Search

A gift is not just for festive seasons and personal landmarks. Over the years gifts have helped to create new bonds between nations, secure marriages, end wars or just strengthen [...]

ARTIST YAYOI KUSAAAA'S fantastical Mount Fuji scenes are printed on it, designer Yumi Katsura makes bridal gowns from it, and film director David Lynch creates lithographs with it. Called washi, [...]

The American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) has since its inception published annual serial monographs or journals to achieve its mission of communicating horticultural science. To recognize the accomplishments of the membership, a series of professional awards was created. After the individual awards, the ASHS created publication awards. This paper, and the papers that follow, document the publication awards of the ASHS. The papers were based on presentations at the 2023 annual conference and serve as additional recognition of the contributions of member authors and as a historical record of achievements of the ASHS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider an environmentwhere players need to decide whether to buy a certain product (or adopt a technology) or not. The product is either good or bad, but its true value is unknown to the players. Instead, each player has her own private information on its quality. Each player can observe the previous actions of other players and estimate the quality of the product. A classic result in the literature shows that in similar settings, informational cascades occur, where learning stops for the whole network and players repeat the actions of their predecessors. In contrast to this literature, in this paper, players get more than one opportunity to act. In each turn, a player is chosen uniformly at random from all the players and can decide to buy the product and leave the market or wait. Her utility is the total expected discounted reward, and thus, myopic strategies may not constitute equilibria. We provide a characterization of perfect Bayesian equilibria (PBEs) with forward-looking strategies through a fixed-point equation of dimensionality that grows only quadratically with the number of players. Using this tractable fixed-point equation, we show the existence of a PBE and characterize PBEs with threshold strategies. Based on this characterization, we study informational cascades in two regimes. First, we show that for a discount factor $\delta$ strictly smaller than 1, informational cascades happen with high probability as the number of players $N$ increases. Furthermore, only a small portion of the total information in the system is revealed before a cascade occurs. Second, and more surprisingly, we show that for a fixed $N$ , and for a sufficiently large $\delta < 1$ , when the product is bad, there exists an equilibrium where an informational cascade can happen only after at least half of the players revealed their private information, and consequently, the probability for a “bad cascade” where all the players buy the product vanishes exponentially with $N$. Finally, when $\delta =1$ and the product is bad, there exists an equilibrium where informational cascades do not happen at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relatively little literature specific to the discipline of History aims to translate theory into practice in regard to designing effective online and flipped learning experiences. This article synthesises current literature into practical advice and reflects on previous experience as an aid to historians (a) tasked with developing online or flipped units or (b) who have transitioned online and are seeking ways to improve. Feedback from students and learning analytics from a flipped unit at a large Australian university underpin the paper's advice. Student feedback and behaviour, coupled with the reflections of the unit's designers, encourage (1) prioritising effective educational media and recording practices over the production of digital material with the longest shelf life, (2) explicit consideration of unit structure and support offered to students, (3) readings which consider the student perspective, (4) enthusiasm about the delivery format, and (5) the overarching importance of constructive alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With enemy fire pummelling the American camp, First Class Sergeant Bennie G Adkins burst into his rudimentary headquarters and hastily gathered together any papers or files he could find. The [...]

Key Events 1767 TOWNSHEND ACTS Further to the taxation policies of the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts are passed. These acts establish taxation on imported essential goods, like tea, paper [...]

The article offers information on the coinage of Poland. Topics include Poland was one of the great nations of Europe, Warsaw came to be known as the ‘Paris of the East', Russian Empress Catherine II was able to put one of her former favorites, Stanislaus Poniatowksi, on the Polish throne as Stanislaus Augustus, Under the leadership of Tadeusz Kosciuszko Poland attempted to regain her place in the European family of nations, in 1807 the duchy used debased Prussian coinage in the marketplace.

Of the many important figures that had the bravery and conviction to stand up against Nazi Germany, one has remained unnoticed in war history until now. Recently declassified papers reveal [...]

