Hasil untuk "History of Eastern Europe"

David Hazemali, Aleš Maver, Mateja Matjašič Friš

This article examines the role of newcomers in Maribor during the early eighteenth century through an analysis of 401 marriages recorded between 1700 and 1748 in the Parish of St John the Baptist. At least one spouse in each of these documented marriages originated from outside Maribor (including ar- rivals from German-speaking Styria, from Carinthia and Carniola, as well as nearby towns and villages). The study shows strong evidence that in-migration via marriage was vital for Maribor’s demographic and economic recovery after the late seventeenth-century plague. Newcomers often married into established local families, particularly those of guild masters and artisans, swiftly obtaining burgher status and guild membership. Marriage functioned as a key integration mechanism that transformed ‘outsiders’ into ‘insiders’ and helped replenish skilled labour in the town. The findings highlight that Maribor depended on a constant influx of migrants to sustain its population and craft industries, as was typical of many pre-industrial towns where deaths outpaced births. Through quantitative analysis of marriage registers and illustrative case studies, the article contributes new insights into early modern urban mobility, showing how socially sanctioned institutions like marriage facilitated the integration of migrants into urban society.

Bartosz Apanowicz, Wojciech Milczarek, Andrzej Kowalski

This paper presents a novel method for determining the extent of mining-induced ground subsidence using InSAR technology, specifically the SBAS time series. The study aimed to develop a precise approach for determining subsidence extent. The research was carried out in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin, located in central-eastern Europe (Poland), a region known for its long history of intensive hard coal mining. InSAR analysis used imagery from March 2015 to February 2022. The developed approach includes accuracy analysis of SAR images processed, data filtering, and evaluation of mining-induced asymmetry. The study established an empirical formula that links the subsidence extent to the depth of the mined deposit (H), found to be 1.16H with a standard deviation of 0.22H. This result is based on 138 limit points, exceeding traditional geodetic sample size. Improved precision enhances mining land safety, minimizing potential mining damage, and supporting spatial planning affected areas.

Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius, Wilfred Steenbruggen

In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides comprehensive rules for the processing of personal data. In addition, the EU lawmaker intends to adopt specific rules to protect confidentiality of communications, in a separate ePrivacy Regulation. Some have argued that there is no need for such additional rules for communications confidentiality. This Article discusses the protection of the right to confidentiality of communications in Europe. We look at the right's origins to assess the rationale for protecting it. We also analyze how the right is currently protected under the European Convention on Human Rights and under EU law. We show that at its core the right to communications confidentiality protects three individual and collective values: privacy, freedom of expression, and trust in communication services. The right aims to ensure that individuals and organizations can safely entrust communication to service providers. Initially, the right protected only postal letters, but it has gradually developed into a strong safeguard for the protection of confidentiality of communications, regardless of the technology used. Hence, the right does not merely serve individual privacy interests, but also other more collective interests that are crucial for the functioning of our information society. We conclude that separate EU rules to protect communications confidentiality, next to the GDPR, are justified and necessary.

Gorazd Bajc, Tomaž Hvala, Darko Friš

During the Second World War, Franc Snoj, a politician of the Catholic Slovenian People’s Party and minister in the Yugoslav government in exile, made efforts to win the sympathy of the American public for the political aims of the Yugoslav government in the United States during the period 1941–1943 (during his first visit in September 1941 and a second visit from December 1941 to May 1943). In particular, he sought to win the support of the large local immigrant community of American Slovenes and other Yugoslav emigrants for the Party’s objectives, namely the unification of the entire Slovenian territory (the so-called United Slovenia programme) as an autonomous (federal) part of the restored Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Snoj encountered many obstacles: the Yugoslav idea was increasingly weakened by the conflicts between Serbs and Croats; republican ideas were strongly present among the American Slovenes who rejected the monarchy; the growing competitiveness of some political rivals of a liberal orientation, who were active in the wartime emigration (from the beginning Ivan Marija Čok, and later also Boris Furlan); the efforts of Italian anti-fascists (epitomised by Carlo Sforza), who were opposed to the change of the national border in favour of Yugoslavia. An additional problem was the different world-view definitions, which increased among the American Slovenes, after they had learned in autumn 1942 that Tito’s partisans were fighting against the invaders in Yugoslavia, while the Yugoslav government in exile continued to support Mihailović’s Chetniks. In the united organisation of American Slovenes to help the ‘old homeland’, the Slovene American National Council, which was formed in December 1942, they finally decided to support only the partisan movement, contrary to Snoj’s expectations (which, however, led to a final split among American Slovenes). This was especially advocated by the well-known Slovene-American writer Louis Adamič – until then he and Snoj had worked together correctly. It can therefore be said that Snoj did not fully fulfil the political task, which he was sent to accomplish in the United States. He always tried to be loyal to the leaders of his party, which was in exile led by Miha Krek, although it was obviously difficult for him to reconcile his actions with pragmatic choices, such as Krek’s support for the Greater Serbia advocate Konstantin Fotić. In the United States, Snoj also had a lot of contact with the US intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services, which was pleased with him because he sent them a lot of material. In this respect, Snoj (like some other individuals) cannot be described as a classic agent or a confidential undercover collaborator. One can imagine that he also tried to lobby the US authorities for Slovenian war demands and objectives through such connections.

