The IllustrisTNG simulation suite, particularly TNG50, was reported to have generated a notable population of elongated, bar-like structures within galaxies classified as Early-Type Galaxies (ETGs). In this work, we revisit the nature of these structures at $z=0$ using a morphology-agnostic census. We find that these features are ubiquitous ($f_{\rm bar} \sim 75-80\%$) in dispersion-dominated galaxies ($D/T < 0.2$) in TNG50-1. They are not prolate rotators (rotating around their long axis), but genuine non-axisymmetric instabilities characterized by coherent, albeit slow, pattern speeds. Unlike the fast bars found in Late-Type Galaxies, these bar-like structures in ETGs are physically longer ($\gtrsim 3$ kpc), rotate significantly slower ($Ω_p \lesssim 20$ km s$^{-1}$ kpc$^{-1}$), and reside in red, gas-poor, dispersion-dominated systems. By tracing the evolutionary history of these systems, we demonstrate that such structures originate as typical fast bars in gas-richer discs at higher redshifts ($z \gtrsim 0.2$). They survive the galaxy quenching phase, undergoing secular deceleration and lengthening due to dynamical friction, ultimately appearing as slow, fossilized rotators in the $z=0$ red sequence. We conclude that the specific excess of bar-like structures in TNG50 ETGs likely reflects a combination of the imperfect baryonic physics of the simulation (over-producing these bar-like structures or their host ETGs) and a potential observational blind spot regarding long-lived, secularly evolved bars in hot stellar systems.
Generative AI tools often answer questions using source documents, e.g., through retrieval augmented generation. Current groundedness and hallucination evaluations largely frame the relationship between an answer and its sources as binary (the answer is either supported or unsupported). However, this obscures both the syntactic moves (e.g., direct quotation vs. paraphrase) and the interpretive moves (e.g., induction vs. deduction) performed when models reformulate evidence into an answer. This limits both benchmarking and user-facing provenance interfaces. We propose the development of a reader-centred taxonomy of grounding as a set of support relations between generated statements and source documents. We explain how this might be synthesised from prior research in linguistics and philosophy of language, and evaluated through a benchmark and human annotation protocol. Such a framework would enable interfaces that communicate not just whether a claim is grounded, but how.
Nicholas Zolman, Christian Lagemann, Urban Fasel
et al.
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown significant promise for uncovering sophisticated control policies that interact in complex environments, such as stabilizing a tokamak fusion reactor or minimizing the drag force on an object in a fluid flow. However, DRL requires an abundance of training examples and may become prohibitively expensive for many applications. In addition, the reliance on deep neural networks often results in an uninterpretable, black-box policy that may be too computationally expensive to use with certain embedded systems. Recent advances in sparse dictionary learning, such as the sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy), have shown promise for creating efficient and interpretable data-driven models in the low-data regime. In this work we introduce SINDy-RL, a unifying framework for combining SINDy and DRL to create efficient, interpretable, and trustworthy representations of the dynamics model, reward function, and control policy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches on benchmark control environments and flow control problems, including gust mitigation on a 3D NACA 0012 airfoil at $Re=1000$. SINDy-RL achieves comparable performance to modern DRL algorithms using significantly fewer interactions in the environment and results in an interpretable control policy orders of magnitude smaller than a DRL policy.
In the late 4th century, bishops utilized the so-called ius intercessionis right to intervene in order to help those in need, be they the persecuted, the accused or the convicted. These actions of a bishop were rooted foremost in the idea of mercy and it was also due to this right that a bishop became the one to decide about the granting of the right to asylum – a right which was gradually extended to Christian churches at the time. St. Augustine encounters the issue of Christian asylum as the bishop of Hippo Regius in Africa mainly in his preserved correspondence, but he talks about seeking sanctuary in Christian churches also in one of his sermons, specifically in Sermo 302 delivered on the feast of St. Lawrence. This paper focuses on presenting the circumstances of a violent act in Hippo Regius and its implications to potentially sanctuary seeking in local Christian church, particularly on the ground of analysis of post sermonem to Sermo 302.
