Hasil untuk "Medieval history"

John Drummond, Wayne Orchiston, Carolyn Brown et al.

C/1910 A1 was one of the Great Comets of the twentieth century. Although it was widely observed from the Northern Hemisphere, it was first discovered by observers south of the Equator. The comet arrived just months before the widely anticipated apparition of Comet 1P/Halley and was significantly more spectacular. As a result, the two comets were confused, and many who, in later years, talked about how prominent Comet 1P/Halley was in 1910 were often remembering C/1910 A1. In this paper, we present the results of a detailed search through historical records and media publications in Aotearoa / New Zealand, to investigate how extensively C/1910 A1 was observed from New Zealand. We compare our results with observations reported for Comet 1P/Halley later in 1910, finding that surprisingly few observations of C/1910 A1 were made by New Zealand observers. We discuss cases where the comet was misidentified as being an early sighting of 1P/Halley and compare the observations made in New Zealand with international observations/records/accounts. We find that, although the Great January Comet of 1910 was observed from New Zealand, it was witnessed by few compared to other parts of the world, meaning that the apparition of C/1910 A1 was something of a missed opportunity for New Zealand astronomers.

Xurui Zhou, Gongwei Chen, Yuquan Xie et al.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents require effective use of historical context to perform sequential navigation tasks. While incorporating past actions and observations can improve decision making, naive use of full history leads to excessive computational overhead and distraction from irrelevant information. To address this, we introduce HiconAgent, a GUI agent trained with History Context-aware Policy Optimization (HCPO) for efficient and effective utilization of historical information. HCPO optimizes history usage in both sampling and policy updates through two complementary components: (1) Dynamic Context Sampling (DCS) presents the agent with variable length histories during sampling, enabling adaptive use of the most relevant context; (2) Anchor-guided History Compression (AHC) refines the policy update phase with a dual branch strategy where the compressed branch removes history observations while keeping history actions as information flow anchors. The compressed and uncompressed branches are coupled through a history-enhanced alignment loss to enforce consistent history usage while maintaining efficiency. Experiments on mainstream GUI navigation benchmarks demonstrate strong performance. Despite being smaller, HiconAgent-3B outperforms GUI-R1-7B by +8.46 percent grounding accuracy and +11.32 percent step success rate on GUI-Odyssey, while achieving comparable results on AndroidControl and AITW with up to 2.47x computational speedup and 60 percent FLOPs reduction.

Michał Pawleta, Aleksandra Chabiera, Agnieszkka Oniszczuk

Dziedzictwo archeologiczne pełni istotną rolę w kulturze i historii, jednak jego wartości w polskim społeczeństwie wciąż nie są dostatecznie rozpoznane, rozumiane i doceniane. Badania społeczne dotyczące tego tematu prowadzone są rzadko, co utrudnia opracowywanie skutecznych strategii jego ochrony oraz promocji. W artykule dokonano analizy wyników badania dotyczącego wiedzy, postaw oraz zaangażowania Polaków w kwestie związane z dziedzictwem archeologicznym według danych z sondażu CATI (ang. Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviews), przeprowadzonego w 2024 r. na reprezentatywnej próbie 1080 dorosłych mieszkańców Polski, w ramach projektu „Wartości dziedzictwa archeologicznego z perspektywy lokalnych społeczności – analiza porównawcza”. Uzyskane rezultaty przeanalizowano w kontekście szerszych wyzwań związanych z ochroną, zarządzaniem i popularyzacją dziedzictwa archeologicznego, proponując rekomendacje dotyczące poprawy obecnych strategii i działań w tym zakresie. Postulowano także konieczność prowadzenia dalszych badań społecznych na ten temat. 

Leonardo Castellani, Anna Gabetti

The formalism of generalized quantum histories allows a symmetrical treatment of space and time correlations, by taking different traces of the same history density matrix. We recall how to characterize spatial and temporal entanglement in this framework. An operative protocol is presented, to map a history state into the ket of a static composite system. We show, by examples, how the Leggett-Garg and the temporal CHSH inequalities can be violated in our approach.

Wang Bill Zhu, Deqing Fu, Kai Sun et al.

Existing recommendation systems either rely on user interaction logs, such as online shopping history for shopping recommendations, or focus on text signals. However, item-based histories are not always accessible, and are not generalizable for multimodal recommendation. We hypothesize that a user's visual history -- comprising images from daily life -- can offer rich, task-agnostic insights into their interests and preferences, and thus be leveraged for effective personalization. To this end, we propose VisualLens, a novel framework that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to enable personalization using task-agnostic visual history. VisualLens extracts, filters, and refines a spectrum user profile from the visual history to support personalized recommendation. We created two new benchmarks, Google-Review-V and Yelp-V, with task-agnostic visual histories, and show that VisualLens improves over state-of-the-art item-based multimodal recommendations by 5-10% on Hit@3, and outperforms GPT-4o by 2-5%. Further analysis shows that VisualLens is robust across varying history lengths and excels at adapting to both longer histories and unseen content categories.

