In July 2022, the Labour Party launched a renewed door-to-door campaigning script with a view to improving the way the party on the ground speaks to constituents, bearing in mind that for most voters, door-to-door canvassing is the most direct contact they will have with the party. The changed script reflected a return to a persuasion model, in place of the approach entirely focused on collecting data and getting identified supporters to the polls, which had prevailed since the 1990s. It also marked an effort to better mobilise local activists by improving their experience on the doorstep. Labour’s efforts to upgrade its campaigning methods and strategy largely arose from the deep-seated feeling of insecurity resulting from the party’s 14 years in opposition, the long-term changes in the electorate which were painfully brought to light by Brexit, and the collapse of the “Red Wall” in 2019. Labour’s overall strategy was thus designed to recapture working-class, socially conservative “hero voters”. Drawing from first-hand material and direct participation in Labour training programmes both live and online, as well as campaigning in the general election in one of the battleground seats, this article provides an analysis of the conduct of the Labour Party 2024 ground campaign to assess whether the return to a persuasion model after 30 years of GOTV reflected a qualitative change in the perception by the Labour Party of their electorate and of their activists.
The hypergiant RW Cep is one of the largest stars in our galaxy. The evolution and mass loss of such stars has profound effects on their surrounding regions and the galaxy as a whole. Between 2020 and 2024, RW Cep experienced a historic mass-loss event known as the Great Dimming. This study provides a spectroscopic analysis of RW Cep during the Great Dimming. We examine its atmospheric dynamics and place it in the context of the star's variability behaviour since the early 2000s. We conducted high-cadence spectroscopic observations of RW Cep during the dimming event using the Tartu Observatory 1.5-meter telescope and the Nordic Optical Telescope. We analysed the atmospheric dynamics by measuring the radial velocities and line depths of Fe I and other spectral lines. The radial velocities of the Fe I lines reveal a vertical velocity gradient of 10-20 km/s in the atmosphere, correlating with the strength of the spectral lines. Stronger lines, formed in higher atmospheric layers, have higher radial velocities. We measured the systemic velocity at -50.3 km/s. During the dimming, radial velocities were affected by additional emission from the ejected gas, which was blue-shifted relative to the absorption lines. Post-dimming, we observed large-scale atmospheric motions with amplitude ~25 km/s. Strong resonance lines of Ba II, K I, Na I and Ca I showed stable central emission components at -56 km/s, likely of circumstellar origin.
Abstract This chapter examines the evolution of PN Review, a leading Manchester-based poetry magazine, in relation to second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Largely funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain, the magazine was initially not a welcoming place for female poets and contributors. Women’s poetry was often disparaged, and few women contributed to the magazine. From the early 1980s, however, PN Review started to include more women voices—a transition led by the founding editor Michael Schmidt, who was eager to include forgotten and neglected female poets on his list. This chapter argues that changes in public funding, and increased market opportunities for women authors and feminist ideas, forced the magazine to evolve and adapt quickly. Women were taking a more visible role in the publishing world, as the success of the feminist press Virago (created in 1973) shows. Women poets were becoming more vocal, and openly denounced their marginalisation in the poetry scene. The funding cuts decided by Margaret Thatcher’s government led to profound changes as Arts Council “clients” competed fiercely to survive in a tough landscape. Changing priorities at the Arts Council—including the need for more diversity in publishing—also had an impact on grant holders. PN Review therefore offers a good example of a literary institution that was directly pushed towards gender diversity through external pressures from the Arts Council of Great Britain and the market.
Stellar halos of galaxies retain crucial clues to their mass assembly history. It is in these galactic components that the remains of cannibalised galactic building blocks are deposited. For the case of the Milky Way, the opportunity to analyse the stellar halo's structure on a star-by-star basis in a multi-faceted approach provides a basis from which to infer its past and assembly history in unrivalled detail. Moreover, the insights that can be gained about the formation of the Galaxy not only help constrain the evolution of our Milky Way, but may also help place constraints on the formation of other disc galaxies in the Universe. This paper includes a summary of work undertaken during a PhD thesis aiming to make progress toward answering the most fundamental question in the field of Galactic archaeology: "How did the Milky Way form?" Through the effort to answer this question, we summarise new insights into aspects of the history of assembly and evolution of our Galaxy and measurements of the structure of various of its Galactic components.
