Hasil untuk "History (General) and history of Europe"

A. Domnich, Francesco Lapi, A. Orsi et al.

BACKGROUND Data on the natural history of the community-acquired RSV in adult outpatients are limited. It is also unclear whether the existing influenza surveillance platforms based on influenza-like illness (ILI) case definitions are efficient for RSV. The two-season RESPIRA-50 study was established in 2023 to identify an optimal RSV case definition and to explore the natural history of RSV. Here, the first-season results are reported. METHODS The study was conducted in Genoa (Italy) during the 2023/2024 RSV season. Twenty-four general practitioners were randomized 1:1 to enroll adults aged ≥ 50 years seeking care for acute respiratory infection (ARI) or ILI, respectively. Both syndromes were defined according to the European criteria. All subjects were tested by real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) for RSV and other pathogens. RSV-positive adults were followed for up to 30 days. RESULTS Of 517 subjects included, 7.0 % [95 % confidence interval (CI): 4.9-9.5 %)] tested positive for RSV. RSV prevalence in the ARI group (8.0 %; 95 % CI: 5.0-12.1 %) was higher than in the ILI group (6.0 %; 95 % CI: 3.5-9.5 %) with an odds ratio of 1.36 (95 % CI: 0.69-2.70). Conversely, positivity for influenza (10.4 % vs 12.4 %) and SARS-CoV-2 (12.4 % vs 16.9 %) were lower in the ARI group and the corresponding ORs were 0.82 (95 % CI: 0.48-1.42) and 0.70 (95 % CI: 0.43-1.15), respectively. The mean duration of an RSV episode was 18.8 ± 8.0 days and two thirds of individuals were prescribed antibiotics. A total of 33.3 % (95 % CI: 18.6-51.0 %) of RSV-positive individuals developed complications, of which bronchitis (13.9 %) and pneumonia (8.3 %) were the most frequent. CONCLUSIONS Compared with ARI, ILI-based surveillance may underestimate the burden of RSV in community-dwelling adults aged ≥ 50 years. A high proportion of RSV-positive adult outpatients develops complications, which lead to substantial resource consumption.

Gloria Chicote

Mi contribución a este Homenaje consiste en efectuar una reflexión sobre la presencia del romancero en la vida académica de Aurelio González. El estudio del romancero atraviesa todas sus líneas de investigación desde distintos lugares de asedio al género: el romancero viejo, el romancero tradicional moderno, el romancero americano. La poética y la gramática del romancero lo preocuparon y ocuparon desde su tesis de doctorado dedicada al estudio de las formas y funciones de los principios en el romancero viejo en 1984, hasta el romancero americano al que dedicó los últimos 20 años de su vida. Asimismo, el estudio de la tradición oral moderna lo tuvo como participante de las grandes encuestas realizadas en España a fines del siglo XX coordinadas por Diego Catalán. Estas páginas constituyen un recorrido a través de los estudios romancísticos de Aurelio González que pone de manifiesto su insoslayable contribución al campo.

Whatley, Katherine G.T.

This article tells the story of a diasporic Jewish family across generations, continents, and languages through a shared name—Katherine—showing how names serve as talismans, linking present and past. Centered on the author’s grandmother, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who lived in Europe and Australia, and the author, raised in Japan, it explores how Jewish names act as markers of memory, identity, politics, and religion. The author argues that Jewish naming rituals reflect the diasporic, cosmopolitan nature of prewar Jewish society. She examines tensions between assimilation and non-assimilation, secularism and mysticism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, advocating for a renewed sense of multilingual, cosmopolitan Jewish identity. Drawing on Judaism, Buddhism, and esoteric mysticism, the author presents multilingualism and cosmopolitanism as inherent strengths of Jewish diasporic life—and as vital in today’s world. Through her own translational upbringing and family history, she offers a deeply personal narrative intertwined with 20th-century upheavals and calls for a revival of prewar Jewish cosmopolitanism.

KaiWen Wei, Kejun He, Xiaomian Kang et al.

