The marriage of Germanus, nephew of Emperor Justin I (r. 518–527), to Matasuintha, former Gothic queen and granddaughter of Theoderic the Great (r. 475–526), in late 549 or early 550, was a significant yet often overlooked moment in the later stages of the Gothic War. Scholars generally interpret the marriage as a pragmatic alliance shaped by immediate strategic concerns – either a political manoeuvre by Justinian or a personal initiative by Germanus following his appointment as commander in Italy. This article revisits that assumption by exploring three related questions. First, did the marriage and military appointment signal a reconciliation between Justinian and Germanus, or a calculated attempt by the emperor to stabilize a deteriorating political situation? Second, how did their relationship evolve in the years leading up to the union, particularly after Theodora’s death in 548? Finally, more speculatively, was Germanus’ earlier decision to marry his daughter to the general John in 545 connected to his own dynastic ambitions?
Ancient history, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
In the theoretical study of distributed communication networks, "history trees" are a discrete structure that naturally models the concept that anonymous agents become distinguishable upon receiving different sets of messages from neighboring agents. By conveniently organizing temporal information in a systematic manner, history trees have been instrumental in the development of optimal deterministic algorithms for networks that are both anonymous and dynamically evolving. This note provides an accessible introduction to history trees, drawing comparisons with more traditional structures found in existing literature and reviewing the latest advancements in the applications of history trees, especially within dynamic networks. Furthermore, it expands the theoretical framework of history trees in new directions, also highlighting several open problems for further investigation.
Durante o stalinismo tardio (1945-53), o cinema soviético, como o americano, produziu várias películas veiculando mensagens de interesse governamental. A propaganda soviética transparece em filmes como Zagovor obrechennyh, 1950, apesar (e talvez com maior maestria) do trabalho do diretor Mikhail Kalatozov. Por meio da sócio-história cinematográfica de Marc Ferro pode-se apreciar a construção de um discurso legitimador dos novos regimes socialistas locais, da condução da luta política contra o titoísmo e a passagem do Leste Europeu da influência ocidental (ora inglesa, ora alemã) para a soviética (cumprindo o papel do antigo pêndulo russo), e o fim da experiência democrática liberal, trocada pela da democracia popular, com a derrota do novo rival americano e de seu Plano Marshall na região, substituídos pelo COMECOM.
I apply Dawid's Meta-Empirical Assessment (MEA) methodology to the theory of cosmological inflation. I argue that applying this methodology does not currently offer a compelling case for ascribing non-empirical confirmation to cosmological inflation. In particular, I argue that despite displaying strong instances of Unexpected Explanatory Coherence (UEA), it is premature to evaluate the theory on the basis of the No Alternatives Argument (NAA). More significantly though, I argue that the theory of cosmological inflation fails to sustain a convincing Meta-Inductive Argument (MIA) because the empirical evidence and theoretical successes that it seeks to draw meta-empirical support from do not warrant a meta-inductive inference to inflation. I conclude by assessing how future developments could pave the way towards crafting a more compelling case for the non-empirical confirmation of cosmological inflation.
The paper re-examines the principal methodological questions, arising in the debate over the cosmological standard model's postulate of Dark Matter vs. rivalling proposals that modify standard (Newtonian and general-relativistic) gravitational theory, the so-called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and its subsequent extensions. What to make of such seemingly radical challenges of cosmological orthodoxy? In the first part of our paper, we assess MONDian theories through the lens of key ideas of major 20th century philosophers of science (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Laudan), thereby rectifying widespread misconceptions and misapplications of these ideas common in the pertinent MOND-related literature. None of these classical methodological frameworks, which render precise and systematise the more intuitive judgements prevalent in the scientific community, yields a favourable verdict on MOND and its successors -- contrary to claims in the MOND-related literature by some of these theories' advocates; the respective theory appraisals are largely damning. Drawing on these insights, the paper's second part zooms in on the most common complaint about MONDian theories, their ad-hocness. We demonstrate how the recent coherentist model of ad-hocness captures, and fleshes out, the underlying -- but too often insufficiently articulated -- hunches underlying this critique. MONDian theories indeed come out as severely ad hoc: they do not cohere well with either theoretical or empirical-factual background knowledge. In fact, as our complementary comparison with the cosmological standard model's Dark Matter postulate shows, with respect to ad-hocness, MONDian theories fare worse than the cosmological standard model.
Del Carmen Encinas Reguero, M.; Quijada Sagredo, M. (eds) (2021). Tragic Rhetoric. The Rhetorical Dimensions of Greek Tragedy. Roma: Aracne. Le Rane Studi 69, 412 pp.
