For most of the vast span of human history, economic growth was all but nonexistent. Then, about two centuries ago, some nations began to emerge from this epoch of economic stagnation, experiencing sustained economic growth that led to significant increases in standards of living and profoundly altered the level and distribution of wealth, population, education, and health across the globe. The question ever since has been--why?This is the first book to put forward a unified theory of economic growth that accounts for the entire growth process, from the dawn of civilization to today. Oded Galor, who founded the field of unified growth theory, identifies the historical and prehistorical forces behind the differential transition timing from stagnation to growth and the emergence of income disparity around the world. Galor shows how the interaction between technological progress and population ultimately raised the importance of education in coping with the rapidly changing technological environment, brought about significant reduction in fertility rates, and enabled some economies to devote greater resources toward a steady increase in per capita income, paving the way for sustained economic growth. - Presents a unified theory of economic growth from the dawn of civilization to today - Explains the worldwide disparities in living standards and population we see today - Provides a comprehensive overview of the three phases of the development process - Analyzes the Malthusian theory and its empirical support - Examines theories of demographic transition and their empirical significance - Explores the interaction between economic development and human evolution
Tomy Muringayil Joseph, Debarshi Kar Mahapatra, Amin Esmaeili
et al.
The human nature of curiosity, wonder, and ingenuity date back to the age of humankind. In parallel with our history of civilization, interest in scientific approaches to unravel mechanisms underlying natural phenomena has been developing. Recent years have witnessed unprecedented growth in research in the area of pharmaceuticals and medicine. The optimism that nanotechnology (NT) applied to medicine and drugs is taking serious steps to bring about significant advances in diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease—a shift from fantasy to reality. The growing interest in the future medical applications of NT leads to the emergence of a new field for nanomaterials (NMs) and biomedicine. In recent years, NMs have emerged as essential game players in modern medicine, with clinical applications ranging from contrast agents in imaging to carriers for drug and gene delivery into tumors. Indeed, there are instances where nanoparticles (NPs) enable analyses and therapies that cannot be performed otherwise. However, NPs also bring unique environmental and societal challenges, particularly concerning toxicity. Thus, clinical applications of NPs should be revisited, and a deep understanding of the effects of NPs from the pathophysiologic basis of a disease may bring more sophisticated diagnostic opportunities and yield more effective therapies and preventive features. Correspondingly, this review highlights the significant contributions of NPs to modern medicine and drug delivery systems. This study also attempted to glimpse the future impact of NT in medicine and pharmaceuticals.
Wenbin Li, Jingling Wu, Xiaoyong Lin. Jing Chen
et al.
Civil aviation is a cornerstone of global transportation and commerce, and ensuring its safety, efficiency and customer satisfaction is paramount. Yet conventional Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions in aviation remain siloed and narrow, focusing on isolated tasks or single modalities. They struggle to integrate heterogeneous data such as voice communications, radar tracks, sensor streams and textual reports, which limits situational awareness, adaptability, and real-time decision support. This paper introduces the vision of AviationLMM, a Large Multimodal foundation Model for civil aviation, designed to unify the heterogeneous data streams of civil aviation and enable understanding, reasoning, generation and agentic applications. We firstly identify the gaps between existing AI solutions and requirements. Secondly, we describe the model architecture that ingests multimodal inputs such as air-ground voice, surveillance, on-board telemetry, video and structured texts, and performs cross-modal alignment and fusion, and produces flexible outputs ranging from situation summaries and risk alerts to predictive diagnostics and multimodal incident reconstructions. In order to fully realize this vision, we identify key research opportunities to address, including data acquisition, alignment and fusion, pretraining, reasoning, trustworthiness, privacy, robustness to missing modalities, and synthetic scenario generation. By articulating the design and challenges of AviationLMM, we aim to boost the civil aviation foundation model progress and catalyze coordinated research efforts toward an integrated, trustworthy and privacy-preserving aviation AI ecosystem.
Civil society has been deemed by various scholars, such as Robert D. Putnam, to be a predictor and a cornerstone of a robust and consolidated democracy (Putnam et al., 1993). Putnam highlights in his book Bowling Alone (2000) that American civil society has become weaker: people organize less, and literally, they bowl alone. But what if there is yet another aspect to Putnam's story that has not been fully accounted for, namely the rise of Digital Civil Society (DCS)? Perhaps people in the third decade of the 21st century bowl online. They still organize, mobilize, and care for their civil liberties and democratic institutions; however, the public sphere in which this takes place has shifted online to cyberspace (Bernholz et al., 2013) or to what still needs to be conceptualized, the digital public sphere (DPS), which this article attempts to measure and demarcate.
