Search Results (1,319)

This article examines the Integrevise^TM platform through a repeated cross-sectional, multi-cycle pilot case study of viva-based verification in AI-mediated assessment environments. Integrevise^TM pairs a submitted written artifact with a short adaptive viva in which students explain their work, reasoning, and application in their own words. Rather than functioning as an AI detector or automated grading system, the platform operates as a diagnostic assessment layer intended to surface comprehension, authorship confidence, and disengagement risk before final grades become the only available signal. The pilot was conducted across Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 at a private liberal arts college in the Midwest; these phases involved different student groups and are therefore treated as iterative implementation cycles rather than a longitudinal cohort. Results should be interpreted as preliminary pilot evidence. In Spring 2026, 52 vivas were completed, but formal student survey data were limited to seven respondents and showed mixed perceptions: only 14.3% agreed that the oral assessment helped them think more deeply about the assignment, whereas 57.1% disagreed or strongly disagreed. Platform feedback was also incomplete, with 20 of 52 vivas (38.5%) producing no student feedback record. Qualitative feedback, tutor observations, and implementation notes nevertheless suggest that viva-based verification may help identify some comprehension gaps and implementation barriers that written artifacts alone may not reveal. The findings, therefore, support continued investigation of Integrevise^TM as a process-rich assessment intervention, but not broad claims of efficacy or scalability without larger, more systematic validation. Full article

Linking art and ecology can mean two significantly different things. First, it may suggest art that takes the objects of ecology as its theme. This, most frequently, means art that is about ecological health, including climate warming. Second, and less often, it may suggest that art can be imagined from the methodologies of ecology rather than from the approaches of art history. The first two parts of this article are deliberately selective literature reviews of each approach, followed by a third part that traces the three-decade trajectory of an artistic collaboration that embodies both. (In full disclosure, I am one of the two artists.) What might such a self-consciously ecological art practice look like? These sections aim to provide the background and critical context for a response to this question, and that response is the final section of the article, an original artist project: The Last Cool Skies (2026) by artists Lyndell Brown and Charles Green. These artist pages are intended to be the principal focus of this article and are presented as research in the form of visual art across this journal’s pages, as original research contributions in themselves and not as ancillary or as simply illustrations to this article’s text. Full article

This article is a follow-up of a previous article where music was defined as matter or substance that flows. It argued for a rheological approach to music listening, conceiving of music as a virtual, motional object that evolves over time. The current article proceeds on similar lines by introducing the concept of phoronomy as the kinematic study of motion. It revolves about the way listeners can perceptually track sound by relying on motor imagery and ideomotor simulation, thus describing listening as an action verb by entailing active engagement with the sonic world. Listening, in that view, is a real-time phenomenon that keeps pace with the unfolding of the music, involving a kind of sound tracking that is characterized by sensory immediacy and perceptual bonding. By elaborating on the root metaphor of drawing an imaginary curve, it explores how listeners can stay as closely to the music as possible through a gestural approach that describes the listening experience as a virtual trajectory through virtual space. An attempt is made to provide both foundational grounding from broader theoretical frameworks and recent empirical findings. Full article

Cellulose has been integral to a range of essential applications throughout history and remains relevant today. This research highlights an important topic: the study of cellulose-based and wood-derived supports in works by Portuguese artists from the twentieth century. Such an investigation is valuable for conservation and heritage science, as materials such as cardboard, plywood, hardboard, and particleboard are common in modern and contemporary artworks but are often not thoroughly characterized or discussed. Micro-infrared spectroscopy, when combined with reference materials, offers a promising means of identifying and analyzing these supports. The study focuses on works by Portuguese artists from 1915 to 1986. Applying principal component analysis to infrared data in the 1000–1200 cm⁻¹ range enabled us to distinguish among the artists. For Pomar, Rodrigo, Vespeira, Calvet, and Hatherly, using hardboard in this range appears most suitable. For Salazar, Teles, and Pinheiro, particleboard is the optimal choice. Beech and eucalyptus plywood are preferable for Pires Vieira and Carlos Botelho. The effort to connect material knowledge with sustainable conservation practices is commendable. The research also aims to relate cellulose-based supports adhering to the European Union’s Sustainable Development Goals, fostering more sustainable and meaningful approaches to cultural preservation. Full article

