Hasil untuk "History of the Greco-Roman World"

Richard de Grijs

In the nineteenth century, the Dutch established time signals in their Atlantic colonies to synchronise maritime navigation with European standards. In Paramaribo (Suriname), a sophisticated sequence of apparatus -- including time balls, noon guns, discs and flags -- operated from 1851 until World War I. Naval officers aboard guard ships used sextants equipped with artificial horizons to determine local noon, thus integrating the colony into the global Greenwich-based cartographic system. This infrastructure was not merely technical; it became a civic ritual, with the daily noon gun structuring urban life and becoming a point of political negotiation between naval commanders and the colonial governor. In contrast, the Dutch Caribbean islands employed simpler, pragmatic systems. Curaçao used a daily time flag, a cost-effective solution suited to its climate and harbour scale, while smaller islands like Aruba and St. Eustatius relied on occasional noon guns. This diversity reflected a decentralised colonial administration that adapted technologies to local conditions and budgets. The history of these time signals reveals a process of hybrid adaptation, not simply replication of European models. They were shaped by environmental challenges, fiscal constraints and local politics, functioning simultaneously as navigational aids and civic landmarks. Their eventual decline, owing to budgetary pressures and new technologies like wireless telegraphy, underscores the fragile and negotiated nature of colonial scientific infrastructures.

Amélie Belleli

Feminine fertility being of dynastical relevance, sources are specifically interested in births. The uterus perpetuates Roman blood, and he who is born from a mother shrouded in purple, can claim the throne. The existence of Roman-Barbarian alliances highlights the power women could wield in integrating the Empire. This “hyphen” role doesn’t elude Vandal king Genseric, as he arranges a marriage to Theodosian princess Eudocia for his son Huneric in 455. Clear proof of his aspirations, this union grants him a privileged bond with the Empire and the imperial power. Gemini diademetis heres, their son Hilderic embodies the continuity of the Theodosian blood. The feminine figure must be seen as a central element in these Roman-Barbarian marriages as she provides the Roman blood, which is passed on to potential children, despite the barbarian paternity. When Hilderic’s children arrive in Constantinople, Justinian and Theodora’s welcoming ratifies their illustrious roman kinship, over their Vandal lineage.

Ferran Grau Codina

El humanista alcoyano Andreu Sempere justificaba la redacción de su manual de retórica en la inexistencia de tratado alguno, antiguo o reciente, con el que enseñar adecuadamente el arte de la retórica. No obstante, el aprovechamiento de unos y otros es muy importante en su obra. Analizamos la presencia de los autores ‘recientes’ y la deuda de Sempere con ellos a través de la citas textuales y referencias explícitas presentes en su Methodus oratoria. Entre los autores mencionados se cuentan Giovita Rapicius (Ravizza), Luis Estrebeo (Jacques-Louis d’Estrebay), ambos autores muy utilizados en los capítulos sobre el ritmo oratorio, una de las partes más desarrolladas y singulares de la Methodus, Petrus Ramus y Omer Talon, Juan Luis Vives y Julio César Escalígero (Poetices libri VII). En muchos casos, Sempere los menciona para criticarlos y expresar sus diferencias com ellos, en otros, matiza y elogia sus teorías.

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.

Donald C. Chang

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.

María Fernández Ríos

Para el presente trabajo, rescatamos la epopeya neolatina titulada Lyrae Heroycae libri quatuordecim (Salamanca, Matías Gast, 1581) del humanista español Francisco Núñez de Oria. Este poema épico, tan poco conocido como su autor, conjuga dos tradiciones a priori antagónicas: el canon épico clásico y la novedosa materia caballeresca. Partiendo de la premisa de que el Orlando Furioso de Ludovico Ariosto es la fuente vernácula principal de la obra, nos proponemos analizar el influjo de una de las fuentes vernáculas secundarias que subyacen en este monumental poema: el Morgante de Luigi Pulci.

Romeo, Alessandra

In Inferno’s Cantos 24 and 25 Dante points out the auctoritas of Latin epic poets (Ovid, Lucan), but uses a series of rhetorical figures intended to emphasise his own superiority and the novelty of his poetic enterprise. Dante competes with Ovid (Cadmus’s metamorphosis into a snake in Ov. met. 4. 569-603 = Dante Inf. 25. 103-138) by recycling Ovid’s grammar of description and lowering its high style according to the new poetic objective as he recounts the anti-sublime world of Malebolge. Virgil as a character of Dante’s Commedia also participates in this procedure, since he presents one of his epic creatures, Cacus (the monster slain by Hercules in Aeneid 8), in terms strongly divergent from the high diction adopted by the real Virgil as Aeneid’s author.

François Prost

Hao Li, Zhijing Yang, Xiaobin Hong et al.

