Hasil untuk "History of Germany"

Guy Tennenholtz, Jihwan Jeong, Chih-Wei Hsu et al.

Effective decision making in partially observable environments requires compressing long interaction histories into informative representations. We introduce Descriptive History Representations (DHRs): sufficient statistics characterized by their capacity to answer relevant questions about past interactions and potential future outcomes. DHRs focus on capturing the information necessary to address task-relevant queries, providing a structured way to summarize a history for optimal control. We propose a multi-agent learning framework, involving representation, decision, and question-asking components, optimized using a joint objective that balances reward maximization with the representation's ability to answer informative questions. This yields representations that capture the salient historical details and predictive structures needed for effective decision making. We validate our approach on user modeling tasks with public movie and shopping datasets, generating interpretable textual user profiles which serve as sufficient statistics for predicting preference-driven behavior of users.

Yuhui Zhu, Alessandro Biondi

Modern out-of-order CPUs heavily rely on speculative execution for performance optimization, with branch prediction serving as a cornerstone to minimize stalls and maximize efficiency. Whenever shared branch prediction resources lack proper isolation and sanitization methods, they may originate security vulnerabilities that expose sensitive data across different software contexts. This paper examines the fundamental components of modern Branch Prediction Units (BPUs) and investigates how resource sharing and contention affect two widely implemented but underdocumented features: Bias-Free Branch Prediction and Branch History Speculation. Our analysis demonstrates that these BPU features, while designed to enhance speculative execution efficiency through more accurate branch histories, can also introduce significant security risks. We show that these features can inadvertently modify the Branch History Buffer (BHB) update behavior and create new primitives that trigger malicious mis-speculations. This discovery exposes previously unknown cross-privilege attack surfaces for Branch History Injection (BHI). Based on these findings, we present three novel attack primitives: two Spectre attacks, namely Spectre-BSE and Spectre-BHS, and a cross-privilege control flow side-channel attack called BiasScope. Our research identifies corresponding patterns of vulnerable control flows and demonstrates exploitation on multiple processors. Finally, Chimera is presented: an attack demonstrator based on eBPF for a variant of Spectre-BHS that is capable of leaking kernel memory contents at 24,628 bit/s.

Hans-Jörg Epple, Teresa Domaszewska, Ann-Christin von Brünneck et al.

Abstract Introduction Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection might result in fatal outcome in patients with haematologic malignancies or those with primary or iatrogenic immunodefects. However, in countries with low tuberculosis (TB) incidence the awareness for TB is still challenging, with an increasing need due to migrating populations from regions with high TB to low TB incidence countries. Case report and epidemiological analysis A 52-year-old caucasian female, refugee from Afghanistan, presented at University Hospital Charité (Berlin, Germany) with progressive left-sided hearing loss due to ear canal obstruction as well as right axillary exophytic and ulcerating skin lesions, finally diagnosed as BRAF-V600E-mutated Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH). Following systemic chemotherapy, LCH showed complete remission (CR) with however unexpectedly progressive left-axillary lymphadenopathy. Biopsy of these lymph nodes revealed granulomatous inflammation with central caseous necroses. Mycobacterium tuberculosis DNA was undetectable in a biopsy from the lesion, but culture of fresh re-biopsy material showed growth of M. tuberculosis. Given the patient´s migration history from a high-prevalence (Afghanistan) to a low-prevalence (Germany) TB country, we also present the long-time trend of the total number of TB patients notified in Germany in 2002–2023, i.e. a total of 21 years, aggregated by country of birth. Whereas the number of TB patients born in Germany is decreasing since 2002, the number of patients born abroad exceeded the number of those born in Germany in 2012, and remained higher ever since. Conclusion Our report highlights the challenge to treat patients at the crossroads of malignancy and TB, and the need for appropriate attention and awareness of physicians of the increased TB risk in people migrating from a high- to a low-burden TB country. Also, the case demonstrates once more the high value of culture for diagnosis of mycobacteria infection. Clinical Trial Not applicable.