This article examines the Buddhist artworks commissioned by Yŏm Sŭngik (廉承益, ?–1302), a powerful court official and ritual specialist active during the reign of King Ch’ungnyŏl in late Koryŏ. Focusing on three surviving works—a copied Lotus Sutra manuscript (1283), an Amitābha Tathāgata painting (1286), and a woodblock-printed Baoqieyin jing dhāraṇī (1292)—the study explores how Buddhist art functioned as a material expression of repentance, ritual healing, karmic eradication, and aspirations for Pure Land rebirth. Through analysis of votive inscriptions, painting inscriptions, and dhāraṇī texts, the article argues that the repeated four-line gāthā appearing in both the sutra manuscript and Amitābha painting is most plausibly understood within the devotional and ritual framework of the Yenyŏm mit’a toryang ch’ambŏp, rather than primarily through Huayan doctrinal interpretation, as previous scholarship has suggested. The article further situates Yŏm Sŭngik’s patronage within broader political and familial networks linking elite officials, Buddhist monks, and the religious culture of the Koryŏ and Yuan courts. Ultimately, it argues that Buddhist art in late Koryŏ operated not merely as devotional imagery, but as an active medium of ritual practice through which repentance, healing, and hopes for Pure Land rebirth were materially enacted. Full article

This research provides new insights into the materials, methods of application and modification of the black lines used by Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) in his Neoplastic works. Interesting information was gained from letters and studio photographs, the making of mock-ups and reconstructions, and the in-depth study of four paintings, dated between 1921 and 1938, in the collection of Fondation Beyeler (Riehen/Basel, Switzerland)—Tableau I (1921–1925), Composition with yellow and blue (1932), Composition with double line and blue (1935) and Picture no. III (1938)—as well as the examination of an unfinished painting, Composition with red (1934, private collection). The four paintings were investigated with high-magnification stereomicroscopy, technical photography in transmitted light and raking light, X-rays and infrared reflectography. Detailed information about the buildup and composition of the layers was gathered with the study of cross sections and microsamples, using optical microscopy and chemical analyses. It was shown that Mondrian frequently moved the lines and changed their width up to the very last working phase and, probably, did not use a ruler in the traditional sense to achieve straight lines. In one of the works, Mondrian even employed a pencil, tracing a groove in the wet paint to accentuate straight edges. The black lines consist of multiple paint layers of diluted bone black oil paint, added with small amounts of coloured paint, alternated with thin oil-resin layers, sometimes containing lead white particles. Finally, a thin (pigmented) oil-resin finish was applied on top of the black line. Full article

Fine-paste earthenware held symbolic significance in Hindu and Buddhist rituals and domestic use in Southeast Asia. Despite the influx of Chinese glazed ceramics from the ninth century onward, these locally produced vessels continued to circulate widely until the fourteenth century along maritime trade routes extending from northern Sumatra and Java to the southern Philippines and the Thai–Malay Peninsula. Integrated petrographic, Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM), and Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS) analyses were employed to compare fine-paste earthenware from the Kok Moh production center in Songkhla Province, Thailand, and the Kota Cina consumption site in northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Petrographic observations indicate broadly similar mineralogical compositions in samples from both sites, consistent with the use of kaolin-rich clay materials. FESEM reveals that Kok Moh samples exhibit relatively dense and homogeneous microstructures with more continuous matrices, whereas Kota Cina specimens display coarser textures, more distinct mineral inclusions, and less consolidated matrices. EDS elemental mapping further demonstrates a more uniform distribution of major elements in the Kok Moh samples. Although both groups share broadly similar silica–alumina compositions, the observed microstructural differences suggest variations in clay preparation and firing practices rather than major differences in raw material selection. Comparison with published data from Nakhon Si Thammarat supports an association with kaolin-rich clay resources in southern Thailand. In contrast, the examined ceramics differ from fine-paste wares reported from northeastern Thailand, Myanmar, and India. These findings suggest that maritime Southeast Asian fine-paste ware developed as a localized technological tradition shaped by regional resources, production practices, and maritime exchange networks. Full article

