Hasil untuk "History of Northern Europe. Scandinavia"

Alice Bower

This paper explores representations of dvergar (sing. dvergr) in medieval Icelandic narrative sources to ascertain to what extent dvergar were associated with dwarfism and how these links developed over time. The first section of the study focuses on mythological representations of dvergar. In the second section, the analysis turns to Sneglu-Halla þáttr’s Túta, an early example of a human character whose physical description references dvergar. The final section examines the dvergar characters of the legendary sagas (fornaldarsögur) and romance sagas (riddarasögur), which would influence later portrayals of dvergar in Icelandic folklore. The aim of this research is to contribute to further clarification of the historical relationship between dvergar and dwarfism in Icelandic narratives.

Bo-Eun Choi, Jessica K. Werk, Kirill Tchernyshyov et al.

The Magellanic Stream (MS) is a vast gaseous structure in the Milky Way halo, containing most of its mass in ionized form and tracing the interaction between the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and the Galaxy. Using HST/COS G160M spectra from the Plane Quasar Survey, we detect C IV absorbers likely associated with the MS, extending to the northern side of the Galactic plane, approximately 60$^\circ$ beyond its previously known ionized extent. These absorbers exhibit position and kinematic alignment and show consistent ionization trends with previously studied MS sight lines. The non-detection of low ions such as Al II and Si II, and the detection of C IV (and Si IV in some sightlines), indicates a highly ionized gas phase. The observed Si IV/C IV column density ratios suggest a gas temperature of $T \sim 10^{5.3}$~K and favor collisional ionization over photoionization. We estimate the newly detected extension increases the previous ionized gas mass of the MS, and its coherent kinematics suggest that it was stripped within the past few hundred Myr and has not yet mixed with the Milky Way halo. The existence of highly-ionized MS gas at a location above the Galactic Plane may constrain the orbital direction of the Magellanic Clouds.

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.

J. Alfonso L. Aguerri, Jesús Falcón-Barroso, María Argudo-Fernández et al.

Dwarf galaxies dominate the galaxy population in the nearby Universe and occupy the regime where feedback, reionization, and environment exert their strongest influence on galaxy formation. Despite their importance, detailed spectroscopic constraints on the faintest dwarfs are currently limited to a handful of systems in the Local Volume, leaving the role of large-scale environment essentially unexplored at ultra-low stellar masses. A northern 30-40m class telescope equipped with a multiplexed optical integral-field spectrograph will enable a systematic, spatially resolved spectroscopic census of dwarf galaxies with $M_\star \sim 10^{5}-10^{7} M_\odot$ across a wide range of environments. A deep survey of the Coma Cluster, combined with targeted observations of dwarfs in clusters, groups, filaments, and low-density regions, will map star formation histories, chemical enrichment, and internal kinematics at unprecedented depth. This program will directly test models of dark-matter physics, early-Universe feedback, and environmental quenching in the lowest-mass galaxies, establishing dwarf galaxies as precision probes of both galaxy formation and fundamental physics.

Trygve Ugland

This paper offers a first status report and an analysis of the teaching of Scandinavian politics in Canadian universities. Based on a questionnaire sent out to the 57 affiliated member departments of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) in 2022, the paper identifies a clear mismatch between the attention paid to various aspects of the Scandinavian political model among academics and society more generally in Canada, and the very limited number of courses specifically dedicated to Scandinavian politics at Canadian universities during the 2018-2022 period.  The paper makes some recommendations on how to promote and integrate Scandinavian politics content more actively into university teaching. Moreover, the paper presents a dedicated course on Scandinavian politics at a Canadian university as an example. The importance of a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to Scandinavian politics is here highlighted.

Inga Lill Grønnerud

Den 1. desember 1920 la de lokale jernbaneansatte ved Kongsvinger stasjon ned arbeidet. Jernbanestreiken var landsomfattende. I denne artikkelen undersøker jeg streiken lokalt på Kongsvinger stasjon med utgangspunkt i primærkildene etter streikeleder Christian Digerud, skrevet i kampens hete. I artikkelen ønsker jeg å legge fram hvem som var aktørene bak den lokale streiken, de som la ned arbeidet og dermed sørget for at alle hjula og all vanlig virksomhet stoppet opp. Til tross for at streiken var landsomfattende og varte i over to uker, viser jeg i denne artikkelen at langt på nær alle var enige i streiken. Streikebryteri ble forsøkt avverget, men ikke uten kostnad. Den lokale pressen sprikte i dekningen av streiken og trykte påstander om streikelederen. Det likte han dårlig. Partiene Venstre og Høyre motarbeidet streiken. Streiken var på mange måter dømt til å mislykkes fra start. Streiken bidro til at fagforeninger og deres organisasjoner i alle sektorer fikk økt innvirkning på regulering av arbeidslivet.