We develop and apply a new framework for reconstructing the ionization history during the epoch of recombination with combinations of cosmic microwave background (CMB), baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) and supernova data. We find a wide range of ionization histories that are consistent with current CMB data, and also that cosmological parameter constraints are significantly weakened once freedom in recombination is introduced. BAO data partially break the degeneracy between cosmological parameters and the recombination model, and are therefore important in these reconstructions. The 95% confidence upper limits on H0 are 80.1 (70.7) km/s/Mpc given CMB (CMB+BAO) data, assuming no other changes are made to the standard cosmological model. Including Cepheid-calibrated supernova data in the analysis drives a preference for non-standard recombination histories with visibility functions that peak early and exhibit appreciable skewness. Forthcoming measurements from SPT-3G will reduce the uncertainties in our reconstructions by about a factor of two.
There are about 6000 stars, that can be seen with the naked eye and have been observed for centuries for various purposes. More modern investigations using advanced telescopes show that our Milky Way, a quite common galaxy, consists of about 100 -- 400 billion stars. And, it is estimated that there are between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe -- all of them consist mostly of stars, and sending observable signals which also represents nothing more than a superposition of the light of individual stars. So we can conclude that the most common observable objects in the Universe are $\textit{stars}$. In this chapter, we focus on the long history of the observation of stars (compared to studies in other fields of science) to find out more about the nature of these objects.
As the core technique of online recruitment platforms, person-job fit can improve hiring efficiency by accurately matching job positions with qualified candidates. However, existing studies mainly focus on the recommendation scenario, while neglecting another important channel for linking positions with job seekers, i.e. search. Intuitively, search history contains rich user behavior in job seeking, reflecting important evidence for job intention of users. In this paper, we present a novel Search History enhanced Person-Job Fit model, named as SHPJF. To utilize both text content from jobs/resumes and search histories from users, we propose two components with different purposes. For text matching component, we design a BERT-based text encoder for capturing the semantic interaction between resumes and job descriptions. For intention modeling component, we design two kinds of intention modeling approaches based on the Transformer architecture, either based on the click sequence or query text sequence. To capture underlying job intentions, we further propose an intention clustering technique to identify and summarize the major intentions from search logs. Extensive experiments on a large real-world recruitment dataset have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.
Environments in Reinforcement Learning are usually only partially observable. To address this problem, a possible solution is to provide the agent with information about the past. However, providing complete observations of numerous steps can be excessive. Inspired by human memory, we propose to represent history with only important changes in the environment and, in our approach, to obtain automatically this representation using self-supervision. Our method (TempAl) aligns temporally-close frames, revealing a general, slowly varying state of the environment. This procedure is based on contrastive loss, which pulls embeddings of nearby observations to each other while pushing away other samples from the batch. It can be interpreted as a metric that captures the temporal relations of observations. We propose to combine both common instantaneous and our history representation and we evaluate TempAl on all available Atari games from the Arcade Learning Environment. TempAl surpasses the instantaneous-only baseline in 35 environments out of 49. The source code of the method and of all the experiments is available at https://github.com/htdt/tempal.
Fabian Paischer, Thomas Adler, Vihang Patil
et al.
In a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), an agent typically uses a representation of the past to approximate the underlying MDP. We propose to utilize a frozen Pretrained Language Transformer (PLT) for history representation and compression to improve sample efficiency. To avoid training of the Transformer, we introduce FrozenHopfield, which automatically associates observations with pretrained token embeddings. To form these associations, a modern Hopfield network stores these token embeddings, which are retrieved by queries that are obtained by a random but fixed projection of observations. Our new method, HELM, enables actor-critic network architectures that contain a pretrained language Transformer for history representation as a memory module. Since a representation of the past need not be learned, HELM is much more sample efficient than competitors. On Minigrid and Procgen environments HELM achieves new state-of-the-art results. Our code is available at https://github.com/ml-jku/helm.
