Haonan Yang, Chandreyee Maitra, Frank Haberl
et al.
The first four all-sky surveys with eROSITA the soft X-ray instrument on board the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) satellite revealed a new X-ray source, eRASSU J012422.9-724248, in the Magellanic Bridge, near the Eastern Wing of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). We performed a broadband timing and spectral analysis using the optical and X-ray data of eRASSU J012422.9-724248. Using the X-ray observations with eROSITA, Swift, NuSTAR and optical data from the optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) and the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO), we confirm the nature of eRASSU J012422.9-724248 as a Be/X-ray binary (BeXRB) pulsar in the Magellanic bridge. The position is coincident with that of an early-type star (OGLE ID SMC732.10.7). We detect the spin period at 341.71 s in NuSTAR data and infer a period of 63.65 days from the 15 year monitoring with OGLE, that we interpret as the orbital period of the system. A tentative CRSF at ~12.3 keV is identified in NuSTAR spectra with ~1.8-sigma. The source appears to show a persistent X-ray luminosity and an optical magnitude transition on the long timescale. We propose eRASSU J012422.9-724248 is a new member of the class of persistent BeXRBs.
The research focuses on nicknames sourced from our survey, as well as on those received from Crimean Tatar periodical press through which this type of anthroponyms have been studied, interpreted and systematized.
The purpose of the study is to select, systematize and etymologically analyze Crimean Tatar nicknames used in various regions of the Crimean Peninsula.
The features leading to denomination are: appearance and other physiological characteristics, profession, personality and the deeds of a person. Such characteristics as historical data on the origin of the family (the name of a clan or tribe), the social status, faith of a person have less likely been a reason for nicknaming.
The article considers nicknames of noble people (e.g. Crimean khans and the family name, nickname derivatives of clans having a different status) as well as nicknames given to common folk, and describes their evaluative component.
Besides the tradition of people nicknaming, villages were also awarded nicknames.
The structure and meaning of nicknames differed within the dialects of the Crimean Tatar language. At the same time, there used to be nicknames common to all regions of the peninsula. Crimean Tatar nicknames have both clear and vague etymology.
The research provides with a more detailed classification of Crimean Tatar nicknames. An attempt has been made to give an etymological interpretation of individual nicknames and determine their dialect.
Relevance of the publication of the source. The text is an annotated translation of Russian publications by Fedir Shmit (1877–1837) in the Kharkiv newspaper “Yuzhny Kray” in January 1915. In lengthy stories published in eight issues of the newspaper, a specialist in the history of Byzantium and Rus-Ukraine Art, a museum expert, professor, and dean of the Faculty of History and Philology of Kharkiv University shares his impressions of his time in German captivity (August 1914—early January 1915) and reflects on the causes, course, and prospects of the Great War. The scientist uses the term “captivity” to describe his forced stay in Germany from August 1914 to early January 1915, where, thanks to the help of colleagues, he was able to continue his scientific research, wait for an exchange, and return to Kharkiv.
The publication updates a little-known page in the scientist's life, since these memories have not been the subject of attention of scientists and, as a rule, are only mentioned in passing in biographical studies, and also makes available to the general public a translation into Ukrainian of a significant source on the history of World War I and Kharkiv University.
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.
