History state formalism for time series with application to finance
F. Lomoc, N. Canosa, A. P. Boette
et al.
We present a method for analyzing general time series by employing the history state formalism of quantum mechanics. This formalism allows us to describe a complete evolution based on a single quantum state, the history state, which simultaneously includes -also as a quantum system- the reference clock. It naturally leads to the concept of system-time entanglement, with the ensuing entanglement entropy constituting a measure of the effective number of distinguishable states visited in the history. Through a quantum coherent state embedding of the time series data, it is then possible to associate a quantum history state to the series. The gaussian overlap between these coherent states provides thus a smooth measure of distinguishability between the series data. The eigenvalues of the corresponding overlap matrix determine in fact the entanglement spectrum and entropy of the history state, which provide a rigorous characterization of the evolution. As illustration, the formalism is applied to typical financial time-series data. Through the entanglement entropy and spectrum, different evolution regimes can be identified. Entanglement based volatility indicators are also derived, and compared with standard volatility measures.
From Inertia to Community Unionism: Trade Union Responses to Racism and Discrimination in the Workplace
Donia Touihri-Mebarek
Recent developments such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic have laid bare persistent racial disparities in the UK, especially in the workplace. Despite the presence of a battery of legislative and regulatory protections, ethnic minority groups are characterised by lower employment levels, occupational segregation in the lowest-paying and most insecure jobs, a substantial pay gap compared to the white majority and overall lower economic achievement. In this context, the role of trade unions in combatting racism and discrimination is worth questioning. This article analyses how issues of race and industrial relations have been and continue to be connected. Drawing on official reports from trade unions and available archives, it underlines the developing position of trade unions regarding issues of racism and discrimination. It first analyses how the labour market became racialised following the advent of significant non-white immigration, with racism pervasive in trade unions. It then highlights the role played by ethnic minority groups’ resistance and mobilisation to oppose racism and discriminatory practices in the workplace. Finally, it scrutinises how the unions’ changing attitudes and policy agenda on racism and discrimination foster renewal through strategic engagement in community unionism.
History of Great Britain, English literature
GREAT: Generalizable Backdoor Attacks in RLHF via Emotion-Aware Trigger Synthesis
Subrat Kishore Dutta, Yuelin Xu, Piyush Pant
et al.
Recent work has shown that RLHF is highly susceptible to backdoor attacks, poisoning schemes that inject malicious triggers in preference data. However, existing methods often rely on static, rare-token-based triggers, limiting their effectiveness in realistic scenarios. In this paper, we develop GREAT, a novel framework for crafting generalizable backdoors in RLHF through emotion-aware trigger synthesis. Specifically, GREAT targets harmful response generation for a vulnerable user subgroup characterized by both semantically violent requests and emotionally angry triggers. At the core of GREAT is a trigger identification pipeline that operates in the latent embedding space, leveraging principal component analysis and clustering techniques to identify the most representative triggers. To enable this, we present Erinyes, a high-quality dataset of over $5000$ angry triggers curated from GPT-4.1 using a principled, hierarchical, and diversity-promoting approach. Experiments on benchmark RLHF datasets demonstrate that GREAT significantly outperforms baseline methods in attack success rates, especially for unseen trigger scenarios, while largely preserving the response quality on benign inputs.
Loyal service to the Fatherland: in honour of the 75th anniversary of N.M. Valeev’s birth
Milyausha A. Akhmetova
The article is dedicated to the 75th anniversary of Doctor of Philology, Professor, Academician of the Tatarstan Academy of Sciences, Honoured Scholar of the Republic of Tatarstan and the Russian Federation, the member of the Union of Writers of Russia and the Presidium of the Union of Local Historians of Russia – Nail Mansurovich Valeev. It describes him as an outstanding Russian humanities scholar, literary critic, art critic, historian, local historian, cultural studies scholar, major organiser of scientific events and a public official. His unique and resonant academic work, significant and conceptual projects contribute to the prestige of our republic and country. Over the three decades of his life in the city of Elabuga, he wrote hundreds of articles and ten books about the historical and cultural heritage of Elabuga, about the fate of Elabuga merchants-benefactors. His enormous work on organising a purposeful study of the history of the city led to the recognition of Elabuga as one of the tourist-attractive cities of Russia. Regularly held international scientific conferences devoted to the study of the fate of the merchant dynasties of the city and the creative heritage of the forgotten classic of Russian literature D.I. Stakheev, attracted the attention of scholars from all over Russia and around the world, as well as the descendants of the merchant dynasties of the Stakheevs from Australia, Switzerland, Great Britain, France, etc. to the rich history of the city. Huge work was carried out by N.M. Valeev to draw the attention of the Republic of Tatarstan Academy of Sciences academics and the scholars of the Federal Research Center “Kazan Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences” to the study and preservation of the historical and cultural heritage of the city of Chistopol. Academic works of N.M. Valeev about the life of Kazan art of the twentieth century, the Literary Chistopol encyclopedia, the monograph Boris Pasternak in Chistopol. To the origins of the “Doctor Zhivago” novel and other works caused a wide resonance around the country and the world, attracted the attention of specialists to the rich history of Tatarstan and Chistopol.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Folklore
A History Equivalence Algorithm for Dynamic Process Migration
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.