Early Christian literature. Fathers of the Church, etc., Philosophy of religion. Psychology of religion. Religion in relation to other subjects
Coupled oscillator networks provide mathematical models for interacting periodic processes. If the coupling is weak, phase reduction -- the reduction of the dynamics onto an invariant torus -- captures the emergence of collective dynamical phenomena, such as synchronization. While a first-order approximation of the dynamics on the torus may be appropriate in some situations, higher-order phase reductions become necessary, for example, when the coupling strength increases. However, these are generally hard to compute and thus they have only been derived in special cases: This includes globally coupled Stuart--Landau oscillators, where the limit cycle of the uncoupled nonlinear oscillator is circular as the amplitude is independent of the phase. We go beyond this restriction and derive second-order phase reductions for coupled oscillators for arbitrary networks of coupled nonlinear oscillators with phase-dependent amplitude, a scenario more reminiscent of real-world oscillations. We analyze how the deformation of the limit cycle affects the stability of important dynamical states, such as full synchrony and splay states. By identifying higher-order phase interaction terms with hyperedges of a hypergraph, we obtain natural classes of coupled phase oscillator dynamics on hypergraphs that adequately capture the dynamics of coupled limit cycle oscillators.
Alyssa M. Vanderbeek, Anna A. Vidovszky, Jessica L. Ross
et al.
A crucial task for a randomized controlled trial (RCT) is to specify a statistical method that can yield an efficient estimator and powerful test for the treatment effect. A novel and effective strategy to obtain efficient and powerful treatment effect inferences is to incorporate predictions from generative artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms into covariate adjustment for the regression analysis of a RCT. Training a generative AI algorithm on historical control data enables one to construct a digital twin generator (DTG) for RCT participants, which utilizes a participant's baseline covariates to generate a probability distribution for their potential control outcome. Summaries of the probability distribution from the DTG are highly predictive of the trial outcome, and adjusting for these features via regression can thus improve the quality of treatment effect inferences, while satisfying regulatory guidelines on statistical analyses, for a RCT. However, a critical assumption in this strategy is homoskedasticity, or constant variance of the outcome conditional on the covariates. In the case of heteroskedasticity, existing covariate adjustment methods yield inefficient estimators and underpowered tests. We propose to address heteroskedasticity via a weighted prognostic covariate adjustment methodology (Weighted PROCOVA) that adjusts for both the mean and variance of the regression model using information obtained from the DTG. We prove that our method yields unbiased treatment effect estimators, and demonstrate via comprehensive simulation studies and case studies from Alzheimer's disease that it can reduce the variance of the treatment effect estimator, maintain the Type I error rate, and increase the power of the test for the treatment effect from 80% to 85%~90% when the variances from the DTG can explain 5%~10% of the variation in the RCT participants' outcomes.
Geoscientists, as well as researchers in many fields, need to read a huge amount of literature to locate, extract, and aggregate relevant results and data to enable future research or to build a scientific database, but there is no existing system to support this use case well. In this paper, based on the findings of a formative study about how geoscientists collaboratively annotate literature and extract and aggregate data, we proposed DeepShovel, a publicly-available AI-assisted data extraction system to support their needs. DeepShovel leverages the state-of-the-art neural network models to support researcher(s) easily and accurately annotate papers (in the PDF format) and extract data from tables, figures, maps, etc. in a human-AI collaboration manner. A follow-up user evaluation with 14 researchers suggested DeepShovel improved users' efficiency of data extraction for building scientific databases, and encouraged teams to form a larger scale but more tightly-coupled collaboration.
Flavia Serra, Veronika Peralta, Adriana Marotta
et al.
The importance of context in data quality (DQ) was shown many years ago and nowadays is widely accepted. Early approaches and surveys defined DQ as \textit{fitness for use} and showed the influence of context on DQ. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) for investigating how context is taken into account in recent proposals for DQ management. We specifically present the planning and execution of the SLR, the analysis criteria and our results reflecting the relationship between context and DQ in the state of the art and, particularly, how that context is defined and used for DQ management.