This article analyzes how David Bowie borrowed a number of codes and art forms from Japanese culture and incorporated them into his own research. It explores the complex interplay of exchange and circulation between elite and pop culture, and the integration of traditional and avant-garde practices into an approach that is both commercial and artistically ambitious, and the impact this stylistic entanglement has on concepts such as the mainstream or the underground.
Virginia Woolf was a keen preserver of some Victorian values, and among these the art of Charles Dickens, with his representation of London, its voices, sounds, music and noises. Dickens’s Little Dorrit and its closing sentence opens up my critical track by suggesting that Woolf’s reconstruction of the past must give to Victorian sounds a role that is neither ancillary nor merely impressionistic. This article focuses on Woolf’s portrayal of Victorian urban life in her fiction, especially in The Years (1937), where London sounds are everywhere present and deployed to create the polyphony—an exciting cacophony in modernist terms—of the great city. In Woolf’s fiction sounds are meant to convey symbolic meanings, to bring myth to the foreground, while also adding to the realism of the text. Sounds function like the many voices of an organ—the baroque instrument par excellence—suggesting at once order and chaos, norm and transgression: they frame representation and yet also break the frame by directly affecting the reader. This effect of discordia concors as acoustic experience is implemented within the verbal context, emphasizing the dialogic relationship between the source of sound, its reception, and the performative function sounds obtain within the texture of The Years.
Since the end of the 1990s, local authorities in the UK have taken long-term commitments under public-private financing schemes in order to renew or refurbish their school estate. This article focuses on the legacy of the Private Finance Initiative, which is considered from three different but complementary perspectives: financial, educational and architectural. It highlights the lack of flexibility and the long-term costs of the contracts as well as their consequences on local council finances and school budgets, in a context dominated by austerity policies from 2010 onwards. While local councils have improved their expertise in dealing with such contracts, the imbalance of the relationship between public and private sector partners remains a central issue and has led to an erosion of public authorities’ control and decision-making capacity. Although public-private partnerships have made it possible to complete large-scale school-building programmes and to improve the level of maintenance, the quality of those buildings can be questioned. Lessons have been learnt and local authorities are now turning towards more diverse forms of procurement, in an attempt to ensure greater value for money and to protect the interests of public service users.
This paper proposes two algorithms, namely "back-tracking" and "history following", to reach consensus in case of communication loss for a network of distributed agents with switching topologies. To reach consensus in distributed control, considered communication topology forms a strongly connected graph. The graph is no more strongly connected whenever an agent loses communication.Whenever an agent loses communication, the topology is no more strongly connected. The proposed back-tracking algorithm makes sure that the agent backtracks its position unless the communication is reestablished, and path is changed to reach consensus. In history following, the agents use their memory and move towards previous consensus point until the communication is regained. Upon regaining communication, a new consensus point is calculated depending on the current positions of the agents and they change their trajectories accordingly. Simulation results, for a network of six agents, show that when the agents follow the previous history, the average consensus time is less than that of back-tracking. However, situation may arise in history following where a false notion of reaching consensus makes one of the agents stop at a point near to the actual consensus point. An obstacle avoidance algorithm is integrated with the proposed algorithms to avoid collisions. Hardware implementation for a three robots system shows the effectiveness of the algorithms.