The efforts undertaken in 1895 to organize a permanent mission of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Rome culminated in the establishment in 1903 of the position of scientific correspondent, to which Professor of Russian History at Yuryev University E. F. Schmourlo (1854–1934) was elected. His task was to identify as fully as possible the materials of Roman, Italian and European archives and libraries on Russian history. The collected documents were supposed to be published in a series of thematic collections and collection of materials. In the first series, an incomplete collection of documents for 1578–1581 was published, and in the second, four volumes of thematic publications (three of them in two issues). The scientific correspondent formed a large special library, which was intended to serve his needs and the needs of those Russian researchers who would come to conduct their research in Rome. To facilitate future archival work, he was also entrusted with the compilation of a paleographic collection. Thanks to persistence and some additional efforts, the scientific correspondent received permission to work in the Archives of the Congregation for the Propaganda of the Faith, closed to a wide circle of researchers, and collected many new materials there. Unfortunately, the broadly conceived scientific undertaking could not be fully realized. A Russian institute like those national scientific institutions that appeared there at the end of the 19th century after the opening of the Vatican Archives to researchers was not created in Rome. E. F. Schmourlo proposed a project for such an Institute to the Academy of Sciences in 1917. In connection with the outbreak of World War I, the activities of the scientific correspondent changed significantly – in 1915–1916 he was assigned to oversee the protection of “historical monuments and scientific collections in the area of military operations”. Then in 1918–1919, after the “October Revolution” in Russia, he actively joined the work of the anti-Bolshevik organization “Union for the Revival of Russia in Unity with the Allies” for some time. Having found himself a forced emigrant and having practically lost contact with the Academy of Sciences, he continued to fulfill his duties and conduct scientific research as much as possible. At the end of 1924, it became clear that this work was already difficult to do in Rome, especially since in December 1924 the Academy of Sciences decided to abolish the position of scientific correspondent. Having received its consent to transfer the library of the scientific correspondent in Rome to the Institute of Eastern Europe (Istituto per l’Europa Orientale) for temporary use for 10 years, having sold his personal library and received a pension from the Czechoslovak government, E. F. Schmourlo moved to Prague at the end of 1924, where he headed the Russian Historical Society, which he had organized in 1925. In 1935, his archive was transferred to the RZIA in Prague, from where it was transported to Moscow in 1945 (currently – GARF).
Philology. Linguistics, Slavic languages. Baltic languages. Albanian languages
This article is devoted to the research of a group of scholars from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice who over the course of several decades – especially starting from the 1970s, and partly up to now – have studied the cultural and political relationships between Russia and Asia. Some of these scholars were specialists in Russian studies, others came from orientalist disciplines (in particular Iranian and Turkish studies), but showed an in-depth interest – also based on acquaintance with the language – in Russia and the Soviet Union. Their research has produced a large number of publications, of a predominantly literary and historical nature, which constitute an important contribution to the knowledge of Russian-Eastern interactions, with particular reference to the Caucasus, but also to Central Asia, Crimea and the Volga region. Some aspects of this ‘Venetian school’ of Russian-Asian studies can be very useful, albeit counter-current, for present-day research on the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet area.
History of Eastern Europe, Slavic languages. Baltic languages. Albanian languages
Abdollah Masoud Darya, Muhammad Mubasshir Shaikh, Grzegorz Nykiel
et al.
This study investigates the spatial and temporal characteristics of L1 amplitude scintillation-causing ionospheric irregularities over the Eastern Arabian Peninsula during the ascending phase of solar cycle 25 (years 2020--2023). The temporal occurrences of weak and strong scintillation were separated by sunset, with weak scintillation observed predominantly pre-sunset during the winter solstice and strong scintillation observed mainly post-sunset during the autumnal equinox. Strong scintillation was much more pronounced in 2023 compared to the other three years, indicating a strong influence of solar activity. Spatially, weak-scintillation-causing irregularities exhibited a wide distribution in azimuth and elevation, while strong-scintillation-causing irregularities were concentrated southwards. The combined analysis of S4 and rate of total electron content index (ROTI) suggested that small-scale ionospheric irregularities were present in both pre- and post-sunset periods, while large-scale irregularities were only seen during the post-sunset period. Furthermore, the presence of southward traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs) during the 2023 autumnal equinox was confirmed with the total electron content anomaly ($Δ\text{TEC}$), while the Ionospheric Bubble Index (IBI) provided by the Swarm mission was unable to confirm the presence of equatorial plasma bubbles during the same period. Observations from the FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 mission indicated that strong-scintillation-causing irregularities were more prevalent under the F2-layer peak, while the weak-scintillation-causing irregularities were mostly observed at the E-layer, F2-layer, and above the F2-layer.
Using fine-grained, publicly available data, this paper studies the short-term association between environmental factors, i.e., weather and air pollution characteristics, and weekly mortality rates in small geographical regions in Europe. Hereto, we develop a mortality modeling framework where a baseline model describes a region-specific, seasonal trend observed within the historical weekly mortality rates. Using a machine learning algorithm, we then explain deviations from this baseline using features constructed from environmental data that capture anomalies and extreme events. We illustrate our proposed modeling framework through a case study on more than 550 NUTS 3 regions (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, level 3) in 20 European countries. Using interpretation tools, we unravel insights into which environmental features are most important when estimating excess or deficit mortality relative to the baseline and explore how these features interact. Moreover, we investigate harvesting effects through our constructed weekly mortality modeling framework. Our findings show that temperature-related features are most influential in explaining mortality deviations from the baseline over short time periods. Furthermore, we find that environmental features prove particularly beneficial in southern regions for explaining elevated levels of mortality, and we observe evidence of a harvesting effect related to heat waves.