Nates Tali, Zadoff Mirjam

Asha Vincent, Jürgen Müller, Christian Lisdat et al.

Chronometric levelling is a novel technique for the realisation of the International Height Reference System (IHRS). A detailed study of this technique is carried out through closed-loop simulations, aiming to unify regional/local height systems (LHS) in Europe and Brazil. Focusing on a unification accuracy of 1 cm, realistic scenarios with various error parameters/vertical datum parameters in LHS and clock observation uncertainties were analysed. The errors associated with local heights raised from datum offsets, local vertical datum alignment discrepancies in latitude and longitude, accumulated tilts depending on the distance from the reference tide gauge and levelling point elevation-dependent offsets were introduced. Clocks achieving a fractional uncertainty of 10^-18 and 10^-17 were assumed in the simulations, considering temporal correlations of clock intrinsic uncertainties, external effects on clock observations such as tidal effects, propagation delay in terms of link uncertainties and presence of outliers. We determine the preferred distributions of clocks in a network for the best estimation of error parameters. The estimation of the error parameters is related to the spatial distribution of the clocks, hence, an optimal setup of placing clocks at the most distant levelling points, reference tide gauges and elevated points is implemented. Further, a configuration of clock distribution is proposed with master clocks and local clocks with reduced links. Taking into consideration all these realistic constraints, a unification accuracy of 1 cm can be obtained. The unified European and Brazilian height systems are further related to the global geoid such that all geoid-related heights achieve an accuracy of 3 cm.

Yurii Mateleshko

The purpose of the research paper is to characterize the activity of German non-governmental institutions (organizations) in Ukraine during 1992-2022 through the prism of the concept of ‘soft power’ by J. Nye, as well as to clarify the forms, aims, priorities, and results of their activity. The scientific novelty is in the concept of ‘soft power’ application in the study of the activities of German non-governmental organizations in Ukraine at the time of independence. The methodology of the research, which is essentially interdisciplinary, is based on the combination of the political science concept of J. Nye and the historical approach. The ‘soft power’ of Germany is analyzed as a combination of four components: resources (values, language, culture, etc.), actors (subjects of influence who use the attractiveness of the resources to involve target groups of the population), tools (means of influence including public diplomacy and its varieties), results (positive image, implementation of political and cultural values, etc.). Conclusions. Since the beginning of its independence, Ukraine has become the object of significant interest both on the part of the government agencies of the Federal Republic of Germany and its numerous non-governmental institutions that have been active in our country since 1992. German non-governmental organizations can be conditionally divided into two groups: 1) political, which primarily include party foundations; 2) cultural, educational, and scientific, among which the Goethe-Institut, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Wave (Deutsche Welle) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation should be singled out. When implementing the ‘soft power’ policy, these institutions rest on such resources as democracy and a developed civil society’s values, the German language and culture, and the federal system of education and science. The activities of German non-governmental organizations in Ukraine generally correspond to their general goals. Among the main results of these institutions’ activities can be named the formation of a positive image of Germany in Ukraine, as well as the spread of European political values among target groups of the Ukrainian population (mainly young people). The result of the latter has become the formation of civil society in Ukraine and increasing European integration, which has been also facilitated by the activities of other democratic countries’ institutions. However, confirmation of the last statement requires separate research. It also seems promising to study the relationship between Germany’s ‘soft power’ (or another Western country) and the emigration of the Ukrainian population during the period of independence.

Paola Ferretti

Book Review

Jacob Carlson, Tom Bryan, Melissa Dell

Thousands of users consult digital archives daily, but the information they can access is unrepresentative of the diversity of documentary history. The sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for optical character recognition (OCR) - which jointly learns a vision and language model - is poorly extensible to low-resource document collections, as learning a language-vision model requires extensive labeled sequences and compute. This study models OCR as a character level image retrieval problem, using a contrastively trained vision encoder. Because the model only learns characters' visual features, it is more sample efficient and extensible than existing architectures, enabling accurate OCR in settings where existing solutions fail. Crucially, the model opens new avenues for community engagement in making digital history more representative of documentary history.