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to reverse-engineer the computational circuits within large language models, but current methods rely on exhaustive or heuristic search over exponentially many feature interactions. This paper introduces Active Circuit Discovery (ACD), a framework that combines attribution-graph analysis with active inference to select interventions efficiently. ACD uses Anthropic’s circuit-tracer library as its attributiongraph backend, applying Edge Attribution Patching with transcoders to identify the active transcoder features for each prompt. A partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) agent, implemented with pymdp, maintains a multi-factor generative model of feature importance, layer role, and causal influence. At each step, the agent selects both a target feature and an intervention type (ablation, activation patching, or feature steering) by minimising Expected Free Energy over the joint feature–action space, and it learns its observation model online through Dirichlet parameter updates. ACD is an interventionselection layer over existing attribution-graph tools; it is not a whole-circuit discovery method, and no claim of state-of-the-art circuit discovery is made. The framework is evaluated on Gemma-2-2B (26 layers) and Llama-3.2-1B (16 layers) across four settings: Indirect Object Identification (IOI), multi-step reasoning, feature steering, and a multidomain benchmark spanning geography, mathematics, science, logic, and history. With a budget of 20 interventions per prompt, an ablation-only agent scored by bounded oracle efficiency against the ablation oracle reaches 82.0% efficiency on Gemma IOI and 73.0% on Gemma multi-step. It exceeds random selection by 43.5% (relative) on Gemma IOI (paired permutation p = 0.031) and is competitive with greedy ranking, a heuristic UCB bandit, and a plain UCB baseline. A direct Edge-Attribution-Patching ranking is itself a strong baseline that the agent does not consistently surpass, and on Llama multi-step the agent reaches 9.3% efficiency (37.8% with finer layer-role bins). All comparisons report bootstrap 95% confidence intervals. The full multi-action agent is characterised separately by a Relative Cumulative KL, a steering-driven amplification factor reported apart from the bounded efficiency. Feature steering changes the top-1 prediction in a dose-dependent manner, but a matched random-feature control shows that circuit-selected features are only marginally, and not significantly, more steerable than random active features at large multipliers, indicating that part of the effect is generic activation scaling. Multi-domain analysis shows task-dependent circuit structure, with IOI circuits concentrated in late layers and reasoning and scientific knowledge recruiting early and middle layers. Code, notebooks (free T4), AMD64/aarch64 Docker images, and raw results are publicly available. Full article

This essay advances a theological reappraisal of Impressionist painting as a modern mode of sacramental perception capable of renewing the contemplative imagination within a disenchanted West. While recent scholarship has interpreted Impressionism as a limit case of aesthetic immanence, reducing vision to light, temporality, and surface, this study argues that such immanence is not closed. Drawing on Aidan Nichols’s distinction between art made for the liturgy and art tutored by it and informed by David Fagerberg’s account of liturgy as the right ordering of reality itself, the argument proposes that Impressionist form can be evaluated according to precise theological criteria. Sustained ekphrastic analysis of Monet’s Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light (1894), Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (c. 1902–1904), and Messiaen’s Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus (1941) is brought into conversation with Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, Pavel Florensky’s theology of perspective, and Augustine’s account of distentio animi. Read in this light, Impressionism emerges not as indifference to the sacred, but as a discipline of attention that disposes artist and perceiver toward participation in a liturgical reality already given in creation: a modern praeparatio evangelica whose formal achievements, though historically bounded, remain theologically available. The argument does not presume that Impressionist form is theological in intention, but that, when attended to with sufficient formal discipline, it may be recognized as consonant with theological accounts of perception. Full article

