Hasil untuk "History of Asia"

Lvmin Zhang, Shengqu Cai, Muyang Li et al.

Autoregressive video generation relies on history context for content consistency and storytelling. As video histories grow longer, efficiently encoding them remains an open problem - particularly for personal users and local workflows where compute and memory budgets are limited. We present a lightweight history encoder that maps long video histories into short-length embeddings, pretrained with a frame query objective that learns to attend to content features at arbitrary temporal positions. The pretraining stage provides the encoder with dense history coverage on large-scale video data; the subsequent finetuning stage adapts the pretrained encoder under an autoregressive video generation objective to establish content-level consistency. In this way, the lightweight embeddings achieve comparable performance to heavier alternatives. We evaluate the framework with ablative settings and discuss the architecture designs.

Jemima Alves

 Este artigo analisa o microconto no contexto da literatura árabe contemporânea, com ênfase nos aspectos sociológicos, formais e performáticos do gênero. Parte-se da premissa de que a ascensão do microconto está ligada às transformações sociais e tecnológicas das últimas décadas, bem como à influência da internet e da necessidade de concisão textual. Apesar de sua origem ocidental, o microconto encontra ressonância em formas narrativas árabes tradicionais, o que lhe confere uma identidade híbrida e transnacional. A partir da análise de textos do autor saudita Abdullah Nasser — especialmente aqueles que dialogam com a metalinguagem e a autorreferência —, o artigo propõe uma reflexão sobre identidade, subjetividade e performance no ato da escrita e da tradução. Ao relacionar o estilo de Nasser ao de Dalton Trevisan, o trabalho evidencia aproximações estéticas e temáticas entre diferentes tradições literárias, enfatizando o papel político da escrita subjetiva. A tradução, nesse contexto, é apresentada como performance e reconfiguração corporal, instaurando um novo corpus a partir do encontro entre línguas, autores e leitores.

Tatyana V. Petrova, Andrey A. Lissovsky, Semyon Yu. Bodrov et al.

Previous phylogeographic study of the root vole (<i>Alexandromys oeconomus</i>) revealed four mitochondrial cytochrome <i>b</i> lineages—North and Central European, North (=Central) Asian and Beringian. Three of them were studied in detail, while the North Asian lineage, which occupies the most extensive territory and is considered to be the place of origin for the species, was understudied. In the framework of the current study, we obtained 95 new sequences (34 localities) from the wide territory of Northern Asia and in total, examined 940 specimens from 181 localities throughout the species’ distribution range. The North Asian lineage was found to be more diverse than the Beringian and the European lineages. Southern Siberia and especially the Altai–Sayan region displayed the highest haplotype and nucleotide diversity, suggesting the region’s role as a genetic diversity hotspot. We suppose that the expansion of the North Asian lineage started from Western Transbaikalia. Its representatives colonised the territory from the Urals to the northern shore of the Okhotsk Sea, and then spread in the opposite direction, to Southern Siberia. As a result, a mixture of haplogroups is observed in the Altai–Sayan region. According to the BEAST analysis calibrated with the first <i>A. oeconomus</i> records, the MRCA of North Asian and Beringian lineages is dated back to ~0.82 Mya, and the first divergence within the North Asian lineage may have occurred ~0.6 Mya. When compared with colonisation times of other representatives of the Arvicolinae subfamily, our dating seems to be overestimated. In this regard, molecular data for dated fossil remains of the root vole are essential for subsequent studies.

Se-eun Yoon, Ahmad Bin Rabiah, Zaid Alibadi et al.

Customers reach out to online live chat agents with various intents, such as asking about product details or requesting a return. In this paper, we propose the problem of predicting user intent from browsing history and address it through a two-stage approach. The first stage classifies a user's browsing history into high-level intent categories. Here, we represent each browsing history as a text sequence of page attributes and use the ground-truth class labels to fine-tune pretrained Transformers. The second stage provides a large language model (LLM) with the browsing history and predicted intent class to generate fine-grained intents. For automatic evaluation, we use a separate LLM to judge the similarity between generated and ground-truth intents, which closely aligns with human judgments. Our two-stage approach yields significant performance gains compared to generating intents without the classification stage.

Meysam Soltani Nejad, Neda Samandari Najafabadi, Sonia Aghighi et al.

