Hasil untuk "History of Great Britain"

T. Trull, Seungmin Jahng, R. Tomko et al.

D. Currie, Viviane Paquin

Richard de Grijs

[Abridged] In the late nineteenth century, Mars emerged as one of the most intensively reported astronomical objects in the popular press, driven by favourable oppositions, improved telescopic capabilities and growing speculation regarding planetary habitability. I examine how Mars was interpreted in Australian newspapers between the 1870s and 1899, focusing on the ways in which astronomical knowledge was framed, contextualised and debated within a colonial media environment. Drawing on a large collection of digitised newspaper articles, I analyse how observational authority, instrumental credibility and individual expertise were harnessed in press reporting. The paper situates Australian Mars coverage within a global network of scientific communication dominated by metropolitan centres in Europe and North America, while highlighting the distinctive role played by southern-hemisphere visibility. Australian observatories and observers were frequently positioned as contributors of confirmatory observation rather than interpretive leadership, reinforcing a pattern of locally grounded but internationally oriented scientific engagement. The analysis traces a shift from early emphasis on disciplined observation and measurement to later periods characterised by contested interpretations, particularly surrounding the so-called Martian "canals" and the speculative claims advanced by personalities such as Percival Lowell in the USA. By examining how newspapers mediated between observational astronomy, engineering analogies and popular imagination, this study contributes to a broader understanding of how planetary science entered public discourse beyond metropolitan centres. In doing so, it underscores the active role of colonial newspapers in shaping scientific meaning and situates Australian Mars reporting within the wider history of nineteenth-century astronomical culture.

Xiyue Zhu, Peng Tang, Haofu Liao et al.

Language models have led to a leap forward in web automation. The current web automation approaches take the current web state, history actions, and language instruction as inputs to predict the next action, overlooking the importance of history states. However, the highly verbose nature of web page states can result in long input sequences and sparse information, hampering the effective utilization of history states. In this paper, we propose a novel web history compressor approach to turbocharge web automation using history states. Our approach employs a history compressor module that distills the most task-relevant information from each history state into a fixed-length short representation, mitigating the challenges posed by the highly verbose history states. Experiments are conducted on the Mind2Web and WebLINX datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Results show that our approach obtains 1.2-5.4% absolute accuracy improvements compared to the baseline approach without history inputs.

M. Chytrý, L. Maskell, J. Pino et al.

Sh.G. Seidov, N.V. Makeeva, A.V. Melikov

Background. The theory of modernization, claimed in the 1960s in order to become an alternative to Marxism, in fact, in the person of Western authors, was unable to satisfactorily present a generalizing line of social development. Meanwhile, this theory itself is needed, but requires an updated approach, which, in particular, represents an analysis of process technology. The purpose of the stu is to verify this approach and demonstrate its capabilities using the example of specific scientific subjects. Materials and methods. The article outlines the theoretical principles of the essence of modernization transformations in the sphere of state and law. It is noted that the renewal of the state mechanism leads to the politicization of society and the formation of civil society, which is also accompanied by the modernization of the legal system, while the final stage of the entire process is the emergence of the rule of law. The applicability of this theory to the phenomenon of colonialism, legal humanization carried out since the 19th century, and the modernization of Greece, which started at the turn of the 1870–1880s, is shown. In essence, the authors use the deduction method, demonstrating how the theoretical postulates proposed by Professor A.Yu. Salomatin can be applied to various circumstances. The comparative method is also used. Results. Turning to the phenomenon of colonialism, it is advisable to consider its mature forms of the 19th – mid-20th centuries. in the context of modernization, when colonial empires do not simply continue to engage in primitive robbery of colonies, but carry out their systematic integration into their economies, which is accompanied by infrastructural development of territories and experimentation with self-government principles. Or there is every reason to connect the appearance of slogans against information imperialism to the 1970s, since then the West not only unexpectedly and inexplicably weakened, but temporarily lost its aggressiveness due to the exhaustion of the previous modernization model and the delay in the transition to postmodernization. The technological theory of modernization helps to better understand such an innovation in the legislation of the 19th century as the humanization of criminal penalties, to see in it not an accident, but a pattern. Equally, on the basis of this theory, we can analyze the pace and characteristics of renewal in different countries. For example, when comparing the modernization starts of Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, it should be noted that in small, economically and socially stagnant Greece, dependent on the great powers, the starting point of transformation should be sought somewhere at the turn of the 1870–1880s. – that is, much later than even in the countries of the second modernization echelon (Russia, Japan, Argentina). Conclusions. The state and legal history of Europe, and other continents, requires serious study based on the technological theory of modernization. By examining phenomena through the prism of consistent and natural transformations within the state and society, by comparing the pace and characteristics of modernization processes in different countries, we can better understand the dynamics of the development of state and law.

