The Republic of Serbia is the closest partner (and strategic partner) of the Russian Federation among the countries of the Balkan Peninsula. The long-standing and multifaceted cooperation is based on cultural and religious proximity, as well as mutual understanding and respect regarding the implementation of foreign policy priorities and national interests understood according to the theoretical perspective – realism. Russia’s war with Ukraine has affected the bilateral relations of Russia and Serbia in the security field and in political, economic (including energy) and cultural issues. Through a comparative analysis, the study examines how Russian-Serbian cooperation has evolved after 2022 in comparison to its development between 1992 and 2022.
History of Central Europe, History of Balkan Peninsula
At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Hungarian state faced a significant dilemma: It had to assert its independence within the Habsburg Empire while navigating the challenges of modern ethnic and linguistic national movements in Hungary. Many members of the reform-era Hungarian aristocracy believed that modernization, urbanization, and the extension of rights would lead to the assimilation or, at least, to loyalty of non-Hungarian groups. They envisioned a multi-ethnic state where Hungarian would be the official language for political and administrative purposes, while acknowledging the existence of other languages within the realm. This concept of a ‘Hungarian political nation’ was later formalized in the 1867 Compromise. However, others warned that the rise of Hungarian nationalism could alienate non-Hungarian groups, particularly the Slavs, and competing nation-building processes might be a threat to the integrity of the multi-ethnic Hungarian state.
Intended to foster Slavic cooperation within the Habsburg Empire, the Prague Congress in June 1848 further intensified concerns. While initially seen as a potential ally against Austrian dominance, the Congress’s pronouncements on Slavic rights and autonomy were perceived as a threat to Hungarian statehood. Kossuth, in particular, reacted strongly to the Congress’s accusations of Hungarian oppression and its calls for Slavic independence.
The Prague Congress had a profound impact on Hungarian political thought. It solidified the perception of Slavic nationalism as a threat to the integrity of the Hungarian Kingdom. Rather than fostering cooperation, the Congress turned out to be a symbol of conflict and a point of contention in Hungarian-Slavic relations.
Archaeology, Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology
The article is an attempt to reconstruct the biography of Stanisław Strumph- Wojtkiewicz – a publicist, poet, journalist, translator – one of the most widely read writers of the Polish People’s Republic. Based on extensive archival materials, the author analyzes the life and work of Strumph-Wojtkiewicz, restoring the memory of a figure who is now almost completely forgotten, but who was once recognizable and appreciated both in the interwar period and during World War II, as well as in the post-war years.
John Drummond, Wayne Orchiston, Carolyn Brown
et al.
C/1910 A1 was one of the Great Comets of the twentieth century. Although it was widely observed from the Northern Hemisphere, it was first discovered by observers south of the Equator. The comet arrived just months before the widely anticipated apparition of Comet 1P/Halley and was significantly more spectacular. As a result, the two comets were confused, and many who, in later years, talked about how prominent Comet 1P/Halley was in 1910 were often remembering C/1910 A1. In this paper, we present the results of a detailed search through historical records and media publications in Aotearoa / New Zealand, to investigate how extensively C/1910 A1 was observed from New Zealand. We compare our results with observations reported for Comet 1P/Halley later in 1910, finding that surprisingly few observations of C/1910 A1 were made by New Zealand observers. We discuss cases where the comet was misidentified as being an early sighting of 1P/Halley and compare the observations made in New Zealand with international observations/records/accounts. We find that, although the Great January Comet of 1910 was observed from New Zealand, it was witnessed by few compared to other parts of the world, meaning that the apparition of C/1910 A1 was something of a missed opportunity for New Zealand astronomers.
