New ways of analysing the history of varieties of English - an acoustic analysis of early pop music recordings from Ghana

I will present first results of an acoustic analysis of Ghanaian “Highlife” songs from the 1950s to 1960s. My results show that vowel subsystems in the 1950s and 1960s show a different kind of variation than in present-day Ghanaian English. Particularly the STRUT lexical set is realized as /a, ɔ/ in the Highlife-corpus. Today, it is realized with three different vowels in Ghanaian English, /a, ε, ɔ/ (Huber 2004: 849). A particular emphasis will also be on the way Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2011) can be used to analyze music recordings

IBPP Research Associates - Perspective from Ghana on Terrorism

The article - No Peace in Isolation by a staff writer at The Ghanaian Times - discusses terrorism as an international issue

Book review: British business and Ghanaian independence

Draft of book review for American Historical Review: Josephine F. Milburn. British Business and Ghanaian Independence. Hanover, N.H. : University Press of New England, for the University of Rhode Island. 1977 Pp. ix, 156

What is it about? The topic in some Ghanaian Gur grammars

This talk deals with the pragmatic notion topic and its encoding in Buli and some related Ghanaian Gur languages and reveals that it is responsible for several intricate phenomena in the grammar of these languages

The ‘Skills Drain’ of Health Professionals from the developing World:a Framework for Policy Formulation

This paper examines policy towards health professionals’ migration from economic and governance perspectives

Women’s Work: Labor Market Outcomes and Female Entrepreneurship in Ghana

This paper is an investigation of female entrepreneurship in Ghana. It seeks to answer the following question: Why are Ghanaian women so heavily concentrated in microenterprise in the informal economy? The literature review explores labor market trends for women on three different scales including an overview of developing countries, Sub-Saharan Africa regional, and Ghana-specific analysis. After exploring issues women face in formal employment, the study delves into business operations of informal, urban-based market participants by analyzing data pertaining to Ghanaian microenterprise. Additionally, the paper details the experiences and views of female entrepreneurs through in-depth interviews and participant observations with thirty female textile traders conducted in Makola Market in Accra, Ghana during the summers of 2012 and 2014. This study will contribute to the growing body of work on female entrepreneurship in the West African region

To be or not to be? About the copula system in Buli (Gur)

This talk concerns the copula system in Buli, a Ghanaian language which has also been attested in Bahia (Rodrigues 1935, Zwernemann 1968). Special focus will be put on the categorization of two copula-reminiscent elements for which I will propose a discoursepragmatic analysis

Decreased microbial co-occurrence network stability and SCFA receptor level correlates with obesity in African-origin women.

We compared the gut microbial populations in 100 women, from rural Ghana and urban US [50% lean (BMI < 25 kg/m2) and 50% obese (BMI ≥ 30 kg/m2)] to examine the ecological co-occurrence network topology of the gut microbiota as well as the relationship of short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) with obesity. Ghanaians consumed significantly more dietary fiber, had greater microbial alpha-diversity, different beta-diversity, and had a greater concentration of total fecal SCFAs (p-value < 0.002). Lean Ghanaians had significantly greater network density, connectivity and stability than either obese Ghanaians, or lean and obese US participants (false discovery rate (FDR) corrected p-value ≤ 0.01). Bacteroides uniformis was significantly more abundant in lean women, irrespective of country (FDR corrected p < 0.001), while lean Ghanaians had a significantly greater proportion of Ruminococcus callidus, Prevotella copri, and Escherichia coli, and smaller proportions of Lachnospiraceae, Bacteroides and Parabacteroides. Lean Ghanaians had a significantly greater abundance of predicted microbial genes that catalyzed the production of butyric acid via the fermentation of pyruvate or branched amino-acids, while obese Ghanaians and US women (irrespective of BMI) had a significantly greater abundance of predicted microbial genes that encoded for enzymes associated with the fermentation of amino-acids such as alanine, aspartate, lysine and glutamate. Similar to lean Ghanaian women, mice humanized with stool from the lean Ghanaian participant had a significantly lower abundance of family Lachnospiraceae and genus Bacteroides and Parabacteroides, and were resistant to obesity following 6-weeks of high fat feeding (p-value < 0.01). Obesity-resistant mice also showed increased intestinal transcriptional expression of the free fatty acid (Ffa) receptor Ffa2, in spite of similar fecal SCFAs concentrations. We demonstrate that the association between obesity resistance and increased predicted ecological connectivity and stability of the lean Ghanaian microbiota, as well as increased local SCFA receptor level, provides evidence of the importance of robust gut ecologic network in obesity

Ghana and the Ideal of the Citizen-Shareholder: A Corporate-Law Response to the Resource Curse

This Note assesses Ghana’s legal regime for managing revenues from its newfound petroleum reserves as a means of combatting the resource curse—the well-documented political and economic phenomenon wherein resource-rich countries experience greater levels of corruption and poor governance and weaker democracy and economic growth than resource-poor nations. The Ghanaian regime fails to provide systemic protections against the resource curse by (1) supplying insufficient economic development and poverty relief, (2) lacking incentives and mechanisms for overseeing and holding accountable the powers responsible for managing petroleum revenues, and (3) providing insufficient channels for spreading the economic benefits of extraction beyond the petroleum sector. This Note undertakes a comparative study of a representative group of petroleum revenue-management regimes—those of Alaska, Norway, Indonesia, and Trinidad and Tobago—in search of an effective regime that might be transplanted to Ghana. Finding that none of these regimes are adequately applicable to Ghana’s economic, social, or political context, this Note goes on to propose a novel regime for petroleum revenue management in Ghana, drawing on principles of U.S. corporate law