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) traditionally relies on explicit reasoning chains, which, despite being interpretable, impose severe constraints on inference efficiency and scalability in long-range environments. Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently encounter latency bottlenecks due to the generation of verbose textual narratives during decision-making. To address these limitations, we propose spatial reasoning vision-and-language navigation (SR-VLN), a novel framework that shifts the paradigm from explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) to an implicit spatial representation space. SR-VLN introduces a pyramidal hierarchical history framework integrated with perceptual compression to condense historical trajectories into multi-scale representations, effectively minimizing token overhead while preserving critical spatial semantics. Rather than generating verbose textual reasoning steps, SR-VLN employs compact, learnable spatial tokens (S-Tokens) to perform agile inference directly within the latent feature space. To establish robust causal mappings between these implicit states and navigational actions, we employ a hybrid training strategy that combines sparse reward supervision with reinforcement learning via GRPO. Extensive evaluations on the R2R, REVERIE, and SOON datasets demonstrate that SR-VLN achieves state-of-the-art overall navigation performance, while maintaining a comparable balance between accuracy and efficiency. Compared to explicit reasoning baselines, our method reduces token consumption by 68% and achieves a 4.1× speedup in inference while reaching a 76.02% success rate and a 73.80% SPL on the R2R unseen split, thereby facilitating near-real-time action prediction in long-range navigation environments. Full article

The Singaporean government’s Green Plan 2030 aims to “galvanize a whole-of-nation movement and advance [its] national agenda on sustainable development,” transforming the Garden City into a City in Nature. The state’s #OneMillionTrees campaign, which intends to plant a million trees over a decade, seems less focused on climate adaptation, given Singapore’s unresolved environmental issues such as oil refinement, terraforming, and hyperconsumption. Instead, it appears to superficially address deeper socioenvironmental wounds inflicted on the postcolonial people and land. In this article, I explore the visual culture of Singapore’s ableist-nationalist greening campaigns alongside artworks such as Marvin Tang’s A Guide to Tree Planting and History of 39 Cuttings—Hybrids, and Woong Soak Teng’s Ways to Tie Trees and Rules for Photographing a Scoliotic Patient. I argue that Tang and Woong highlight adaptation issues in the face of eco-ableist sustainability in Singapore, challenging simplistic notions of climate adaptation by attending to vulnerable, sexed and gendered more-than-human bodies. The field of art history has an opportunity to probe ableist visions of ecological sustainability—within an emerging discourse between environmental justice and disability studies—by historicizing and interpreting such art, as it speaks to enduring, more-than-human impairment and climate adaptation. Full article

This article examined a conception of personal growth put forth in a multidimensional model of psychological well-being over 35 years ago. The model is widely used around the world. One key dimension of well-being is personal growth, which is examined in detail here. The conceptual underpinnings of this construct are reviewed, as well as its formal definition and empirical operationalization. Decades of scientific research about personal growth are selectively reviewed, focusing on factors that predict different levels of personal growth as well as how it is linked with other phenomena such as health, biological risk factors, and cognitive capacities. Future directions in the science and practice of personal growth are put forth, including the need to address obstacles to personal growth tied to widening inequality, the role of the arts and humanities in nurturing personal becoming, and the need to elevate virtue and ethics as core features of eudaimonia, with exemplars from human history provided. Full article

Background and Objectives: Numerous risk factors for both female and male fertility have been established including age, ovarian reserve, infertility cause, occupational and lifestyle factors. The objective of our study was to determine the influence of occupational and lifestyle factors on assisted reproduction (ART) outcomes at a Serbian referral tertiary center. Materials and Methods: The study included all consecutive infertile couples undergoing ART at the Clinic for Ob/Gyn University Clinical Center Belgrade, from January 2019 to January 2022. Inclusion criteria comprised primary and unexplained infertility, age ≤ 45 years, body mass index ≤ 30 kg/m² and undergoing fresh autologous ART cycles. All patients filled in the socio-epidemiological questionnaire that analyzed their lifestyle and habits. Medical history data and data regarding the current ART cycle were taken from patient records. The primary outcome was clinical pregnancy. Results: Our study included 501 couples (women and men) with infertility undergoing ART. Clinical pregnancy was achieved in 22.2% of examined patients. Achieving clinical pregnancy in the ART cycle for women was associated with younger age and use of vitamins, minerals, and trace elements, whereas younger age and absence of chronic illnesses were the most important factors for male partners. When women and men were assessed together as couples, achieving clinical pregnancy correlated only with the use of vitamins, minerals and trace-elements by both partners. Conclusions: This study confirmed that some occupational and lifestyle factors were associated with clinical pregnancy after ART in patients with unexplained primary infertility and normal BMI. Full article

