Thursday, March 31, 2016

Detail of the cycle "Stories of the life of the Virgin" - William Baker and workshop - 1497-87 - Fresco - Eton College Chapel.

Byzantine wonder in the Roman Forum.

The Roman Forum is probably one of the most dramatic and charming areas of Rome, especially at night, when its idyllic settings bring us back to ages past. In one of its most spectacular areas we find the ancient church of Santa Maria Antiqua, an early Christian church with rare Byzantine-style frescoes, it was thought to be lost in 847 because of an earthquake, another church, then demolished in 1900 was built upon it, the original building was found to be intact in the late 18th century. The most interesting fact is that the church has been closed down for intensive restoration since 1980 and only this year it was once again opened.

The church was built at the foot of the Palatine hill, where the temple of Augustus was located in an area that dates from the time of Domitian as an access to the Forum from the hill and where probably Pretorian guards were stationed.

When the Byzantines ruled over Rome in 552 they restored some of the original imperial palaces, as well as the ancient walls and aqueducts, they also used a sort of rectangular hall and the adjacent four sided-portico as a sort of Palatine chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Until then the churches built inside of the city walls had as a titulus the name of the original owners of the houses in which churches were founded, whereas new churches were founded outside the walls as sanctuaries located on the tombs of martyrs, such as San Callisto or San Sebastiano. The construction of a church on these spots was thought to "exorcise" the ghosts of paganism.

The church was continuously restored and embellished by popes, such as Martinus I, John VII, Zachary, Paul I and Adrian I. In 847 an earthquake made the surrounding buildings collapse on the church and Pope Leo IV transferred the titulus to Santa Maria Nova (now Basilica of Santa Francesca Romana). In 1617 a little church was built on the ruins of it by architect Onorio Longhi with the titulus of Santa Maria Liberatrice.

Excavations began in the 18th century and more precise ones occurred in the end of the 19th century when the original frescoes were discovered, this is when the Longhi church was demolished and the icons and titulus were moved to a church in Testaccio.

The original Roman building had a basilica-shaped plan, a rectangular hall divided in three aisles. A little apse was created in the thick wall and two chapels on the two sides of the sanctuary. The quadrangle used to be a vestibule and there are the remains of an impluvium from the time of Caligula  and niches that used to host statues, on the left there is a a ramp that leads to the Palatine hill.

The church also hosts an incredible quantity of frescoes executed between the 6th and 9th century in the Byzantine stye. These works are very important, they include the first representation of an enthroned Madonna and they are also essential as a testimony of Byzantine art, because nothing of this sort survived in the east after the iconoclast crisis of 726.

In the left hand aisle there are two cycle of frescoes, in the top there are scenes from the old testament and on the bottom an enthroned Christ surrounded by saints, popes and martyrs.

Among the most interesting wall paintings there is a crucifixion in a chapel at the end of the aisle in which Christ's feet are not overlying. The Byzantine influence on this work is quite strong, especially because of the frontality and hierarchy of the proportions and symmetry of the figures, characteristics of a new visual language more easy to understand by the people.

Another beautiful fresco is the archangel Gabriel, known as the angelo bello, dating 565/578.

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

The Prince and the Elderly Lady.

The vecchietta romana, the Roman elderly lady is an institution in the Eternal City. They are famous for their strong character, you don't want to be against one, it would probably be the last thing you will do. They decide what goes on in churches and set up the prices in the mercato. They can be seen in the early hours of the day or in the late afternoon after returning from the market or church. There is one story that proves how great these women can be...

If you happen to pass by the grand Palazzo Altieri on the Piazza del Gesù, you should linger for a bit in the via Santo Stefano del Cacco. You will notice a narrow door and two small windows that are very much in contrast with the rest of the building. This is not a mistake of the great Baroque architect Giovanni Antonio De Rossi who designed the palace, but it is the result of a very funny anecdote.

In 1650 the Altieri, a noble papal family, commissioned a great palazzo to be built in the Piazza del Gesù. Many buildings, belonging both to the rich and the poor were sacrificed to make room for it, the prince spared no expense in buying all those houses to make room for his. In the end only one house was left, that of an elderly lady, widow of a shoemaker who did not want to renounce to her modest house in which she was born and in which she wanted to die. The lady declined all offers from the prince, he even offered her thrice the sum her house was actually worth. In the Papal States there used to be no laws regarding the expropriation of private property for public interest, therefore work on the palace stopped. The noble family made an appeal to the Pope who decided that work on the palace could proceed while respecting the house of the lady. Architect De Rossi was forced to incorporate the modest house in the huge palazzo, with its own private entrance, the prince even paid the renovation of the little house so that it would not clash with the rest of the palace. The little house can be still seen today and this story reminds us about the strength of Roman ladies. When you see one, think about the vecchietta that defeated one of the greatest Roman families of all time!

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

The miracle of St. Philip Neri.

The chapel of the Palazzo Massimo near the Piazza Navona was created in the XVIII century in a room of the Palazzo where in 1583 St. Philip Neri brought the son of Fabrizio Massimo back to life - since then, every 16th March - solemn Masses are celebrated in the chapel remembering this miracle and the blessing bestowed by the saint on the family. Attending the service is indeed an incredible experience.

Monday, March 7, 2016

Cloth of Honour.

It is interesting to notice that the square pattern found in the "Cloth of Honour" at St. Nicholas Church was already quite popular during the 15th century in Europe.

The "Cloth of Honour" at St. Nicholas Church, Compton

Here is a couple of examples from Renaissance Italy: one comes from a palazzo near the Piazza Navona, in Rome the theme is quite popular on these sort of façades and also in other decorations.

A Renaissance palazzo near the Piazza Navona

The other example is that of the Della Robbia ceiling decoration in the Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal in San Miniato Florence.

The Della Robbia ceiling in the Cardinal of Portugal Chapel in San Miniato, Florence

I think it is an interesting proof of the connection there was in Europe through the arts. We can draw an imaginary line that goes from Rome to England, just like the Via Francigena: after Rome we have Florence that reaches Paris and then Bruges, here is the strongest connection given both by trade and the arts, following this the line reaches England, where, in the late Middle Ages, visual arts flourished, especially in the south and in East Anglia, where the Flemish influence is still visible.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

An unexpected discovery: an Englishman's house in Renaissance Rome.

Not too far from the Pantheon, near the Chiesa della Maddalena, we find what is reputedly Rome’s smallest square: Piazza Rondanini, along the Via del Pozzo delle Cornacchie. The piazza takes its name from its main building: the Palazzo Rondanini.

The Rondanini Palace

The history of the Palazzo is quite interesting: it was built in the early years of the 16th century for the English prelate Thomas Wolsey who was appointed Cardinal titular of St. Cecilia in Trastevere in 1515.

The early coat of arms of Henry VIII

Unfortunately, the Cardinal died in 1530 in Leicester before he could even visit the palace. On the first floor, in what is now the restaurant “Le Volte” there is a room with the original 16th century fresco decoration in the Renaissance grotesque style with the arms of Henry VIII. The fascinating fresco is in the Roman Renaissance style, there are painted trees on the walls of the room, creating the illusion of being in a garden, this was a very popular theme then. The palace was built on the semi-circular walls of the baths of Nero.

The Renassaince fresco from Wolsey's palazzo

After Wolsey, one of the first owners of the palazzo was Cardinal Tiberio Crispo, very close to the Farnese and in particular to Alessandro (Pope Paul III) who commissioned frescoes attributed to Raffaellino del Colle that still decorate the Piano Nobile of the palazzo. After his death the Boncompagni acquired the palace, then it passed to the Neapolitan cardinal Alfonso Gesualdo who sold it to Gianfranco Aldobrandini in 1596, nephew of Clement VIII. He commissioned the restoration of the palace to Ottaviano Mascarino. In 1688 Cardinal Paolo Emilio Rondanini bought the palazzo which still brings his family name, later also the piazza took it, until then it was known as “Piazza di Aquili”, from the famous family of Roman Renaissance painters that lived and worked there, such as Antoniazzo Romano and Marcantonio Aquili. The palace’s name changed into Palazzo Rondanini alla Rotonda to distinguish it from the other Rondanini palace on the Via del Corso. Despite all the different owners the palace still displays the beautiful frescoes with the late Medieval English coat of arms, making it an Englishman's house in Renaissance Rome.

Detail of the Renaissance fresco with the garden illusion from Wolsey's palazzo


The U.S. should seek to organize an international donor conference including high-level representatives of governments, business and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to devise a new Marshall Plan of multilateral economic assistance, loans and trade credits that would benefit Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon if and when peace and security agreements are reached.

It is time for the world community, with American leadership and broad participation, to create a historic "peace dividend" that would incentivize all parties to reach agreements and make it clear to all peoples that a new peace and security are better than endless war, carnage, poverty and death.

I will have more to say about Egypt when the dust settles in the near future. I will say that like many around the world I was inspired and moved and supported the young people, women and others who stood at Tahrir Square demanding the end of the Mubarak regime.

And like many people around the world, and many people in Egypt, I was saddened by the way the first attempt turned out and am inspired that the young people, women and others are back again risking their lives to build the Egypt they believe in.

My favorite founding fathers were Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, who believed that the great cause was a universal cause. For those who believe that it will be hard to resolve the issues between Israel and Palestinians, and hard to bring true conciliation from Cairo to Damascus today, they are of course correct.

But Nelson Mandela spent decades imprisoned by a government practicing the racist scourge of apartheid before achieving for South Africa what George Washington achieved for America. I stand with the young people, women and others who journeyed again this week to Tahrir Square. They stand for the ideal that good and brave people can make life better for their nation, and we should stand with them now as we honor Mandela today.


Log In

carving3Since our establishment in 1995, our CDNV founders came from a long line of hand craftsmen. CDNV expertise originated from Pre-Columbian, Asian and Egyptian traditions and customs.

The tradition of craftsmanship developed by the population of San Antonio, Ecuador dates to the 16th century, and includes sought after wooden religious art and altar pieces that are shipped to Colombia, Peru, Spain and elsewhere.

