This chapter explores Benjamin Disraeli’s influence on two strands of Conservative Party ideology: Tory democracy and one-nation conservatism. Both rejected laissez-faire economics and promoted social reform, but one-nation conservatives favoured a more interventionist state. While Tory democrats used Disraeli as both a guide for policy and a legitimising tool for their platform, one-nation conservatives just used his reputation to legitimise their project, preferring to use the tools of Keynesianism to achieve Disraelian goals rather than updating Disraeli-ism for the twentieth century.
Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents require effective use of historical context to perform sequential navigation tasks. While incorporating past actions and observations can improve decision making, naive use of full history leads to excessive computational overhead and distraction from irrelevant information. To address this, we introduce HiconAgent, a GUI agent trained with History Context-aware Policy Optimization (HCPO) for efficient and effective utilization of historical information. HCPO optimizes history usage in both sampling and policy updates through two complementary components: (1) Dynamic Context Sampling (DCS) presents the agent with variable length histories during sampling, enabling adaptive use of the most relevant context; (2) Anchor-guided History Compression (AHC) refines the policy update phase with a dual branch strategy where the compressed branch removes history observations while keeping history actions as information flow anchors. The compressed and uncompressed branches are coupled through a history-enhanced alignment loss to enforce consistent history usage while maintaining efficiency. Experiments on mainstream GUI navigation benchmarks demonstrate strong performance. Despite being smaller, HiconAgent-3B outperforms GUI-R1-7B by +8.46 percent grounding accuracy and +11.32 percent step success rate on GUI-Odyssey, while achieving comparable results on AndroidControl and AITW with up to 2.47x computational speedup and 60 percent FLOPs reduction.
During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, particularly between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the urban landscape of certain Catholic districts took on the colours of the Palestinian flag. Whether painted on murals, hung on buildings or waved at demonstrations, the flags reflected an identification with the Palestinian cause that, like the Northern Ireland conflict, was read through the prism of the colonial question and partition. In addition, the experiences of incarceration, administrative detention and hunger strike provided fertile ground for transnational solidarity links to flourish between certain armed groups such as the Irish Republican Army or the Irish National Liberation Army and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. These links of solidarity between certain Northern Irish republican factions and certain Palestinian organisations took the form of exchanges of weapons, ammunition and knowledge of explosives. Much later, in the early 2000s, after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the start of the second Intifada, Palestinian flags once again made a very visible appearance at republican demonstrations, such as the annual Bloody Sunday commemorations. Israeli flags also appeared in some Protestant neighbourhoods in Northern Ireland, notably on the initiative of the Ulster Defence Association, highlighting a discourse based on the obsidional mentality of the Unionist community, and often nourished by religious beliefs. While peace was signed in Northern Ireland, and the violence gradually subsided, the conflict shifted to the symbolic level, suggesting that the reconciliation process was not entirely successful. Through a study of primary sources (interviews, activist press, grey literature, general press) this essay sheds light on the origins of the republican identification with the Palestinian cause, its implications and its use by the Sinn Féin republican party for pragmatic purposes. It also looks at unionist demonstrations in support of Israel, trying to identify political and religious affinities. This support for the belligerents in the Middle East conflict allows us to question the unfinished nature of the peace process in Northern Ireland, and the divisions that persist « in hearts and minds », in the words of John Hume.
Existing recommendation systems either rely on user interaction logs, such as online shopping history for shopping recommendations, or focus on text signals. However, item-based histories are not always accessible, and are not generalizable for multimodal recommendation. We hypothesize that a user's visual history -- comprising images from daily life -- can offer rich, task-agnostic insights into their interests and preferences, and thus be leveraged for effective personalization. To this end, we propose VisualLens, a novel framework that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to enable personalization using task-agnostic visual history. VisualLens extracts, filters, and refines a spectrum user profile from the visual history to support personalized recommendation. We created two new benchmarks, Google-Review-V and Yelp-V, with task-agnostic visual histories, and show that VisualLens improves over state-of-the-art item-based multimodal recommendations by 5-10% on Hit@3, and outperforms GPT-4o by 2-5%. Further analysis shows that VisualLens is robust across varying history lengths and excels at adapting to both longer histories and unseen content categories.
This paper aims to study how the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the weaknesses of the Welsh NHS and more generally public health provision, as its fragmented organisation led to confusing messages from the Welsh and British governments being given just to Welsh people, hence revealing the incoherences of the United Kingdom’s constitutional settlement. Since health is a devolved matter, it will first be necessary to study how the Welsh government handled the epidemic.