Michael W. Dean

Larissa G. Titarenko

<p>The article is devoted to analyzing a new sociological paradigm proposed by Nikolai Genov, a European sociologist of Bulgarian origin, known for his work in the history and theory of sociology, social transformation in Eastern Europe and globalization. His new monograph is characterized by his desire to offer the sociological community an original outlook on the theoretical trends in the development of the discipline over the past few decades, as well as to construct a new paradigm of social interaction as a way to overcome the current theoretical crisis. It presents a rational analysis of the current state of theoretical sociology while substantiating and describing the heuristic possibilities of sociology, revealed by means of paradigmatic synthesis based on the concept of social interaction as rethought by the author. Social interactions are the prerogative of key actors operating in networks of social relations and within social processes. The new paradigm can provide sociologists with explanatory models that can serve as the basis for creating mid-level theories that would incorporate previously accumulated sociological knowledge. According to Genov, this synthesis can open up new ways for advancing sociological comprehension of controversial social problems at different levels of their consideration (macro-, meso- and micro-) and while considering modern global development trends.</p>

Hanxun Zhong, Zhicheng Dou, Yutao Zhu et al.

Personalized dialogue systems explore the problem of generating responses that are consistent with the user's personality, which has raised much attention in recent years. Existing personalized dialogue systems have tried to extract user profiles from dialogue history to guide personalized response generation. Since the dialogue history is usually long and noisy, most existing methods truncate the dialogue history to model the user's personality. Such methods can generate some personalized responses, but a large part of dialogue history is wasted, leading to sub-optimal performance of personalized response generation. In this work, we propose to refine the user dialogue history on a large scale, based on which we can handle more dialogue history and obtain more abundant and accurate persona information. Specifically, we design an MSP model which consists of three personal information refiners and a personalized response generator. With these multi-level refiners, we can sparsely extract the most valuable information (tokens) from the dialogue history and leverage other similar users' data to enhance personalization. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model in generating more informative and personalized responses.

Xuan Long Do, Bowei Zou, Liangming Pan et al.

Conversational question generation (CQG) serves as a vital task for machines to assist humans, such as interactive reading comprehension, through conversations. Compared to traditional single-turn question generation (SQG), CQG is more challenging in the sense that the generated question is required not only to be meaningful, but also to align with the occurred conversation history. While previous studies mainly focus on how to model the flow and alignment of the conversation, there has been no thorough study to date on which parts of the context and history are necessary for the model. We argue that shortening the context and history is crucial as it can help the model to optimise more on the conversational alignment property. To this end, we propose CoHS-CQG, a two-stage CQG framework, which adopts a CoHS module to shorten the context and history of the input. In particular, CoHS selects contiguous sentences and history turns according to their relevance scores by a top-p strategy. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performances on CoQA in both the answer-aware and answer-unaware settings.

Tetiana Boiko

Damian Clarke, Manuel Llorca Jaña, Daniel Pailañir

Quantile regression and quantile treatment effect methods are powerful econometric tools for considering economic impacts of events or variables of interest beyond the mean. The use of quantile methods allows for an examination of impacts of some independent variable over the entire distribution of continuous dependent variables. Measurement in many quantative settings in economic history have as a key input continuous outcome variables of interest. Among many other cases, human height and demographics, economic growth, earnings and wages, and crop production are generally recorded as continuous measures, and are collected and studied by economic historians. In this paper we describe and discuss the broad utility of quantile regression for use in research in economic history, review recent quantitive literature in the field, and provide an illustrative example of the use of these methods based on 20,000 records of human height measured across 50-plus years in the 19th and 20th centuries. We suggest that there is considerably more room in the literature on economic history to convincingly and productively apply quantile regression methods.

Jan Zapletal, Raphael Watschinger, Günther Of et al.

The presented paper concentrates on the boundary element method (BEM) for the heat equation in three spatial dimensions. In particular, we deal with tensor product space-time meshes allowing for quadrature schemes analytic in time and numerical in space. The spatial integrals can be treated by standard BEM techniques known from three dimensional stationary problems. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, we provide temporal antiderivatives of the heat kernel necessary for the assembly of BEM matrices and the evaluation of the representation formula. Secondly, the presented approach has been implemented in a publicly available library besthea allowing researchers to reuse the formulae and BEM routines straightaway. The results are validated by numerical experiments in an HPC environment.

