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Approaches to Latin Love Elegy
No full textWhile different in their approaches, structure and intended readership, the four books
reviewed here are connected by their common aim of responding to traditional views of
elegy as a minor, ‘softer’ genre, which stands in binary opposition to the magniloquence
of epicPeer-reviewe
The new normal? Central banks as social insurers and reputation-protecting political agents
No full textAn idée fixe of Great Moderation economic policy was that central banks are only effective
macroeconomic managers when they are segregated from electoral politics. That idea made a swift transition from radical heterodoxy to commonsensical orthodoxy during the 1980s and proved remarkably resistant to reality during the 2008 financial crisis. After almost twenty years of ‘unconventional’ monetary policy, scholars, policymakers, and politicians are justifiably searching for more credible ways to conceptualise and use the nation-state’s monetary authority. Two recent books provide vital energy for that intellectual exercise. Éric Monnet’s Balance of Power is a bold re-conceptualisation of monetary authority as a welfare-state support in liberal democracies. In addition to dissipating the illusion that central banks are simply interest-rate-setting inflation fighters, Monnet presents a systematic argument for integrating them into a web of deliberative institutions (including public development banks and economically empowered parliaments) to bolster the legitimacy and effectiveness of monetary policy. Relatedly, Manuella Moschella’s Unexpected Revolutionaries attacks the idea that central bankers are responsive only to technocratic doctrine and private-market behaviour, showing how monetary authorities sculpt policies to bolster their reputation with political actors. Paying close reference to private-market liquidity guarantees and quantitative easing, Moschella maps the fortunes of unconventional policy in alignment with political support for financial-market backstops and exceptional economic stimulus. Both books provoke readers to jettison the anodyne generalities of central banks’ own glossy pamphlets and think afresh about the possibilities of economic policy’s new normality.Peer-reviewe
Establishing bio-logging data collections as dynamic archives of animal life on Earth
No full textRapid growth in bio-logging—the use of animal-borne electronic tags to document the movements, behaviour, physiology and environments of wildlife—offers opportunities to mitigate biodiversity threats and expand digital natural history archives. Here we present a vision to achieve such benefits by accounting for the heterogeneity inherent to bio-logging data and the concerns of those who collect and use them. First, we can enable data integration through standard vocabularies, transfer protocols and aggregation protocols, and drive their wide adoption. Second, we need to develop integrated data collections on standardized data platforms that support data preservation through public archiving and strategies that ensure long-term access. We outline pathways to reach these goals, highlighting the need for resources to govern community data standards and guide data mobilization efforts. We propose the launch of a community-led coordinating body and provide recommendations for how stakeholders—including government data centres, museums and those who fund, permit and publish bio-logging work—can support these efforts.We acknowledge input from approximately 100 bio-logging researchers, data scientists, equipment manufacturers and other experts who attended the workshop 'A future for a common bio-logging language? Discussions about data standards and interoperability in the bio-logging world' held at the 2017 Bio-Logging Science Symposium in Konstanz, Germany, responded to surveys sent out by the Data Standardisation Working Group of the International Bio-Logging Society during 2017 and/or participated in the group's subsequent meetings. We are particularly grateful to B. Woodward, P. Lovell and the late B. McConnell for their contributions. We also thank the users of various community bio-logging data platforms, whose feedback has influenced our recommendations, and platform managers who assisted in gathering data for Fig. 1 and Supplementary Table 1. Impetus for finalizing our recommendations and vision was provided by the COVID-19 Bio-Logging Initiative, which is funded in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF9881) and the National Geographic Society (NGS-82515R-20; both to C.R.), and endorsed by the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. We also acknowledge support from: the Australian Research Council (DP210103091; to A.M.M.S.); an IRD Fellowship 2021-2022 at Fondation Imera, Institute for Advanced Studies at Aix-Marseille Universite (to F.C.); the National Biodiversity Future Centre to Fondazione Edmund Mach, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, PNRR, Mission 4 Component 2, Investment 1.4, Project CN00000033 (to F.C.); NASA's Ecological Forecasting Program (80NSSC21K1182; to S.C.D.); the Netherlands Biodiversity Information Facility (MOVE2GBIF; to S.C.D., P.D.); and the Research Foundation - Flanders (LifeWatch; to P.D.).Peer-reviewe
Corruption, economic globalisation, and resistance: Insights from the Philippine rice industry