Wood works and wood carving, an activity with ancient cultural roots among Andean populations, much of the art in Ecuador is traditional and usually the skills involved are passed down from generation to generation.

CDNV integrates old traditions that date back to the 14th century with modern designs through the 21st century.

Each and every individual frame possess its own uniqueness. We take pride in our work, and continue to strive to perfect each and every frame produced at CDNV.


 Subcontracting Opportunity: Analysis and modeling to make recommendations and inform strategic planning : CSH

December 14, 2017

CSH is seeking a subcontractor to provide expertise in analysis and strategic planning related to Medicaid Managed Care Organization funding for housing-related services, rental subsidies, tenancy supports, and/or infrastructure investments for high need individuals experiencing homelessness.  The subcontractor will provide expertise and document review to inform strategic planning, governance, and financial modeling for a Chicago and Cook County Flexible Housing Pool (FHP).  A new fund is being created that will include combined public and private funding for rental subsidies and housing tenancy supports.  The subcontractor will provide expertise to inform the FHP Planning Leadership Team on issues pertaining to potential health plan investment in the fund.

The work will include informing the financial models the FHP leadership team is creating as well as making recommendations and providing guidance on governance structure and program agreements.

Planned activities:

  1. Attend FHP meetings per an agreed upon schedule.
  2. Provide strategic guidance to inform governance, financial modeling, and program agreements of FHP.
  3. Create documents or tools, gather data, and compile information as needed in order to complete the deliverables outlined below.

Deliverable 1: Review financial modeling products and provide guidance specific to potential concerns, opportunities, and interests of hospitals that would be potential investors.

Deliverable 2: Prepare a summary report or document that includes the recommendations, potential barriers, and opportunity areas specific to hospital investment in a new FHP.

Deliverable 3: Create a sell sheet or terms of participation that could be a takeaway for health plants, ensuing linkage to the Illinois MCO contracts.

Funding Available:
An amount not to exceed $2750 is available for this project in calendar year 2018. Through the contracting process, specific tasks and dates for deliverables will be identified and agreed upon.

Application Process and Vendor Requirements:
To apply for this opportunity email Julie Nelson indicating your interest and qualifications at Julie.nelson@csh.org by 5 pm, December 19th.  Applicants may apply for both subcontracting opportunities related to the Flexible Housing Pool. Upon review of vendor applications, CSH will meet with the selected and best qualified vendor in order to provide additional information.  The selected vendor will then have the opportunity to submit a formal proposal for the scope of work.

Applications may be submitted in any format the respondent chooses to use.  Applications received before the deadline will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

  • Demonstrated successful performance of substantially similar work
  • Relevant project work specific to housing as a health care intervention or hospital collaborations and partnerships addressing social determinants of health.
  • Experience and expertise in population health and/or inappropriate hospital utilization due to homelessness or unstable housing and the resulting financial and outcome impacts on hospitals
  • Experience and expertise specific to hospital community benefits
  • Experience and capacity to act as a liaison and convene key Chicago and Cook County hospital leadership, including membership associations
  • Years of relevant experience
  • Rate reasonableness and overall cost of services
  • Special consideration will be given to small, disadvantaged, minority or women-owned businesses

Please note that CSH requires subcontractors, including individuals and sole proprietors, to carry workers' compensation insurance while performing work under a CSH subcontract.  If you have questions regarding this requirement, please contact Julie Nelson.  CSH subcontractors cannot have existing, pending or expired debarments that preclude them from doing business with the United States government and cannot have convictions for, nor have any pending indictments for, fraud or a criminal offense in connection with a public contract or subcontract.

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Southport, Manitoba, Canada

Monday, October 25, 2010

Tubulence Penetration

Happy Flying!

Monday, October 18, 2010

How High Can You Fly?

I was recently reading a thread on an online forum (How high can You Fly? at www.aviationbanter.com).

The question asked by the original poster was basically, “If engine limitations disappear, how high could an aircraft fly, given aerodynamic and airframe limitations?”. Interesting question, I thought. Unfortunately, the thread degenerated into personal sniping and, in many cases, a demonstrated lack of understanding of the problem(s) being discussed. So I thought I’d take a run at the question here.

First of all, engine limitations will never really disappear. That is, unless someone (who will subsequently become very rich) finds a way to circumvent the Second Law of Thermodynamics. However, with enough technological advances, these limitations can become practically insignificant in comparison to other limitations we face. So let’s look at the question from the idealized position of no engine limitations other than the fact that the engine must be air breathing (for combustion or some other chemical reaction) or at least air processing (for a propeller or fan).

The fact is, for currently existing airframes, eliminating engine limitations wouldn’t significantly improve maximum altitudes. It would almost certainly improve cruise and climb performance within the existing altitude range—consider an engine that produces more power from a the same weight, or one that doesn’t lose power as altitude is gained. It might also lead to small improvements in maximum altitude. But big changes in maximum altitude would also require changes to the airframe design.

Two non-engine problems that show up at high altitudes are critical Mach (resulting in the so called "Coffin Corner"), which is due to compressibility effects, and a decrease in the damping of flutter, which is the result of reduced air density.

Critical Mach (Mcrit) is the lowest speed at which a portion of the airflow over the top of a wing travels at or above the speed of sound. As the airflow slows down again, it forms a shock wave, which causes airflow separation—leading to a loss of lift and a massive rise in drag. As a general rule, thinner wings have a higher Mcrit than thicker wings. This is one reason why high altitude aircraft tend to have thinner, more lightly cambered wings.

Mcrit becomes an issue because at higher altitudes, a given indicated airspeed corresponds to a higher true airspeed (due to reduced air density). At the same time, the speed of sound is getting lower (due to reduced air temperature). So for a given indicated airspeed, Mach number gets higher as altitude increases. Conversely, for a given Mach number, indicated airspeed gets lower as altitude increases. This means that Mcrit, which is a fixed function of wing design, corresponds to a progressively lower indicated airspeed as we climb higher.

Sooner or later as we climb, Mcrit enters into the cruise speed range. At some altitude, stall speed and Mcrit meet, and there is no speed at which controlled equilibrium flight can be maintained. No matter how good our engine is, we must remain below this altitude at all times. We must also be cognizant of the narrowing range of useable airspeeds available as we approach this altitude. As an example, the U-2 high altitude spy plane has a tiny speed margin at it’s operational (read “spying”) altitude. 5 knots too slow and it stalls, 5 knots too fast and it overspeeds! Airline pilots, flying aircraft that are designed for high altitudes, must be very aware of the reduced speed range available at higher altitudes. The problem shows up at much lower altitudes in aircraft that are not designed for high Mach number flight.

Airframe problem number 2 is the effect that altitude has on Vne. One of the defining features of flight at speeds over Vne is the presence of flutter, which is an unstable and destructive vibration in the airframe which is aggravated by high speed airflow. This vibration is damped at low altitude in the higher density air. The damping effectively increases the value of Vne. To a first approximation, we can treat Vne as a constant true airspeed v-speed.

So the bottom line here is that the indicated Vne actually drops as altitude increases—it isn’t constant, as we normally assume. Manufacturers account for this in many cases by adding a carefully determined safety factor that allows for reduced damping at the aircraft’s absolute ceiling. Some manufacturers choose instead to publish multiple Vne’s, which are lower at higher altitudes—up to the aircraft’s absolute ceiling. Either of these approaches works fine, but what happens if we strap a new engine onto the airframe and enable flight at higher altitudes? In the absence of additional manufacturer’s Vne data, flying to higher altitudes is a gamble. We could inadvertently exceed the altitude-appropriate Vne and find ourselves in a world of hurt. This problem is easy to fix if we have data on the Vne change with altitude. But we will still eventually run into problems because the margin between Vs and Vne is too narrow—assuming we don’t run into Mcrit problems first!

So all in all, it fair to say that if-and-when far superior engine technology becomes available, airframe design will have to be adapted accordingly. Simply bolting newer and better engines onto existing airframes won’t allow us to realize the full potential of these engines. Alas, this is not a problem we’ll likely need to address for many years yet!

Happy Flying!

Monday, October 11, 2010

Fall Like a Leaf, Grasshopper

Today I went on a "Mutual Proficiency Flight" in the Grob. These flights are used here to keep instructors proficient without the instructor practice being obtained at the expense of the students. It’s an excellent program for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that we can work on improving our own flying skills without worrying about students seeing us get it wrong. This is not about pride or ego, but about the fact that students are following our example, and if they see us do something wrong, there’s always the risk that that’s the example that will be followed.

One of the exercises we did was a "Falling Leaf Stall". The Falling Leaf is a maneuver in which we enter a stall and, rather than recover immediately (as we usually do), we remain in the stall for an extended period—often losing multiple thousands of feet of altitude. This gives us an opportunity to observe the symptoms of the stall for an extended period and to (try to) keep the wings level with rudder. Most aircraft are directionally unstable in the stall, so directional and roll control can be tricky, and ailerons are usually a no-no (“Why?” You ask? This is a topic for another post!). I wanted to do the Falling Leaf because I’m still very new to the Grob, and I’ve always considered the maneuver to be an excellent skill-building exercise.

Much to my chagrin, I didn’t do a very good job. I guess I didn’t do terrible, but mediocre would be a fair assessment. My training partner, Brandon, did a much better job. So, of course, I had to try a second attempt. It was an improvement, but still not as good as Brandon’s first try. In both of my attempts, I had to recover earlier than planned in order to avoid spinning—which, of course, is one of the points of the exercise!

During normal stall training, we recover from the stall either at the "first indication" (which, in practice, means before the stall), or immediately upon entering the stall. This makes a lot of sense, since the objective is to recover with a minimum loss of altitude. Why is this minimum loss of altitude so important? Stalls in the “real world” generally occur at low altitude. So they mandate a quick and effective recovery to prevent an unpleasant encounter with the ground (which, in case you can’t tell, is a euphemism for “crash”). So it makes sense to train the way we fly. A quick recovery in training will promote a quick recovery in the real world.

