History.

ZTE traces its roots back to 1912, at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its first match was a 4–2 defeat to a team from Vasvár. The team was first composed of members of a literary and debating society. ZTE flourished under coach József Vadász, but World War I halted its progress. In 1920, Zalaegerszegi TE, or "Gymanistics Club of Zalaegerszeg," was born. They were defeated in their debut match, losing 2–1 to AK Szombathely on August 21, 1920, but were motivated by a crowd of over 2,000 fans.  ZTE's league history began in 1924, when they joined the Hungarian second division. The club won the title a decade later and entered the top flight in 1934. However, the start of World War II under the regime of Admiral Miklós Horthy saw ZTE's field and equipment confiscated. After the war, in 1957, ZTE merged with two other local teams, signalling the rebirth of the club.

1990s.

From then on to the 1990s, however, ZTE did not really challenge the Hungarian title much. The league was dominated by Budapest club Ferencvárosi TC. In 1994, ZTE managed to gain a solid foothold on the Hungarian first division.

2000s.

In the 2000s the club reached their zenith by winning the Hungarian League for the first time in the club history. In the 2001–02 season Zalaegrszeg finished second in the first stage of the championship gaining 61 points while Budapest rivals MTK Budapest FC 64 points. In the championship play-off Zalaegerszeg could secure their first title by gaining 71 points. Péter Bozsik's team could overtake Budapest rivals Ferencváros and MTK Budapest. Krisztián Kenesei and Gábor Egressy were the key figures of the title-winning team by scoring 37 goals. In the 2002–03 Zalaegerszeg could not finish in the first six teams of the first stage of the Hungarian League therefore they could play in the relegation play-off as reigning champions. They finished first in the relegation play-off but it was a real disappointement for the former champion. In the following seasons ZTE came 9th, 6th and 11th, respectively.  In the 2002–03 UEFA Champions League qualifying phase Zalaegerszeg defeated Croatian champions NK Zagreb on away goals. The first match was played in Zalaegerszeg and the club won it by 1–0. The only goal was scored by Darko Ljubojević. In the second leg Zagreb was winning by 2–0 when in the 87th minute Zalaegerszeg was awarded a penalty which was scored by Flórián Urbán. ZTE beat Zagreb on away goals. In the third qualifying round Zalaegerszeg faced with the English giant club Manchester United. In the first leg, ZTE provided a stunning shock by winning 1–0 in Hungary with a last minute goal from Béla Koplárovics. However, in the return leg at Old Trafford, Man United won a convincing 5–0 victory. Ruud van Nistelrooy scored in the 5th minute and in the 75th minute then David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Ole Gunnar Solskjær scored. The English side progressed to the first group stage with a 5–1 aggregate victory. In the 2006–07 season after nine rounds Zalaegerszeg was on the top of the league table. At the end of the season the club finished third securing a place in the European competitions of the Intertoto Cup 2007. In the spring of 2009 János Csank was appointed as the coach of the club. The success coach has already won two Hunagrian League titles with Vác and Ferencváros.

2010s.

In the 2010–11 season Zalaegerszeg was competing for the Europa League position with Budapest rivals Ferencváros but ZTE finished fourth and could not secure a place for the qualifiers. In the 2011–12 season Zalaegerszeg started the season with five consecutive defeats which resulted the dismissal of János Csank. He was replaced by former Ferencváros coach László Prukner. The first half of the 2011–12 Hungarian League season was a nightmare for the club since they finished last gaining only 6 points without any victories. On April 21, 2012 Zalaegerszeg were relegated to the second division of the Hungarian League after the defeat against titleholders Videoton.  On 15 May 2014, former Zalaegerszeg player Gergely Kocsárdi was elected as director of the club. It was also announced that the company called Pharos '95 gained more than 50% of the shares of the club for about 16 million HUF.  By winning the 2018–19 Nemzeti Bajnokság II season, Zalaegerszeg were promoted to the 2019–20 Nemzeti Bajnokság I season.

Crest and colours.

The colours of the club are blue and white.

Manufacturers and shirt sponsors.

The following table shows in detail Zalaegerszegi TE kit manufacturers and shirt sponsors by year:

Stadiums and facilities.

Zalaegerszeg play their matches in the ZTE Arena. The stadium is able to host 14000 people. Due to the increased attention Zalaegerszeg played their 2002–03 UEFA Champions League match against Manchester United at the Ferenc Puskás Stadium.

Zalaegerszegi Torna Egylet Football Club (), commonly known as Zalaegerszegi TE, Zalaegerszeg or ZTE, is a football club from the city of Zalaegerszeg in Hungary. They are best known for beating Manchester United 1–0 in the 2002–03 UEFA Champions League qualifying stage. Zalaegerszeg has won one Hungarian League title in 2002.

Der Zalaegerszegi Torna Egylet Football Club, oft kurz ZTE oder Zete genannt, ist ein ungarischer Fußballverein aus der Stadt Zalaegerszeg im Westen des Landes.


Description and paleobiology.

"Pistosaurus" was about long, and had a body form resembling that of nothosaurs, aquatic reptiles that flourished during the Triassic. However, the vertebral column was stiff, like that of a plesiosaur, implying that the animal used its paddle-like flippers to propel itself through the water, as the plesiosaurs probably did. The head also resembled that of a plesiosaur, but with the primitive palate of a nothosaur, and numerous, sharp teeth ideal for catching and eating fish.

Post-cranial skeleton.

The description below is based on the specimen examined by paleontologist Sues in 1987.

Pectoral girdle and forelimbs.

The structure of pectoral girdle and humerus are used to support the anterior part of the body. The scapula in pectoral girdle of "Pistosaurus" consists with a massive body and a short posterodorsal process. It is smaller in size compared to coracoid. And its lateral margin of the body is gently convex anteroposteriorly while the medial margin is more strongly convex.  The coracoid bone of "Pistosaurus" is flat and expanded medially. The glenoid region is similar to "Nothosaurus" in development: both the slight notching of its margin and a distinct facet contact with the humeral head. There is also a ridge like thickening which links the glenoid to posteromedial region of the coracoid. This feature is a synapomorphy that appears in plesiosaurs, which is a thickened ridge passes transversely across the anterior portion of the coracoid to connect the glenoid region. This feature is suggested related to compressional force by limb motion in "Pistosaurus".  A specimen of the left humerus of "Pistosaurus" analyzed by Paleontologist A.R.I. Cruickshank is one of the largest specimens recorded: 245mm long and 45mm wide at the mid-shaft. The specimen showing that the axis of "Pistosaurus’" humerus is straight, with the distal end slightly expanded posteriorly. From proximal view, the head of the humerus is concave, which is a sign of a substantial cap of cartilage at the head of humerus. The humerus of "Pistosaurus" also lacks "entepicondylar foramen".  "Pistosaurus" has a strongly flattened ulna. It has medium length and nearly symmetrical in dorsal view. Its anterior margin is more curved and thicker than the posterior one. This feature broads the wide spatium interosseum enclosed between radius and ulna. The proximal end of radius is less expanded than that of ulna, while the distal end is less expanded than proximal one but thickened. The anterior margin is nearly straight while the posterior margin is more curved compared to the anterior one. Like other sauropterygians, the radius of "Pistosaurus" is slightly longer than the ulna.

Pelvic girdle.

The pelvic girdle of "Pistosaurus" is more similar to primitive sauropterygians than to plesiosaurs.  The ilium of "Pistosaurus" has an iliac blade, which has almost parallel anterior and posterior margins. Same as other non-plesiosaur sauropterygians, the ilium in "Pistosaurus" contacts both the pubis and the ischium, forming a ring-like structure. The ilium from "Pistosaurus" is relatively large in size compared to "Nothosaurus", whose ilia did not appear to have any elongated blade.  The femur of "Pistosaurus" is longer than its humerus. Its anterior margin is almost straight whereas the posterior margin is concave. According to the specimen provided by paleontologist Sues, the proximal articular end is much more robust than the distal one, and is more or less triangular in transverse section.

Classification.

Although it is unlikely that "Pistosaurus" was a direct ancestor of the plesiosaurs, the mixture of features suggests that it was closely related to that group.  The following cladogram follows an analysis by Ketchum & Benson, 2011.  The classification for Plesiosauria was difficult at the first place. The anatomy of stem group Sauropterygia has very primitive synapomorphies such as dermal palate. Initially, Plesiosauria were suggested related to Pistosauroidea"," which belongs to Eusauropterygia from Triassic. Three genera of Plesiosauria was known in the history: "Corosaurus alvocensis, Cymatosaurus," and "Pistosaurus longaevus". A later discovery of a new Pistosauridea from middle triassic of Nevada by paleontologist Sander indicates that "Augustasaurus" is closely related to "Pistosaurus", while there are several difference including axial skeleton.

Pistosaurus ( “saurus” in Greek meaning “reptile” and “lizard”) is an extinct genus of aquatic sauropterygian reptile closely related to plesiosaurs. Fossils have been found in France and Germany, and date to the Middle Triassic. It contains a single species, "Pistosaurus longaevus. Pistosaurus" is known as the oldest “subaquatic flying” reptile on earth.

Pistosaurus ("Pistosaurus longaevus") war ein im Meer der Mitteltrias lebendes Reptil, dessen Name "Flüssigkeits-Echse" bedeutet. Es hatte sowohl Merkmale der Nothosaurier, welche einen stromlinienförmigen Körper und einen langen Schwanz besaßen, als auch Merkmale der Plesiosaurier, die in den Weltmeeren der Jura- und Kreidezeit lebten. Daher wird davon ausgegangen, dass der Saurier ein Übergangsstadium zwischen den beiden Gruppen darstellt.


History.