Generative recommendation, which directly generates item identifiers, has emerged as a promising paradigm for recommendation systems. However, its potential is fundamentally constrained by the reliance on purely autoregressive training. This approach focuses solely on predicting the next item while ignoring the rich internal structure of a user's interaction history, thus failing to grasp the underlying intent. To address this limitation, we propose Masked History Learning (MHL), a novel training framework that shifts the objective from simple next-step prediction to deep comprehension of history. MHL augments the standard autoregressive objective with an auxiliary task of reconstructing masked historical items, compelling the model to understand ``why'' an item path is formed from the user's past behaviors, rather than just ``what'' item comes next. We introduce two key contributions to enhance this framework: (1) an entropy-guided masking policy that intelligently targets the most informative historical items for reconstruction, and (2) a curriculum learning scheduler that progressively transitions from history reconstruction to future prediction. Experiments on three public datasets show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generative models, highlighting that a comprehensive understanding of the past is crucial for accurately predicting a user's future path. The code will be released to the public.

Alex Alarcon, Andrew P. Hearin, Matthew R. Becker et al.

We present DiffstarPop, a differentiable forward model of cosmological populations of galaxy star formation histories (SFH). In the model, individual galaxy SFH is parametrized by Diffstar, which has parameters $θ_{\rm SFH}$ that have a direct interpretation in terms of galaxy formation physics, such as star formation efficiency and quenching. DiffstarPop is a model for the statistical connection between $θ_{\rm SFH}$ and the mass assembly history (MAH) of dark matter halos. We have formulated DiffstarPop to have the minimal flexibility needed to accurately reproduce the statistical distributions of galaxy SFH predicted by a diverse range of simulations, including the IllustrisTNG hydrodynamical simulation, the Galacticus semi-analytic model, and the UniverseMachine semi-empirical model. Our publicly available code written in JAX includes Monte Carlo generators that supply statistical samples of galaxy assembly histories that mimic the populations seen in each simulation, and can generate SFHs for $10^6$ galaxies in 1.1 CPU-seconds, or 0.03 GPU-seconds. We conclude the paper with a discussion of applications of DiffstarPop, which we are using to generate catalogs of synthetic galaxies populating the merger trees in cosmological N-body simulations.

Ruoyun Hui, C. Scheib, Eugenia D’Atanasio et al.

The extent of the devastation of the Black Death pandemic (1346–1353) on European populations is known from documentary sources and its bacterial source illuminated by studies of ancient pathogen DNA. What has remained less understood is the effect of the pandemic on human mobility and genetic diversity at the local scale. Here, we report 275 ancient genomes, including 109 with coverage >0.1×, from later medieval and postmedieval Cambridgeshire of individuals buried before and after the Black Death. Consistent with the function of the institutions, we found a lack of close relatives among the friars and the inmates of the hospital in contrast to their abundance in general urban and rural parish communities. While we detect long-term shifts in local genetic ancestry in Cambridgeshire, we find no evidence of major changes in genetic ancestry nor higher differentiation of immune loci between cohorts living before and after the Black Death.

Joanna Wojdon, Dorota Wiśniewska

This article is based on the content analysis of the Polish Facebook group Nauczyciele historii (“History Teachers”) which is administered by, and addressed to, practicing and prospective history teachers. The group’s over six thousand members engage and interact by writing, reading, reacting to, and commenting via as many as twenty plus posts daily. We examined the group’s on-line discussions for manifestations of the member-teachers’ epistemic considerations: their reasoning about the epistemic nature of history; their assumptions regarding the goals and meaning of history as a school subject; and their attitudes toward the narratives of difference, diversity, and multi-perspectivism. Our findings reveal that Polish history teachers’ epistemology is poorly conceptualized, rather naïve, and largely unaffected by the developments in historical and didactical theories of the last 50 years. Those teachers do not reflect on the epistemic nature of history. They approach history as a “science”, which they presume to be objective and unambiguous. They tend to see themselves as transmitters of knowledge about the past which their pupils should internalize, and as propagators of those “patriotic” values that - according to certain received, long-established discourses - strengthen national identity and social cohesion.

Sofía Palacios-Pacheco, Berta Martín-López, Mónica Expósito-Granados et al.

