The interior design of a building provides critical insights into its historical and cultural context. This study examines the architectural and symbolic relationships among two Nationality and Heritage Rooms in the Cathedral of Learning—the Yugoslav and Hungarian Rooms. The research explores how the Hungarian and Yugoslav Rooms illustrate the influence of nation-state formations after the First World War, emphasizing the relationship between national identity and architectural expression. Particular attention is given to the underrepresentation of ethnicity in the decision making and the interior design of the Yugoslav Room, and the integration of folk and neo-baroque elements in Hungarian architecture in case of the Hungarian Room. This research was conducted within the framework of a Fulbright Scholarship and was initially presented at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hungarian Heritage Room. Further findings were shared at the forty-eighth conference of the American Hungarian Educators Association at Rutgers University, where the study was awarded the Research Presentation Award.
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted household consumption, savings, and income across Europe, particularly affecting countries like Hungary, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic. This study investigates the effectiveness of fiscal policies in mitigating these impacts, focusing on government interventions such as spending, subsidies, revenue, and debt. Utilizing a Markov Switching Vector Auto regression (MS-VAR) model, the study examines data from 2000 to 2023, considering three economic regimes: the initial shock, the peak crisis, and the recovery phase. The results indicate that the COVID-19 shock led to a sharp decline in household consumption and income in all three countries, with Slovenia facing the most severe immediate impact. Hungary, however, showed the strongest recovery, driven by effective fiscal measures such as subsidies and increased government spending, which significantly boosted both household consumption and income. The Czech Republic demonstrated a more gradual recovery, with improvements observed in future-oriented consumption (IMPC). In conclusion, the study underscores the critical role of targeted fiscal interventions in mitigating the adverse effects of crises. The findings suggest that governments should prioritize timely and targeted fiscal policies to support household financial stability during economic downturns and ensure long-term recovery.
Single-use plastics (SUPs) impose substantial environmental costs. Following Directive (EU) 2019/904, Austria and Germany introduced producer charges and fund payments to finance clean-up. Using a high-frequency panel of retail offer spells with prices and a fixed-effects event-study design with two-way clustered standard errors, this paper estimates the extent to which these costs are passed through to consumer prices. We find clear evidence of price pass-through in Austria. Pooled Austrian SUP products are 13.01 index points more expensive than non-SUP controls within twelve months (DiD(12m); p<0.001) and 19.42 points over the full post-policy period (p<0.001). At the product level, highly taxed balloons exhibit strong and persistent effects (DiD(12m)=13.43, p=0.007; Full DiD=19.96, p<0.001). For plastic to-go cups, the twelve-month estimate is negative but statistically insignificant (DiD(12m)=-22.73, p=0.096), while the full-period estimate is positive and likewise insignificant. In Germany, where the Single-Use Plastics Fund took effect in 2024, the post-policy window is short and estimates are not statistically significant; these results are therefore interpreted as descriptive rather than causal. As the data contain prices but not quantities, the analysis speaks to price incidence on consumers and producers, not to changes in consumption or litter.
We introduce a new paradox, which we call Counterfactual Local Friendliness (CLF): a Wigner's-friend-type logical collision in which every decisive inference is obtained by interaction-free flags whose disturbance on the probed object is bounded by a tunable parameter $ε$. Under (Q) universal unitarity for outside observers, (S) single-outcome facts, (C) cross-agent consistency, and (IF-$ε$) $ε$-counterfactuality of the friends' internal modules, quantum theory predicts a nonzero post-selected event that forces mutually incompatible certainties about a single upstream variable -- without appealing to absorptive or projective in-lab measurements. We also derive an $ε$-IF three-box noncontextual bound: any single-world, noncontextual model satisfying exclusivity and epsilon-stability must obey $P(A) + P(B) \le 1 + K_ε$, while quantum theory yields $P(A) = P(B) = 1$, violating the bound for arbitrarily small $ε$. Together these results isolate what is paradoxical about counterfactual phenomena: not energy exchange with the probed system, but the incompatibility of agent-level facts in single-world narratives.
Sean Oesch, Phillipe Austria, Amul Chaulagain
et al.
Defenders are overwhelmed by the number and scale of attacks against their networks.This problem will only be exacerbated as attackers leverage artificial intelligence to automate their workflows. We propose a path to autonomous cyber agents able to augment defenders by automating critical steps in the cyber defense life cycle.
The present study examines three versions of Tóték (commonly translated as The Toth Family; literally The Tóts), the first two by István Örkény, one of Hungary’s leading twentieth-century writers: a highly successful drama from 1967, instrumental in reforming stage language in Hungary; and the 1966 novella of the same title. The third is their 1969 film adaptation, Isten hozta, őrnagy úr! (Welcome, Major), by Zoltán Fábri. The analysis of the drama and the novel focuses primarily on how a major arriving from the front during World War II brings the madness and irrationality of the war into the life of the Toth family when he stays with them for two weeks. The paper’s second part examines the film adaption, asking in particular how the film represents madness and absurdity, given their key role in the original literary sources. The situation and the fate of the Toth family can be interpreted in all three works in more general terms as well, as a model for the working mechanisms and absurdity of dictatorships anywhere, hence, even if only indirectly, of 1960s Hungary. Saghy.Miklos@hung.u-szeged.hu
Gabriela Viale Pereira, Lukas Daniel Klausner, Lucy Temple
et al.
Smart city solutions require innovative governance approaches together with the smart use of technology, such as digital twins, by city managers and policymakers to manage the big societal challenges. The project Smart Cities aNd Digital Twins in Lower Austria (SCiNDTiLA) extends the state of the art of research in several contributing disciplines and uses the foundations of complexity theory and computational social science methods to develop a digital-twin-based smart city model. The project will also apply a novel transdisciplinary process to conceptualise sustainable smart cities and validate the smart city generic model. The outcomes will be translated into a roadmap highlighting methodologies, guidelines and policy recommendations for tackling societal challenges in smart cities with a focus on rescaling the entire framework to be transferred to regions, smaller towns and non-urban environments, such as rural areas and smart villages, in ways that fit the respective local governance, ethical and operational capacity context.
The way the topic of black-body radiation is presented in standard textbooks (i.e. from Rayleigh-Jeans to Max Planck) does not follow the actual historical timeline of the understanding of the black-body radiation problem. Authors believe that a presentation which follows an actual timeline of the ideas (although not a logical presentation of the field) would be of interest not only from the history of science perspective but also from a pedagogical perspective. Therefore, we attempt a concise history of this very interesting field of science.
Historians often look for genealogies of nationalism in Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman imperial history. In this article, I use an inter-imperial framework to argue that the formative period of contemporary Eastern Mediterranean-European regionalism was the last five decades of these two empires. The diplomatic, economic and cultural relations between the two middle powers compose an alternative history to national narratives. I show that dualism (‘independence’ within empire) was an attractive imperial reform model for Ottoman Muslim intellectuals. I describe first a forgotten Egyptian-Ottoman dualist vision, and then I analyse the more well-known Arab-Turkish dualist plans up to 1921.
The following article reconstructs the almost 25-year-long relationship between the two fin de siècle poets Arthur Schnitzler and Richard Dehmel. The analysis is based on the assumption that the rival “artist friendship” is determined by a constitutive generic competition. Schnitzler admired Dehmel’s genius in forms of poetry that he himself had not mastered, first and foremost lyric poetry, but otherwise regarded him critically where he himself had succeeded, namely in the genre of drama. This early resentment forms a lifelong paradigm of Schnitzler’s perception of Dehmel and prevented a sincere appreciation of Dehmel as an artistic equal.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
One of the variants for systematizing the activities of the historian of mathematics is proposed, as well as a scheme for organizing research and search work in the preparation of scientific articles and reports on the history of science.
The spatial distribution of the railway crossings on the river Danube in Hungary is very uneven. There is only one electrified and double-tracked bridge in the country, the Southern Railway Bridge in Budapest. The Újpest bridge in Budapest only provides connection through line 4 which is not electrified and the Baja bridge is not electrified, too, and both of them are single-tracked. The long-planned V0 railway line that is to be cross the Danube approximately halfway between Budapest and Baja would not only help to redistribute the total network flow which currently passes through almost exclusively the Southern bridge but would also provide redundancy for the existing bridges in the case of their disruption. Four of the five proposed V0 path alternatives are analyzed on the basis of these two network properties.
