Hasil untuk "History of Great Britain"

Jingjing Chen, Hongjie Fang, Chenxi Wang et al.

Many manipulation tasks require memory beyond the current observation, yet most visuomotor policies rely on the Markov assumption and thus struggle with repeated states or long-horizon dependencies. Existing methods attempt to extend observation horizons but remain insufficient for diverse memory requirements. To this end, we propose an object-centric history representation based on point tracking, which abstracts past observations into a compact and structured form that retains only essential task-relevant information. Tracked points are encoded and aggregated at the object level, yielding a compact history representation that can be seamlessly integrated into various visuomotor policies. Our design provides full history-awareness with high computational efficiency, leading to improved overall task performance and decision accuracy. Through extensive evaluations on diverse manipulation tasks, we show that our method addresses multiple facets of memory requirements - such as task stage identification, spatial memorization, and action counting, as well as longer-term demands like continuous and pre-loaded memory - and consistently outperforms both Markovian baselines and prior history-based approaches. Project website: http://tonyfang.net/history

S. Charsley

Introduction PART I: 1. The British Wedding Cake in the Late Twentieth Century 2. Variation, differences and Themes 3. Cultural Creation: myth, history and language 4. When the Wedding Cake Was Not and Might Never Have Been PART II: 5. Great Cakes, Plum(b) Cakes and Bride Cakes 6. Confectionery and Icing 7. The Rise of the Victorian Cake and its Successors PART III: 8. Uses and Their Evolution 9. Meanings and Interpretation 10. Towards a Theory of Cultural Change.

Lauriane Simony

G. Kanayama, H. Pope

A. Mansfield

ABSTRACT From 2020, the long-standing debate regarding the English national curriculum’s capacity to discuss issues of ethnicity and race escalated. The history subject curriculum particularly is seen as excluding ethnic minorities from an ‘Island Story’ often depicting a White Anglocentric identity disassociated with the wider world. In 2021, the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report declared that secondary school education must play a central role in augmenting social inclusion and shaping future citizens. The government’s current position for increasing inclusion places responsibility at the feet of teachers and schools. It is claimed by government that the curriculum’s flexibility and broadness provide opportunity to inject more diversity to what is taught, thereby meeting any demands for inclusivity. Yet the 2021 Historical Association survey emphasised a need amongst teachers for greater support despite making great efforts to diversify the curriculum. This position paper argues that making the British Empire a compulsory topic within the English history curriculum provides a ready-made vehicle for enhancing diversity and inclusion. Bolstered by global history’s methodology of relying on multiple viewpoints, together they would decentre the history curriculum’s insular potential to offer a diverse, inclusive, modern global perspective of Britain’s ‘Island Story’.

Daisuke Taniguchi, Kazuya Yamazaki, Shinsuke Uno

Betelgeuse, one of the most studied red supergiant stars, dimmed in the optical by ~1.2 mag between late 2019 and early 2020, reaching an historical minimum called "the Great Dimming." Thanks to enormous observational effort to date, two hypotheses remain that can explain the Dimming: a decrease in the effective temperature and an enhancement of the extinction caused by newly produced circumstellar dust. However, the lack of multi-wavelength monitoring observations, especially in the mid infrared where emission from circumstellar dust can be detected, has prevented us from closely examining these hypotheses. Here we present 4.5-year, 16-band photometry of Betelgeuse between 2017-2021 in the 0.45-13.5 micron wavelength range making use of images taken by the Himawari-8 geostationary meteorological satellite. By examining the optical and near-infrared light curves, we show that both a decreased effective temperature and increased dust extinction may have contributed by almost the same amount to the Great Dimming. Moreover, using the mid-infrared light curves, we find that the enhanced circumstellar extinction actually contributed to the Dimming. Thus, the Dimming event of Betelgeuse provides us an opportunity to examine the mechanism responsible for the mass loss of red supergiants, which affects the fate of massive stars as supernovae.

Bhargav Kumar Kakumani, Suman Prabha Yadav

In this article, we consider a viscoelastic plate equation with past history, nonlinear damping, and logarithmic nonlinearity. We prove explicit and general decay rate results of the solution to the viscoelastic plate equation with past history. Convex properties, logarithmic inequalities, and generalised Young's inequality are mainly used to prove the decay estimate.

