Daniela Palleschi, Camilo R. Ronderos, Pia Knoeferle
The present study investigated the effects of (in)congruence between a referent’s lifetime (alive vs. dead) and verb tense during language processing, assessing to what extent these effects are modulated by the source of referent-lifetime knowledge. A referent’s lifetime status (dead vs. alive) was conveyed either via a known famous (Experiment 1) or unknown (Experiment 2) name, or was primed non-linguistically via a photograph of a known famous referent (Experiment 3). The findings suggest that referent-lifetime information influenced the processing of verb tense across the different context sources, but not at the earliest point possible (the verb). Instead, lifetime-tense congruence effects emerged two words later (Experiments 1 and 2), or in the sentence-final region (Experiment 3). The presence and size of nested effects were graded by lifetime context: larger congruence effects were elicited by Experiment 1 than by Experiment 2 in both tenses, with significant effects in the present perfect condition only in Experiment 3. In all, referent-lifetime status modulated tense processing in the expected direction, but with variations in whether effects emerge in post-verb regions or at sentence-end depending on how referent-lifetime knowledge was accessed. This temporal variability needs to be considered in accommodating context effects in processing accounts.
Abstract No other country defined the trajectory of Churchill's political career more than Germany, a country of which he had little direct knowledge but which he either sought to emulate, accommodate or oppose throughout his time in politics. This article traces Churchill's relationship with Germany from his entry into politics at the beginning of the Edwardian era through to the end of his life, when a newly prosperous West Germany had become a fixture in Cold War international politics.
Botany in 18th-century Poland faced challenging conditions for development, resulting in only a small number of active botanists in the country at the time. Notable figures included Jacob Theodor Klein (1685−1759) in Gdańsk, Christian Heinrich Erndtel (1676−1734) in Warsaw, and Krzysztof Kluk (1739−1796) in Ciechanowiec. Until now, Jan (John) Zier (?−1793) had been completely unknown in Poland. This article is the first attempt in Polish literature to gather all previously known information about him and present his contribution to the development of botany.
Little is known about Zier’s birth, place of origin, or education. Around 1780, he settled in Hanover, Germany, where he collaborated with the German botanist Jakob F. Ehrhart (1742−1795) in publishing the exsiccata Phytophylacium Ehrhartianum. In 1785, he moved to London, where he worked with James Dickson (1738−1822), the well known owner of a plant-nursery and seed shop, on his work Fasciculus [secundus etc.] plantarum cryptogamicarum Britanniae, focusing on cryptogamic plants of Britain. Zier wrote the diagnoses of species for the first three fascicles of this treatment, which were published between 1785 and 1793, though his contribution is not acknowledged in the text. In London, he also met the apothecary and botanist William Curtis (1746−1799) who was at that time working on Flora londinensis. One source suggests that J. Zier may have assisted in the creation of this opus, though this has not been definitely confirmed.
On 18 March 1788, J. Zier was admitted as a member of the Linnean Society of London, which allowed him to establish connections with prominent British botanists of the time, including Joseph Banks (1743−1820), president of the Royal Society; James E. Smith (1759−1828), founder and president of the Linnean Society; William Hudson (1730−1793), author of Flora anglica; and Jonas C. Dryander (1748−1810), librarian of the Royal Society and vice-president of the Linnean Society. In 1790, J. Zier was set to take up the chair of the natural history at the University of Vilnius in the then Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but his poor health prevented him from leaving London. Around 1792, he made a will, the content of which has survived to this day. A progressive illness led to his death at a relatively young age in early July 1793.
Jan (John) Zier did not publish any scientific work under his own name. The plant specimens he collected are preserved in various herbaria, including those of Ehrhart in Göttingen (GOET), Moscow (MW), and the Linnean Herbarium in London (LINN), as well as in the Natural History Museum in London (BM), the Komarov Institute of Botany of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg (LE), and in Uppsala (UPS). Jan Zier’s name is commemorated in the generic name Zieria Sm. (Rutaceae) and in the moss name Bryum zieri Dicks. ex Hedw. (Bryaceae). The latter species was subsequently placed in the separate genus Zieria Schimp., but this name, as a younger homonym, was replaced by Plagiobryum Lindb. for formal reasons, though it is still retained in the subgeneric name Bryum subg. Zieria C.Hartm.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Science (General)
Daniel G. Mulcahy, Jacobo Reyes‐Velasco, Daniel I. Vázquez‐Arce
et al.
