Hasil untuk "Modern history, 1453-"

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.

April Kim

South Korea’s public education system is widely recognised for its exceptional academic performance, as demonstrated by its high rankings in international assessments such as PISA. However, despite these achievements, public trust—including parental confidence—remains notably low domestically, even with a centralised education government education system. In contrast, the education system in Flanders, Belgium, takes a fundamentally different approach. By granting schools significant autonomy and implementing education policies tailored to local needs and characteristics, Flanders aims to enhance both quality and equity of its public education system. This policy brief examines key elements of the Flanders’ education system and presents sustainable policy recommendations that align with South Korea’s unique cultural and educational context.

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.

Roy Friedman, Yair Weiss

Modern GANs achieve remarkable performance in terms of generating realistic and diverse samples. This has led many to believe that ``GANs capture the training data manifold''. In this work we show that this interpretation is wrong. We empirically show that the manifold learned by modern GANs does not fit the training distribution: specifically the manifold does not pass through the training examples and passes closer to out-of-distribution images than to in-distribution images. We also investigate the distribution over images implied by the prior over the latent codes and study whether modern GANs learn a density that approximates the training distribution. Surprisingly, we find that the learned density is very far from the data distribution and that GANs tend to assign higher density to out-of-distribution images. Finally, we demonstrate that the set of images used to train modern GANs are often not part of the typical set described by the GANs' distribution.

Andreas Schrimpf

There are about 6000 stars, that can be seen with the naked eye and have been observed for centuries for various purposes. More modern investigations using advanced telescopes show that our Milky Way, a quite common galaxy, consists of about 100 -- 400 billion stars. And, it is estimated that there are between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe -- all of them consist mostly of stars, and sending observable signals which also represents nothing more than a superposition of the light of individual stars. So we can conclude that the most common observable objects in the Universe are $\textit{stars}$. In this chapter, we focus on the long history of the observation of stars (compared to studies in other fields of science) to find out more about the nature of these objects.

M. McCormick, U. Büntgen, M. Cane et al.

Marina POPA, Olivia PLĂMĂDEALĂ

International migration of the workforce has become a global challenge and is constantly in the spotlight of the world community. Since ancient times, humanity has been on the move. Some people move in search of jobs or economic opportunities, others to join family or to study. Others migrate in response to the negative effects of climate change, natural disasters or environmental factors. Among migration phenomena, an essential role is held by the migration of the young human factor. Today, it is estimated that the number of young people, i.e. people aged between 15 and 24, is around 1.3 billion and account for 15.5 per cent of the global population. (UN, 2020). Migration in general, and that of young people in particular, is one of the current challenges for the developing countries, including the Republic of Moldova. The increasing migration of young people concerns the authorities and civil society, given its effects on the country's human potential and socio-economic development. In this article we aim to study the current trends of the migration process, in particular to address the motivation of young people in Moldova to migrate in order to study abroad.

Wei Zhang, Wong Kam-Kwai, Yitian Chen et al.

The study of cultural artifact provenance, tracing ownership and preservation, holds significant importance in archaeology and art history. Modern technology has advanced this field, yet challenges persist, including recognizing evidence from diverse sources, integrating sociocultural context, and enhancing interactive automation for comprehensive provenance analysis. In collaboration with art historians, we examined the handscroll, a traditional Chinese painting form that provides a rich source of historical data and a unique opportunity to explore history through cultural artifacts. We present a three-tiered methodology encompassing artifact, contextual, and provenance levels, designed to create a "Biography" for handscroll. Our approach incorporates the application of image processing techniques and language models to extract, validate, and augment elements within handscroll using various cultural heritage databases. To facilitate efficient analysis of non-contiguous extracted elements, we have developed a distinctive layout. Additionally, we introduce ScrollTimes, a visual analysis system tailored to support the three-tiered analysis of handscroll, allowing art historians to interactively create biographies tailored to their interests. Validated through case studies and expert interviews, our approach offers a window into history, fostering a holistic understanding of handscroll provenance and historical significance.

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.