Data spaces are evolving rapidly. In Europe, the concept of data spaces, which emphasises the importance of trust, sovereignty, and interoperability, is being implemented as a platform such as Catena-X. Meanwhile, Japan has been developing its approach to data sharing, in line with global trends but also to address unique domestic challenges, resulting a platform such as DATA-EX. Achieving interoperability between European and Japanese data spaces remains a critical challenge due to the differences created by these parallel advances. Although interoperability between data spaces has several aspects, compatibility of trust in the participating entities and the data exchanged is a significant aspect due to its influence on business. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of DATA-EX and Catena-X while focusing on aspect of trust, to explore the challenges and opportunities for achieving interoperability between Japanese and European data spaces. By examining common data exchange processes, key objects such as datasets, and specific evaluation criteria, the study identifies gaps, challenges, and proposes actionable solutions such as inter-exchangeable topology. Through this analysis, the paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on global data interoperability.
Alexandra Klymenko, Stephen Meisenbacher, Patrick Gage Kelley
et al.
The proliferation of AI has sparked privacy concerns related to training data, model interfaces, downstream applications, and more. We interviewed 25 AI developers based in Europe to understand which privacy threats they believe pose the greatest risk to users, developers, and businesses and what protective strategies, if any, would help to mitigate them. We find that there is little consensus among AI developers on the relative ranking of privacy risks. These differences stem from salient reasoning patterns that often relate to human rather than purely technical factors. Furthermore, while AI developers are aware of proposed mitigation strategies for addressing these risks, they reported minimal real-world adoption. Our findings highlight both gaps and opportunities for empowering AI developers to better address privacy risks in AI.
Ahmad Alrazni Alshammari, Othman Altwijry, Andul-Hamid Abdul-Wahab
Purpose – From 1979 to 2023, the takaful structure has been adopted in many jurisdictions, making the documenting of its early days of establishment relatively difficult and somewhat unreliable. This is unlike conventional insurance, where the history and legislation are well documented and archived in various research (Hellwege, 2016; Marano and Siri, 2017). The purpose of this paper is to provide a chronology for the establishment and development of takaful via the takaful establishment in each jurisdiction, documenting its first takaful operator and first takaful regulation. Design/methodology/approach – This paper has used a qualitative method in the form of reviewing literature and available data such as journals, books and official resources. The data is thoroughly analysed in order to build the chronology for takaful. It adopted an exploratory research design, which is deemed suitable in situations where few works of literature have examined the subject (Neuman, 2014). The paper explores the establishment and non-establishment of takaful in 57 countries. The paper categorises the countries into seven regions starting with the GCC, Levant, Asia, Central Asia, Africa, Europe and Others. Findings – The takaful chronology presented in this paper shows that takaful operations exist in 47 jurisdictions, starting from Sudan and the UAE in 1979, with the most recent adopters being Morocco and Iran in December 2021. It is found that 22 jurisdictions do not have takaful regulations, and the Takaful Act 1984, issued in Malaysia, is considered the first takaful regulation that sets the basis for other regulations that follow. Originality/value – The paper contributes to the literature by providing a comprehensive chronology of takaful, especially as the few existing timelines have been found to be incomplete and consist of contradictory information.
At the beginning of the 20th century, two prominent families – the industrialist and merchant Vanderbilt family from the USA and the old noble Szechenyi family from Hungary – were united by marriage. In January 1908, a young American millionaire Gladys Vanderbilt was married in New York to Count Ladislav Szechenyi, a chamberlain and diplomat. The young couple subsequently settled in Hungary, where they traveled between their residences. They also spent time in the east of Slovakia, first in Strážske (Örmezö) and later in Remetské Hámre. The first two of their five daughters were born here. But today only few people here, in our country know who was Gladys Vanderbilt, Countess Szechenyi and that she contributed significantly to the development of the eastern Slovakia region. To date, there has been no research that has charted not only the beginning of their relationship, but also the years they spent in our area. And since there is no literature on the subject, I decided to do an initial detailed research of the contemporary press published in the Habsburg Monarchy and in the USA. The newspaper not only reported in detail on the young couple’s acquaintance, but also followed the announcement of their engagement, their marriage, their move to Europe, and finally their greeting in Strážske. Particularly interesting is the view of the newspapers in mid-October 1907, when tabloid articles were published about a „degenerate Hungarian count“ who only cares about the property of his bride, or about a dollar American princess who might not be accepted by the aristocracy in Austria-Hungary.
