Hasil untuk "History of Asia"

M. Eliade

First published in 1951, "Shamanism" soon became the standard work in the study of this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon. Writing as the founder of the modern study of the history of religion, Romanian emigre--scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) surveys the practice of Shamanism over two and a half millennia of human history, moving from the Shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia--where Shamanism was first observed--to North and South America, Indonesia, Tibet, China, and beyond. In this authoritative survey, Eliade illuminates the magico-religious life of societies that give primacy of place to the figure of the Shaman--at once magician and medicine man, healer and miracle-doer, priest, mystic, and poet. Synthesizing the approaches of psychology, sociology, and ethnology, "Shamanism" will remain for years to come the reference book of choice for those intrigued by this practice."

Amir Asiaee, Samhita Pal, Cole Beck et al.

Generalizing treatment effects from a randomized trial to a target population requires the assumption that potential outcome distributions are invariant across populations after conditioning on observed covariates. This assumption fails when unmeasured effect modifiers are distributed differently between trial participants and the target population. We develop a sensitivity analysis framework that bounds how much conclusions can change when this transportability assumption is violated. Our approach constrains the likelihood ratio between target and trial outcome densities by a scalar parameter $Λ\geq 1$, with $Λ= 1$ recovering standard transportability. For each $Λ$, we derive sharp bounds on the target average treatment effect -- the tightest interval guaranteed to contain the true effect under all data-generating processes compatible with the observed data and the sensitivity model. We show that the optimal likelihood ratios have a simple threshold structure, leading to a closed-form greedy algorithm that requires only sorting trial outcomes and redistributing probability mass. The resulting estimator runs in $O(n \log n)$ time and is consistent under standard regularity conditions. Simulations demonstrate that our bounds achieve nominal coverage when the true outcome shift falls within the specified $Λ$, provide substantially tighter intervals than worst-case bounds, and remain informative across a range of realistic violations of transportability.

Amir Asiaee, Zhuohui J. Liang, Chao Yan

Tabular synthetic data generators are typically trained to match observational distributions, which can yield high conventional utility (e.g., column correlations, predictive accuracy) yet poor preservation of structural relations relevant to causal analysis and out-of-distribution (OOD) reasoning. When the downstream use of synthetic data involves causal reasoning -- estimating treatment effects, evaluating policies, or testing mediation pathways -- merely matching the observational distribution is insufficient: structural fidelity and treatment-mechanism preservation become essential. We propose CausalWrap (CW), a model-agnostic wrapper that injects partial causal knowledge (PCK) -- trusted edges, forbidden edges, and qualitative/monotonic constraints -- into any pretrained base generator (GAN, VAE, or diffusion model), without requiring access to its internals. CW learns a lightweight, differentiable post-hoc correction map applied to samples from the base generator, optimized with causal penalty terms under an augmented-Lagrangian schedule. We provide theoretical results connecting penalty-based optimization to constraint satisfaction and relating approximate factorization to joint distributional control. We validate CW on simulated structural causal models (SCMs) with known ground-truth interventions, semi-synthetic causal benchmarks (IHDP and an ACIC-style suite), and a real-world ICU cohort (MIMIC-IV) with expert-elicited partial graphs. CW improves causal fidelity across diverse base generators -- e.g., reducing average treatment effect (ATE) error by up to 63% on ACIC and lifting ATE agreement from 0.00 to 0.38 on the intensive care unit (ICU) cohort -- while largely retaining conventional utility.

Amir Asiaee, Chao Yan, Zachary B. Abrams et al.

When synthetic data is released, some individuals are harder to protect than others. A patient with a rare disease combination or a transaction with unusual characteristics stands out from the crowd. Differential privacy provides worst-case guarantees, but empirical attacks -- particularly membership inference -- succeed far more often against such outliers, especially under moderate privacy budgets and with auxiliary information. This paper introduces risk-equalized DP synthesis, a framework that prioritizes protection for high-risk records by reducing their influence on the learned generator. The mechanism operates in two stages: first, a small privacy budget estimates each record's "outlierness"; second, a DP learning procedure weights each record inversely to its risk score. Under Gaussian mechanisms, a record's privacy loss is proportional to its influence on the output -- so deliberately shrinking outliers' contributions yields tighter per-instance privacy bounds for precisely those records that need them most. We prove end-to-end DP guarantees via composition and derive closed-form per-record bounds for the synthesis stage (the scoring stage adds a uniform per-record term). Experiments on simulated data with controlled outlier injection show that risk-weighting substantially reduces membership inference success against high-outlierness records; ablations confirm that targeting -- not random downweighting -- drives the improvement. On real-world benchmarks (Breast Cancer, Adult, German Credit), gains are dataset-dependent, highlighting the interplay between scorer quality and synthesis pipeline.

