Nuclear star clusters (NSCs) are dense, compact stellar systems only a few parsecs across, located at galaxy centers. Their small sizes make them difficult to resolve spatially. NSCs often coexist with massive black holes, and both trace the dynamical state and evolution of their host galaxies. Dense stellar environments such as NSCs are also ideal sites for forming intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs). To date, spatially resolved NSC properties, crucial for reconstructing dynamical and star-formation histories, have only been obtained for galaxies within 5 Mpc, using the highest-resolution instruments on the current class of very large telescopes. This severely limits spectroscopic studies, and a systematic, unbiased survey has never been accomplished. Because the vast majority of known NSCs are located in the Northern Hemisphere, only a 30-m-class telescope in the North can provide the statistical power needed to study their physical properties and measure the mass of coexisting central black holes. We propose leveraging the capabilities of a 30-m-class Northern telescope to obtain the first comprehensive, spatially resolved survey of NSCs, finally allowing us to unveil their formation pathways and their yet unknown connection with central massive black holes.
Brown dwarfs lack nuclear fusion and cool with time; the coldest known have an effective temperature below 500 K, and are known as Y dwarfs. We present a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) photometric dataset of Y dwarfs: twenty-three were imaged in wide-field mode, 20 using NIRCam with the F150W and F480M filters, and 3 using NIRISS with the F480M filter. We present an F480M vs. F150W $-$ F480M color-magnitude diagram for our sample, and other brown dwarfs with F150W and F480M colors synthesized from JWST spectra by Beiler et al. (2024). For one target, WISEA J083011.95$+$283716.0, its detection in the near-infrared confirms it as one of the reddest Y dwarfs known, with F150W $-$ F480M $= 9.62$ mag. We provide its updated parallax and proper motion. One of the Beiler et al. Y dwarfs, CWISEP J104756.81+545741.6, is unusually blue, consistent with strong CO absorption seen in its spectrum which the F480M filter is particularly sensitive to. The strong CO and the kinematics of the object suggest it may be very low-mass and young. We update the resolved photometry for the close binary system WISE J033605.05$-$014350.4 AB, and find that the secondary is almost as cold as WISE 085510.83$-$071442.5, with $T_{\rm eff} \lesssim 300$ K, however the F150W $-$ F480M color is significantly bluer, possibly suggesting the presence of water clouds. Astrometry is measured at the JWST epoch for the sample which is consistent with parallax and proper motion values reported by Kirkpatrick et al. (2021) and Marocco et al. (in prep).
Masoumeh Aghababaei, Ataollah Ebrahimi, Ali Asghar Naghipour
et al.
Mapping Plant Ecological Units (PEUs) supports sustainable rangeland management, yet distinguishing them from multispectral imagery remains challenging due to high intra-class variability and spectral overlap. This study evaluates the contribution of auxiliary data layers to improve PEU classification from Landsat-8 OLI imagery in semi-arid rangelands of northeastern Iran. A Random Forest (RF) classifier was trained using field samples and multiple feature combinations, including spectral indices, topographic variables (DEM, slope, aspect), and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) components. Classification performance was assessed using Overall Accuracy (OA), Kappa coefficient, and non-parametric Friedman and post-hoc tests to determine significant differences among scenarios. The results show that auxiliary features consistently enhanced classification performance compared with spectral bands alone. In particular, integrating DEM and PCA layers yielded the highest accuracy (OA = 79.3%, κ = 0.71), with statistically significant improvement (p < 0.05). The findings demonstrate that incorporating topographic and transformed spectral information can effectively reduce class confusion and improve the separability of PEUs in complex rangeland environments. The proposed workflow provides a transferable approach for ecological unit mapping in other semi-arid regions facing similar environmental and management challenges.
2030STEM Collaboration, J. Adams, Cameron Bess
et al.