ABSTRACT Clarion Island, in the Revillagigedo Archipelago off the Pacific Coast of Mexico, hosts a unique assemblage of vertebrates. Introduced species have caused significant ecological damage, and Spiny‐tailed Iguanas (Ctenosaura pectinata) were assumed to have been introduced in recent times, prompting plans for eradication. To investigate the origin of the Ctenosaura population on Clarion Island, we conducted phylogenetic analyses of the Clarion Island and mainland populations using a portion of the mitochondrial DNA gene ND4. We estimated the date of divergence of the Clarion Island population from mainland Mexico populations using a relaxed‐clock method. Phylogenetic analyses reveal that Clarion iguanas are sister to mainland C. brachylopha populations in northwestern Mexico, a species recently resurrected out of C. pectinata. We estimated a divergence of approximately 425,600 years ago for the Clarion population—predating human colonization of the Americas. These findings support natural dispersal, likely through rafting on vegetation mats, as the mechanism of colonization. Iguanas are well known for their ability to colonize islands, and this represents their second‐longest overwater dispersal (> 1100 km); slightly greater than the distance of the Galapagos Islands from mainland Ecuador. Our findings demonstrate that Spiny‐tailed Iguanas are native to Clarion Island and should be considered an integral part of the island's native fauna. Conservation plans must prioritize the protection of this population, which we identify as an evolutionarily significant unit (ESU). Further genetic sampling and analyses are needed to determine the population's genetic variation and taxonomic status. Our findings challenge prior assumptions and emphasize the need for evidence‐based conservation strategies to preserve the integrity of oceanic island ecosystems.
By studying more local, small-scale radio stations with transnational reach, such as “Voice of Truth,” media history scholarship can better understand the complexity of media landscapes during the Cold War. The production team of the exiled Greek communist radio station based in Bucharest worked to reconcile grand Marxist theories and ideological frameworks with the daily experiences of their target audience, namely Greek labour migrants in West Germany. Seeking to be at the avant-garde of informed resistance, the producers opened as many channels as possible to receive and transmit information, often in remarkable ways given their limited resources. By closely monitoring sociopolitical affairs, triangulating information, and reinforcing transnational ties, the exiled communist radio station proved to be more multivocal and less sclerotic than we might imagine.
Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting has a wide range of applications in both industry and academia. Recent advances in Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network (STGNN) have achieved great progress in modelling spatial-temporal correlations. Limited by computational complexity, most STGNNs for MTS forecasting focus primarily on short-term and local spatial-temporal dependencies. Although some recent methods attempt to incorporate univariate history into modeling, they still overlook crucial long-term spatial-temporal similarities and correlations across MTS, which are essential for accurate forecasting. To fill this gap, we propose a framework called the Long-term Multivariate History Representation (LMHR) Enhanced STGNN for MTS forecasting. Specifically, a Long-term History Encoder (LHEncoder) is adopted to effectively encode the long-term history into segment-level contextual representations and reduce point-level noise. A non-parametric Hierarchical Representation Retriever (HRetriever) is designed to include the spatial information in the long-term spatial-temporal dependency modelling and pick out the most valuable representations with no additional training. A Transformer-based Aggregator (TAggregator) selectively fuses the sparsely retrieved contextual representations based on the ranking positional embedding efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate that LMHR outperforms typical STGNNs by 10.72% on the average prediction horizons and state-of-the-art methods by 4.12% on several real-world datasets. Additionally, it consistently improves prediction accuracy by 9.8% on the top 10% of rapidly changing patterns across the datasets.