L. Jonkers, T. Strack, M. Alonso-Garcia et al.

<p>Data on marine microfossil assemblage composition have multiple applications. Initially, they were primarily used for (chrono)stratigraphy and palaeoecology, but these data are now also widely used to study evolutionary and ecological processes, such as past biodiversity and its links with environmental dynamics, or to provide a basis for conservation efforts and biomonitoring. The large range of potential applications renders microfossil abundance data ideal for reuse. However, the complexity inherent in taxonomic data, which encompass extant and extinct species, coupled with the inherent intricacies of information on biological communities extracted from sedimentary archives, poses considerable hurdles in reusing marine microfossil data, even when they are publicly available. Here, we present guidelines derived from an online survey conducted within the marine micropalaeontological community, aimed at improving the reusability of microfossil assemblage data. These guidelines advocate for clarity and transparency in the documentation of the methods and the outcome, and we outline the data attributes required for effective reuse of micropalaeontological data. These guidelines are intended for researchers who generate microfossil abundance datasets and for reviewers, editors, and data curators at repositories.</p> <p>A total of 113 researchers evaluated the relevance of about 50 data attributes that might be needed to enable and maximise the reuse of marine microfossil abundance datasets. Each property is ranked based on the survey results. All information is, in principle, considered “desired”. Information that improves the reusability is ranked as “recommended”, and information that is required for reuse is ranked as “essential”. Analysis of a selection of datasets available online reveals a rather large gap between data properties deemed essential by survey participants and what is actually contained in publicly available microfossil assemblage datasets. While the survey<span id="page147"/> indicates that the micropalaeontological community values good data stewardship, improving data reusability still requires new efforts to incorporate all the essential information. The guidelines presented here are intended as a step in that direction. Determining the optimal forms and formats for data sharing are obvious next steps the community needs to take.</p>

R. Rofallski, A. Colson, A. Colson et al.

Bundle adjustment in multimedia environments, such as underwater or through refractive interfaces, poses unique challenges for parameter estimation due to increased correlations between interior orientation and refractive parameters. This contribution investigates the estimability and correlation of these parameters in object-invariant multimedia bundles by presenting both a simulated and a real-world dataset. Using a strict ray tracing bundle adjustment approach, we analyze how water depth, surface tilt, and parameter set selection influence correlations and numerical stability. Statistical metrics - including correlation matrices, parameter significance tests, and variance inflation factors (VIF) - are evaluated for their effectiveness in diagnosing problematic configurations. Results show that while traditional metrics like &sigma;₀ may not reveal instability, VIF and correlation analysis provide practical additional procedures for identifying robust parameter estimations. The findings offer a workflow for practitioners, highlighting optimal parameter configurations and the limitations of statistical diagnostics in multimedia photogrammetry.

Benjamin L. Allen, Benjamin L. Allen, Andrew J. Abraham et al.

Killing animals is a ubiquitous human activity consistent with our predatory and competitive ecological roles within the global food web. However, this reality does not automatically justify the moral permissibility of the various ways and reasons why humans kill animals – additional ethical arguments are required. Multiple ethical theories or frameworks provide guidance on this subject, and here we explore the permissibility of intentional animal killing within (1) consequentialism, (2) natural law or deontology, (3) religious ethics or divine command theory, (4) virtue ethics, (5) care ethics, (6) contractarianism or social contract theory, (7) ethical particularism, and (8) environmental ethics. These frameworks are most often used to argue that intentional animal killing is morally impermissible, bad, incorrect, or wrong, yet here we show that these same ethical frameworks can be used to argue that many forms of intentional animal killing are morally permissible, good, correct, or right. Each of these ethical frameworks support constrained positions where intentional animal killing is morally permissible in a variety of common contexts, and we further address and dispel typical ethical objections to this view. Given the demonstrably widespread and consistent ways that intentional animal killing can be ethically supported across multiple frameworks, we show that it is incorrect to label such killing as categorically unethical. We encourage deeper consideration of the many ethical arguments that support intentional animal killing and the contexts in which they apply.

