‘Affirmation’ als Textverfahren. Zur Gattungskritik und Praxis biographischen Schreibens in Marlene Streeruwitz’ Roman «Nachwelt»
David Österle
Marlene Streeruwitz’s award-winning novel Nachwelt (1999, Posterity) is a highly avant-garde experiment in metafiction. Described on its cover as both a «novel» and a «travelogue», the text intertwines autobiographical elements with biographical elements from the life of the sculptor Anna Mahler, daughter of Gustav Mahler and Alma Mahler-Werfel. Drawing on Judith Butler’s redefinition of ‘affirmation’, this article examines how Streeruwitz develops a narrative technique in Nachwelt that both critiques conventional biographical narratives and creates an alternative form of life writing, grounded in an ‘affirmative’ textual strategy.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
Exploiting Inaccurate Branch History in Side-Channel Attacks
Yuhui Zhu, Alessandro Biondi
Modern out-of-order CPUs heavily rely on speculative execution for performance optimization, with branch prediction serving as a cornerstone to minimize stalls and maximize efficiency. Whenever shared branch prediction resources lack proper isolation and sanitization methods, they may originate security vulnerabilities that expose sensitive data across different software contexts. This paper examines the fundamental components of modern Branch Prediction Units (BPUs) and investigates how resource sharing and contention affect two widely implemented but underdocumented features: Bias-Free Branch Prediction and Branch History Speculation. Our analysis demonstrates that these BPU features, while designed to enhance speculative execution efficiency through more accurate branch histories, can also introduce significant security risks. We show that these features can inadvertently modify the Branch History Buffer (BHB) update behavior and create new primitives that trigger malicious mis-speculations. This discovery exposes previously unknown cross-privilege attack surfaces for Branch History Injection (BHI). Based on these findings, we present three novel attack primitives: two Spectre attacks, namely Spectre-BSE and Spectre-BHS, and a cross-privilege control flow side-channel attack called BiasScope. Our research identifies corresponding patterns of vulnerable control flows and demonstrates exploitation on multiple processors. Finally, Chimera is presented: an attack demonstrator based on eBPF for a variant of Spectre-BHS that is capable of leaking kernel memory contents at 24,628 bit/s.
Gruppenbild mit Mendl. Wieso auf einer ikonischen Schnellfotografie Jung-Wiens Hugo von Hofmannsthal nicht zu sehen ist und wie Richard Beer-Hofmann fast die ‘Ankerbrot’-Fabrik finanziert hat
Martin Anton Müller
The essay examines the ferrotypes taken in the Wiener Prater, featuring members of ‘Jung-Wien’, including Hermann Bahr, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Felix Salten, and Arthur Schnitzler. A closer examination is given to one photo, revealing that contrary to common belief, the figure depicted is not Hofmannsthal, but rather the industrialist Fritz Mendl (1864–1929).
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
Cover and Introductory Pages
Fausto Cercignani
Studia austriaca, Vol 32 (2024) - Cover and Introductory Pages
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
The Expression of Silence in Franz Schubert’s «Mein Traum»
Tim Schmidt
Silence is commonly understood as a void – in this sense, there is no silence. The figure of thought – silence, calibrates meaning within relationships. I argue that the meaning of several writings in Franz Schubert’s diary has a much larger impact than is commonly understood to this day. Specific tones and ‘beep’ sequences evoke emotions and a deep layer of melancholy, all of which serve as the guiding force in Schubert’s music. In contrast, silence – the moment in which meaning becomes elusive – impoverishes that moment within the lines of the diary note Mein Traum.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
How Should We Represent History in Interpretable Models of Clinical Policies?
Anton Matsson, Lena Stempfle, Yaochen Rao
et al.