Refactoring-aware Block Tracking in Commit History
Mohammed Tayeeb Hasan, Nikolaos Tsantalis, Pouria Alikhanifard
Tracking statements in the commit history of a project is in many cases useful for supporting various software maintenance, comprehension, and evolution tasks. A high level of accuracy can facilitate the adoption of code tracking tools by developers and researchers. To this end, we propose CodeTracker, a refactoring-aware tool that can generate the commit change history for code blocks. To evaluate its accuracy, we created an oracle with the change history of 1,280 code blocks found within 200 methods from 20 popular open-source project repositories. Moreover, we created a baseline based on the current state-of-the-art Abstract Syntax Tree diff tool, namely GumTree 3.0, in order to compare the accuracy and execution time. Our experiments have shown that CodeTracker has a considerably higher precision/recall and faster execution time than the GumTree-based baseline, and can extract the complete change history of a code block with a precision and recall of 99.5% within 3.6 seconds on average.
“The World in Terms of Mirror Imaging”: an Interview with Mary O’Donnell
Mª Elena Jaime de Pablos
The writer Mary O’Donnell (County Monaghan, 1954) is one of Ireland’s most prominent authors. She has published eight collections of poetry including Unlegendary Heroes (1998), The Ark Builders (2009), Those April Fevers (2015) and most recently Massacre of the Birds (2020), four novels, among them The Light-Makers (1992), The Elysium Testament (1999) and Where They Lie (2014), and three collections of short stories: Strong Pagans (1991), Storm over Belfast (2008) and Empire (2018). She has also published a dozen essays and hundreds of reviews of both theatre and books. Besides, she is a frequent contributor to RTE Radio. Her voice and presence in Irish letters has been closely connected to the culture of her country. Her literature reflects the spirit of the age in which it is produced and revolves around phenomena that deeply affect the world today. Her range of subjects includes gender identity crises, mental instability, marriage in relation to female experience, sexuality, domestic and gender violence, child abuse, the artist in crisis, infertility, dysfunctional families, ecology and the natural world and the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Her works, written with immense talent, vivacity, skill, cleverness and humor, have been translated into several languages. In this interview, Mary O’Donnell discusses her most recent works in poetry and narrative: her collection of poems Massacre of the Birds (2020), her collection of short stories Empire (2018) and the novel Where They Lie (2014).
History of Great Britain, Language and Literature
Patrice Bouche, Shirley Doulière et Margaret Gillespie, La place des femmes dans l’espace public, 1800-1939, Grande- Bretagne, Irlande, Empire
Véronique Molinari
History of Great Britain, English literature
Intervention of the Entente Powers and Their Allies in Russia During the Civil War (1918–1922): Modern Foreign Studies
Igor Bogomolov
Introduction. The review is devoted to modern foreign literature on the military intervention of the Entente powers and their allies in Russia in 1918–1922. The centenary of the Russian Civil War is a suitable occasion to characterize the modern historiography of intervention and the prospects for its research. Methods and materials. In the analysis of the literature, historical-genetic, historical-typological and historical-comparative methods were used. Analysis. The centenary of the Civil War in Russia passes almost unnoticed in foreign historiography, which is also due to the shift of attention to the Russian revolution. The Russian Civil War is often considered as an integral part of the revolutionary era, so its research in recent years has not gone beyond the generalizing works on the history of the revolution. The intervention is in a more advantageous position, since the military personnel of the United States, Great Britain, France, Japan, Canada, and Australia participated in it. Accordingly, the interest of researchers from these countries remains. Nevertheless, despite the “anniversaries” of the landings of Allied troops in Arkhangelsk, Transcaucasia and Vladivostok, operations in the Baltic and Siberia, only a small number of monographs and articles were published. A certain surge of interest is visible in popular science books about the operations of British and American troops in the North of Russia, but their authors used a small number of sources and did not present fundamentally new conclusions. Results. The “jubilee” historiography of the intervention is quite modest, but the topic of intervention has prospects due to numerous “white spots”, a lot of unexplored sources. The topic of foreign interventions remains relevant for the modern world.