Real-world image denoising is a practical image restoration problem that aims to obtain clean images from in-the-wild noisy inputs. Recently, the Vision Transformer (ViT) has exhibited a strong ability to capture long-range dependencies, and many researchers have attempted to apply the ViT to image denoising tasks. However, a real-world image is an isolated frame that makes the ViT build long-range dependencies based on the internal patches, which divides images into patches, disarranges noise patterns and damages gradient continuity. In this article, we propose to resolve this issue by using a continuous Wavelet Sliding-Transformer that builds frequency correspondences under real-world scenes, called DnSwin. Specifically, we first extract the bottom features from noisy input images by using a convolutional neural network (CNN) encoder. The key to DnSwin is to extract high-frequency and low-frequency information from the observed features and build frequency dependencies. To this end, we propose a Wavelet Sliding-Window Transformer (WSWT) that utilizes the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), self-attention and the inverse DWT (IDWT) to extract deep features. Finally, we reconstruct the deep features into denoised images using a CNN decoder. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations conducted on real-world denoising benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed DnSwin performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.

Roberto Casalbuoni, Daniele Dominici, Massimo Mazzoni

The history of the Institute of Physics at the University of Florence is traced from the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Antonio Garbasso as Director (1913), to the 1960s. Thanks to Garbasso's expertise, not only did the Institute gain new premises on Arcetri hill, where the Astronomical Observatory was already located, but it also formed a brilliant group of young physicists made up of Enrico Fermi, Franco Rasetti, Enrico Persico, Bruno Rossi, Gilberto Bernardini, Daria Bocciarelli, Lorenzo Emo Capodilista, Giuseppe Occhialini and Giulio Racah, who were engaged in the emerging fields of Quantum Mechanics and Cosmic Rays. This Arcetri School disintegrated in the late 1930s for the transfer of its protagonists to chairs in other universities, for the environment created by the fascist regime and, to some extent, for the racial laws. After the war, the legacy was taken up by some students of this school who formed research groups in the field of nuclear physics and elementary particle physics. As far as theoretical physics was concerned, after the Fermi and Persico periods these studies enjoyed a new expansion towards the end of the 1950s, with the arrival of Giacomo Morpurgo and above all, that of Raoul Gatto, who created the first real Italian school of Theoretical Physics at Arcetri.

Artur Costrino

Apresento aqui nova tradução completa e anotada em português do texto Disputatio regalis et nobilissimi iuvenis Pippini cum Albino scholastico. Esse importante texto de caráter didático é composto quase que inteiramente a partir de outros textos anteriores que circulavam nos domínios carolíngios e evidencia o processo de composição de Alcuíno de Iorque, baseado, senão na emulação, certamente na prática da coleção e mistura de exemplos passados. A tradução acompanha breve introdução e notas que explicitam as respostas dos enigmas mais difíceis.

Alicia Rodríguez-Álvarez

El presente trabajo analiza el tratamiento de los llamados “monstrous births” en los tratados de obstetricia ingleses redactados a lo largo del siglo XVII. El estudio que proponemos demostrará que se puede distinguir un primer grupo de tratados con descripciones detalladas acompañadas de ilustraciones, propias de baladas y panfletos de carácter popular y con una marcada intención sensacionalista, y un segundo grupo de tratados con un interés genuino por este tipo de malformaciones que revelan la voluntad científica de la literatura médica del momento.

Yael Naze

With Cyrano, Voltaire, and Verne, France provided important milestones in the history of early science fiction. However, even if the genre was not very common a few centuries ago, there were numerous additional contributions by French-speaking writers. In this paper, we review two cases of interplanetary novels written in the second half of the eighteenth century and sharing a rare particularity: their authors were female. Voyages de Milord Ceton was imagined by Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert whereas Cornelie Wouters de Wasse conceived Le Char Volant. While their personal lives were very different, and their writing style too, both authors share in these novels a common philosophy in which equality -- between ranks but also between genders -- takes an important place. Their works thus clearly fit into the context of the Enlightenment.

João Batista Toledo Prado

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Bianca Cristiana Olteanu, Ovidiu Țentea

Colonia Ulpia Traiana Augusta Dacica Sarmizegetusa, founded by emperor Trajan, was the first Roman city in the newly conquered province of Dacia. This paper focuses on the area located in the very heart of the city, occupied during the Severan period by the temple dedicated to the Palmyrene gods. The temple overlapped a domus with two different construction phases. During the archaeological excavations, fragments of painted walls belonging to the first phase of this domus were discovered. This paper aims to show how the decoration of the building evolved, particularly when we are dealing initially with a domestic use of the area, along with a religious and sacred one later. How a place is decorated gives us insights into the Roman way of life in the province of Dacia. Taking into consideration the multitude of meanings one could apply to the concepts of place and space, it is important to see how the perception of a monument has changed over time.