Traditional approaches to studying decision-making in neuroscience focus on simplified behavioral tasks where animals perform repetitive, stereotyped actions to receive explicit rewards. While informative, these methods constrain our understanding of decision-making to short timescale behaviors driven by explicit goals. In natural environments, animals exhibit more complex, long-term behaviors driven by intrinsic motivations that are often unobservable. Recent works in time-varying inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aim to capture shifting motivations in long-term, freely moving behaviors. However, a crucial challenge remains: animals make decisions based on their history, not just their current state. To address this, we introduce SWIRL (SWitching IRL), a novel framework that extends traditional IRL by incorporating time-varying, history-dependent reward functions. SWIRL models long behavioral sequences as transitions between short-term decision-making processes, each governed by a unique reward function. SWIRL incorporates biologically plausible history dependency to capture how past decisions and environmental contexts shape behavior, offering a more accurate description of animal decision-making. We apply SWIRL to simulated and real-world animal behavior datasets and show that it outperforms models lacking history dependency, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This work presents the first IRL model to incorporate history-dependent policies and rewards to advance our understanding of complex, naturalistic decision-making in animals.
Book Review: Christof-Füchsle, Martin, and Razak Khan, eds. Nodes of Translation: Intellectual History Between Modern India and Germany. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2024.
Abbas Ghaddar, David Alfonso-Hermelo, Philippe Langlais
et al.
In this work, we dive deep into one of the popular knowledge-grounded dialogue benchmarks that focus on faithfulness, FaithDial. We show that a significant portion of the FaithDial data contains annotation artifacts, which may bias models towards completely ignoring the conversation history. We therefore introduce CHARP, a diagnostic test set, designed for an improved evaluation of hallucinations in conversational model. CHARP not only measures hallucination but also the compliance of the models to the conversation task. Our extensive analysis reveals that models primarily exhibit poor performance on CHARP due to their inability to effectively attend to and reason over the conversation history. Furthermore, the evaluation methods of FaithDial fail to capture these shortcomings, neglecting the conversational history. Our findings indicate that there is substantial room for contribution in both dataset creation and hallucination evaluation for knowledge-grounded dialogue, and that CHARP can serve as a tool for monitoring the progress in this particular research area. CHARP is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/huawei-noah/CHARP
<p>Polar research is an interdisciplinary and multi-faceted field of research ranging from history to geology and geophysics to social sciences and education. Thus, several different universities and institutions within Germany participate in polar research. The seminar series POLARSTUNDE, organized by the German Society for Polar Research (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Polarforschung) and the German National Committee of the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS Germany) regularly features different topics of German polar research. Although initially a “pandemic solution”, the seminar series has established itself as a valuable and highly successful part of the German polar research landscape. The seminar series was held in German and was aimed at both scientists and the general public. This article addresses the first season of POLARSTUNDE and provides (1) comprehensive summaries of the talks and (2) insight into the planning and execution from an organizational point of view.</p>
3D imaging of large painted and vaulted historic ceilings offers many challenges, including those due to complex small and large-scale geometry, environmental conditions and limited access. In this paper we introduce CHAPI (Cultural Heritage Automated Photogrammetric Imaging), a low cost solution to these problems which provides an efficient, semi-automated method of capturing large vaulted ceiling paintings in high detail, with a consistent photogrammetric network and in limited time. We will present and examine two different case studies from the Plafond3D project, the baroque ceiling paintings of the Schloss Rheinsberg Spiegelsaal (mirror room) and the Ansbach Residence Festsaal (great hall/ballroom). The paper will examine the particular challenges of capturing large painted areas with accurate colour and geometric reproduction, and suggest how the photogrammetric recording and reconstruction process of ceilings can be optimised for large rooms. This paper also gives technical specifications and Open Access Code for the CHAPI build.
Nicholas J. Gotelli, Douglas B. Booher, Mark C. Urban
et al.