The vision of 2030STEM is to address systemic barriers in institutional structures and funding mechanisms required to achieve full inclusion in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and accelerate leadership pathways for individuals from underrepresented populations across STEM sectors. 2030STEM takes a systems-level approach to create a community of practice that can test, learn and promote programs and policies that affirm and value cultural identities in STEM. To achieve parity and full representation in the STEM workforce, a variety of changes are needed across academia and STEM professional industries (e.g., business, finance, biotech, government) to accelerate underrepresented groups into positions of leadership throughout the STEM ecosystem. Through a series of subject matter interviews, roundtables, and curated analysis four major themes have surfaced, which, if implemented, could exponentially accelerate the creation of critical pathways to leadership, break down pre-existing barriers and biases, intentionally elevate the voices, value, and research of underrepresented groups in STEM, and implement new structural strategies at scale. This white paper provides a summary of innovative new practices designed to accelerate inclusion, including expanding on known global toolkits, new funding strategies, and the structural changes required throughout various STEM professions to propel pathways to leadership for underrepresented groups.
In open-retrieval conversational machine reading (OR-CMR) task, machines are required to do multi-turn question answering given dialogue history and a textual knowledge base. Existing works generally utilize two independent modules to approach this problem’s two successive sub-tasks: first with a hard-label decision making and second with a question generation aided by various entailment reasoning methods. Such usual cascaded modeling is vulnerable to error propagation and prevents the two sub-tasks from being consistently optimized. In this work, we instead model OR-CMR as a unified text-to-text task in a fully end-to-end style. Experiments on the ShARC and OR-ShARC dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed end-to-end framework on both sub-tasks by a large margin, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Further ablation studies support that our framework can generalize to different backbone models.
How is doing Ottoman history changing with the digital turn? How do digital tools enable research that would otherwise be impossible or very difficult? What existing research questions do these tools enable us to approach in new ways, and what new research questions do digital methods inspire? How do digital technologies and computational tools facilitate and enhance existing research by making the research process easier? What new organizational forms, ethical concerns, financial challenges and epistemological debates do the digital way of doing history entail?1 This special issue engages these questions by presenting a wide range of research notes and articles in the expanding field of digital Ottoman studies (DOS). We include twenty-one short research notes surveying ongoing projects across a span of digital methodologies, as well as three research articles that explore the possibilities of applying digital methods to various research questions. This overview highlights the promise of ongoing digital projects in Ottoman studies well as some of the challenges. Recent decades have witnessed dizzying developments in digital methods in the humanities and social sciences, transformative for quantitative, spatial, and textual analysis. Beginning with computerized research in the 1960s, digital information technologies have become integrated in historical method to the point that Gerben Zaagsma argued in 2013 that digital history is not an independent or auxiliary field within the discipline of history,
A two-degree-of-freedom (two-DOF) equation of motion was derived in the frequency domain using a substructuring technique for efficiently calculating the in-structure response spectrum (ISRS) considering equipment–structure interaction. The model of the primary structure was condensed into a mechanical impedance function and combined with the equipment represented by a single-degree-of-freedom oscillator in the frequency domain. This condensed two-DOF system is applied to the efficient calculation of the ISRS considering the equipment–structure interaction without repeated analysis of the coupled model with full DOFs. This coupled analysis procedure was applied to a finite element model of an auxiliary building in a nuclear power plant to validate both the accuracy and impact on the equipment response. Finally, the adequacy of three representative decoupling criteria on the necessity of coupled analysis was investigated by applying those criteria to the auxiliary building example.
A. Trentham-Dietz, Oğuzhan Alagöz, C. Chapman
et al.
Since 2000, the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) modeling teams have developed and applied microsimulation and statistical models of breast cancer. Here, we illustrate the use of collaborative breast cancer multilevel systems modeling in CISNET to demonstrate the flexibility of systems modeling to address important clinical and policy-relevant questions. Challenges and opportunities of future systems modeling are also summarized. The 6 CISNET breast cancer models embody the key features of systems modeling by incorporating numerous data sources and reflecting tumor, person, and health system factors that change over time and interact to affect the burden of breast cancer. Multidisciplinary modeling teams have explored alternative representations of breast cancer to reveal insights into breast cancer natural history, including the role of overdiagnosis and race differences in tumor characteristics. The models have been used to compare strategies for improving the balance of benefits and harms of breast cancer screening based on personal risk factors, including age, breast density, polygenic risk, and history of Down syndrome or a history of childhood cancer. The models have also provided evidence to support the delivery of care by simulating outcomes following clinical decisions about breast cancer treatment and estimating the relative impact of screening and treatment on the United States population. The insights provided by the CISNET breast cancer multilevel modeling efforts have informed policy and clinical guidelines. The 20 years of CISNET modeling experience has highlighted opportunities and challenges to expanding the impact of systems modeling. Moving forward, CISNET research will continue to use systems modeling to address cancer control issues, including modeling structural inequities affecting racial disparities in the burden of breast cancer. Future work will also leverage the lessons from team science, expand resource sharing, and foster the careers of early stage modeling scientists to ensure the sustainability of these efforts.
