Switzerland

Mit den Begriffen Gedächtnis, Geld und Gesetz wird die Diskussion um das Verhalten der Schweiz im Zweiten Weltkrieg in einen größeren historischen und theoretischen Zusammenhang gestellt. In den hektischen Wendungen der öffentlichen Auseinandersetzung wird oft vergessen, wie sehr das Geld beziehungsweise die Geldmetaphorik Geschichtsbilder dominiert und wie stark die sogenannte Vergangenheitsbewältigung in den Sog der Verrechtlichung geraten ist. Der Sammelband stellt diese Vorgänge zur Diskussion. Er geht auf die national unterschiedlichen Pathosformeln und Mythenbildungen ein, die sich im Umgang mit unabgeschlossener Geschichte zeigen und die der Gedenkpolitik ihr Gepräge geben. Die Funktion von Recht und Geld in bezug auf Krieg, Nationalsozialismus und Shoah steht dabei ebenso zur Debatte wie Verlaufsformen, Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der rechtlichen, ökonomischen und kulturellen Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit.

‘Haus Hansi' was home to Dr Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) in the incredibly productive final decade of his life. He lived in this quaint and comfortable house, known as ‘Haus Hansi’, from 1914 to 1924. The house is set high with good ‘street appeal’. It exudes the graciousness of a bygone era. Steiner’s decade of residence at Haus Hansi witnessed the transformation of the mostly bare hill overlooking Dornach into Anthroposophy headquarters. The Goetheanum, the Glass House (Glashaus), the Furnace (Heizhaus), the Electrical Transformer (Transformatorenhaus) and numerous other of Steiner’s innovative and distinctive organic architectural creations were built in this decade. It was also the decade in which Steiner founded Waldorf education and laid the foundations for biodynamic agriculture. The house that Rudolf Steiner occupied in Dornach (at Unterer Zielweg 36) is little changed from the time of his residence there - other than the decor. The plaque over the entrance states his time of residence there as 1914 to 1925. According to the Russian artist, Assya Turgeniev: “this house was called ‘Haus Hansi’ by Dr Steiner - with permission from the little Hansi Grossheintz”. (‘Hansi’ being a diminutive of ‘Hans’, a son of Dr Grossheintz). Haus Hansi occupies a convenient location half way up the hill from the town centre of Dornach and from the tram and train stations of Dornach, and it is a few minutes stroll down the hill from the Goetheanum.

Funding models influence provision and development of palliative care services. As palliative care integrates into mainstream health care provision, opportunities to develop funding mechanisms arise. However, little has been reported on what funding models exist or how we can learn from them. To assess national models and methods for financing and reimbursing palliative care. Initial literature scoping yielded limited evidence on the subject as national policy documents are difficult to identify, access and interpret. We undertook expert consultations to appraise national models of palliative care financing in England, Germany, Hungary, Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and Wales. These represent different levels of service development and a variety of funding mechanisms. Funding mechanisms reflect country-specific context and local variations in care provision. Patterns emerging include the following: Pr...

Changes in ecosystem functions following disturbances are of central concern in ecology and a challenge for ecologists is to understand the factors that affect the resilience of community structures and ecosystem functions. In many forest ecosystems, one such important natural disturbance is fire. The aim of this study was to understand the variation of resilience in six functional groups of invertebrates in response to different fire frequencies in southern Switzerland. We measured resilience by analysing arthropod species composition, abundance and diversity in plots where the elapsed time after single or repeated fires, as determined by dendrochronology, varied. We compared data from these plots with data from plots that had not burned recently and defined high resilience as the rapid recovery of the species composition to that prior to fire. Pooling all functional groups showed that they were more resilient to single fires than to repeated events, recovering 6–14 years after a single fire, but only 17–24 years after the last of several fires. Flying zoophagous and phytophagous arthropods were the most resilient groups. Pollinophagous and epigaeic zoophagous species showed intermediate resilience, while ground-litter saprophagous and saproxylophagous arthropods clearly displayed the lowest resilience to fire. Their species composition 17–24 years post-burn still differed markedly from that of the unburned control plots. Depending on the fire history of a forest plot, we found significant differences in the dominance hierarchy among invertebrate species. Any attempt to imitate natural disturbances, such as fire, through forest management must take into account the recovery times of biodiversity, including functional group composition, to ensure the conservation of multiple taxa and ecosystem functions in a sustainable manner.

12 University of Southampton, Southampton, UK. Abstract. The PASCAL Visual Object Classes Challenge ran from February to March 2005. The goal of the challenge was to recognize objects from a number of visual object classes in realistic scenes (i.e. not pre-segmented objects). Four object classes were selected: motorbikes, bicycles, cars and people. Twelve teams entered the challenge. In this chapter we provide details of the datasets, algorithms used by the teams, evaluation criteria, and results achieved. 1

In this paper, we present the evolution of Swiss Media and Communication Studies over the last decade by summarizing the main results from a project funded by the Swiss University Conference (2008-2017). We give an overall picture of the growth in the field (in terms of student numbers, resources and activities), look at diversity in terms of topics (two clusters are identified and presented with respect to various indicators), present changes at the level of individual research units (where we find variance in terms of evolution), give insights into publication patterns (two different publication cultures are found) and describe mobility and career pathways in the field. We observe limited mobility within Switzerland, internal pathways at the level of doctoral students and post-docs, and international mobility, mainly within the same linguistic region, at the professorial level. We conclude that the field has reached a consolidation phase and achieved a rather stable situation, but faces new challenges, with digitalization and the pressure towards homogenization in publication output among the most important.