Modeling policies for sequential clinical decision-making based on observational data is useful for describing treatment practices, standardizing frequent patterns in treatment, and evaluating alternative policies. For each task, it is essential that the policy model is interpretable. Learning accurate models requires effectively capturing the state of a patient, either through sequence representation learning or carefully crafted summaries of their medical history. While recent work has favored the former, it remains a question as to how histories should best be represented for interpretable policy modeling. Focused on model fit, we systematically compare diverse approaches to summarizing patient history for interpretable modeling of clinical policies across four sequential decision-making tasks. We illustrate differences in the policies learned using various representations by breaking down evaluations by patient subgroups, critical states, and stages of treatment, highlighting challenges specific to common use cases. We find that interpretable sequence models using learned representations perform on par with black-box models across all tasks. Interpretable models using hand-crafted representations perform substantially worse when ignoring history entirely, but are made competitive by incorporating only a few aggregated and recent elements of patient history. The added benefits of using a richer representation are pronounced for subgroups and in specific use cases. This underscores the importance of evaluating policy models in the context of their intended use.
NORMY: Non-Uniform History Modeling for Open Retrieval Conversational Question Answering
Muhammad Shihab Rashid, Jannat Ara Meem, Vagelis Hristidis
Open Retrieval Conversational Question Answering (OrConvQA) answers a question given a conversation as context and a document collection. A typical OrConvQA pipeline consists of three modules: a Retriever to retrieve relevant documents from the collection, a Reranker to rerank them given the question and the context, and a Reader to extract an answer span. The conversational turns can provide valuable context to answer the final query. State-of-the-art OrConvQA systems use the same history modeling for all three modules of the pipeline. We hypothesize this as suboptimal. Specifically, we argue that a broader context is needed in the first modules of the pipeline to not miss relevant documents, while a narrower context is needed in the last modules to identify the exact answer span. We propose NORMY, the first unsupervised non-uniform history modeling pipeline which generates the best conversational history for each module. We further propose a novel Retriever for NORMY, which employs keyphrase extraction on the conversation history, and leverages passages retrieved in previous turns as additional context. We also created a new dataset for OrConvQA, by expanding the doc2dial dataset. We implemented various state-of-the-art history modeling techniques and comprehensively evaluated them separately for each module of the pipeline on three datasets: OR-QUAC, our doc2dial extension, and ConvMix. Our extensive experiments show that NORMY outperforms the state-of-the-art in the individual modules and in the end-to-end system.
Primordial Gravitational Wave Probes of Non-Standard Thermal Histories
Annet Konings, Mariia Marinichenko, Oleksii Mikulenko
et al.
Primordial gravitational waves propagate almost unimpeded from the moment they are generated to the present epoch. Nevertheless, they are subject to convolution with a non-trivial transfer function. Within the standard thermal history, shifts in the temperature-redshift relation combine with damping effects by free streaming neutrinos to non-trivially process different wavelengths during radiation domination, with subsequently negligible effects at later times. Presuming a nearly scale invariant primordial spectrum, one obtains a characteristic late time spectrum, deviations from which would indicate departures from the standard thermal history. Given the paucity of probes of the early universe physics before nucleosynthesis, it is useful to classify how deviations from the standard thermal history of the early universe can be constrained from observations of the late time stochastic background. The late time spectral density has a plateau at high frequencies that can in principle be significantly enhanced or suppressed relative to the standard thermal history depending on the equation of state of the epoch intervening reheating and the terminal phase of radiation domination, imprinting additional features from bursts of entropy production, and additional damping at intermediate scales via anisotropic stress production. In this paper, we survey phenomenologically motivated scenarios of early matter domination, kination, and late time decaying particles as representative non-standard thermal histories, elaborate on their late time stochastic background, and discuss constraints on different model scenarios.
Hidden in Plain Sight: Exploring Chat History Tampering in Interactive Language Models
Cheng'an Wei, Yue Zhao, Yujia Gong
et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Llama have become prevalent in real-world applications, exhibiting impressive text generation performance. LLMs are fundamentally developed from a scenario where the input data remains static and unstructured. To behave interactively, LLM-based chat systems must integrate prior chat history as context into their inputs, following a pre-defined structure. However, LLMs cannot separate user inputs from context, enabling chat history tampering. This paper introduces a systematic methodology to inject user-supplied history into LLM conversations without any prior knowledge of the target model. The key is to utilize prompt templates that can well organize the messages to be injected, leading the target LLM to interpret them as genuine chat history. To automatically search for effective templates in a WebUI black-box setting, we propose the LLM-Guided Genetic Algorithm (LLMGA) that leverages an LLM to generate and iteratively optimize the templates. We apply the proposed method to popular real-world LLMs including ChatGPT and Llama-2/3. The results show that chat history tampering can enhance the malleability of the model's behavior over time and greatly influence the model output. For example, it can improve the success rate of disallowed response elicitation up to 97% on ChatGPT. Our findings provide insights into the challenges associated with the real-world deployment of interactive LLMs.
Nadkarni, Maya. 2020. Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 252 pp.
Katalin Fábian
Hungary, Language and Literature
ScrollTimes: Tracing the Provenance of Paintings as a Window into History
Wei Zhang, Wong Kam-Kwai, Yitian Chen
et al.
The study of cultural artifact provenance, tracing ownership and preservation, holds significant importance in archaeology and art history. Modern technology has advanced this field, yet challenges persist, including recognizing evidence from diverse sources, integrating sociocultural context, and enhancing interactive automation for comprehensive provenance analysis. In collaboration with art historians, we examined the handscroll, a traditional Chinese painting form that provides a rich source of historical data and a unique opportunity to explore history through cultural artifacts. We present a three-tiered methodology encompassing artifact, contextual, and provenance levels, designed to create a "Biography" for handscroll. Our approach incorporates the application of image processing techniques and language models to extract, validate, and augment elements within handscroll using various cultural heritage databases. To facilitate efficient analysis of non-contiguous extracted elements, we have developed a distinctive layout. Additionally, we introduce ScrollTimes, a visual analysis system tailored to support the three-tiered analysis of handscroll, allowing art historians to interactively create biographies tailored to their interests. Validated through case studies and expert interviews, our approach offers a window into history, fostering a holistic understanding of handscroll provenance and historical significance.
Online Decision Making with History-Average Dependent Costs (Extended)
Vijeth Hebbar, Cedric Langbort
In many online sequential decision-making scenarios, a learner's choices affect not just their current costs but also the future ones. In this work, we look at one particular case of such a situation where the costs depend on the time average of past decisions over a history horizon. We first recast this problem with history dependent costs as a problem of decision making under stage-wise constraints. To tackle this, we then propose the novel Follow-The-Adaptively-Regularized-Leader (FTARL) algorithm. Our innovative algorithm incorporates adaptive regularizers that depend explicitly on past decisions, allowing us to enforce stage-wise constraints while simultaneously enabling us to establish tight regret bounds. We also discuss the implications of the length of history horizon on design of no-regret algorithms for our problem and present impossibility results when it is the full learning horizon.
Spaces of Contrast. A Spatial Analysis of Franz Grillparzer’s «Der arme Spielmann»
Xiaohu Jiang
Physical setting plays an important role in literary writings. After the spatial turn, scholars of literary studies also turned their eyes to the sociological significance of spatial description in literary texts. This essay presents a spatial analysis of Grillparzer’s Der arme Spielmann and argues that in this novella Grillparzer uses the contrast in space as a vital indicator of the disparity between his characters. These spatial contrasts are mainly derived from characters’ differences in terms of birth, class, wealth, education, job and so on. The difficulty of reducing those differences signifies the suffocating political atmosphere in nineteenth-century Austria.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
Kusz, Veronika. 2020. A Wayfaring Stranger: Ernst von Dohnányi’s American Years, 1949-1960. Oakland: University of California Press. 233 pp.
Sarah M. Lucas
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Hungary, Language and Literature
Veto, Miklos. 2020. From Budapest to Paris (1936-1957) – An Autobiography. Translated by Rajat D. Acharya. Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications. 145 pp.
Dávid Szőke
-
Hungary, Language and Literature
Effect of Temperature History During Additive Manufacturing on Crystalline Morphology of Polyether Ether Ketone
Austin Lee, Mathew Wynn, Liam Quigley
et al.
Additive manufacturing parameters of high-performance polymers greatly affect the thermal history and consequently quality of the end-part. For fused deposition modeling (FDM), this may include printing speed, filament size, nozzle, and chamber temperatures, as well as build plate temperature. In this study, the effect of thermal convection inside a commercial 3D printer on thermal history and crystalline morphology of polyetheretherketone (PEEK) was investigated using a combined experimental and numerical approach. Using digital scanning calorimetry (DSC) and polarized optical microscopy (POM), crystallinity of PEEK samples was studied as a function of thermal history. In addition, using finite element (FE) simulations of heat transfer, which were calibrated using thermocouple measurements, thermal history of parts during virtual 3D printing was evaluated. By correlating the experimental and numerical results, the effect of printing parameters and convection on thermal history and PEEK crystalline morphology was established. It was found that the high melting temperature of PEEK, results in fast melt cooling rates followed by short annealing times during printing, leading to relatively low degree of crystallinity (DOC) and small crystalline morphology.
