Hasil untuk "Ancient history"

C. Herzberg, K. Condie, J. Korenaga

Ghislaine M. Lawrence

Those who attended the International Congress on Clinical Chemistry at The Hague in 1987 saw an exhibition illustrating the development of the subject during the last four centuries. We who missed that opportunity are now more than adequately compensated by this book in which Professor Buttner and Dr Habrich describe all the exhibits, illustrate many of them, and add an extensive commentary. The eight chapters, arranged in chronological order, correspond to the exhibition's showcases. Each is devoted to a major landmark in the subject and is centred on a personality who was representative of his age. The earliest figure, Franciscus Dele Boe Sylvius (1614-72), introduces the chapter entitled 'latrochemical concepts prevail against the ancient humoral a representative of the early days of mechanized analysis. However, the authors have not merely concentrated on these eight men and they are too modest when they deny, in their preface, that they have demonstrated the continuity of clinical chemistry. They have, in fact, produced a good history of the subject, including numerous references to primary and secondary literature and brief but sound biographical accounts of many scientists; and they show clearly how clinical chemistry emerged as a separate discipline in Germany and Austria in the mid-nineteenth century. Historians will be familiar with the microscopes of Leeuwenhoek and Hooke, but many pieces of apparatus are probably shown here for the first time. It is very instructive to see, for example, photographs of the four versions of the autoanalyser that Skeggs constructed between 1951 and 1953, and it is to be hoped that other contemporary scientists will be encouraged by his example to preserve the prototypes of their apparatus. Finally, high praise must be awarded to the typesetters, Typotop of Stuttgart, and the printers, A. Bachmeier of Weinheim. Using the resources of modern printing technology they have produced a book in which the text, in two colours, and the illustrations, monochrome and coloured, are splendidly integrated. collection of thirteen papers is an important indicator of new directions in the history and sociology of technology. Organized into four sections, the book deals first with new manifestos for the study of technology-Pinch and Bijker's social constructivist approach, drawing on the sociology of scientific knowledge and the empirical programme of relativism, Hughes's use of systems metaphor and Michel Callon's network theory. A second group of papers considers models which might be used to simplify the "thick description" of political, …

M. Raghavan, Matthias Steinrücken, Kelley Harris et al.

Rosario Moreno Soldevila, Manuel Alejandro González Muñoz, Alberto Marina Castillo et al.

This paper describes four methodological proposals for rescuing from oblivion and highlighting women writers in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. In workshops employing a variety of active methodologies, students become acquainted with Greek writers like Sappho, Diotima of Mantinea and Aspasia, and their Roman counterparts, including Sulpicia and Agrippina the Younger, while also becoming aware of the authorship of these women writers and their lack of visibility. The proposals take the shape of activities aimed at fostering a vocation for science among baccalaureate students in Spain but can also be easily adapted to secondary and even higher education in other educational contexts.

Glaydson José da Silva

Xiaolei Diao, Zhihan Zhou, Lida Shi et al.

Constructing historical language models (LMs) plays a crucial role in aiding archaeological provenance studies and understanding ancient cultures. However, existing resources present major challenges for training effective LMs on historical texts. First, the scarcity of historical language samples renders unsupervised learning approaches based on large text corpora highly inefficient, hindering effective pre-training. Moreover, due to the considerable temporal gap and complex evolution of ancient scripts, the absence of comprehensive character encoding schemes limits the digitization and computational processing of ancient texts, particularly in early Chinese writing. To address these challenges, we introduce InteChar, a unified and extensible character list that integrates unencoded oracle bone characters with traditional and modern Chinese. InteChar enables consistent digitization and representation of historical texts, providing a foundation for robust modeling of ancient scripts. To evaluate the effectiveness of InteChar, we construct the Oracle Corpus Set (OracleCS), an ancient Chinese corpus that combines expert-annotated samples with LLM-assisted data augmentation, centered on Chinese oracle bone inscriptions. Extensive experiments show that models trained with InteChar on OracleCS achieve substantial improvements across various historical language understanding tasks, confirming the effectiveness of our approach and establishing a solid foundation for future research in ancient Chinese NLP.

