Ha-Balkan Ha-Bo‘er (The Balkans in Flames)

2021 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-399
Author(s):  
Eyal Ginio

Ha-Balkan Ha-Bo‘er (The Balkans in Flames), the memoirs of Yitzhak Halperin, are at the center of this article. Born in Palestine in 1890, Halperin was part of the so-called “first generation” – meaning Jews, natives of the newly established colonies in Palestine, who conversed in the Hebrew language and whose life and social productivity embodied the Zionist vision of the nation. Halperin volunteered to serve in the Ottoman Army in November 1911. Later, during the first weeks of the First Balkan War (October 1912-May 1913), he served on the Macedonian front before fleeing to Salonica, where he deserted.  Published in Hebrew in 1932, Halperin’s memoirs can be read against both Zionist and Ottoman contexts. They shed light on various personal experiences and perceptions that can enrich our understanding of his particular ideological and ethnic group. In addition, his memoirs are unique as they describe the daily experiences of an Ottoman rank-and-file soldier who served in the Balkan Wars. As such, it offers different insights into the broader Ottoman context. Halperin’s memoirs expose two main topics: the related issues of identity, sociability, and friendship as they developed among the conscripts during his military service; and his clear disappointment with the poor performance and low morale of the Ottoman army before and during the Balkan Wars.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Yorgos Christidis

This article analyzes the growing impoverishment and marginalization of the Roma in Bulgarian society and the evolution of Bulgaria’s post-1989 policies towards the Roma. It examines the results of the policies so far and the reasons behind the “poor performance” of the policies implemented. It is believed that Post-communist Bulgaria has successfully re-integrated the ethnic Turkish minority given both the assimilation campaign carried out against it in the 1980s and the tragic events that took place in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This Bulgaria’s successful “ethnic model”, however, has failed to include the Roma. The “Roma issue” has emerged as one of the most serious and intractable ones facing Bulgaria since 1990. A growing part of its population has been living in circumstances of poverty and marginalization that seem only to deteriorate as years go by. State policies that have been introduced since 1999 have failed at large to produce tangible results and to reverse the socio-economic marginalization of the Roma: discrimination, poverty, and social exclusion continue to be the norm. NGOs point out to the fact that many of the measures that have been announced have not been properly implemented, and that legislation existing to tackle discrimination, hate crime, and hate speech is not implemented. Bulgaria’s political parties are averse in dealing with the Roma issue. Policies addressing the socio-economic problems of the Roma, including hate speech and crime, do not enjoy popular support and are seen as politically damaging.


1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (7) ◽  
pp. 91-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. C. Lindrea ◽  
S. P. Pigdon ◽  
B. Boyd ◽  
G. A. Lockwood

During commissioning and process stabilization of a NDBEPR plant at Bendigo intracellular distribution and movement of phosphorus, K+, Mg2+ and Ca2+ was followed to establish the nature of biomass development. The system was also monitored at the end of a period of breakdown of the BEPR process and during its return to phosphorus removal. Phosphorus (P) and Mg2+ distribution in the biomass were closely related during all phases of plant operation, and laboratory trials indicated that the poor performance of the full-scale plant was associated with seasonal reduction in influent Mg2+. Laboratory scale trials produced a similar effect when the influent Mg2+ was limited to concentrations much lower than those experienced in the full scale plant, but only after the Mg2+ and P reserves in the biomass were depleted. The distribution of P, K+, Mg2+ and Ca2+ in the biomass from the full scale plant was similar to that seen in the laboratory trials when cations in the feed were severely limited and recovery of the full scale plant also closely matched that of the laboratory scale system.


Author(s):  
Mohammad Siddique Seddon

This chapter explores the religious and political influences that shaped Abdullah Quilliam’s Muslim missionary activities, philanthropic work and scholarly writings in an attempt to shed light on his particular political convictions as manifest through his unique religiopolitical endeavors. It focuses especially on Quilliam’s Methodist upbringing in Liverpool and his support of the working classes. It argues that Quilliam’s religious and political activism, although primarily inspired by his conversion to Islam, was also shaped and influenced by the then newly emerging proletariat, revolutionary socialism. Quilliam’s continued commitment to the burgeoning working-class trades union movement, both as a leading member representative and legal advisor, coupled with his reputation as the "poor man’s lawyer" because of his frequent fee-free representations for the impoverished, demonstrates his empathetic proximity to working-class struggles.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 353
Author(s):  
Thomas Flayols ◽  
Andrea Del Prete ◽  
Majid Khadiv ◽  
Nicolas Mansard ◽  
Ludovic Righetti

Contacts between robots and environment are often assumed to be rigid for control purposes. This assumption can lead to poor performance when contacts are soft and/or underdamped. However, the problem of balancing on soft contacts has not received much attention in the literature. This paper presents two novel approaches to control a legged robot balancing on visco-elastic contacts, and compares them to other two state-of-the-art methods. Our simulation results show that performance heavily depends on the contact stiffness and the noises/uncertainties introduced in the simulation. Briefly, the two novel controllers performed best for soft/medium contacts, whereas “inverse-dynamics control under rigid-contact assumptions” was the best one for stiff contacts. Admittance control was instead the most robust, but suffered in terms of performance. These results shed light on this challenging problem, while pointing out interesting directions for future investigation.


