Hasil untuk "Museums. Collectors and collecting"

J. Young

There is no class of our carboniferous fossils in which so little work has been done as in the plant-remains, either in the way of collecting or having them properly determined. This neglect in many cases may be owing to the bulky condition in which many of them are found in the strata, and which forbids their being secured as cabinet specimens. Not many collectors are tempted to shoulder a portion of the trunk of a Sigillaria or a Lepidodendron, say one or two feet in diameter and three or four feet in length, however well preserved the specimen may be. If secured at all, such specimens are generally found to be fit only for museum display, and not for private collections. Neither would any one think of breaking up such stems into smaller portions, as the beauty and interest of fossil plants consist in a great measure (where the internal structure has not otherwise been preserved) in the entirety of the external form of the specimens. Large specimens of plants are therefore often allowed to go to decay in the shale-heaps at the pits or in the quarries where they have been exhumed, owing to the difficulty of carrying them away into places of security. The poor state of preservation in which plant-remains are met with in many strata does not tempt collectors to secure them for their cabinets or for future examination, even although new and rare forms may thereby be overlooked. There are, however, a few localities This 250-word extract was created in the absence of an abstract

Itziar Arana Cobos

The text examines the role of the Museo Nacional del Prado as a research institution and the expansion of its channels of knowledge production through its incorporation into national and international R&D&I programmes. Alongside already consolidated instruments—such as the Boletín del Museo del Prado, temporary exhibitions, catalogues, and the activities of the Centro de Estudios—the project “Agency of Filipino Artists in Spain (1764–1898)” is presented as a key example of this new line of action. This multidisciplinary initiative, carried out by a broad national and international team, seeks to deepen the study of Filipino artistic production and its reception in Spain and Europe. The text also analyses the opportunities offered by the Spanish Science and Technology System and European programmes to reinforce the museum’s research activity. It concludes that integration into these R&D&I policies is a strategic avenue for strengthening the Prado’s scientific infrastructure and consolidating its position as a leading institution in the study of cultural heritage.

Ana Hernández Pugh

En 1833 Fernando VII aprobó la compra de ocho dibujos con destino al Real Museo de Pinturas y Esculturas. Ahora sabemos por documentación inédita que el acervo perteneció a Rafael Plañiol, grabador en hueco y director de la Casa de la Moneda de Sevilla. El cotejo entre los distintos registros e inventarios nos ha permitido identificar las ocho obras y, con ello, dar a conocer y poner en valor la primera adquisición de dibujos expresamente destinada a enriquecer los fondos dibujísticos del Museo del Prado.

Jiaming Luo, Weiyi Luo, Guoqing Sun et al.

Designing effective debt collection systems is crucial for improving operational efficiency and reducing costs in the financial industry. However, the challenges of maintaining script diversity, contextual relevance, and coherence make this task particularly difficult. This paper presents a debt collection system based on real debtor-collector data from a major commercial bank. We construct a script library from real-world debt collection conversations, and propose a two-stage retrieval based response system for contextual relevance. Experimental results show that our system improves script diversity, enhances response relevance, and achieves practical deployment efficiency through knowledge distillation. This work offers a scalable and automated solution, providing valuable insights for advancing debt collection practices in real-world applications.

Aditya Karan, Nicholas Vincent, Karrie Karahalios et al.

Given that data-dependent algorithmic systems have become impactful in more domains of life, the need for individuals to promote their own interests and hold algorithms accountable has grown. To have meaningful influence, individuals must band together to engage in collective action. Groups that engage in such algorithmic collective action are likely to vary in size, membership characteristics, and crucially, objectives. In this work, we introduce a first of a kind framework for studying collective action with two or more collectives that strategically behave to manipulate data-driven systems. With more than one collective acting on a system, unexpected interactions may occur. We use this framework to conduct experiments with language model-based classifiers and recommender systems where two collectives each attempt to achieve their own individual objectives. We examine how differing objectives, strategies, sizes, and homogeneity can impact a collective's efficacy. We find that the unintentional interactions between collectives can be quite significant; a collective acting in isolation may be able to achieve their objective (e.g., improve classification outcomes for themselves or promote a particular item), but when a second collective acts simultaneously, the efficacy of the first group drops by as much as $75\%$. We find that, in the recommender system context, neither fully heterogeneous nor fully homogeneous collectives stand out as most efficacious and that heterogeneity's impact is secondary compared to collective size. Our results signal the need for more transparency in both the underlying algorithmic models and the different behaviors individuals or collectives may take on these systems. This approach also allows collectives to hold algorithmic system developers accountable and provides a framework for people to actively use their own data to promote their own interests.