John E. Perry, J. Leidenhag

Is there a journal less likely than Modern Theology to devote a special issue to the natural sciences? When we were in grad school, we would have said, “No and I hope they never descend to that. You see, Modern Theology does real theology.” Real theology, we thought, should always be queen of the sciences. We had picked up the fads of our generation, and one such fad was the idea that whenever scientists were invited to the theological table, then theology would automatically assume a subservient position. But then we came across Kenneth Surin’s founding editorial in Modern Theology that promised to study “theology in relation to history and culture . . . and the natural and social sciences.” How did this square with the rest of the journal’s bold vision? We were not able to piece it together until later. What we were picking up on, however— without quite sensing the significance— was theology’s “new boldness.” That was Kathryn Tanner’s phrase in her essay reflecting on Modern Theology’s first twentyfive years. Tanner was not alone. In the twentyfifth anniversary issue of the journal, several former editors and current editorial board members recounted some version of the same outlook. No longer were theology’s options constrained by modernity; it was time to proclaim a pox on both houses— those too ready to culturally accommodate and those too ready to culturally repudiate. What should replace the tired options of modernity varies, depending on whom you ask. For George Lindbeck, theology should be understood as a culturallinguistic grammar— because the old options, which looked like opposites (experientialexpressivist and cognitivepropositionalist), were in fact fighting on the same side. For Stanley Hauerwas, theology should take the form of ecclesial practices of resident alien Christians— because the old options, which looked like opposites (Democrats and Republicans), were in fact members of the same family squabbling over who had jurisdiction of the kitchen. For Kenneth Surin, theology was defined as whatever would

Cinthia Balé

Durante los gobiernos kirchneristas (2003-2015) el recuerdo de la última dictadura militar se convirtió en objeto del quehacer estatal de un modo novedoso para la democracia argentina. En esos años se produjeron una multiplicidad de políticas de memoria que, en forma paralela al proceso de reapertura de los juicios por crímenes de lesa humanidad, colocaron al pasado reciente en el centro de la escena pública. ¿Cómo explicar esta novedad? ¿De qué forma caracterizar el régimen de memoria propiciado por los gobiernos kirchneristas en relación con el pasado reciente? Este artículo analiza estas cuestiones a partir del entrecruzamiento entre la teoría del análisis del discurso político y los estudios de memoria. Desde ese punto de vista, mostraremos que el recuerdo del terrorismo de Estado funcionó como una práctica de trazado de fronteras políticas y que el sujeto privilegiado de dicha memoria era el pueblo. Argumentaremos que el régimen de memoria que se configuró desde los gobiernos kirchneristas, así como sus efectos polémicos, pueden ser adecuadamente comprendidos como consecuencia de la lógica populista de constitución de lo social.  

Nayla Pis Diez, Mariela Stavale

Este trabajo tiene por objetivo general debatir en torno a las formas de las militancias de la historia reciente latinoamericana y argentina, desde una mirada, un concepto y un caso histórico. De esta forma, la investigación aquí volcada contempla dos aspectos. Primero, una revisión bibliográfica en torno al concepto de nueva izquierda, que también encara un repaso por los debates y las formas de analizar y comprender la violencia política en la historia reciente, sus vínculos con las militancias y procesos socio-culturales, políticos, también sindicales y obreros. Segundo, nos abocamos a la reconstrucción del caso de las Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas - Peronismo de Base de Argentina, dos organizaciones creadas entre 1968 y 1970, en íntima relación con dos hitos clave de esas décadas: si las FAP surgieron de la mano de una de las primeras experiencias guerrilleras realizada en el norte argentino, el PB lo hizo en el seno de la experiencia sindical denominada clasista

Dennis E. Krause, Joseph Bertaux, A. Meenakshi McNamara et al.

A 5th force coupling to baryon number $B$ has been proposed to account for the correlations between the acceleration differences $Δa_{ij}$ of the samples studied in the Eötvös experiment, and the corresponding differences in the baryon-to-mass ratios $Δ(B/μ)_{ij}$. To date the Eötvös results have not been supported by modern experiments. Here we investigate the phenomenological implications of a possible magnetic analog $\vec{\mathscr{B}}_5$ of the conventional 5th force electric field, $\vec{\mathscr{E}}_5$, arising from the Earth's rotation. We demonstrate that, in the presence of couplings proportional to $\vec{\mathscr{B}}_5$, both the magnitude and direction of a possible 5th force field could be quite different from what would otherwise be expected and warrants further investigation.

