Our Work

Modern forms of sovereign power have walked over everything that is sacred. State power can only be subject to laws and limitations, if one believes that the phenomenon of power has limits, that there…

Modern forms of sovereign power have walked over everything that is sacred. State power can only be subject to laws and limitations, if one believes that the phenomenon of power has limits, that there are things that must not be done. In reality, however, the spur of competition drives rivalries and appetites far beyond what any power can possibly control. Simone Weil's philosophical anthropology addressed precisely this problem. Her central insight is that overcoming human social mechanisms governed by force can only succeed by grounding the needs of the soul in the acceptance of a metaphysical, supernatural principle, which she calls grace. This paper takes the departure from Weil's analysis of how force – congruous with physical gravity – dominates all social mechanisms and why modern revolutionary ideologies or political constructs such as socialism or liberalism, but also institutional Christianity, are unable to overcome the crisis. The remaining part sketches out her vision for spiritual renewal of Europe. In essence, civilisation needs to break with the modern principles of collectivism and the immanent hope for salvation through an earthly good. Weil advocates a shift of attention towards human duties and an ethics of self-renunciation as the bases for an internal transformation of the human soul.

Richard Sakwa's The Culture of the Second Cold War is a compelling analysis of the emergence of what he calls the Political West. This new actor on the geopolitical stage, argues Sakwa, can only be fu…

Richard Sakwa's The Culture of the Second Cold War is a compelling analysis of the emergence of what he calls the Political West. This new actor on the geopolitical stage, argues Sakwa, can only be fully understood if the culture that sustains it is foregrounded. This culture is structured around a unilateral view of the international order, rather than a dialogical approach to global understanding. Sakwa argues a return to the international charter system of friendly rivalry that emerged after World War II would encourage a more dialogically oriented global order. It is argued that the idea of geophilosophy found in the work of Deleuze and Guattari both sustains Sakwa's approach to the culture of the second Cold War and challenges his appeal to the international charter system. It is concluded that we need a form of geopolitics based on hospitality to the stranger rather than on friendly rivalry, as the latter is too tied to an idea of what I call the Philosophical West.

This repository provides the reproducibility package accompanying the manuscript “Cross-fire transferability of four-year NBR-based spectral recovery after the 2021 wildfires in southwestern T&u…

This repository provides the reproducibility package accompanying the manuscript “Cross-fire transferability of four-year NBR-based spectral recovery after the 2021 wildfires in southwestern Türkiye”. The package contains the analysis-ready modelling sample, Google Earth Engine and Python analysis scripts, locked out-of-fold model predictions, model-selection records, sensitivity-analysis outputs, uncertainty and calibration results, derived tables and figures, random seeds, data dictionaries, provenance information, and supporting quality-control documentation. The study evaluates the transferability of four-year NBR-based spectral recovery across five 2021 wildfire complexes in southwestern Türkiye using outer leave-one-fire-out validation and spatially blocked inner cross-validation. The repository supports reproduction and auditing of the reported analyses. Source Sentinel-2, CORINE Land Cover, EFFIS, MODIS MCD64A1, and other third-party datasets remain subject to their original providers’ terms and licences. Spectral recovery reported in this study should not be interpreted as complete biomass, ecosystem, or restoration recovery. Version 1.1.0 adds two reviewer-motivated robustness analyses: direct prediction of NBR in 2025 to reduce dependence on the recovery-ratio formulation, and event-grouped inner cross-validation using leave-one-training-fire-out model selection.

This paper discusses Richard Sakwa's ideas on revolution, focusing on his 2006 article "From Revolution to Krizis". It claims that these ideas offer a significant rethinking of the modern obsession wi…

This paper discusses Richard Sakwa's ideas on revolution, focusing on his 2006 article "From Revolution to Krizis". It claims that these ideas offer a significant rethinking of the modern obsession with the Revolution, as they argue that the events in the Eastern part of Europe that ended Communism in 1989-91 also conclusively dismissed the entire modern revolutionary tradition. According to Sakwa, the two main modalities of this revolutionary tradition are the Enlightenment and the Marxist-emancipatory revolution, which were built upon each other, and culminated in a permanent civil war. This was not accidental, rather a consequence of the misdirected radicality of Enlightenment and critical thinking. These ideas are compared to Foucault's discussion of Hobbes in his 1976 Collège de France lectures. Taking these ideas a step further, the article argues that such a dismissal implies the need of a search for a meaningful conservativism, of which some signs can be seen in recent developments in the region.

This Introduction explores the resources of a modern intellectual, the writer Richard Sakwa for an analysis of the current role and significance of an author as political figure. Suggesting that the t…

This Introduction explores the resources of a modern intellectual, the writer Richard Sakwa for an analysis of the current role and significance of an author as political figure. Suggesting that the tradition of political science and political sociology needs new approaches and inspirations from other disciplines that take their horizon broader. This helps to explain Sakwa's inspiration from political anthropology, from Girard's mimetic theory, from political philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, when he creatively re-developed them into his life work. In honour of Richard Sakwa we regard the complexity of a lifework that is exercised in a more authentic way.

