Hasil untuk "History (General)"

O. John, S. Srivastava

J. Avise

R. Cann

G. Vermeij

Geerat Vermeij wrote this "celebration of shells" to share his enthusiasm for these supremely elegant creations and what they can teach us about nature. Most other popular books on shells emphasize the identification of species, but Vermeij uses shells as a way to explore major ideas in biology. How are shells built? How do they work? How did they evolve? With these questions in mind, the author lucidly - and charmingly - demonstrates how shells give us insights into the lives of animals in our own day as well as in the distant geological past. As snails, clams, and other molluscs enlarge their shells, they inscribe a detailed record of the everyday events and unusual circumstances that mark their lives. Moreover, the fossil record that chronicles the history of life is replete with shells of extinct species. Vermeij draws on comparisons of shells from different parts of the world and from successive geological periods to argue that predators have played a decisive role in the evolution of shells. Architectural specialization, he argues, is dictated by the risks, rewards, costs, and benefits imposed by predators and competitors on shell-builders living in a dangerous world. This book will be of interest both to amateur shell collectors and to scholars, and its lively review of evolutionary history should prove especially appealing to a general audience.

Yousef Fazel, Aaron B Koenig, Mehmet Sayiner et al.

C. Baker, P. Phongpaichit

Since it was first published in 2005, A History of Thailand has been hailed as an authoritative, lively and readable account of Thailand's political, economic, social and cultural history. From the early settlements in the Chao Phraya basin to today, Baker and Phongpaichit trace how a world of mandarin nobles and unfree peasants was transformed by colonialism, the expansion of the rice frontier and the immigration of traders and labourers from southern China. This book examines how the monarchy managed the foundation of a new nation‐state at the end of the nineteenth century, and how urban nationalists, ambitious generals, communist rebels and business politicians competed to take control through the twentieth century. It tracks Thailand's economic changes, globalisation and the evolution of mass society, and draws on popular culture to dramatize social trends. This edition contains a new chapter on Thailand's turbulent politics since 2006 and incorporates new sources and research throughout.

Olga Czeranowska, Izabela Grabowska, Iga Wermińska-Wiśnicka

Since the 2004 European Union enlargement, the United Kingdom has seen a significant influx of Polish migrants, many of whom initially found employment in low-skilled roles due to their immediate availability and low entry barriers. This study explores the career changes of young adult Polish migrants in the UK over the past two decades. Using data from British public statistics – the Annual Population Survey (APS) and in-depth interviews – we comprehensively analyse their labour market positionalities in the UK. Our findings reveal a shift from initial deskilling and confinement to the secondary labour market to diverse, upwardly mobile career changes. This study emphasises the critical role of practical skills, work ethics, experience, and social networks in migrants’ professional development. This research contributes to the broader discourse on post-EU enlargement of Central and Eastern European migration, providing a nuanced understanding of young adult Polish migrants’ labour market experiences in the UK.

Huiliang Zhang, Di Wu, Arnaud Zinflou et al.

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.

Jingyang Ke, Feiyang Wu, Jiyi Wang et al.

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.

Ewoud Wempe, Amina Helmi, Simon D. M. White et al.

We study the mass growth histories of the halos of Milky Way and M31 analogues formed in constrained cosmological simulations of the Local Group. These simulations constitute a fair and representative set of $Λ$CDM realisations conditioned on properties of the main Local Group galaxies, such as their masses, relative separation, dynamics and environment. Comparing with isolated analogues extracted from the TNG dark-matter-only simulations, we find that while our M31 halos have a comparable mass growth history to their isolated counterparts, our Milky Ways typically form earlier and their growth is suppressed at late times. Mass growth associated to major and minor mergers is also biased early for the Milky Way in comparison to M31, with most accretion occurring 1 - 4 Gyr after the Big Bang, and a relatively quiescent history at later times. 32% of our Milky Ways experienced a Gaia-Enceladus/Sausage (GES)-like merger, while 13% host an LMC-like object at the present day, with 5% having both. In one case, an SMC- and a Sagittarius-analogue are also present, showing that the most important mergers of the Milky Way in its Local Group environment can be reproduced in $Λ$CDM. We find that the material that makes up the Milky Way and M31 halos at the present day first collapsed onto a plane roughly aligned with the Local Sheet and Supergalactic plane; after $z \sim 2$, accretion occurred mostly within this plane, with the tidal effects of the heavier companion, M31, significantly impacting the late growth history of the Milky Way.