The works of such late-Victorian writers as Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Theodore Wratislaw, John Oliver Hobbes and Oscar Wilde represent Catholic churches as retreats set apart from the ugliness and mediocrity of Victorian England—religious versions of Des Esseintes’s Fontenay-aux-Roses house in À rebours—filled with incense, organ music, and coloured light filtering through medieval stained-glass windows. In Dowson’s correspondence or in his poem ‘Benedictio Domini’, in Johnson’s ‘Our Lady of France’, in Wratislaw’s ‘Palm Sunday’ and ‘Songs to Elizabeth’, in some of Wilde’s stories, the opposition between inside and outside expresses figuratively the fundamental incompatibility between an ideal of beauty, embodied in the aesthetic experience of the church, and the coarseness of the outside world. This article explores how such a polarised vision reflects contemporary debates about the interior organisation and decoration of churches. Drawing on William Whyte’s analyses of changing attitudes towards church architecture in the 19th century in Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space (OUP 2017), it shows how literary representations of church interiors in fin-de-siècle literature reflect the shift from the Protestant aniconic, congregation-centred approach to church design, in favour of an architecture of affect and sensation, where space and ornamentation lead the worshipper to experience the divine through a sensory overload. It focuses on two aspects of church architecture and decoration that are foregrounded in fin-de-siècle poetry and fiction—and were highly polemical in the late Victorian context because of their association with the Ritualist controversy and with ‘Romishness’: the eastward position, i.e. the celebration of the Eucharist on a stone altar fixed to the back of the chancel rather than on a wooden communion table facing the congregation; and altar candles, which were condemned in anti-ritualist pamphlets as both pagan and ‘popish’. Through these two examples, this article argues that fin-de-siècle literary representations of church interiors reflect a major change in the perception of sacred space, from the ‘auditory church’ (Whyte) of the 18th century, where function (essentially focused on the proclamation of the word of God) dictated the organisation of space and even the furnishings, to the ‘visual church’, saturated with symbolism, where the eye, rather than the ear, becomes the central organ of religious experience.
Current studies on adversarial robustness mainly focus on aggregating local robustness results from a set of data samples to evaluate and rank different models. However, the local statistics may not well represent the true global robustness of the underlying unknown data distribution. To address this challenge, this paper makes the first attempt to present a new framework, called GREAT Score , for global robustness evaluation of adversarial perturbation using generative models. Formally, GREAT Score carries the physical meaning of a global statistic capturing a mean certified attack-proof perturbation level over all samples drawn from a generative model. For finite-sample evaluation, we also derive a probabilistic guarantee on the sample complexity and the difference between the sample mean and the true mean. GREAT Score has several advantages: (1) Robustness evaluations using GREAT Score are efficient and scalable to large models, by sparing the need of running adversarial attacks. In particular, we show high correlation and significantly reduced computation cost of GREAT Score when compared to the attack-based model ranking on RobustBench (Croce,et. al. 2021). (2) The use of generative models facilitates the approximation of the unknown data distribution. In our ablation study with different generative adversarial networks (GANs), we observe consistency between global robustness evaluation and the quality of GANs. (3) GREAT Score can be used for remote auditing of privacy-sensitive black-box models, as demonstrated by our robustness evaluation on several online facial recognition services.
With the widespread availability of high-speed networks, it becomes feasible to outsource computing to remote providers and to federate resources from many locations. Such observations motivated the development, from the mid-1990s onwards, of a range of innovative Grid technologies, applications, and infrastructures. We review the history, current status, and future prospects for Grid computing.
The paper discusses Jerome’s attack against the belief that human beings share the same substance as the heavenly powers and even as the Trinity, according to the dignity (dignitas) of the soul: in polemical texts such as Ep. 124.14, Jerome attributes this belief to Origen. Jerome’s intent clearly to demarcate the difference in nature between human and divine beings is also reflected in his exegetical writings, especially when dealing with Psalm 81, where human beings are addressed as “gods.” The paper investigates Jerome’s understanding of the dignitas of humanity as it emerges from his Homily on Psalm 81: the comparison with Origen’s own passages on Psalm 81 reveals that Jerome closely follows Origen’s exegetical argument. However, through a careful definition of human dignitas Jerome intentionally distances himself from Origen when it comes to associating human beings with immortal beings, most notably Christ.