This is a study of the history of the asteroids in the main asteroid belt. Collisions have been the dominant process. Every asteroid has been impacted by others a multitude of times, with consequences of cratering, erosion, spin increments, fragmentation, and occasional catastrophic disruption and dispersion. Extensive information for asteroid orbits, sizes, shapes, composition, and rotation rates of those asteroids is now available. Those are a result of their history, but to interpret them requires understanding the processes. That understanding can be improved by simulations of the history. A simulation needs robust models of the dynamical and collisional events. Such models have evolved substantially in the last few decades. Here I present current models, a method, and a code "SSAH" for stochastic simulations of the history of the main belt. That code gives a framework upon which existing and future models can be based. The results lead to new paradigms for asteroid histories including the distribution of spins; the irrelevance of strength spin limits; the "unusual" spins of 2001 OE84; and of large slow-spinning tumbling objects (Mathilde); the "V-shape" in the spin versus diameter plot; the non-Maxwellian distribution of spins of a given diameter range; the numbers of expected tumblers, and more. At the same time, the simulations expose gaps in our knowledge that require further research. The SSAH code is freely available for the use of others.
The paper briefly presents history, status, and plans of the search for the critical structures - the onset of fireball, the onset of deconfinement, and the deconfinement critical point - in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. First, the basic ideas are introduced, the history of the observation of strongly interacting matter in heavy ion collisions is reviewed, and the path towards the quark-gluon plasma discovery is sketched. Then the status of the search for critical structures is discussed - the discovery of the onset of deconfinement, indications for the onset of fireball, and still inconclusive results concerning the deconfinement critical point. Finally, an attempt to formulate priorities for future measurements - charm quarks vs the onset of deconfinement and detailed study of the onset of fireball - closes the paper.
From 1885 to 1921 United Kingdom politics were polarized around the question of parliamentary devolution for Ireland (Home Rule). A major argument against Home Rule was that it would have been incompatible with the survival of the British Empire and indeed of the United Kingdom, because sovereignty could not be divided. However, Home Rule supporters insisted that the proposal was in the Irish national interest. This claim was in itself divisive in Ireland, as well as within the United Kingdom as a whole, and set the South against Ulster, which by 1912 was (literally) up in arms against any idea of weakening or diluting the Union with Britain. By 1887 Liberals in both Scotland and (soon afterwards) in Wales started to campaign for their own form of Home Rule. Ostensibly only an ‘Irish’ question, Home Rule was in fact the beginning of a wider debate about the governance of the United Kingdom and the tension between a centralized political system and the claims of ethnic groups and distinct regions in a multi-national state. This article examines the wider significance of the crisis in the constitutional rebalancing of a liberal, but still undemocratic, state. It will start from the time when the British system was at its apex, between 1707 and 1885. In this period parliament provided social and cultural legitimacy for the centralization of power and created cohesion for the wider imperial project. Second, this article focuses on the advent of democracy from 1885, and the way the latter made it more difficult for parliament to agree on the ‘national’ interest – especially when the latter depended on finding common ground between four nations.
MOND is a paradigm that contends to account for the mass discrepancies in the Universe without invoking `dark' components, such as `dark matter' and `dark energy'. It does so by supplanting Newtonian dynamics and General Relativity, departing from them at very low accelerations. Having in mind readers who are historians and philosophers of science, as well as physicists and astronomers, I describe in this review the main aspects of MOND -- its statement, its basic tenets, its main predictions, and the tests of these predictions -- contrasting it with the dark-matter paradigm. I then discuss possible wider ramifications of MOND, for example the potential significance of the MOND constant, $a_0$, with possible implications for the roots of MOND in cosmology. Along the way I point to parallels with several historical instances of nascent paradigms. In particular, with the emergence of the Copernican world picture, that of quantum physics, and that of relativity, as regards their initial advent, their development, their schematic structure, and their ramifications. For example, the interplay between theories and their corollary laws, and the centrality of a new constant with converging values as deduced from seemingly unrelated manifestations of these laws. I demonstrate how MOND has already unearthed a number of unsuspected laws of galactic dynamics (to which, indeed, $a_0$ is central) predicting them a priori, and leading to their subsequent verification. I parallel the struggle of the new with the old paradigms, and the appearance of hybrid paradigms at such times of struggle. I also try to identify in the history of those established paradigms a stage that can be likened to that of MOND today.