History of Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics, International relations
Less is More: Learning to Refine Dialogue History for Personalized Dialogue Generation
Hanxun Zhong, Zhicheng Dou, Yutao Zhu
et al.
Personalized dialogue systems explore the problem of generating responses that are consistent with the user's personality, which has raised much attention in recent years. Existing personalized dialogue systems have tried to extract user profiles from dialogue history to guide personalized response generation. Since the dialogue history is usually long and noisy, most existing methods truncate the dialogue history to model the user's personality. Such methods can generate some personalized responses, but a large part of dialogue history is wasted, leading to sub-optimal performance of personalized response generation. In this work, we propose to refine the user dialogue history on a large scale, based on which we can handle more dialogue history and obtain more abundant and accurate persona information. Specifically, we design an MSP model which consists of three personal information refiners and a personalized response generator. With these multi-level refiners, we can sparsely extract the most valuable information (tokens) from the dialogue history and leverage other similar users' data to enhance personalization. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model in generating more informative and personalized responses.
The Egyptian Museum in Fiction: The Mummy’s Eyes as the ‘Black Mirror’ of the Empire
Nolwenn Corriou
This article considers the way the late nineteenth-century genre of mummy fiction represents the exhibition of Egyptian mummies in the space of private or public museums. In the context of the constitution of the ‘imperial archive’ (Thomas Richards), the museum plays a substantial role and the interactions between the archaeologist or museum visitor and the mummy in fiction can be interpreted in imperial terms, archaeological processes of excavation, classification and exhibition mirroring imperial dynamics. The motif of the gaze in particular gives us an insight into Victorian and Edwardian notions of knowledge and its links with imperial domination at the turn of the century. In texts such as Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and Henry Rider Haggard’s ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ (1913), the scientific and aesthetising gaze of the archaeologist is challenged by the eyes of the mummy who, in turn, gazes at the museum visitor and thus defeats the imperial order of the museum. My contention is that the showcasing of mummies in these two texts leads to a critique of imperialism as the mummy’s gaze, by offering a mirror image to the museum visitor, can mediate imperial anxieties and put on display the repressed parts of the imperial psyche.
Has the distribution of smoking across young adult transition milestones changed over the past 20 years? Evidence from the 1970 British Cohort Study (1996) and Next Steps (2015–16)
T. Gagné, I. Schoon, A. Sacker
Introduction: Transitions into work and family life during young adulthood exacerbate differences in the progression of smoking over the life-course. Few have considered how changes in smoking and the transition to adulthood in the past two decades have influenced these relationships over time. Methods: We compared the distribution of smoking at ages 25–26 across transition milestones among 3764 men and 4568 women in the 1970 British Cohort study (1996) and 3426 men and 4281 women in the Next Steps study (2015–16). We regressed occasional and daily smoking status on educational attainment, economic activity, living arrangements, relationship status, and parenthood, adjusting for family background, socio-demographics, and smoking history. Results: There were few differences in associations between the 1996 and 2015-16 samples. Young men and women were less likely to smoke if they had higher education, were homeowners, and cohabited with a partner. Women were less likely to smoke occasionally if they were full-time students, and men were less likely to smoke daily if they were employed full-time and not living with children. However, comparing associations in 2015–16 to 1996: 1) in men, higher education had a weaker negative association and living with a partner had a stronger negative association with daily smoking; 2) in women, independently renting had a weaker positive association with daily smoking. Conclusions: Despite considerable changes in smoking and the transition to adulthood over the past two decades, the distribution of smoking at ages 25–26 across transition milestones has been relatively stable during this time period in Great Britain.
Public aspects of medicine, Social sciences (General)
On the Impact of Inclination-Dependent Attenuation on Derived Star Formation Histories: Results from Disk Galaxies in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey Fields
Keith Doore, Rafael T. Eufrasio, Bret D. Lehmer
et al.