The problem with this quick recovery approach is that it limits our exposure to aircraft behavior in and around the stall. Why is this bad? Well, for at least two reasons: 1) The more exposure we have to stall symptoms, the better we are at recognizing an unplanned stall, and 2) Aircraft behavior (read “control response”) in the stall is usually very different than aircraft behavior out of the stall (I say "usually" because different aircraft types have different stall characteristics).

Point (1) is important because in order to recover from an inadvertent stall with minimum loss of altitude, we first have to recognize that we are stalled (or about to stall). Failure to recognize a stalled condition is just as bad as an inability to recover.

Point (2) is important because the vast majority of aircraft types require that we not use ailerons while stalled (and like I said above, this is a whole ’nother post). This is a hard habit to break since at all other times, we control roll with ailerons. Ask a flight instructor how difficult it is to get students to not use ailerons to correct for a wing-drop in a stall and they’ll tell you all about it. But find an instructor who uses the Falling Leaf, and you’ll probably hear a different story. The difference comes down to the oft-quoted mantra of "Practice Makes Perfect" (or, more correctly, "Proper Practice Makes Perfect"). More time spent in the stall, correcting correctly, leads to better directional corrections, even during the quick stalls that we normally train for.

It’s always struck me as odd that the Falling Leaf isn’t a required exercise for the training of pilots. In fact, I’ve met instructors who have never heard of the exercise. If you fly and you’ve never tried the Falling Leaf, go up with an instructor who is familiar with the exercise and try it out. If you’re an instructor and you’ve struggled with your student’s directional control during stall training, try the Falling Leaf exercise and see how things improve.

Happy Flying!

Monday, October 4, 2010

To Be or Not To Be -- An Instructor, That Is

One of the questions that often gets asked by new Commercial Pilots or Commercial Pilot candidates nearing completion is the dreaded, "Should I get my Instructor Rating?". It shows up again and again on online aviation forums (for example: here), and practicing instructors are constantly getting the question from students.

I refer to the question as "dreaded" because there really isn’t a right answer. The answer is different for everyone. Should you or shouldn’t you? Maybe. Maybe not.

I’m inclined to say that if you have no experience beyond your own training, then you shouldn’t be instructing. But that view ignores the present reality of the industry, and I’ll leave it aside for now. Perhaps it will make an interesting future post.

The main question you need to ask yourself is, "Do you want to be a flight instructor?". This shouldn’t be confused with, "Do you want to build hours at someone else’s expense?", which , alas, is a far-too-common motivation for people who don’t actually want to instruct. There are other ways to build hours. If this is what you’re looking for, do some homework and find them. But do your homework early, the direction you choose may influence choices you make during your CPL training (e.g. – do you need float time? taildragger time? multi-engine time? mountain experience?).

So, do you want to be a flight instructor? Think before you answer.

Think about it another way: If your instructing flight hours didn’t count in your logbook, would you still be interested? If your answer is no, that’s a red flag. Perhaps it’s not a show stopper, but it’s definitely a red flag. There are in fact some charter and airline companies that don’t recognize instructing as "real" experience. Frankly, I don’t agree, but again, this is a topic for a future post. But you have to realize that these companies are out there. Of course, there are also charter and airline companies that show a (usually small) preference to ex-instructors—at least partly because they make promising future instructors (i.e. - training captains, company check pilots, and various pilot/manager positions).

The bottom line here is that if you’re just instructing to get hours and move on, it’s a bad idea. Even if you ignore ethical and professional considerations—such as the instructional commitment and quality of instruction received by your students—you will be miserable. Instructing, done right, is hard work. It’s very rewarding for those who have a genuine desire to teach, but it’s tedious and frustrating to those just building hours. Between the classroom, simulator, and administration (i.e. – paperwork), your actual flight time is less than half of your work. Again, this really isn’t a problem for those who want to teach. But if you just want to fly and don’t care so much about the development of others, this can be a painful existence.

So if you want to instruct and believe you will find it rewarding, do it! If not, move on. Get an entry level position towing banners, doing pipeline patrols, or working the dock in anticipation of flying floats (which will require you to get float experience first—do that as part of your CPL!).

Happy Flying!


Matrix Games Releases Starshatter

Matrix Games announced that it has released Starshatter:

Starshatter uses a dynamic campaign engine to custom-build an unlimited number of unique missions into five story-based campaigns. These campaigns can take a player from fighter pilot or frigate captain all the way to fleet commander, and it can be played either single-player or with up to eight players on a network. The surroundings for each mission are dynamic and adaptive, so that missions that are not chosen by the player are performed by other pilots who may or may not succeed. Thus the storyline is advanced according to the players' choices as well as their piloting skills. As players advance, they will gain opportunities to engage in both atmospheric and space assaults, command squadrons, determine mission rosters and plan and execute strategies for task forces and starships.

David Heath, Director of Operations at Matrix Games, said: "This is a completely new breed of space combat game. Gamers have been waiting for years for such a multi-dimensional flight strategy simulator. It's not just an empty box with beautiful graphics; on the contrary, sci-fi flight sim fans and strategy gamers alike will enjoy the dynamic, intelligent play and will find an addictive and fulfilling game in Starshatter ."

Note - the game has nothing to do with bowel movements.


Deconstruction of a Myth?
Austria and the Hungarian Refugees of 1956-57

The wave of refugees created by the 1956 Hungarian revolution constitutes a particularly interesting example of political migration. When studying this exodus and its effects, Hungary’s Western neighbour Austria deserves special attention since it was the country that at first received the majority of the refugees. Large-scale refugee movements typically have important political and security repercussions for both the sending and receiving of countries. Judged by today’s standards—with the routine news in the apathetic “first” world of tens of thousands of refugees desperately trying to enter Europe in search of a brighter future—it seems almost amazing how positively, even passionately, the Hungarian refugees were welcomed in Austria and elsewhere in the West.

The fact that 1956 represents an exceptional and fascinating moment in migration history may explain why in Austria these events tend to be remembered in a highly positive way. It is often the case that contemporary Austrian witnesses have their own personal story to tell of Austria’s impressive humanitarian performance. In May 1957 the Austrian Interior Minister Oskar Helmer stressed in a session of the council of ministers that Austria had made “a good impression” because of its willingness to help the refugees. He continued: “We have earned ourselves a name in the entire world because of the refugees”.[1] Both Austrian and foreign scholarship on this topic almost unanimously agrees on this positive evaluation of Austria’s role in sheltering the refugees. During the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolution in October 2006, the truism of Austria’s selfless provision of aid was hardly questioned, as newspaper articles, exhibitions, and above all official ceremonies celebrated Austria’s positive role in 1956.[2]

There is no doubt that the efforts of the Austrian people were indeed outstanding. As the popular American novelist James A. Michener wrote in his famous book The Bridge at Andau, which was based on interviews he conducted with Hungarian refugees in Austrian refugee camps, “It would require another book to describe in detail Austria’s contribution to freedom. I can express it briefly only in this way: If I am ever required to be a refugee, I hope to make it to Austria.”[3] The sheer magnitude of Austria’s efforts is amply demonstrated in the countless thankful notes from Hungarians (and non-Hungarians) from all over the world now in the Austrian State Archive in Vienna. To cite just one example, the following letter reached the Austrian Foreign Ministry from Brisbane, Australia: “We, the Hungarian Community in Brisbane, wish to express our most sincere gratitude for the help your government extended to our brave compatriots wounded in their desperate struggle for freedom. During the centuries your country has often helped us in our historical role of being Europe’s bulwark against the hordes of the East, but help has never been more appreciated than in this critical hour.”[4]

In the midst of all this (self-)praise, it is all too easy to forget that Austria was cast into a very delicate situation due to the influx of the Hungarian refugees for which it was not prepared in terms of either resources or infrastructure. The aim of this paper is to present, on the basis of archival material, a more balanced picture of the reception of the Hungarian refugees by highlighting how Austria struggled to handle the situation. It will be shown how Austria as a state reacted to this difficult situation and how different institutions—ministries, charity organisations, and the United Nations—managed to work together to resolve the crisis.

The 1956 Hungarian revolution and Austria

Austria received its state treaty and full sovereignty in May 1955 after a decade of occupation by Allied forces. The Hungarian crisis, which broke out on October 23, 1956, constituted its first serious foreign policy crisis.[5] When the Soviet troops used brutal military force to crush the thirteen-day revolt, Austria had to put into effect the neutrality it had adopted only a year before. While the Austrian population and its leadership (except the politically isolated and unimportant Austrian communists) clearly sympathized with the freedom-fighting Hungarians, the Austrian government had to live up to its neutral status and carefully measure its reactions. In particular, its border was secured to prevent any interference from Austrian territory. Its prominent role in connection with the Hungarian uprising was initially to allow those people fleeing Hungary to enter Austria and subsequently to direct them on to other countries. Its humanitarian efforts were acknowledged world-wide, apart from of course the Soviet Union and its satellites, who accused Austria of having allowed “reactionary elements” and weapons to cross the Austrian-Hungarian border and thus of having violated its neutrality.

A breaking wave of refugees

Although refugees were already a familiar sight in Austria in the 1950s,[6] the massive influx of Hungarian refugees proved to be an exceptional moment in Austrian history, even if its long term role was primarily to act as a first place for asylum and a hub for collecting refugees in preparation for further movement elsewhere.