Asia has a rich history of cultivating sweet cherries, a practice that has been carried out since ancient times. However, the effective management of Alternaria disease in sweet cherry crops has presented a formidable challenge, resulting in notable decreases in yield. Various attempts have been made to employ both chemical and biological treatments; however, their effectiveness has been restricted. In order to tackle this problem, an investigation was carried out, with the primary objective of isolating and identifying Alternaria isolates that are accountable for the occurrence of sweet cherry soft spot rot. Out of the twelve isolates examined, the CHM-4 isolate was found to be the most pathogenic. Its identification was achieved through the use of the ITS genomic region (ITS1 and ITS4), and the BLAST results revealed a 95 % similarity with Alternaria alternata (MG744381.1). The objective of the research was to explore the potential of silver nanoparticles (SNPs) synthesized by phytosynthesis as a novel antifungal agent to combat sweet cherry soft spot pathogenicity. The biosynthesis of SNPs was carried out using sweet cherry fruits kernel exudate, which served as an environmentally friendly source. The exudates exhibited the ability to produce nanoparticles with an average size of 24.97 nm. Analysis conducted using a transmission electron microscope (TEM) revealed the multifaceted structure of these nanoparticles. Furthermore, when tested at concentrations of 5, 10, 20, and 40 μg/ml, these biosynthetic nanoparticles demonstrated the capability to inhibit the growth of Alternaria fungi and effectively destroy fungal hyphae. It is advisable to utilize diverse components of sweet cherry for the synthesis of various nanoparticles owing to their compatibility with the surrounding environment.

Hyerin Kim, Nakbin Choi, Myong-In Lee et al.

This study analyzed the causes of the extreme heatwave in East Asia in 2018, which brought a record-breaking event in South Korea in terms of the number of hot days and the intensity in history. Long-lasting atmospheric patterns were observed during the 2018 heatwave, and the patterns were similar to those known as the Pacific–Japan (PJ), circum-global teleconnection (CGT), and Arctic Oscillation (AO) patterns identified in a previous study. In 2018, all three patterns appeared to exhibit a strong positive phase. In particular, the PJ and AO Indices showed the highest values within the analysis period, having a major impact on the heatwave. According to a quantitative analysis through multi-linear regression (MLR) of how much each of the three patterns affects the heatwave, all three patterns of PJ, CGT, and AO have significant effects on the heatwave in Korea. The statistically reconstructed heatwave days (HWD) time series with the three indices by MLR account for 51% of the total variability at the interannual timescale. Especially in 2018, most of the occurred HWD could be restored using the three indices. Also, in 1994, when the three indices had a high peak, the number of HWDs was the second-longest ever, while in 1993, when all three indices had a low peak, the heatwave was the lowest. This study quantitatively examined whether the large-scale extreme heatwave in 2018 greatly increased because of PJ, CGT, and AO. This study suggests that extreme heatwave can occur again if three apparently independent atmospheric patterns appear at once in the future.

Joern Ploennigs, Markus Berger

Recent generative AI platforms are able to create texts or impressive images from simple text prompts. This makes them powerful tools for summarizing knowledge about architectural history or deriving new creative work in early design tasks like ideation, sketching and modelling. But, how good is the understanding of the generative AI models of the history of architecture? Has it learned to properly distinguish styles, or is it hallucinating information? In this chapter, we investigate this question for generative AI platforms for text and image generation for different architectural styles, to understand the capabilities and boundaries of knowledge of those tools. We also analyze how they are already being used by analyzing a data set of 101 million Midjourney queries to see if and how practitioners are already querying for specific architectural concepts.

Alamsyah Alamsyah, Siti Maziyah, Vicky Very Angga

This article discusses the development of kentrung art, a traditional art originating from a city on the north coast of Java, namely Jepara. Kentrung has been present to accompany the people of Jepara for a long time and has become one of the instruments in religious rituals in Jepara. In addition, kentrung is also one of the entertainment's communities. In the 1970s to 1980s, kentrung experienced its heyday because it was in great demand by the public. However, in subsequent periods, kentrung faced challenges threatening its existence. Using historical methods, this article examines the adaptation strategy of kentrung art in meeting the challenges of globalization which have brought popular skills to the masses. Apart from that, kentrung also has to face the problem of regeneration because apart from the lack of spectators, there are also very few young people who are interested in becoming kentrung artists. The situation is becoming increasingly threatening to the existence of kentrung because the Covid-19 Pandemic is hitting the world. The results of the research show that the government's commitment, in this case the region and the community, guarantees the sustainability of the kentrung arts. An example is the case of regeneration initiated by the Jungpara Foundation which later gave birth to a kentrung art group named Ken Palman. In addition to regenerating, they also packaged kentrung performances to be more contemporary to attract the public.

Sun‐Lin Chung, C. Lo, T. Lee et al.