In this article, we challenge the idea that the development and the dissemination of scientific knowledge about Roma can be understood as “Eastern” or “Western.” Instead, we argue that the classical division between “science” and “pseudoscience” has the potential to fuel scientific racism and political and social exclusion across the globe. We narrate, for the first time, the role of sociobiology in the development of Roma “race science,” highlighting the ways in which its networks are developed and maintained. These specific mechanisms underlying the production of knowledge and its social and ideological effects may have further applications, such as the spread of mis- and dis-information. Our intent is to examine the attempts to deconstruct sociobiology and its application to Roma, by focusing on the effect of selective awareness among critics of sociobiology, which inevitably leads to the use of epistemic filters and heightens the risk of producing epistemic injustice. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.
History (General) and history of Europe, Anthropology
In this paper, I aim to analyse Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness from the perspective of its economic systems. In Kertész’s work they form a discursive network that permeates the entire novel (Szirák 2022). It is also important to see that the circulation of symbolic and material values also plays a key role in the demarcation of the boundaries between the concentration camps and the world outside. However, in the novel’s memorable yet perplexing conclusion, this distinction turns into a speech about the relative purity and simplicity of life in the camp. In an attempt to answer the questions arising from this statement by György Köves, I will argue that understanding of the economic models and the differences between them in the worlds of the inside and the outside is essential to the interpretation of Fatelessness.
History of Central Europe, Language and Literature
The aim of this article is to introduce the phenomenon of Chinese fashion or Chinamode in the 18th century Kingdom of Bohemia, and – in line with the theme of this issue of Cornova – to explain how it moved first into, and then across the territory. Without attempting a thorough analysis of the subject, which would be beyond the scope of a short essay, my investigation centred on interior furnishing and wall decorations in particular: three diverse case studies are provided. The polarity between Chinoiseries and authentic imports from East Asia is also looked at. In conclusion, I try to delineate the phases of Chinese fashion in Bohemia, and present their characteristics.
The formalism of generalized quantum histories allows a symmetrical treatment of space and time correlations, by taking different traces of the same history density matrix. We recall how to characterize spatial and temporal entanglement in this framework. An operative protocol is presented, to map a history state into the ket of a static composite system. We show, by examples, how the Leggett-Garg and the temporal CHSH inequalities can be violated in our approach.
Using fine-grained, publicly available data, this paper studies the short-term association between environmental factors, i.e., weather and air pollution characteristics, and weekly mortality rates in small geographical regions in Europe. Hereto, we develop a mortality modeling framework where a baseline model describes a region-specific, seasonal trend observed within the historical weekly mortality rates. Using a machine learning algorithm, we then explain deviations from this baseline using features constructed from environmental data that capture anomalies and extreme events. We illustrate our proposed modeling framework through a case study on more than 550 NUTS 3 regions (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, level 3) in 20 European countries. Using interpretation tools, we unravel insights into which environmental features are most important when estimating excess or deficit mortality relative to the baseline and explore how these features interact. Moreover, we investigate harvesting effects through our constructed weekly mortality modeling framework. Our findings show that temperature-related features are most influential in explaining mortality deviations from the baseline over short time periods. Furthermore, we find that environmental features prove particularly beneficial in southern regions for explaining elevated levels of mortality, and we observe evidence of a harvesting effect related to heat waves.