John Hill

Our understanding of the planning processes involved before any Neolithic structure was physically built, from the moment when it was conceived in a person’s mind up to the point of its construction requires further investigation for which experimental archaeology can provide some direction. During the British Neolithic period, circa 4000-2500 BC, we witness the building of numerous ceremonial, domestic and funerary structures which dominated the landscape. The exact number of structures created is unknown, although it is possible that we could be looking at a figure in the thousands (Hill, 2024). If we accept that the architectural form of these structures was so designed that their appearance alone indicated the specific types of rituals or domestic usages that could be legitimately held there (see Fleming, 1973, p.189; Bradley, 2007, pp. 46-50), then accordingly, their respective designs would have been well thought out: their architecture had to meet the visual and experiential expectations of the people. Overall, one is led to consider the possibility that any form of construction was the result of deliberate thinking and that the Neolithic builders were working to specific plans or blueprints in advance of any building work. Furthermore, moving from design to physical form required setting out, a technique which implied measuring of some description. This is where we hit the major drawback to this assertion, which experimental archaeology can offer insight. The British Neolithic communities were preliterate, and they have left behind no written records or any sculptured, pictorial reliefs at their building works which could be interpreted as evidence of “architectural” schematics. Nor do we find surveyor marks or hints of measuring-notches scratched on the surfaces of those orthostats used to build their monuments. We have yet to recover any material evidence of a British Neolithic numeracy system that could have supported those prehistoric surveying and setting out techniques that must have been needed to build complex monuments such as Stonehenge. Such a difficult subject should not be ignored and experimental archaeology may offer a solution for consideration.

Sarah Etz, Séverine Marguin, Henrike Rabe

Based on the assumption that museums have been spatially transformed in recent decades in the course of globalization, decolonization, and mediatization, we investigate from a socio-spatial perspective what influence this has on visitor experience and whether it leads to inequalities in ways of knowing. To this end, we conducted a visitor study in a science exhibition in a newly opened museum complex in Berlin, by using a mixed methods approach combining movement tracking, visitor survey and ethnographic observation. By analyzing the spatial practice in and spatial perception of the exhibition, we developed parameters along which spatial appropriation in the museum differs and correlated them with variables relating to museum spatial knowledge and scientific expertise. By integrating the spatial and social data using a multiple correspondence analysis protocol, we show that the legibility of museum space varies according to the visitors' cultural and specific symbolic-spatial capital. As this unequal access to the museum space has a direct influence on ways of knowing, the study shows that inequalities are reproduced by the current spatial refiguration of the museum.

Brennan Schaffner, Archie Brohn, Jason Chee et al.

It is common practice for researchers to join public WhatsApp chats and scrape their contents for analysis. However, research shows collecting data this way contradicts user expectations and preferences, even if the data is effectively public. To overcome these issues, we outline design considerations for collecting WhatsApp chat data with improved user privacy by heightening user control and oversight of data collection and taking care to minimize the data researchers collect and process off a user's device. We refer to these design principles as User-Centered Data Sharing (UCDS). To evaluate our UCDS principles, we implemented a mobile application representing one possible instance of these improved data collection techniques and evaluated the viability of using the app to collect WhatsApp chat data. Second, we surveyed WhatsApp users to gather user perceptions on common existing WhatsApp data collection methods as well as UCDS methods. Our results show that we were able to glean similar informative insights into WhatsApp chats using UCDS principles in our prototype app to common, less privacy-preserving methods. Our survey showed that methods following the UCDS principles are preferred by users because they offered users more control over the data collection process. Future user studies could further expand upon UCDS principles to overcome complications of researcher-to-group communication in research on WhatsApp chats and evaluate these principles in other data sharing contexts.

Mikhail Drobyshevskiy, Denis Aivazov, Denis Turdakov et al.

Online network crawling tasks require a lot of efforts for the researchers to collect the data. One of them is identification of important nodes, which has many applications starting from viral marketing to the prevention of disease spread. Various crawling algorithms has been suggested but their efficiency is not studied well. In this paper we compared six known crawlers on the task of collecting the fraction of the most influential nodes of graph. We analyzed crawlers behavior for four measures of node influence: node degree, k-coreness, betweenness centrality, and eccentricity. The experiments confirmed that greedy methods perform the best in many settings, but the cases exist when they are very inefficient.