At the outbreak of the revolution and during the early days of fighting, there was little to worry about because the number of refugees was relatively small. At this point only 3,000 to 4,000 people crossed into Austria.[7] The Austrian authorities sent a telegram to their embassies in Paris, London, and Washington requesting help, but at that time they did not expect a large influx of refugees. After all, many Austrian officials seemed to believe that the revolution would be victorious and a flood of refugees was unlikely to occur. Nevertheless, the Austrian Minister of the Interior Oskar Helmer proclaimed as early as October 26 that asylum would be granted to all Hungarian refugees, regardless of their reasons for leaving their home country.[8]

The few refugees who came before early November did not cause any embarrassment for the authorities. However, this state of affairs soon changed dramatically. On November 4 Soviet troops mounted a powerful intervention, aiming to crush the revolt. Suddenly, the hopes of a victorious revolution vanished and gave way to the fear of Soviet repression and reprisals. The massive influx of people into Austria started in the early morning of that day. Although the authorities had been preparing for an arrival of refugees, this mass immigration exceeded all their calculations. It was as if a dam had burst; all along the 300-km-long frontier men, women, and children travelling in trucks, tractors, carts or on foot crossed from Hungary to Austria.[9] For weeks, the border was entirely open and on a daily basis 3,000 to 5,000 refugees entered Austrian soil. The “Iron Curtain”—or to use the official Hungarian denomination, the “technical border barrier”—had sealed off the border since 1949, but it had been dismantled in the spring of 1956 as a consequence of the improved relations between Austria and Hungary during what is referred to as the “thaw period” in the international context of the Cold War. Now with both the barbed wire and the mines entirely gone, the refugees could easily stroll over what the Austrians called the “green border”.[10] Later, when the Soviet troops started to survey the border more closely, the best known way to reach Austria was without doubt over the so called “Einser Kanal” (Channel Number One) at the famous bridge at Andau, later immortalized in James Michener’s famous novel.[11]

While the fighting was still going on in Hungary, many women and children were sent over the border for their protection. Later, when the fighting ceased many young men crossed the border.[12] The refugees included entire families, people of all ages, students, and even orphans. The reasons for their flight ranged from the fear of political repression as a consequence of the revolution to the long-cherished wish to escape the communist regime. More then half of the refugees came from the capital city of Budapest, while the rest hailed almost exclusively from the western regions of Hungary. About 4 percent of the national population fled; the percentage from the city of Sopron was as high as 12 percent. Two-thirds of the refugees were male, with more than half under the age of 25.[13]

There were also a certain number of soldiers amongst the refugees. In accordance with international law, the Austrian Ministry of Defence decided to open four internment camps for all refugees carrying weapons and those clearly recognizable as military personnel. By December 1956 more than a 1,000 people were held in the largest internment camp in Salzburg, Wals-Siezenheim. The interned refugees were practically prisoners; they could not move about freely, and their chances of being accepted by other countries were slim.

The Austrian authorities were forced to improvise since no infrastructure existed to receive such a massive influx of persons. Red Cross officials tried to collect and group the refugees behind the border. The refugees, many totally exhausted and nearly frozen to death, were first taken to schools or restaurants. They were then transferred in larger groups to a refugee camp in Eisenstadt, the capital of Austria’s border province, Burgenland. From there public trains or buses brought them to a large camp called Traiskirchen to the south of Vienna. Finally, by mid-November, when things became better organised, the refugees were distributed among different camps all over the country.

However, the existing camps were soon filled and the stream of refugees did not cease. By mid-November 1956, when the wave of refugees reached its peak, Austrian newspapers referred to the situation in the border regions as catastrophic. Officials did not know where to put the newly arriving refugees since every possible place was already occupied. At times the border patrols even told refugees to come back in a couple of days in the hope that the situation would improve.[14]

Primitive camps instead of the “Golden West”

Where should thousands of refugees be taken in a country which was still recovering from the hardships of the Second World War and which still took care of around 120,000 refugees? The only practical possibility was to house the new refugees in empty war-damaged houses and any abandoned building in the former occupation forces that remained unused. In the beginning, the new “camps” consisted only of empty rooms, some even without water or electricity. In some cases toilets, windows, and doors were broken or lacking altogether. The refugees had to sleep on straw, which had to be brought in by local farmers.[15]

This situation worsened after November 4. On that day alone more than 5,000 refugees crossed the border. However, following the initial surprise, chaos gave way to better organisation and management. Soon every refugee received a minimum of 2,400 calories of daily nutrition, and clean and warm clothes were distributed, along with pocket money, toiletries, and cigarettes. Sanitary facilities were built and medical care was supplied.

Nevertheless, life in the camps caused distress amongst the refugees. They lived together in cramped and narrow spaces, and had little means of physical or intellectual activity. The Interior Ministry tried to cope with this situation and asked all contributing aid organisations to attend to the cultural and religious needs of the refugees. Radio, newspapers, films, literature in Hungarian language, sports and other activities were called for.[16] Many organizations reacted positively, and provided courses in baseball, football and ballet, dancing lessons, and theatre groups. Even a small orchestra was organized. Buses with Hungarian literature arrived at the camps and informative newspapers were published in various Austrian provinces informing the refugees about legal rights, asylum law, and the possibilities of emigration to other countries. Furthermore, the diverse religious needs of the refugees were also provided for.

Despite all these efforts, doctors detected a “camp psychosis” among the refugees, which manifested itself in passivity, depression, and latent aggressiveness.[17] These symptoms were especially noticeable in the internment camp in Salzburg, from whence many of the internees tried to flee in order to sneak into a “normal” camp. In mid-November 1956 around 100 internees held a hunger strike to protest against the way they were treated, and later that month disturbances there required police intervention to restore order.[18] In mid-December 1956 the director of security in Burgenland reported that the formerly thankful Hungarians had become more and more dissatisfied and impatient. In addition, they demanded expensive drugs and were not happy with the medical care.[19] Austrian officials were of course less than pleased by these complaints. A document from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that the camps were suitably equipped, and more comforts and conveniences would only induce the refugees to stay in Austria.[20] In January 1957 Interior Minister Helmer was forced to make a public declaration that refugees also had duties and criticised those who caused trouble.[21]

Chaos and rivalry amongst Austrian institutions and organisations

One Austrian newspaper reporting in mid-November 1956 about the strong emotional solidarity shown by the Austrian population concluded that when the “cool head gets lost,” help turns into confusion.[22] Despite the admirable work being done, the organization of care for the refugees was hampered by the multitude of aid organizations working in parallel and the rivalry and quarrels among them. The UN High Commissioner Auguste Lindt had the task of coordinating the entire refugee program, while the Red Cross strove to harmonize the efforts of the different humanitarian institutions, and the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) took over the registration and further transport of the refugees. Allegedly 40 organizations were involved in refugee care in Austria, including the Knights of Malta, Caritas, Rettet das Kind, CARE, the International Rescue Committee, the Knights of St. John, and the Quakers. Some of the organizations came into being in a spontaneous manner in response to this crisis and thus were not only un-coordinated, but also perceived other organizations as rivals. The President of the Austrian Red Cross, for example, refused to collaborate (at least for a while) with other organizations in assessing the camps’ needs.[23] At times the understanding between the Red Cross and the Austrian authorities deteriorated to the extent that the former threatened to stop its food shipments.[24]

In addition, collaboration among the Austrian authorities and different ministries was poorly managed. The Austrian Chancellor Figl had tried at an early stage of the crisis to introduce an action-committee to coordinate the Austrian authorities. However, due to the reluctance of the Minister of the Interior, this committee only came into being on November 13.[25] A department called 10 UH (Ungarnhilfe [Hungarian Aid]) had already been set up a week earlier within the Ministry of the Interior, which was to act as an overall coordinator.[26] The Minister also complained about the unsatisfactory collaboration of various local governments.[27]

Financial issues never ran smoothly. The Austrian authorities finally struck a compromise with the League of the Red Cross, which assumed the expenses for the larger camps until the summer of 1957. The Austrian Red Cross took over this task until the autumn of that year, and then passed it on to the Austrian Ministry of the Interior.[28]

Where should the refugees go?

As mentioned above, the Austrian authorities, on October 28, had already contacted their embassies in Paris, London, and Washington, hoping to obtain assistance with the refugee problem. The sheer number crossing the border after November 4 quickly led the government to conclude that it was unable to handle this mass of people alone. It was thus eager for the refugees to move on to other Western countries as soon as possible. However, it became clear almost immediately that many states were more willing to support the Austrians financially in aiding the Hungarian refugees than to open their own borders to them.[29]

Austria expected help from all the states that had signed the Geneva Convention, as well as from the other Western European countries and the USA. On November 4, the day of the second Soviet intervention, Helmer sent a telegram to the High Commissioner of Refugees and drew his attention to Austria’s problems. As a result, offers to take in refugees poured into Vienna. The generous promises, however, were not followed by action. To begin with, the transportation of the refugees was slow due to its having been suddenly improvised.[30] Before long the problem of the receiving states’ selection of refugees surfaced. The fact that other countries screened and selected the refugees as immigrants turned into an acute problem when Austria’s capacity to house and feed them reached its limit, and still thousands more kept arriving every day. A document from the Ministry of the Interior from November 1956 clearly expresses the view that the usual measure of screening—including selection, medical exams, and the acceptance of only young and working age people—was not appropriate for these special circumstances. Austria would end up having to take care of all the women, children, sick and old people in addition to the sacrifices it had already made.[31] The Austrian UN delegation was adamant in its demands before the UN Plenary session at the end of November: “ This measure [the transfer of refugees] should be implemented by a waiver of all bureaucratic formalities. May it be remembered that Austria, too, cannot discriminate at her borders”.[32] Austria tried to make clear that not only the working population but also the elderly people and children had to be transferred along with their families. Austria was especially critical of the screening measures implemented by the United States, which insisted on long medical examinations by the immigration office. They not only made the refugees come to Vienna several times for the medical check-up, but also made sure that “no toes and fingers were missing,” as one Austrian document put it mockingly.[33]

In mid-November 1956—when all possible accommodations in Austria were filled to capacity and some school buildings in the Austrian provinces had to been given over to house refugees—Helmer once again complained in the council of ministers about the scant help given by other countries. For example, Switzerland was the only country to accept refugees without any examination and the Netherlands, which had offered to take up to 2,000 refugees, caused “unthinkable difficulties.” Observing that Belgium only wanted to take men and young people, his anger was undisguised: “that’s what the charity of the foreign countries looks like!” Helmer sorrowfully warned, “we now have to speak rightly of a state of emergency. Yesterday refugees were housed in a running train since we have no accommodation left.”[34]