Capita was formed in 1984 as a division of the non-profit CIPFA (Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy). In 1987 it became an independent company with 33 staff as a result of a management buy-out, led by Rod Aldridge, and was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1991.  In March 2006, Executive Chairman Rod Aldridge resigned in the aftermath of claims that contracts awarded to the Group were influenced by his loan of £1 million to the Labour Party. Aldridge resigned saying that he denied the claims, but to avoid any lingering doubts about it, he was leaving the company. Aldridge had overseen the company's growth from a small company in 1987 to a FTSE 100 member in 2006. He was replaced by his longtime associate Paul Pindar.  In February 2007, a Capita office in Victoria, London was subject to a letter bomb attack. One person was injured.  On 2 October 2009, one of Capita's businesses (Capita Financial Group) announced plans to move some of its operations from London to Leeds.  On 1 July 2011, Capita acquired Ventura, a customer contact specialist for a cash consideration of £65 million. On 28 February 2013, Capita bought the Fire Service College from the Department for Communities and Local Government for £10 million.  In 2014 Pindar stepped down as chief executive. He was replaced by Andy Parker.  The company acquired Avocis, a German call centre business, in 2015, Orange Bus, a specialist digital interaction agency, in 2016 and NYS Corporate events and travel agency in 2017.  In October 2017, the company announced that former Amec Foster Wheeler CEO Jonathan Lewis would take over as CEO from 1 December 2017 following departure of Andy Parker. After completing an initial assessment, on 31 January 2018 Lewis announced a profits warning, dividend suspension, a £700m rights issue, cost cutting and a disposals programme, as net debts were predicted to hit £1.15bn and a pensions deficit reached £381m. The announcement knocked 47% off Capita's shares, reducing its market value by over £1.1bn. The share price slide continued the following day, losing a further 13%. On 3 April 2018, Capita shares fell 6% to a 20-year low after British Airways decided to retain in-house operation of two UK call centres rather than award contracts to run them to Capita. On 23 April 2018, Capita launched a cash call to raise £701m and reported a £513m loss for the previous financial year. On 1 August 2018, Capita announced its profits in the six months to 30 June had dropped to £80.5m (from £195m in the same period in 2017), while revenues were down 4% to £1.98bn; the company's shares fell almost 9% after markets opened, to 148p a share.  Following Lewis's appointment, the company embarked on a "multi-year strategy" to turnaround the company. In May 2019 the company became the first FTSE 250 company in 30 years to appoint rank-and-file workers to its board. Lyndsay Browne, a chartered accountant and finance manager, and Joseph Murphy, a project manager in the real estate division, beat competition from other internal candidates to become the first worker's representatives on the Capita board.  In September 2019 the company announced that it was re-branding as a "purpose-led" living wage employer, changing its logo for the first time in 13 years. The company said that from April 2020 it will pay all 40,000 of its employees an independently verified "real living wage." This will involve a pay rise for almost 6,000 employees. The rates, which are set at the basic income needed to cover the real cost of living, are overseen by the Living Wage Commission.

Operations.

Consultancy division.

In July 2019 the company announced that it was launching a consultancy arm. The new division will employ around 1,000 consultants and compete with the likes of Accenture, Deloitte and KPMG.

Healthcare recruitment.

Capita entered the healthcare recruitment market during May 2011 through acquisition of Team24, a healthcare recruitment specialist - extending the services they offer within the recruitment industry.

Capita Financial Administrators.

In 2006 Capita Financial Administrators (CFA) was fined £300,000 by the Financial Services Authority for having poor anti-fraud controls. The division provides administration services for third parties and the Capita Group.

Legal Services.

Capita also intended to enter into the legal services market and entered into a funding arrangement with the Law Firm Optima Legal Services Limited which saw them, in the period between May 2006 to the end of 2009 invest a total of £36,700,000 by way of investment loans into Optima. As part of the funding arrangement Capita Group had the option of acquiring the shares of Optima Legal Services for the nominal sum of £1 upon the full implementation of the Legal Services Act 2007 which would make ownership of law firms by the likes of Capita possible. It is thought that such Alternative Business Structures ("ABS") could be lawful around October 2011. However, on 9 August 2010 it was reported that the Solicitors Regulatory Authority ("SRA") had found that the arrangement breached its rules in that it effectively amounted to an ABS. As a consequence, Optima Legal Services Lead Litigation and Property Partners, Philip Robinson and Anthony Ruane respectively were both severely reprimanded by the SRA for what was found to be professional misconduct and only narrowly avoided referral to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and Adrian Lamb, former CEO of Optima Legal Services Limited, left the business in June 2010.

Constructionline.

In 1998, Capita won the contract to run Constructionline, the newly created Public-Private Partnership owned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). In January 2015, Capita acquired Constructionline outright from BIS for £35m. Three years later, on 31 January 2018, Capita announced it wanted to sell Constructionline as part of a transformation programme including disposal of non-core assets and cost cutting. In June 2018, it was reported that Constructionline had been sold to private equity investor Warburg Pincus for £160m.

NHS Services.

In June 2014 it was reported that at least five of eight Liverpool NHS Trusts which had contracted their payroll and recruitment to Capita in 2012 were withdrawing because of concerns about the quality of the service provided. Several NHS trusts contracted with the company for human resources services. West London Mental Health NHS Trust cancelled their contract in September 2014 after the company proved "unable to meet acceptable 'time to hire' targets", particularly for nurses. At the same time Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust and Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS Foundation Trust terminated their contracts.  In November Mersey Care Trust revealed that "information governance issues" had been uncovered when the services were taken back in-house. Details of staff at other Merseyside trusts were sent to Liverpool Community Health Trust’s HR department.  The company was awarded a 4-year contract to become sole provider of administrative services including payment administration, management of medical records and eligibility lists of practitioners for GPs, opticians and dentists across the UK by NHS England in June 2015. In July 2016 it was reported that there was "a large backlog of unprocessed correspondence relating to patients". It was earlier reported that the company was unable to deal "effectively" with the movement of paper records between practices.  In 2015, an undercover Daily Telegraph investigation showed that in some cases locum agencies, Medicare and Team24 owned by Capita were charging some hospitals higher fees than others and giving false company details. The agencies were charging up to 49% of the fee. Health secretary Jeremy Hunt criticised agencies who sought "big profits" at the expense of the NHS and taxpayers and promised to "reduce the margins rip-off agencies are able to generate."  The company established Primary Care Support England in September 2015, replacing former regional services provided by each local health authority. The new service was described as shambolic by the Local Optical Committee Support Unit and the Optical Confederation. A deal was negotiated to enable optician practices to claim interest, administrative costs and bank charges on late payments of General Ophthalmic Services fees by Capita. In August 2016 a survey of GPs found 85% were missing records of recently registered patients, 65% had experienced shortages of clinical supplies or delays in deliveries, and 32% had suffered from missed or delayed payments. Delays in the payment of GP trainees' salaries were also reported. The situation was repeated in October 2017 with "The Guardian" reporting that "hundreds" of trainee GPs had not been paid. Capita was unable to say how many were affected in what the Cameron fund - a GP hardship charity - blamed on "another botched privatisation." Inadequacies by Capita may have put patients at risk. The National Audit Office maintains almost 90 women were told incorrectly they were no longer in the cervical screening programme. Patients could have been at risk due to trouble with the 'performers list' a list of NHS dentists, GP's and opticians. "The failure to update performers lists may have compromised patient safety in cases where practitioners should have been removed," the report authors maintained. Roughly 1,000 dentists, doctors and opticians could not work in 2016 due to delays processing new applications. Further failures included a backlog of 500,000 patient registration letters, failure to deliver medical supplies, and patients' medical records being lost or delayed.  In March 2019 Simon Stevens announced that the cervical screening programme administration they had been running would be brought back in house.

Irish postcodes.

In 2014, Capita were awarded the contract to introduce postcodes to the Republic of Ireland. The Irish communications minister has welcomed the implementation saying that the Irish code is the first in the world to be unique to each individual address. The scheme was launched in July 2015.  The emergency services have expressed concern that the new system may lead to responders having difficulty getting to incidents. Further, the Irish Data Protection Authority has raised concerns over the design of the code as information about individuals will be made more accessible. Liam Duggan, CEO of Capita Ireland stated at a Government enquiry in 2014 that they had thoroughly tested the new system for unsuitable words and even used a game of Scrabble for this purpose.  The project is generally running to programme and budget: roll out, which was originally planned to start in March 2015, will now take place in "mid-2015" and the cost, which was originally budgeted at €25 million has increased to €27 million.

Criticism.

Capita Group has not been received well by the public and in the media. It has gained the nickname "Crapita", particularly from the coverage in the satirical and current affairs magazine "Private Eye", which routinely documents the company's many failures and setbacks in the public sector.  Pindar himself has attracted criticism for complaining about being called a 'fat cat', due to his a £770,000 per annum salary and ownership of an Aston Martin DB9. "It really takes the biscuit—especially when you consider his workers are fighting for a rise equivalent to just four pints of milk a week", said a workers' representative. The average Capita employee salary at the time was £28,000 per year.  It was revealed in January 2013 that Capita was embroiled in a scandal over misinforming people that they had to leave the UK as they had no valid visa. One such person was, in fact, the holder of a UK passport.  In 2014, a leak to "The Guardian" revealed that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had to send civil servants in to help the company process personal independence payments for the seriously ill and the disabled. "Waiting times for assessment," the newspaper noted, "have been so long that in some cases people with terminal conditions have died before receiving a penny."  The 2015 sale of a government research operation charged with overlooking food safety to Capita has been criticized by Tim Lang, an advisor to the UK government and the WHO on food safety issues. Arguing that a for-profit operation will be under pressure to ignore low-paying projects vital to public safety and the environment, he indicates that there is no profit in public research concerning food and biodiversity or food and pesticide residues, and predicts "commercial concerns will skew Fera's priorities"  Former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron questioned how Atos and Capita could have been paid over £500m from taxpayers money for assessing fitness to work as 61% who appealed won their appeals. Farron stated, "This adds to the suspicion that these companies are just driven by a profit motive, and the incentive is to get the assessments done, but not necessarily to get the assessments right. They are the ugly face of business."  Capita has also been criticised for several issues involving army recruitment.

Capita plc (), commonly known as Capita, is an international business process outsourcing and professional services company headquartered in London.