We develop and implement an inclination-dependent attenuation prescription for spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting and study its impact on derived star-formation histories. We apply our prescription within the SED fitting code Lightning to a clean sample of 82, z=0.21-1.35 disk-dominated galaxies in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North and South fields. To compare our inclination-dependent attenuation prescription with more traditional fitting prescriptions, we also fit the SEDs with the inclination-independent Calzetti et al. (2000) attenuation curve. From this comparison, we find that fits to a subset of 58, z < 0.7 galaxies in our sample, utilizing the Calzetti et al. (2000) prescription, recover similar trends with inclination as the inclination-dependent fits for the far-UV-band attenuation and recent star-formation rates. However, we find a difference between prescriptions in the optical attenuation (AV) that is strongly correlated with inclination (p-value < 10^-11). For more face-on galaxies, with i < 50 deg, (edge-on, i = 90 deg), the average derived AV is 0.31 +\- 0.11 magnitudes lower (0.56 +\- 0.16 magnitudes higher) for the inclination-dependent model compared to traditional methods. Further, the ratio of stellar masses between prescriptions also has a significant (p-value < 10^-2) trend with inclination. For i = 0-65 deg, stellar masses are systematically consistent between fits, with log(Mstar_inc/Mstar_Calzetti) = -0.05 +/- 0.03 dex and scatter of 0.11 dex. However, for i = 80-90 deg, derived stellar masses are lower for the Calzetti et al. (2000) fits by an average factor of 0.17 +\- 0.03 dex and scatter of 0.13 dex. Therefore, these results suggest that SED fitting assuming the Calzetti et al. (2000) attenuation law potentially underestimates stellar masses in highly inclined disk-dominated galaxies.
BBC Independence and Impartiality: The Case of the 1956 Suez Crisis
Mélanie Dupéré
As the world’s oldest national broadcaster, The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is unique in its contribution to British life and its level of international influence. The BBC is well known for its historic core mission (to inform, educate and entertain) and commitment to the principles of independence and impartiality. Yet the definition and practical application of these tenets are far from clear-cut. Considered by some to be a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization, the BBC has been subjected to much criticism throughout its long history regarding its ability to resist State and corporate pressures. This article seeks to explore State pressures in the context of calls for national unity in times of crisis when tensions with the BBC are at their greatest. To this end, a qualitative analysis of the 1956 Suez Crisis is conducted and is linked to the decline of the British Empire. This study shows the limited interpretation of impartiality by the BBC at that time. Anthony Eden’s Conservative government fought a propaganda war at home and abroad in the build-up to military intervention. The BBC’s independence was ambiguous at best, although it emerged from the crisis with its reputation intact due to its insistence on the notion of impartiality.
History of Great Britain, English literature
Aligning the Newspaper and the People: Defining the Popular in the British Press
Martin Conboy
The Daily Mirror developed as the first general picture daily in Britain and had become the nation’s best-selling daily newspaper by the end of the First World War. Its turn to the political left came from the mid-1930s as a marketing ploy to establish a distinctive identity within a crowded middle-market. This commercially astute targeting of a mass readership, delivering the most successful daily newspaper in British history by the mid-1960s, illustrates a great deal of the complexity of the term ‘popular’ when used in relation to mass media. It drew on the traditions of best-selling magazines, Sunday newspapers, and American tabloid pioneers combined with modern techniques of market research to identify a new and broad readership. The explicit integration of readers’ views, deployment of brash headlines, and a bold page layout highlighting photography, in editorial combination, made the paper the forerunner of a distinctly British tabloid style that would become a world-leading trend. Magazine-style features had flowed between various forms of periodicals in Britain throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but it was the Daily Mirror that perfected an appeal to a young, left-of-centre, popular readership that had hitherto been largely ignored by publishers; an approach that included appealing to female readers in a distinctly ‘modern’ way. This article will centre on definitions of the popular in the formative era 1935–45 and the impact that such a style of popular newspaper would eventually have on the entire British market. In preparing the way for later manifestations of the magazine-newspaper, popular hybrids such as the Sun and the later version of the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror can be seen as the prototype of not just the popular tabloid that would come to dominate the British market but also of the shift to a ‘tabloid culture’ that continues to inform our contemporary legacy and digital news environments.
How Macroeconomists Lost Control of Stabilization Policy: Towards Dark Ages
Jean Bernard Chatelain, Kirsten Ralf
This paper is a study of the history of the transplant of mathematical tools using negative feedback for macroeconomic stabilization policy from 1948 to 1975 and the subsequent break of the use of control for stabilization policy which occurred from 1975 to 1993. New-classical macroeconomists selected a subset of the tools of control that favored their support of rules against discretionary stabilization policy. The Lucas critique and Kydland and Prescott's time-inconsistency were over-statements that led to the "dark ages" of the prevalence of the stabilization-policy-ineffectiveness idea. These over-statements were later revised following the success of the Taylor rule.