Personalized optimal decision making, finding the optimal decision rule (ODR) based on individual characteristics, has attracted increasing attention recently in many fields, such as education, economics, and medicine. Current ODR methods usually require the primary outcome of interest in samples for assessing treatment effects, namely, the experimental sample. However, in many studies, treatments may have a long‐term effect, and as such, the primary outcome of interest cannot be observed in the experimental sample due to the limited duration of experiments, which makes the estimation of ODR impossible. This paper is inspired to address this challenge by making use of an auxiliary sample to facilitate the estimation of ODR in the experimental sample. We propose an auGmented inverse propensity weighted Experimental and Auxiliary sample‐based decision Rule (GEAR) by maximizing the augmented inverse propensity weighted value estimator over a class of decision rules using the experimental sample, with the primary outcome being imputed based on the auxiliary sample. The asymptotic properties of the proposed GEAR estimators and their associated value estimators are established. Simulation studies are conducted to demonstrate its empirical validity with a real AIDS application.
This paper presents coins unearthed in three separate places at the Villa of Theseus at Nea Paphos (Cyprus). With just a few exceptions they date to the fourth–early fifth centuries AD. Even though only some specimens are precisely identifiable, they deserve presentation since they may suggest termini post quem for the reconstructions and enlargement of the Villa of Theseus. At the same time, the numismatic evidence helps to support the hypothesis that more than one earthquake occurred in the late Roman period at Nea Paphos and caused the destruction of its residences in the whole or in part of the area.
Rosa Gurrea Barricarte, Marcus Heinrich Hermanns, Juan Aurelio Pérez Macías
Se presentan los análisis de seis muestras de escoria halladas durante trabajos de acondicionamiento urbanístico de la ciudad de Ibiza (Islas Baleares). Estas muestras, que son unas de las primeras muestras de escoria analizadas procedentes del casco antiguo de la ciudad de Ibiza, corresponden a productos de un taller metalúrgico dedicado a la industria broncínea. Las tres primeras muestras son restos de elementos metálicos de bronces ternarios (cobre, estaño y plomo) en fase de producción. Esos metales se mezclarían en vasos (crisoles), a los que corresponden las tres últimas muestras, que conservan en algún caso restos de esos tres elementos (cobre, estaño y plomo). Como nota interesante, están fabricados en arcillas ricas en hierro y cal, cuya adición posiblemente sea intencional a juzgar por paralelos históricos.
In interdisciplinary contemporary science, knowledge is obtained from a close collaboration of specialists with various competences. Philosophy appears to be effective in clarifying the meaning of concepts, discerning the normative and the empirical, determining whether the differences in the positions of the participants depend on how they use words or the essence of the argument. Philosophers actively help to develop various fields of the humanities and social sciences and they are in demand in the sciences. They admit themselves that the history of philosophy is the unifying factor for all the areas, although the areas of their research are diverse. The article considers the question of whether it is possible to talk about a specific influence exerted by professional historians of philosophy on other disciplines. Restricted to the humanities, it traces the streams that exist in the dialogue between the humanities and historical-philosophical studies, and also considers what contribution the historians of philosophy make in the field of historical sciences, in various areas of political research, in gender studies, anthropology, theology and religious philosophy, as well as the articulation of practical philosophy as a way of life. Despite the fact that the history of philosophy is thought of as an auxiliary discipline, the contribution of the historians of philosophy to the development of related and indirectly related fields of scholarship is significant: they reconstruct the genealogy of meaning and as a result, the concepts or ideas are clarified within their native cultural environment.