Human-carnivore relations in Europe have varied throughout history. Because of recent conservation efforts and passive rewilding, carnivore populations are recovering, which translates into more interactions with humans. Thus, unraveling these interactions as well as the multiple contributions carnivores provide to people is crucial to their conservation. We examined the literature conducted in Europe since 2000 and used the nature’s contributions to people (NCP) framework to identify factors that have shaped human-carnivore relations. To do so, we examined the state of scientific knowledge and relationships among types of NCP from carnivores, countries, and carnivore species; and between NCP, actors, and management actions. Results indicated that research has been oriented toward large carnivore species and their detrimental contributions to people. Further, the effectiveness of carnivore management strategies has only been evaluated and monitored in a limited set of all the research. To balance any negative views on carnivores, we suggest that the recognition of the duality of carnivores, as providers of both beneficial and detrimental contributions, should be included in EU conservation policies.

Annie Yang

Extended reality can weave together the fabric of the past, present, and future. A two-day design hackathon was held to bring the community together through a love for history and a common goal to use technology for good. Through interviewing an influential community elder, Emile Pitre, and referencing his book Revolution to Evolution, my team developed an augmented reality artifact to tell his story and preserve on revolutionary's legacy that impacted the University of Washington's history forever.

Francisco Calderón

Algebraic quantum field theory (AQFT) puts forward three "causal axioms" that aim to characterize the theory as one that implements relativistic causation: the spectrum condition, microcausality, and primitive causality. In this paper, I aim to show, in a minimally technical way, that none of them fully explains the notion of causation appropriate for AQFT because they only capture some of the desiderata for relativistic causation I state or because it is often unclear how each axiom implements its respective desideratum. After this diagnostic, I will show that a fourth condition, local primitive causality (LPC), fully characterizes relativistic causation in the sense of fulfilling all the relevant desiderata. However, it only encompasses the virtues of the other axioms because it is implied by them, as I will show from a construction by Haag and Schroer (1962). Since the conjunction of the three causal axioms implies LPC and other important results in QFT that LPC does not imply, and since LPC helps clarify some of the shortcomings of the three axioms, I advocate for a holistic interpretation of how the axioms characterize the causal structure of AQFT against the strategy in the literature to rivalize the axioms and privilege one among them.

Gargi Bakshi, Rushikesh K. Joshi

Dynamic changes in processes necessitate the notion of state equivalence between the old and new workflows. In several cases, the history of the workflow to be migrated provides sufficient context for a meaningful migration. In this paper, we present an algorithm to find the equivalence mapping for states from the old workflow to the new one using a trail-based consistency model called history equivalence. The algorithm finds history equivalent mappings for all migratable states in the reachability graph of the process under migration. It also reports all non-migratable states that fall in the change region for a given pair of old and new Petri Nets. The paper presents the algorithm, its working, and an intuitive proof. The working is demonstrated through a couple of illustrations.

N. Luxi, Alexia Giovanazzi, A. Capuano et al.

To date, four vaccines have been authorised for emergency use and under conditional approval by the European Medicines Agency to prevent COVID-19: Comirnaty, COVID-19 Vaccine Janssen, Spikevax (previously COVID-19 Vaccine Moderna) and Vaxzevria (previously COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca). Although the benefit–risk profile of these vaccines was proven to be largely favourable in the general population, evidence in special cohorts initially excluded from the pivotal trials, such as pregnant and breastfeeding women, children/adolescents, immunocompromised people and persons with a history of allergy or previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, is still limited. In this narrative review, we critically overview pre- and post-marketing evidence on the potential benefits and risks of marketed COVID-19 vaccines in the above-mentioned special cohorts. In addition, we summarise the recommendations of the scientific societies and regulatory agencies about COVID-19 primary prevention in the same vaccinee categories.