Capita ist ein britisches Unternehmen, gelistet im FTSE 250 Index, mit Hauptsitz in London. Das Unternehmen ist im Wirtschaftsbereich Outsourcing spezialisiert und hat Kunden in Verwaltungen/Behörden wie auch in der Privatwirtschaft.


History.

WWDC.

Steve Jobs mentioned Dashcode as a new feature to be included in Leopard during his 2006 WWDC keynote speech. Although not installed by default as part of an Xcode installation, the DVDs handed out at the WWDC did contain a version of Dashcode. Although the version number was in fact lower than that of the "MacBook build", the WWDC build of Dashcode contained several additional templates, as well as some interface and functionality improvements. This WWDC build launched on both Mac OS X v10.4 and the WWDC build of Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard"), but was unusable on 10.4 (crashes soon after startup).

Public beta.

On December 20, 2006, Apple released a public beta of Dashcode. When announcing this release, Apple stated the beta had been "scaled back" for compatibility with Mac OS X v10.4. This beta expired on July 15, 2007.

Dashcode and iOS.

Dashcode Version 2.0 (151) is included as part of Apple's iOS SDK. This allows for the creation of Web apps for the iOS version of Safari.  Dashcode Version 3.0.2 (336) is installed with Xcode on OS X Lion. It is not known if this will allow for the local installation of Dashcode-created web apps, as such an ability will allow iOS to run a software layer akin to Mac OS X's Dashboard, which runs on a local installation. Currently, iOS maintains a separation between native code and web code, in that way native applications can access data from the Internet, web content can't be accessed by native applications save for Safari; likewise, web content (including web apps) can be run inside the Safari browser, but cannot have access to the filesystem or other internals of iOS and cannot be installed on the operating system in the same way as native code.  Native code software for iOS is currently developed using the Xcode suite, particularly an iPhone-centric version of Interface Builder packaged with the iOS SDK.

Dashcode was a software application created by Apple Inc. that was included with Mac OS X Leopard and facilitates the development of widgets for Dashboard. It was first included on new MacBooks shipping around the time of May 24, 2006, as part of the Xcode developer tools.

Dashcode ist eine Entwicklungsumgebung von Apple für Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 und neuer, mit der man einfach Widgets für das Dashboard von Mac OS X sowie Web-Anwendungen für das iPhone und Apple Safari erstellen kann. Beide basieren auf Web-Standards wie HTML, CSS und JavaScript.


Career.

Sarna was born in Łódź to Stefana and Jozef Sałacińska and studied at the city's XVIII high school. She took up track and field in her youth, joining the Ogniwa athletics club in 1955 and made her international debut for Poland in 1959. She continued to study during this period and ultimately gained a master's degree in physical education. She married her coach, Edmund Sarna, in 1968 and began competing under her married from that point onwards.  Sarna's first national title was in the long jump in 1964 and her performance of equalled the championship record. After that she had a national win in the women's pentathlon in 1966, amassing a score of 4332 points. She was chosen to represent Poland in that event at the 1966 European Athletics Championships and placed 15th. After a win in the 200 metres at the Polish Athletics Championships in 1967, she transitioned into a sprint and long jump specialist. A second Polish long jump title in 1968 gained her selection for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, being one of two Polish entrants alongside Irena Szewińska. She achieved a personal best there, recording to take fifth place in the final.  The 1969 season proved to be the best of Sarna's career. She won a 200 metres/long jump double at the national championships. She was entered in three events for the 1969 European Athletics Championships in Athens: the long jump, 100 metres and the 4 × 100 metres relay. In the long jump she again improved her best in championship competition and her mark of was enough to be the reigning Olympic champion Viorica Viscopoleanu and secure the first and only international gold medal of her career. She reached the semi-finals of the 100 m and ran the anchor leg of the relay to bring the team of Krystyna Mandecka, Danuta Jędrejek and Urszula Jóźwik to fifth in the final.  Following her European Championships success, she won two further continental medals: at the 1970 European Athletics Indoor Championships she jumped a lifetime best of to take the bronze medal just two centimetres behind Viscopoleanu. The runner-up, Heide Rosendahl, succeeded Sarna as European champion a year later. The quality of the competition was not as high at the 1973 European Athletics Indoor Championships and despite only having a mark of she was again third on the podium, this time behind Diana Yorgova and Jarmila Nygrýnová. She also ran in the 60 metres at the 1970 edition, placing fifth.  Sarna's final national titles came in the 1973 season, when she was Poland's long jump champion both indoors and outdoors. Her indoor winning mark of remained the championship record until 1978, when it was improved by Anna Włodarczyk. Sarna made the last of her 47 international appearances in the 1973 season. After retiring from the sport, she went into education as a coach and physical education teacher.

Mirosława Kazimiera Sarna (née Sałacińska; born 8 June 1942) is a Polish former track and field athlete who competed in the long jump, short sprints and the women's pentathlon. She was the gold medallist in the long jump at the 1969 European Athletics Championships and was twice a bronze medallist in that discipline at the European Athletics Indoor Championships.

Mirosława Kazimiera Sarna (geborene "Sałacinska"; * 8. Juni 1942 in Litzmannstadt) ist eine ehemalige polnische Leichtathletin. Bei einer Körpergröße von 1,68 m betrug ihr Wettkampfgewicht 60 kg.


Education and early career.

Wolf was born and raised in Weingarten. After receiving his high school diploma in Ravensburg he studied law at the University of Konstanz. Upon completing his traineeship at the regional court district Ravensburg, the county councillor's office in Ravensburg and the Regierungspräsidium (Administrative Council) Tübingen, he underwent a specialization program in "Management and Finance" at Konstanz University. In 1988 he took his second state examination.  Upon completing his legal education, Wolf worked at the district office of Tuttlingen as Councillor for Public Safety, Order and Traffic until 1991. He was then employed until 1993 as a personal assistant and office manager for Baden-Württemberg's Transport Minister Thomas Schäuble. During the following two years he served as a judge at the administrative court in Sigmaringen. From 1994 until October 1996 he worked as a Head of Unit in the policy department of the Baden-Württemberg State Ministry.

Political career.

In November 1996 Wolf was elected mayor of Nürtingen. In 2003 he was elected county councillor in the district of Tuttlingen. Three years later he was elected to the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg in 2006 and re-elected 2011. In the same year he was also chosen to be president of the Landtag. In December 2014 he succeeded Peter Hauk as faction leader of the CDU in the Landtag and was elected in January 2015. At the same time, the CDU's state party convention nominated him as its leading candidate for the 2016 Baden-Württemberg state elections.  During his campaign Wolf demanded daily refugee quotas and border centers for migrants in a joint statement with CDU Rhineland-Palatinate's frontrunner Julia Klöckner in February 2016. According to their proposal, no one should be allowed to enter Germany without a reason for asylum or a protection status. Thereby, the statement increased pressure on Angela Merkel in the European migrant crisis. Eventually, the German government rejected the proposal.  On March 15, 2016, after the CDU's historic defeat in the state election, Wolf was re-elected as leader of the parliamentary group, even though his party only garnered 27 percent of the popular vote. This was criticized by several CDU state politicians and county chapters, who accused Wolf of "arrogant" behavior, because he did not step down after his defeat.  In May 2016, Wolf was appointed State Minister of Justice and European Affairs in the government of Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann of Baden-Württemberg. As one of the state’s representatives at the Bundesrat, he has been serving as chairman of the Committee on European Affairs since October 2016.

Guido Wolf (born 28 September 1961) is a German politician. He is a member of the CDU party. Since 2006 he is a MP of the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. In 2015 he was elected faction leader of the CDU Baden-Württemberg and leading candidate for the 2016 Baden-Württemberg state elections. On 15 March 2016 he was re-elected as parliamentary group leader. Wolf also was county councillor (Landrat) from 2003 to 2011 in the district of Tuttlingen. From 2011 to 2015 he was president of the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. Since May 2016, Wolf is Minister of Justice and European Affairs in Baden-Württemberg in the Cabinet Kretschmann II.

Guido Wolf (* 28. September 1961 in Weingarten, Landkreis Ravensburg) ist ein deutscher Jurist und Politiker (CDU). Er war von 2015 bis 2016 Landtagsfraktionsvorsitzender der CDU Baden-Württemberg und somit Oppositionsführer. Außerdem war er Spitzenkandidat für die Landtagswahl in Baden-Württemberg 2016. Seit Mai 2016 ist er im Kabinett Kretschmann II Minister für Justiz und Europaangelegenheiten.


Formal statement.

For any connected undirected graph "G" with maximum degree Δ, the chromatic number of "G" is at most Δ unless "G" is a complete graph or an odd cycle, in which case the chromatic number is Δ + 1.

Proof.

gives a simplified proof of Brooks' theorem. If the graph is not biconnected, its biconnected components may be colored separately and then the colorings combined. If the graph has a vertex "v" with degree less than Δ, then a greedy coloring algorithm that colors vertices farther from "v" before closer ones uses at most Δ colors. Therefore, the most difficult case of the proof concerns biconnected Δ-regular graphs with Δ ≥ 3. In this case, Lovász shows that one can find a spanning tree such that two nonadjacent neighbors "u" and "w" of the root "v" are leaves in the tree. A greedy coloring starting from "u" and "w" and processing the remaining vertices of the spanning tree in bottom-up order, ending at "v", uses at most Δ colors. For, when every vertex other than "v" is colored, it has an uncolored parent, so its already-colored neighbors cannot use up all the free colors, while at "v" the two neighbors "u" and "w" have equal colors so again a free color remains for "v" itself.

Extensions.