Abstract Purpose Changes in the world show that the role, importance, and coherence of SSH (social sciences and the humanities) will increase significantly in the coming years. This paper aims to monitor and analyze the evolution (or overlapping) of the SSH thematic pattern through three funding instruments since 2007. Design/methodology/approach The goal of the paper is to check to what extent the EU Framework Program (FP) affects/does not affect research on national level, and to highlight hot topics from a given period with the help of text analysis. Funded project titles and abstracts derived from the EU FP, Slovenian, and Estonian RIS were used. The final analysis and comparisons between different datasets were made based on the 200 most frequent words. After removing punctuation marks, numeric values, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs, 4,854 unique words in ETIS, 4,421 unique words in the Slovenian Research Information System (SICRIS), and 3,950 unique words in FP were identified. Findings Across all funding instruments, about a quarter of the top words constitute half of the word occurrences. The text analysis results show that in the majority of cases words do not overlap between FP and nationally funded projects. In some cases, it may be due to using different vocabulary. There is more overlapping between words in the case of Slovenia (SL) and Estonia (EE) and less in the case of Estonia and EU Framework Programmes (FP). At the same time, overlapping words indicate a wider reach (culture, education, social, history, human, innovation, etc.). In nationally funded projects (bottom-up), it was relatively difficult to observe the change in thematic trends over time. More specific results emerged from the comparison of the different programs throughout FP (top-down). Research limitations Only projects with English titles and abstracts were analyzed. Practical implications The specifics of SSH have to take into account—the one-to-one meaning of terms/words is not as important as, for example, in the exact sciences. Thus, even in co-word analysis, the final content may go unnoticed. Originality/value This was the first attempt to monitor the trends of SSH projects using text analysis. The text analysis of the SSH projects of the two new EU Member States used in the study showed that SSH's thematic coverage is not much affected by the EU Framework Program. Whether this result is field-specific or country-specific should be shown in the following study, which targets SSH projects in the so-called old Member States.
Nel solco della consuetudine dei “treni bianchi” che conducevano gli ammalati verso i principali santuari mariani quali Lourdes e Loreto, nel 1943 il Vaticano aveva commissionato a Vittorio De Sica la direzione di un film che trattasse dei viaggi dei pellegrini nella basilica lauretana. La pellicola, intitolata La porta del cielo, a causa degli eventi bellici dovette subire riduzioni, soprattutto per ciò che concerne la ripresa delle scene da girare a Loreto, tanto che la chiesa della Santa Casa fu riprodotta all’interno del perimetro extra-territoriale di San Paolo fuori le Mura. Le riprese, iniziate il I marzo 1944, vennero così realizzate integralmente a Roma e terminate poco dopo l’entrata delle truppe americane in città il 4 giugno. Qui De Sica anticipa le tematiche del neorealismo, sviluppate poi nel dopoguerra insieme a Cesare Zavattini, entrando nelle sottili pieghe delle problematiche quotidiane dei malati (e dei loro accompagnatori) in viaggio verso il santuario. La produzione inserì nei registri delle comparse oltre quattrocento persone, includendo ebrei, ricercati politici, renitenti alla leva, che così riuscirono ad evitare i rastrellamenti e, dopo l’arrivo degli americani, tornarono ad abbracciare nuovamente la città.
Following the custom of the “white trains” that led the sick towards the main Marian sanctuaries such as Lourdes and Loreto, in 1943 the Vatican had commissioned Vittorio De Sica to direct a film dealing with pilgrims’ journeys to the Lauretan basilica. The film, entitled La porta del cielo (The Gate of Heaven), due to the war events had to be changed, especially in regards to the scenes to be shot in Loreto, so the Santa Casa was reproduced within the extra-territorial perimeter of San Paolo fuori le mura. Filming, which began on March 1st 1944, was thus carried out entirely in Rome and ends shortly after the entry of American troops into the city on June 4th. Here De Sica anticipates the themes of neorealism, developed after the war with Cesare Zavattini, entering the daily problems of the sick (and of their companions) travelling towards the sanctuary. The production includes over four hundred people in the registers of extras, including Jews, political dissidents, draft dodgers, who thus managed to avoid round-ups and, after the arrival of the Americans, return to embrace the city again.