1964 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oscar A. Parsons ◽  
Harriet I. Maslow ◽  
Freda Morris ◽  
J. Peter Denny

The Trail Making Test, previously reported highly effective in differentiating brain-damaged from non-brain-damaged Ss, was administered to 21 brain-damaged Ss and 63 non-brain-damaged Ss. Since the latter Ss performed at a level indistinguishable from that of the brain-damaged Ss, several studies were designed in an attempt to “explain” the poor performance of the non-brain-damaged Ss. The possible effects of behavioral agitation, anxiety, examiner differences, facility with letters of the alphabet, order of administration, and ego-involvement were investigated. Only anxiety was found to be significantly related to performance. However, in other analyses age, education, vocabulary, and degree of psychiatric disturbance were significantly related to performance. Until these variables are considered in the scoring system, it seems unlikely that the TMT will be effective as a general screening test for brain-damage.


2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Cavalcanti Ferreira ◽  
Leonardo Fonseca da Silva

AbstractThis article examines the effects of sectorial shifts and structural transformation on the recent productivity path of Latin America. We use a four-sector (agriculture, industry, modern services and traditional services) general equilibrium model calibrated to the main economies in the region. The model very closely replicates labor reallocations across sectors and the growth of aggregate labor productivity from 1950 to 2005. Structural transformation explains a sizeable portion of the region’s convergence in the first decades. In most cases, the poor performance of the traditional services sector is the main cause of the slowdown in productivity growth observed in the region after the mid-1970s and is a key factor in explaining the divergence during this period.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Manatschal

AbstractMuch has been written on the positive effect of direct democracy (initiatives, referendums) on voter turnout. However, we have limited knowledge about potential differential effects on voters belonging to various ethnic groups. The paper argues that depending on a group’s responsiveness to the political context, direct democracy can (dis-)integrate voters (from) into the electorate. Empirical analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) voting supplement survey data, together with data on the absolute use of direct democracy across US states, corroborates this theoretical expectation, however lending more support for the disintegrating assumption. Frequent direct democratic elections further widen the negative voting gap between first-generation Asian voters and voters living in the US for three generations or longer, whereas they tend to diminish this voting gap for first-generation Hispanic voters. The disintegrative pattern for first-generation Asian voters remains even significant when excluding California from the state sample, yet not the integrative tendency for first-generation Hispanics. Additional analyses using alternative measures of direct democracy and voting, and applying statistical adjustments to address causality concerns, confirm the robustness of these findings, which shed light on the so-far underexplored (dis-)integrative potential of political institutions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 618 ◽  
pp. A117 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Zhang

Context. CLEAN algorithms are excellent deconvolution solvers that remove the sidelobes of the dirty beam to clean the dirty image. From the point of view of the scale, there are two types: scale-insensitive CLEAN algorithms, and scale-sensitive CLEAN algorithms. Scale-insensitive CLEAN algorithms perform excellently well for compact emission and perform poorly for diffuse emission, while scale-sensitive CLEAN algorithms are good for both point-like emission and diffuse emission but are often computationally expensive. However, observed images often contain both compact and diffuse emission. An algorithm that can simultaneously process compact and diffuse emission well is therefore required. Aims. We propose a new deconvolution algorithm by combining a scale-insensitive CLEAN algorithm and a scale-sensitive CLEAN algorithm. The new algorithm combines the advantages of scale-insensitive algorithms for compact emission and scale-sensitive algorithms for diffuse emission. At the same time, it avoids the poor performance of scale-insensitive algorithms for diffuse emission and the great computational load of scale-sensitive algorithms for compact emission in residuals. Methods. We propose a fuse mechanism to combine two algorithms: the Asp-Clean2016 algorithm, which solves the computationally expensive problem of convolution operation in the fitting procedure, and the classical Högbom CLEAN (Hg-Clean) algorithm, which is faster and works equally well for compact emission. It is called fused CLEAN (fused-Clean) in this paper. Results. We apply the fused-Clean algorithm to simulated EVLA data and compare it to widely used algorithms: the Hg-Clean algorithm, the multi-scale CLEAN (Ms-Clean), and the Asp-Clean2016 algorithm. The results show that it performs better and is computationally effective.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document