\mathcal{H}_0$ at a constant multiple of the standard error. Here we summarize Jeffreys's early work on the paradox and clarify his reasons for including the $\sqrt{n}$ term. The prior distribution is seen to play a crucial role; by implicitly correcting for selection, small parameter values are identified as relatively surprising under $\mathcal{H}_1$. We highlight the general nature of the paradox by presenting both a fully frequentist and a fully Bayesian version. We also demonstrate that the paradox does not depend on assigning prior mass to a point hypothesis, as is commonly believed.

Georg Rehm, Katrin Marheinecke, Stefanie Hegele et al.

Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe's specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI, including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions, has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT landscape, describing funding programmes, activities, actions and challenges in the different countries with regard to LT, including the current state of play in industry and the LT market. We present a brief overview of the main LT-related activities on the EU level in the last ten years and develop strategic guidance with regard to four key dimensions.

Günther Of, Raphael Watschinger

We consider a fast, data-sparse directional method to realize matrix-vector products related to point evaluations of the Helmholtz kernel. The method is based on a hierarchical partitioning of the point sets and the matrix. The considered directional multi-level approximation of the Helmholtz kernel can be applied even on high-frequency levels efficiently. We provide a detailed analysis of the almost linear asymptotic complexity of the presented method. Our numerical experiments are in good agreement with the provided theory.

T. Parsons, N. Smelser

Yudzhel’ Oz’tyurk

The present article was initially based on the thought of evaluating Kefe’s pre-Ottoman period. The title shaped itself during the writing process. Kefe was not indeed an ordinary city, but a continental capital city. We have determined the title from this understanding. As Balard, Veinstein, Malowist, and my monograph were analyzed in the later stages of the writing process, the situation of Kefe between the pre-Ottoman and the Ottoman periods became evident. In accordance with these analyses, a change in the scope of the article was made and the idea of comparison was determined as the central idea. At this stage, the effort to revive the protected and lost elements of Caffa in different periods of sovereignty emerged all by itself. This tendency became a totally dominant conception after some period, and I felt free to compare Caffa of Genoese and the Ottoman period. In this sense, I have revaluated Michel Balard and Gilles Veinstein’s comprehensive essay on the subject of “continuity and change” that I had reviewed before, but I had not focused on. The present study at first examines fthe historical phases of Caffa from an administrative and legal point of view, and then analyzes the organization of the space and the demographic structure in the urban perspective. In the following stages, the data obtained about the economic, financial and commercial structure in the Genoese and Ottoman periods are analyzed comparatively.

Ivan Kalmar

ABSTRACT A common popular and scholarly opinion of Islamophobia in the so-called ‘Visegrád Four’ or ‘V4’ (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) sees it as caused by circumstances unique to Eastern Europe. Specifically to blame, it is alleged, is a distinctive local history of intolerance, especially antisemitism, and the fact that under socialism these countries were exempt from the post-war soul-searching that took place in Western Europe. Kalmar’s paper, instead, decentres Islamophobia in the V4 by considering it less as a limited regional phenomenon, and more in terms of how it is linked to Islamophobia in other European Union member states and the United States. As elsewhere, foremost among the conditions that encourage Islamophobia in the V4 is the alienation of certain publics on the periphery, which is an effect of global neoliberal policies. These have generated, along with Islamism and Islamophobia, a reinvented, essentializing discourse of difference between Eastern and Western Europe. In spite of that alleged difference, however, Islamophobic populism in the V4 is not just a regional threat to liberal democracy, but targets all of the European Union and the world.

B. Price, D. Kaim, Marcin Szwagrzyk et al.

Mountain forest areas are key for providing a wide range of ecosystem services and are hot spots for land use change processes, in particular, increase in forest cover at the expense of mountain pastures and meadows. Mountain forest systems in eastern and western Europe have likely similar future socio-economic situations but significantly different socio-economic history. Using a scenario-based land use modelling approach (Dyna-CLUE framework) we model three scenarios (trend, liberalisation and self-sufficiency) of future land use in the Polish Carpathians and the Swiss Alps, focussing on forest cover change. We find that forest cover increase can be expected to continue in European mountainous regions under all likely scenarios, limited only by relatively strict policy interventions. Biophysical factors, rather than socio-economic ones, are key for defining the suitability for, and therefore likely locations of future forest cover, but land use legacy plays a very important role in the spatial patterns of future forest cover, particularly in eastern Europe.