This record contains the code accompanying the article "Skillful Data-Driven Subseasonal Soil Moisture Forecasting: Prospects and Limits for Flash Drought Prediction" (Otero, Özer, Fernánd…

This record contains the code accompanying the article "Skillful Data-Driven Subseasonal Soil Moisture Forecasting: Prospects and Limits for Flash Drought Prediction" (Otero, Özer, Fernández-Torres, Ma). The repository includes:- the SMCast model and the deep-learning baselines used in the paper (UNet, E3DLSTM, DroughtFormer), all at a similar parameter count;- training scripts (deterministic training and probabilistic quantile-head fine-tuning);- evaluation scripts that generate predictions and metrics, including persistence and climatology reference forecasts, plus aggregation of metrics across training seeds;- preprocessing scripts that turn raw ERA5 into model inputs, soil-moisture anomalies, flash-drought indices, percentile thresholds and train/validation/test splits. Dependencies are managed with uv (Python 3.10; the lockfile pins CUDA 12.8 PyTorch wheels). ERA5 data are not included and are available from the Copernicus Climate Data Store. Data paths are set in the YAML files under config/. See README.md for installation, data setup, training and evaluation commands. Released under the MIT License.

Slides of an online presentation regarding Wikidata organized by Babeș-Bolyai University (17 November 2025). The recording is available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iiL9WFx2JY Slides w…

Slides of an online presentation regarding Wikidata organized by Babeș-Bolyai University (17 November 2025). The recording is available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iiL9WFx2JY Slides were originally uploaded at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_introduction_to_Wikidata_and_its_use_for_librarians_and_researchers.pdf

Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate multiple tokens with a single forward pass per decoding round, achieving greater parallelism than autoregressive models (ARMs). Revision promises further redu…

Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate multiple tokens with a single forward pass per decoding round, achieving greater parallelism than autoregressive models (ARMs). Revision promises further reductions in sequential computation by allowing a DLM to overwrite previously generated tokens and thereby reducing the number of decoding rounds. Yet it remains unclear whether this advantage persists as DLMs evolve. To assess the expressive power of DLMs with and without revision, we work in a model where each Transformer's decoding round uses $\mathrm{AC}^0$ computation. We compare the minimum number of rounds each class needs to sample $(X,f_L(X))$, where the word $X$ is uniform on $\{0,1\}^n$ and $f_L$ is the membership function of a binary regular language $L$. We show that revision yields an asymptotic advantage. A DLM with revision exactly samples this distribution in at most two rounds without chain-of-thought (CoT) positions. However, a DLM without revision has tight round complexity $\Theta(\log n/\log\log n)$ even with a constant number of CoT positions for every $L\notin\mathrm{AC}^0$, i.e., every regular language whose membership cannot be computed by such circuits. Moreover, for every such $L$ and every constant $\theta>0$, $O(n^{1-\theta})$ CoT positions do not suffice to sample this distribution in constant rounds without revision. We further show that there is a separation when the goal is to approximately sample a length-$n$ word uniformly from some regular language $L$. These results provide a theoretical framework for understanding how revision reduces sequential computation and expands the scope of parallel speedups achievable by DLMs.

Col-detection and analysis code reproducing the figures and reported quantities of Paul (2026, Weather and Climate Dynamics). Includes a manifest linking each figure and result to its producing script…

Col-detection and analysis code reproducing the figures and reported quantities of Paul (2026, Weather and Climate Dynamics). Includes a manifest linking each figure and result to its producing script.

A educação inclusiva constitui-se como uma diretriz fundamental das políticas públicas educacionais brasileiras, estando diretamente relacionada à garantia do direit…

A educação inclusiva constitui-se como uma diretriz fundamental das políticas públicas educacionais brasileiras, estando diretamente relacionada à garantia do direito à educação, à equidade e à justiça social. O estudo tem como objetivo analisar os desafios e as possibilidades da gestão escolar na implementação da educação inclusiva na rede pública de ensino, destacando o papel do gestor escolar como agente estratégico da gestão pública. A pesquisa caracteriza-se como bibliográfica, de abordagem qualitativa, fundamentada em livros, artigos científicos, legislações e documentos oficiais que abordam a educação inclusiva, a gestão escolar e as políticas públicas educacionais. Os resultados evidenciam que a efetivação da inclusão escolar depende de fatores como formação continuada dos profissionais, planejamento pedagógico inclusivo, gestão democrática e articulação intersetorial. Conclui-se que, apesar das dificuldades estruturais e institucionais, a gestão escolar possui possibilidades concretas de atuação para promover uma educação inclusiva e de qualidade na rede pública.