Tania Regina de Luca

O artigo tem por objetivo analisar os doze exemplares da revista Ilustração Brasileira, mensário impresso na França e que circulou entre 1901 e 1902. O periódico é citado na historiografia como um dos pioneiros no uso da fotografia e colocado ao lado das revistas de variedades que se multiplicaram a partir do início do século XX, momento em que a impressão direta da fotografia nos impressos periódicos tornou-se possível. A despeito de ser muito mencionada, não se conta com estudos sistemáticos sobre essa revista e nem com informações a respeito dos objetivos ou dos responsáveis pelo empreendimento. Dados esparsos provenientes de jornais da época, associados à análise dos conteúdos e dos colaboradores, fornecem algumas pistas que ajudam a esclarecer pelo menos parte do problema e a elucidar a natureza da publicação, lançada num momento em que inovações técnicas abriam novas possibilidades para as revistas ilustradas.

Ulrich Päßler

Heinrich Menu von Minutoli unternahm 1820 eine Reise nach Nordafrika zur Erforschung ägyptischer und griechischer Altertümer. Die Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften bestimmte die jungen Naturforscher Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg und Wilhelm Hemprich als weitere Teilnehmer. Während Minutoli bereits ein Jahr nach Beginn der Expedition 1821 nach Europa zurückkehrte, setzten Ehrenberg und Hemprich ihre Forschungen fort. Von Alexandria aus unternahmen sie, zum Teil getrennt, Exkursionen in die libysche Wüste, auf die Sinaihalbinsel, zum Roten Meer, in das Libanongebirge sowie bis in den Sudan und nach Eritrea, wo Hemprich 1825 dem Malariafieber erlag. Wie von der Akademie der Wissenschaften beauftragt, sammelten Ehrenberg und Hemprich insgesamt 34 000 Tiere, 46 000 Pflanzen und 300 Mineralien. Diese trafen im Laufe der Jahre, verpackt in insgesamt 114 Kisten, in Berlin ein. Die Akademie stellte Mittel für die Auswertung der Sammlungen zur Verfügung. Ehrenbergs Reisebericht blieb aber ebenso Fragment wie das großangelegte Tafelwerk Symbolae physicae.

Andreza SANTOS CRUZ MAYNARD

This article offers an analysis of the screening of the Italian film Luciano Serra, pilota (1938) in the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro during the Second World War. The sources consulted for this work include mainly the newspapers that advertised the programming of the screening rooms, the magazines that circulated in the country, the film itself, as well as official sources (Brazilian laws and decrees). The advertisements published in Brazil about Luciano Serra, pilota are part of a set of procedures and strategies of profit maximisation, but they also reflect characteristics and values of Brazilian society before the state of belligerence towards the Axis countries.

Xutan Peng, Yi Zheng, Chenghua Lin et al.

We introduce the task of historical text summarisation, where documents in historical forms of a language are summarised in the corresponding modern language. This is a fundamentally important routine to historians and digital humanities researchers but has never been automated. We compile a high-quality gold-standard text summarisation dataset, which consists of historical German and Chinese news from hundreds of years ago summarised in modern German or Chinese. Based on cross-lingual transfer learning techniques, we propose a summarisation model that can be trained even with no cross-lingual (historical to modern) parallel data, and further benchmark it against state-of-the-art algorithms. We report automatic and human evaluations that distinguish the historic to modern language summarisation task from standard cross-lingual summarisation (i.e., modern to modern language), highlight the distinctness and value of our dataset, and demonstrate that our transfer learning approach outperforms standard cross-lingual benchmarks on this task.

Julio Arroyo Vozmediano

Reseña de: Mitchell, Silvia Z., Queen, Mother, and Stateswoman: Mariana of Austria and the Government of Spain. University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. xv + 293 pp. ISBN:  978-0-271-08339-1

Julie SZE

“Environmental Justice in a moment of danger” is Julie Sze’s new book, published in 2020 by the University of California Press. Given the global situation, there could not have been a more appropriate title. The pandemic is only the latest of the environmental emergencies that are hitting social groups and populations in an unequal way, once again making social, economic, gender and ethnic inequalities more evident. Starting from the current pandemic and reflecting on the contents of her latest volume, Julie Sze invites readers to politicize the concept of sustainability, to go beyond a non-conflictual understanding of it and to seek ways for a radical transformation of our societies.

Antonio Juan Calvo Maturana

In the following pages we consider the reconfiguration of heroism in the last decades of the Spanish Ancien Régime. These changes were related to the political propaganda sponsored by Charles III and Charles IV in accordance with their absolutist and reformist agenda. We find a hero whose cause is the fatherland and whose role model is the so-called «hombre de bien». From this perspective, important characters in the Pantheon of these times, such as the patriotic king or the hero of the common good are analyzed.