This article aims to demonstrate the essential role of compassion in the puritan practice of spiritual healing, as it developed in England from the end of the reign of Elizabeth I to the end of the 1630s. While the pastoral care established by puritan divines to address the spiritual crises caused by soteriological anxiety has received some scholarly attention, the question of the emotional resources mobilised by spiritual consolers remains a neglected theme in existing scholarship. Yet, if spiritual comfort is a discursive exchange, the interaction it involves is not solely verbal but also encompasses a significant emotional dimension. In particular, the guides to the practice of spiritual comfort consistently identify compassion as an indispensable quality for the exercise of spiritual comfort: it allows the consoler to find the right balance between gentleness and firmness in their interaction with the afflicted; more generally, it contributes to creating a protective therapeutic environment, based on a relationship of trust and benevolence, within which the afflicted benefits from constant spiritual and emotional support.
History (General) and history of Europe, French literature - Italian literature - Spanish literature - Portuguese literature
Abstract This article analyzes the divergence between China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), despite their textual similarities. It argues that China’s approach to data protection is shaped by distinct domestic understandings of “risk,” rooted in past legislation, judicial practices, and social concerns. Using focal point theory, the authors identify three key dimensions of risk in China: large-scale participation, economic loss, and threats from third parties. These focal points explain why China’s risk-based approach prioritizes different enforcement goals than the GDPR. The article also shows how these differences manifest in several areas, including the definition of personal information, the regulation of automated decision-making, and the design of enforcement authorities. Ultimately, the article challenges the assumption that legal diffusion through the “Brussels Effect” leads to uniform global standards. Instead, it highlights how domestic cultural and institutional factors reshape transplanted laws, creating seemingly performative enforcement that reflects localized regulatory logics.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences
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.
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.
This paper aims to examine the literary strategies and political perspectives of Somnuek Chusil, a renowned Nora artist in the Southern Thai region. Contrast to recent international and Thai research on Nora dance that focused on the aspect of ritual, social function, and adaptation under the condition of global modernity, the authors’ analysis centers on the noted Nora artist’s lyrical composition, encompassing 40 of lyrics, to understand his political worldview and literary strategy as part of local experience to the changing of Thai society. The findings reveal four language strategies employed by Somnuek—simile, hyperbole, the use of idioms, and incorporation of the Southern Thai dialect. Of particular note is the dialect’s distinctive role in critiquing political figures and instilling a sense of awareness regarding rights, freedom, and democratic citizenship. Despite the diverse interpretations of political concepts in global academia, Somnuek skillfully harnesses various dialects and writing techniques making him being locally competent interlocutor, and ascending to the status of a famous folk artist in southern Thailand.
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.
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.
Objective To develop and validate two new fracture risk algorithms (QFractureScores) for estimating the individual risk of osteoporotic fracture or hip fracture over 10 years. Design Prospective open cohort study with routinely collected data from 357 general practices to develop the scores and from 178 practices to validate the scores. Setting General practices in England and Wales. Participants 1 183 663 women and 1 174 232 men aged 30-85 in the derivation cohort, who contributed 7 898 208 and 8 049 306 person years of observation, respectively. There were 24 350 incident diagnoses of osteoporotic fracture in women and 7934 in men, and 9302 incident diagnoses of hip fracture in women and 5424 in men. Main outcome measures First (incident) diagnosis of osteoporotic fracture (vertebral, distal radius, or hip) and incident hip fracture recorded in general practice records. Results Use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), age, body mass index (BMI), smoking status, recorded alcohol use, parental history of osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, asthma, tricyclic antidepressants, corticosteroids, history of falls, menopausal symptoms, chronic liver disease, gastrointestinal malabsorption, and other endocrine disorders were significantly and independently associated with risk of osteoporotic fracture in women. Some variables were significantly associated with risk of osteoporotic fracture but not with risk of hip fracture. The predictors for men for osteoporotic and hip fracture were age, BMI, smoking status, recorded alcohol use, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, asthma, tricyclic antidepressants, corticosteroids, history of falls, and liver disease. The hip fracture algorithm had the best performance among men and women. It explained 63.94% of the variation in women and 63.19% of the variation in men. The D statistic values for discrimination were highest for hip fracture in women (2.73) and men (2.68) and were over twice the magnitude of the corresponding values for osteoporotic fracture. The ROC statistics for hip fracture were also high: 0.89 in women and 0.86 for men versus 0.79 and 0.69, respectively, for the osteoporotic fracture outcome. The algorithms were well calibrated with predicted risks closely matching observed risks. The QFractureScore for hip fracture also had good performance for discrimination and calibration compared with the FRAX (fracture risk assessment) algorithm. Conclusions These new algorithms can predict risk of fracture in primary care populations in the UK without laboratory measurements and are therefore suitable for use in both clinical settings and for self assessment (www.qfracture.org). QFractureScores could be used to identify patients at high risk of fracture who might benefit from interventions to reduce their risk.