Abstract Dated, geo‐referenced museum specimens are a rich data source for reconstructing species' distribution and abundance patterns. However, museum records are potentially biased towards over‐representation of rare species, and it is unclear whether museum records can be used to estimate relative abundance in the field. We assembled 17 coupled field and museum datasets to quantitatively compare relative abundance estimates with the Dirichlet distribution. Collectively, these datasets comprise 73,039 museum records and 1,405,316 field observations of 2,240 species. Although museum records of rare species overestimated relative abundance by 1‐fold to over 100‐fold (median study = 9.0), the relative abundance of species estimated from museum occurrence records was strongly correlated with relative abundance estimated from standardized field surveys (r2 range of 0.10–0.91, median study = 0.43). These analyses provide a justification for estimating species relative abundance with carefully curated museum occurrence records, which may allow for the detection of temporal or spatial shifts in the rank ordering of common and rare species.
The purpose of this brief article is to clarify certain distortions of the history of ideas about the quantum theory of de Sitter space that have appeared in recent literature.
This article examines the importance of graphic representations in the social sciences, and particularly in (medieval) history, taking as its starting point a reflection by {É}tienne-Jules Marey, a physiologist and pioneer of 19th-century photography and cinema. Marey believed that the visual should replace language in many fields. Indeed, the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw an exponential multiplication of visual media, particularly with the advent of digital technology. However, this ''graphics revolution'' has not affected all disciplines equally. Significant differences remain between scientific fields such as astrophysics, anthropology, chemistry and medieval history, despite their shared commitment to describing dynamic processes and changes of state. Yet, while historians have already digitized a large part of the cultural heritage from Antiquity to the 10th-13th centuries, exploration of this corpus using visualizations remains limited. There is therefore untapped potential in this field.This article begins by outlining a typology and quantification of the past and potential roles of visual representations in medieval history. It examines two distinct intellectual approaches: 1. the use of visuals to support a scientific discourse (majority) and 2. the construction of a historical discourse based on observations made from visual figures with the aim of modeling phenomena invisible to the naked eye. The author thus examines the use of ''images'' in medievalism, focusing on the annual volumes of the Soci{é}t{é} des historiens m{é}di{é}vistes de l'enseignement sup{é}rieur (SHMESP), up to 2006. Two other parts of the text look at the still-rare forms of visual representation in medieval history, particularly those with a ''heuristic vocation'', using iconographic objects, parchments, buildings and digitized texts. The article suggests various visualization techniques, such as network analysis, the creation of ''stemmas 2.0'' and interactive chronologies, which could benefit the discipline. These methods could potentially profoundly change our understanding of ancient societies, by showing the dynamic relationships between different aspects of these societies. One of the most important advances expected from these visual methods is a better understanding of the patterns of development in medieval Europe, which varied from region to region. The hypothesis is that the scarcity of heuristic graphics in medieval history stems from the relationship with ancient documents and the historical method based on narration and exemplarity. The article thus questions the value of ''visual modelling'' in medieval history, and highlights the challenges associated with the widespread adoption of this approach in the humanities and social sciences. Finally, the text invites us to reflect on the nature and functioning of heuristic visual devices, by comparing medieval ''images'' and contemporary scientific visuals. In both cases, the point is to materialize the invisible in order to show something that exists beyond the visual. The author suggests that this way of approaching visuals could play a growing role in the decades to come, particularly in the field of data science.
Establishing management programs to preserve the benthic communities along the NW Pacific and the Arctic Ocean (AO) requires a deep understanding of the composition of communities and their responses to environmental stressors. In this study, we thus examine patterns of benthic community composition and patterns of species richness along the NW Pacific and Arctic Seas and investigate the most important environmental drivers of those patterns. Overall we found a trend of decreasing species richness toward higher latitudes and deeper waters, peaking in coastal waters of the eastern Philippines. The most dominant taxa along the entire study area were Arthropoda, Mollusca, Cnidaria, Echinodermata, and Annelida. We found that depth, not temperature, was the main driver of community composition along the NW Pacific and neighboring Arctic Seas. Depth has been previously suggested as a factor driving species distribution in benthic fauna. Following depth, the most influential environmental drivers of community composition along the NW Pacific and the Arctic Ocean were silicate, light, and currents. For example, silicate in Hexactinellida, Holothuroidea, and Ophiuroidea; and light in Cephalopoda and Gymnolaemata had the highest correlations with community composition. In this study, based on a combination of new samples and open-access data, we show that different benthic communities might respond differently to future climatic changes based on their taxon-specific biological, physiological, and ecological characteristics. International conservation efforts and habitat preservation should take an adaptive approach and apply measures that take the differences among benthic communities in responding to future climate change into account. This facilitates implementing appropriate conservation management strategies and sustainable utilization of the NW Pacific and Arctic marine ecosystems.