On November 17 the Austrian government once again sent a memorandum to all the accredited foreign missions within the country.[35] It demanded that they react positively in regard to three essential measures: the immediate transfer of the refugees to other countries without a previous examination; the provision of financial support; and aid shipments of food, clothing, and other necessities. In a message to the Washington embassy the situation was depicted as follows: “Thousands more people stream into Austria—apparently with the silent toleration of the Soviet authorities. The moment draws closer when Austrian authorities will not even be in a situation to take up the refugees as a stop-gap measure.”[36] Austria also reiterated its appeal at the Plenary Assembly of the United Nations. On November 27 the Austrian delegate Kurt Waldheim explained that 87,000 refugees had fled from Hungary into Austria and that only 20,000 had been transferred to other countries. Furthermore, every day about 8,000 new refugees were arriving. He stressed: “Austria cannot do it alone. She necessarily depends on generous, joint help from other countries. Reception centres, holiday homes and empty hotels, all available private housing facilities and even schools, are completely filled up […] We are confronted with an emergency that can only be met by immediate measures.” [37]

In addition, Austria’s budget was heavily burdened by the outlays for the refugees. Government experts had calculated that the total expenses for food, camps, and medical supplies incurred up to November 7 had exceeded receipts from donations by two million dollars.[38] In late November Waldheim stated before the UN General Assembly: “[…] it has to be understood by all those able to help that the burden Austria is most willingly taking upon herself, is a heavy one and is about to exceed the country’s financial capacities. Austria has already spent 120 million Austrian Schillings, the equivalent of 4.8 million dollars, on refugees from Hungary during the last four weeks. The costs of maintaining the current number of Hungarian refugees in Austria for a period of six months are estimated at 600 million schillings or about 24 million dollars.” [39]

The American President, Eisenhower, reacted to the requests of many Hungarians and on December 1 raised the immigration quota from 6,500 to 21,500. However, even this measure was not enough. Alarmed by the situation, the US Vice President, Richard Nixon, visited Austria later that month to gain firsthand experience of the crisis. While there he held talks with the Austrian authorities, inspected the border, and talked to refugees.[40] As has already been commented, many refugees hoped to be given asylum in America. However, the United States immigration laws only permitted refugees from the first country that granted them asylum, which in the case of the Hungarian refugees was Austria. Thus not only did many refugees only reluctantly accept the opportunity to emigrate to a country other than the United States, but this issue also created a serious problem when refugees tried to re-enter Austrian territory after having been transferred to other European countries.[41]

As the documents from the Austrian archives cited here clearly show, the transportation of refugees to the other Western countries did not happen fast enough from the Austrian perspective. Nevertheless, this does not diminish the fact that the receiving countries subsequently proved to be very generous and provided real opportunities for the refugees. The Hungarian refugees were resettled in 37 countries. The Austrian Yearbook for 1956 reveals that the US accepted the largest number of Hungarian refugees (19,655), followed by Great Britain (13,018) and West Germany (10,934). However, according to the official statistics there were still 87,725 refugees in Austria at the end of 1956. Another source tells us that by summer 1959, the US had taken in 38,058 refugees, Canada 25,513, and Great Britain 20,690. According to these figures 11,471 refugees remained in Austria at this time.[42]

The often admired willingness of the West to accept the Hungarian refugees can partly be explained by the fact that the whole world had closely followed the dramatic showdown in Budapest. It was the first major international crisis to appear on television, and was headline news in newspapers and on cinema newsreels for weeks. In addition, the events were almost always presented and assessed in their Cold War context. After all, every refugee fleeing to the West seemed to prove the democracies’ moral superiority and thus needed to be welcomed. The feeling of guilt in the West (and the public pressure on governments) should also not be underestimated. Many Western governments were happy that “at least something” was being done since the Hungarian people had been left alone in their struggle for democracy.

However, it should be noted that the Hungarian refugees fled in a very short time span in relatively small numbers, and the burden they imposed was distributed all over the world. Furthermore, Europe’s economic upsurge had just started and so there were not that many rivals in the labor market. Yet the positive reception of the 1956 Hungarian refugees is even more remarkable if one considers the reluctant attitudes towards displaced people all around the world then still in need of resettlement, for example in Austria, Italy, Germany, Greece, China, or the Middle East.[43]

The refugees as a security problem

The fact that thousands of refugees stayed in Austria proved especially difficult for Austria’s interior security officials, who were concerned about their political activities. Among the refugees there were many activists who held political discussions, tried to create refugee organizations, and even hoped to continue promoting the ideals of the revolution. By mid-November 1956, when the fighting in Hungary began to die out, more young people who wanted to continue the struggle assembled in Austria. The perturbed Austrian Foreign Minister wrote: “Taking into account the large number of people, it becomes harder and harder for the Austrian authorities responsible to control and prevent the political activities of the refugees. Considering their political danger, immediate transportation of large numbers to other countries is already urgently necessary.”[44]

The highest priority was to remove the refugees from the border area in order to prevent possible political incidents. The governor of the eastern province of Burgenland had already detected irredentist activities there.[45] Other authorities also observed that refugees were creating new political organisations. In February 1957 a directive by the Interior Ministry addressed the political and intelligence activities of the Hungarian refugees in Austria: “The Ministry of the Interior is, under no circumstances, willing to tolerate any activity by foreigners in Austria which aims to disturb the peaceful relations of the Republic with other states, or which aims to influence the internal political situation in other countries.”[46]

The fact that thousands of Hungarian refugees resided in Austria began to be especially problematic when the secret services from both the East and West tried to take advantage of the situation. American intelligence organisations, for example, tried to hire refugees to go back to Hungary and to serve as agents there. On the other hand, the Hungarian secret police tried to recruit refugees in order to stay informed about developments within Austria. It goes without saying that this was a very delicate situation for a neutral country such as Austria.

Repatriation of Hungarian refugees

Austria was in a delicate position when it came to the new Hungarian government’s repatriation demands. Ever since early November 1956, the Hungarian government, via its Vienna consulate, demanded that the Austrians not impede those willing to return to Hungary. Since the end of November, the Hungarians were eagerly trying to set up a repatriation commission that was active in the Austrian camps. The Hungarians, having proclaimed an amnesty to all those willing to return, declared they had information about thousands of Hungarian refugees wanting to return to their homes. The Austrian authorities, they claimed, prevented this and forced the refugees to emigrate to other countries.[47]

The Austrians were of the opinion that all those willing to leave were not dissuaded from doing so. Any refugee wanting to go back to Hungary had only to sign a written declaration saying that he or she chose to return at his or her own discretion and was willing to be handed over to the Hungarian authorities. One particularly delicate element of this procedure was the establishment of each person’s identity.[48]

While Hungary wanted to handle the issue in a bilateral manner, the Austrians strove to internationalize it by involving the UN High Commissioner. A solely Hungarian commission was proposed by the Hungarian government, but the Austrians rejected this idea. Following negotiations between the Austrian authorities and the High Commissioner, a bilateral commission began work in mid-January 1957. The commission consisted of both Austrian and Hungarian representatives, along with an observer sent by the High Commissioner. The refugees who wished to appear before the commission were to be collected in special camps where they had to await the decision of the Hungarian authorities.[49]

The Austrian authorities had stated from the very beginning that they could not take responsibility for incidents in camps, given the “known temper of the Hungarians.”[50] Indeed, soon after the arrival of the repatriation commission, the first incident occurred in a refugee camp, when some refugees tried to throw stones at the members of the commission. The police had to intervene to help them depart safely.[51] From that moment on the commission held its meetings not in the refugee camps, but in other official buildings.[52]

It is very hard to a give the exact number of repatriated Hungarian refugees. While some sources refer to around 3,000 refugees, others cite around 12,000 by mid-1959. A report from the UNHCR even speaks of 18,200 refugees who eventually returned to Hungary. The Hungarian Foreign Ministry claimed that 13,000 refugees had already returned by January 1958.[53]

The question of children and minors became a special case that resulted in a legal conflict lasting for years. The Hungarian government demanded the repatriation of all minors under the age of eighteen, while the Austrian government wanted to send back only those under the age of fourteen. The bulk of the children under 14 were indeed repatriated, and the older children were dealt with individually through the involvement of the High Commissioner.

Hungarian demands for establishing a repatriation commission were accompanied by a propaganda offensive from the entire Eastern bloc. An example worth citing is the UN delegate from Belorussia, who alleged that the Austrian government and the UN hampered the efforts of refugees who wanted to return to Hungary. The delegate of the USSR went even further and declared that children who wanted to join their parents back home in Hungary were interned behind barbed wire.[54] The Eastern press portrayed the situation of the refugee camps in Austria in horrific and terrible terms, claiming the refugees were imprisoned in camps with scarce room, and very little food and water. It was also alleged that the Hungarian refugees were being sold as slaves to mines and plantations or were being recruited for the Foreign Legion.[55]

The sudden eruption of a political or economic crisis can, under certain circumstances, result in massive emigration. This not only has negative effects on the country from which inhabitants are fleeing, as in the well known case of a “brain drain,” but also for the neighbouring countries which are forced to receive the refugees. The exodus of thousands of Hungarian citizens as a consequence of the unsuccessful 1956 Hungarian revolution can be studied as a textbook exemplar of such a situation. The country which was most directly affected by this exodus—at least in the early stages—was Hungary’s Western neighbor, Austria. Unlike present-day practice, the Austrian authorities granted asylum to all Hungarian refugees and the international community agreed to classify them as “political refugees,” despite the fact that not all of them satisfied the Geneva Convention’s criteria.

The spontaneous direct action and provision of material aid by the Austrian people is an established fact which has been stressed by many scholars. The deep sympathy for the Hungarian refugees can be explained by the synergy of many factors: geographic proximity, the memory of a shared Austro-Hungarian past, Austrian memories of the experience of Soviet occupation from 1945 to 1955, and the integration of the Hungarian revolution into the context of the Cold War.

However, as the subsequent transportation of the refugees to other places of asylum failed to occur as quickly as the Austrians had anticipated, the image of the Hungarian refugees in Austria soon deteriorated. After November 1956 there were increasing complaints about both the high costs of aiding the refugees and pessimism about when they would move on to other destinations. The refugees began to be portrayed as a burden to the Austrian state, which was seen as both a humanitarian and political problem. Interior Minister Helmer openly stated that the refugees also had their duties, and the media started to stress that the limits of Austria’s capacity to assist had been reached. Furthermore, initial sympathy soon faded as the thousands of refugees became rivals in the job market and in the search for accommodations.[56]

The refugee problem represented a two-fold problem for Austria as a state, in that it posed both a political quandary and a financial and administrative burden. Austria was without a doubt honestly surprised by the sheer magnitude of the sudden influx of refugees. Organisational problems such as poorly equipped camps or conflicts among charity organisations soon surfaced as a result. Austria repeatedly requested help from other Western countries, and was quite upset by their unwillingness to assist. Not only were the masses of refugees simply too much for such a small country; they also constituted a serious security problem. With regard to Austria’s foreign policy, the reception of the refugees raised two issues. On the one hand, Austria was constantly attacked by the Eastern bloc countries in connection with the refugee question, and relations with the Soviet Union and its satellites suffered a severe blow. On the other hand, Austria’s humanitarian actions were widely acknowledged in the West, and Austria became known as a refugee country.

For the thousands of refugees, Austria was the first Western country in which they found shelter. This was not only deeply symbolic of Austria’s Western orientation just a year after the Soviet occupation forces had left the country’s Eastern regions, but it was also an unforgettable moment for the refugees themselves. The latter point may be the reason why the former Hungarian refugees who became Austrian citizens continue to shower praise on Austria’s efforts in receiving the 1956 refugee wave. Yet while Austria’s humanitarian actions should not be understated, widely held naive “myths” need to be corrected by also revealing the more complex, and in some senses negative, events that took place. The lessons archival documents teach us—fifty years after the actual events—include the advisability of stepping back and acknowledging that the reception of the refugees in Austria did not happen as smoothly as is normally portrayed.

The 1956 exodus of the Hungarian refugees was not only a landmark in Austrian history. The refugee crisis has also left an indelible and enduring mark on an international scale. Most scholars now agree that 1956 was the first example of a generous acceptance of refugees. Even more importantly, it provides a strong argument for framing the settlement of refugee problems in an international context, instead of trying to handle it bilaterally. Without the help of the UNHCR, the ICEM and the various non-governmental organizations, the crisis could not have been solved by Austria alone. The aftermath of the 1956 uprising helped shape the way humanitarian organizations would deal with refugee crises for decades to come. The episode also left a permanent mark on international refugee law and policy.[57]

Selected Bibliography:

Beyer, Gunther. “The Political Refugee: 35 Years Later.” In Theories of Migration, ed. by Robin Cohen, 96-105, Cheltenham: Elgar, 1996.

Ceresnyés, Ferenc. “Ötvenhatosok menekülése Ausztriába és Ausztrián át.” Múltunk 1 (1998): 42-70.

Engelke, Edda. Ungarnflüchtlinge in der Steiermark. Vienna: Studienverlag, 2006.

Gáal, Károly, and Roland Widder (eds.). 1956 und das Burgenland: Berichte über die Hilfsaktionen für ungarische Flüchtlinge. Eisenstadt: Burgenländische Landesregierung, 1996.

Goodwin-Gill, Gill. The Refugee in International Law. Oxford: University Press, 1996.

Granville, Johanna. “Of Spies, Refugees and Hostile Propaganda: How Austria Dealt with the Hungarian Crisis of 1956.” History 91 (2006): 62-90.

Haslinger, Peter. “Zur Frage der ungarischen Flüchtlinge in Österreich 1956-1957. ” In Migrationen und ihre Auswirkungen. Das Beispiel Ungarn 1918-1995 , ed. by Gerhard Seewann, 147-162. Munich: Oldenburg, 1997.

Hoff, Hans and Hans Strotzka. Die psychohygienische Betreuung der ungarischen Neuflüchtlinge in Österreich 1956-1958. Vienna: Holllinek, 1958.

Kern, Friedrich. Österreich: Offene Grenze der Menschlichkeit. Die Bewältigung des ungarischen Flüchtlingsproblems im Geiste internationaler Solidarität. Vienna, 1959.

Loescher, Gill. Beyond Charity: International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Crisis. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Michener, James. The Bridge at Andau. New York: Fawcett, 1957.

Murber, Ibolya. Flucht in den Westen 1956. Ungarnflüchtlinge in Österreich und Liechtenstein. Feldkirch: Rheticus, 2002.

Murber, Ibolya, and Zoltán Fónagy (eds.). Die ungarische Revolution und Österreich 1956. Vienna: Czernin, 2006.

Rasky, Béla. “‘Flüchtlinge haben auch Pflichten.’ Österreich und die Ungarnflüchtlinge,” 1956. (5.20.2007).

Sóos, Katalin. “ Ausztria és a Magyar Menekültügy 1956-7”Századok 5 (1998): 1019-1051.

Stanek, Eduard. Verfolgt, Verjagt, Vertrieben. Flüchtlinge in Österreich von 1945-1984. Vienna: Europaverlag, 1985.

Stedingk, Yvonne (ed.), Die Organisation des Flüchtlingswesens in Österreich seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Vienna: Braumüller, 1970.

Szépfalusi, István . “ A legújabb felismeresek az 1956/57-es Magyar menekülthullámról.” Limes. Komáron-Estergom Megyei Tudmányos Szemle 1 (1998): 113-122.

Zierer, Brigitte. Politische Flüchtlinge in österreichischen Printmedien – dargestellt am Vergleich des Ungarischen Volksaufstandes und der Revolution in Rumänien 1989. Ph.D. Thesis. Vienna University, 1995.

1. Ministerratsprotokoll, 30.4.1957 in Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Archiv der Republik (hereafter: ÖStA, AdR), BKA/Ministerratsprotokolle, 2. Republik, Raab II.

2. The official ceremony took place at the “Austria Center” in Vienna on October 17, 2006. Hungary, represented by Prime Minister Gyurcsány and president Solyóm, set out to solemnly thank Austria for its efforts to help the Hungarian refugees in 1956. President Solyóm stated: “Austria, its state and people, has offered such a high moral performance which serves as an example up to this date.” The Austrian President and Chancellor were awarded the highest Hungarian decorations. The Austrian officials, headed by Chancellor Schüssel and President Fischer, in turn were thanked for the positive role of the Hungarian refugees who had stayed in Austria. Pester Lloyd, 10.17.2006.

3. Michener, James. The Bridge at Andau. New York: Fawcett, 1957, 244.

4. Telegramm des Relief Committee For a Free Hungary an Figl, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol 1956/Ungarn 3a, GZl. 511.190, Zl. 520.448.

5. The Hungarian revolution of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against the Communist government of Hungary and its Soviet -imposed policies. It started on October 23 , 1956 with a student demonstration in Budapest. The revolt spread from the capital across the country while the Soviet troops and the Hungarian State Security could not gain the upper hand. A new government headed by the communist reformer Imre Nagy was established. He disbanded the hated State Security, declared Hungary’s intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact , and pledged to re-establish free elections. On November 4 , a large Soviet force invaded Budapest and crushed the revolution, killing thousands of civilians. Repression and mass arrests followed, and the opposition was surpressed.

6. In the aftermath of the Second World War Austria was a transit country for masses of refugees and Displaced Persons (DPs). In 1946 around 1.4 million refugees were counted in Austria; by 1955 around one-fifth of them (245,000) had received Austrian citizenship. In the summer of 1956, of the 127,000 persons who had the status of refugees in Austria, 18,000 came from Hungary. At that point many of the earlier refugees continued to live in camps. See Stedingk, Yvonne (ed.). Die Organisation des Flüchtlingswesens in Österreich seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Vienna: Braumüller, 1970, 25.

7. Among these early refugees were a certain number of Hungarian communists who fled what they believed would be a successful revolution. Even around 120 members of the feared Hungarian secret police (ÁVO) found their way to Austria. See Stanek, Eduard. Verfolgt, Verjagt, Vertrieben. Flüchtlinge in Österreich von 1945-1984. Vienna: Europaverlag, 1985, 60.

8. It should be noted that the risk of such a proclamation was quite high and that the Austrian government counted on only about 10,000 refugees at that time.

9. As one soldier guarding the border recalled: “We were always asked over the radio if a jeep or a Dodge should be sent [to pick up the refugees]. Most of the time we said that they should go ahead and send a Dodge in order to fit everybody in since a couple of meters away we usually find more refugees anyhow.” Gáal, Károly, and Roland Widder (eds.). 1956 und das Burgenland: Berichte über die Hilfsaktionen für ungarische Flüchtlinge. Eisenstadt: Burgenländische Landesregierung, 1996, 198.

10. Already during these crucial times, Austrian officials put forward the interpretation that the Soviets let the Hungarians escape on purpose hoping that all the hopelessly anti-Soviet elements would be eliminated from Hungarian society. Österr. Botschaft Belgrad an BKA/AA, 1.12.1956, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol/Ungarn 3d, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56, Zl. 791.898.

11. For some time it was the only escape route to the “free” West before the Soviet troops blew up the bridge. After that the refugees crossed the channel either by boats or swam in the freezing cold water.

12. Erklärung des Gesandten Waldheim in der III. Kommission, 11.27.1956, in ÖStA, AdR, II-Pol 1956/Ungarn 3c, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56.

13. Rasky, Béla, “ ‘ Flüchtlinge haben auch Pflichten.’ Österreich und die Ungarnflüchtlinge 1956. ” (5.20.07), 4.

14. Haslinger, Peter. “Zur Frage der ungarischen Flüchtlinge in Österreich 1956-1957.” In Migrationen und ihre Auswirkungen. Das Beispiel Ungarn 1918- 1995. Ed. Gerhard Seewann. Munich: Oldenburg, 1997, 154.

15. While the refugees sleeping on straw created an evident fire risk, the Austrian Interior Minister’s statement before the council of ministers showed more concern for Austria’s reputation than for the sake of the refugees: “The price of this could be Austria’s considerable reputation abroad.” Ministerratsprotokoll, 11.13.56, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/Ministerratsprotokolle, 2. Republik, Raab II.

16. Haslinger, “Zur Frage,” 151.

17. Hoff, Hans and Hans Strotzka. Die psychohygienische Betreuung der ungarischen Neuflüchtlinge in Österreich 1956-1958. Vienna: Holllinek, 1958, 31.

18. Ceresnyés, Ferenc. “Ötvenhatosok menekülése Ausztriába és Ausztrián át.” Múltunk 1 (1998): 56.

19. Tiroler Sicherheitsdirektion an Bundesministerium für Inneres (hereafter: BMfI), in ÖStA, AdR, BMfI, GZl. 368.251-2/56, Zl. 368.251-2/56.

20. Haslinger, “Zur Frage,” 155.

21. Zierer, Brigitte. Politische Flüchtlinge in österreichischen Printmedien–dargestellt am Vergleich des Ungarischen Volksaufstandes und der Revolution in Rumänien 1989. Ph.D. Thesis. Vienna University, 1995, 484.

22.Die Presse, 11.16.56.

23. Haslinger, “Zur Frage,” 154.

24. Gáal, Widder, 1956 und das Burgenland, 25.

25. Ministerratsprotokoll, 11.13.1956, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/Ministerratsprotokolle, 2. Republik, Raab II.

26. Kern, Friedrich. Österreich: Offene Grenze der Menschlichkeit. Die Bewältigung des ungarischen Flüchtlingsproblems im Geiste internationaler Solidarität. Vienna, 1959, 27. It was time for coordination. On November 5, the US ambassador Thompson called the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and asked it to do something about coordinating aid for the Hungarian refugees. He remarked that such a mess and the glaring lack of communication among the different ministries, the Red Cross, and other private organisations led him to think that the Austrian authorities had lost control over the situation. Amtsvermerk, 11.06.56, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol 1956/Ungarn 3d, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56, Zl. 519.915-Pol/56.

28. Vereinbarung über die Ungarn-Flüchtlingshilfe in Österreich, 12.12.56, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol/Ungarn 3d, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56; Kern, Österreich, 89.

29. In addition, the Hungarian refugees were at that point not pleased about leaving Austria since they either wanted to await the final outcome of the situation in Hungary or were still hoping for other family members to join them. The fact that most refugees hoped to emigrate to the United States and not to any other country did not help the situation either.

30. A plane belonging to the French Red Cross landed in Vienna on November 7 with medicine and picked up refugees on its way back home. The next day, the first transport left for Switzerland. Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands used buses. However, given the masses of refugees, what was needed was coordinated action.

31. Amtsvermerk, 11.15.56, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol 1956/Ungarn 3d, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56, Zl. 520.422-Pol/56.

32. Erklärung des Gesandten Waldheim in der III. Kommission, 11.27.56, in ÖStA, AdR, II-Pol 1956/Ungarn 3c, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56.

33. Haslinger, “Zur Frage,” 157.

34. Ministerratsprotokoll, 11.13.56, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/Ministerratsprotokolle, 2. Republik, Raab II.

35. Telegramm BKA/AA an Österr. Botschaft in Moskau, 11.17.56, in ÖStA, AdR, II-Pol 1956/Ungarn 3c, GZl. 511.190, Zl. 520.565.

36. BKA/AA an Botschaft Washington, 11.17.56, in ÖStA, AdR, II-Pol 1956/Ungarn 3c, GZl. 511.190, Zl. 520.440.

37. Erklärung des Gesandten Walheim in der III. Kommission, 11.27.56, in ÖStA, AdR, II-Pol 1956/Ungarn 3c, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56.

38. Gesamtaufwand für Flüchtlinge aus Ungarn, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol 1956/Ungarn 3d, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56, Zl. 520.048-Pol/56.

40. Informationen für den Herren Bundesminister, 12.12.56, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol/Ungarn 3d, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56, Zl. 791.815-Pol/56; Amtsvermerk, 12.21.56, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol 1956/ Ungarn 3d, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56, Zl. 792.188-Pol/56; Amtsvermerk, 12.21.56, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol 1956/ Ungarn 3d, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56, Zl. 792.159.

41. There were cases in which refugees announced that they wanted to return to Hungary and once in Austria they refused to travel any further. This upset the Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold Figl who said in the council of ministers on January 15, 1957: “Even our people are already going mad over this refugee story. We cannot be the benefactor of the entire world…. We cannot make any concessions, otherwise we will get all of them [the refugees] back.” Ministerratsprotokoll, 1.15.57, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/Ministerratsprotokolle, 2. Republik, Raab II. The Austrian government decided to close its border to returning refugees unless it was guaranteed that they would really proceed back to Hungary. Ministerratsvortrag, 1.21.57, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/Ministerratsprotokolle, 2. Republik, Raab II.

42. Kern, Österreich, 68.

43. Loescher, Gill. Beyond Charity: International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Crisis. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 71.

45. Ministerratsprotokoll, 12.04.56, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/Ministerratsprotokolle, 2. Republik, Raab II.

46. Weisung des BMfI, Generaldirektion für die Öffentliche Sicherheit, 2.01.57, in ÖStA, AdR, BMfI, GZl. 28.000-2/60, Zl. 32.752-2/57.

47. Ungarische Verbalnote, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol 1956/ Ungarn 3d, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56, Zl. 792.243-Pol/56. Up until mid-December, only 500 persons had gone back to Hungary, whereas more than 1,000 had crossed the border daily despite the restrictive measures taken on the Hungarian side. Amtsvermerk, 12.27.56, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol 1956/ Ungarn 3d, GZl. 511.190-Pol/56, Zl. 792.110.

48. Österreichische Neue Tageszeitung, 1.22.56, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol 1956, Ungarn 6.

49. Arbeiter-Zeitung, 2.02.57, in ÖStA, AdR, 02, BPD, Ungarn, Liasse Ungarische Revolution.

51. Die Presse, 2.07.57, in ÖStA, AdR, 02, BPD, Ungarn, Liasse Ungarische Revolution.

52. Die Presse, 2.08.57, in ÖStA, AdR, 02, BPD, Ungarn, Liasse Ungarische Revolution.

53. UNHCR, World’s Refugees, 30-31.

54. Vertretung bei den Vereinten Nationen an BKA/AA, 12.07.56, in ÖStA, AdR, II-Pol 1956/Ungarn 3c, GZl. 511.190, Zl. 791.946.

55. Prawda, 25.11.1956, in Sowjetpresse über Österreich, in ÖStA, AdR, BKA/AA, II-Pol 1956, Ungarn 6, GZl. 519.644-Pol/56, Zl. 791.431-Pol/56.

56. Zierer, Ungarnflüchtlinge, 169.

57. The various intergovernmental organisations such as the UNHCR and the Red Cross became more important as a result of the crisis. The UNHCR emerged much strengthened and its international prestige considerably enhanced. It was significant that the UNHCR at this time got its first foothold in Communist bloc countries, namely Hungary and Yugoslavia (where it established a temporary office). The Hungarian exodus provided the UNHCR with its first experience of handling a massive refugee wave and provided its first opportunity to work hand in hand with the Societies of the International Red Cross and the League of the Red Cross.

Preferred citation: Gémes, Andreas. 2009. Deconstruction of a Myth? Austria and the Hungarian Refugees of 1956-57. In: Time, Memory, and Cultural Change, ed. S. Dempsey and D. Nichols, Vienna: IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences, Vol. 25.


acut-off rule

How Does Diabetes Cause Nephrotic Syndrome

2017-10-26 06:17

How Does Diabetes Cause Nephrotic SyndromeNephrotic Syndrome is a group of clinical manifestations, which can be caused by many conditions and diseases. Diabetes is just one of them. How does diabetes cause Nephrotic Syndrome? Read on to learn more information.

Diabetes and Nephrotic Syndrome

Diabetes means your blood sugar level is high. To remove the excess sugar out of body, your kidneys have to work hard. Long-term overwork can damage the kidneys easily. So far diabetes is the leading cause of kidney disease. In the early stage of Diabetic Nephropathy, you may only have microalbuminuria, but with the progression of disease, it is likely for you to have massive proteinuria, swelling, and other symptoms. And then Nephrotic Syndrome occurs.

How to control Nephrotic Syndrome caused by diabetes?

Conventional treatment is to use steroids and immunosuppressants. They can help reduce protein leakage, but this is only stopgap measure. If you would like to get a permanent control, you should repair kidney damage and promote renal function.

In Beijing Tongshantang Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Toxin-Removing Treatment is widely used into Nephrotic Syndrome treatment. It can make swelling disappear, and proteinuria and hematuria turn negative. Even if refractory swelling, proteinuria and hematuria can be controlled very well.

This treatment is to make use of various Chinese therapies such as Micro-Chinese Medicine Osmotherapy, Medicated Bath, Foot Bath, Mai Kang Mixture and oral Chinese medicine to expel waste products and extra fluid out of body to make internal environment good for kidney self-healing. It can also improve blood circulation and increase blood flow into damaged kidneys to provide the damaged kidneys with enough essential elements so as to speed up kidney recovery. After about one week’s treatment, swelling will vanish, and half month later, your proteinuria will gradually decrease as well. With treatment going on, Nephrotic Syndrome will be under control, and your diabetes can be stabilized as well.

How does diabetes cause Nephrotic Syndrome? Now you get the answer. If you do not want your disease to develop to kidney failure quickly, you should take treatment as early as possible to control the disease well. For more information on Nephrotic Syndrome related with Diabetes, please leave a message below or contact online doctor.