Bang-Yen Chen

The theory of designs is an important branch of combinatorial mathematics. It is well-known in the theory of designs that a finite subset of a sphere is a tight spherical 1-design if and only if it is a pair of antipodal points. On the other hand, antipodal sets and 2-number for a Riemannian manifold are introduced by B.-Y. Chen and T. Nagano in 1982. An antipodal set is called a great antipodal set if its cardinality is equal to the 2-number. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a survey on important results in compact symmetric spaces with great antipodal sets as the designs. In the last two sections of this paper, we present some important applications of 2-number and great antipodal sets to topology and group theory.

Arno Simons

This paper explores the potential of contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) as a new tool in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS) for studying contextual and evolving meanings of scientific concepts. Using the term "Planck" as a test case, I evaluate five BERT-based models with varying degrees of domain-specific pretraining, including my custom model Astro-HEP-BERT, trained on the Astro-HEP Corpus, a dataset containing 21.84 million paragraphs from 600,000 articles in astrophysics and high-energy physics. For this analysis, I compiled two labeled datasets: (1) the Astro-HEP-Planck Corpus, consisting of 2,900 labeled occurrences of "Planck" sampled from 1,500 paragraphs in the Astro-HEP Corpus, and (2) a physics-related Wikipedia dataset comprising 1,186 labeled occurrences of "Planck" across 885 paragraphs. Results demonstrate that the domain-adapted models outperform the general-purpose ones in disambiguating the target term, predicting its known meanings, and generating high-quality sense clusters, as measured by a novel purity indicator I developed. Additionally, this approach reveals semantic shifts in the target term over three decades in the unlabeled Astro-HEP Corpus, highlighting the emergence of the Planck space mission as a dominant sense. The study underscores the importance of domain-specific pretraining for analyzing scientific language and demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of adapting pretrained models for HPSS research. By offering a scalable and transferable method for modeling the meanings of scientific concepts, CWEs open up new avenues for investigating the socio-historical dynamics of scientific discourses.

J. Metcalfe

J. Rich-Edwards, Graham A Colditz, M. Stampfer et al.

Gianluca Sposato

Il presente contributo si propone di far nuova luce sulla storia di un importante ciclo ad affresco del ‘600 fiorentino, raffigurante in 15 lunette i Misteri del Rosario e realizzato dal pittore valdarnese Giovanni da San Giovanni per l’ex monastero di Annalena a Firenze. Il ciclo è stato a lungo dimenticato perché considerato distrutto a inizio XIX secolo. Le pitture murali, invece, vennero risparmiate dalle demolizioni del complesso: riportate su tela dal restauratore emiliano Giovanni Rizzoli, presero la strada della Gran Bretagna alla fine dell’800. Le inedite informazioni sono emerse dallo studio di numerose fonti a stampa e dalla consultazione di diversi archivi in Italia e in Inghilterra. La riscoperta della riproduzione a stampa dei Misteri (pubblicata nel 1904) potrà sicuramente favorire il ritrovamento del ciclo in terra inglese. The paper aims to shed new light on the history of an important 17th century Florentine fresco cycle, depicting the Mysteries of the Rosary in 15 lunettes, made by Giovanni da San Giovanni in the former Annalena monastery in Florence. The cycle was long forgotten, since it was considered destroyed at the beginning of the 19th century: the artworks survived, however, transferred to canvas by the Emilian restorer Giovanni Rizzoli, and ended up in Great Britain by the end of the 19th century. Many unpublished information emerged from the study of numerous printed sources and from the consultation of numerous archives in Italy and England. The rediscovery of the engravings of the Mysteries (published in 1904) will certainly favor the possible discovery of the cycle in England as well.