F. Lomoc, A. P. Boette, N. Canosa et al.

We analyze the application of the history state formalism to quantum walks. The formalism allows one to describe the whole walk through a pure quantum history state, which can be derived from a timeless eigenvalue equation. It naturally leads to the notion of system-time entanglement of the walk, which can be considered as a measure of the number of orthogonal states visited in the walk. We then focus on one-dimensional discrete quantum walks, where it is shown that such entanglement is independent of the initial spin orientation for real Hadamard-type coin operators and real initial states (in the standard basis) with definite site parity. Moreover, in the case of an initially localized particle it can be identified with the entanglement of the unitary global operator that generates the whole history state, which is related to its entangling power and can be analytically evaluated. Besides, it is shown that the evolution of the spin subsystem can also be described through a spin history state with an extended clock. A connection between its average entanglement (over all initial states) and that of the operator generating this state is also derived. A quantum circuit for generating the quantum walk history state is provided as well.

Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman

With the widespread availability of high-speed networks, it becomes feasible to outsource computing to remote providers and to federate resources from many locations. Such observations motivated the development, from the mid-1990s onwards, of a range of innovative Grid technologies, applications, and infrastructures. We review the history, current status, and future prospects for Grid computing.

Federico Gálvez Gambero

El aumento de las necesidades de gasto de la Corona de Castilla a fines del siglo XV hizo necesario contar con estructuras financieras para canalizarlo. Tras una lenta evolución, este proceso culminó a partir de 1495, cuando se crearon dos tesorerías, de lo ordinario y de lo extraordinario. El fracaso de la primera en 1496 llevó a reunir ambas funciones en la segunda, que mantuvo su nombre, pero ejerció ya como caja general. Durante la siguiente década, la institución fue una pieza imprescindible de la hacienda real, sobreviviendo a diferentes desafíos, entre los que destaca la crisis sucesoria iniciada tras el fallecimiento de Isabel la Católica. De este modo, los titulares nombrados por Felipe el Hermoso en 1506 y Fernando el Católico en 1507 fueron designados ya tesoreros generales. Estos cambios representaron un desafío para la hacienda real, que modificó estructuras y procedimientos para gestionar la nueva tesorería general.

Néstor Vigil Montes

La implantación del notariado público en el reino de Murcia es un interesante ejemplo del modelo de rápido establecimiento del oficio ex novo, propio de los territorios recién conquistados en la Península Ibérica durante el siglo XIII, el cual fue estudiado para los casos de Sevilla, Córdoba, Valencia y Mallorca. Mediante el análisis de la legislación y de los documentos notariales conservados, pretendemos analizar los paralelismos y las divergencias con esos otros casos peninsulares, las características particulares de la mezcla de contingentes repobladores procedentes tanto de la Corona de Castilla como de la Corona de Aragón y la adaptación del notariado público a los cambios políticos acaecidos en el reino de Murcia durante el siglo XIII.

Johann Beukes

The medievalist caricature of sexual regress in Late-Medieval female monasteries: This article confronts the widely published medievalist caricature of sexual regress in Late-Medieval female monasteries by presenting a statistical analysis of the relatively low (measured against the Early and Central Middle Ages) frequency of sexual contact between monks and nuns, monks and monks, and nuns and nuns in 15th century England. C.H. Knudsen’s examination of the pastoral register of the bishop of Lincoln, William Alnwick, in the period from 1436 to 1449 is utilised to counter the common, yet profoundly modernist notion of the Late-Medieval ‘wayward nun’. Five idea-historical developments from the Early and Central Middle Ages are presented as a backdrop to this statistical analysis, showing that sexual encounters in monasteries in the Early to Central Middle Ages in the Latin West occurred more often than merely sporadic. Having defined medievalism as ‘post-Medieval ideological-reductionist and anachronistic reconstructions of the Middle Ages, whereby the Middle Ages is essentialised by one or more contingencies’, it becomes clear that the notion of ‘sexual regress in Late Medieval female monasteries’ with the image of the ‘wayward nun’ centralised therein, points to a form of medievalism: a single contingent aspect of Medieval female monasteries – the occurrence of sexual contact, however discreet – is used to present a fabricated totality of a complex socio-historical context. How complex this historical context indeed is, becomes apparent in Knudsen’s analysis of the bishop of Lincoln’s pastoral register during his 79 visits to 70 monasteries and interrogations of 217 nuns and 528 monks. Concluding that the ‘promiscuous monk’ was a far more general phenomenon than the ‘wayward nun’ in the Later Middle Ages, Knudsen’s analysis confirms that the Middle Ages is still as much a domain of research as it is a realm of fantasy today. The modernist fixation on the Late-Medieval ‘wayward nun’ is, for example, expressed in Heinrich Lossow’s (1843–1897) provocative painting Die Versündigung (ca.1880). It is argued that the ‘wayward nun’ in Lossow’s painting was a self-conscious attempt to escape from the impasse created by Victorian sexual repression: just as in every other 19th and early 20th century representation of sexual regress in Late-Medieval female monasteries, ‘she’ was nothing more than vulgar fiction. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This critique of the medievalist caricature of sexual regress in Late-Medieval female monasteries overlaps with a variety of philosophical and theological disciplines, including Medieval philosophy, Medieval history, church history, patristics, philosophy of religion and sociology of religion. Whenever these proximate disciplines are impacted by niche Medieval research, it may hold implications that these disciplines could take note of.