Science, General. Including nature conservation, geographical distribution
Marija Alseikaitė-Gimbutienė (Gimbutas) (1921–1994) was born and raised in Lithuania within a family of physicians and intellectuals devoted to the preservation of Lithuanian folk culture. She studied archaeology with Professor Jonas Puzinas who was the first scientifically trained archaeologist in independent Lithuania. Marija Gimbutas was thoroughly trained in Eastern European archaeology, Baltic prehistory, Indo-European linguistics, ethnology, history, folklore, mythology, and European languages taught by the most accomplished Lithuanian scholars in their fields. In 1942 she earned a Master՚s degree at Vilnius University for her thesis on “Burial Practices in the Lithuanian Iron Age.” In 1946 she earned her doctorate in archaeology from Tübingen University in Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1949. This paper traces her prodigious production of major publications and scholarly achievements fostered by her multidisciplinary education in Lithuania. It discusses the development of her Kurgan hypothesis, her excavations in Southeastern Europe, her theory of Old Europe, her formulation of archaeomythology, and the ancient veneration of the earth as the source of life.
Simultaneous Machine Translation is the task of incrementally translating an input sentence before it is fully available. Currently, simultaneous translation is carried out by translating each sentence independently of the previously translated text. More generally, Streaming MT can be understood as an extension of Simultaneous MT to the incremental translation of a continuous input text stream. In this work, a state-of-the-art simultaneous sentence-level MT system is extended to the streaming setup by leveraging the streaming history. Extensive empirical results are reported on IWSLT Translation Tasks, showing that leveraging the streaming history leads to significant quality gains. In particular, the proposed system proves to compare favorably to the best performing systems.
Maxime Borry, Alexander Hübner, Adam B. Rohrlach
et al.
DNA de novo assembly can be used to reconstruct longer stretches of DNA (contigs), including genes and even genomes, from short DNA sequencing reads. Applying this technique to metagenomic data derived from archaeological remains, such as paleofeces and dental calculus, we can investigate past microbiome functional diversity that may be absent or underrepresented in the modern microbiome gene catalogue. However, compared to modern samples, ancient samples are often burdened with environmental contamination, resulting in metagenomic datasets that represent mixtures of ancient and modern DNA. The ability to rapidly and reliably establish the authenticity and integrity of ancient samples is essential for ancient DNA studies, and the ability to distinguish between ancient and modern sequences is particularly important for ancient microbiome studies. Characteristic patterns of ancient DNA damage, namely DNA fragmentation and cytosine deamination (observed as C-to-T transitions) are typically used to authenticate ancient samples and sequences, but existing tools for inspecting and filtering aDNA damage either compute it at the read level, which leads to high data loss and lower quality when used in combination with de novo assembly, or require manual inspection, which is impractical for ancient assemblies that typically contain tens to hundreds of thousands of contigs. To address these challenges, we designed PyDamage, a robust, automated approach for aDNA damage estimation and authentication of de novo assembled aDNA. PyDamage uses a likelihood ratio based approach to discriminate between truly ancient contigs and contigs originating from modern contamination. We test PyDamage on both on simulated aDNA data and archaeological paleofeces, and we demonstrate its ability to reliably and automatically identify contigs bearing DNA damage characteristic of aDNA. Coupled with aDNA de novo assembly, Pydamage opens up new doors to explore functional diversity in ancient metagenomic datasets.