H. Ekiert, J. Pajor, Paweł Klin et al.

Artemisia vulgaris L. (common mugwort) is a species with great importance in the history of medicine and was called the “mother of herbs” in the Middle Ages. It is a common herbaceous plant that exhibits high morphological and phytochemical variability depending on the location where it occurs. This species is well known almost all over the world. Its herb—Artemisiae vulgaris herba—is used as a raw material due to the presence of essential oil, flavonoids, and sesquiterpenoids lactones and their associated biological activities. The European Pharmacopoeia has listed this species as a potential homeopathic raw material. Moreover, this species has been used in traditional Chinese, Hindu, and European medicine to regulate the functioning of the gastrointestinal system and treat various gynecological diseases. The general aim of this review was to analyze the progress of phytochemical and pharmacological as well as professional scientific studies focusing on A. vulgaris. Thus far, numerous authors have confirmed the beneficial properties of A. vulgaris herb extracts, including their antioxidant, hepatoprotective, antispasmolytic, antinociceptive, estrogenic, cytotoxic, antibacterial, and antifungal effects. In addition, several works have reviewed the use of this species in the production of cosmetics and its role as a valuable spice in the food industry. Furthermore, biotechnological micropropagation of A. vulgaris has been analyzed.

M. Gutnyk, F. Nürnberger

The evolution of concepts and methods of physical and chemical science that contributed to the formation of the Fe-C diagram during the previous centuries is considered. Despite the classical knowledge, there are still differences in the representation of the Fe-C diagram by scientists from different countries, in particular, the data of scientists from Germany, Poland, Ukraine, the USA, and Australia are somewhat mismatched. The authors tried to understand the reasons for this discrepancy. To conduct the research, general scientific methods of cognition were used: comparative analysis and synthesis, as well as a chronological one. It is claimed that the first studies of carbon content in steel were carried out in 1802. Further research development began in 1827–1829 when it was established that graphite is pure carbon. It is emphasized that further studies of carbon content in steel and cast iron are connected with attempts to create the first graphs of dependence on content and temperature. This, in turn, contributed to the development of the industrial revolution. It is believed that the first complete diagram was presented in 1897 by Roberts-Austen. Later, with the use of X-ray methods and microscopy, the Fe-C diagram gradually took on a new form. At the beginning of the 20th century, scientists actively proposed their phase diagrams. Studies conducted by scientists of different countries during 1909–1911 gained a consolidation, which was produced at the 6th Congress of the International Association for testing materials meeting into the unification of the names of phase transformations. Further research until the beginning of the Second World War was aimed at the creation of “pure” steel, that is, without harmful impurities, and clarifying the transformation temperatures. The period of the Great Depression in the USA and the war in Europe did not contribute to scientific research. At the same time, for the mass production of steel and cast iron, errors in critical points of a few degrees did not have a significant impact, that is, refining the temperatures of phase transformations were not considered appropriate. Today’s trend in scientific research is aimed at solving environmental problems caused by the industrial revolution.

Denis Mak Chi

Aims: The aim of this research is to study the efficacy of intranasal administration of 0.9% saline solution in patients with acute viral rhinitis and a history of Rhinitis medicamentosa. Materials and Methods: The study included 96 patients with a confirmed diagnosis of acute viral rhinitis and a history of Rhinitis medicamentosa. All patients were equally randomized to two groups. In both groups, patients were treated according to the European Position Paper on Rhinosinusitis and Nasal Polyps with nasal decongestants (oxymetazoline), but in Group 2, the treatment regimen was supplemented with topical use of 0.9% saline solution. Local TNF-α and IL-1β levels were determined in all patients on Days 1, 5, and 10. In addition, on the next day after oxymetazoline withdrawal, a Nasal airway resistance was measured in all patients using active posterior rhinomanometry. Results: The duration of rhinorrhea and nasal congestion and, respectively, the duration of oxymetazoline administration significantly differed between the groups (p<0.001) and was 7.9±1.1 days for Group 1 and 4.7±0.9 days for Group 2. In general, the dynamics of changes in local TNF-α and IL-1β levels in both groups was similar. Throughout the study, there was a progressive decrease in both inflammatory mediators, with faster changes occurring in Group 2. A strong positive correlation (rs=0.89; p<0.001) between TNF-α and IL-1β levels was established. According to the results of active posterior rhinomanometry on the day following oxymetazoline withdrawal, Nasal airway resistance was significantly higher in Group 1 (p<0.001), which indicates the presence of difficulty breathing in patients of this group. In addition, patient examination showed that manifestations of Rhinitis medicamentosa occurred in 3 (6.25%) patients of Group 1 and in 17 (35.42%) patients of Group 2. Differences between the groups were significant (p<0.01). Conclusion: The use of topical nasal decongestants, in particular oxymetazoline, in patients with acute viral rhinitis and a history of Rhinitis medicamentosa for more than 7 days has a potential risk of development of a recurrence of Rhinitis medicamentosa. Supplementing the treatment regimen for acute viral rhinitis with the topical use of 0.9% saline solution reduces the duration of treatment and the use of topical decongestants, and therefore prevents the recurrence of Rhinitis medicamentosa.