With the evolution of pre-trained language models, current open-domain dialogue systems have achieved great progress in conducting one-session conversations. In contrast, Multi-Session Conversation (MSC), which consists of multiple sessions over a long term with the same user, is under-investigated. In this paper, we propose History-Aware Hierarchical Transformer (HAHT) for multi-session open-domain dialogue. HAHT maintains a long-term memory of history conversations and utilizes history information to understand current conversation context and generate well-informed and context-relevant responses. Specifically, HAHT first encodes history conversation sessions hierarchically into a history memory. Then, HAHT leverages historical information to facilitate the understanding of the current conversation context by encoding the history memory together with the current context with attention-based mechanisms. Finally, to explicitly utilize historical information, HAHT uses a history-aware response generator that switches between a generic vocabulary and a history-aware vocabulary. Experimental results on a large-scale MSC dataset suggest that the proposed HAHT model consistently outperforms baseline models. Human evaluation results support that HAHT generates more human-like, context-relevant and history-relevant responses than baseline models.
Hanumanth Srikanth Cheruvu, Xin Liu, Jeffrey E Grice
et al.
The dataset represented in this article is referred to by the review article entitled “Topical drug delivery: history, percutaneous absorption, and product development” (MS Roberts et al., 2021) [1]. The dataset contains maximal flux (Jmax), and permeability coefficient (kp) values collated from In Vitro human skin Permeation Test (IVPT) reports published to date for various drugs, xenobiotics, and other solutes applied to human epidermis from aqueous solutions. Also included are each solute's physicochemical properties and the experimental conditions, such as temperature, skin thickness, and skin integrity, under which the data was generated. This database is limited to diluted or saturated aqueous solutions of solutes applied on human epidermal membranes or isolated stratum corneum in large volumes so that there was minimal change in the donor phase concentration. Included in this paper are univariate Quantitative Structure-epidermal Permeability Relationships (QSPR) in which the solute epidermal permeation parameters (kp, and Jmax) are related to potential individual solute physicochemical properties, such as molecular weight (MW), log octanol-water partition coefficient (log P), melting point (MP), hydrogen bonding (acceptor - Ha, donor – Hd), by scatter plots. This data was used in the associated review article to externally validate existing QSPR regression equations used to forecast the kp and Jmax for new therapeutic agents and chemicals. The data may also be useful in developing new QSPRs that may aid in: (1) drug choice and (2) product design for both topical and transdermal delivery, as well as (3) characterizing the potential skin exposure of hazardous substances.
Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics, Science (General)
Del Carmen Encinas Reguero, M.; Quijada Sagredo, M. (eds) (2021). Tragic Rhetoric. The Rhetorical Dimensions of Greek Tragedy. Roma: Aracne. Le Rane Studi 69, 412 pp.
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature, History of the Greco-Roman World
We are concerned with the initial value problem governed by generalized Rayleigh-Stokes equations, where the nonlinearity depends on history states and takes values in Hilbert scales of negative order. The solvability and Hölder regularity of solutions are proved by using fixed point arguments and embeddings of fractional Sobolev spaces. An application to a related inverse source problem is given.
This general introduction to the Arabic Language, now available in paperback, places special emphasis on the history and variation of the language. Concentrating on the difference between the two types of Arabic - the Classical standard language and the dialects - Kees Versteegh charts the history and development of the Arabic language from the earliest beginnings to modern times. The reader is offered a solid grounding in the structure of the language, its historical context and its use in various literary and non-literary genres, as well as an understanding of the role of Arabic as a cultural, religious and political world language. Intended as an introductory guide for students of Arabic, it will also be a useful tool for discussions both from a historical linguistic and from a socio-linguistic perspective. Coverage includes all aspects of the history of Arabic, the Arabic linguistic tradition, Arabic dialects and Arabic as a world language. Links are made between linguistic history and cultural history, while the author emphasises the role of contacts between Arabic and other languages. This important book will be an ideal text for all those wishing to acquire an understanding or develop their knowledge of the Arabic language. Key Features: * A general introduction to the Arabic language * Accessible and effective communication of information * Impeccably documented * Updated guide to further reading * User-friendly index
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.
In the main article [CQG 38 (2021) 055003], a new "canonical" form for the Lewis metrics of the Weyl class has been obtained, depending only on three parameters -- Komar mass and angular momentum per unit length, plus the angle deficit -- corresponding to a coordinate system fixed to the "distant stars" and an everywhere timelike Killing vector field. Such form evinces the local but non-global static character of the spacetime, and striking parallelisms with the electromagnetic analogue. We discuss here its generality, main physical features and important limits (the Levi-Civita static cylinder, and spinning cosmic strings). We contrast it on geometric and physical grounds with the Kerr spacetime -- as an example of a metric which is locally non-static.