Integrating Dialog History into End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding Systems
Jatin Ganhotra, Samuel Thomas, Hong-Kwang J. Kuo
et al.
End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) systems that process human-human or human-computer interactions are often context independent and process each turn of a conversation independently. Spoken conversations on the other hand, are very much context dependent, and dialog history contains useful information that can improve the processing of each conversational turn. In this paper, we investigate the importance of dialog history and how it can be effectively integrated into end-to-end SLU systems. While processing a spoken utterance, our proposed RNN transducer (RNN-T) based SLU model has access to its dialog history in the form of decoded transcripts and SLU labels of previous turns. We encode the dialog history as BERT embeddings, and use them as an additional input to the SLU model along with the speech features for the current utterance. We evaluate our approach on a recently released spoken dialog data set, the HarperValleyBank corpus. We observe significant improvements: 8% for dialog action and 30% for caller intent recognition tasks, in comparison to a competitive context independent end-to-end baseline system.
Asymptotically optimal strategies for online prediction with history-dependent experts
Jeff Calder, Nadejda Drenska
We establish sharp asymptotically optimal strategies for the problem of online prediction with history dependent experts. The prediction problem is played (in part) over a discrete graph called the $d$ dimensional de Bruijn graph, where $d$ is the number of days of history used by the experts. Previous work [11] established $O(\varepsilon)$ optimal strategies for $n=2$ experts and $d\leq 4$ days of history, while [10] established $O(\varepsilon^{1/3})$ optimal strategies for all $n\geq 2$ and all $d\geq 1$, where the game is played for $N$ steps and $\varepsilon=N^{-1/2}$. In this paper, we show that the optimality conditions over the de Bruijn graph correspond to a graph Poisson equation, and we establish $O(\varepsilon)$ optimal strategies for all values of $n$ and $d$.
On the Possible Evolutionary History of the Water Ocean on Venus
Tetsuya Hara, Anna Suzuki
We have investigated the possible evolutional history of the water ocean on Venus, adopting the one dimensional radiative-convective model,including the parameters as albedo and relative humidity. Under this model, it has the possibility that the habitable zone could include Venus. It could continue for $\sim 1$ Gy in faint young solar flux increasing, with modest parameters such as albedo = 0.3, relative humidity (RH=1), and $p_{n0}=10^5 $Pa. If we relax parameters considering the 3-Dimensional calculations, the ocean could exist there longer than $\sim$ 4.6 Gy. In such cases, we have to consider the cause of runaway other than just solar luminosity increasing. It is important to investigate Venus history for the coming future of Earth and observations of exoplanets for their historical habitable zones.
Böske Simon, Miss Hungaria and Miss Europa (1929): Beauty Pageants and Packaging Gender, Race, and National Identity in Interwar Hungary
Louise O. Vasvári
In this interdisciplinary article that draws on the intersections of Hungarian and Jewish Studies within a framework of cultural studies and gender studies, Louise O. Vasvári investigates the socio-political role of beauty pageants in 1920s European and—more specifically—in Hungarian social, political and cultural life. The article is structured as a case study of the life of Böske Simon, who was born into a bourgeois Jewish family in 1909 and who won the first Miss Hungaria competition in 1929, soon followed by the title of Miss Europa. Vasvári aims to place Simon’s role as Hungarian beauty queen in a broader focus by examining from a gender perspective the international development of beauty pageants, of the illustrated press, and of commercial beauty culture in the 1920s. She examines the symbolic space allotted to the concept “Modern Girl,” who in the interwar [re]construction of gender and national identities came to represent both the enticements and the dangers of modernity. More specifically, she examines how the problematic gender representation of women in such pageants and their reception by the press and by the public interact in the broader interwar nationalistic cultural sphere in post-Trianon Hungary.
Hungary, Language and Literature