Elizabeth Gibson-Morgan

Between the now more remote prospect of a second referendum on Scotland’s independence and Sinn Fein’s claim for a reunification of the two Irelands, one might wonder where Wales stands. Under the Wales Act 2017, the evolution from a conferred-powers model to a reserved-powers model and the transition from an Assembly to a Welsh parliament – or Senedd Cymru – have granted Wales more independence from Westminster. An emboldened, resolutely devolutionist Wales is now working on its own model of governance as a possible alternative to the Westminster model. This is part of a constitution-building process not only for the Welsh people but also as a viable solution to the fragmented British Union. To this effect, a Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales was set up in 2021. While its remit includes examining all options for Wales, including independence, its May 2022 progress report clearly stated that “Wales remains an integral part of the United Kingdom”. The Welsh model of governance could serve as a source of inspiration for England.

Leonardo Impett, Fabian Offert

In this paper, we revisit Johanna Drucker's question, "Is there a digital art history?" -- posed exactly a decade ago -- in the light of the emergence of large-scale, transformer-based vision models. While more traditional types of neural networks have long been part of digital art history, and digital humanities projects have recently begun to use transformer models, their epistemic implications and methodological affordances have not yet been systematically analyzed. We focus our analysis on two main aspects that, together, seem to suggest a coming paradigm shift towards a "digital" art history in Drucker's sense. On the one hand, the visual-cultural repertoire newly encoded in large-scale vision models has an outsized effect on digital art history. The inclusion of significant numbers of non-photographic images allows for the extraction and automation of different forms of visual logics. Large-scale vision models have "seen" large parts of the Western visual canon mediated by Net visual culture, and they continuously solidify and concretize this canon through their already widespread application in all aspects of digital life. On the other hand, based on two technical case studies of utilizing a contemporary large-scale visual model to investigate basic questions from the fields of art history and urbanism, we suggest that such systems require a new critical methodology that takes into account the epistemic entanglement of a model and its applications. This new methodology reads its corpora through a neural model's training data, and vice versa: the visual ideologies of research datasets and training datasets become entangled.

Ulyana Piterbarg, Lerrel Pinto, Rob Fergus

Neural Language Models (LMs) offer an exciting solution for general-purpose embodied control. However, a key technical issue arises when using an LM-based controller: environment observations must be converted to text, which coupled with history, results in long and verbose textual prompts. As a result, prior work in LM agents is limited to restricted domains with small observation size as well as minimal needs for interaction history or instruction tuning. In this paper, we introduce diff history, a simple and highly effective solution to these issues. By applying the Unix diff command on consecutive text observations in the interaction histories used to prompt LM policies, we can both abstract away redundant information and focus the content of textual inputs on the salient changes in the environment. On NetHack, an unsolved video game that requires long-horizon reasoning for decision-making, LMs tuned with diff history match state-of-the-art performance for neural agents while needing 1800x fewer training examples compared to prior work. Even on the simpler BabyAI-Text environment with concise text observations, we find that although diff history increases the length of prompts, the representation it provides offers a 25% improvement in the efficiency of low-sample instruction tuning. Further, we show that diff history scales favorably across different tuning dataset sizes. We open-source our code and data to https://diffhistory.github.io.