W erze patrystycznej chętnie pochylano się nad etymologią imion biblijnych, ponieważ Ojcowie Kościoła byli przekonani, że imiona używane w Biblii zawierają ukryte znaczenie, jak utrzymywał św. Augustyn w De doctrina christiana 2, 38, 56-57 (por. PL 34, 61-62). Na Wschodzie etymologią imion zajmował się obszernie Orygenes, na Zachodzie zaś św. Hieronim ze Strydonu. Niniejszy artykuł przedstawia wybrane patrystyczne interpretacje na temat imienia Maria, opierając się głównie na przekazie Hieronima (por. Liber de nominibus hebraicis, PL 23, 771-858), który jako pierwszy spośród Ojców Kościoła zachodniego zajął się wyprowadzaniem etymologii nazw własnych. Etymologie zaproponowane przez Strydończyka (Maria = illuminatrix/illuminata/illuminant me isti, smyrna maris, stella maris, amarum mare, domina) konfrontujemy z dzisiejszym stanem wiedzy o językach semickich i zestawiamy je z greckimi Onomastica sacra. W podpunkcie ostatnim zaś analizujemy wybrane pohieronimowe interpretacje tegoż imienia (Ambroży z Mediolanu, Eucheriusz z Lyonu, Izydor z Sewilli).
Early Christian literature. Fathers of the Church, etc., Philosophy of religion. Psychology of religion. Religion in relation to other subjects
Rytmiczny ruch naczyń, polegający na rozciąganiu i skurczu ich ścian, na skutek mechanicznego działania tłoczonej przez serce krwi dostarcza wiele istotnych informacji o pracy naszego serca, naszym samopoczuciu, emocjach. Już w starożytności doceniano jego znaczenie dla oceny mierzalnych parametrów życiowych. Nie wszystkie jednak imiona starożytnych medyków zajmujących się tą tematyką są znane i uwzględniane w narracji historii medycyny. Praxagoras, Herofilus, czy Eratistratos to imiona wielkich lekarzy, którzy w znacznym stopniu przyczynili się do badań nad pulsem, a których dzieła stały się postawą do dalszych badań nad pulsem przez Galena jego następców. Marcellinus, medyk nieznany do niedawna w historii medycyny, mocno akcentował w swoim traktacie konieczność połączenia teorii i praktyki w kształceniu przyszłych lekarzy. Jego zdaniem nauka praktyczna, pozwalała dopracować umiejętność prawidłowej oceny i sposobu mierzenia tętna, które najlepiej było wyczuwalne w nadgarstku. To właśnie dzięki zapomnianym starożytnym badaczom, znanym często tylko z przekazów ich kontynuatorów medycyna starożytna uczyniła mierzenie pulsu podstawowym narzędziem diagnozy pomocnym dla określenia problemów zdrowotnych pacjenta.
Early Christian literature. Fathers of the Church, etc., Philosophy of religion. Psychology of religion. Religion in relation to other subjects
The classical Kuramoto model consists of finitely many pairwise coupled oscillators on the circle. In many applications a simple pairwise coupling is not sufficient to describe real-world phenomena as higher-order (or group) interactions take place. Hence, we replace the classical coupling law with a very general coupling function involving higher-order terms. Furthermore, we allow for multiple populations of oscillators interacting with each other through a very general law. In our analysis, we focus on the characteristic system and the mean-field limit of this generalized class of Kuramoto models. While there are several works studying particular aspects of our program, we propose a general framework to work with all three aspects (higher-order, multi-population, and mean-field) simultaneously. Assuming identical oscillators in each population, we derive equations for the evolution of oscillator populations in the mean-field limit. First, we clarify existence and uniqueness of our set of characteristic equations, which are formulated in the space of probability measures together with the bounded-Lipschitz metric. Then, we investigate dynamical properties within the framework of the characteristic system. We identify invariant subspaces and stability of the state, in which all oscillators are synchronized within each population. Even though it turns out that this so called all-synchronized state is never asymptotically stable, under some conditions and with a suitable definition of stability, the all-synchronized state can be proven to be at least locally stable. In summary, our work provides a rigorous mathematical framework upon which the further study of multi-population higher-order coupled particle systems can be based.