Currently, 7 named Sarcocystis species infect cattle: Sarcocystis hirsuta , S. cruzi , S. hominis , S. bovifelis , S. heydorni , S. bovini and S. rommeli ; other, unnamed species also infect cattle. Of these parasites of cattle, a complete life cycle description is known only for S. cruzi , the most pathogenic species in cattle. The life cycle of S. cruzi was completed experimentally in 1982, before related parasite species were structurally characterized, and before the advent of molecular diagnostics; to our knowledge, no archived frozen tissues from the cattle employed in the original descriptions remain for DNA characterization. Here, we isolated DNA from a paraffin-embedded kidney of a calf experimentally infected with S. cruzi in 1980; we then sequenced portions of 18S rRNA, 28S rRNA, COX1 and Acetyl CoA genes and verified that each shares 99–100% similarity to other available isolates attributed to S. cruzi from naturally infected cattle. We also reevaluated histological sections of tissues of calves experimentally infected with S. cruzi in the original description, exploiting improvements in photographic technology to render clearer morphological detail. Finally, we reviewed all available studies of the life cycle of S. cruzi , noting that S. cruzi was transmitted between bison (Bison bison) and cattle (Bos taurus) and that the strain of parasite derived from bison appeared more pathogenic than the cattle strain. Based on these newfound molecular, morphological and physiological data, we thereby redescribed S. cruzi and deposited reference material in the Smithsonian Museum for posterity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Burghley 2023 entries, providing essential information about each horse and rider, including their form, age and owner. It include the details of the competition, the potential contenders for individual medals and the performance history of several horse and rider combinations.