Nuno de Fragoso Vidal

Luciano Bode

Linmi Tao, Ruiyang Liu, Donglai Tao et al.

Numerical difference computation is one of the cores and indispensable in the modern digital era. Tao general difference (TGD) is a novel theory and approach to difference computation for discrete sequences and arrays in multidimensional space. Built on the solid theoretical foundation of the general difference in a finite interval, the TGD operators demonstrate exceptional signal processing capabilities in real-world applications. A novel smoothness property of a sequence is defined on the first- and second TGD. This property is used to denoise one-dimensional signals, where the noise is the non-smooth points in the sequence. Meanwhile, the center of the gradient in a finite interval can be accurately location via TGD calculation. This solves a traditional challenge in computer vision, which is the precise localization of image edges with noise robustness. Furthermore, the power of TGD operators extends to spatio-temporal edge detection in three-dimensional arrays, enabling the identification of kinetic edges in video data. These diverse applications highlight the properties of TGD in discrete domain and the significant promise of TGD for the computation across signal processing, image analysis, and video analytic.

Akash Gupta, Ivaxi Sheth, Vyas Raina et al.

With the recent emergence of powerful instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), various helpful conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been deployed across many applications. When prompted by users, these AI systems successfully perform a wide range of tasks as part of a conversation. To provide some sort of memory and context, such approaches typically condition their output on the entire conversational history. Although this sensitivity to the conversational history can often lead to improved performance on subsequent tasks, we find that performance can in fact also be negatively impacted, if there is a task-switch. To the best of our knowledge, our work makes the first attempt to formalize the study of such vulnerabilities and interference of tasks in conversational LLMs caused by task-switches in the conversational history. Our experiments across 5 datasets with 15 task switches using popular LLMs reveal that many of the task-switches can lead to significant performance degradation.

Václav Ledvinka

Nicolas Perreaux

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.

Piotr Nykiel

The article is devoted to the early phase of the career of Martin Eric Nasmith (1883–1965) and is an attempt to summarise his achievements during three underwater patrols in the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara in 1915. Those missions brought him the appellation of the most effective British submariner of WW1. In Anglophone historiography, all the books and articles related to this subject constitute a one-sided narrative based solely on British sources. Thus, the author has made the first attempt in western historiography to compare the British and Turkish points of view. Although a few such efforts have been made in Tur- key, their results are not widely known to western historians, and in some cases, they raise objections. The decision to take up this challenge came from an awareness that Nasmith’s view of the situation at the moment when he was personally observing the effects of his attacks could not be complete and entirely objective. He could not have known that some of the vessels he had sunk in shallow coastal waters were salvaged by the Turks and restored to service. The article gives detailed coverage of the attacks conducted by Nasmith on Ottoman warships, steam-powered merchant ships and land targets, during all three patrols of the “E11” submarine. As a result of his research, the author was able to draw attention to the fact that the results of “E11”’s second patrol were incomparably more favourable than those of the first one (for which Nasmith was awarded the Victoria Cross), both in terms of losses inflicted on the Ottoman Navy and on the transport fleet. In the case of the latter, the total tonnage of definitively sunken steam-powered vessels was more than 470 percent higher. While Nasmith claimed that he had sunk at least 122 Ottoman vessels during all three patrols, Turkish sources indicate that the total number of warships and steam-powered transport ships definitively destroyed by him did not exceed fifteen.

Clara Manco

Although gambling is traditionally associated with homosocial competition and with the prestige of the aristocratic ethos, Restoration comedies abound with examples of marginal characters at the gambling table. This article explores the symbolic implications of these marginal gamblers in plays written and produced during the reigns of Charles II and James II. These characters, whether they be women or comic butts, show us to what extent gambling constitutes a moment of suspension, or even of renegociation of theatrical, social and political hierarchies, ranging from brief moments of carnivalesque relief to genuine revenge of the weak over the powerful.

Alicia Florián, Silvana Fogliato

Yvette A. Marks

The Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield hosted the 2nd Experimental Archaeology Student Symposium (EAStS) between the 28th February and 1st March 2020, following on from the first successful meeting held in Newcastle in October 2018. The Symposium hosted nine papers on a variety of different experimental reconstructions of material production and processes. A discussion panel was undertaken considering the future of experimental archaeology and what its purpose should be in this fast changing world with its diverse problems. The meeting also included an experimental day, during which attendees joined in smelting copper ore, casting bronze objects and working copper into broaches, led by Copper Smith and Experimental Archaeologist Sian Evans.