Huy Nguyen, Christoph Treude, Patanamon Thongtanunam

With the exponential growth of AI tools that generate source code, understanding software has become crucial. When developers comprehend a program, they may refer to additional contexts to look for information, e.g. program documentation or historical code versions. Therefore, we argue that encoding this additional contextual information could also benefit code representation for deep learning. Recent papers incorporate contextual data (e.g. call hierarchy) into vector representation to address program comprehension problems. This motivates further studies to explore additional contexts, such as version history, to enhance models' understanding of programs. That is, insights from version history enable recognition of patterns in code evolution over time, recurring issues, and the effectiveness of past solutions. Our paper presents preliminary evidence of the potential benefit of encoding contextual information from the version history to predict code clones and perform code classification. We experiment with two representative deep learning models, ASTNN and CodeBERT, to investigate whether combining additional contexts with different aggregations may benefit downstream activities. The experimental result affirms the positive impact of combining version history into source code representation in all scenarios; however, to ensure the technique performs consistently, we need to conduct a holistic investigation on a larger code base using different combinations of contexts, aggregation, and models. Therefore, we propose a research agenda aimed at exploring various aspects of encoding additional context to improve code representation and its optimal utilisation in specific situations.

Anton Matsson, Lena Stempfle, Yaochen Rao et al.

Modeling policies for sequential clinical decision-making based on observational data is useful for describing treatment practices, standardizing frequent patterns in treatment, and evaluating alternative policies. For each task, it is essential that the policy model is interpretable. Learning accurate models requires effectively capturing the state of a patient, either through sequence representation learning or carefully crafted summaries of their medical history. While recent work has favored the former, it remains a question as to how histories should best be represented for interpretable policy modeling. Focused on model fit, we systematically compare diverse approaches to summarizing patient history for interpretable modeling of clinical policies across four sequential decision-making tasks. We illustrate differences in the policies learned using various representations by breaking down evaluations by patient subgroups, critical states, and stages of treatment, highlighting challenges specific to common use cases. We find that interpretable sequence models using learned representations perform on par with black-box models across all tasks. Interpretable models using hand-crafted representations perform substantially worse when ignoring history entirely, but are made competitive by incorporating only a few aggregated and recent elements of patient history. The added benefits of using a richer representation are pronounced for subgroups and in specific use cases. This underscores the importance of evaluating policy models in the context of their intended use.

Muhammad Shihab Rashid, Jannat Ara Meem, Vagelis Hristidis

Open Retrieval Conversational Question Answering (OrConvQA) answers a question given a conversation as context and a document collection. A typical OrConvQA pipeline consists of three modules: a Retriever to retrieve relevant documents from the collection, a Reranker to rerank them given the question and the context, and a Reader to extract an answer span. The conversational turns can provide valuable context to answer the final query. State-of-the-art OrConvQA systems use the same history modeling for all three modules of the pipeline. We hypothesize this as suboptimal. Specifically, we argue that a broader context is needed in the first modules of the pipeline to not miss relevant documents, while a narrower context is needed in the last modules to identify the exact answer span. We propose NORMY, the first unsupervised non-uniform history modeling pipeline which generates the best conversational history for each module. We further propose a novel Retriever for NORMY, which employs keyphrase extraction on the conversation history, and leverages passages retrieved in previous turns as additional context. We also created a new dataset for OrConvQA, by expanding the doc2dial dataset. We implemented various state-of-the-art history modeling techniques and comprehensively evaluated them separately for each module of the pipeline on three datasets: OR-QUAC, our doc2dial extension, and ConvMix. Our extensive experiments show that NORMY outperforms the state-of-the-art in the individual modules and in the end-to-end system.

Annet Konings, Mariia Marinichenko, Oleksii Mikulenko et al.

Primordial gravitational waves propagate almost unimpeded from the moment they are generated to the present epoch. Nevertheless, they are subject to convolution with a non-trivial transfer function. Within the standard thermal history, shifts in the temperature-redshift relation combine with damping effects by free streaming neutrinos to non-trivially process different wavelengths during radiation domination, with subsequently negligible effects at later times. Presuming a nearly scale invariant primordial spectrum, one obtains a characteristic late time spectrum, deviations from which would indicate departures from the standard thermal history. Given the paucity of probes of the early universe physics before nucleosynthesis, it is useful to classify how deviations from the standard thermal history of the early universe can be constrained from observations of the late time stochastic background. The late time spectral density has a plateau at high frequencies that can in principle be significantly enhanced or suppressed relative to the standard thermal history depending on the equation of state of the epoch intervening reheating and the terminal phase of radiation domination, imprinting additional features from bursts of entropy production, and additional damping at intermediate scales via anisotropic stress production. In this paper, we survey phenomenologically motivated scenarios of early matter domination, kination, and late time decaying particles as representative non-standard thermal histories, elaborate on their late time stochastic background, and discuss constraints on different model scenarios.