... were equally scattered in Northern Ireland (Allison & Millar 1954) and too few for definitive assessment in Iceland (Gudmundsson 1962) ; in northern Scotland (Sutherland 1956) , Norway (Swank 1952), Sweden (Sallstrom 1942), Denmark (Gram 1934, Hyllested 1956), and ...

There is an increasing need and interest in including indicators of landscape fragmentation in monitoring systems of sustainable landscape management. Landscape fragmentation due to transportation infrastructure and urban development threatens human and environmental well-being by noise and pollution from traffic, reducing the size and viability of wildlife populations, facilitating the spread of invasive species, and impairing the scenic and recreational qualities of the landscape. This paper provides the rationale, method, and data for including landscape fragmentation in monitoring systems, using as an example the Swiss Monitoring System of Sustainable Development (Monet). We defined and compared four levels of fragmentation analysis, or fragmentation geometries (FGs), each based on different fragmenting elements, e.g., only anthropogenic, or combinations of anthropogenic and natural elements. As each FG has specific strengths and weaknesses, the most appropriate choice of FG depends on the context and objectives of a study. We present data on the current degree of landscape fragmentation for the five ecoregions and 26 cantons in Switzerland for all four FGs. Our results show that the degree of landscape fragmentation as quantified by the effective mesh size method is strongly supported by the postulates and indicator selection criteria of Monet, and we identify the most suitable FG focusing on the land area below 2,100 m (e.g., excluding lakes) and allowing for an equitable comparison of fragmentation degrees among regions that differ in area covered by lakes and high mountains. For a more detailed analysis of landscape fragmentation in the context of environmental impact assessments and strategic environmental assessments, a combination of all four FGs may provide a more informative tool than any single FG.

Since the 1970s, quotas have continually been used to control immigration to Switzerland. But the categories of foreigners subject to this quota system have changed over time, and the system itself has also undergone numerous modifications. Given that immigration quotas may gain more prominence in Switzerland in the coming years, it is worth taking a closer look at how this specific aspect of immigration policy is currently implemented.

In numerous European countries of immigration, there are controversial discussions about how transnational influences and local dynamics relate to each other within Muslim communities. This study addresses the subject of transnational Muslim networks and their local impact in the Swiss context in a threefold manner: firstly, it analyses media and political perceptions in Switzerland. Secondly, it evaluates the state of research on transnational networks and complements this with comments from experts interviewed on the subject. Thirdly, these perspectives are broadened by an empirical exploration of seven local Muslim communities in Switzerland. The roles played by transnational relations on one hand and local interactions on the other, as well as how these relate to each other, are analysed based on concrete cases. In doing so, the study takes into account both the self-perception of Muslim actors and the perceptions of different stakeholders in society. Overall, more than 40 interviews and expert consultations have been conducted during the research process.

This article examines to what extent specific institutional arrangement of an education system moderates the influence of social background on students’ track allocation, and whether this happens via primary or secondary effects of social origin. I tackle the problem of omitted-variable bias by analyzing subnational education systems in Switzerland, a country with a variety of cantonal school systems but otherwise homogeneous institutions. The results show a complex picture. First, even though the absolute transition probability to the highest track is higher in education systems with low stratification for students of higher social background, this does not translate into a relative advantage as in most cantons the odds of transitioning do not differ between high- and low-SES students. Second, in line with previous research, I observe that the secondary effect of social origin prevails in more stratified education systems. Third, it is not possible to conclude with certainty that specific features of the education system enable high-SES parents to disproportionately influence their children’s transition probabilities because the results are rather unstable.

The processing of seismic profiles recorded in 1990 and the reprocessing of older seismic data was the main work undertaken in 1991. The intensive interpretation of these profiles influenced by well-data provided the basis for independant reviews carried out by BEB, swisspetrol and the evaluation of new plays. In the form of special projects, two review studies of the whole of Switzerland werer carried out (gas geochemistry, reservoir properties). In a third project the potential of coal bed methane in Switzerland was evaluated

to design a community healthcare information network for all 450,000 citizen in the State of Geneva, Switzerland, connecting public and private healthcare professionals. Requirements include the decentralized storage of information at the source of its production, the creation of a virtual patient record at the time of the consultation, the control by the patient of the access rights to the information, and the interoperability with other similar networks at the national and european level. a participative approach and real-world pilot projects are used to design, test and validate key components of the network, including its technical architecture and the strategy for the management of access rights by the patients. a distributed architecture using peer-to-peer communication of information mediators can implement the various requirements while limiting to an absolute minimum the amount of centralized information. Access control can be managed by the patient with the help of a medic...

Speech presented by the Swiss attorney-at-law Niccolò Salvioni on the topic:

“Switzerland: how can Transitional Justice support asset recovery and rights to Reparation?“

in occasion of the International Workshop:

“Truth, accountability and Asset Recovery: How Transitional Justice can fight corruption”,

organized by International Center for Transitional Justice – ICTJ – NY, at the presence of distinguished delegations of Tunisia, Gambia, Kenia, South Africa and Armenia on March 2 – 3, 2020, at Hotel Africa in Tunis, Tunisia.

Three attached infographs represents:

a) The interactions between Swiss Department of Justice and Swiss Department of Foreign affairs dealing with Freezing and Restitution of Illicit Assets held by Foreign Politically Exposed Persons and role of Truth and reconciliation commissions as “soft” Transitional Justice.

b) 1) The Swiss Criminal Jurisdiction by Swiss federal Penal Code and others for acts carried out abroad with regard to Assets or goods;

b) 2) The Swiss complementary Criminal jurisdiction for acts carried out abroad as consequence of Implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: possibility of measures to take evidences against a foreign perpetrator, limits.