No full textScholars have shown that narratives of corruption can both intensify economic globalisation and fuel resistance to it. However, little research has been done on how policy debates are framed by people with competing perspectives on corruption. This article draws on interviews with key stakeholders to highlight how narratives of corruption have framed debates about policy reform in the Philippine rice industry. Respondents whose views reflect an economic perspective that promotes market mechanisms to address corruption justified a law designed to deregulate the rice market. Their actions were a panacea to the growing power of cartels illegally and often corruptly importing rice into the country. Respondents whose views reflect a critical perspective argued that this law would only bolster cartel power and that other policy solutions such as land reform and self-sufficiency would reduce corruption and other injustices. Our analysis reveals how those debates informed deregulation of the Philippine rice sector and resulted in a Rice Tariffication Law in 2019. In the process, we reveal how competing perspectives on corruption and associated narratives are ideologically deployed to shape policy reforms that expand economic globalisation and benefit some groups, such as consumers, at the expense of others, particularly small-scale farmers.This work was supported by the Australian Aid Program within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Funding informationPeer-reviewe
OpenKD: Opening Prompt Diversity for Zero- and Few-Shot Keypoint Detection
No full textExploiting foundation models (e.g., CLIP) to build a versatile keypoint detector has gained increasing attention. Most existing models accept either the text prompt (e.g., “the nose of a cat”), or the visual prompt (e.g., support image with keypoint annotations), to detect the corresponding keypoints in query image, thereby, exhibiting either zero-shot or few-shot detection ability. However, the research on multimodal prompting is still underexplored, and the prompt diversity in semantics and language is far from opened. For example, how to handle unseen text prompts for novel keypoint detection and the diverse text prompts like “Can you detect the nose and ears of a cat?” In this work, we open the prompt diversity in three aspects: modality, semantics (seen vs. unseen), and language, to enable a more general zero- and few-shot keypoint detection (Z-FSKD). We propose a novel OpenKD model which leverages a multimodal prototype set to support both visual and textual prompting. Further, to infer the keypoint location of unseen texts, we add the auxiliary keypoints and texts interpolated in visual and textual domains into training, which improves the spatial reasoning of our model and significantly enhances zero-shot novel keypoint detection. We also find large language model (LLM) is a good parser, which achieves over 96% accuracy when parsing keypoints from texts. With LLM, OpenKD can handle diverse text prompts. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Z-FSKD and initiates new ways of dealing with unseen text and diverse texts. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/AlanLuSun/OpenKD.Changsheng Lu is supported by Australian Government Research Training Program (AGRTP) International Scholarship. Piotr Koniusz is supported by CSIRO\u2019s Science Digital.Peer-reviewe
Reconstructing the long-term ecological history of Long Island, Furneaux Group (Bass Strait), Lutruwita/Tasmania
No full textThe Bass Strait islands are the elevated remnants of a now-submerged continental land bridge that connected the mainland of Australia to Lutruwita/Tasmania during low sea level phases of the Quaternery period. The Furneaux Group is made up of around 100 islands, harbouring a rich diversity of plants derived from glacial refugia and stepping-stone dispersal as millennial-scale climate change altered the land and seascape configuration of the land bridge. Despite the region’s significance, long-term ecological and environmental dynamics of most of these islands remain poorly known. We present the first palaeoecological study of Long Island, a small granite island of the Furneaux group, currently covered by extensive grasslands in the west and patches of forest and woodland in the east and north of the island. We use decadal to centennial-scale resolution palaeoecological evidence for vegetation, animal and fire dynamics, alongside historical accounts of vegetation changes inferred from aerial photo analysis, to develop a comprehensive record of the island’s long-term ecology. Results show that grasslands have been an important feature of the island for at least the last 1000 years, and are reminiscent of Last Glacial Maximum grasslands of the now-submerged Bassian Plain. Both aerial photo analysis and the palaeoecological record show increases in forest cover on the island’s eastern corner over the past four decades. We discuss these ecological dynamics in the context of environmental and climatic shifts. This study emphasises the importance of palaeoecological studies, specifically their value in understanding modern ecosystems in their historic context. This data is critical in understanding the island’s current landscape and how this might change into the future.Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions The authors wish to acknowledge the funding support for this research through the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CE170100015) and an ARC Laureate (FL220100099).Peer-reviewe