Christian Molkenthin, Christian Donner, Sebastian Reich
et al.
The spatio-temporal Epidemic Type Aftershock Sequence (ETAS) model is widely used to describe the self-exciting nature of earthquake occurrences. While traditional inference methods provide only point estimates of the model parameters, we aim at a full Bayesian treatment of model inference, allowing naturally to incorporate prior knowledge and uncertainty quantification of the resulting estimates. Therefore, we introduce a highly flexible, non-parametric representation for the spatially varying ETAS background intensity through a Gaussian process (GP) prior. Combined with classical triggering functions this results in a new model formulation, namely the GP-ETAS model. We enable tractable and efficient Gibbs sampling by deriving an augmented form of the GP-ETAS inference problem. This novel sampling approach allows us to assess the posterior model variables conditioned on observed earthquake catalogues, i.e., the spatial background intensity and the parameters of the triggering function. Empirical results on two synthetic data sets indicate that GP-ETAS outperforms standard models and thus demonstrate the predictive power for observed earthquake catalogues including uncertainty quantification for the estimated parameters. Finally, a case study for the l'Aquila region, Italy, with the devastating event on 6 April 2009, is presented.
Christina Müller, Marcus Brandenburger, Christian Cachin
et al.
Blockchain technology promises to revolutionize manufacturing industries. For example, several supply-chain use-cases may benefit from transparent asset tracking and automated processes using smart contracts. Several real-world deployments exist where the transparency aspect of a blockchain is both an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time. The exposure of assets and business interaction represent critical risks. However, there are typically no confidentiality guarantees to protect the smart contract logic as well as the processed data. Trusted execution environments (TEE) are an emerging technology available in both edge or mobile-grade processors (e.g., Arm TrustZone) and server-grade processors (e.g., Intel SGX). TEEs shield both code and data from malicious attackers. This practical experience report presents TZ4Fabric, an extension of Hyperledger Fabric to leverage Arm TrustZone for the secure execution of smart contracts. Our design minimizes the trusted computing base executed by avoiding the execution of a whole Hyperledger Fabric node inside the TEE, which continues to run in untrusted environment. Instead, we restrict it to the execution of only the smart contract. The TZ4Fabric prototype exploits the open-source OP-TEE framework, as it supports deployments on cheap low-end devices (e.g., Raspberry Pis). Our experimental results highlight the performance trade-off due to the additional security guarantees provided by Arm TrustZone. TZ4Fabric will be released as open-source.
Jan Czajkowski, Christian Majenz, Christian Schaffner
et al.
Game-playing proofs constitute a powerful framework for non-quantum cryptographic security arguments, most notably applied in the context of indifferentiability. An essential ingredient in such proofs is lazy sampling of random primitives. We develop a quantum game-playing proof framework by generalizing two recently developed proof techniques. First, we describe how Zhandry's compressed quantum oracles~(Crypto'19) can be used to do quantum lazy sampling of a class of non-uniform function distributions. Second, we observe how Unruh's one-way-to-hiding lemma~(Eurocrypt'14) can also be applied to compressed oracles, providing a quantum counterpart to the fundamental lemma of game-playing. Subsequently, we use our game-playing framework to prove quantum indifferentiability of the sponge construction, assuming a random internal function.
Abstract All the major sixteenth-century Reformers knew something about the early church and used the early Fathers. As an Augustinian monk and professor of theology, however, Luther’s knowledge and use of the great Father was both deeper and more nuanced. While indebted to Augustine, Luther went further in defining what it meant for theology to be ‘scriptural’. He saw history as the interaction of God’s two regimes, and the church of every age as weak and flawed but conquering through the cross of Christ. This led him to a free use of the Fathers without being constrained to always agree with or imitate them. The comfort he received from the Apostles’ Creed in particular led him to appreciate the early creedal statements, and so it was natural for him to use them as models when formulating the new confessions required in his own day. The sixteenth-century heritage of written confessions of faith is a heritage under-appreciated but still vital for church bodies today.1