Bernard J. Carr, Anne M. Green

We overview the history of primordial black hole (PBH) research from the first papers around 50 years ago to the present epoch. The history may be divided into four periods, the dividing lines being marked by three key developments: inflation on the theoretical front and the detection of microlensing events by the MACHO project and gravitational waves by the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA project on the observation front. However, they are also characterised by somewhat different focuses of research. The period 1967-1980 covered the groundbreaking work on PBH formation and evaporation. The period 1980-1996 mainly focussed on their formation, while the period 1996-2016 consolidated the work on formation but also collated the constraints on the PBH abundance. In the period 2016-2024 there was a shift of emphasis to the search for evidence for PBHs and - while opinions about the strength of the purported evidence vary - this has motivated more careful studies of some aspects of the subject. Certainly the soaring number of papers on PBHs in this last period indicates a growing interest in the topic.

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.

Marcelina Kałasznik

Bharati Daftari-Hölzer

Leigh N. Fletcher, Oliver R. T. King, Jake Harkett et al.

Saturn's northern summertime hemisphere was mapped by JWST/MIRI (4.9-27.9 $μ$m) in November 2022, tracing the seasonal evolution of temperatures, aerosols, and chemical species in the five years since the end of the Cassini mission. The spectral region between reflected sunlight and thermal emission (5.1-6.8 $μ$m) is mapped for the first time, enabling retrievals of phosphine, ammonia, and water, alongside a system of two aerosol layers (an upper tropospheric haze $p<0.3$ bars, and a deeper cloud layer at 1-2 bars). Ammonia displays substantial equatorial enrichment, suggesting similar dynamical processes to those found in Jupiter's equatorial zone. Saturn's North Polar Stratospheric Vortex has warmed since 2017, entrained by westward winds at $p<10$ mbar, and exhibits localised enhancements in several hydrocarbons. The strongest latitudinal temperature gradients are co-located with the peaks of the zonal winds, implying wind decay with altitude. Reflectivity contrasts at 5-6 $μ$m compare favourably with albedo contrasts observed by Hubble, and several discrete vortices are observed. A warm equatorial stratospheric band in 2022 is not consistent with a 15-year repeatability for the equatorial oscillation. A stacked system of windshear zones dominates Saturn's equatorial stratosphere, and implies a westward equatorial jet near 1-5 mbar at this epoch. Lower stratospheric temperatures, and local minima in the distributions of several hydrocarbons, imply low-latitude upwelling and a reversal of Saturn's interhemispheric circulation since equinox. Latitudinal distributions of stratospheric ethylene, benzene, methyl and carbon dioxide are presented for the first time, and we report the first detection of propane bands in the 8-11 $μ$m region.

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.

Erkan Osmanović, Jan Trna

Kateřina Křížová

Johann Georg Lughofer

The article introduces Poetry Slam as a new trend in the literary field. The German-speaking slam scene is presented, with a focus on Austria and showing how poetry slam influences and changes the literary scene. In addition to performance, heterogeneity and multilingualism are defining characteristics in slam. This is not mere coincidence resulting from slam's loose rules. Rather, as the article shows, these traits are deeply inscribed in the slam movement and intrinsic to the system.

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.

Marta Kostelecká

Czech and Dutch differ among others in terms of reduction processes. Spoken Dutch can sometimes be difficult to understand for a Czech. This is due to the fact that there is a lot of reduction in sounds. On the one hand, the reduction can be at the level of the dropped word ends or omitted vowels in unstressed syllables. This kind of reduction can still be identified in many cases by a speaker of Dutch as a foreign language. In addition, as Ernestus et. al. (2016) calls it, extreme reduction can occur where the words and sentences are reduced. In such cases, this phonological process causes requests in the perception of such utterances by speaker of Dutch as a foreign language. In this article I give a description of the results of a pilot study carried out among Czech students of Dutch at A2+ level that was focused on understanding reduced utterances. Moreover,I formulate an outline for further research.

Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen