•Diversified initial solutions are helpful for algorithms to find good final ones.•Initial solutions' quality is more important than diversity for weak algorithms.•Initial solutions' diversity is ...more important than quality for strong algorithms.•Algorithm's CPU time is generally positively correlated with its searching capacity.•Findings have certain universality and reference value for solving similar 1-PDVRPs.
The bike-sharing rebalancing problem (BRP) belongs to a class of one-commodity pickup and delivery vehicle route problems (1-PDVRPs) which often must be solved using heuristic algorithms due to the large problem size. However, an open question is which factors affect the quality of the final solutions for the BRP with heuristic algorithms, and how they affect the solution quality. This study proposed six initial solution construction methods and two heuristic algorithms, and applied 32 instances to explore this question in greater depth. The results showed that problem size and the algorithms' searching capacity are the most important factors affecting the quality of final solutions. Furthermore, the influence of the quality and diversity of initial solutions cannot be ignored. The quality of final solutions is negatively correlated with problem size, and positively correlated with the algorithms' searching capacity, and the quality and diversity of initial solutions. The influence of the quality and diversity of initial solutions on the quality of final solutions is positively correlated with problem size. For algorithms with insufficient (powerful) searching capacity, the influence of the quality (diversity) of initial solutions is more significant than that of their diversity (quality). High-quality and rich-diversity initial solutions are very helpful for algorithms to find high-quality final solutions. In addition, the CPU time of heuristic algorithms is generally positively correlated with their searching capacity. These findings have certain universal applicability and reference value for solving the 1-PDVRPs with similar solution structures using heuristic algorithms.
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In the early nineteenth century, a new age began: the age of questions. In the Eastern and Belgian questions, as much as in the slavery, worker, social, woman, and Jewish questions, contemporaries ...saw not interrogatives to be answered but problems to be solved. Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Adolf Hitler were among the many who put their pens to the task. The Age of Questions asks how the question form arose, what trajectory it followed, and why it provoked such feverish excitement for over a century. Was there a family resemblance between questions? Have they disappeared, or are they on the rise again in our time? In this pioneering book, Holly Case undertakes a stunningly original analysis, presenting, chapter by chapter, seven distinct arguments and frameworks for understanding the age. She considers whether it was marked by a progressive quest for emancipation (of women, slaves, Jews, laborers, and others); a steady, inexorable march toward genocide and the "Final Solution"; or a movement toward federation and the dissolution of boundaries. Or was it simply a farce, a false frenzy dreamed up by publicists eager to sell subscriptions? As the arguments clash, patterns emerge and sharpen until the age reveals its full and peculiar nature. Turning convention on its head with meticulous and astonishingly broad scholarship, The Age of Questions illuminates how patterns of thinking move history
Beginning with the negotiations that concluded with the unanimous
adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9, 1948, and
...extending to the present day, the United States, Soviet
Union/Russia, China, United Kingdom, and France have put forth
great effort to ensure that they will not be implicated in the
crime of genocide. If this were to fail, they have also ensured
that holding any of them accountable for genocide will be
practically impossible. By situating genocide prevention in a
system of territorial jurisdiction; by excluding protection for
political groups and acts constituting cultural genocide from the
Genocide Convention; by controlling when genocide is meaningfully
named at the Security Council; and by pointing the responsibility
to protect in directions away from any of the P-5, they have
achieved what can only be described as practical impunity for
genocide. The Politics of Genocide is the first book to
explicitly demonstrate how the permanent member nations have
exploited the Genocide Convention to isolate themselves from the
reach of the law, marking them as "outlaw states."
ABSTRACT
History theory does not have a mature theory of questions. This reflects both historical and philosophical assumptions. As Holly Case has argued in The Age of Questions (2018), the big ...questions of the nineteenth century and their proposed final solutions arguably primed the murderous logic of genocide in the first half of the twentieth century. On her account, questions have become tamed as technical tools in historical monographs and reviews like this one. This picture of the twentieth century, though, runs up against R. G. Collingwood's historiographical logic of questions and the rise of erotetic logics in computer science. Computational erotetic logics have shaped the creation of large language models such as the GPT series and focused our attention on expressivity, effectivity, and classification in the relation of questions and answers. Collingwood's logic is different, using the relation of questions to questions to point to presuppositions. This metaphysical view of erotetic logic is timely, for it reminds why it might be so hard for historians to cut through with true propositions in an age of AI. Collingwood reminds us that a focus on truth‐evaluable answers to questions does not explain why those questions were asked in the first place. Chasing chains of questions back to presuppositions, Collingwood argues that tackling what is assumed and what is lived with can help historians to change an unthinking world. In our age, this includes the idea of a shift from historians being the users of large language models to historians being the designers of new forms of relationship between people and information.
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The Germans' awareness of the murder of the European Jews began with the liberation of the concentration camps by the Allies. From there, a complicated history leads, via the judicial confrontation ...with the crime and the establishment of the new discipline of Zeitgeschichte (contemporary history), to the TV event 'Holocaust' (1979), which marked a caesura not only for the German public, but also for historical scholarship. Of great importance was the mere fact that 'Holocaust' established a globally understandable term for what in German had until then only been referred to in the language of the perpetrators Endlösung (Final Solution) or Judenvernichtung (extermination of the Jews), or in a metaphorical manner ('Auschwitz'). The intensified public and historiographical examination of the destruction of the European Jewry that followed 'Holocaust' also provoked political and cultural counterforces, and led to heated debates in the 1980s. The term Zivilisationsbruch (breach of civilization) introduced by Dan Diner in the wake of the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) marked the singularity of the Jewish genocide and influenced both the development of Holocaust historiography and the evolution of Holocaust memory. The article seeks to explore this impact by going back into the German and European history of research on and remembrance of the fate of the Jews in Europe during World War II - from its beginnings in the late 1940s up to the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in 2000 and the years thereafter.
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These essays, written in the course of half a century of research and thought on German and Jewish history, deal with the uniqueness of a phenomenon in its historical and philosophical context. ...Applying the "classical" empirical tools to this unprecedented historical chapter, Kulka strives to incorporate it into the continuum of Jewish and universal history. At the same time he endeavors to fathom the meaning of the ideologically motivated mass murder and incalculable suffering. The author presents a multifaceted, integrative history, encompassing the German society, its attitudes toward the Jews and toward the anti-Jewish policy of the Nazi regime; as well as the Jewish society, its self-perception and its leadership.
This paper offers a focalization reading of Michael Chabon’s
The Final Solution
, attempting to uncover the way the author narrates the Holocaust with both animal and human perspectives. Drawing on ...the existing scholarship regarding focalization, it engages with the parrot’s and the old man’s points of view, and looks at their significance to the representation of the protagonist’s Holocaust memories. Aided by Holocaust imagery and consciousness representation techniques, the parrot’s animal and the old man’s Holmesian perspectives evoke the scenes of the Holocaust and the Nazi images, and show a Holocaust that is irrational, unknowable and unspeakable, that is, Chabon reconfigures the focalization structure of Holmesian canon to demonstrate the inability of Holmesian reason to solve the mystery of the Holocaust, and the inability of human language to speak about the horror and trauma of the Holocaust. For Chabon, this unique focalization pattern helps to present the trauma and existential crisis of the protagonist, and narrate his Holocaust memories artistically.
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"On October 16, 1943, the Jews of Rome were targeted for arrest and deportation. The Nazis, the Vatican, and the Jews of Rome examines why?and more importantly how?it could have been avoided, ...featuring new evidence and insight into the Vatican?s involvement. At the time, Rome was within reach of the Allies, but the overwhelming force of the Wehrmacht, Gestapo, and SS in Rome precluded direct confrontation. Moral condemnations would not have worked, nor would direct confrontation by the Italians, Jewish leadership, or even the Vatican. Gallo underscores the necessity of determining what courses of actions most likely would have spared Italian Jews from the gas chambers. Examining the historical context and avoiding normative or counterfactual assertions, this book draws upon archival sources ranging from diaries to intelligence intercepts in English, Italian, and German. With antisemitism on the rise today and the last remaining witnesses passing away, it is essential to understand what happened in 1943. The Nazis, the Vatican, and the Jews of Rome grapples with this particular, awful episode within the larger, horrifying story of the Holocaust. Despite the inadequacy of memory, we must continue to attempt to make sense of the inexplicable. "
"Most accounts of the Holocaust focus on trainloads of prisoners speeding toward Auschwitz, with its chimneys belching smoke and flames, in the summer of 1944. This book provides a hitherto untold ...chapter of the Holocaust by exploring a prequel to the gas chambers: the face-to-face mass murder of Jews in Galicia by bullets. The summer of 1941 ushered in a chain of events that had no precedent in the rapidly unfolding history of World War II and the Holocaust. In six weeks, more than twenty thousand Hungarian Jews were forcefully deported to Galicia and summarily executed. In exploring the fate of these Hungarian Jews and their local coreligionists, A Summer of Mass Murder transcends conventional history by introducing a multitude of layers of politics, culture, and, above all, psychology?for both the victims and the executioners. The narrative presents an uncharted territory in Holocaust scholarship with extensive archival research, interviews, and corresponding literature across countries and languages, incorporating many previously unexplored documents and testimonies. Eisen reflects upon the voices of the victims, the images of the perpetrators, whose motivation for murder remains inexplicable. In addition, the author incorporates the long-forgotten testimonies of bystander contemporaries, who unwittingly became part of the unfolding nightmare and recorded the horror in simple words. This book also serves as a personal journey of discovery. Among the twenty thousand people killed was the tale of two brothers, the author?s uncles. In retracing their final fate and how they were swept up in the looming genocide, A Summer of Mass Murder also gives voice to their story. "
In his entertaining and informative book Graphic
Discovery , Howard Wainer unlocked the power of graphical
display to make complex problems clear. Now he's back with
Picturing the Uncertain World , a ...book that explores how
graphs can serve as maps to guide us when the information we have
is ambiguous or incomplete. Using a visually diverse sampling of
graphical display, from heartrending autobiographical displays of
genocide in the Kovno ghetto to the "Pie Chart of Mystery" in a
New Yorker cartoon, Wainer illustrates the many ways
graphs can be used--and misused--as we try to make sense of an
uncertain world. Picturing the Uncertain World takes
readers on an extraordinary graphical adventure, revealing how the
visual communication of data offers answers to vexing questions yet
also highlights the measure of uncertainty in almost everything we
do. Are cancer rates higher or lower in rural communities? How can
you know how much money to sock away for retirement when you don't
know when you'll die? And where exactly did nineteenth-century
novelists get their ideas? These are some of the fascinating
questions Wainer invites readers to consider. Along the way he
traces the origins and development of graphical display, from
William Playfair, who pioneered the use of graphs in the eighteenth
century, to instances today where the public has been misled
through poorly designed graphs. We live in a world full of
uncertainty, yet it is within our grasp to take its measure. Read
Picturing the Uncertain World and learn how.