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.
In this research, we quantify an inflow of women into science in the past three decades. Structured Big Data allow us to estimate the contribution of women scientists to the growth of science by disciplines (N = STEMM 14 disciplines) and over time (1990-2023). A monolithic segment of STEMM science emerges from this research as divided between the disciplines in which the growth was powerfully driven by women - and the disciplines in which the role of women was marginal. There are four disciplines in which 50% of currently publishing scientists are women; and five disciplines in which more than 50% of currently young scientists are women. But there is also a cluster of four highly mathematized disciplines (MATH, COMP, PHYS, and ENG) in which the growth of science is only marginally driven by women. Digital traces left by scientists in their publications indexed in global datasets open two new dimensions in large-scale academic profession studies: time and gender. The growth of science in Europe was accompanied by growth in the number of women scientists, but with powerful cross-disciplinary and cross-generational differentiations. We examined the share of women scientists coming from ten different age cohorts for 32 European and four comparator countries (the USA, Canada, Australia, and Japan). Our study sample was N = 1,740,985 scientists (including 39.40% women scientists). Three critical methodological challenges of using structured Big Data of the bibliometric type were discussed: gender determination, academic age determination, and discipline determination.
This article explores the use of amulets on children’s bodies, drawing on empirical examples from Mugum in western Nepal and theoretical insights from anthropology of personhood, kinship and infrastructure. Taking four-year old Tashi and his family in Mugum as a starting point, we show how the status of toddlers and small children is “extraordinary”; they are physically fragile, emotionally uncontrolled, and weakly connected, and in need of special protection. In the complex transition to ordinary personhood, amulets serve as one of many “technologies of protection” for children (Garrett 2013, 189). We suggest that amulets act as a stable infrastructure that enables a hope for children to live ordinary lives, and argue that the significance of these means of protection intersects closely with notions of marginality.
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The article raises the question of language items (words or phrases) which could be the markers of a textual relationship between Biblical translations and their originals, on the examples of two East Slavonic texts created presumably in the 15th century in the Ruthenian lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The article is based on the data of the edited Slavonic-Russian Pentateuch and two versions of the East Slavonic translation of the Song of Song, from the museum (Russian State Library, Moscow, mid-16th century) and Vilna copies (Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Vilnius, first quarter of the 16th century), including the glossary for both versions from the so-called Zabelin Set, a cluster of Biblical texts translated from Jewish sources into Old Ruthenian from the 17th-century manuscript (State Historical Museum, Moscow). These examples demonstrate the importance of the search for possible intermediary languages for texts, which, by all formal indicators, are the fruit of direct language and literary contacts between Slavs and Jews. There are proposed methods of ascertaining an original language and the language of a possible intermediary through a system of linguistic-textual markers. The weakest linguistic-textual markers are Hebrew loanwords written with Cyrillic script, especially when these are proper names only. Such forms do not exclude the possibility that their source was not the Masoretic Text itself, but translations of the latter made within the framework of the same Jewish tradition, i.e., the Targums (cfr. in particular the ‘Old Yiddish Targum’ and the ‘Judeo-Turkic Targum’). The most reliable linguistic-textual marker turns out to be the presence of words that are not just foreign-language borrowings and not from the Hebrew language, but that also qualify as hapaxes that were not adopted by the language of the book tradition into which the corresponding translation was made. Between these two extreme types of markers there are intermediate steps, which in different ways reveal the presence of an intermediary language and an intermediary text, but as a whole, all the markers speak in favor of the existence of these intermediaries.
