Automated program repair (APR) has recently shifted toward large language models and agent-based systems, yet most systems rely on local snapshot context, overlooking repository history. Prior work shows that repository history helps repair single-line bugs, since the last commit touching the buggy line is often the bug-introducing one. In this paper, we investigate whether repository history can also improve agentic APR systems at scale, especially for complex multi-hunk bugs. We present HAFixAgent, a History-Aware Bug-Fixing Agent that injects blame-derived repository heuristics into its repair loop. A preliminary study on 854 Defects4J (Java) and 501 BugsInPy (Python) bugs motivates our design, showing that bug-relevant history is widely available across both benchmarks. Using the same LLM (DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp) for all experiments, including replicated baselines, we show: (1) Effectiveness: HAFixAgent outperforms RepairAgent (+56.6\%) and BIRCH-feedback (+47.1\%) on Defects4J. Historical context further improves repair by +4.4\% on Defects4J and +38.6\% on BugsInPy, especially on single-file multi-hunk (SFMH) bugs. (2) Robustness: under noisy fault localization (+1/+3/+5 line shifts), history provides increasing resilience, maintaining 40 to 56\% success on SFMH bugs where the non-history baseline collapses to 0\%. (3) Efficiency: history does not significantly increase agent steps or token costs on either benchmark.
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.
Se presenta una interpretación del poema “Ka-Ḥādiṯatin Ġāmiḍatin” (Como un incidente misterioso), de Mahmud Darwish, con base en una traducción personal (árabe-español) del poema y en la filosofía de Martin Heidegger sobre lenguaje y poesía, así como en el concepto de escritor comprometido de Jean-Paul Sartre. El poema explora el significado y la creación de la poesía. Sus versos contienen comentarios esperanzadores que el poeta griego Yanis Ritsos dirigió a Palestina hace más de treinta años y que vuelven a adquirir valor en las condiciones actuales en esa región.
Fedor Sharko, Varvara Busova, Eugenia Boulygina
et al.
Abstract Background Ancient DNA is a valuable source of information about the distant past of our planet. Reconstructing the past ecosystems is essential for understanding many aspects of life in the steppes of southern Siberia and Central Asia, where numerous human societies representing different archaeological cultures have lived. The remains of their activities, revealed by archaeological excavations, provide a wide range of sources for the cultural and natural/biological history of the region. One of the most enigmatic Iron Age archaeological cultures in southern Siberia is the Tashtyk culture, which dates back to the 1st – 7th centuries AD. The people of this culture inhabited the Minusinsk Basin and practiced different burial rites, including cremation. Thanks to the exceptional preservation of organic remains in individual Tashtyk burials we know of quite an unusual phenomenon: the placement of cremains into the human-like mannequins made from animal skin and filled with herbaceous plants. This study analyses ancient DNA extracted from the grass stuffing of a mannequin found in 2023 at the Oglakhty cemetery, which dates back to 250–300 AD. Our aim is to identify the plant species that were used to stuff the mannequin approximately 1,700 years ago, and to compare their diversity with that of modern-day plant species. This is particularly significant given that the Oglakhty region is part of the Khakassky State Nature Reserve, which was added to the UNESCO Tentative List in 2016 due to its biodiversity and concentration of archaeological sites. Results We sequenced the ancient DNA of a dried historical grass mixture in order to reconstruct the nearly complete chloroplast genomes of several apparent Poaceae species. Our analysis showed that, 1,700 years ago, the diversity of plant species in the Oglakhty area was similar to the modern meadow flora of the Minusinsk Basin. These included typical steppe and forest-steppe zone plant genera of Siberia, such as Holcus, Phleum, Poa, and Stipa. Interestingly, alongside the species commonly found in modern southern Siberian steppes and meadows, we discovered the rare, ephemeral, and protected moss grass, Coleanthus subtilis (Tratt.) Seidel ex Roem. et Schult. whose current distribution range spans highly fragmented areas of northern Eurasia and North America but not the Minusinsk Basin. Conclusion The herbaceous plant C. subtilis, whose DNA fragments were obtained through the metagenomic profiling of the human-like mannequin’s stuffing at the Oglakhty cemetery, provides new insights into the cultural and natural history of Siberia. Firstly, we identified several grass taxa in the mannequin’s stuffing. Most of them are characteristic for the steppe zone; the only exception is C. subtilis, which usually inhabits riverbanks. Therefore, we assume that, despite being primarily stuffed with the steppe plants, the Oglakhty mannequin was crafted on a riverbank, where C. subtilis might have got inside likely by chance. It is important to note that the stuffing process apparently took place after the vegetation season of C. subtilis in second half of summer and the beginning of autumn. Secondly, our research suggests that a population of C. subtilis, which is currently absent from the documented flora of southern Siberia, previously grew in the Minusinsk Basin wetlands. Our study highlights the need for field expeditions aimed to identify endemic populations of C. subtilis in the Yenisei River valley.
Computing the return times of extreme events and assessing the impact of climate change on such return times is fundamental to extreme event attribution studies. However, the rarity of such events in the observational record makes this task a challenging one, even more so for "record-shattering" events that have not been previously observed at all. While climate models could be used to simulate such extremely rare events, such an approach entails a huge computational cost: gathering robust statistics for events with return time of centuries would require a few thousand years of simulation. In this study, we use an innovative tool, rare event algorithm, that allows to sample numerous extremely rare events at a much lower cost than direct simulations. We employ the algorithm to sample extreme heatwave seasons, corresponding to large anomalies of the seasonal average temperature, in a heatwave hotspot of South Asia using the global climate model Plasim. We show that the algorithm estimates the return levels of extremely rare events with much greater precision than traditional statistical fits. It also enables the computation of various composite statistics, whose accuracy is demonstrated through comparison with a very long control run. In particular, our results reveal that extreme heatwave seasons are associated with an anticyclonic anomaly embedded within a large-scale hemispheric quasi-stationary wave-pattern. Additionally, the algorithm accurately represents the intensity-duration-frequency statistics of sub-seasonal heatwaves, offering insights into both seasonal and sub-seasonal aspects of extreme heatwave seasons. This innovative approach could be used in extreme event attribution studies to better constrain the changes in event's probability and intensity with global warming, particularly for events with return times spanning centuries or millennia.
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.
When standard methods of human–elephant conflict mitigation are not successful, free-ranging wild elephants may continue to come into close contact with people. This results in more frequent and severe conflict, with consequences ranging from crop raiding to loss of human and elephant lives. Understandably, in such situations, local communities may want to be rid of entire herds of elephants. Historically, one of the strategies the Myanmar Government practiced to resolve human–elephant conflict was the capture of whole herds using the Kheddah system. This involved trapping the herd in a stockade, immediately followed by on-site post-capture taming. After taming, the captured elephants were utilized as logging elephants. Elephants worked in timber extraction, retired at age 55 years and were then cared for by the Government until they died. The capture of wild elephants by the Kheddah system was formally banned in Myanmar in 1985 but occasional, small-scale, captures were allowed until 2013 under the strict control of the Myanmar Government. These operations were aimed primarily at capturing elephants involved in human–elephant conflict, rather than to supplement the working elephant population. One of the last Kheddah operations, organized and managed by the author, was conducted in 1996 at the Taikkyi township of the Yangon Region, as a last resort to end human–elephant conflict in an emergency. While chemical immobilization was being used at this time, it was not logistically possible with the high numbers of elephants engaged in the conflict. This review aims to record the history of an activity that was an important element of Myanmar’s timber industry more than three decades ago. In this paper, the author presents a description of Kheddah not to endorse it, but to document (1) the Myanmar elephant population management strategy in the past, before it is forgotten, and (2) the practicality of the Kheddha operation when the singly selected commonly- used immobilization or noosing method of elephant capture is unfeasible. The author attempts to shed light on the modern veterinary procedures that may significantly reduce the notorious historical outcome of Kheddha, especially the resulting mortality of captured elephants, should the Kheddha system of capture ever be used as an emergency solution for ongoing problems of human–elephant conflict in the range states of Asia.
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.
The Jeffreys-Lindley paradox exposes a rift between Bayesian and frequentist hypothesis testing that strikes at the heart of statistical inference. Contrary to what most current literature suggests, the paradox was central to the Bayesian testing methodology developed by Sir Harold Jeffreys in the late 1930s. Jeffreys showed that the evidence against a point-null hypothesis $\mathcal{H}_0$ scales with $\sqrt{n}$ and repeatedly argued that it would therefore be mistaken to set a threshold for rejecting $\mathcal{H}_0$ at a constant multiple of the standard error. Here we summarize Jeffreys's early work on the paradox and clarify his reasons for including the $\sqrt{n}$ term. The prior distribution is seen to play a crucial role; by implicitly correcting for selection, small parameter values are identified as relatively surprising under $\mathcal{H}_1$. We highlight the general nature of the paradox by presenting both a fully frequentist and a fully Bayesian version. We also demonstrate that the paradox does not depend on assigning prior mass to a point hypothesis, as is commonly believed.