Panuthep Tasawong, Jian Gang Ngui, Alham Fikri Aji et al.

Culturally aware safeguards are crucial for AI alignment in real-world settings, where safety extends beyond common sense and encompasses diverse local values, norms, and region-specific regulations. However, building large-scale, culturally grounded datasets is challenging due to limited resources and a scarcity of native annotators. Consequently, many safeguard models rely on machine translation of English datasets, often missing regional and cultural nuances. We present a novel agentic data-generation framework to scalably create authentic, region-specific safety datasets for Southeast Asia (SEA). On this foundation, we introduce the SEA-Guard family, the first multilingual safeguard models grounded in SEA cultural contexts. Evaluated across multiple benchmarks and cultural variants, SEA-Guard consistently outperforms existing safeguards at detecting regionally sensitive or harmful content while maintaining strong general safety performance.

Lukáš Likavčan

SETI is not a usual point of departure for environmental humanities. However, this paper argues that theories originating in this field have direct implications for how we think about viable inhabitation of the Earth. To demonstrate SETI's impact on environmental humanities, this paper introduces Fermi paradox as a speculative tool to probe possible trajectories of planetary history, and especially the "Sustainability Solution" proposed by Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum. This solution suggests that sustainable coupling between extraterrestrial intelligences and their planetary environments is the major factor in the possibility of their successful detection by remote observation. By positing that exponential growth is not a sustainable development pattern, this solution rules out space-faring civilizations colonizing solar systems or galaxies. This paper elaborates on Haqq-Misra's and Baum's arguments, and discusses speculative implications of the Sustainability Solution, thus rethinking three concepts in environmental humanities: technosphere, planetary history, and sustainability. The paper advocates that (1) technosphere is a transitory layer that shall fold back into biosphere; (2) planetary history must be understood in a generic perspective that abstracts from terrestrial particularities; and (3) sustainability is not sufficient vector of viable human inhabitation of the Earth, suggesting instead habitability and genesity as better candidates.

Peter Galison, Juliusz Doboszewski, Jamee Elder et al.

This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

Anna Fino, Asia Mainenti

A $p$-Kähler structure on a complex manifold of complex dimension $n$ is given by a $d$-closed transverse real $(p,p)$-form. In the paper we study the existence of $p$-Kähler structures on compact quotients of simply connected Lie groups by discrete subgroups endowed with an invariant complex structure. In particular, we discuss the existence of $p$-Kähler structures on nilmanifolds, with a focus on the case $p =2$ and complex dimension $n = 4$. Moreover, we prove that a $(n-2)$-Kähler almost abelian solvmanifold of complex dimension $n\geq3$ has to be Kähler.

A. A. Watson

A brief history of the development of surface detectors for the study of the high-energy cosmic rays is presented. The paper is based on an invited talk given at UHECR2022 held in LAquila, October 2022. In a complementary talk, P Sokolsky discussed the development of the fluorescence technique for air-shower detection.

Alessandro Fabris, Nina Baranowska, Matthew J. Dennis et al.

Employers are adopting algorithmic hiring technology throughout the recruitment pipeline. Algorithmic fairness is especially applicable in this domain due to its high stakes and structural inequalities. Unfortunately, most work in this space provides partial treatment, often constrained by two competing narratives, optimistically focused on replacing biased recruiter decisions or pessimistically pointing to the automation of discrimination. Whether, and more importantly what types of, algorithmic hiring can be less biased and more beneficial to society than low-tech alternatives currently remains unanswered, to the detriment of trustworthiness. This multidisciplinary survey caters to practitioners and researchers with a balanced and integrated coverage of systems, biases, measures, mitigation strategies, datasets, and legal aspects of algorithmic hiring and fairness. Our work supports a contextualized understanding and governance of this technology by highlighting current opportunities and limitations, providing recommendations for future work to ensure shared benefits for all stakeholders.