A more general version of the theorem applies to list coloring: given any connected undirected graph with maximum degree Δ that is neither a clique nor an odd cycle, and a list of Δ colors for each vertex, it is possible to choose a color for each vertex from its list so that no two adjacent vertices have the same color. In other words, the list chromatic number of a connected undirected graph G never exceeds Δ, unless G is a clique or an odd cycle. This has been proved by.  For certain graphs, even fewer than Δ colors may be needed. shows that Δ − 1 colors suffice if and only if the given graph has no Δ-clique, "provided" Δ is large enough. For triangle-free graphs, or more generally graphs in which the neighborhood of every vertex is sufficiently sparse, O(Δ/log Δ) colors suffice.  The degree of a graph also appears in upper bounds for other types of coloring; for edge coloring, the result that the chromatic index is at most Δ + 1 is Vizing's theorem. An extension of Brooks' theorem to total coloring, stating that the total chromatic number is at most Δ + 2, has been conjectured by Mehdi Behzad and Vizing. The Hajnal–Szemerédi theorem on equitable coloring states that any graph has a (Δ + 1)-coloring in which the sizes of any two color classes differ by at most one.

Algorithms.

A Δ-coloring, or even a Δ-list-coloring, of a degree-Δ graph may be found in linear time. Efficient algorithms are also known for finding Brooks colorings in parallel and distributed models of computation.

In graph theory, Brooks' theorem states a relationship between the maximum degree of a graph and its chromatic number. According to the theorem, in a connected graph in which every vertex has at most Δ neighbors, the vertices can be colored with only Δ colors, except for two cases, complete graphs and cycle graphs of odd length, which require Δ + 1 colors.

Der Satz von Brooks gibt eine Obergrenze für die Anzahl der Farben an, die benötigt werden, um alle Knoten eines Graphen so zu färben, dass keine zwei benachbarten Knoten dieselbe Farbe haben.


Geography.

Around 1910, Abaúj-Torna county shared borders with the counties Gömör-Kishont, Szepes, Sáros, Zemplén, and Borsod. The rivers Hernád and Bódva flowed through the county. Its area was 3317 km2 around 1910.

History.

The county Abaúj-Torna was a combination of the counties Abaúj and Torna, officially joined in 1881. In the aftermath of World War I, the northern part of Abaúj-Torna county became part of newly formed Czechoslovakia (as "Abovskoturnianska župa"), as recognized by the concerned states in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. It continued to exist as an administrative unit until 1922. The southern half stayed in Hungary as the county Abaúj-Torna, with capital Szikszó.  Following the provisions of the First Vienna Award, most of the Czechoslovak part was returned to Hungary in November 1938. It was added to the county Abaúj-Torna, with capital Kassa (present-day Košice). After World War II, the Trianon border was restored, the county was renamed to Abaúj County again. In 1950, it merged with the county of Borsod-Gömör and the Hungarian part of Zemplén to form the present Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county. Since 1993, when Czechoslovakia was split, the northern part of the county's former territory is part of Slovakia's Košice Region.

Demographics.

In 1900, the county had a population of 196,462 people and was composed of the following linguistic communities:  Total:  According to the census of 1900, the county was composed of the following religious communities:  Total:  In 1910, the county had a population of 202,288 people and was composed of the following linguistic communities:  Total:  According to the census of 1910, the county was composed of the following religious communities:  Total:  In 1941: 203,438 Hungarians, 18,879 Slovaks, 2581 Bunjevacs, 904 Germans, 623 Roma, 256 Ruthenians, 72 Romanians, 3 Croatians, 105 other; 140,377 Roman Catholics, 45,384 Protestants, 22,476 Greek Catholics, 14,764 Jewish, 4773 Evangelicals, 339 Greek Orthodox, 116 Baptists and 55 Unitarians.

Subdivisions.

In the early 20th century, the subdivisions of Abaúj-Torna were:  The towns Füzér, Szikszó, Gönc and Abaújszántó are now in Hungary.

Abaúj-Torna (,, ) was an administrative county (comitatus) of the Kingdom of Hungary. Its capital was Kassa (present-day Košice). Its territory is now divided between Hungary and Slovakia.

Das Komitat Abaúj-Torna (deutsch "Abaujwar-Tornau" ungarisch "Abaúj-Torna vármegye", slowakisch "Abovsko-turnianska župa", lateinisch "comitatus Abaujvariensis et Tornensis") war eine Verwaltungseinheit (Gespanschaft bzw. Komitat) im Königreich Ungarn, sowie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg in Ungarn und kurzzeitig unter dem Namen "Abovsko-turnianska župa" in der Tschechoslowakei.


Lifestyle.

Cultural tendencies of this period differ from that of the earlier Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) period in that people living during this period began to depend more heavily upon domesticated animals to supplement their earlier mixed agrarian and hunter-gatherer diet. In addition the flint tool kit of the period is new and quite disparate from that of the earlier period. One of its major elements is the naviform core. This is the first period in which architectural styles of the southern Levant became primarily rectilinear; earlier typical dwellings were circular, elliptical and occasionally even octagonal. Pyrotechnology, the expanding capability to control fire, was highly developed in this period. During this period, one of the main features of houses is a thick layer of white clay plaster flooring, highly polished and made of lime produced from limestone. It is believed that the use of clay plaster for floor and wall coverings during PPNB led to the discovery of pottery. The earliest proto-pottery was White Ware vessels, made from lime and gray ash, built up around baskets before firing, for several centuries around 7000 BCE at sites such as Tell Neba'a Faour (Beqaa Valley). Sites from this period found in the Levant utilizing rectangular floor plans and plastered floor techniques were found at Ain Ghazal, Yiftahel (western Galilee), and Abu Hureyra (Upper Euphrates). The period is dated to between c. 10,700 and c. 8,000 BP or 7000–6000 BCE.  Plastered human skulls were reconstructed human skulls that were made in the ancient Levant between 9000 and 6000 BC in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period. They represent some of the oldest forms of art in the Middle East and demonstrate that the prehistoric population took great care in burying their ancestors below their homes. The skulls denote some of the earliest sculptural examples of portraiture in the history of art.

Society.

Danielle Stordeur's recent work at Tell Aswad, a large agricultural village between Mount Hermon and Damascus could not validate Henri de Contenson's earlier suggestion of a PPNA "Aswadian" culture. Instead, they found evidence of a fully established PPNB culture at 8700 BC at Aswad, pushing back the period's generally accepted start date by 1,200 years. Similar sites to Tell Aswad in the Damascus Basin of the same age were found at Tell Ramad and Tell Ghoraifé. How a PPNB culture could spring up in this location, practicing domesticated farming from 8700 BC has been the subject of speculation. Whether it created its own culture or imported traditions from the North East or Southern Levant has been considered an important question for a site that poses a problem for the scientific community.

Extent.

Work at the site of 'Ain Ghazal in Jordan has indicated a later Pre-Pottery Neolithic C period, which existed between 8,200 and 7,900 BP. Juris Zarins has proposed that a Circum Arabian Nomadic Pastoral Complex developed in the period from the climatic crisis of 6200 BCE, partly as a result of an increasing emphasis in PPNB cultures upon animal domesticates, and a fusion with Harifian hunter gatherers in Southern Palestine, with affiliate connections with the cultures of Fayyum and the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Cultures practicing this lifestyle spread down the Red Sea shoreline and moved east from Syria into southern Iraq.  The culture disappeared during the 8.2 kiloyear event, a term that climatologists have adopted for a sudden decrease in global temperatures that occurred approximately 8,200 years before the present, or c. 6200 BCE, and which lasted for the next two to four centuries. In the following Munhatta and Yarmukian post-pottery Neolithic cultures that succeeded it, rapid cultural development continues, although PPNB culture continued in the Amuq valley, where it influenced the later development of the Ghassulian culture.

Artifacts.

Around 8000 BCE, before the invention of pottery, several early settlements became experts in crafting beautiful and highly sophisticated containers from stone, using materials such as alabaster or granite, and employing sand to shape and polish. Artisans used the veins in the material to maximum visual effect. Such object have been found in abundance on the upper Euphrates river, in what is today eastern Syria, especially at the site of Bouqras. These form the early stages of the develoment of the Art of Mesopotamia.

Genetics.

Pre-Pottery Neolithic B fossils that were analysed for ancient DNA were found to carry the Y-DNA (paternal) haplogroups E1b1b (2/7; ~29%), CT (2/7; ~29%), E(xE2,E1a,E1b1a1a1c2c3b1,E1b1b1b1a1,E1b1b1b2b) (1/7; ~14%), T(xT1a1,T1a2a) (1/7; ~14%), and H2 (1/7; ~14%). The CT clade was also observed in a Pre-Pottery Neolithic C specimen (1/1; 100%). Maternally, the rare basal haplogroup N* has been found among skeletal remains belonging to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, as have the mtDNA clades L3 and K.  DNA analysis has also confirmed ancestral ties between the Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture bearers and the makers of the Epipaleolithic Iberomaurusian culture of North Africa, the Mesolithic Natufian culture of the Levant, the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic culture of East Africa, the Early Neolithic Cardium culture of Morocco, and the Ancient Egyptian culture of the Nile Valley, with fossils associated with these early cultures all sharing a common genomic component.

Diffusion.

Carbon 14 datation.

The spread of the Neolithic in Europe was first studied quantitatively in the 1970s, when a sufficient number of 14C age determinations for early Neolithic sites had become available. Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza discovered a linear relationship between the age of an Early Neolithic site and its distance from the conventional source in the Near East (Jericho), thus demonstrating that, on average, the Neolithic spread at a constant speed of about 1 km/yr. More recent studies confirm these results and yield the speed of 0.6–1.3 km/yr at 95% confidence level.

Analysis of mitochondrial DNA.

Since the original human expansions out of Africa 200,000 years ago, different prehistoric and historic migration events have taken place in Europe. Considering that the movement of the people implies a consequent movement of their genes, it is possible to estimate the impact of these migrations through the genetic analysis of human populations. Agricultural and husbandry practices originated 10,000 years ago in a region of the Near East known as the Fertile Crescent. According to the archaeological record this phenomenon, known as “Neolithic”, rapidly expanded from these territories into Europe. However, whether this diffusion was accompanied or not by human migrations is greatly debated. Mitochondrial DNA – a type of maternally inherited DNA located in the cell cytoplasm- was recovered from the remains of Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) farmers in the Near East and then compared to available data from other Neolithic populations in Europe and also to modern populations from South Eastern Europe and the Near East. The obtained results show that substantial human migrations were involved in the Neolithic spread and suggest that the first Neolithic farmers entered Europe following a maritime route through Cyprus and the Aegean Islands.

Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) is part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, a Neolithic culture centered in upper Mesopotamia, dating to years ago, that is, 8,800–6,500 BCE. It was typed by Kathleen Kenyon during her archaeological excavations at Jericho in the West Bank. Like the earlier PPNA people, the PPNB culture developed from the Mesolithic Natufian culture. However, it shows evidence of a northerly origin, possibly indicating an influx from the region of northeastern Anatolia.

Das Präkeramische Neolithikum B oder PPNB (für "Pre-Pottery Neolithic B)" wurde von Kathleen Kenyon auf Grund der Befunde von Jericho definiert. Es ist die jüngere Stufe des Akeramikums und folgt auf das Präkeramische Neolithikum A (PPNA) der Levante. Das PPNB bezeichnet eine Epoche, in der bereits sesshafter Ackerbau und Viehhaltung betrieben wurden, keramische Gefäße dagegen in der Region unbekannt waren. Aus Ton und anderen Materialien wurden kleine Tier- und Menschenfiguren hergestellt (Cafer Höyük, Mureybet). Gefäße wurden aus Gips oder gebranntem Kalk ("Vaisselles Blanches" oder "White ware") angefertigt. Auch Steingefäße sind bekannt, teilweise in Tierform (Bouqras). Aus ʿAin Ghazal (Jordanien) sind menschliche Hohlfiguren bekannt, die aus einem kalkhaltigen Material angefertigt sind.


Competition.

Competitive events are separated into middle school and high school levels, with students competing only with their respective age group. Competitions take place at the local, state, regional and national level. A component of leadership is often entailed in events at both levels, with some events being devoted to leadership (such as the Leadership Challenge).  All TSA competitions are correlated with national science, technology, engineering and mathematics and business standards. Expert judging by technology educators and industry representatives inspires the best from participants. Sample middle school events include Biotechnology Issues, Career Prep, Video Game Design, and Inventions and Innovations. High school events include Animatronics, Computer Aided Design (CAD), Dragster Design, Promotional Design, System Control Technology, Flight Endurance, Software Development, and Webmaster. Scores are out of 100 points and based upon a nationally developed rubric. Winners are chosen based on these scores. In many events, semi-finalists (top 12) move onto a second round of competition which usually involves an interview with the judges about the project. First, second, and third-place winners are awarded a trophy, and finalists (top 10) are recognized at the national level.

Program initiatives.

The Technology Student Association has partnered with many groups to promote other skills. Junior Solar Sprint is a national program allows students to design solar-powered cars. Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics, and Science (TEAMS) is an annual one-day competition where students use their skills to solve issues facing our global society. TSA has partnered with the VEX Robotics Competition to allow students to design and create robots to complete specific tasks. UNITE is a summer program funded by the U.S. Army Research Office that encourages high school students to pursue engineering careers. Every TSA middle school and high school member is required to submit LEAP (Leadership. Education. Achievement. Personal Growth.) documentation as part of every competition in which they compete. LEAP documentation tracks the leadership activities and experiences a TSA member has completed as part of each competition.

History.

TSA became an independent organization in 1978, when AIASA Inc. was formed to oversee the activities of the American Industrial Arts Student Association. Between the foundation of AIASA as an independent organization (it had formerly been a part of the American Industrial Arts Association) and 1988, the association grew and began to take shape.  In 1988, the AIASA changed its name to the Technology Student Association as part of a shift in focus from industrial arts to mainstream technology. This action followed a similar name change by the Texas state delegation the previous year. In 1989, the official logo, submitted by a chapter advisor, was adopted. In 1990, the logo received a trademark from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.  Today, the association has grown to include over 250,000 members in 2,000 secondary schools across 49 states. It has established an Honor Society, manages numerous competitive events and has partnerships with several organizations. Since 1978, TSA has had a membership almost 4,000,000.  Additionally, TSA has a service partnership with the American Cancer Society (ACS), which are parts of their National Service Project. TSA members raise money to promote advocacy and research in the ACS, and the ACS issues Spirit of Service awards at each national conference. In the past, conferences have hosted Relay for Life events on site.

Student Leadership.

Every year at the Technology Student Association National conference, the students elect a National Officer team.

The Technology Student Association (TSA) is a national student organization created to develop skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as well as business education. TSA aims to develop leadership, academic, and business management skills in the workplace among students and leaders within the community. The organization has 250,000 members. The 2019 national conference was held on June 28 - July 2, 2019, in Gaylord National Resort, National Harbor, MD. The 2020 national conference will be held from June 27 - July 1, 2020, in Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville, TN.

Die Technology Student Association ist eine amerikanische Schülerorganisation mit über 250.000 Mitgliedern, die die technische Ausbildung von Schülern und ihren Lehrern („Advisor“) fördert.


History.

History of great success: 1950s to 1980s.

For at least half a century, Madrid has been a standard-bearer in European basketball, accumulating a record ten continental titles, based on its dominance in the 1960s. Its early dominance in Spain has resulted in another untouchable cache of 35 national domestic league and 28 national cup trophies. And almost every time that Madrid did not play in Europe's top-tier level competition, it won a different continental trophy – four Saporta Cups, a Korać Cup, and a ULEB Cup – as a stepping-stone back to the big time.  Players like Emiliano Rodríguez, Clifford Luyk, Wayne Brabender, Walter Szczerbiak, Juan Antonio Corbalán, Dražen Petrović, Mirza Delibašić, Arvydas Sabonis, and Dejan Bodiroga have turned Real Madrid into one of the biggest basketball clubs in the world. Madrid won as many as 7 EuroLeague titles between 1964 and 1980, becoming a European basketball club legend, and even when it took the club 15 years to win it again, it found success in other European competitions, too.  Madrid downed Olimpia Milano in the 1984 Cup Winners' Cup, on free throws made by Brian Jackson, then Petrović had 62 points in the 1989 Cup Winners' Cup final, against Snaidero Caserta. Madrid added a 1988 Korać Cup title, against Cibona Zagreb.

1990–2010.

Real Madrid won the 1992 Saporta Cup trophy against PAOK, on a buzzer-beating jumper by Rickey Brown. It was not until Sabonis arrived in Madrid, when Real won its last EuroLeague title in 1995, by beating Olympiacos in the final. Madrid next won the 1997 Saporta Cup title against Verona, but no more European-wide trophies came for the club in the next decade.  Madrid still found success at home, winning Spanish League titles in 2000 and 2005. It all changed in 2007, when Joan Plaza was promoted to the club's head coach position. With the help of players like Louis Bullock, Felipe Reyes, and Álex Mumbrú, Madrid added a new trophy to its roll of honours, the ULEB Cup, as it won 12 of its last 13 games, and downed Lietuvos Rytas, by a score of 75–87, in the 2007 ULEB Cup Final. Moreover, Madrid finished in 2nd place in the 2006–07 Spanish League regular season, and stayed strong in its play in Palacio Vistalegre, during the Spanish league playoffs; to lift its 30th national league trophy, by besting their arch-rivals, Winterthur FC Barcelona, 3–1 in the Spanish League title series in 2007.

2011–present: Pablo Laso era.

In Pablo Laso's era, Real Madrid Baloncesto managed to find consistent success. Spanish top-tier level players of the time, like Sergio Rodríguez and Rudy Fernández, were acquired by the club. Also, ACB Rising Star winner Nikola Mirotić was a part of the team's mix, along with Sergio Llull and Felipe Reyes, to give Real Madrid a strong home grown core of players. This group of players gave Real Madrid Baloncesto 6 Copa del Reys (Spanish Cup) titles, 5 Spanish Super Cup titles, 5 Liga ACB (Spanish League) titles, 2 EuroLeague championship, and an FIBA Intercontinental Cup championship.  On May 17, 2015, after waiting 20 years to win another EuroLeague championship, Real Madrid won the 2015 EuroLeague championship against Olympiacos. Madrid's Andrés Nocioni was named the Final Four MVP. This title was called "La Novena". Following the EuroLeague title, the 2014–15 ACB season's championship was also won by Real. Because Real also won the national Spanish Cup and the national Spanish Supercup that season, the club won its first "Quadruble crown".  On September 27, 2015, 34 years after their last FIBA Intercontinental Cup title, Real Madrid won their fifth FIBA Intercontinental Cup trophy, after defeating the Brazilian League club Bauru. Sergio Llull was named the MVP of the tournament. Real Madrid thus made it a record five FIBA Intercontinental Cup titles won, and with the Intercontinental Cup title.  On 20 May 2018, Real Madrid conquered again the EuroLeague, achieving their tenth title ever. The considered major leader of the team that season would be a Slovenian guard/forward named Luka Dončić, who became the designated MVP of the EuroLeague on all accounts at 19 years old.

Honours.

Individual awards.

ACB Most Valuable Player ACB Finals MVP All-ACB First Team All-ACB Second Team ACB Three Point Shootout Champion ACB Slam Dunk Champion ACB Most Spectacular Player of the Year  Spanish Cup MVP Spanish Supercup MVP EuroLeague MVP EuroLeague Final Four MVP FIBA Intercontinental Cup MVP All-EuroLeague First Team All-EuroLeague Second Team EuroLeague Rising Star EuroLeague Best Defender

Notable players.

Players who are currently on the team are in boldface. Players who are still active, but in other team, are in "italics".

Real Madrid Baloncesto (English: Real Madrid Basketball) is a Spanish professional basketball team that was founded in 1931, as a division of the Real Madrid CF multi sports club. They play domestically in the Liga ACB, and internationally in the EuroLeague.