Daniela Fruscione

This essay deals with Anglo-Frisian “discourse” from both a historical and a philological point of view. It investigates the Kentish Frisian connection in the field of legal vocabulary. The precise relationship between Old English and Frisian is difficult to reconstruct because historical data about Frisia are scarce and contradictory, and because there is a lack of Frisian language material that is contemporary with Old English. Without intending to make a revolutionary new proposal, this essay highlights a few relevant semantic and morphological parallels between the catalogue of body injuries found in Æthelberht’s first English law and the much later Frisian legal documents. These parallels suggest an early contact between the two languages.

Sh.G. Seidov, N.V. Makeeva, A.V. Melikov

Background. The theory of modernization, claimed in the 1960s in order to become an alternative to Marxism, in fact, in the person of Western authors, was unable to satisfactorily present a generalizing line of social development. Meanwhile, this theory itself is needed, but requires an updated approach, which, in particular, represents an analysis of process technology. The purpose of the stu is to verify this approach and demonstrate its capabilities using the example of specific scientific subjects. Materials and methods. The article outlines the theoretical principles of the essence of modernization transformations in the sphere of state and law. It is noted that the renewal of the state mechanism leads to the politicization of society and the formation of civil society, which is also accompanied by the modernization of the legal system, while the final stage of the entire process is the emergence of the rule of law. The applicability of this theory to the phenomenon of colonialism, legal humanization carried out since the 19th century, and the modernization of Greece, which started at the turn of the 1870–1880s, is shown. In essence, the authors use the deduction method, demonstrating how the theoretical postulates proposed by Professor A.Yu. Salomatin can be applied to various circumstances. The comparative method is also used. Results. Turning to the phenomenon of colonialism, it is advisable to consider its mature forms of the 19th – mid-20th centuries. in the context of modernization, when colonial empires do not simply continue to engage in primitive robbery of colonies, but carry out their systematic integration into their economies, which is accompanied by infrastructural development of territories and experimentation with self-government principles. Or there is every reason to connect the appearance of slogans against information imperialism to the 1970s, since then the West not only unexpectedly and inexplicably weakened, but temporarily lost its aggressiveness due to the exhaustion of the previous modernization model and the delay in the transition to postmodernization. The technological theory of modernization helps to better understand such an innovation in the legislation of the 19th century as the humanization of criminal penalties, to see in it not an accident, but a pattern. Equally, on the basis of this theory, we can analyze the pace and characteristics of renewal in different countries. For example, when comparing the modernization starts of Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, it should be noted that in small, economically and socially stagnant Greece, dependent on the great powers, the starting point of transformation should be sought somewhere at the turn of the 1870–1880s. – that is, much later than even in the countries of the second modernization echelon (Russia, Japan, Argentina). Conclusions. The state and legal history of Europe, and other continents, requires serious study based on the technological theory of modernization. By examining phenomena through the prism of consistent and natural transformations within the state and society, by comparing the pace and characteristics of modernization processes in different countries, we can better understand the dynamics of the development of state and law.

Wei Zhang, Wong Kam-Kwai, Yitian Chen et al.

The study of cultural artifact provenance, tracing ownership and preservation, holds significant importance in archaeology and art history. Modern technology has advanced this field, yet challenges persist, including recognizing evidence from diverse sources, integrating sociocultural context, and enhancing interactive automation for comprehensive provenance analysis. In collaboration with art historians, we examined the handscroll, a traditional Chinese painting form that provides a rich source of historical data and a unique opportunity to explore history through cultural artifacts. We present a three-tiered methodology encompassing artifact, contextual, and provenance levels, designed to create a "Biography" for handscroll. Our approach incorporates the application of image processing techniques and language models to extract, validate, and augment elements within handscroll using various cultural heritage databases. To facilitate efficient analysis of non-contiguous extracted elements, we have developed a distinctive layout. Additionally, we introduce ScrollTimes, a visual analysis system tailored to support the three-tiered analysis of handscroll, allowing art historians to interactively create biographies tailored to their interests. Validated through case studies and expert interviews, our approach offers a window into history, fostering a holistic understanding of handscroll provenance and historical significance.