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Parallel Programming

During the last few years, we have seen a trend change in CPU design. Until about 2003, CPUs  became more powerful through frequency scaling. The number of operations per second increased exponentially over a period of 20 years. Clock speeds went from 4.77 MHz in the first IBM PC (1981) to 3.3 GHz in a high-end PC of the year 2003. Thus, Moore’s law was supported chiefly by increasing clock speed. Then something “strange” happened: clock speeds plateaued. For a brief moment, it appeared that Moore’s law was nearing its end. Not because of the physical limits of miniaturisation, or because higher clock speeds were impossible, but because of thermal problems associated with such high clock frequencies. Water cooled systems were already introduced at the top-end of the market, but obviously the energy efficiency of these systems presents a serious economic problem. Then in 2004, the first PC dual core processor was introduced. Dual cores became widely available in 2005 and by now we have become used to quadcore processors, while eight-core systems are around the corner. The trend is obvious: in the forseeable future we will move from multi-core to many-core CPUs with dozens and perhaps even more cores.

Increasing the clock speed of a CPU has the effect, that program execution speed increases proportionally with clock speed. The increase is independent of software and hardware architectures. A sequential algorithm simply runs twice as fast on a machine where CPU operations take half the time. Unfortunately, this is not the case for a machine with twice as many CPUs. A sequential algorithm runs just as fast on a 3 GHz single core CPU than on a 3 GHz dual core CPU, because it uses only one of the CPU cores. Increased overall execution speed is therefore only achieved when multiple tasks run concurrently, because they can be executed simultaneously on different CPUs. This problem of parallelism is not new in computer science. Unfortunately though, today’s programming languages aren’t very well equipped to deal with parallel scaling. The computer language idiom that typifies multi-core concurrency is the thread model. Threads are lightweight processes that are typically used for self-contained subtasks. Several languages, notably Java, offer APIs and native support for their implementation. Threads are well suited to asynchronous processing, for example in communication and networking. They can also be used for simple parallelisation, where a computing problem is parallel by nature (for example serving multiple web documents at the same time). However, threads are relatively cumbersome and thus not really suitable for fine-grained parallel programming, such as traversing data structures or executing nested loops in parallel. Edward A. Lee describes the problems with threads in this excellent article.

The fundamental problem that software engineers face is described by Amdahl’s law. Amdahl’s formula expresses the speed gain of an algorithm achieved by parallelisation: speedup = N / ( (B*N) + (1-B) ), where B is the non-parallelizable (sequential) percentage of the problem and N is the number of worker threads, or processor cores. There are two notable things about Amdahl’s law: (1) the speedup is highly dependent on B, and (2) the curve flattens logarithmically with increasing N. It’s also important to know that Amdahl’s law assumes a constant problem size, which is unrealistic given that parallelisation  requires a certain amount of control overhead. Nevertheless, we can draw several conclusions from Amdahl’s law. First, the performance gain from parallel scaling is lower than that of frequency scaling. Second, it is not proportional to the number of cores. Third, it is highly dependent on software architecture, since the latter chiefly determines the size of B. From the perspective of a software engineer, the last conclusion is probably the most interesting one. It leads to the question what can be done to maximise parallelisation at the level of the algorithm exploiting data and task parallelisms. The present thread model is too coarse-grained to provide solutions at the algorithm-level. Hence, what is called for are new programming idioms that make this task easier.

Ideally, parallelisation is fully automatic, implemented by the compiler and the underlying hardware architecture. In this case, the application programmer could simply continue to formulate sequential algorithms without having to worry about parallelism. Unfortunately, automatic parallelisation has turned out to be extremely complex and difficult to realise. Despite many years of research in compiler architecture, there are no satisfactory results. Parallelisation at the algorithm level involves several abstraction steps, such as decomposition, mapping, scheduling, synchronisation, and result merging. The hardest among these tasks is very likely decomposition, which means breaking down a sequential task into parts that can be solved in parallel. The preferred method for doing this is divide and conquer. A problem is divided into identical smaller pieces, whereas the division can be expressed recursively or iteratively. The problem chunks can then be solved in parallel and the subtask results are joined into one final result. Prime examples for this strategy are merge sort and sequential search algorithms. These are easily parallelisable. Likewise many operations on arrays and collections can be parallelised fairly easily. But certain tasks are not obviously parallelisable, for example the computation of the Fibonacci series: f (n) = f (n-1) + f (n-2). Since every step in the computation depends on the previous step, the Fibonacci algorithm is sequential by nature. In theoretical informatics, the question whether algorithms of the complexity classes P and NP are in principle parallelisable is still unsolved. For practical purposes, some problems are simply non-parallelisable.

Given that automatic parallelisation is currently out of reach, the need for the facilitation of algorithm parallelisation in computer languages boils down to (1) the need for expressive constructs that allow programmers to express parallelisms intuitively, and (2) the need for freeing programmers from writing boilerplate code for the drudge work of parallel execution, such as scheduling, controlling, and synchronisation. There are already a number of computer languages that provide built-in idioms for parallel programming, such as Erlang, Parallel Haskell, MPD, Fortress, Linda, Charm++ and others. However, these are fringe languages with a small number of users. It is questionable whether the   parallel scaling trend in hardware will lead to a wide adoption of any of these languages. Perhaps mainstream languages will evolve to acquire new APIs, libraries, and idioms to support parallel programming. For example, there are Compositional C++, MPI, Unified Parallel C, Co-Array Fortran and other existing extensions that make widely used languages more suitable for parallel programming, although there aren’t any established standards yet. It also remains to be seen whether the functional programming paradigm will catch on in view of parallel programming. Java is promising, because the JDK 7 (Dolphin) will contain a  new API for fine-grained parallel processing. In this very informative article by Brian Goetz, the author of Java Concurrency in Practice, introduces the new java.util.concurrency API features of Java SE 7. It will include a fork-join framework that simplifies the expression of parallel processing, for example in loops or in recursive method invocation. It will also provide new data structures, such as ParallelArray, that make parallel iteration easier to express. To learn more about parallel computing, read the free Introduction To Parallel Computing by Blaise Barney or search the free parallel programming books at Google Books.


20-minute exercise (small-group discussion)

In small groups, turn to the episode of Justine’s trial (57-64).  In the margins of your text for this chapter, write page numbers that represent passages from earlier in Volume I that connect in some way to this passage.  For example, in the margin of page 58, next to the passage that begins, “for all the kindness which her beauty might otherwise have excited . . . ” (fifth line from the top), I might write “31.”  On page 31, referring to one of his college teachers, Victor mentions “the amiable character of this man.”  Although “amiable”* does not primarily mean kind,  Justine’s kindness reminds me of Victor’s response to this more friendly of his two university professors.

*friendly, agreeable, sociable

In the allotted time, discuss with your partners as many of such connections as you can find.

60-minute exercise (independent writing)


As we enter the holiday season, my thoughts are focused on spending time with my family. I look forward to watching holiday movies like ELF (you're going to need to watch this clip because it will make you happy). ELF is one of my favorites because of Will Farrell's infectious childlike joy...

Then there's the Holiday Inn where my kids and I enjoy the song-and-dance while seriously discussing the nuances of historical context in some of the questionable scenes. Before we watch White Christmas, we enjoy preparing a sandwich to put on the mantle. What, you don't do this? Those actors look hungry, for reals. And don't even get me started on the Harry Potter marathons. I. Am. So. Excited.

I also have a tradition of baking with my daughter and nieces and letting flour coat the kitchen like a dusting of snow on the mountains. It's a beautiful sight and likely the only snow we'll get in our part of California!

   The baking babies in action: my nieces Hannah and Nina and my daughter Lucy.

At the end of the day, we light a fire, collect candles on the table and shine the light of the holiday spirit on everyone we see and everything we do. <sniff>

Community is the ultimate family

For many of us, our family extends far beyond the people to which we are actually related. We have aunties that are not really aunts, sisters that are best friends and neighbors that we've adopted. Some of us have coworkers that are closer to us that some of our own family members.

It's in that sense of family that community takes its shape. People are bound together by common values, goals and tasks whether it's a family, a church, a tribe or even an online community. (See what I did right there? Yeah, that happened.) That's where you all come in!

I might be going out on a limb (or maybe I drank a little too much of the holiday spirit) but I think that the Jive community is a family. I've never before met an unrelated group of people so bound together by passion for a topic or quest for community goals. I mean, JiveWorld is PROOF.

   Look at this tribe of Jive Community members at JiveWorld14! Holla in the comments if you see yourself here.

I believe that in the heart of each community manager is this burning drive to bring people together -- to make an even bigger and better virtual group hug. It's what makes us special.

Warm feelings for my Jive Community family

I want each and every one of you reading this to know how much I appreciate you being here. I appreciate you writing your posts and commenting on other's posts. I appreciate each question that you answer and every piece of spam that you flag for moderation. I am extremely grateful every time you volunteer to run a group or host a discussion. For being involved and present, you have my unending thanks.

This virtual place that we call the Jive Community is REAL. It is real because behind every avatar there is a person. YOU. You might be sitting at a desk, on a sofa or even at a dining room table. You might be located in Los Angeles, London or maybe even Lisbon. You could be working from a coffee shop, hanging out in the home office or posting from a train travelling 70 miles an hour down the tracks. Regardless of where you are, you are also HERE and we are working better together because of it.

Each and every one of us plays a critical role in this family and I rely on you to make this place alive: to light the fires, to help me bake the cookies, to bring presents for the orphans and to laugh at all the "really funny parts" with me.

I might be getting a little emotional, I've already been accused of it today, and the sappy holiday music I have piped into my headphones isn't making me less sappy.

It's like this at my desk...


What is the Linguistic Analysis API? (Preview)

The Linguistic Analysis API provides access to natural language processing (NLP) tools that identify the structure of text. The current release provides three types of analysis:

Getting Started

Once you've familiarized yourself with the major types of analysis listed above, you can look into the endpoint for getting the list of available analyzers and how they are named, and then the endpoint for analyzing new input.


Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Earth’s climate has undergone great changes throughout the planet’s roughly 4.5-billion-year history. Because climate describes conditions in the atmosphere, it follows that changes in the atmosphere lead to changes in climate. Atmospheric changes in turn are influenced by Earth’s natural features. These include the oceans, ice masses, landforms, and vegetation.

All of Earth’s natural features change over time. Some of them change over a short period of time. For example, the amount of land…

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