Real Madrid Baloncesto ist die Basketballabteilung des renommierten spanischen Sportvereins Real Madrid. Sie wurde am 8. März 1931 gegründet und konnte bislang zahlreiche nationale und internationale Erfolge feiern. Mit acht Siegen im Europapokal der Landesmeister, zwei in der ULEB Euroleague, vier im Europäischen Pokalsiegerbewerb, je einem im Korać-Cup und im ULEB Eurocup ist Real Madrid der erfolgreichste Verein des Kontinents. Darüber hinaus liegt der Klub mit 35 Titeln in der Spanischen Meisterschaft und 28 Pokalsiegen auch in Spanien an der Spitze. Ebenso wie die Fußballmannschaft ist auch die Basketballabteilung noch nie aus der obersten Spielklasse abgestiegen. Außer den Madrilenen können das in der spanischen Liga nur Joventut und Lokalrivale CB Estudiantes von sich behaupten.


Brief background.

In a historic speech on 3 March 1848, shortly after news of the revolution in Paris had arrived, Lajos Kossuth demanded parliamentary government for Hungary and constitutional government for the rest of Austria. The Revolution started on 15 March 1848, and after military setbacks in the winter and a successful campaign in the spring, Kossuth declared independence on 19 April 1849. By May 1849, the Hungarians controlled all of the country except Buda, which they won after a three-week bloody siege. The hopes of ultimate success, however, were frustrated by the intervention of Russia.  After all appeals to other European states failed, Kossuth abdicated on 11 August 1849, in favor of Artúr Görgey, who he thought was the only general capable of saving the nation. On 13 August 1849, Görgey signed a surrender at Világos (now Şiria, Romania) to the Russians, who handed the army over to the Austrians. At the insistence of the Russians, Görgey was spared. The Austrians took reprisals on other officers of the Hungarian army.  The thirteen Hungarian generals were executed by hanging at Arad on October 6, 1849, with the exception of Arisztid Dessewffy and two others, because of their friendship to the Prince of Luxembourg. Hanging was deemed a humiliation. On the same day, Count Lajos Batthyány (1806–1849), the first Hungarian prime minister, was executed in Pest at an Austrian military garrison.  Kossuth fled to the Ottoman Empire; he maintained that Görgey alone was responsible for the failure of the rebellion, calling him "Hungary's Judas". Others, looking at the impossible situation Görgey was given, have been more sympathetic. They have said that, given the circumstances, he was left with no option other than surrender.  One of the public squares contains a martyrs' monument, erected in the memory of the generals. It consists of a colossal figure of Hungary, with four allegorical groups, and medallions of the executed generals.  Hungarians have come to regard the thirteen rebel generals as martyrs for defending the cause of freedom and independence for their people. Not all the generals were ethnic Hungarians, but they fought for the cause of an independent and — for its age — liberal Hungary. In this regard Baron Gyula Ottrubay Hruby who was also executed in Arad, was actually Czech, and spoke in German. The anniversary of their execution is remembered on October 6 as a day of mourning for Hungary.

Custom.

Legend has it that while the revolutionary leaders were being executed, Austrian soldiers were drinking beer and arrogantly clinking their beer mugs together in celebration of Hungary's defeat.  Hungarians thus vowed not to clink glasses again while drinking beer for 150 years. In reality, however, there is no information regarding this event at all. It has also been speculated that wine producers hoping to raise their profits were the ones who popularized the tradition. While the Hungarians' vow expired on 6 October 1999, in practice, this tradition continued for about a decade after. Throughout Hungary, clinking beer mugs or bottles was considered to be bad manners by some. By the 2000s, most Hungarians began to click to their beer mugs – as in the rest of Europe. The aforementioned tradition is no longer practiced today, the exception being a handful of openly patriotic citizens that vow to never forget the Arad incident in Hungarian history.

The Thirteen Martyrs of Arad () were the thirteen Hungarian rebel generals who were executed by the Austrian Empire on 6 October 1849 in the city of Arad, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary (now in Romania), after the Hungarian Revolution (1848–1849). The execution was ordered by the Austrian general Julius Jacob von Haynau.

Als Märtyrer von Arad ( "Aradi vértanúk") werden in Ungarn 13 Anführer und Generäle des ungarischen Aufstands von 1848/49 bezeichnet, die am 6. Oktober 1849 (dieser Tag ist in Ungarn ein nationaler Gedenktag) in der heute in Rumänien liegenden Stadt Arad hingerichtet wurden, obwohl ihnen freies Geleit zugesichert worden war.


Narrow energy band theory.

The Hubbard model is based on the tight-binding approximation from solid-state physics, which describes particles moving in a periodic potential, sometimes referred to as a lattice. For real materials, each site of this lattice might correspond with an ionic core, and the particles would be the valence electrons of these ions. In the tight-binding approximation, the Hamiltonian is written in terms of Wannier states, which are localized states centered on each lattice site. Wannier states on neighboring lattice sites are coupled, allowing particles on one site to "hop" to another. Mathematically, the strength of this coupling is given by a "hopping integral", or "transfer integral", between nearby sites. The system is said to be in the tight-binding limit when the strength of the hopping integrals falls off rapidly with distance. This coupling allows states associated with each lattice site to hybridize, and the eigenstates of such a crystalline system are Bloch wave functions, with the energy levels divided into separated energy bands. The width of the bands depends upon the value of the hopping integral.  The Hubbard model introduces a contact interaction between particles of opposite spin on each site of the lattice. When the Hubbard model is used to describe electron systems, these interactions are expected to be repulsive, stemming from the screened Coulomb interaction. However, attractive interactions have also been frequently considered. The physics of the Hubbard model is determined by competition between the strength of the hopping integral, which characterizes the system's kinetic energy, and the strength of the interaction term. The Hubbard model can therefore explain the transition from metal to insulator in certain interacting systems. For example, it has been used to describe metal oxides as they are heated, where the corresponding increase in nearest-neighbor spacing reduces the hopping integral to the point where the on-site potential is dominant. Similarly, the Hubbard model can explain the transition from conductor to insulator in systems such as rare-earth pyrochlores as the atomic number of the rare-earth metal increases, because the lattice parameter increases (or the angle between atoms can also change – see Crystal structure) as the rare-earth element atomic number increases, thus changing the relative importance of the hopping integral compared to the on-site repulsion.

Example: 1D chain of hydrogen atoms.

The hydrogen atom has only one electron, in the so-called "s" orbital, which can either be spin up (formula_1) or spin down (formula_2). This orbital can be occupied by at most two electrons, one with spin up and one down (see Pauli exclusion principle).  Now, consider a 1D chain of hydrogen atoms. Under band theory, we would expect the 1s orbital to form a continuous band, which would be exactly half-full. The 1D chain of hydrogen atoms is thus predicted to be a conductor under conventional band theory.  But now consider the case where the spacing between the hydrogen atoms is gradually increased. At some point we expect that the chain must become an insulator.  Expressed in terms of the Hubbard model, on the other hand, the Hamiltonian is now made up of two terms. The first term describes the kinetic energy of the system, parameterized by the hopping integral, formula_3. The second term is the on-site interaction of strength formula_4 that represents the electron repulsion. Written out in second quantization notation, the Hubbard Hamiltonian then takes the form  where formula_6 is the spin-density operator for spin formula_7 on the formula_8-th site. The total density operator is formula_9 and occupation of formula_8-th site for the wavefunction formula_11 is formula_12. Typically "t" is taken to be positive, and "U" may be either positive or negative in general, but is assumed to be positive when considering electronic systems as we are here.  If we consider the Hamiltonian without the contribution of the second term, we are simply left with the tight binding formula from regular band theory.  When the second term is included, however, we end up with a more realistic model that also predicts a transition from conductor to insulator as the ratio of interaction to hopping, formula_13, is varied. This ratio can be modified by, for example, increasing the inter-atomic spacing, which would decrease the magnitude of formula_3 without affecting formula_4. In the limit where formula_16, the chain simply resolves into a set of isolated magnetic moments. If formula_13 is not too large, the overlap integral provides for superexchange interactions between neighboring magnetic moments, which may lead to a variety of interesting magnetic correlations, such as ferromagnetic, antiferromagnetic, etc. depending on the parameters of the model. The one-dimensional Hubbard model was solved by Lieb and Wu using the Bethe ansatz. Essential progress has been achieved in the 1990s: a hidden symmetry was discovered, and the scattering matrix, correlation functions, thermodynamic and quantum entanglement were evaluated.

More complex systems.

Although the Hubbard model is useful in describing systems such as a 1D chain of hydrogen atoms, it is important to note that in more complex systems there may be other effects that the Hubbard model does not consider. In general, insulators can be divided into Mott–Hubbard type insulators (see Mott insulator) and charge-transfer insulators.  Consider the following description of a Mott–Hubbard insulator:  This can be seen as analogous to the Hubbard model for hydrogen chains, where conduction between unit cells can be described by a transfer integral.  However, it is possible for the electrons to exhibit another kind of behavior:  This is known as charge transfer and results in charge-transfer insulators. Note that this is quite different from the Mott–Hubbard insulator model because there is no electron transfer between unit cells, only within a unit cell.  Both of these effects may be present and competing in complex ionic systems.

Numerical treatment.

The fact that the Hubbard model has not been solved analytically in arbitrary dimensions has led to intense research into numerical methods for these strongly correlated electron systems. One major goal of this research is to determine the low-temperature phase diagram of this model, particularly in two-dimensions. Approximate numerical treatment of the Hubbard model on finite systems is possible via a number of methods.  One such method, the Lanczos algorithm, can produce static and dynamic properties of the system. Ground state calculations using this method require the storage of three vectors of the size of the number of states. The number of states scales exponentially with the size of the system, which limits the number of sites in the lattice to about 20 on currently available hardware. With projector and finite-temperature auxiliary-field Monte Carlo, two statistical methods exist that also can obtain certain properties of the system. For low temperatures, convergence problems appear that lead to an exponential growth of computational effort with decreasing temperature due to the so-called fermion sign problem.  The Hubbard model can also be studied within dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). This scheme maps the Hubbard Hamiltonian onto a single-site impurity model, a mapping that is formally exact only in infinite dimensions and in finite dimensions corresponds to the exact treatment of all purely local correlations only. DMFT allows one to compute the local Green's function of the Hubbard model for a given formula_4 and a given temperature. Within DMFT, one can compute the evolution of the spectral function and observe the appearance of the upper and lower Hubbard bands as correlations increase.