You Wu

As a candidate of dark matter, primordial black holes (PBHs) have attracted more and more attentions as they could be possible progenitors of the heavy binary black holes (BBHs) observed by LIGO/Virgo. Accurately estimating the merger rate of PBH binaries will be crucial to reconstruct the mass distribution of PBHs. It was pointed out the merger history of PBHs may shift the merger rate distribution depending on the mass function of PBHs. In this paper, we use 10 BBH events from LIGO/Virgo O1 and O2 observing runs to constrain the merger rate distribution of PBHs by accounting the effect of merger history. It is found that the second merger process makes subdominant contribution to the total merger rate, and hence the merger history effect can be safely neglected.

Lina Reichenberg, Fredrik Hedenus, Niclas Mattsson et al.

Long distance transmission within continents has been shown to be one of the most important variation management strategies in renewable energy systems, where allowing for transmission expansion will reduce system cost by around 20%. In this paper, we test whether the system cost further decreases when transmission is extended to intercontinental connections. We analyze a Eurasian interconnection between China, Mid-Asia and Europe, using a capacity expansion model with hourly time resolution. The model is constrained by an increasingly tighter global cap on CO2 emissions in order to investigate the effect of different levels of reliance on variable sources. Our results show that a supergrid option decreases total system cost by a maximum of 5%, compared to continental grid integration. This maximum effect is achieved when (i) the generation is constrained to be made up almost entirely by renewables, (ii) the land available for VRE farms is relatively limited and the demand is relatively high and (iii) the cost for solar PV and storage is high. The importance of these two factors is explained by that a super grid allows for harnessing of remote wind-, solar- and hydro resources as well as management of variations, both of which are consequential only in cases where dispatchable resources are limited or very costly. As for the importance of the cost for storage, it represents a competing variation management option, and when it has low cost, it substitutes part of the role of the supergrid, which is to manage variations through long-distance trade. The cost decrease from a Eurasian supergrid was found to be between 0% and 5%, compared to the cost in the case of continental-scale grids. We conclude that the benefits of a supergrid from a techno-economic perspective are in most cases negligible, or modest at best.17 pages, f

Josh Bullock, Justin E. Lane, Igor Mikloušić et al.

Europe's contemporary political landscape has been shaped by massive shifts in recent decades caused by geopolitical upheavals such as Brexit and now, COVID-19. The way in which policy makers respond to the current pandemic could have large effects on how the world looks after the pandemic subsides. We aim to investigate complex questions post COVID-19 around the relationships and intersections concerning nationalism, religiosity, and anti-immigrant sentiment from a socio-cognitive perspective by applying a mixed-method approach (survey and modelling); in a context where unprecedented contagion threats have caused huge instability. There are still significant gaps in the scholarly literature on populism and nationalism. In particular, there is a lack of attention to the role of evolved human psychology in responding to persistent threats, which can fall into four broad categories in the literature: predation (threats to one's life via being eaten or killed in some other way), contagion (threats to one's life via physical infection), natural (threats to one's life via natural disasters), and social (threats to one's life by destroying social standing). These threats have been discussed in light of their effects on religion and other forms of behaviour, but they have not been employed to study nationalist and populist behaviours. In what follows, two studies are presented that begin to fill this gap in the literature. The first is a survey used to inform our theoretical framework and explore the different possible relationships in an online sample. The second is a study of a computer simulation. Both studies (completed in 2020) found very clear effects among the relevant variables, enabling us to identify trends that require further explanation and research as we move toward models that can adequately inform policy discussions.

Takumi Nakane, Xuequan Lu, Chao Zhang

In evolutionary algorithms, genetic operators iteratively generate new offspring which constitute a potentially valuable set of search history. To boost the performance of crossover in real-coded genetic algorithm (RCGA), in this paper we propose to exploit the search history cached so far in an online style during the iteration. Specifically, survivor individuals over past few generations are collected and stored in the archive to form the search history. We introduce a simple yet effective crossover model driven by the search history (abbreviated as SHX). In particular, the search history is clustered and each cluster is assigned a score for SHX. In essence, the proposed SHX is a data-driven method which exploits the search history to perform offspring selection after the offspring generation. Since no additional fitness evaluations are needed, SHX is favorable for the tasks with limited budget or expensive fitness evaluations. We experimentally verify the effectiveness of SHX over 4 benchmark functions. Quantitative results show that our SHX can significantly enhance the performance of RCGA, in terms of accuracy.