History of Eastern Europe, Slavic languages. Baltic languages. Albanian languages
Kalach cult caves are dug out in a chalk butte in the town of Kalach, Voronezh Region. Their total length makes 892 m. The caves contain rooms of different use: temples, chapels, cells, corridors, and more. Central and northern sections of cave labyrinths are known to replicate the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem representing Christ’s way of the Cross. The letters found in D.M. Strukov’s fund in the Russian State Historical Archive may enhance our insights into Kalach labyrinths dating. Concurrently, because of a contradictory character of the accounts under study, it is inconclusive exactly what the time of Kalach caves construction is.
We analyze the application of the history state formalism to quantum walks. The formalism allows one to describe the whole walk through a pure quantum history state, which can be derived from a timeless eigenvalue equation. It naturally leads to the notion of system-time entanglement of the walk, which can be considered as a measure of the number of orthogonal states visited in the walk. We then focus on one-dimensional discrete quantum walks, where it is shown that such entanglement is independent of the initial spin orientation for real Hadamard-type coin operators and real initial states (in the standard basis) with definite site parity. Moreover, in the case of an initially localized particle it can be identified with the entanglement of the unitary global operator that generates the whole history state, which is related to its entangling power and can be analytically evaluated. Besides, it is shown that the evolution of the spin subsystem can also be described through a spin history state with an extended clock. A connection between its average entanglement (over all initial states) and that of the operator generating this state is also derived. A quantum circuit for generating the quantum walk history state is provided as well.
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.
Based on string theory's framework, the gauge/gravity duality, also known as holography, has the ability to solve practical problems in low energy physical systems like metals and fluids. Holographic applications open a path for conversation and collaboration between the theory-driven, high energy culture of string theory and fields like nuclear and condensed matter physics, which in contrast place great emphasis on the empirical evidence that experiment provides. This paper takes a look at holography's history, from its roots in string theory to its present-day applications that are challenging the cultural identity of the field. I will focus on two of these applications: holographic QCD and holographic superconductivity, highlighting some of the (often incompatible) historical influences, motives, and epistemic values at play, as well as the subcultural shifts that help the collaborations work. The extent to which holographic research -- arguably string theory's most successful and prolific area -- must change its subcultural identity in order to function in fields outside of string theory reflects its changing nature and the field's uncertain future. Does string theory lose its identity in the low-energy applications that holography provides? Does holography still belong under string theory's umbrella, or is it destined to form new subcultures with each of its fields of application? I find that the answers to these questions are dynamic, interconnected, and highly dependent on string theory's relationship with its field of application. In some cases, holography can maintain the goals and values it inherited from string theory. In others, it instead adopts the goals and values of the field in which it is applied. These examples highlight a need for the STS community to expand its treatment of string theory beyond its relationship with empiricism and role as a theory of quantum gravity.
The paper presents a collection of maps by Johann Isidor Jelínek depicting the Šebetov estate in the 18th century. Johann Isidor Jelínek was an assistant surveyor and an apprentice of the architect František Antonín Grimm. His maps of the Šebetov estate capture in detail various formations in the landscape and are a valuable topographic source for exploring the landscape of the mid-18th century.
Auxiliary sciences of history, History of Central Europe
Between the ninth and seventh centuries BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire became the largest the world had yet seen. In the process of imperial conquest, the Assyrian state incorporated previously foreign territories and people into their world. Landscapes, materials, and the labor of conquered bodies became a part of the Assyrian royal palaces of northern Iraq, both as elements of their construction and as themes emphasized within the extensive visual programs of the palace reliefs. Within and through visual depiction of enemy bodies and foreign landscapes, in the process of being (often violently) reshaped by Assyrian hands, Neo-Assyrian kings brought the farthest reaches of their world into the center of imperial power. This article considers how specific strategies of representation in palace art allowed the Assyrian palace to serve as a microcosm of the empire and a map of its borders. Palace art emphasized the remade, reworked, or recreated, defining “Assyrianness” as that which remakes and has been remade. As a central act of remaking, I examine representations of captive or submissive foreigners, whose presence in the reliefs commemorates their humiliation while compounding and enhancing it in the very ways that these figures are depicted: cringing, deficient, and physiologically incorrect. I pay particular attention to examples from the late King Ashurbanipal’s reign, in which foreign leaders are singled out through representation with distinctive facial features. I argue that this act of (literally) drawing distinctions was an inherently imperial process, one that both expressed and enabled an ideology of expansion and control.