Elizabeth Gibson-Morgan

The legal uncertainties and legal disputes raised by Brexit have indirectly led to a growing use of judicial review and a more assertive judiciary. The tenth anniversary of the United Kingdom Supreme Court (UKSC) – officially set up in October 2009 – was a time to look back on its work reflecting on some of its key rulings as well as on its constitutional position. A special series of lectures were delivered by a judge from each of the four nations - represented in the Supreme Court – in November and December 2019 to reflect on the court’s work over the last ten years (2009-2019). The first Welsh speaking judge of the UKSC David Lloyd-Jones entitled his lecture “Wales: Law in a small nation.” That very year Brexit gave proposal to “ensure that it [judicial review] is not abused to conduct politics by another means or create needless delays” – as written in the 2019 Conservative manifesto. Such a proposal, they fear, would seriously undermine judges’ check on the lawfulness of the acts and decisions of the executive as well as judges’ authority.

Mona Parra

This paper investigates the little-known yet crucial part that cooperation with French cryptanalysts played in the remarkable British success in cracking Enigma codes during World War Two. On the French side, the central figure of this alliance was the head of the French army codebreaking unit, Gustave Bertrand. Shortly before the war, he had put British and Polish cryptanalysts in contact with each other, and this became instrumental in allowing the British to decode Enigma messages. After the fall of France in 1940, Bertrand chose to remain in France and, with the support of some leading Vichy officials, kept on working on German codes and cooperated with the British, on a clandestine basis. This entailed huge risks for the two partners. The Allied landing in North Africa all but put an end to this alliance, although a few exchanges did take place after that date. This cooperation paved the way for the massive expansion of the British codebreaking centre, which became a world leader in the field.

Alan D. Bross, E. C. Dukes, Ralf Ehrlich et al.

The pyramids of the Giza plateau have fascinated visitors since ancient times and are the last of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world still standing. It has been half a century since Luiz Alvarez and his team used cosmic-ray muon imaging to look for hidden chambers in Khafres Pyramid. Advances in instrumentation for High-Energy Physics (HEP) allowed a new survey, ScanPyramids, to make important new discoveries at the Great Pyramid (Khufu) utilizing the same basic technique that the Alvarez team used, but now with modern instrumentation. The Exploring the Great Pyramid Mission plans to field a very-large muon telescope system that will be transformational with respect to the field of cosmic-ray muon imaging. We plan to field a telescope system that has upwards of 100 times the sensitivity of the equipment that has recently been used at the Great Pyramid, will image muons from nearly all angles and will, for the first time, produce a true tomographic image of such a large structure.

R. Drayton

H. Kriesi

Z. Fajri, M. Outiskt, Y. Khouyaoui et al.

<p>The coastal zone is a highly complex area because of its location at the interface between land and sea and as a preferred location for many forms of development. A mega tsunami from the Canary Islands will hit not only the Atlantic coasts of Morocco, but also Spain, Portugal, Great Britain and even reach US shores.</p><p>A slight earthquake or possible volcanic eruption can trigger one of the most violent natural disasters in history. Indeed, according to Steven Ward and Simon Day (2001) the west flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano, located on the island of Palma is unstable and could, as a result of a future eruption, collapse into the ocean. It would be in the worst scenario of a huge piece of 25 km long, 15 wide and 1,400 meters thick that would come off, a total of 500 cubic kilometers of land and rocks. This wave could reach 50 meters of height, once arrived on the Moroccan coasts. In this study, a numerical inundation and vulnerability models are used to identify the location and nature of current and future hazards and risk on the Moroccan coast to better understand the tsunami hazard and vulnerability along the Moroccan coast. We have worked on the correction of coastlines from satellite imagery on Google Earth and the digitization of bathymetric and topographic maps, in order to create digital elevation models (DEM). We have also studied the vulnerability assessment of the buildings by using the BTV model (Building Tsunami Vulnerability) such as a combination of tsunami inundation numerical modelling, field survey data and geographic information system.</p>