J. L. Reveal, O. Rackham

S. Ghosh

The review article attempts to focus on the practice of human cadaveric dissection during its inception in ancient Greece in 3rd century BC, revival in medieval Italy at the beginning of 14th century and subsequent evolution in Europe and the United States of America over the centuries. The article highlights on the gradual change in attitude of religious authorities towards human dissection, the shift in the practice of human dissection being performed by barber surgeons to the anatomist himself dissecting the human body and the enactment of prominent legislations which proved to be crucial milestones during the course of the history of human cadaveric dissection. It particularly emphasizes on the different means of procuring human bodies which changed over the centuries in accordance with the increasing demand due to the rise in popularity of human dissection as a tool for teaching anatomy. Finally, it documents the rise of body donation programs as the source of human cadavers for anatomical dissection from the second half of the 20th century. Presently innovative measures are being introduced within the body donation programs by medical schools across the world to sensitize medical students such that they maintain a respectful, compassionate and empathetic attitude towards the human cadaver while dissecting the same. Human dissection is indispensable for a sound knowledge in anatomy which can ensure safe as well as efficient clinical practice and the human dissection lab could possibly be the ideal place to cultivate humanistic qualities among future physicians in the 21st century.

H. Ai, X. Fang, Bin Yang et al.

Domestic pigs have evolved genetic adaptations to their local environmental conditions, such as cold and hot climates. We sequenced the genomes of 69 pigs from 15 geographically divergent locations in China and detected 41 million variants, of which 21 million were absent from the dbSNP database. In a genome-wide scan, we identified a set of loci that likely have a role in regional adaptations to high- and low-latitude environments within China. Intriguingly, we found an exceptionally large (14-Mb) region with a low recombination rate on the X chromosome that appears to have two distinct haplotypes in the high- and low-latitude populations, possibly underlying their adaptation to cold and hot environments, respectively. Surprisingly, the adaptive sweep in the high-latitude regions has acted on DNA that might have been introgressed from an extinct Sus species. Our findings provide new insights into the evolutionary history of pigs and the role of introgression in adaptation.

M. W. Pedersen, S. Overballe-Petersen, L. Ermini et al.

Valter Di Cecco, Aurelio Manzi, Camillo Zulli et al.

Studying the evolution of seed morphology and, in turn, the evolution of cultivars across time and space is of fundamental importance to agriculture and archaeology. The identification of ancient and modern grapevine (<i>Vitis vinifera</i> L.) cultivars is essential for understanding the historical evolution of grape cultivation. Grape seed morphology provides valuable information to explore the evolution of grape cultivars over time and space. The main aim of our study was to build a comprehensive regional database of grape seed morphological traits from modern and archaeological wine cultivars and wild grape species. We aimed to identify which seeds of modern grape cultivars exhibited morphological similarities to archaeological cultivars. This study focused on fifteen distinct modern types of seeds and two archaeological samples from the Byzantine-to-Early Medieval period. We acquired digital images of seeds using a flatbed scanner. For each sample, 100 seeds were randomly selected, and morphometric data on each seed were gathered using ImageJ. Differences among the seed cultivars were investigated using linear discriminant analysis. Archaeological seeds were found to be more similar to cultivated <i>V. vinifera</i> cultivars rather than <i>V. sylvestris</i> populations. Among the cultivated cultivars, Sangiovese and Tosta antica resulted to be cultivars most similar cultivars to the archaeological ones. The morphometric analysis of grape seeds proved to be a valuable resource for investigating the evolution of vine cultivars throughout history. Combining image analysis techniques with genetic data will open new perspectives for studying the origins of and variations in grape cultivars, contributing to the conservation and enhancement of viticultural heritage.

Zdravko Dimitrov

The archaeological studies of the frontier zones of the Roman Empire are of particular importance due to the abundant excavated data that can be directly linked to historical sources and epigraphic evidence known for centuries. <br /><br />In the Lower Danube region of the Roman Limes, an area that has not been as extensively explored as the areas in Central and Western Europe, there are now a lot of new rescue and regular excavations. The new field data, which were obtained from details unearthed near the village of Sinagovtsi, Vidin region, only 15 km away from the ancient centre of Ratiaria, are important as they might help clarify the way of life in Antiquity if linked to and interpreted together with the already known epigraphic, historical and numismatic data.

Isaac M. Lopez, Tristan Ozuch

We classify spin ALE ancient Ricci flows and spin ALE expanding solitons with suitable groups at infinity. In particular, the only spin ancient Ricci flows with groups at infinity in $SU(2)$ and mild decay at infinity are hyperkähler ALE metrics. The main idea of the proof, of independent interest, consists in showing that the large-scale behavior of Perelman's $μ$-functional on any ALE orbifold with non-negative scalar curvature is controlled by a renormalized $λ_{\mathrm{ALE}}$-functional related to a notion of weighted mass.

Kyeongsu Choi, Jiuzhou Huang, Taehun Lee

We construct an $I$-family of ancient graphical mean curvature flows over a minimal hypersurface in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ of finite total curvature with the Morse index $I$ by establishing exponentially fast convergence in terms of $|x|^2-t$. As a corollary, we show that these ancient flows have finite total curvature and finite mass drop. Moreover, one family of these flows is mean convex by a pointwise estimate.

Giuseppe G. A. Celano

This paper presents an experiment consisting in the comparison of six models to identify a state-of-the-art morphosyntactic parser and lemmatizer for Ancient Greek capable of annotating according to the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank annotation scheme. A normalized version of the major collections of annotated texts was used to (i) train the baseline model Dithrax with randomly initialized character embeddings and (ii) fine-tune Trankit and four recent models pretrained on Ancient Greek texts, i.e., GreBERTa and PhilBERTa for morphosyntactic annotation and GreTA and PhilTa for lemmatization. A Bayesian analysis shows that Dithrax and Trankit annotate morphology practically equivalently, while syntax is best annotated by Trankit and lemmata by GreTa. The results of the experiment suggest that token embeddings are not sufficient to achieve high UAS and LAS scores unless they are coupled with a modeling strategy specifically designed to capture syntactic relationships. The dataset and best-performing models are made available online for reuse.

Alix Deruelle, Tristan Ozuch

In stark contrast to lower dimensions, we produce a plethora of ancient and immortal Ricci flows in real dimension $4$ with Einstein orbifolds as tangent flows at infinity. For instance, for any $k\in\mathbb{N}_0$, we obtain continuous families of non-isometric ancient Ricci flows on $\#k(\mathbb{S}^2\times \mathbb{S}^2)$ depending on a number of parameters growing linearly in $k$, and a family of half-PIC ancient Ricci flows on $\mathbb{CP}^2\#\mathbb{CP}^2$. The ancient/immortal dichotomy is determined by a notion of linear stability of orbifold singularities with respect to the expected way for them to appear along Ricci flow: by bubbling off Ricci-flat ALE metrics. We discuss the case of Ricci solitons orbifolds and motivate a conjecture that spherical and cylindrical solitons with orbifold singularities, which are unstable in our sense, should not appear along Ricci flow by bubbling off Ricci-flat ALE metrics.

Tracy Cai, Kimmy Chang, Fahad Nabi

It was only until the 20th century when the Chinese language began using punctuation. In fact, many ancient Chinese texts contain thousands of lines with no distinct punctuation marks or delimiters in sight. The lack of punctuation in such texts makes it difficult for humans to identify when there pauses or breaks between particular phrases and understand the semantic meaning of the written text (Mogahed, 2012). As a result, unless one was educated in the ancient time period, many readers of ancient Chinese would have significantly different interpretations of the texts. We propose an approach to predict the location (and type) of punctuation in ancient Chinese texts that extends the work of Oh et al (2017) by leveraging a bidirectional multi-layered LSTM with a multi-head attention mechanism as inspired by Luong et al.'s (2015) discussion of attention-based architectures. We find that the use of multi-layered LSTMs and multi-head attention significantly outperforms RNNs that don't incorporate such components when evaluating ancient Chinese texts.

Yuting Wei, Yuanxing Xu, Xinru Wei et al.

Given the importance of ancient Chinese in capturing the essence of rich historical and cultural heritage, the rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitate benchmarks that can effectively evaluate their understanding of ancient contexts. To meet this need, we present AC-EVAL, an innovative benchmark designed to assess the advanced knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs within the context of ancient Chinese. AC-EVAL is structured across three levels of difficulty reflecting different facets of language comprehension: general historical knowledge, short text understanding, and long text comprehension. The benchmark comprises 13 tasks, spanning historical facts, geography, social customs, art, philosophy, classical poetry and prose, providing a comprehensive assessment framework. Our extensive evaluation of top-performing LLMs, tailored for both English and Chinese, reveals a substantial potential for enhancing ancient text comprehension. By highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs, AC-EVAL aims to promote their development and application forward in the realms of ancient Chinese language education and scholarly research. The AC-EVAL data and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/yuting-wei/AC-EVAL.

Yixuan Zhang, Haonan Li

Large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating language. However, their ability in comprehending ancient languages, particularly ancient Chinese, remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we present ACLUE, an evaluation benchmark designed to assess the capability of language models in comprehending ancient Chinese. ACLUE consists of 15 tasks cover a range of skills, spanning phonetic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, inference and knowledge. Through the evaluation of eight state-of-the-art LLMs, we observed a noticeable disparity in their performance between modern Chinese and ancient Chinese. Among the assessed models, ChatGLM2 demonstrates the most remarkable performance, achieving an average score of 37.4%. We have made our code and data public available.

Xiangzhi Cao

We proved a Bernstein theorem of ancient solutions to mean curvature flow.