The merger history of primordial-black-hole binaries
You Wu
As a candidate of dark matter, primordial black holes (PBHs) have attracted more and more attentions as they could be possible progenitors of the heavy binary black holes (BBHs) observed by LIGO/Virgo. Accurately estimating the merger rate of PBH binaries will be crucial to reconstruct the mass distribution of PBHs. It was pointed out the merger history of PBHs may shift the merger rate distribution depending on the mass function of PBHs. In this paper, we use 10 BBH events from LIGO/Virgo O1 and O2 observing runs to constrain the merger rate distribution of PBHs by accounting the effect of merger history. It is found that the second merger process makes subdominant contribution to the total merger rate, and hence the merger history effect can be safely neglected.
Recalibrating the Cosmic Star Formation History
Stephen M. Wilkins, Christopher C. Lovell, Elizabeth R. Stanway
The calibrations linking observed luminosities to the star formation rate depend on the assumed stellar population synthesis model, initial mass function, star formation and metal enrichment history, and whether reprocessing by dust and gas is included. Consequently the shape and normalisation of the inferred cosmic star formation history is sensitive to these assumptions. Using v2.2.1 of the Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis (\bpass) model we determine a new set of calibration coefficients for the ultraviolet, thermal-infrared, and, hydrogen recombination lines. These ultraviolet and thermal infrared coefficients are 0.15-0.2 dex higher than those widely utilised in the literature while the H$α$ coefficient is $\sim 0.35$ dex larger. These differences arise in part due to the inclusion binary evolution pathways but predominantly reflect an extension in the IMF to 300 $M_{\odot}$ and a change in the choice of reference metallicity. We use these new coefficients to recalibrate the cosmic star formation history, and find improved agreement between the integrated cosmic star formation history and the in-situ measured stellar mass density as a function of redshift. However, these coefficients produce new tension between star formation rate densities inferred from the ultraviolet and thermal-infrared and those from H$α$.
Does History Repeat Itself? Periodic Time Cosmology
Elizabeth Gould, Niayesh Afshordi
It has been suggested that the cosmic history might repeat in cycles, with an infinite series of similar aeons in the past and the future. Here, we instead propose that the cosmic history repeats itself exactly, constructing a universe on a periodic temporal history, which we call Periodic Time Cosmology. In particular, the primordial power spectrum, convolved with the transfer function throughout the cosmic history, would form the next aeon's primordial power spectrum. By matching the big bang to the infinite future using a conformal rescaling (a la Penrose), we uniquely determine the primordial power spectrum, in terms of the transfer function up to two free parameters. While nearly scale invariant with a red tilt on large scales, using Planck and Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation observations, we find the minimal model is disfavoured compared to a power-law power spectrum at $5.1σ$. However, extensions of $Λ$CDM cosmic history change the large scale transfer function and can provide better relative fits to the data. For example, the best fit seven parameter model for our Periodic Time Cosmology, with $w=-1.024$ for dark energy equation of state, is only disfavoured relative to a power-law power spectrum (with the same number of parameters) at $1.8σ$ level. Therefore, consistency between cosmic history and initial conditions provides a viable description of cosmological observations in the context of Periodic Time Cosmology.
Illustrating Animals and Visualizing Natural History in Chambers’s Encyclopaedias
Rose Roberto
In the 19th century, there was wide-spread public interest in natural history, as reflected in the high attendance at zoos and travelling menageries, in the market for popular field guides, in fashions for orchid collecting, fossil hunting and aquarium building, and in well-attended popular science lectures. More than 10 years before Darwin’s Origin of Species, a book titled Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation about evolution or ‘transmutation’ was anonymously authored by Scottish publisher Robert Chambers. The first edition sold out on both sides of the Atlantic. Chambers never admitted authorship of this book in his lifetime. His firm, W. & R. Chambers was well known for educational publishing. Between 1859 and 1892, the firm produced two encyclopaedias: Chambers’s Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People and Chambers’s Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge, New Edition. Both editions contain numerous entries on mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and microorganisms, with numerous illustrations depicting these topics. This paper discusses preliminary research on these encyclopaedias and the woodblocks used to illustrate them. It will discuss the depiction of animals and other natural history topics, comparing how entries and representations evolved between both editions and examine the influence of wider trends in the growing ‘popular markets’ for natural history, encyclopaedias, and book illustration generally during this period. Finally it looks at the firm’s philosophy of self-improvement, progress and understanding of science and questions whether the natural history images used in these encyclopaedias provided its 19th century audiences with any clues for the sensational author of Vestiges.