There is considerable debate concerning the life cycles and taxonomy of Sarcocystis species in cattle. Of the 8 species of Sarcocystis named from cattle, 2 (Sarcocystis cruzi and Sarcocystis heydorni) are morphologically distinctive because their sarcocysts are microscopic and the sarcocyst wall is thin (<0.5 μm thick). The sarcocysts of the remaining species (Sarcocystis hirsuta, Sarcocystis hominis, Sarcocystis bovini, Sarcocystis bovifelis, Sarcocystis sinensis, Sarcocystis rommeli) have thick (5–8 μm) walls indistinguishable by light microscopy, alone. To provide needed clarity, I herein review the history, nomenclature and life cycle of S. bovifelis (originally named by Heydorn and associates from Germany), redescribe it and deposit specimens of its various life-cycle stages at a museum for future reference. I also provide means to distinguish this parasite from S. hirsuta. Cats are the definitive hosts for both S. bovifelis and S. hirsuta. The sarcocysts of S. bovifelis are microscopic, its sarcocyst wall is type 10g, it has 2 schizogonic stages in blood vessels and sarcocysts are formed between 25 and 30 days post-inoculation in striated muscles, but not in the heart. Sporulated oocysts are 17.1 × 12.7 μm and sporocysts are 12.8 × 8.4 μm. The sarcocysts of Sarcocystis hirsuta are macroscopic, up to 7mm long, its wall is type 18. Nothing is known of the development of S. hirsuta in cattle tissues and in cat intestine. Size of its oocysts and sporocysts is uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we provide several characterizations of integral input-to-state stability (iISS) of time-delay systems. These characterizations differ in the way the considered Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals (LKFs) dissipate along the solutions of the system. This dissipation can involve the LKF itself, as in existing iISS characterizations, but can alternatively involve the instantaneous value of the solution’s norm (pointwise dissipation), the supremum norm of the state history (historywise dissipation), or a mix of the two (${\mathcal K}{\mathcal L}$ dissipation). We show that all of them guarantee iISS. By relying on a recent converse result by Y. Lin and Y. Wang, we show that most of them are also necessary for iISS. These relaxed dissipation rates simplify the iISS analysis of time-delay systems and contribute to uniforming iISS theory with that of input-free systems. Proofs rely on several results for time-delay systems that may be of interest on their own, including a novel characterization of global asymptotic stability and the fact that iISS is equivalent to global asymptotic stability of the input-free system plus a uniform bounded energy-bounded state property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a brief description of Karl Ferdinand Braun" cathode-ray vacuum tube that is able to visually capture the oscillations in electrical circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we consider a subclass of partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) problems which we termed confounding POMDPs. In these types of POMDPs, temporal difference (TD)-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms struggle, as TD error cannot be easily derived from observations. We solve these types of problems using a new bio-inspired neural architecture that combines a modulated Hebbian network (MOHN) with deep Q-network (DQN), which we call modulated Hebbian plus Q-network architecture (MOHQA). The key idea is to use a Hebbian network with rarely correlated bio-inspired neural traces to bridge temporal delays between actions and rewards when confounding observations and sparse rewards result in inaccurate TD errors. In MOHQA, DQN learns low-level features and control, while the MOHN contributes to high-level decisions by associating rewards with past states and actions. Thus, the proposed architecture combines two modules with significantly different learning algorithms, a Hebbian associative network and a classical DQN pipeline, exploiting the advantages of both. Simulations on a set of POMDPs and on the Malmo environment show that the proposed algorithm improved DQN’s results and even outperformed control tests with advantage-actor critic (A2C), quantile regression DQN with long short-term memory (QRDQN + LSTM), Monte Carlo policy gradient (REINFORCE), and aggregated memory for reinforcement learning (AMRL) algorithms on most difficult POMDPs with confounding stimuli and sparse rewards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we study the problem of information sharing among rational self-interested agents as a dynamic game of asymmetric information. We assume that the agents imperfectly observe a Markov chain, and they are called to decide whether they will share their noisy observations or not at each time instant. We utilize the notion of conditional mutual information to evaluate the information being shared among the agents. The challenges that arise due to the interdependence of agents’ information structure and decision making are exhibited. For the finite horizon game, we prove that agents do not have incentive to share information. In contrast, we show that cooperation can be sustained in the infinite-horizon case by devising appropriate punishment strategies, which are defined over the agents’ beliefs on the system state. We show that these strategies are closed under the best-response mapping and that cooperation can be the optimal choice in some subsets of the state belief simplex. We characterize these equilibrium regions, prove uniqueness of a maximal equilibrium region, and devise an algorithm for its approximate computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study a general class of dynamic multi- agent decision problems with asymmetric information and nonstrategic agents, which include dynamic teams as a special case. When agents are nonstrategic, an agent’s strategy is known to the other agents. Nevertheless, the agents’ strategy choices and beliefs are interdependent over times, a phenomenon known as signaling. We introduce the notion of sufficient information that effectively compresses the agents’ information in a mutually consistent manner. Based on the notion of sufficient information, we propose an information state for each agent that is sufficient for decision-making purposes. We present instances of dynamic multiagent decision problems where we can determine an information state with a time-invariant domain for each agent. Furthermore, we present a generalization of the policy-independence property of belief in partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDP) to dynamic multiagent decision problems. Within the context of dynamic teams with asymmetric information, the proposed set of information states leads to a sequential decomposition that decouples the interdependence between the agents’ strategies and beliefs over time and enables us to formulate a dynamic program to determine a globally optimal policy via backward induction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging applications of control, estimation, and machine learning, from target tracking to decentralized model fitting, pose resource constraints that limit which of the available sensors, actuators, or data can be simultaneously used across time. Therefore, many researchers have proposed solutions within discrete optimization frameworks where the optimization is performed over finite sets. By exploiting notions of discrete convexity, such as submodularity, the researchers have been able to provide scalable algorithms with provable suboptimality bounds. In this article, we consider such problems but in adversarial environments, where in every step a number of the chosen elements in the optimization is removed due to failures/attacks. Specifically, we consider for the first time a sequential version of the problem that allows us to observe the failures and adapt, while the attacker also adapts to our response. We call the novel problem robust sequential submodular maximization (RSM). Generally, the problem is computationally hard and no scalable algorithm is known for its solution. However, in this article, we propose robust and adaptive maximization (RAM), the first scalable algorithm. RAM runs in an online fashion, adapting in every step to the history of failures. Also, it guarantees a near-optimal performance, even against any number of failures among the used elements. Particularly, RAM has both provable per-instance a priori bounds and tight and/or optimal a posteriori bounds. Finally, we demonstrate RAM's near-optimality in simulations across various application scenarios, along with its robustness against several failure types, from worst-case to random. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ascaris lumbricoides, the roundworm, and Trichuris trichiura, the whipworm, are human intestinal nematode parasites; both are soil-transmitted helminths, are often placed together in an epidemiological context and both remain neglected despite high prevalence. Our understanding of parasitic disease continues to be enhanced through animal models. Despite the similarities between whipworm and roundworm, there are key differences between the two species and these have influenced the application of their respective animal models. In the case of T. trichiura, the fact that a murine equivalent, T. muris completes its life cycle in a mouse model has greatly enhanced our knowledge of whipworm biology, pathogenicity and immunology. In contrast, A. lumbricoides and its porcine equivalent, Ascaris suum, lack a rodent model in which the life cycle is completed. However, evidence continues to accumulate demonstrating that mice represent useful models of early Ascaris infection, a key stage of the life cycle. The use of mouse models for both Ascaris and Trichuris has a long history with early pioneers discovering fundamental aspects of each parasite's biology. Novel technologies and perspectives, as outlined in this special issue, demonstrate how through the prism of mouse models, we can continue to explore the similarities and differences between roundworms and whipworms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: Global Views; History; Legal Issues EN Global Views History Legal Issues 421 421 1 10/09/23 20231013 NES 231013 2023 OCT 12 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Women's Health Weekly -- New research on history is the subject of a new report. The news editors obtained a quote from the research from Soran University: "In complex ways, Margret Atwood uses the feminist dystopian genre to resist gender-based oppression. [Extracted from the article]

This article provides a historical overview of the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific (NIWC Pacific) and its contributions to information warfare. Established 80 years ago, the center initially focused on sonar technology and undersea weapons. Throughout its history, NIWC Pacific has developed various technologies, including torpedoes, satellite communication systems, and robotics. The article also highlights the center's involvement in important operations, such as providing support during Operation Desert Storm and the 9/11 attacks. NIWC Pacific is currently focused on integrating information across all domains and is considered a leader in information warfare. The article emphasizes the importance of storytelling and vision in leadership and mentions the lab's efforts to create short films depicting their technical visions for the future. It concludes by suggesting that the lab's library may hold answers for future employees and expresses hope for the continuation of the center's legacy. [Extracted from the article]

Engineers are increasingly turning to the centuries-old art of folding paper into three-dimensional forms to shape some of the modern world's most ambitious designs. The models shown here, many of [...]