Maria Urmă

Book review: Daniel Ion Sofron, Perspectivă artistică. O abordare practică / Perspective in Art. A Practical Approach, PIM Publishing House, Iași, 2022, 2 volumes, 240 pages.

Udi Boker, Karoliina Lehtinen

Automata models between determinism and nondeterminism/alternations can retain some of the algorithmic properties of deterministic automata while enjoying some of the expressiveness and succinctness of nondeterminism. We study three closely related such models -- history determinism, good for gameness and determinisability by pruning -- on quantitative automata. While in the Boolean setting, history determinism and good for gameness coincide, we show that this is no longer the case in the quantitative setting: good for gameness is broader than history determinism, and coincides with a relaxed version of it, defined with respect to thresholds. We further identify criteria in which history determinism, which is generally broader than determinisability by pruning, coincides with it, which we then apply to typical quantitative automata types. As a key application of good for games and history deterministic automata is synthesis, we clarify the relationship between the two notions and various quantitative synthesis problems. We show that good-for-games automata are central for "global" (classical) synthesis, while "local" (good-enough) synthesis reduces to deciding whether a nondeterministic automaton is history deterministic.

Somil Gupta, Neeraj Sharma

The rise of intelligent assistant systems like Siri and Alexa have led to the emergence of Conversational Search, a research track of Information Retrieval (IR) that involves interactive and iterative information-seeking user-system dialog. Recently released OR-QuAC and TCAsT19 datasets narrow their research focus on the retrieval aspect of conversational search i.e. fetching the relevant documents (passages) from a large collection using the conversational search history. Currently proposed models for these datasets incorporate history in retrieval by appending the last N turns to the current question before encoding. We propose to use another history selection approach that dynamically selects and weighs history turns using the attention mechanism for question embedding. The novelty of our approach lies in experimenting with soft attention-based history selection approach in an open-retrieval setting.

Ivan Majnarić

This paper examines the narrative strategies of the oldest two medieval Eastern Adriatic historical accounts regarding the emergence of the Early Medieval gentes in local history. Seen through the framework of Othering, these accounts display complicated images within images rather than a linear narrative. At the same time, two categories of the Other seem to appear in them – the present, preferable Other, and the past, undesirable Other. By employing such strategies, the two histories depict all the gentes in an almost identical manner, and in accordance with the established images, with only some layers of actual historical background.Keywords: Middle Ages, Eastern Adriatic, medieval historians, Others, Croats“… multi christianorum … eligentes magis cum eis sustinere persecutiones et penuriam et salvare animas suas, quam gaudere ad tempus cum gentilibus et vi eorum perdere animas” (CPD 1: 28-30). Such severe accusations were brought in historical accounts from the High Middle Ages against those wicked gentes that were, at some point during the Migration Period, disturbing the “peacefully living” urban population of the Eastern Adriatic. Did the events mentioned in them really happen? If not, what was the point of a medieval historiographical narrative? Who were the gentes of those “dark ages,” especially from the viewpoint of the High Medieval histories? To answer these questions in the following text, I will employ one among a variety of useful frameworks for understanding Early Medieval history of the Eastern Adriatic – that of Othering. To put it simply, Othering can be understood as a binary dichotomy of interrelationships between persons, social groups, and/or identities in dominant and inferior cultural positions, in which the notion of belonging becomes a crucial sign of one’s social position. In such a formation of the Self and the Other, the process of the Othering provides evidence of the fashioning of the Self, its hidden desires and goals, through the stereotyping and scapegoating of the Other – weather positively or negatively – and by being aware of the Other. In fact, the Self is revealed and constructed through the Other and in relation to the Other. In such a dynamic, the value judgment of the Other varies over time between inferior (most often) and equal. Depending on how distant they are from the Self, there can be more than one Other, although they are to some extent all the same because of their Otherness. The concept can be deployed in many ways, one of which is also the construction of the identity/ethnicity, particularly suitable in this case. It is also a useful tool primarily in postcolonial medieval studies (or postcolonial theory applied to medieval societies). Although such use has been much debated, it seems to serve the purpose of interpreting various medieval cultural and social contacts, confrontation, and exchange (above all transculturation and hybridity), as well as medieval narratives. I will proceed to examine the narratives of the two oldest historical accounts from the Eastern Adriatic area – Gesta Regum Sclavorum (CPD; also called Chronicle of the Priest of Diocleia) and Historia Salonitana (HS) – about the Migration Period, with a focus on the emergence of Croats in the history of South-Eastern Europe. I aim to demonstrate the manner in which medieval historians used multi-layered strategies of Othering to present the past in a hierarchical order corresponding to the needs of their present. By doing so, two categories of the Other seem to appear – the present, preferable Other, and the past, undesirable Other. I hope that I will, at the same time, promote a more thorough (inter)textual analysis of the narrative corpora and symbol structures of both Eastern Adriatic medieval histories, as medievalist