T. Ali

Up through the 1980s, agrarian history constituted a central subject matter in the study of colonial South Asia. Assuming that virtually everyone in the Indian countryside had always been settled agriculturalists who lived in villages, agrarian history was often informed by Marxist approaches focusing on class formation and rural immiseration and it regarded the institution of colonial property and the workings of capitalism as the main driving forces of change. Agrarian history lost ground during the 1990s as scholarship shifted to examining the role of the colonial state in cultural processes and to exploring urban history. Environmental history, which devoted its attention to the impact of change on non-agrarian spaces like forests and on non-peasants like hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators, and pastoralists, also began to thrive. In this study, Neeladri Bhattacharya returns to agrarian history, but with a totally novel approach that is informed in part by the insights of environmental history and even more strongly by the literature on colonial discourse and ethnographic knowledge. Based upon impressive research in colonial archives, Bhattacharya focuses on the Punjab after the mid-nineteenth century, exploring the history of a landscape that previously had been characterized by extensive shrublands, common lands, and pastoral tracts. Agrarian society in Bhattacharya’s rendering was created by colonialism instead of having existed in some readymade form that was then subjected to colonial influences. The main driving force in Bhattacharya’s narrative is not capitalism per se, but the workings of the British state. He particularly discusses the effects of the colonial rulers’ concerns with refashioning the countryside in light of their understandings of what would create productive rural spaces and of what constituted “customary practice.” The book thus convincingly portrays the agrarian conquest of the Punjab as a highly disruptive, even violent process, but in a very different way from older Marxist approaches.

Lucie Ratail

Pre-Victorian Britain, as a transitory period from the Enlightenment to the Age of Industrialisation, witnessed shifts in understandings of ‘noise’, ‘sound’ and ‘music’ and growing interest in acoustics and other sound studies. Traditionally ending in 1820 with the publication of Melmoth the Wanderer, the main period of gothic fiction precedes the Victorian Era while foreshadowing its concerns, notably through the questioning of sounds’ impact on people’s movements and mental health. Manipulating the readers’ emotions and interpretation through the evocation of horror and terror, novelists used sound as one of the key features in the creation of the gothic sublime. Gothic’s gloomy atmosphere tends to be associated with the Victorian period despite its being embedded in another time span, showing the impact of gothic sublimity as a key concern of the nineteenth century. This article studies the extent to which pre-Victorian gothic fiction’s soundscapes mirror the evolution in sound perception, understanding and treatment over the turn of the nineteenth century, and foreshadow subsequent acoustic concerns. Through the definition of both generic and specific gothic soundscapes, it analyses the impact of sound theories on reality and fiction.

A. Y. Vasileva

The purpose of the study is to determine how the development of the tourism business of Thomas Cook and Son in the Nile Valley influenced the perception and assessment of contemporaries of the British presence in Egypt at the end of the 19th century. The relevance of the analyzed problem lies in the fact that the study of the history of tourism in the era of New imperialism allows us to supplement our understanding of the representations of the empire and private business and their mutual influence. It is substantiated that, according to the views of contemporaries, the activities of the company contributed to the creation of conditions for the economic development of Egypt, opened these territories to the world, providing free movement along the Nile, and contributed to the spread of the English language, making this country more “civilized” in the eyes of Europeans. We conclude that, at the same time, the handbooks of the company broadcasted the achievements of the imperial policy of Great Britain, reinforcing the idea of the positive consequences of the British occupation for Egypt. It is concluded that the commercial success of private business became a visible manifestation of the success of the England’s civilizing mission. The research materials can be used to further study the relationship between the development of mass tourism and the colonial policy of Great Britain.

Keping Bi, Pavel Metrikov, Chunyuan Li et al.

An effective email search engine can facilitate users' search tasks and improve their communication efficiency. Users could have varied preferences on various ranking signals of an email, such as relevance and recency based on their tasks at hand and even their jobs. Thus a uniform matching pattern is not optimal for all users. Instead, an effective email ranker should conduct personalized ranking by taking users' characteristics into account. Existing studies have explored user characteristics from various angles to make email search results personalized. However, little attention has been given to users' search history for characterizing users. Although users' historical behaviors have been shown to be beneficial as context in Web search, their effect in email search has not been studied and remains unknown. Given these observations, we propose to leverage user search history as query context to characterize users and build a context-aware ranking model for email search. In contrast to previous context-dependent ranking techniques that are based on raw texts, we use ranking features in the search history. This frees us from potential privacy leakage while giving a better generalization power to unseen users. Accordingly, we propose a context-dependent neural ranking model (CNRM) that encodes the ranking features in users' search history as query context and show that it can significantly outperform the baseline neural model without using the context. We also investigate the benefit of the query context vectors obtained from CNRM on the state-of-the-art learning-to-rank model LambdaMart by clustering the vectors and incorporating the cluster information. Experimental results show that significantly better results can be achieved on LambdaMart as well, indicating that the query clusters can characterize different users and effectively turn the ranking model personalized.