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.
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.
While an integration by parts formula for the bilinear form of the hypersingular boundary integral operator for the transient heat equation in three spatial dimensions is available in the literature, a proof of this formula seems to be missing. Moreover, the available formula contains an integral term including the time derivative of the fundamental solution of the heat equation, whose interpretation is difficult at second glance. To fill these gaps we provide a rigorous proof of a general version of the integration by parts formula and an alternative representation of the mentioned integral term, which is valid for a certain class of functions including the typical tensor-product discretization spaces.
This study, titled A Collection of Documents from the Kazakh Sultans to the Qing Dynasty, deals with 16 documents addressed from Kazakh sultans to the Qing Dynasty (and the Russian Empire/Governor-General of Siberia). These were written in the Oyirad (Mongol) language with Tod script or in the Turkic language with Arabic script from the eighteenth to nineteenth century, and come complete with text, transcription, and translation. In addition, this study includes two essays written by the authors who made use of these documents. The majority of Qing documents are preserved in a collection of the First Historical Archives (第一歴史襠案館) in Beijing. Many of these documents related to the Kazakhs have started to be published as The Collection of the Archival Documents Concerning Sino-Kazakh Relations at the Time of the Qing Dynasty (清代中哈関係襠案彙編) and so on, and to be used for historical research. Of the documents dealt with in this study, 14 are from the Manchu Language Reference Copy of Grand Council Palace Memorial (軍機処満文副奏摺) of the First Historical Archives, one is from Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Kazakhstan, and one is from Vneshnyaya politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka (Moskva: Izd-vo Nauka, t. 11–12, 1979–1980). However, most of these documents are not included in the published collection mentioned above. Therefore, this study, together with the above-mentioned collection, represents another major step in the study of these documentss.
In addition, by utilizing these documents, Takahiro Onuma clarifies that the international world order between the Qing dynasty and Kazakh nomads in Central Asia was not based on the “suzerain-dependency (Ch. zong-fan 宗藩) relationship”, which was heavily influenced by Confucianism, but rather, on the “master-slave (Mon. ejen-albatu) relationship”, which originated in Mongol nomadic society. Jin Noda, who also utilized these documents, states that the title of Kazakh sultans, which has been regarded as a product of the Qing benefit policy, was in fact a result of both the Kazakh sultans and Qing requiring the ‘title-bestowal system’ in the process of the establishment of relations. This system was gradually becoming a mere formality, partly because of the influence of Russia. These findings suggest that the Kazakh khanates were independently developing a “bilateral diplomatic policy” while mediating between the Qing and Russian empires, and they highlight the policy differences of both empires toward the Kazakh khanates. We hope that the findings from this study will further advance the study of the history of the mutual relations between the Kazakh khanates and the Qing and Russian empires.
Auxiliary sciences of history, History of Civilization
International Recruitment Industry has experienced significant growth in recent decades. This study investigates Recruitment Industry in three distinct national contexts in Asia. In comparison, as a developed country, Japan has the world's second-largest recruitment industry, India, as an emerging economy, has experienced dramatic growth in this industry over the last few decades. The emergent Recruitment Industry of Iran needs to study, analyze and exploit successful global experiences. This study includes history, structure, legal context, relevant institutions, and growth drivers of the recruitment industry of each country, providing a comparative study about recent developments of the Recruitment Industry and the increasing importance of recruitment agencies in three different social, economic and social contexts. It also contributes to filling the research gap of the recruitment industry in Iran. This study analyzes Iran's status in the international recruitment industry and offers recommendations to exploit the successful experiences of industry leaders to improve Iran's recruitment industry and labor market.
Albert Einstein's practice in physics and his philosophical positions gradually reoriented themselves from more empiricist towards rationalist viewpoints. This change accompanied his turn towards unified field theory and different presentations of himself, eventually leading to his highly programmatic Autobiographical Notes in 1949. Einstein enlisted his own history and professional stature to mold an ideal of a theoretical physicist who represented particular epistemic virtues and moral qualities. These in turn reflected the theoretical ideas of his strongly mathematical unification program and professed Spinozist beliefs.
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.