Byung Ha Chung, S. Horie, E. Chiong

The objective of this review was to describe the epidemiology and risk factors of prostate cancer (PCa) in Asian populations. English language publications published over the last 10 years covering studies on the incidence, mortality, and risk factors of PCa in Asia were reviewed. The incidence of PCa in Asia is rising but is still significantly lower than that in Western countries. Studies in Asia indicated that the consumption of red meat, fat, dairy, and eggs was associated with a higher risk for PCa. Age and family history were also found to be risk factors. The emergence of genetic data indicates that different genetic backgrounds between Asian and Western populations play a role in the observed differences in PCa incidence. The lower incidence of PCa in Asian men than in Western men may in part be due to a lack of systematic prostate-specific antigen screening, but environmental and genetic factors also play a role.

Zhuo Xu, Masayoshi Tomizuka

In this extended abstract, we investigate the design of learning representation for human intention inference. In our designed human intention prediction task, we propose a history encoding representation that is both interpretable and effective for prediction. Through extensive experiments, we show our prediction framework with a history encoding representation design is successful on the human intention prediction problem.

Cássia Bitencourt, Nicolai M. Nürk, Alessandro Rapini et al.

Apocynaceae (the dogbane and milkweed family) is one of the ten largest flowering plant families, with approximately 5,350 species and diverse morphology and ecology, ranging from large trees and lianas that are emblematic of tropical rainforests, to herbs in temperate grasslands, to succulents in dry, open landscapes, and to vines in a wide variety of habitats. Despite a specialized and conservative basic floral architecture, Apocynaceae are hyperdiverse in flower size, corolla shape, and especially derived floral morphological features. These are mainly associated with the development of corolline and/or staminal coronas and a spectrum of integration of floral structures culminating with the formation of a gynostegium and pollinaria—specialized pollen dispersal units. To date, no detailed analysis has been conducted to estimate the origin and diversification of this lineage in space and time. Here, we use the most comprehensive time-calibrated phylogeny of Apocynaceae, which includes approximately 20% of the species covering all major lineages, and information on species number and distributions obtained from the most up-to-date monograph of the family to investigate the biogeographical history of the lineage and its diversification dynamics. South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia (potentially including Oceania), were recovered as the most likely ancestral area of extant Apocynaceae diversity; this tropical climatic belt in the equatorial region retained the oldest extant lineages and these three tropical regions likely represent museums of the family. Africa was confirmed as the cradle of pollinia-bearing lineages and the main source of Apocynaceae intercontinental dispersals. We detected 12 shifts toward accelerated species diversification, of which 11 were in the APSA clade (apocynoids, Periplocoideae, Secamonoideae, and Asclepiadoideae), eight of these in the pollinia-bearing lineages and six within Asclepiadoideae. Wind-dispersed comose seeds, climbing growth form, and pollinia appeared sequentially within the APSA clade and probably work synergistically in the occupation of drier and cooler habitats. Overall, we hypothesize that temporal patterns in diversification of Apocynaceae was mainly shaped by a sequence of morphological innovations that conferred higher capacity to disperse and establish in seasonal, unstable, and open habitats, which have expanded since the Eocene-Oligocene climate transition.

Martin Gaenszle

The new Kirati religion founded by the spiritual leader and ‘national luminary’ Mahaguru Phalgunanda Lingden (1885–1949) is a unique blend of an ethnic tradition marked by shamanic practice and elements of Hinduism. Little is known about the ritual practice performed by the Mahaguru himself and his disciples. However, today, the principal successor, Atmananda Lingden, is propagating his version of the Satyahangma religion and building a large community of followers. Rituals are based on the Sāmjik Mundhum, a red book containing the canonical text. My contribution here will take a look at the making of this ritual tradition and the controversies that have resulted from different interpretations of Phalgunanda’s heritage. The biggest event in the year is the celebration of Phalgunanda’s birthday on Kartik 25 (ca 11 November). In eastern Nepal in particular, this is an event of great spiritual as well as political importance, as could be observed in 2018.

Anthony C. Diala, Sonya R. Cotton

In its quest to restore land to millions of its citizens dispossessed under colonial and apartheid regimes, South Africa adopted a Restitution of Land Rights Act and set up a Land Claims Court in 1994 and 1996, respectively. This article uses select judgments of the Land Claims Court to critique the interpretative mindset of judges and the ideological neutrality of certain definitions in the Restitution Act. It argues that the colonial legacy of legal positivism and 20th century anthropological imagery inhibits the access to justice of dispossessed Africans living on the periphery of land rights. It uses the word ‘chained’ to describe communities whose restitution of land rights depends on their ability to (re)imagine themselves through a judicial prism of fossilized colonial ideas of traditional structures, lineage, and unbroken practices. The article recommends measures for promoting a South African legal culture that is sensitive to legal pluralism, mindful of indigenous law’s flexibility, and distrustful of undue standardization that stifles people’s access to justice.