Guangzhao Cheng, Siliang Tang

In many real-world games, such as traders repeatedly bargaining with customers, it is very hard for a single AI trader to make good deals with various customers in a few turns, since customers may adopt different strategies even the strategies they choose are quite simple. In this paper, we model this problem as fast adaptive learning in the finitely repeated games. We believe that past game history plays a vital role in such a learning procedure, and therefore we propose a novel framework (named, F3) to fuse the past and current game history with an Opponent Action Estimator (OAE) module that uses past game history to estimate the opponent's future behaviors. The experiments show that the agent trained by F3 can quickly defeat opponents who adopt unknown new strategies. The F3 trained agent obtains more rewards in a fixed number of turns than the agents that are trained by deep reinforcement learning. Further studies show that the OAE module in F3 contains meta-knowledge that can even be transferred across different games.

R. Lefkowitz

Harry Crane, Min Xu

The spread of infectious disease in a human community or the proliferation of fake news on social media can be modeled as a randomly growing tree-shaped graph. The history of the random growth process is often unobserved but contains important information such as the source of the infection. We consider the problem of statistical inference on aspects of the latent history using only a single snapshot of the final tree. Our approach is to apply random labels to the observed unlabeled tree and analyze the resulting distribution of the growth process, conditional on the final outcome. We show that this conditional distribution is tractable under a shape-exchangeability condition, which we introduce here, and that this condition is satisfied for many popular models for randomly growing trees such as uniform attachment, linear preferential attachment and uniform attachment on a $D$-regular tree. For inference of the root under shape-exchangeability, we propose O(n log n) time algorithms for constructing confidence sets with valid frequentist coverage as well as bounds on the expected size of the confidence sets. We also provide efficient sampling algorithms that extend our methods to a wide class of inference problems.

G. Stoyanov, D. Dzhenkov

Abstract Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a grade IV WHO malignant tumor with astrocytic differentiation. As one of the most common clinically diagnosed central nervous system (CNS) oncological entries, there have been a wide variety of historical reports of the description and evolution of ideas regarding these tumors. The first recorded reports of gliomas were given in British scientific reports, by Berns in 1800 and in 1804 by Abernety, with the first comprehensive histomorphological description being given in 1865 by Rudolf Virchow. In 1926 Percival Bailey and Harvey Cushing gave the base for the modern classification of gliomas. Between 1934 and 1941 the most prolific researcher in glioma research was Hans-Joachim Scherer, who postulated some of the clinico-morphological aspects of GBM. With the introduction of molecular and genetic tests the true multifomity of GBM has been established, with different genotypes bearing the same histomorphological and IHC picture, as well as some of the aspects of gliomagenesis. For a GBM to develop, a specific trigger mutation needs to occur in a GBM stem cell – primary GBM, or a slow aggregation of individual mutations, without a distinct trigger mutation – secondary GBM. Knowledge of GBM has been closely related to general medical knowledge of the CNS since these malignancies were first described more than 200 years ago. Several great leaps have been made in that time, in the footsteps of both CNS and advancements in general medical knowledge.