Tong Zhang, Yong Liu, Boyang Li et al.

With the evolution of pre-trained language models, current open-domain dialogue systems have achieved great progress in conducting one-session conversations. In contrast, Multi-Session Conversation (MSC), which consists of multiple sessions over a long term with the same user, is under-investigated. In this paper, we propose History-Aware Hierarchical Transformer (HAHT) for multi-session open-domain dialogue. HAHT maintains a long-term memory of history conversations and utilizes history information to understand current conversation context and generate well-informed and context-relevant responses. Specifically, HAHT first encodes history conversation sessions hierarchically into a history memory. Then, HAHT leverages historical information to facilitate the understanding of the current conversation context by encoding the history memory together with the current context with attention-based mechanisms. Finally, to explicitly utilize historical information, HAHT uses a history-aware response generator that switches between a generic vocabulary and a history-aware vocabulary. Experimental results on a large-scale MSC dataset suggest that the proposed HAHT model consistently outperforms baseline models. Human evaluation results support that HAHT generates more human-like, context-relevant and history-relevant responses than baseline models.

Jacob Carlson, Tom Bryan, Melissa Dell

Thousands of users consult digital archives daily, but the information they can access is unrepresentative of the diversity of documentary history. The sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for optical character recognition (OCR) - which jointly learns a vision and language model - is poorly extensible to low-resource document collections, as learning a language-vision model requires extensive labeled sequences and compute. This study models OCR as a character level image retrieval problem, using a contrastively trained vision encoder. Because the model only learns characters' visual features, it is more sample efficient and extensible than existing architectures, enabling accurate OCR in settings where existing solutions fail. Crucially, the model opens new avenues for community engagement in making digital history more representative of documentary history.

Teppei Minoda, Shintaro Yoshiura, Tomo Takahashi

We argue that observations of the reionization history can be used as a probe of primordial density fluctuations, particularly on small scales. Although the primordial curvature perturbations are well constrained from measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and large-scale structure, these observational data probe the curvature perturbations only on large scales, and hence its information on smaller scales will give us further insight on primordial fluctuations. Since the formation of early galaxies is sensitive to the amplitude of small-scale perturbations, and then, in turn, gives an impact on the reionization history, one can probe the primordial power spectrum on small scales through observations of reionization. In this work, we focus on the running spectral indices of the primordial power spectrum to characterize the small-scale perturbations, and investigate their impact on the reionization history using the numerical code \texttt{21cmFAST}, which adopts a simple but commonly used reionization model. We also derive the constraints on the running spectral indices from observations of the reionization history indicated by the luminosity function of the Lyman-$α$ emitters. We show that the reionization history, in combination with large-scale observations such as CMB, would be a useful tool to investigate primordial density fluctuations.

Stéphanie Sherpa, M. Blum, Thibaut Capblancq et al.

Multiple introductions are key features for the establishment and persistence of introduced species. However, little is known about the contribution of genetic admixture to the invasive potential of populations. To address this issue, we studied the recent invasion of the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) in Europe. Combining genome‐wide single nucleotide polymorphisms and historical knowledge using an approximate Bayesian computation framework, we reconstruct the colonization routes and establish the demographic dynamics of invasion. The colonization of Europe involved at least three independent introductions in Albania, North Italy and Central Italy that subsequently acted as dispersal centres throughout Europe. We show that the topology of human transportation networks shaped demographic histories with North Italy and Central Italy being the main dispersal centres in Europe. Introduction modalities conditioned the levels of genetic diversity in invading populations, and genetically diverse and admixed populations promoted more secondary introductions and have spread farther than single‐source invasions. This genomic study provides further crucial insights into a general understanding of the role of genetic diversity promoted by modern trade in driving biological invasions.

T. Deng, Feixiang Wu, Zhekun Zhou et al.