Taya Davan

Introduction. For the first time the Epic of Jangar became known in scientific circles after B. Bergmann published a German account of The Song of the Battle between the Heroes of Jangar and Shara Gyurgyu the Terrible in the early 19th century. Since then, the Jangar had become known in the world as the Kalmyk heroic epic. After the publication of newly discovered songs of the Jangar at the beginning of the 20th century in Mongolia, it became known as a Mongolian epic. In the late 1970s, after publishing numerous songs of the Jangar in China, the epic became known as epic legacy of the Oirats of Russia, China and Mongolia. One of the scientific centers of China which has been actively searching for the Jangar texts for 41 years is Inner Mongolia University. From 1977 to 2018, teachers of the Mongolian Faculty undertook ten scientific expeditions to the Oirat-inhabited areas of Xinjiang. Goals. The article seeks to introduce the history and results of field expeditions to Xinjiang made during 41 years in order to record new songs of the Jangar epic. For the first time in the history of modern Mongolian studies, the paper describes the results of large-scale field works that have been carried out for four decades. During the first expedition in 1977 to Hoboksar, a University teacher Chojinjav managed to meet the prominent Oirat storyteller Yerempil and record six songs of the Jangar epic. In 1978, the expedition already consisted of three researchers and explored Bortala Mongol and Ili Kazakh autonomous prefectures. In those days, over 40 storytellers were identified and 60 songs of the epic were recorded. Each subsequent expedition brought its own results. One of the longest search expeditions took place in 1996, which lasted almost thirteen months and covered the Bortala Mongol, Ili Kazakh and Bayingolin autonomous prefectures, including Tarbagatai district. During that time, the University teacher D. Taya identified more than 40 storytellers and recorded 90 songs of the Jangar. Conclusion. Thus, for four decades, the University of Inner Mongolia was conducting systematic and systematic search works which gave tangible results — names of new talented storytellers-jangarchis were discovered, a huge layer of new and numerous versions of already known chapters of the Jangar were recorded but most importantly — scientific confirmation of the existence of a living epic tradition among the Oirats of Xinjiang was obtained.

Craig Aurtz Tombet, Amine El Houmaidi, Mohammed Aynaou et al.

Testicular ENKTCL is a rare disease. Asia is the most affected. Primary testicular NK/T-cell lymphoma is rare. Metastases are early and the prognosis is poor. Metastases mainly involve the lymph nodes, skin, contralateral testis, bone marrow, spleen and central nervous system. Nasal metastasis giving rise to bifocal presentation is extremely rare. We report the management of a patient initially seen for a nasal swelling with a hidden history of scrotal swelling, in whom nasal biopsies as well as the analysis of the orchidectomy part made it possible to retain the diagnosis of ENKTCL of the testis with a nasal metastasis.

I Gustu Agung Ayu Mas Ratnawati

Niall D. Ferguson

Jean-Gabriel Young, Guillaume St-Onge, Edward Laurence et al.

Network growth processes can be understood as generative models of the structure and history of complex networks. This point of view naturally leads to the problem of network archaeology: reconstructing all the past states of a network from its structure---a difficult permutation inference problem. In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian formulation of network archaeology, with a generalization of preferential attachment as our generative mechanism. We develop a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm to evaluate the posterior averages of this model, as well as an efficient heuristic that uncovers a history well correlated with the true one, in polynomial time. We use these methods to identify and characterize a phase transition in the quality of the reconstructed history, when they are applied to artificial networks generated by the model itself. Despite the existence of a no-recovery phase, we find that nontrivial inference is possible in a large portion of the parameter space as well as on empirical data.

Mariateresa Crosta

This essay demonstrates the key role of Astronomy in Botticelli's "Venus and Mars-NG915" painting, to date only very partially understood. Worthwhile coincidences among the principles of the Ficinian philosophy, the historical characters involved and the compositional elements of the painting, show how the astronomical knowledge of that time strongly influenced this masterpiece. First, Astronomy provides its precise dating since the artist used the astronomical ephemerides of his time, albeit preserving a mythological meaning, and a clue for Botticelli's signature. Second, it allows the correlation among Botticelli's creative intention, the historical facts and the astronomical phenomena such as the heliacal rising of the planet Venus in conjunction with the Aquarius constellation dating back to the earliest representations of Venus in Mesopotamian culture. This work not only bears a significant value for the history of science and art, but, in the current era of three-dimensional mapping of billion stars about to be delivered by Gaia, states the role of astronomical heritage in Western culture. Finally, following the same method, a precise astronomical dating for the famous Primavera painting is suggested.