The Hubbard model is an approximate model used, especially in solid-state physics, to describe the transition between conducting and insulating systems. The Hubbard model, named after John Hubbard, is the simplest model of interacting particles in a lattice, with only two terms in the Hamiltonian (see example below): a kinetic term allowing for tunneling ("hopping") of particles between sites of the lattice and a potential term consisting of an on-site interaction. The particles can either be fermions, as in Hubbard's original work, or bosons, in which case the model is referred to as either the "Bose–Hubbard model".

Das Hubbard-Modell (nach dem britischen Physiker John Hubbard) ist ein grob genähertes Modell eines Festkörpers und ist daher in der Festkörperphysik von großer Bedeutung. Es beschreibt das Verhalten von Elektronen in einem als starr angenommenen Gitter. Dabei werden die abstoßenden Coulomb-Kräfte nur für diejenigen Elektronen berücksichtigt, die sich am gleichen Gitterplatz aufhalten. Der Anteil der kinetischen Energie der Elektronen wird durch ein Überlappungsintegral formula_1 modelliert, das aus dem Tight-Binding-Modell kommt.


Operationals importance.

The new high-speed railway from Ingolstadt to Nuremberg branches off the old Munich–Ingolstadt–Treuchtlingen (timetable no. KBS 990). The high-speed tracks begin turning out even within the station limits in order to run into the Audi Tunnel which is immediately next to the station. There is also a heavily used goods siding which branches off to the refineries that are located in the eastern part of the city.

Passenger services.

The Nordbahnhof is only served by regional train services: the "Regionalexpress (RE)" and "Regionalbahn (RB)" trains. "Intercity-Express (ICE)" and "InterCity (IC)" trains pass through without stopping. A summary of passenger services at the station is shown in the table below:  In addition several extra trains are laid on during rush hours between Ingolstadt Nord and Eichstätt and between Ingolstadt Nord and Munich. Because the Nordbahnhof, unlike the Hauptbahnhof, is located close to the town centre and not far from the Audi factory, it is used particularly by schoolchildren, students and Audi employees travelling to and from the area.

Goods traffic.

Goods traffic plays a major role at Ingolstadt Nord. Numerous goods trains arrive with manufacturing parts for the Audi factory. These trains are detached in the station and shunted into the car manufacturer's industrial sidings. The factory has an extensive set of tracks that are busy around the clock.  In Ingolstadt Nord there is also a branch line, several kilometres long, that is still used by goods traffic. This splits again at the edge of the town into various goods sidings leading to two oil refineries and the "InterPark" industrial estate.

Infrastructure.

The station has an extensive track system which includes five tracks with platforms (nos. 3 to 7) and which are used by passenger trains. Tracks 4 and 5 belong to the new high-speed route and only trains of the Munich-Nuremberg Express stop here. All platforms have a height of 76 cm. Tracks 3, 6 and 7 are 270 m long; tracks 4 and 5 are only 170 m long. All platforms have lifts; platforms 4 and 5 are only partly suitable for wheelchairs due to their steep slopes. Apart from 3 ticket machines, two snack vending machines and a toilet block there are no services at the station.  The station building, dating from 1869/1870, and the station forecourt are currently (2007) in poor structural condition. In the near future, however, a conversion is planned which should see the town of Ingolstadt purchasing the station building from Deutsche Bahn, and converting it into a cultural centre. However, there are no firm plans yet. In addition, there is a plan to build a multi-storey car park with 290 bays and an integrated kiosk, which will greatly improve the parking situation for travellers. It was announced that the necessary real estate would be bought in September or October 2007 and that work would begin in spring 2008.

Ingolstadt Nord station (also called the "Nordbahnhof" in German, meaning "North station") is the second operational passenger station in the town of Ingolstadt, in the state of Bavaria in southern Germany. The other station is Ingolstadt Hauptbahnhof.

Der Bahnhof Ingolstadt Nord ist neben dem Ingolstädter Hauptbahnhof und dem Haltepunkt Ingolstadt Audi der dritte in Betrieb befindliche Personenbahnhof in Ingolstadt. Im Gegensatz zum Hauptbahnhof befindet er sich nahe der Innenstadt, wird jedoch ausschließlich im Regionalverkehr bedient.


Overview.

Recommender systems usually make use of either or both collaborative filtering and content-based filtering (also known as the personality-based approach), as well as other systems such as knowledge-based systems. Collaborative filtering approaches build a model from a user's past behavior (items previously purchased or selected and/or numerical ratings given to those items) as well as similar decisions made by other users. This model is then used to predict items (or ratings for items) that the user may have an interest in. Content-based filtering approaches utilize a series of discrete, pre-tagged characteristics of an item in order to recommend additional items with similar properties. Current recommender systems typically combine one or more approaches into a hybrid system.  The differences between collaborative and content-based filtering can be demonstrated by comparing two early music recommender systems – Last.fm and Pandora Radio.  Each type of system has its strengths and weaknesses. In the above example, Last.fm requires a large amount of information about a user to make accurate recommendations. This is an example of the cold start problem, and is common in collaborative filtering systems. Whereas Pandora needs very little information to start, it is far more limited in scope (for example, it can only make recommendations that are similar to the original seed).  Recommender systems are a useful alternative to search algorithms since they help users discover items they might not have found otherwise. Of note, recommender systems are often implemented using search engines indexing non-traditional data.  Recommender systems were first mentioned in a technical report as a "digital bookshelf" in 1990 by Jussi Karlgren at Columbia University, and implemented at scale and worked through in technical reports and publications from 1994 onwards by Jussi Karlgren, then at SICS,  and research groups led by Pattie Maes at MIT, Will Hill at Bellcore, and Paul Resnick, also at MIT  whose work with GroupLens was awarded the 2010 ACM Software Systems Award.  Montaner provided the first overview of recommender systems from an intelligent agent perspective. Adomavicius provided a new, alternate overview of recommender systems. Herlocker provides an additional overview of evaluation techniques for recommender systems, and Beel et al. discussed the problems of offline evaluations. Beel et al. have also provided literature surveys on available research paper recommender systems and existing challenges.  Recommender systems have been the focus of several granted patents.

Approaches.

Collaborative filtering.

One approach to the design of recommender systems that has wide use is collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering is based on the assumption that people who agreed in the past will agree in the future, and that they will like similar kinds of items as they liked in the past. The system generates recommendations using only information about rating profiles for different users or items. By locating peer users/items with a rating history similar to the current user or item, they generate recommendations using this neighborhood. Collaborative filtering methods are classified as memory-based and model-based. A well-known example of memory-based approaches is the user-based algorithm, while that of model-based approaches is the Kernel-Mapping Recommender.  A key advantage of the collaborative filtering approach is that it does not rely on machine analyzable content and therefore it is capable of accurately recommending complex items such as movies without requiring an "understanding" of the item itself. Many algorithms have been used in measuring user similarity or item similarity in recommender systems. For example, the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) approach and the Pearson Correlation as first implemented by Allen.  When building a model from a user's behavior, a distinction is often made between explicit and implicit forms of data collection.  Examples of explicit data collection include the following:  Examples of implicit data collection include the following:  Collaborative filtering approaches often suffer from three problems: cold start, scalability, and sparsity.  One of the most famous examples of collaborative filtering is item-to-item collaborative filtering (people who buy x also buy y), an algorithm popularized by Amazon.com's recommender system.  Many social networks originally used collaborative filtering to recommend new friends, groups, and other social connections by examining the network of connections between a user and their friends. Collaborative filtering is still used as part of hybrid systems.

Content-based filtering.

Another common approach when designing recommender systems is content-based filtering. Content-based filtering methods are based on a description of the item and a profile of the user's preferences. These methods are best suited to situations where there is known data on an item (name, location, description, etc.), but not on the user. Content-based recommenders treat recommendation as a user-specific classification problem and learn a classifier for the user's likes and dislikes based on an item's features.  In this system, keywords are used to describe the items and a user profile is built to indicate the type of item this user likes. In other words, these algorithms try to recommend items that are similar to those that a user liked in the past, or is examining in the present. It does not rely on a user sign-in mechanism to generate this often temporary profile. In particular, various candidate items are compared with items previously rated by the user and the best-matching items are recommended. This approach has its roots in information retrieval and information filtering research.  To create a user profile, the system mostly focuses on two types of information:  1. A model of the user's preference.  2. A history of the user's interaction with the recommender system.  Basically, these methods use an item profile (i.e., a set of discrete attributes and features) characterizing the item within the system. To abstract the features of the items in the system, an item presentation algorithm is applied. A widely used algorithm is the tf–idf representation (also called vector space representation). The system creates a content-based profile of users based on a weighted vector of item features. The weights denote the importance of each feature to the user and can be computed from individually rated content vectors using a variety of techniques. Simple approaches use the average values of the rated item vector while other sophisticated methods use machine learning techniques such as Bayesian Classifiers, cluster analysis, decision trees, and artificial neural networks in order to estimate the probability that the user is going to like the item.  A key issue with content-based filtering is whether the system is able to learn user preferences from users' actions regarding one content source and use them across other content types. When the system is limited to recommending content of the same type as the user is already using, the value from the recommendation system is significantly less than when other content types from other services can be recommended. For example, recommending news articles based on browsing of news is useful, but would be much more useful when music, videos, products, discussions etc. from different services can be recommended based on news browsing. To overcome this, most content-based recommender systems now use some form of hybrid system.  Content-based recommender systems can also include opinion-based recommender systems. In some cases, users are allowed to leave text review or feedback on the items. These user-generated texts are implicit data for the recommender system because they are potentially rich resource of both feature/aspects of the item, and users' evaluation/sentiment to the item. Features extracted from the user-generated reviews are improved meta-data of items, because as they also reflect aspects of the item like meta-data, extracted features are widely concerned by the users. Sentiments extracted from the reviews can be seen as users' rating scores on the corresponding features. Popular approaches of opinion-based recommender system utilize various techniques including text mining, information retrieval, sentiment analysis (see also Multimodal sentiment analysis) and deep learning.