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature, History of the Greco-Roman World
Personalized dialogue systems explore the problem of generating responses that are consistent with the user's personality, which has raised much attention in recent years. Existing personalized dialogue systems have tried to extract user profiles from dialogue history to guide personalized response generation. Since the dialogue history is usually long and noisy, most existing methods truncate the dialogue history to model the user's personality. Such methods can generate some personalized responses, but a large part of dialogue history is wasted, leading to sub-optimal performance of personalized response generation. In this work, we propose to refine the user dialogue history on a large scale, based on which we can handle more dialogue history and obtain more abundant and accurate persona information. Specifically, we design an MSP model which consists of three personal information refiners and a personalized response generator. With these multi-level refiners, we can sparsely extract the most valuable information (tokens) from the dialogue history and leverage other similar users' data to enhance personalization. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model in generating more informative and personalized responses.
Conversational question generation (CQG) serves as a vital task for machines to assist humans, such as interactive reading comprehension, through conversations. Compared to traditional single-turn question generation (SQG), CQG is more challenging in the sense that the generated question is required not only to be meaningful, but also to align with the occurred conversation history. While previous studies mainly focus on how to model the flow and alignment of the conversation, there has been no thorough study to date on which parts of the context and history are necessary for the model. We argue that shortening the context and history is crucial as it can help the model to optimise more on the conversational alignment property. To this end, we propose CoHS-CQG, a two-stage CQG framework, which adopts a CoHS module to shorten the context and history of the input. In particular, CoHS selects contiguous sentences and history turns according to their relevance scores by a top-p strategy. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performances on CoQA in both the answer-aware and answer-unaware settings.
This paper describes how the curriculum Reading like a historian, endorsed by the Stanford History Education Group, was used in the first two years of an Italian high school. It is an innovative study program, as it is based on an active approach to learning and aimed at developing some important skills that are typical of the work of the professional historian: in particular, the program focuses on the construction of answers to questions of investigation based on a critical analysis of the sources and their corroboration. Adopting this curriculum of studies in the Italian context necessarily stimulates the teacher to critically rethink the use of the history manual and the organization itself of its teaching.
Theory and practice of education, History (General) and history of Europe
En la experiencia que aquí se presenta, estudiantes de la Universidad de Murcia dejaron las aulas por unas horas para llevar a cabo un aprendizaje situado de la historia del arte mediante un itinerario didáctico sobre la Murcia medieval. De este modo, se rompen las barreras físicas del aula y se integran los elementos de aprendizaje con el propio paisaje urbano por donde los estudiantes pasan a diario. El itinerario didáctico partía desde el antiguo Alcázar Seguir de la ciudad, hoy Convento de clausura, pasando por la plaza de Santo Domingo, antigua plaza del zoco; la conjunción urbana de “las cuatro esquinas”, donde convergen las calles de los principales gremios de la ciudad; la catedral de Murcia, donde se conservan los restos de la antigua mezquita Al-Jama y, finalmente, en el conjunto monumental de San Juan de Dios, donde aún es visible el nicho del mihrab del antiguo oratorio del Alcázar mayor medieval. Los resultados de la investigación se basan en el análisis de un pre-test y un post-test que el alumnado contestó sobre sus conocimientos de la Murcia medieval. La progresión de aprendizaje del alumnado participante fue positiva mejorando en el post-test los resultados previos.
The paper deals with midwives’ practice in the first half of the 20th century. The issue is based on the analysis of serial sources, so-called birth diaries. The research analyses ten series of birth diaries in the pre-printed form in which the midwives recorded information on the course of deliveries. The diaries are kept in Czech and Moravian archives and provide data on obstetric practice in various regions of the Czech lands. That makes it possible for us to compare the circumstances under which the midwives worked as well as their performance in different geographical, demographic, and social conditions, both in industrial and agrarian areas. The obtained data provide answers to several questions, e.g. the beginnings of assistants’ careers, their performance, the social structure of their clientele, as well as medical aspects of obstetric practice and cooperation with physicians. The research attempts to define the links between these indicators and also focuses on the financial gains of the midwives in their obstetric practice.
The need for revolution in modern physics is a well known and often broached subject, however, the precision and success of current models narrows the possible changes to such a great degree that there appears to be no major change possible. We provide herein, the first step toward a possible solution to this paradox via reinterpretation of the conceptual-theoretical framework while still preserving the modern art and tools in an unaltered form. This redivision of concepts and redistribution of the data can revolutionize expectations of new experimental outcomes. This major change within finely tuned constraints is made possible by the fact that numerous mathematically equivalent theories were direct precursors to, and contemporaneous with, the modern interpretations. In this first of a series of papers, historical investigation of the conceptual lineage of modern theory reveals points of exacting overlap in physical theories which, while now considered cross discipline, originally split from a common source and can be reintegrated as a singular science again. This revival of an older associative hierarchy, combined with modern insights, can open new avenues for investigation. This reintegration of cross-disciplinary theories and tools is defined as the Neoclassical Interpretation.