Existing recommendation systems either rely on user interaction logs, such as online shopping history for shopping recommendations, or focus on text signals. However, item-based histories are not always accessible, and are not generalizable for multimodal recommendation. We hypothesize that a user's visual history -- comprising images from daily life -- can offer rich, task-agnostic insights into their interests and preferences, and thus be leveraged for effective personalization. To this end, we propose VisualLens, a novel framework that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to enable personalization using task-agnostic visual history. VisualLens extracts, filters, and refines a spectrum user profile from the visual history to support personalized recommendation. We created two new benchmarks, Google-Review-V and Yelp-V, with task-agnostic visual histories, and show that VisualLens improves over state-of-the-art item-based multimodal recommendations by 5-10% on Hit@3, and outperforms GPT-4o by 2-5%. Further analysis shows that VisualLens is robust across varying history lengths and excels at adapting to both longer histories and unseen content categories.
AbstractKlemens von Metternich played an important role as leader of the Austrian bureaucrats and diplomats in supporting construction of the Suez Canal. He participated in many ways, often informal ones, which before 1848 resulted from his political circumspection and afterward from the fact that he was just a private individual. His so-to-speak informal diplomacy is interesting not only because it discloses the high level of interest he and other Austrian dignitaries paid to the issue but also because it reveals how accessible Metternich was to those involved in the project regardless of nationality, political leanings, and religion. Metternich's interest in the Suez Canal brought him into contact with Europeans as well as Ottomans, conservatives as well as liberals, and even Saint-Simonians: in other words, all who wished to cooperate for the benefit of central Europe and beyond.
The classic accounts of the history of the Habsburg Empire emphasized the importance of the conflict of nationalities and alleged that national oppression was the root cause of the Empire’s dissolution in 1918. Based on new results, however, the Nepostrans ERC project has raised two important issues: caution against the idea of all-pervasive nationalisms, and the perspective that the disappearance of Austria–Hungary was not a clear and sharp break and that continuities were just as important as ruptures. Built on concepts like ‘phantom boundaries’ (Phantomgrenzen) and New Imperial History, the focus of the Nepostrans ERC project is a dual one. The first aspect centers on the transformation of imperial society, governance, and institutions that emerged due to the war effort, and the second on the transition out of the imperial framework as the key consequence of the latter, with special attention given to social and institutional consequences and the enabling of new statebuilding efforts at a local level. The fundamental issues addressed by the project—running from 2018 to 2023—are the various relations between statehood and society at the local and regional levels that are examined in nine cases: Tyrol, Hradec Králové (Königrätz), southern Banat, Znojmo (Znaim), Prekmurje (Muravidék), Rijeka (Fiume), Kolomiya (Kolomea), Baia Mare (Nagybánya), and the outskirts of Budapest. The cases were primarily selected to represent typical variations in the social and political configuration during investigated period, 1917–1930.
Archaeology, Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology
Anastasia A. Karlsen, Karen K. Kyuregyan, Olga V. Isaeva
et al.
Abstract Background The geographic distribution of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and the hepatitis D virus (HDV) genotypes is uneven. We reconstructed the temporal evolution of HBV and HDV in Yakutia, one of the regions of Russia most affected by HBV and HDV, in an attempt to understand the possible mechanisms that led to unusual for Russia pattern of viral genotypes and to identify current distribution trends. Methods HBV and HDV genotypes were determined in sera collected in 2018–2019 in Yakutia from randomly selected 140 patients with HBV monoinfection and 59 patients with HBV/HDV. Total 86 HBV and 88 HDV genomic sequences isolated in Yakutia between 1997 and 2019 were subjected to phylodynamic and philogeographic Bayesian analysis using BEAST v1.10.4 software package. Bayesian SkyGrid reconstruction and Birth–Death Skyline analysis were applied to estimate HBV and HDV population dynamics. Results Currently, HBV-A and HDV-D genotypes are prevalent in Yakutia, in both monoinfected and HDV-coinfected patients. Bayesian analysis has shown that the high prevalence of HBV-A in Yakutia, which is not typical for Russia, initially emerged after the genotype was introduced from Eastern Europe in the fifteenth century (around 600 (95% HPD: 50–715) years ago). The acute hepatitis B epidemics in the 1990s in Yakutia were largely associated with this particular genotype, as indicated by temporal changes in HBV-A population dynamics. HBV-D had a longer history in Yakutia and demonstrated stable population dynamics, indicating ongoing viral circulation despite vaccination. No correlation between HBV and HDV genotypes was observed for coinfected patients in Yakutia (r = − 0.016069332). HDV-2b circulates in Russia in Yakutia only and resulted from a single wave of introduction from Central Asia 135 years ago (95% HPD: 60–350 years), while HDV-1 strains resulted from multiple introductions from Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and different parts of Russia starting 180 years ago (95% HPD: 150–210 years) and continuing to the present day. The population dynamics of HDV-1 and HDV-2 show no signs of decline despite 20 years of HBV vaccination. The Birth–Death Skyline analysis showed an increase in the viral population in recent years for both HDV genotypes, indicating ongoing HDV epidemics. Conclusions Taken together, these data call for strict control of HBV vaccination quality and coverage, and implementation of HBV and HDV screening programs in Yakutia.