Multidecadal Trends of the Mixed Layer Depth and Their Relation to the Wind in Global Ocean Models Forced by an Atmospheric Reanalysis
No full textThe surface mixed layer of the ocean plays a key role in ocean-atmosphere interactions. Despite the ocean surface warming in the past four decades, which increased the stratification, the mixed layer depth (MLD) has been found to increase, most notably in the Southern Ocean in summer. We use 12 models from the Ocean Model Intercomparison Project (OMIP) at different resolutions, forced by the atmospheric reanalysis JRA55-do, to assess their capability to represent the MLD trends over the period 1970–2018 and to investigate their origin. The MLD evolution in the OMIP models is extremely well correlated across models at interannual time scales, especially in summer. Correlations are lower in high resolution models because of the chaotic nature of the mesoscale variability. OMIP models reproduce consistently the deepening trend of the mixed layer in summer in the Southern Ocean and confirm its relation to the wind speed. The MLD deepening is weaker in the models than in observations, probably due to the fact that the wind speed trend is underestimated in the atmospheric reanalysis. We find however that the MLD deepening is not a simple one-dimensional response to the increase of the wind speed at a given location, but that the three-dimensional processes that control the stratification also play a part. This study gives confidence in the capacity of ocean models to project the response of the mixed layer to future changes in wind speed.This work is a contribution to the MixED Layer hEterogeneitY (MEDLEY) project. MEDLEY has received funding from the Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) Climate and JPI Oceans programs under the 2019 joint call, managed by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (contract no. 19-JPOC-0001-01). AEK is supported by the Australian Research Council Grant LP200100406. ACCESS-MOM data was provided by the Consortium for Ocean-Sea Ice Modelling in Australia (COSIMA) () using computational resources provided by the Australian Government through the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) under the National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme and ANU Merit Allocation Scheme. SGY acknowledges support from award NA24OARX431G0043 of NOAA's Climate Variability and Predictability program. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a major facility sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Cooperative Agreement 1852977.Peer-reviewe
X-ray Scatter In 3D Microscopes
No full textX-ray computed tomography (XCT) is a non-destructive imaging technique that enables 3D internal structure examination of objects. This is achieved by employing X-rays to penetrate the object of interest, and these X-rays are measured by a detector to form images. XCT is very useful in medicine and industrial inspection \cite{ou2021}, it can be used to examine an aircraft's part to ensure that there is no internal fracture. However, such an object would introduce \textbf{object scatter}, reducing image contrast, resulting blurry images that prevent us from seeing the small fractures. This is because some X-rays straight from the X-ray source are deflected or scattered by the object to become secondary X-rays that reach detector regions not initially aligned with these primary X-rays. In this work, we demonstrate a method to measure the spatial distribution of object scatter and subsequently remove it. We used an array of small tungsten spheres to block X-rays from reaching the detector, creating shadow regions on the detector. An array of these spheres is called a Beam-Stop-Array (BSA). By design, only X-rays scattered from the object can reach these shadow regions, thereby contributing extra counts in the shadow regions. Assuming object scatter distribution is spatially slowly variant, we can obtain object scatter distribution with extra counts in shadow regions by interpolation. During the project, we found that X-rays can also scatter: (i) within the source and from the cabinet wall of the XCT system; (ii) within the detector. We called these confounding factors as they can also contribute extra counts in the shadow regions, thereby reducing the accuracy of the object scatter measurement. After addressing these confounding factors, the extra counts in the shadow regions are solely due to object scatter. In our experiment, after measuring and correcting for object scatter, the root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of the attenuation profile of the image of an acrylic cylinder and the theoretical profile drops from to . This drop in RMSE indicates that our method successfully increased the accuracy of images
Meaning, anti-alienation, and fulfillment
No full textOne intuition that motivates subjectivist theories about meaning in life is the anti-alienation intuition, that is, for a life to be meaningful it must engage with the person whose life it is. This article contends that the anti-alienation and subjectivist theories it motivates are best understood as tracking fulfillment in life; this is an axiologically distinct evaluative dimension a life can have, which stands apart from meaning.Peer-reviewe