Protease inhibitors (PIs) remain important components of HIV-2 treatment, but resistance genotyping is frequently challenging in individuals with low or undetectable plasma viremia. Proviral DNA sequencing may provide access to archived viral variants and improve understanding of long-term resistance and clinical evolution. In this retrospective longitudinal study, 27 individuals with HIV-2, both ART-experienced and ART-naïve, followed at a hospital in Lisbon, were analyzed. The HIV-2 protease gene was amplified from peripheral blood mononuclear cell-derived proviral DNA, cloned, and sequenced (Sanger sequencing) at baseline and, for ART-treated participants, after eight years of follow-up. Resistance profiles were interpreted using the Stanford HIVdb, HIV-2EU, and Rega algorithms. Clinical data, including ART history, CD4 counts, and plasma viral load, were collected longitudinally. Amino acid diversity was assessed using Shannon entropy, and longitudinal CD4 dynamics were evaluated using mixed-effects models with time-varying ART exposure. Sensitivity analyses were performed using generalized estimating equations (GEE). A total of 222 clonal HIV-2 protease sequences clustered within group A. Major PI resistance mutations were detected in 21.4% of ART-experienced and 23.1% of ART-naïve individuals at baseline. Longitudinal resistance trajectories varied across participants, including persistence, apparent emergence, and non-detection of previously identified mutations. Mixed-effects modeling revealed substantial inter-individual variability in CD4 trajectories, with no statistically significant associations observed between CD4 evolution and ART status, time, or their interaction. GEE analyses yielded consistent results, supporting robustness across modeling frameworks. Entropy analysis identified localized sequence diversity changes restricted to a small number of protease residues, with positions 60 and 75 differing between groups at baseline and position 21 showing longitudinal variation among treated participants. This study demonstrates that proviral DNA sequencing captures archived HIV-2 protease diversity and reveals persistent and dynamic resistance patterns within the viral reservoir. While no population-level association between ART exposure and CD4 trajectory was observed, marked inter-individual variability highlights the complexity of longitudinal immune recovery in HIV-2 infection. These findings support the value of proviral sequencing as a complementary research tool for characterizing long-term viral evolution in settings where plasma-based genotyping is limited. Full article

High-precision indoor trajectory estimation using pure Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) remains challenging due to severe cumulative drift and the complexity of modeling nonlinear dynamics. This paper proposes LKAN, a novel end-to-end framework that integrates the Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) with Long-History Statistical Regularization (LHSR). We design the KANmer encoder, which fuses Multi-Head Self-Attention with KAN to explicitly capture long-range temporal dependencies and intricate nonlinear features from IMU data. To enhance model robustness, a training-only Long-History Statistical Regularization mechanism is introduced; it effectively suppresses feature distribution drift by enforcing historical statistical consistency. Extensive evaluations on three public datasets demonstrate that LKAN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in IMU-only pedestrian localization. Specifically, on the iIMU-TD dataset, LKAN achieves an Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) of 2.04 m and a Relative Trajectory Error (RTE) of 2.72 m, representing a reduction of 33.8% and 31.1%, respectively, compared to the second-best ResT-IMU. Results on the RoNIN dataset further validate the superiority of LKAN. These findings confirm that LKAN effectively mitigates error accumulation, providing a reliable, high-precision solution for real-time IMU-based positioning in complex indoor environments. Full article