Ilaria Patania, Ilaria Patania, Samantha T. Porter
et al.
Natural and anthropogenically induced soil erosion can cause serious loss of the archaeological record. Our work shows the value of multi-scalar geoarchaeological study when excavating and re-excavating rockshelters in a highly dynamic sedimentary environment where erosion is prominent. Here we present our work on Kisese II rockshelter, Tanzania, originally excavated in the 1950s and largely unpublished, that preserves an important Pleistocene-Holocene archaeological record integral to understanding the deep history of the Kondoa Rock-Art World Heritage Center. Unlike rockshelters in quiescent tectonic settings, like much of central Europe or South Africa, Kisese II exists in highly dynamic sedimentary environments associated with the active tectonics of the Great Rift Valley system exacerbated by human-induced environmental and climate change. We report on our 2017 and 2019 exploratory research that includes integrated regional-, landscape-, and site-scale geoarchaeological analyses of past and present sedimentary regimes and micromorphological analyses of the archaeological sediments. Historical records and aerial photographs document extensive changes in vegetation cover and erosional regimes since the 1920s, with drastic changes quantified between 1960 and 2019. Field survey points to an increased erosion rate between 2017 and 2019. To serve future archaeologists, heritage specialists, and local populations we combine our data in a geoarchaeological catena that includes soil, vegetation, fauna, and anthropogenic features on the landscape. At the site, micromorphological coupled with chronological analyses demonstrate the preservation of in situ Pleistocene deposits. Comparison of photographs from the 1956 and 2019 excavations show a maximum sediment loss of 68 cm in 63 years or >10% of >6-m-thick sedimentary deposit. In the studied area of the rockshelter we estimate ~1 cm/yr of erosion, suggesting the ongoing removal of much of the higher archaeological sediments which, based on the coarse stratigraphic controls and chronology of the original Inskeep excavations, would suggest the loss of much of the archaeological record of the last ~4000 years. These multi-scalar data are essential for the construction of appropriate mitigation strategies and further study of the remaining stratigraphy.
We analyze the application of the history state formalism to quantum walks. The formalism allows one to describe the whole walk through a pure quantum history state, which can be derived from a timeless eigenvalue equation. It naturally leads to the notion of system-time entanglement of the walk, which can be considered as a measure of the number of orthogonal states visited in the walk. We then focus on one-dimensional discrete quantum walks, where it is shown that such entanglement is independent of the initial spin orientation for real Hadamard-type coin operators and real initial states (in the standard basis) with definite site parity. Moreover, in the case of an initially localized particle it can be identified with the entanglement of the unitary global operator that generates the whole history state, which is related to its entangling power and can be analytically evaluated. Besides, it is shown that the evolution of the spin subsystem can also be described through a spin history state with an extended clock. A connection between its average entanglement (over all initial states) and that of the operator generating this state is also derived. A quantum circuit for generating the quantum walk history state is provided as well.