This contribution includes an original poem, “Benediction” in tribute of Valentin-Yves Mudimbe and the first translation in English of selections from Les Fuseaux, parfois (1974). Mudimbe authored several collections in the 1970s, and this translation is intended to draw more scholarly attention to his poetic output.

Let F be a totally real field. Let $\mathsf {A}$ be a simple modular self-dual abelian variety defined over F. We study the growth of the corank of Selmer groups of $\mathsf {A}$ over $\mathbb {Z}_p$-extensions of a complex multiplication (CM) extension of F. We propose an extension of Mazur’s growth number conjecture for elliptic curves to this new setting. We provide evidence supporting an affirmative answer by studying special cases of this problem, generalising previous results on elliptic curves and imaginary quadratic fields.

The study of Ordovician ostracods from eastern North America has been neglected for more than 40 years, prompting the need for taxonomic updates. Newly acquired silicified materials from the Late Ordovician Crown Point Formation of Valcour Island, northeastern New York State, are here systematically described. Fifty-two species of 42 genera are identified, including three new species: Vogdesella longidorsa n. sp., Eokloedenella duodepressa n. sp. and Aviacypris valcourensis n. sp. The combination of high diversity and dominance of both beyrichiocopids and podocopids indicates that the Valcour fauna existed in a stable, shallow-water carbonate environment. Biostratigraphical evidence supports an early Sandbian age designation for the Crown Point Formation. Comparison of the Valcour fauna with others in Laurentia as well as from adjacent paleocontinents shows shared composition at the genus level, especially with Baltica, but high endemicity at the species level. This suggests a history of frequent faunal exchange with a fast speciation rate during the early Late Ordovician in the southern region of Laurentia.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/e12dc8ce-0b2a-4f9d-aca2-bf3e298d9635

Sugar beet production demands sustainable intensification approaches to enhance both yield and quality. This study examined the effects of foliar nano-ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3) applications on five sugar beet cultivars – JAMPOL, BTS 9830, DEL 1135, ASEEL and Raspoly – over two growing seasons in Egypt’s Nile Delta, using a split-plot randomized complete block design. Three nano-NH4NO3 concentrations (0, 50 and 100 ppm) were sprayed twice each season to assess impacts on growth, yield and quality parameters. The results indicated limited influence of treatments on primary yield metrics; taproot yields remained unaffected across all cultivars and seasons. Nonetheless, the 50 ppm treatment preserved optimal sugar quality, with sucrose content reaching 19.4 %, compared to 18 % in the controls. Carotenoid levels increased by 12 % under the 100 ppm treatment, reflecting enhanced nutritional quality. Among cultivars, ASEEL yielded the best results with taproot outputs of 34 t/ha and sugar yields of 6.1 t/ha under optimal conditions, demonstrating significant cultivar-dependent variation. Multivariate analysis revealed distinct response patterns among cultivars and treatments, with three-way interactions (Season × Cultivar × Nanoparticle) affecting several traits. Clustering identified four trait groups and three treatment clusters, highlighting sugar beet’s complex response to nanoparticles. Economic analysis shows limited benefits, with no significant increase in taproot yield, despite a rise in secondary metabolites. While nano-NH4NO3 can modify biochemical parameters, the lack of yield improvements casts doubt on its economic feasibility. Cultivar choice primarily influences sugar beet performance, with environmental conditions also affecting treatment efficacy.

In the 1990s, a protest rock movement developed on the American continent within informational capitalism, the democratisation of information and communication technologies, and the development of transnational social movements that fought against global powers. To complement the interpretations that understand this type of musical practice as a cultural aspect of social movements, or as commodities that obey the imperatives of the market, I use Auslander’s concept of performance to analyse how these protest rock groups deploy political ideologies linked to international leftist struggles, in the space and time of concerts and other types of mediations. Through an interpretive analysis, I identify some spatial, gestural, corporeal, and sound elements used to act out leftist political ideologies.

The 1984 Helsinki Festival introduced Finnish and international audiences to contemporary Soviet composers via what was perhaps the largest repertory of contemporary Soviet music in the West up to that point. The week of concerts did not include any premieres, but several works by Schnittke, Gubaidulina, and Denisov that were performed during the festival were recent compositions that had received only a few performances at that point. And yet, the week was also a compromise, prominently featuring Khrennikov and other conservative composers. This article discusses the context and processes that led to the festival’s realisation and its relation to changes in the Soviet musical world at the time. In the past, Soviet authorities often torpedoed attempts to perform nonconformist works in the West and almost never allowed composers to travel. In Helsinki, Schnittke, Gubaidulina, and several other composers were allowed to attend.