Science is about facts and truth. Yet sometimes the truth and facts are not obvious. For example, in the field of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), there has been a long-lasting debate about who were the major contributors in its development. Particularly, there was a strong dispute between the followers of two scientists, R. Damadian and P. Lauterbur. In this review, we carefully trace the major developments in applying NMR for cancer detection starting almost 50 years ago. The research records show that the truth was beyond the claims of either research camps. The development of NMR for cancer detection involved multiple research groups, who made critical contributions at different junctures.
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.
We considered the question of how our artificial constructions are visible to advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. Taking the universality of the laws of physics, we found that the maximum distance where the detection is possible is of the order of $3000$ ly and under certain conditions Type-II advanced alien societies might be able to resolve this problem.
We explain that black holes are the most efficient capacitors of quantum information. It is thereby expected that all sufficiently advanced civilizations ultimately employ black holes in their quantum computers. The accompanying Hawking radiation is democratic in particle species. Due to this, the alien quantum computers will radiate in ordinary particles such as neutrinos and photons within the range of potential sensitivity of our detectors. This offers a new avenue for SETI, including the civilizations entirely composed of hidden particles species interacting with our world exclusively through gravity.
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.
على الرغم من عدم وجود تاريخ اجتماعي مخصص ومفصل عن المدة الاسلامية الاولى والتي شملت جميع الاجناس والديانات التي قطنت الجزيرة العربية، فأن حقائق هذه المادة من الممكن جمعها من بطعون المصادر التاريخية التي اجهدت نفسها بتبيان التاريخ السياسي والعسكري، وبما ان مادة الدارسة سمط العوالي تحتم علينا الالتزام بما يتم طرحه دون الخروج من محتوى النصوص الا للتوضيح والتبيان، اذ لم يخرج المجتمع الاسلامي عن نظام المجتمعات التي قطنت الجزيرة العربية اذ كان يقوم ذلك المجتمع على أساس النظام القبلي، فالقبيلة هي وحدة الحياة الاجتماعية, ولافرادها حقوق التملك والسيادة والتصرف ضمن أعراف القبلية.
Niels C. M. Martens, Miguel Ángel Carretero Sahuquillo, Erhard Scholz
et al.
Editorial of a special issue on dark matter & modified gravity, distributed across the journals Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Published version of the open access editorial (in SHPS) available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.08.015. The six papers are collected here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/studies-in-history-and-philosophy-of-science-part-b-studies-in-history-and-philosophy-of-modern-physics/special-issue/10CR71RJLWM.
Chromatic dispersion is a common problem to degrade the system resolution in optical coherence tomography (OCT). This study is to develop a deep learning network for automated dispersion compensation (ADC-Net) in OCT. The ADC-Net is based on a redesigned UNet architecture which employs an encoder-decoder pipeline. The input section encompasses partially compensated OCT B-scans with individual retinal layers optimized. Corresponding output is a fully compensated OCT B-scans with all retinal layers optimized. Two numeric parameters, i.e., peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index metric computed at multiple scales (MS-SSIM), were used for objective assessment of the ADC-Net performance. Comparative analysis of training models, including single, three, five, seven and nine input channels were implemented. The five-input channels implementation was observed as the optimal mode for ADC-Net training to achieve robust dispersion compensation in OCT
The aim of the research. To examine specifics of library-bibliographical classification of the literature in the Judaica studies of the Judaica Collection of the Institute of Manuscript of the V. I. Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine. Using the international experience in classification of the literature in the Judaica Studies, to identify a prime structure for such classification with a potential of employing UDC classification system for this purpose in Ukraine. Methodology. We have employed the comparative method for our research that enabled us to identify common and different features of various classification systems used in the Judaica classification. The method of induction is also applied as a way of generalizing the connectionsof works that are not interconnected by thematic and branch relations. Scientificnovelty. We have identified strengths and weaknesses of the mentioned classification systems in their application for the Judaic studies fonds. We have also look atsome specifics of Eliazar classification. The key parameter here is ability to classify the respective literature preserving its particular themes whilst maintaining orientation of the Judaica studies towards its interdisciplinary character. Conclusion. DDC and its derivatives are seen as the most applicable for classification of the Judaica studies. Taking into account the current practice of applying the Ukrainian versionof UDC and lack of the specialist classification system for the Judaica studies inmodern Ukraine, use of UDC to classify the Judaica studies collection of the Institute of Manuscript of the V. I. Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine looks quitelogical. It is therefore required to coordinate the respective schedules and adapt the indexes available in UDC to the classification structure offered in this article. These indexes are primarily 22: The Bible, the holy scripture, and 296: The Judaism within the religious studies; 32: Politics within the political studies, 726: Religious buildings within the fine art studies, Jewish languages and literatures within the linguistic studies, and 94: World History within geographic and historic studies. With the proviso referring a particular entry to the Judaic studies, it is worth using the generic identifiers, e.g. (=411.16), or a respective alphabetic character applicable in some classification systems outside UDC as an alternative.