W. Chaney, Bertram Colgrave, R. Mynors

Jenny G. Sorce, Stefan Gottlöber, Gustavo Yepes

Galaxy clusters can play a key role in modern cosmology provided their evolution is properly understood. However, observed clusters give us only a single timeframe of their dynamical state. Therefore, finding present observable data of clusters that are well correlated to their assembly history constitutes an inestimable tool for cosmology. Former studies correlating environmental descriptors of clusters to their formation history are dominated by halo mass - environment relations. This paper presents a mass-free correlation between the present neighbor distribution of cluster-size halos and the latter mass assembly history. From the Big Multidark simulation, we extract two large samples of random halos with masses ranging from Virgo to Coma cluster sizes. Additionally, to find the main environmental culprit for the formation history of the Virgo cluster, we compare the Virgo-size halos to 200 Virgo-like halos extracted from simulations that resemble the local Universe. The number of neighbors at different cluster-centric distances permits discriminating between clusters with different mass accretion histories. Similarly to Virgo-like halos, clusters with numerous neighbors within a distance of about 2 times their virial radius experience a transition at z~1 between an active period of mass accretion, relative to the mean, and a quiet history. On the contrary, clusters with few neighbors share an opposite trend: from passive to active assembly histories. Additionally, clusters with massive companions within about 4 times their virial radius tend to have recent active merging histories. Therefore, the radial distribution of cluster neighbors provides invaluable insights into the past history of these objects.

Tommaso Sgarro

With the publication in France in 1636 of De praedestinatione et reprobatione auxiliis divinae gratiae, Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) comes back to the themes of divine grace and predestination, which had already engaged him, especially in youth writings. Among the reasons for this choice, the need to maintain a high level of theological confrontation against representatives of Dominican orthodoxy, who had been the cause of his exile. Campanella carries on his personal battle, by criticizing one of the most daring and original theses of the Spanish Scholasticism, that’s Odium Dei, inserting it within the broader framework of his thought. From the pages of the work, the great originality of Stilese’s proposal on the topics dealt with emerges, which, however, will not prevent the Roman Inquisition from condemning the writing.

Juan Carlos Iglesias-Zoido

Notice and commentary on books received

D. North

Elisa Calà, Fabio Gosetti, Monica Gulmini et al.

The <i>Privilegium maius</i> is one of the most famous and spectacular forgeries in medieval Europe. It is a set of charters made in the 14th century upon commitment by Duke Rudolf IV, a member of the Habsburg family, to elevate the rank and the prestige of his family. These five charters, now kept at the &#214;sterreichisches Staatsarchiv in Vienna, have been subjected to a thorough interdisciplinary study in order to shed light on its controversial story. The charters are composed of pergamenaceous documents bound to wax seals with coloured textile threads. The present contribution concerns the characterisation of the inks used for writing and of the dyes used to colour to the threads: Are they compatible with the presumed age of the charters? Though showing only a part of the whole story of the charters, dyes analysis could contribute in assessing their complex history from manufacturing to nowadays. The dyes were characterised with non-invasive in situ measurements by means of fibre optic (FORS) and with micro-invasive measurements by means of Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) and High-Performance Liquid Chromatography with Mass Spectrometry (HPLC-MS) analysis. The results showed that the threads of four of the charters (three dyed with madder, one with orchil) were apparently coloured at different dyeing stages, then re-dyed in the 19&#8722;20th century.