Tolga Özhan, Hüseyin Yaman

This paper presents a new inscribed Assos-type sarcophagus found recently in a village close to the ancient city of Alexandreia Troas. A characteristic feature of the general decoration of Assos-type sarcophagi is the attention-grabbing shape of the large central panel positioned on each of the long sides of the sarcophagus. It is proposed that these large central panels may have been schematic representations of rectangular or round funerary altars. Accordingly, the depiction of the funerary altar on the sarcophagus is considered to be a new hybrid style of the practice in the necropolis of Assos of erecting a funerary altar along with the sarcophagus.  With this sarcophagus inscription dating to the third century AD, the presence of the professional association of shipwrights, which is known to have existed in a number of important harbour cities in the western part of the Roman Empire, is attested for the first time in the ancient city of Alexandreia Troas and Asia Minor in general. The epithet ἱερώτατος labelling the collegium suggests that the association may have gained a privileged position in the ancient city. The anonymous owner of the sarcophagus must have been associated with the collegium of shipwrights at Alexandreia Troas and, presumably, he was a shipwright.

Ginette Vagenheim

Dans son traité sur les hommes illustres de l’Antiquité, Pirro Ligorio consacre le troisième livre aux personnes ayant vécu longtemps (macrobies) ; commen­çant par les peuples légendaires, comme les Éthiopiens, l’antiquaire poursuit son enquête en explorant la vie de personnages mythiques et de héros du passé cités chez des auteurs tels qu’Hérodote, Plutarque, Valère Maxime et Pline l’Ancien, mais aussi celle de personnages contemporains et de nombreuses femmes. Après avoir exposé les raisons de son intérêt pour ces macrobies, Ligorio offre à certaines de ces figures une sorte de « nouvelle vie » à travers un procédé très personnel que je décris dans cet article. In his treatise on illustrious men from Antiquity, Pirro Ligorio devotes the third volume to the people who lived a long life (macrobii). After an opening section devoted to legendary populations, like the Ethiopians, Ligorio continues his account with mythical and heroic figures quoted in classical authors like Herodotus, Valerius Maximus, Pliny the Elder, and Plutarch, as well as con­temporary characters and a number of women. After setting out the reasons for his interest in these figures, Ligorio offers them a new lease of life through a very distinctive process, which is analysed in this article.

Zura Kakushadze, Willie Yu

We discuss the idea of a purely algorithmic universal world iCurrency set forth in [Kakushadze and Liew, 2014] (https://ssrn.com/abstract=2542541) and expanded in [Kakushadze and Liew, 2017] (https://ssrn.com/abstract=3059330) in light of recent developments, including Libra. Is Libra a contender to become iCurrency? Among other things, we analyze the Libra proposal, including the stability and volatility aspects, and discuss various issues that must be addressed. For instance, one cannot expect a cryptocurrency such as Libra to trade in a narrow band without a robust monetary policy. The presentation in the main text of the paper is intentionally nontechnical. It is followed by an extensive appendix with a mathematical description of the dynamics of (crypto)currency exchange rates in target zones, mechanisms for keeping the exchange rate from breaching the band, the role of volatility, etc.

Tim Maudlin, Elias Okon, Daniel Sudarsky

We start by surveying the history of the idea of a fundamental conservation law and briefly examine the role conservation laws play in different classical contexts. In such contexts we find conservation laws to be useful, but often not essential. Next we consider the quantum setting, where the conceptual problems of the standard formalism obstruct a rigorous analysis of the issue. We then analyze the fate of energy conservation within the various viable paths to address such conceptual problems; in all cases we find no satisfactory way to define a (useful) notion of energy that is generically conserved. Finally, we focus on the implications of this for the semiclassical gravity program and conclude that Einstein's equations cannot be said to always hold.

Tianhao Yang, Zheng-Jun Zha, Hanwang Zhang

We study the multi-round response generation in visual dialog, where a response is generated according to a visually grounded conversational history. Given a triplet: an image, Q&A history, and current question, all the prevailing methods follow a codec (i.e., encoder-decoder) fashion in a supervised learning paradigm: a multimodal encoder encodes the triplet into a feature vector, which is then fed into the decoder for the current answer generation, supervised by the ground-truth. However, this conventional supervised learning does NOT take into account the impact of imperfect history, violating the conversational nature of visual dialog and thus making the codec more inclined to learn history bias but not contextual reasoning. To this end, inspired by the actor-critic policy gradient in reinforcement learning, we propose a novel training paradigm called History Advantage Sequence Training (HAST). Specifically, we intentionally impose wrong answers in the history, obtaining an adverse critic, and see how the historic error impacts the codec's future behavior by History Advantage-a quantity obtained by subtracting the adverse critic from the gold reward of ground-truth history. Moreover, to make the codec more sensitive to the history, we propose a novel attention network called History-Aware Co-Attention Network (HACAN) which can be effectively trained by using HAST. Experimental results on three benchmarks: VisDial v0.9&v1.0 and GuessWhat?!, show that the proposed HAST strategy consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised counterparts.