The origins of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) are labyrinthine, complex and easily fill several books. Triggered by the death of Emperor Charles VI, it was essentially a [...]

In 1972, Stanley Cohen published his monumental work Folk Devils and Moral Panics. The book is widely credited for defining the latter term, but just what is a 'moral panic'? [...]

As the Great War was coming to a close, a new perceived threat faced Europe: Bolshevism. Standing in the way of the 'Reds' were the 'White' Russians: a jumbled amalgamation [...]

There are few women from the mid-20th century whose legacies remain as iconic and tragic today as they were during their heyday. Marilyn Monroe would be the obvious example, as [...]

Despite centuries of research and interest in the Aztec people, they remain one of the more misunderstood and mysterious cultures to many of us. Thanks to a combination of Spanish [...]

From Sherlock Holmes to Miss Marple, we all love stories of the eccentric master detective, solving crimes through clever deduction and superior wit. Yet the world's first modern investigator was [...]

Historian Taylor Downing's latest book, The Army That Never Was: D-Day and the Great Deception, covers the audacious schemes of Operation Fortitude, the misdirection and misinformation mission to confuse German [...]

Starting in 1938 after the November pogroms, known as Kristallnacht, and going right up to the invasion of Poland in September 1939, a concerted and organised effort was made to [...]

For more than 900 years, the Tower of London has guarded the north bank of the River Thames. At various times a royal palace, menagerie, public record office, mint, arsenal, [...]

The Fairey Swordfish entered service with the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm (FAA) in 1936. Already slow and outdated by modern standards, a requirement was issued in the same year [...]

As the 1980s drew to a close, a quirky group of youthful outsiders began to dominate the New York club scene. These were strange creatures to mainstream observers, a misfit [...]

History shows that when conducting consecutive wars, military leaders fight the 'next' war with doctrine, equipment and tactics stemming from the previous. If it worked last time, the prevailing wisdom [...]

Leonardo da Vinci is remembered as a 'dual genius', the great artist who gave us the Mona Lisa and the great inventor who conceived machines that would not exist for [...]

Key Events 1200 BCE SHELLING OUT One of the earliest forms of money is cowrie shells, belonging to molluscs. China is among the first countries to use the shells for [...]

The slog was relentless. Through dark, deep forest and across broken terrain, mountain peaks studded with bare hillocks, draws and ridgelines, the US Seventh Army had fought its way northward [...]

Key Events 17 FEB 1958 GIVE PEACE A CHANCE The peace symbol is introduced by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at their inaugural meeting in London. It is designed by [...]

An early proponent of the American abolitionist movement and a hugely successful female writer, Lydia Maria Child forged her own path from the young age of 22. Ignoring the naysayers [...]

Michael Kimmage is a leading academic in US-Russian relations and Cold War history. He is currently professor in history at The Catholic University of America and a research fellow with [...]

DANGLING ON A ROPE SOME 40 FEET UP, AMID A LABYRINTH of leafy tree limbs, I looked down and questioned my sanity for asking the two men far below to [...]

ON A BRISK MARCH AFTERNOON, Kazuhiko Akiba and a colleague stood in the courtyard of the Chiba Kogaku glass factory in Japan, ready to unveil their latest creation. A forklift [...]

Who was Charles Lindbergh? Charles Lindbergh became famous in 1927 when he became the first man to fly across the Atlantic from New York to Paris. Suddenly, out of nowhere [...]

When Klara Hitler died from breast cancer in December 1907, just four days before Christmas, her devoted son Adolf was devastated. The Jewish family doctor, Eduard Bloch, visited the family [...]

As she nervously waited for the doctors to begin a cesarean section, she put on a playlist she had made for the occasion. It consisted of songs she found calming [...]

The disastrous retreat from Moscow following the invasion of 1812 would have broken most military commanders, as well as the warfighting spirit of most nations, but Napoleon Bonaparte had proved [...]

In the 19th century, the Underground Railroad was a vital collective effort to aid fugitive slaves in their flight to freedom. In early 1856, William Still, by that point perhaps [...]

RETREAT FROM RUSSIA 1812 This oil-on-canvas painting of the Grande Armee's retreat from Russia is by Nicolas Toussaint Charlet, a French military artist known for his striking portrayals of pride [...]