K. Zaw, S. Meffre, Chunkit Lai et al.

Gerald A. Goldin

Prediction of ``anyons'', often attributed exclusively to Wilczek, came first from Leinaas & Myrheim in 1977, and independently from Goldin, Menikoff, & Sharp in 1980-81. In 2020, experimentalists successfully created anyonic excitations. This paper discusses why the possibility of quantum particles in two-dimensional space with intermediate exchange statistics eluded physicists for so long after bosons and fermions were understood. The history suggests ideas for the preparation of future researchers. I conclude by addressing failures to attribute scientific achievements accurately. Such practices disproportionately hurt women and minorities in physics, and are harmful to science.

Andrea Carosso

In this work, I explore the concept of quantization as a mapping from classical phase space functions to quantum operators. I discuss the early history of this notion of quantization with emphasis on the works of Schrödinger and Dirac, and how quantization fit into their overall understanding of quantum theory in the 1920's. Dirac, in particular, proposed a quantization map which should satisfy certain properties, including the property that quantum commutators should be related to classical Poisson brackets in a particular way. However, in 1946, Groenewold proved that Dirac's mapping was inconsistent, making the problem of defining a rigorous quantization map more elusive than originally expected. This result, known as the Groenewold-Van Hove theorem, is not often discussed in physics texts, but here I will give an account of the theorem and what it means for potential "corrections" to Dirac's scheme. Other proposals for quantization have arisen over the years, the first major one being that of Weyl in 1927, which was later developed by many, including Groenewold, and which has since become known as Weyl Quantization in the mathematical literature. Another, known as Geometric Quantization, formulates quantization in differential-geometric terms by appealing to the character of classical phase spaces as symplectic manifolds; this approach began with the work of Souriau, Kostant, and Kirillov in the 1960's. I will describe these proposals for quantization and comment on their relation to Dirac's original program. Along the way, the problem of operator ordering and of quantizing in curvilinear coordinates will be described, since these are natural questions that immediately present themselves when thinking about quantization.

Aderivaldo Ramos de Santana

O presente artigo analisa o processo da escuna francesa Clementina, apreendida no dia 21 de janeiro de 1831, com 175 africanos escravizados, suspeita de realizar o tráfico transatlântico para o Brasil. O objetivo geral desse artigo é elaborar um estudo de caso, tendo como fontes primárias a correspondência intercambiada entre o consulado francês no Recife e o governo da Província de Pernambuco, assim como as sentenças prolatadas no Brasil e na França, inserindo nossa análise no contexto do debate que antecede a primeira lei antitráfico de 7 de novembro de 1831 e seus desdobramentos. Em particular, buscamos entender como a apreensão da Clementina pode ser reveladora de uma conjuntura social característica, da qual inferimos, ao mesmo tempo, a participação dos traficantes estabelecidos no Recife e suas estratégias para perpetuarem a ilegalidade do contrabando de seres humanos, bem como compreender o papel desse governo no combate a este infame comércio.

Marina V. Ayusheeva, Tsymzhit P. Vanchikova

Introduction. The introduction of new sources characterizing traditions of Buryat chronicle writing into scientific circulation remains an urgent task of Mongolian studies. Dozens of works and their various copies and editions are still there to be explored. The article precedes a further study and translation of a voluminous historical chronicle of the Aga and Khori Buryats. Goals. The study attempts a brief overview of the chronicle’s contents and approaches some peculiarities traced in its text. Materials and methods. The analysis of Rabzhi Sanzhiev’s writing involves a wide range of Buryat historical works — both chronicles and archival documents. The historical comparative and chronological methods prove instrumental in systematizing the data contained, while tools of textual and source studies have made it possible to delineate the author’s text proper. Results. The work identifies an extensive range of sources and the chronicle’s structure according to which R. Sanzhiev’s narrative be conventionally divided into a number of large sections, namely: Shirab-Nimbu Khobituev’s chronicle; copies of official documents; historical works by T. Toboev, D. Zayaev, S. Vandanov, A. Ochirov; and the author’s text. Conclusions. R. Sanzhiev’s writing is a major work of the historical documentary genre. The author undertook painstaking efforts to meticulously clarify data included in Shirab-Nimbu Khobituev’s chronicle and supplement certain facts and data, introduce additional findings from various sources. The continuation of Khobituev’s chronicle — despite the compiled facts are fragmented enough — acts as an independent composition. Archival documents on the history of Buryat self-governance and Buddhism, folklore texts, chronicles and legends included by the author into the narrative are of particular value.

Choo Hock Tan, Aymeric Bourges, Kae Yi Tan

Abstract King Cobra (Ophiophagus hannah) has a significant place in many cultures, and is a medically important venomous snake in the world. Envenomation by this snake is highly lethal, manifested mainly by neurotoxicity and local tissue damage. King Cobra may be part of a larger species complex, and is widely distributed across Southeast Asia, southern China, northern and eastern regions as well as the Western Ghats of India, indicating potential geographical variation in venom composition. There is, however, only one species-specific King Cobra antivenom available worldwide that is produced in Thailand, using venom from the snake of Thai origin. Issues relating to the management of King Cobra envenomation (e.g., variation in the composition and toxicity of the venom, limited availability and efficacy of antivenom), and challenges faced in the research of venom (in particular proteomics), are rarely addressed. This article reviews the natural history and sociocultural importance of King Cobra, cases of snakebite envenomation caused by this species, current practice of management (preclinical and clinical), and major toxinological studies of the venom with a focus on venom proteomics, toxicity and neutralization. Unfortunately, epidemiological data of King Cobra bite is scarce, and venom proteomes reported in various studies revealed marked discrepancies in details. Challenges, such as inconsistency in snake venom sampling, varying methodology of proteomic analysis, lack of mechanistic and antivenomic studies, and controversy surrounding antivenom use in treating King Cobra envenomation are herein discussed. Future directions are proposed, including the effort to establish a standard, comprehensive Pan-Asian proteomic database of King Cobra venom, from which the venom variation can be determined. Research should be undertaken to characterize the toxin antigenicity, and to develop an antivenom with improved efficacy and wider geographical utility. The endeavors are aligned with the WHO´s roadmap that aims to reduce the disease burden of snakebite by 50% before 2030.

Xiaobing Shen, Wei Leng, Wei Leng

Trench-parallel subduction of mid-ocean ridges occurs frequently in plate motion history, such as along the western boundary of the Pacific plate in the early Cenozoic and along the eastern boundary of the Pacific plate at present. Such subduction may strongly alter the surface topography, volcanic activity and slab morphology in the mantle, whereas few studies have been conducted to investigate its evolutionary process. Here, we construct a 2-D viscoelastoplastic numerical model to study the modes and key parameters controlling trench-parallel subduction of mid-ocean ridges. Our model results show that the subduction modes of mid-ocean ridges can be primarily categorized into three types: the fast spreading mode, the slow spreading mode, and the extinction mode. The key factor controlling these subduction modes is the relative motion between the foregoing and the following oceanic plates, which are separated by the mid-ocean ridge. Different subduction modes exert different surface geological expressions, which may explain specific evolutionary processes related to mid-ocean ridge subduction, such as topographic deformation and the eruption gap of volcanic rocks in East Asia within 55–45 Ma and in the western North American plate during the late Cenozoic.

Sumitro Kosasih, Yong CS, Tan Lian Tat et al.

The djenkol bean (Archidendron pauciflorum) is a native delicacy in Southeast Asia, though consumption can sometimes lead to djenkolism. Clinical features of djenkolism include acute abdominal pain, hematuria, urinary retention, and acute kidney injury (AKI). The pain can be severe, which often leads to a misdiagnosis of acute abdomen. In this paper, we report the case of an Indonesian migrant with djenkolism. Due to the short history and severity of the abdominal pain, medical professionals suspected acute abdomen and proceeded with a negative exploratory laparotomy. However, djenkolism was suspected once relatives informed the professionals that the patient had consumed djenkol beans hours earlier. The patient recovered through aggressive hydration and urine alkalinization with bicarbonate infusion. We highlight the importance of being aware of this rare cause of AKI, especially in Southeast Asia, in order to provide early diagnoses and prompt treatments.

Marcel Tanner, Lukas Meier

This text grew from a series of talks between a young science journalist trained in history and Marcel Tanner, global health expert with forty years of field experience in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. At the very core of the series was the question of the successes and failures of global health initiatives at various points in time and in different locations. It also tackled the issue of which of the lessons learned in global health over the past thirty years could possibly be of importance for future scholars and decision-makers in the field. The topics touched upon ranged from new global partnerships to sustain the efforts to eradicate malaria and other diseases to new innovations in personalised health, not least for the world's most neglected populations. The views expressed here are based on scientific findings as well as personal experiences and hence are also inherently subjective. Having said this, we still hope that the rich body of evidence assembled over years of extensive field-work and research partnership is of some value to all those how still dare to embark on the adventure of global health research in a spirit of “mutual learning for change.” Keywords: Plasmodium falciparum, Malaria, Research partnership, Capacity building, Institution building, Tanzania, Côte d'Ivoire, Innovation