Juliana Barbosa, Sunandan Chakraborty, Juliana Freire

Wildlife traffickers are increasingly carrying out their activities in cyberspace. As they advertise and sell wildlife products in online marketplaces, they leave digital traces of their activity. This creates a new opportunity: by analyzing these traces, we can obtain insights into how trafficking networks work as well as how they can be disrupted. However, collecting such information is difficult. Online marketplaces sell a very large number of products and identifying ads that actually involve wildlife is a complex task that is hard to automate. Furthermore, given that the volume of data is staggering, we need scalable mechanisms to acquire, filter, and store the ads, as well as to make them available for analysis. In this paper, we present a new approach to collect wildlife trafficking data at scale. We propose a data collection pipeline that combines scoped crawlers for data discovery and acquisition with foundational models and machine learning classifiers to identify relevant ads. We describe a dataset we created using this pipeline which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest of its kind: it contains almost a million ads obtained from 41 marketplaces, covering 235 species and 20 languages. The source code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/VIDA-NYU/wildlife_pipeline}.

Sara Q. Suliaman

This study was done in Al-Alam City, Salah Al-Din Province, to determine the diversity of the macrofungi in it. The results of the field study showed two species were recorded in Iraq for the first time, Inocutis tamaricis(Pat) Fiasson & Niemelä, 1984 (Basidiomycota, Hymenochaetales) and Melanoleuca castaneofuscaContu, 1998 (Basidiomycota,Agaricales). These species werediagnosed based on macroscopic andmicroscopic, DNA sequence analyses and environmental charactes. The study included the adoption of the ITSgene for molecular diagnosis, the results of which were confirmed for morphological and environmental diagnosis, and the specimens were registered in the NCBI Global GenBank under the international accession numbers OP153814.1and MZ334407.1 for the species I. tamaricisand M. castaneofusca, respectively.

Dworzecki Jacek, Nowicka Izabela, Urbanek Andrzej et al.

The article presents organisational solutions for the protection of museum collections and cultural heritage sites using the example of the state of Vermont (USA). Also described are the solutions adopted by US nationwide agencies established to respond to natural disasters. In addition, the article introduces the mechanisms and organisational and legal solutions for managing information in connection with an emergency situation, taking into account the needs for protecting museum collections and objects important to the culture and history of the residents of the state of Vermont. The article in question was prepared on the basis of expert interviews, analysis of the literature and current laws and regulations.

Xinwei Shen, Qiuwei Wu, Hongcai Zhang et al.

We propose a planning method for offshore wind farm electrical collector system (OWF-ECS) with double-sided ring topology meeting the "N-1" criterion on cable faults, in which the submarine cables layout of OWF is optimized considering cable length and power losses. The proposed mixed-integer quadratic programming (MIQP) model is based on the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) formulation and power network expansion planning, which could approximate the power losses in OWF-ECS. In addition, cross-avoidance constraints are proposed to avoid crossing cables, and the minimum k-degree center tree model is included to improve the convergence. Case studies on OWFs with 30 and 62 WTs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Considering the potential outage cost in the radial topology, the total cost of the planning result is reduced by up to 25.9% with reliability improvement. The cable investment is reduced by 4%~8% with the proposed method compared with conventional heuristic methods and Google OR-tools. The proposed method/model can also achieve acceptable computation efficiency and OWF-ECS planning results with good optimality. Moreover, it could be solved by modern commercial solvers/optimization software, thus it's easy to use even for large-scale OWF.

Jhonny Mertz, Ingrid Nunes

Monitoring software systems at runtime is key for understanding workloads, debugging, and self-adaptation. It typically involves collecting and storing observable software data, which can be analyzed online or offline. Despite the usefulness of collecting system data, it may significantly impact the system execution by delaying response times and competing with system resources. The typical approach to cope with this is to filter portions of the system to be monitored and to sample data. Although these approaches are a step towards achieving a desired trade-off between the amount of collected information and the impact on the system performance, they focus on collecting data of a particular type or may capture a sample that does not correspond to the actual system behavior. In response, we propose an adaptive runtime monitoring process to dynamically adapt the sampling rate while monitoring software systems. It includes algorithms with statistical foundations to improve the representativeness of collected samples without compromising the system performance. Our evaluation targets five applications of a widely used benchmark. It shows that the error (RMSE) of the samples collected with our approach is 9-54% lower than the main alternative strategy (sampling rate inversely proportional to the throughput), with 1-6% higher performance impact.

F. J. T. Salazara, A. F. B. A. Prado

To collect additional solar energy during the hours of darkness and to overcome the limited Terrestrial solar power due to the diurnal day night cycle, the concept of a Geostationary Tethered Collecting Solar Power Satellite System has been proposed by several authors in the last years. This tethered system consists of a long tether used to link two bodies: a single large panel with a capability of collecting solar energy, and an Earth-pointing microwave transmitting satellite. In this manner, the solar energy would be collected directly from the space and beamed back down to any point on Earth. Planar configurations, when the panel and the microwave transmitting satellite are placed on geostationary orbits, have been usually investigated to maintain the tethered system around the Earth. However, this configuration implies that the panel and the microwave transmitting satellite must to orbit the Earth in exactly the same orbital plane of all geostationary satellites.