In machine learning-based mortality models, interpretation methods are well established, and they can reveal structures resembling the age or time effects in traditional mortality models. However, in the reverse direction, using such traditional components to guide the initialization of a neural network remains highly challenging due to information loss during model interpretation. This study addresses this gap by exploring how components from pre-fitted traditional mortality models can be used to initialize neural networks, enabling structural information to be incorporated into a deep learning framework. We introduce Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks (KAN) and first construct two shallow models, KAN[2,1] and ARIMAKAN, to examine their applicability to mortality modeling. We then extend the Combined Actuarial Neural Network (CANN) into a KAN-based Actuarial Neural Network (KANN), in which classical model components calibrated via generalized nonlinear models or generalized additive models are naturally used for initialization. Three KANN variants, namely KANN[2,1], KANNLC, and KANNAPC, are proposed. In these models, neural networks assist in improving the accuracy of traditional models and help refine the original parameter estimates. All KANN-based models can also produce smooth mortality curves as well as smooth age, period, and cohort effects through simple regularization. Experiments on 34 populations demonstrate that KAN-based approaches achieve stable performance while balancing interpretability, smoothness, and predictive accuracy.

We determine the conditions for the reducibility of some parametrised families of quadratic and cubic polynomials over finite fields, and count the number of irreducible trinomials. The existence of a factorisation of these polynomials plays an important role in studying the finite groups of exceptional Lie types.

This article reconsiders V.Y. Mudimbe’s contribution to “decolonial” impulses that are central to current preoccupations in fields such as postcolonial studies. It argues that key concepts developed by Mudimbe, such as the “colonial library,” have been overlooked in these discussions. Further, the article provides insight into important aspects of Mudimbe’s thought on the colonial library by reminding readers of the genealogy he excavates in describing the contours of the colonial library and its continued influence (likened by Mudimbe to a lingering odor) that is still to be dismantled.

The integration of extra-robotic limbs or fingers to enhance and extend motor capabilities, particularly for grasping and manipulation, remains a major challenge. In contrast to the natural human hand, which achieves highly dexterous and adaptive grasping, the performance of current extra-robotic limbs or fingers is still markedly limited. Human hands can detect the onset of slip through tactile feedback originating from tactile receptors during the grasping process, enabling precise and automatic regulation of grip force. This grip force is scaled by the coefficient of friction between the contacting surface and the fingers. The frictional information is perceived by humans depending upon the slip happening between the finger and the object. This ability to perceive friction allows humans to apply just the right amount of force needed to maintain a secure grip, adjusting based on the weight of the object and the friction of the contact surface. Enhancing this capability in extra-robotic limbs or fingers used by humans is challenging. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a novel approach to communicate frictional information to users through encoded vibrotactile cues. These cues are conveyed on the onset of incipient slip, thus allowing the users to perceive the friction and ultimately use this information to increase the force to avoid dropping the object. In a 2-alternative forced-choice protocol, participants gripped and lifted a glass under three different frictional conditions, applying a normal force of 3.5 N. After reaching this force, the glass was gradually released to induce slip. During this slipping phase, vibrations scaled according to the static coefficient of friction were presented to users, reflecting the frictional conditions. The results suggested an accuracy of $94.53\pm 3.05$ ($\text{mean}\pm \text{SD}$) in perceiving frictional information upon lifting objects with varying friction. The results indicate the effectiveness of using vibrotactile feedback for sensory feedback, allowing users of extra-robotic limbs or fingers to perceive frictional information. This enables them to assess surface properties and adjust grip force according to the frictional conditions, enhancing their ability to grasp and manipulate objects more effectively.

This paper explores the lesser-known World War I memorials across the United States, hidden in cemeteries and behind closed doors, which were built by and for immigrant communities during the interwar years. These memorials tell a story of the cataclysmic loss World War I brought to a generation of new Americans. Proclaiming some aspects of their history and concealing other aspects, immigrant communities brought a nuanced response to World War I, a war that destroyed four empires, empires from which many of them had only recently come. They strove to honor both their homelands and their new lives in the United States. But by being concealed far from the larger American public, these memorials also revealed a distrust in popular interpretations of the war and what it had meant, interpretations which excluded immigrants from the national narrative and revealed a shaky grasp on international affairs when they did attempt to include foreign nationals. These memorials represent a cautious but determined effort by immigrant communities to claim a place in the United States.

This article investigates the ways children begin spelling from the start of grade 1 to the end of grade 2 in France. It presents the results of a longitudinal study with 676 children faced to the complexity of French orthography and asked to write words and sentences. The corpus was analysed with regard to phonogrammic and morphogrammic principles at work in the French orthography.

Based on the literature and the specific features of the French writing system, we hypothesized that both skill types would develop as early as Grade 1 of elementary school, with lexical spelling skills developing more rapidly. The findings suggest that the development of the phonogrammic, lexical morphogrammic, and grammatical skills of pupils may take into account different variables: consistency, frequency, syntactic context within which words are used, words that can feature different morphograms or not.