All Hamiltonian complexity results to date have been proven by constructing a local Hamiltonian whose ground state -- or at least some low-energy state -- is a "computational history state", encoding a quantum computation as a superposition over the history of the computation. We prove that all history-state Hamiltonians must be critical. More precisely, for any circuit-to-Hamiltonian mapping that maps quantum circuits to local Hamiltonians with low-energy history states, there is an increasing sequence of circuits that maps to a growing sequence of Hamiltonians with spectral gap closing at least as fast as O(1/n) with the number of qudits n in the circuit. This result holds for very general notions of history state, and also extends to quasi-local Hamiltonians with exponentially-decaying interactions. This suggests that QMA-hardness for gapped Hamiltonians (and also BQP-completeness of adiabatic quantum computation with constant gap) either require techniques beyond history state constructions. Or gapped Hamiltonians cannot be QMA-hard (respectively, BQP-complete).
El propósito de este trabajo es estudiar la presencia del trágico griego Eurípides en la obra nietzscheana hasta 1876. El análisis no sólo busca describir las palabras del filósofo alemán en torno a la materia, sino que, también, pretende determinar la importancia que un personaje de la Antigüedad pudo tener en la labor de interpretación crítica del desarrollo artístico/filosófico de la civilización occidental por parte de Nietzsche.
Aineias (Aeneas Tacticus) legt in seinen Poliorketika dar, wie im Altertum eine kleine Stadt einer Belagerung standhalten kann. Die Schrift ist das älteste militärische Fachbuch, das uns aus der Antike erhalten ist, und bietet die ausführlichste Beschreibung darüber, wie ein Stadttor gesichert wird. Zur Deutung dieser historischen Quelle sind verschiedene, oft hochkomplizierte Modelle vorgeschlagen worden. Der Aufsatz entwickelt eine dem Text eher entsprechende einfache Deutung. Diese vermeidet es, aus anderen Zeugnissen übertragene oder aber nur mit argumenta e silentio begründete Deutungen zum Verständnis des Textes einzusetzen, und macht damit nachvollziehbar, weshalb Aineias weniger auf Technik als vielmehr auf das Vertrauen der Bewohnerschaft zueinander setzt, wenn es um die Sicherung einer von Feinden bedrohten Stadt geht, denn, wie Aineias betont, “zuerst muss man zusehen, ob die Bürger einträchtig sind, da dies bei einer Belagerung das höchste Gut ist.”
This text is a foreword to the proceedings of the International Conference The Making of Jerusalem: constructed spaces and historic communities, Jerusalem, St. James Monastery, 2-4 July 2014.
History (General) and history of Europe, Social sciences (General)
An overlap between the general relativist and particle physicist views of Einstein gravity is uncovered. Noether's 1918 paper developed Hilbert's and Klein's reflections on the conservation laws. Energy-momentum is just a term proportional to the field equations and a 'curl' term with identically zero divergence. Noether proved a \emph{converse} "Hilbertian assertion": such "improper" conservation laws imply a generally covariant action. Later and independently, particle physicists derived the nonlinear Einstein equations assuming the absence of negative-energy degrees of freedom ("ghosts") for stability, along with universal coupling: all energy-momentum including gravity's serves as a source for gravity. Those assumptions (all but) imply (for 0 graviton mass) that the energy-momentum is only a term proportional to the field equations and a symmetric "curl," which implies the coalescence of the flat background geometry and the gravitational potential into an effective curved geometry. The flat metric, though useful in Rosenfeld's stress-energy definition, disappears from the field equations. Thus the particle physics derivation uses a reinvented Noetherian converse Hilbertian assertion in Rosenfeld-tinged form. The Rosenfeld stress-energy is identically the canonical stress-energy plus a Belinfante curl and terms proportional to the field equations, so the flat metric is only a convenient mathematical trick without ontological commitment. Neither generalized relativity of motion, nor the identity of gravity and inertia, nor substantive general covariance is assumed. The more compelling criterion of lacking ghosts yields substantive general covariance as an output. Hence the particle physics derivation, though logically impressive, is neither as novel nor as ontologically laden as it has seemed.
Navigation has been a core component of the web since its inception: users and scripts can follow hyperlinks, and can go back or forwards through the navigation history. In this paper, we present a formal model aligned with the WHATWG specification of navigation history, and investigate its properties. The fundamental property of navigation history is that traversing the history by delta then by delta' should be the same as traversing by delta+delta'. In particular, traversing by +1 (forward) then by -1 (back) is the same as traversing by 0 (doing nothing). We show that the specification-aligned model does not satisfy this property, by exhibiting a series of counter-examples, which motivate four patches to the model. We present a series of experiments, showing that browsers are inconsistent in their implementation of navigation history, but that their behaviour is closer to the patched model than to the specification-aligned model. We propose patches to the specification to align it with the patched model.