Thais Ribeiro Pinto Bravo, Rafaela Gomes da Silva Teixeira, Alberto Calil Junior et al.

The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic brought critical scientific advances at speeds never seen before. The information from scientific studies won the world in news and social media. However, the spread of fake news provided an infodemic among a still unknown disease and no scientifically proven treatment. The present study aimed to evaluate the content and type of information on drugs indicated for the treatment of COVID-19 without scientific evidence in Brazilian social media. Two social media, Instagram and Twitter, were selected to search for drug information related to the prevention or treatment of COVID-19. The research was carried out using hashtags: #chloroquine, #hydroxychloroquine, #ivermectin, and #nitazoxanide for Portuguese publications in March 2020 and 2021. Descriptive statistic was used to present the quantitative data. In 2020, chloroquine was the drug with the highest number of publications in both social networks analyzed. The publications addressed the evidence of drug use and shortages, and the vast majority were considered correct information. While in 2021, ivermectin was the predominant drug cited on Instagram, while chloroquine was the most published on Twitter. Both drugs were related to “early treatment” and political and ideological content, classified as mostly disinformation. Thus, it is necessary to reinforce these social media guidelines to reduce the spread of health disinformation to the population. At the same time, health education in digital media is supported to ensure that the best information on management and care for COVID-19 reaches people and promotes their quality of life.

Matthew J. Vowels

Data collection and research methodology represents a critical part of the research pipeline. On the one hand, it is important that we collect data in a way that maximises the validity of what we are measuring, which may involve the use of long scales with many items. On the other hand, collecting a large number of items across multiple scales results in participant fatigue, and expensive and time consuming data collection. It is therefore important that we use the available resources optimally. In this work, we consider how a consideration for theory and the associated causal/structural model can help us to streamline data collection procedures by not wasting time collecting data for variables which are not causally critical for subsequent analysis. This not only saves time and enables us to redirect resources to attend to other variables which are more important, but also increases research transparency and the reliability of theory testing. In order to achieve this streamlined data collection, we leverage structural models, and Markov conditional independency structures implicit in these models to identify the substructures which are critical for answering a particular research question. In this work, we review the relevant concepts and present a number of didactic examples with the hope that psychologists can use these techniques to streamline their data collection process without invalidating the subsequent analysis. We provide a number of simulation results to demonstrate the limited analytical impact of this streamlining.

Zsuzsanna Böröcz

From the 1950’s onward, the myriad qualities of all plastic objects were praised without a second thought. This enthusiasm significantly delayed the awareness of their enormous impact and it took almost half a century to consider these objects a part of post-war culture. This essay aims to sketch the history of the appreciation of the relevance of plastics in the museum world, specifically as a part of design heritage, seen from the viewpoint of the collector and the conservator-restorer. The case of the Design Museum Brussels, established in 2015, shows how a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach on conservation can be developed to the benefit of our plastics heritage.

E. Figueiredo, Gideon F. Smith

Abstract Figueiredo, E. & G.F. Smith (2021). Joaquim José da Silva (c. 1755–1810): his life, natural history collecting activities, and involvement in the so-called first scientific expedition in the interior of Angola. Candollea 76: 125–138. In English, English abstract. The Portuguese naturalist Joaquim José da Silva (c. 1755–1810) was sent to Angola in the late 18th century to collect natural history specimens, as part of the “viagens philosophicas”, a series of expeditions funded by the Portuguese state to its overseas territories. Silva arrived in Angola in 1783 and remained in the country until his death 27 years later. An account of Silva's life and activities is provided. His travel itineraries in Angola are mapped and a list of his collections that could be located is presented. The little-known expedition to the Cunene River in which he participated is discussed. It was the first expedition to the interior of Angola during which plants were collected for deposition in a herbarium. His plant collections are recorded in the literature as numbering over 200 specimens that are held in the Herbarium of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris (P), after they were removed from Lisbon, Portugal, by Étienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire (1772–1844) during the Napoleonic War, in 1808. The Silva collections served as original material for describing at least 24 names. However, the Silva specimens at P lack collector's name and date and are difficult to trace. Only about 20% of these collections have been located in P. Received: January 15, 2021; Accepted: February 10, 2021; First published online: May 20, 2021

Thamyris Rodrigues Muniz, Gustavo Tanus

Recensão da obra Construindo movimentos: uma conversa em tempos de pandemia, de Angela Davis e Naomi Klein (2020).