Chandan Deuskar

Slums: The History of a Global Injustice by Alan Mayne, who teaches urban history and public policy in Australia and the United Kingdom, is a sweeping survey of middle-class and elite perceptions of ‘slums’, and the often-destructive policies and plans that these perceptions have engendered. The book’s most direct forebear is Mike Davis’s popular Planet of Slums. It also adds to the sociological literature on how the designations of ‘informal’ or ‘slum’ are often a matter of perception and prejudice, and to the work of urban historians on the transnational transfer of planning ideas. The book is a work of both history and advocacy. Mayne argues that prejudicial attitudes towards urban poverty worldwide over the last century and a half have been rooted in conceptions of ‘slums’ originating in nineteenth-century England, and that these attitudes are embodied in, and perpetuated by, the word ‘slum’ itself. Early chapters take the reader through the origins of the word in the urban slang of Victorian England, and the word’s export to the United States, Canada, and Australia. Mayne explores the fascination and repulsion slum stereotypes engendered among the middle classes, and the misguided slum clearance and ‘urban renewal’ schemes imposed on the urban poor by planners and policymakers in these countries up until the 1970s. The scene then shifts to Britain’s colonies, where British colonial officers and local elites replicated prejudices from England. Following independence, these prejudices remained, reinforced by American development consultants. While the use of the term ‘slum’ eventually fell out of favour in the ‘developed’ world, the United Nations and other international development organizations revived it in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. According to Mayne, this usage also revived prejudicial slum stereotypes, and spread them worldwide. Mayne’s main argument, that the word ‘slum’ should be dropped from our collective vocabulary because of its ‘deceitful’ connotations and ignominious past, has its merits, but is sometimes overstated. He imputes great power to the word ‘slum’, at times appearing to blame the word itself for all class snobbery, ethnic prejudice, land grabs, and planning failures. Mayne even consigns Jane Jacobs, who argued against the demolition of poor urban neighbourhoods, to the wrong side of history for having used the word (128). His fixation on the word itself is such that he approves of terms like ‘informal settlements’, ‘shanty towns’, and ‘squatter communities’ as useful alternatives to ‘slums’ (12–13), without considering how they too might be problematic. Mayne insists that the original associations of the word ‘slum’ in wealthier countries have carried over largely intact to its contemporary usage in poorer countries in the twenty-first century. He notes the diverse ways in which the word ‘slum’ is used today – by the United Nations, Asian and African governments, Marxist and subaltern studies scholars, and even grassroots organizations like Shack/ Slum

Laurence Roussillon-Constanty

Since the 1980s, John Everett Millais’s emblematic oil painting, Ophelia (1851–1852) has been remarkably framed by feminist discourses on gender that convincingly demonstrated how the representation of female death could be linked to patriarchal tradition whose underlying discourse was to tame, control and ultimately objectify women. More recently, further investigation of the Shakespearean character as it resurfaced in literature, film and cinema has brought to light the inherent contradictions relating to her very nature: the more Ophelia is represented and made visible in literature and the arts, the more she seems to be vanishing. Starting with the emblematic Pre-Raphaelite painting, this article aims to establish a critical dialogue between works of various periods and various media, ranging from the Victorian era to the present day to demonstrate the mutations and persistence of Millais’s icon.

Fiona Simpkins

The geographical divides that characterised the outcome of the June 2016 European referendum, with a Remain majority in Scotland and Northern Ireland and a Leave majority in England and in Wales, are symptomatic of the increasingly divergent electoral results of the last two decades in each of the four UK nations. While the roots of divergent political patterns across the UK may lay in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales and the long decline of the Conservatives north of the border, we shall contend that the introduction of devolution to Scotland and Wales in 1999 had the most considerable impact on British party politics.

Edoardo Carlesi, Yehuda Hoffman, Stefan Gottlöber et al.

In this work an ensemble of simulated Local Group analogues is used to constrain the properties of the mass assembly history of the Milky Way (MW) and Andromeda (M31) galaxies. These objects have been obtained using the constrained simulation technique, which ensures that simulated LGs live within a large scale environment akin to the observed one. Our results are compared against a standard $Λ$ Cold Dark Matter ($Λ$CDM) series of simulations which use the same cosmological parameters. This allows us to single out the effects of the constraints on the results. We find that (a) the median constrained merging histories for M31 and MW live above the standard ones at the 1-$σ$ level, (b) the median formation time takes place $\approx$ 0.5 Gyr earlier than unconstrained values, while the latest major merger happens on average 1.5 Gyr earlier and (c) the probability for both LG haloes to have experienced their last major merger in the first half of the history of the Universe is $\approx$ 50% higher for the constrained pairs. These results have been estimated to be significant at the 99% confidence level by means of a Kolmogorov-Simirnov test. These results suggest that the particular environment in which the Milky Way and Andromeda form plays a role in shaping their properties, and favours earlier formation and last major merger time values in agreement with other observational and theoretical considerations.