Flood changes may be attributed to drivers of change that belong to three main classes: atmospheric, catchment and river system drivers. In this work, we propose a data-based attribution approach for selecting which driver best relates to variations in time of the flood frequency curve. The flood peaks are assumed to follow a Gumbel distribution, whose location parameter changes in time as a function of the decadal variations of one of the following alternative covariates: annual and extreme precipitation for different durations, an agricultural land-use intensification index, and reservoir construction in the catchment, quantified by an index. The parameters of this attribution model are estimated by Bayesian inference. Prior information on one of these parameters, the elasticity of flood peaks to the respective driver, is taken from the existing literature to increase the robustness of the method to spurious correlations between flood and covariate time series. Therefore, the attribution model is informed in two ways: by the use of covariates, representing the drivers of change, and by the priors, representing the hydrological understanding of how these covariates influence floods. The Watanabe-Akaike information criterion is used to compare models involving alternative covariates. We apply the approach to 96 catchments in Upper Austria, where positive flood peak trends have been observed in the past 50 years. Results show that, in Upper Austria, one or seven day extreme precipitation is usually a better covariate for variations of the flood frequency curve than precipitation at longer time scales. Agricultural land-use intensification rarely is the best covariate, and the reservoir index never is, suggesting that catchment and river drivers are less important than atmospheric ones.
"„Sok szíves üdvözlettel régi barátos...” (“With kind regards, your old friend...”). Coriolan Petranu’s Friendly Connections to the Hungarian Historians. Coriolan Petranu is the founder of modern art history education and scientific research in Transylvania. He had received special education in this field of study that is relatively new in the region. He started his studies in 1911 at the University of Budapest, attending courses in law and art history. During the 1912-1913 academic year he joined the class of Professor Adolph Goldschmiedt (1863-1944) at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin. The professor was an illustrious personality from the same generation as art historians Emil Mâle, Wilhelm Vögte, Bernard Berenson, Roger Fry, Aby Warburg, and Heinrich Wölfflin, specialists who had provided a decisive impetus to art historical research during the twentieth century. In the end of 1913, Coriolan Petranu favored Vienna, with its prestigious art historical school attached to the university from the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There he completed and perfected his education under the supervision of Professor Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941). The latter scholar was highly appreciated for his contributions to the field of universal art history by including the cultures of Asia Minor (Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Persia), revealing the influence that this area had on proto-Christian art, as well as by researching ancient art in Northern Europe. In March 1920 the young art historian successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled Inhaltsproblem und Kunstgeschichte (”Content and art history”). He thus earned his doctor in philosophy title that opened him access to higher education teaching and art history research. His debut was positively marked by his activity as museographer at the Fine Art Museum in Budapest (Szepműveszeti Muzeum) in 1917-1918. Coriolan Petranu has researched Romanian vernacular architecture (creating a topography of wooden churches in Transylvania) and his publications were appreciated, published in the era’s specialized periodicals and volumes or presented during international congresses (such as those held in Stockholm in 1933, Warsaw in 1933, Sofia in 1934, Basel in 1936 and Paris in 1937). The Transylvanian art historian under analysis has exchanged numerous letters with specialists in the field. The valuable lot of correspondence, comprising several thousands of letters that he has received from the United States of America, Great Britain, Spain, France, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the USSR, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Egypt represents a true history of the stage and development of art history as a field of study during the Interwar Period. The archive of the Art History Seminary of the University in Cluj preserves one section dedicated to Hungarian letters that he has send to Hungarian specialists, art historians, ethnographers, ethnologists or colleagues passionate about fine art (Prof. Gerevich Tibor, Prof. Takács Zoltán, Dr. Viski Károly, Count Dr. Teleki Domokos). His correspondence with Fritz Valjavec, editor of the “Südostdeutsche Forschungen” periodical printed in München, is also significant and revealing. The letters in question reveal C. Petranu’s significant contribution through his reviews of books published by Hungarian art historians and ethnographers. Beyond the theoretical debates during which Prof. Petranu has criticized the theories formulated by Prof. Gerevich’s school that envisaged the globalization of Hungarian art between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period and that also included in this general category the works of German masters and artists with other ethnic backgrounds, he has also displayed a friendly attitude and appreciation for the activity/works of his Hungarian colleagues (Viski Károly and Takács Zoltán). The previously unpublished Romanian-Hungarian and Hungarian-Romanian set of letters discussed here attest to this. Keywords: Transylvania, correspondence, vernacular architecture, reviews, photographs, Gerevich Tibor, Dr. Viski Károly "