Antonio J. Pérez‐Sánchez, Anett Schibalski, Boris Schröder et al.

Abstract Environmental heterogeneity is an important driver of ecological communities. Here, we assessed the effects of local and landscape spatial environmental heterogeneity on ant community structure in temperate seminatural upland grasslands of Central Germany. We surveyed 33 grassland sites representing a gradient in elevation and landscape composition. Local environmental heterogeneity was measured in terms of variability of temperature and moisture within and between grasslands sites. Grassland management type (pasture vs. meadows) was additionally included as a local environmental heterogeneity measure. The complexity of habitat types in the surroundings of grassland sites was used as a measure of landscape environmental heterogeneity. As descriptors of ant community structure, we considered species composition in terms of nest density, community evenness, and functional response traits. We found that extensively grazed pastures and within‐site heterogeneity in soil moisture at local scale, and a high diversity of land cover types at the landscape scale affected ant species composition by promoting higher nest densities of some species. Ant community evenness was high in wetter grasslands with low within‐site variability in soil moisture and surrounded by a less diverse landscape. Fourth‐corner models revealed that ant community structure response to environmental heterogeneity was mediated mainly by worker size, colony size, and life history traits related with colony reproduction and foundation. We discuss how within‐site local variability in soil moisture and low‐intensity grazing promote ant species densities and highlight the role of habitat temperature and humidity affecting community evenness. We hypothesize that a higher diversity of land cover types in a forest‐dominated landscape buffers less favorable environmental conditions for ant species establishment and dispersal between grasslands. We conclude that spatial environmental heterogeneity at local and landscape scale plays an important role as deterministic force in filtering ant species and, along with neutral processes (e.g., stochastic colonization), in shaping ant community structure in temperate seminatural upland grasslands.

Richard S. Sutton

The history of meta-learning methods based on gradient descent is reviewed, focusing primarily on methods that adapt step-size (learning rate) meta-parameters.

Demet Dingoyan, Franka Metzner, Franka Metzner et al.

The following study considers correlates of the identification with the origin and host culture of German individuals with a Turkish migrant background. It examines how these two factors mediate the relationship between perceived discrimination, emotion regulation or psychological stress, and aggressive tendencies as the major dependent variable. For this purpose, the data of 229 people with Turkish migration background living in Germany was collected through an online survey. Findings depict that the identification with the Turkish (origin) and German (host) culture mediate the relationship between perceived discrimination and emotion regulation. The relationship between perceived discrimination and psychological stress is mediated by the identification with the German culture. The analysis shows that perceived discrimination is associated with a reduced identification with the German culture and with a high identification with the Turkish culture. Emotion regulation abilities are negatively related to perceived discrimination and identification with the Turkish culture. In contrary, the psychological stress level is positively related to perceived discrimination. The preparedness for aggressive behavior is also associated positively by psychological stress and negatively by emotion regulation abilities. The results are discussed against the background of the specific migration history and living conditions of Turkish immigrants in Germany.

Vinícius Caldeira Quintão, Charlize Kessin de Oliveira Sales, Estefania Morales Herrera et al.

Background: Pediatric emergence delirium is characterized by a disturbance of a child’s awareness during the early postoperative period that manifests as disorientation, altered attention and perception. The incidence of emergence delirium varies between 18% and 80% depending on risk factors and how it is measured. Reports from Canada, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, and France demonstrated a wide range of preventive measures and definitions, indicating that there is a lack of clarity regarding emergence delirium. We aimed to assess the practices and beliefs among Brazilian anesthesiologists regarding emergence delirium. Methods: A web-based survey was developed using REDCap®. A link and QR Code were sent by email to all Brazilian anesthesiologists associated with the Brazilian Society of Anesthesiology (SBA). Results: We collected 671 completed questionnaires. The majority of respondents (97%) considered emergence delirium a relevant adverse event. Thirty-two percent of respondents reported routinely administrating medication to prevent emergence delirium, with clonidine (16%) and propofol (15%) being the most commonly prescribed medications. More than 70% of respondents reported a high level of patient and parent anxiety, a previous history of emergence delirium, and untreated pain as risk factors for emergence delirium. Regarding treatment, thirty-five percent of respondents reported using propofol, followed by midazolam (26%). Conclusion: Although most respondents considered emergence delirium a relevant adverse event, only one-third of them routinely applied preventive measures. Clonidine and propofol were the first choices for pharmacological prevention. For treatment, propofol and midazolam were the most commonly prescribed medications.