Following the UK’s decision to leave the EU, British foreign and defence policy discourse has been inspired by the “Global Britain” narrative. But this narrative only makes sense as far as Britain is able to establish or maintain ambitious partnerships either with the EU or with individual member states. This paper analyses the rationale behind the deepening of bilateral cooperation with France in order to show that it remains crucial if Britain wants to maintain its role as one of the main actors in European defence and security policy.Ten years after the signing of the November 2010 Lancaster House treaties on defence and security and on nuclear cooperation, this paper uses a role theory approach to recall the strategic, political and economic rationales for bilateral cooperation and examine the current state of Franco-British relations. Brexit puts this cooperation at risk – with Emmanuel Macron calling for a stronger EU based on a reinforced Franco-German partnership – and recent developments in defence cooperation in Europe – with the implementation of the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) and the creation of the European Intervention Initiative (EI2) – raise questions about the respective roles of France and the UK. But this paper also shows that the current international context reinforces the case for close Franco-British defence and security relations that are beneficial for both partners, as well as for the EU.
The review traces reports and discussions of the International conference Transatlantic Relations in American and European Literature hosted at the Saint Petersburg State University on June 19–20, 2019. The conference aimed to bring together research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results on the dynamic processes and cultural transfer in the Northern Atlantic region. The papers focused on the Anglo-American Modernism with its principal centers in London, New York and Paris and on numerous periodicals which created intercultural dialogue in 1910–1930s. The participants also turned to other periods of the literary history and highlighted various aspects of the image and ideology reception on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The conference gathered scholars from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan, Rostov-on-Don – specialists in American literary history (T. Venediktova, O. Panova, A. Astvatsaturov, M. Oshukov, Ya. Probshtein, O. Antsyferova, O. Nesmelova, O. Karasik, O. Polovinkina, A. Kalashnikov, K. Vikhrova, M. Arshinov) and in Slavic studies (E. Penskaya, D. Ioffe, V. Feshchenko, O. Sokolova, A. Rosliy, E. Pavlov). The program of the conference also included presentations on history of English (O. Dzhumailo), German (I. Lagutina), Spanish (N. Kharitonova), French (L. Muravyeva), Greek (P. Zarutskiy), Finnish (V. Verzunova) literatures, literary theory (A. BazhenovaSorokina, A. Shvets), history of philosophy (D. Khaustov) and cinema (L. Bugaeva). The speakers considered different trajectories of the transatlantic transfer (US–Europe, US– Great Britain, US–Russia / USSR), outlined various methodological problems relevant to its description, gave interpretations of the real encounters, discussed possible encounters and even paradoxical “non-encounters”. The conference became a unique example of a productive dialogue between scholars – representatives of different generations and academic schools.
It is unfortunate to note again today that World War II did not end, it continues in the form of the war of memory. Politicians and scholars who stand as ideological successors of collaborators are trying to rewrite the history of those tragic days, to downplay the role of the Soviet Union in the victory over fascism. They try to revive certain political myths, which have been debunked long ago, that the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany bear equal responsibility for the outbreak of World War II, that the Red Army did not liberate Eastern Europe but ‘occupied’ it. In order to combat these attempts it is necessary to examine once again a turbulent history of the inter-war period and, particularly, the reasons why all attempts to form a united antifascist front had failed in the 1930s, but eventually led to the formation of the anti-Hitler coalition.The paper focuses on a complex set of political considerations, including cooperation and confrontation, mutual suspicions and a fervent desire to find an ally in the face of growing international tensions, which all together determined the dynamics of relations within a strategic triangle of the Soviet Union — the United States — Great Britain in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The paper shows how all attempts to establish a collective security system during the prewar period had shattered faced with the policy of appeasement, which allowed the Nazi Germany to occupy much of Europe. Only the Soviet Union’s entry into the war changed the course of the conflict and made a decisive contribution to the victory over fascist aggressors. The author emphasizes that at such crucial moment of history I.V. Stalin, F.D. Roosevelt and W. Churchill raised to that challenge, demonstrating realism, common sense and willingness to cooperate. Although within the anti-Hitler coalition there was a number of pending issues, which triggered tensions between the Allies, their leaders managed to move beyond old grievances, ideological differences and short-term political interests, to realize that they have a common strategic goal in the struggle against Nazism. According to the author, this is the foundation for success of the anti-Hitler coalition and, at the same time, the key lesson for contemporary politicians. The very emergence of the anti-Hitler coalition represented a watershed in the history of the 20th century, which has determined a way forward for the whole humanity and laid the foundations for the world order for the next fifty years.
The first determination of the surface temperature of stars other than the Sun is due to the Hungarian astrophysicist Béla Harkányi. Prompted by the recent unprecedented increase in the availability of stellar temperature estimates from Gaia, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Harkányi's birth, this article presents the life and work of this neglected, yet remarkable figure in the context of the history of stellar astrophysics.
This essay utilizes Beckett’s fictional and critical explorations of attention, distraction and drift to reflect on the ways in which, stripped of the conventions of cultural production, walking, thinking and artistic endeavor might be reimagined outside the normative scripts of biopolitics. Centralized and teleological forms give way to rhizomatic instantiations of the same in a process pertaining to all three registers at once (walking, thinking and writing). The result is the formation of a gesture that though suggestive of resistance cannot be viewed as such, in so far as it eschews negation. The paper traces a movement from the dialectical oscillation of attention and distraction in Proust to Beckett’s fashioning of an alternative that finds expression not only in the abstractions of thought and language but also in embodied experience. This alternative will be termed “drift,” a label denoting neither principle nor concept, but a mode of being that anticipates our attempts to think the human in the sensory-digital present. Beckett’s experiments allow us to reconsider forms of knowledge, understanding and conditioning. No less significant is his lesson on how we might do so without becoming embroiled in the dialectics of resistance and compliance.
Hisashi Hayakawa, Harufumi Tamazawa, Yusuke Ebihara
et al.
Records of observations of sunspots and auroras in pre-telescopic historical documents provide useful information about past solar activity both in long-term trends and short-term space weather events. In this study, we present the results of a comprehensive survey of the records of sunspots and aurora candidates in the Yuánshǐ and Míngshǐ, Chinese Official Histories spanning 1261-1368 and 1368-1644, based on continuous observations with well-formatted reportds conducted by contemporary professional astronomers. We then provide a brief comparison of these data with Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) as an indicator of the solar activity during the corresponding periods to show significant active phases between 1350s-80s and 1610s-30s. We then compared the former with contemporary Russian reports for naked-eye sunspots and the latter with contemporary sunspot drawings based on Western telescopic observations. Especially some of the latter are consistent with nitrate signals preserved in ice cores. These results show us some insights on not only minima and maxima of solar activity during 13th - 17th century.
The 2015 General Election in Northern Ireland was set in the particular context of the Stormont House Agreement, which was reached on December 23, 2014, in a renewed attempt to make devolution in Northern Ireland, as defined in the 1998 “Good Friday” Agreement, operate more smoothly. On top of tackling the inescapable issues of finance and welfare in a still sluggish post-financial crisis economic context, the Stormont House Agreement indeed addressed several dividing issues, such as flags, identity, culture and tradition, dealing with the past and institutional reform. This article analyzes the stands taken during the electoral campaign by the five main parties in Northern Ireland (the Democratic Unionist Party, the Ulster Unionist Party, the Social and Democratic and Labour Party, Sinn Féin and the Alliance Party) on the various issues raised in the Stormont House Agreement, underlining their convergences and divergences. It also briefly looks at the results and challenges ahead, in the particular context of the so called “post-conflict” Northern Ireland.
The history force is one of the hydrodynamic forces which act on a particle moving through a fluid. It is an integral over the full time history of the particle's motion and significantly complicates the equations of motion (accordingly it is often neglected). We present here a study of the influence of this force on particles moving in a turbulent flow, for a wide range of particle parameters. It is shown that the magnitude of history force can be significant and that it can have a considerable effect on the particles' slip velocity, acceleration, preferential concentration and collision rate. We also investigate the parameter dependence of the strength of these effects.
The United Kingdom has had an important position in Europe for centuries. Often it is seen as an anti-European country, or as being anti-integration in Europe but it is just defending its own interests, which in many cases hare differed from other members of the European Communities. The UK policy towards European cooperation has been influenced by the particular interest of the country, but there has always been a strong relation between the British and Europe. Great Britain had the biggest empire in human history spread all over the globe, and hence its interest was global rather than limited to local European states. The UK was a victorious country in the Second World War, the only Western European state that participated actively in Nazi defeat. As an important consequence, British nationalism was seen as a positive force to unite all the British against an external threat. During centuries, the British economy has been based on trade, and internationally the government supported and expanded the free trade idea in the world economy to European trade relations. This paper analyzes the main issues that explain the special relations between the EU and the UK. The paper is developed from a historical point of view with a methodology’ based on the critical review of historical facts from a global perspective of the whole traditional approach of the UK towards European integration.