Opava has always been a city on the border. So there have been many changes of regimes and states to which Opava belonged, as well as changes of the city’s ethnic composition. The most numerous and rapid changes happened during the 20 century; whereby the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, then the first Czechoslovak republic until 1938, then part of the German Reich until 1945, then returning to be part of the Czechoslovak republic until 1993 and finally, as part of the Czech Republic till today. Within the century, Opava experienced a constitutional monarchy and periods of liberal democracy alternating with Nazi and Communist dictatorships. In addition to this, the circumstances of the Second World War changed the ethnic composition of the city. Thus, the history and cultural heritage of Opava are interesting sources for studying the politics of memory, the processes of urban space nationalization, as well as the symbolic changes. The politics of memory are, in certain forms, an expression of ideologies and efforts to fit memory by commemorating chosen cultural moments while other cultural moments are omitted by removing the links that lead to their remembrance. The main power groups try to convince the public of the legitimacy of their government by maintaining an awareness of the history held by the authority position or ideas that justify its legitimacy. In practice, the possibility to decide which elements of the past should be remembered have become an important source of power. The aim of the paper is to analyse and compare the politics of memory and efforts to change Opava’s symbolism. The study focuses primarily on the projection of ideologies and identities onto the symbolic landscape under different regimes during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Within the research the concept of urban symbolism is used in dealing with the city’s cultural dimension with a focus on the distribution and meaning of symbols and rituals in relation to the cultivated surroundings. Urban symbolism is expressed through different phenomena, such as the city layout, architecture, monuments and memorials, street and place names, as well as rituals, festivals and processions, as well as myths, novels, films, poetry, music, and websites. All of them can be considered symbol bearers. The study is limited to the analysis of urban public space aspects, such as the destruction and construction of symbolic sites (plaques, statues, monuments, buildings, graves), the renaming of streets and places, and commemorative rituals. In addition to literary sources, chronicles, periodicals and archival sources consulted. Also unrealized plans were taken into account, because especially plans testify to the politics of memory and the effort to change urban symbolism. The ambition of this article is to answer the following questions: How had been changing the politics of memory during the 20 century in Opava? How the city symbolism had been transforming in relation to the changes of jurisdiction to different states or political regimes and how sublimated into present form. How different approaches of political regimes and states to national history and cultural memory? The paper synthesizes the results of research of urban symbolism and politics of memory in the public space of Opava. It interprets and shows how urban public space has been adapting to the changes of regimes and the city symbolism has been modified consciously but also indirectly. Within all the regimes were obvious significant attempts to “transcode” the urban public space by removal of the sites of memory and the commemorative events and establishing Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2020, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 48-69. Opava – The city memory changes under different countries and regimes 49 of new ones. The physical and symbolic aspect of the city was influenced by the ideological and cultural values of its representatives and inhabitants as well as by specific socio-political circumstances and the ethnic composition of the city. The politics of memory has always been reflected in street names. Each regime attempted to delete the symbols of the previous one. The regime of the first Czechoslovak Republic wanted to change the monarchic Austrian city into a free Czech city (taking into account the German majority) and commemorated mainly prominent Czech individuals and victims of the First World War. Nazi Germany wanted to change the city image into a clearly German one. After the end of the Second World War, Czechoslovakia returned to the ideals of the “first republic” and tried to abolish not only the Nazi but also German past. The communist regime continued with transforming the public space according to socialist ideology. After the Velvet Revolution all symbols connected with communist dictatorship were removed from public spaces, and once again we can see a return to the ideals of the “first republic”. After the separation from Slovakia in 1993, the politics of memory has not significantly changed and public space is further shaped and transformed with the same approach to the urban symbolism. Despite the fact that the fluctuations between Germany and Czechoslovakia changed significantly the city symbolism from 1945 until today, some similar aspects can be traced, such as commemorating the victims of both wars, celebrating important Czech individuals, heroes and Soviet liberators. Likewise, all these regimes left the cultural memory of the unpleasant history associated with the persecution against Germans after the Second World War. And finally, the regimes of the first Czechoslovak Republic, German Reich and the third Czechoslovak Republic, all tried to make the national identity in the city stronger through a searching of the national architecture.