Multi-criteria recommender systems.

Multi-criteria recommender systems (MCRS) can be defined as recommender systems that incorporate preference information upon multiple criteria. Instead of developing recommendation techniques based on a single criterion value, the overall preference of user u for the item i, these systems try to predict a rating for unexplored items of u by exploiting preference information on multiple criteria that affect this overall preference value. Several researchers approach MCRS as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem, and apply MCDM methods and techniques to implement MCRS systems. See this chapter for an extended introduction.

Risk-aware recommender systems.

The majority of existing approaches to recommender systems focus on recommending the most relevant content to users using contextual information, yet do not take into account the risk of disturbing the user with unwanted notifications. It is important to consider the risk of upsetting the user by pushing recommendations in certain circumstances, for instance, during a professional meeting, early morning, or late at night. Therefore, the performance of the recommender system depends in part on the degree to which it has incorporated the risk into the recommendation process. One option to manage this issue is "DRARS", a system which models the context-aware recommendation as a bandit problem. This system combines a content-based technique and a contextual bandit algorithm.

Mobile recommender systems.

Mobile recommender systems make use of internet-accessing smart phones to offer personalized, context-sensitive recommendations. This is a particularly difficult area of research as mobile data is more complex than data that recommender systems often have to deal with. It is heterogeneous, noisy, requires spatial and temporal auto-correlation, and has validation and generality problems.  There are three factors that could affect the mobile recommender systems and the accuracy of prediction results: the context, the recommendation method and privacy. Additionally, mobile recommender systems suffer from a transplantation problem – recommendations may not apply in all regions (for instance, it would be unwise to recommend a recipe in an area where all of the ingredients may not be available).  One example of a mobile recommender system are the approaches taken by companies such as Uber and Lyft to generate driving routes for taxi drivers in a city. This system uses GPS data of the routes that taxi drivers take while working, which includes location (latitude and longitude), time stamps, and operational status (with or without passengers). It uses this data to recommend a list of pickup points along a route, with the goal of optimizing occupancy times and profits.  Mobile recommendation systems have also been successfully built using the "Web of Data" as a source for structured information. A good example of such system is SMARTMUSEUM The system uses semantic modelling, information retrieval, and machine learning techniques in order to recommend content matching user interests, even when presented with sparse or minimal user data.

Hybrid recommender systems.

Most recommender systems now use a hybrid approach, combining collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, and other approaches. There is no reason why several different techniques of the same type could not be hybridized. Hybrid approaches can be implemented in several ways: by making content-based and collaborative-based predictions separately and then combining them; by adding content-based capabilities to a collaborative-based approach (and vice versa); or by unifying the approaches into one model (see for a complete review of recommender systems). Several studies that empirically compare the performance of the hybrid with the pure collaborative and content-based methods and demonstrated that the hybrid methods can provide more accurate recommendations than pure approaches. These methods can also be used to overcome some of the common problems in recommender systems such as cold start and the sparsity problem, as well as the knowledge engineering bottleneck in knowledge-based approaches.  Netflix is a good example of the use of hybrid recommender systems. The website makes recommendations by comparing the watching and searching habits of similar users (i.e., collaborative filtering) as well as by offering movies that share characteristics with films that a user has rated highly (content-based filtering).  Some hybridization techniques include:

The Netflix Prize.

One of the events that energized research in recommender systems was the Netflix Prize. From 2006 to 2009, Netflix sponsored a competition, offering a grand prize of $1,000,000 to the team that could take an offered dataset of over 100 million movie ratings and return recommendations that were 10% more accurate than those offered by the company's existing recommender system. This competition energized the search for new and more accurate algorithms. On 21 September 2009, the grand prize of US$1,000,000 was given to the BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos team using tiebreaking rules.  The most accurate algorithm in 2007 used an ensemble method of 107 different algorithmic approaches, blended into a single prediction. As stated by the winners, Bell et al.:  Predictive accuracy is substantially improved when blending multiple predictors. "Our experience is that most efforts should be concentrated in deriving substantially different approaches, rather than refining a single technique." Consequently, our solution is an ensemble of many methods.  Many benefits accrued to the web due to the Netflix project. Some teams have taken their technology and applied it to other markets. Some members from the team that finished second place founded Gravity R&D, a recommendation engine that's active in the RecSys community. 4-Tell, Inc. created a Netflix project–derived solution for ecommerce websites.  A number of privacy issues arose around the dataset offered by Netflix for the Netflix Prize competition. Although the data sets were anonymized in order to preserve customer privacy, in 2007 two researchers from the University of Texas were able to identify individual users by matching the data sets with film ratings on the Internet Movie Database. As a result, in December 2009, an anonymous Netflix user sued Netflix in Doe v. Netflix, alleging that Netflix had violated United States fair trade laws and the Video Privacy Protection Act by releasing the datasets. This, as well as concerns from the Federal Trade Commission, led to the cancellation of a second Netflix Prize competition in 2010.

Performance measures.

Evaluation is important in assessing the effectiveness of recommendation algorithms. To measure the effectiveness of recommender systems, and compare different approaches, three types of evaluations are available: user studies, online evaluations (A/B tests), and offline evaluations.  The commonly used metrics are the mean squared error and root mean squared error, the latter having been used in the Netflix Prize. The information retrieval metrics such as precision and recall or DCG are useful to assess the quality of a recommendation method. Diversity, novelty, and coverage are also considered as important aspects in evaluation. However, many of the classic evaluation measures are highly criticized.  User studies are rather small scale. A few dozens or hundreds of users are presented recommendations created by different recommendation approaches, and then the users judge which recommendations are best. In A/B tests, recommendations are shown to typically thousands of users of a real product, and the recommender system randomly picks at least two different recommendation approaches to generate recommendations. The effectiveness is measured with implicit measures of effectiveness such as conversion rate or click-through rate. Offline evaluations are based on historic data, e.g. a dataset that contains information about how users previously rated movies.  The effectiveness of recommendation approaches is then measured based on how well a recommendation approach can predict the users' ratings in the dataset. While a rating is an explicit expression of whether a user liked a movie, such information is not available in all domains. For instance, in the domain of citation recommender systems, users typically do not rate a citation or recommended article. In such cases, offline evaluations may use implicit measures of effectiveness. For instance, it may be assumed that a recommender system is effective that is able to recommend as many articles as possible that are contained in a research article's reference list. However, this kind of offline evaluations is seen critical by many researchers. For instance, it has been shown that results of offline evaluations have low correlation with results from user studies or A/B tests. A dataset popular for offline evaluation has been shown to contain duplicate data and thus to lead to wrong conclusions in the evaluation of algorithms. Often, results of so-called offline evaluations do not correlate with actually assessed user-satisfaction. This is probably because offline training is highly biased toward the highly reachable items, and offline testing data is highly influenced by the outputs of the online recommendation module. Researchers have concluded that the results of offline evaluations should be viewed critically.

Beyond accuracy.

Typically, research on recommender systems is concerned about finding the most accurate recommendation algorithms. However, there are a number of factors that are also important.

Reproducibility crisis.

The field of recommender systems has been impacted by the replication crisis as well. A systematic analysis of publications applying deep learning or neural methods to the top-k recommendation problem, published in top conferences (SIGIR, KDD, WWW, RecSys), has shown that on average less than 40% of articles are reproducible, with as little as 14% in some conferences. Overall the study identifies 18 articles, only 7 of them could be reproduced and 6 of them could be outperformed by much older and simpler properly tuned baselines. The article also highlights a number of potential problems in today's research scholarship and calls for improved scientific practices in that area. Similar issues have been spotted also in sequence-aware recommender systems. Previous research was also found had little impact on the practical application of recommender systems. By 2011, Ekstrand, Konstan, et al. criticized that "it is currently difficult to reproduce and extend recommender systems research results,” and that evaluations are “not handled consistently". Konstan and Adomavicius conclude that "the Recommender Systems research community is facing a crisis where a significant number of papers present results that contribute little to collective knowledge [...] often because the research lacks the [...] evaluation to be properly judged and, hence, to provide meaningful contributions." As a consequence, much research about recommender systems can be considered as not reproducible. Hence, operators of recommender systems find little guidance in the current research for answering the question, which recommendation approaches to use in a recommender systems. Said & Bellogín conducted a study of papers published in the field, as well as benchmarked some of the most popular frameworks for recommendation and found large inconsistencies in results, even when the same algorithms and data sets were used. Some researchers demonstrated that minor variations in the recommendation algorithms or scenarios led to strong changes in the effectiveness of a recommender system. They conclude that seven actions are necessary to improve the current situation: "(1) survey other research fields and learn from them, (2) find a common understanding of reproducibility, (3) identify and understand the determinants that affect reproducibility, (4) conduct more comprehensive experiments (5) modernize publication practices, (6) foster the development and use of recommendation frameworks, and (7) establish best-practice guidelines for recommender-systems research."

Further reading.

Kim Falk (January 2019), Practical Recommender Systems, Manning Publications,

A recommender system, or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing'system' with a synonym such as platform or engine), is a subclass of information filtering system that seeks to predict the "rating" or "preference" a user would give to an item. They are primarily used in commercial applications.

Ein Empfehlungsdienst (englisch "Recommender System") ist ein Softwaresystem, welches das Ziel hat, eine Vorhersage zu treffen, die quantifiziert, wie stark das Interesse eines Benutzers an einem Objekt ist, um dem Benutzer genau die Objekte aus der Menge aller vorhandenen Objekte zu empfehlen, für die er sich wahrscheinlich am meisten interessiert. Typische Objekte eines Empfehlungsdienstes sind zum Beispiel Produkte eines Webshops, Musikstücke bzw. Künstler oder Filme. Ein Empfehlungsdienst soll dadurch zur Bewältigung der Informationsüberflutung beitragen, indem es dem Benutzer aus einer unübersichtlichen Menge an Objekten eine Teilmenge empfiehlt. Zur Ermittlung der passenden Empfehlungen verwendet ein Empfehlungsdienst Methoden des Maschinellen Lernens und des Information Retrievals.