Corinna Coupette, Janis Beckedorf, Dirk Hartung et al.

How do complex social systems evolve in the modern world? This question lies at the heart of social physics, and network analysis has proven critical in providing answers to it. In recent years, network analysis has also been used to gain a quantitative understanding of law as a complex adaptive system, but most research has focused on legal documents of a single type, and there exists no unified framework for quantitative legal document analysis using network analytical tools. Against this background, we present a comprehensive framework for analyzing legal documents as multi-dimensional, dynamic document networks. We demonstrate the utility of this framework by applying it to an original dataset of statutes and regulations from two different countries, the United States and Germany, spanning more than twenty years (1998-2019). Our framework provides tools for assessing the size and connectivity of the legal system as viewed through the lens of specific document collections as well as for tracking the evolution of individual legal documents over time. Implementing the framework for our dataset, we find that at the federal level, the United States legal system is increasingly dominated by regulations, whereas the German legal system remains governed by statutes. This holds regardless of whether we measure the systems at the macro, the meso, or the micro level.

Nathan Jay Baker, Francesca Pilotto, Phillip Joschka Haubrock et al.

Abstract While there has been increasing interest in how taxonomic diversity is changing over time, less is known about how long‐term taxonomic changes may affect ecosystem functioning and resilience. Exploring long‐term patterns of functional diversity can provide key insights into the capacity of a community to carry out ecological processes and the redundancy of species’ roles. We focus on a protected freshwater system located in a national park in southeast Germany. We use a high‐resolution benthic macroinvertebrate dataset spanning 32 years (1983–2014) and test whether changes in functional diversity are reflected in taxonomic diversity using a multidimensional trait‐based approach and regression analyses. Specifically, we asked: (i) How has functional diversity changed over time? (ii) How functionally distinct are the community's taxa? (iii) Are changes in functional diversity concurrent with taxonomic diversity? And (iv) what is the extent of community functional redundancy? Resultant from acidification mitigation, macroinvertebrate taxonomic diversity increased over the study period. Recovery of functional diversity was less pronounced, lagging behind responses of taxonomic diversity. Over multidecadal timescales, the macroinvertebrate community has become more homogenous with a high degree of functional redundancy, despite being isolated from direct anthropogenic activity. While taxonomic diversity increased over time, functional diversity has yet to catch up. These results demonstrate that anthropogenic pressures can remain a threat to biotic communities even in protected areas. The differences in taxonomic and functional recovery processes highlight the need to incorporate functional traits in assessments of biodiversity responses to global change.

Emmanuelle Stoetzel, Corentin Bochaton, Salvador Bailon et al.

Paleo- and neo-taphonomic analyses of bone assemblages rarely consider all the occurring taxa in a single study and works concerning birds of prey as accumulators of microvertebrate bone remains mostly focus on small mammals such as rodents and soricomorphs. However, raptors often hunt and consume a large range of taxa, including vertebrates such as small mammals, fishes, amphibians, squamates and birds. Bone remains of all these taxonomic groups are numerous in many paleontological and archaeological records, especially in cave deposits. To better characterize the predators at the origin of fossil and sub-fossil microvertebrate accumulations and the taphonomic history of the deposit, it is thus mandatory to conduct global and multi-taxa taphonomic approaches. The aim of this study is to provide an example of such a global approach through the investigation of a modern bone assemblage from a sample of pellets produced by the Lesser Antillean Barn Owl (<i>Tyto insularis</i>) in the island of Dominica. We propose a new methodology that allows us to compare different taxa (rodents, bats, squamates and birds) and to experiment with a cross-validation process using two observers for each taxonomic group to test the reliability of the taphonomic observations.