Museum Audio Description: The Problem of Textual Fidelity

Museums present a myriad of source texts, which are often highly ambiguous. Yet Museum Audio Description (AD) is sited in an AD tradition which advocates objectivity. In screen AD, researchers have examined multiple aspects of the translation decisions facing the describer-translator, considering the ways in which AD is shaped by the demands of the source text, the impact of AD on the recipient’s experience and how these aspects may relate to objectivity. We examine the extent to which these decisions may apply to museum AD or differ in a museum setting. We argue that the notion of the ‘source text’ for museums should be expanded beyond the visual elements of museum’s collections, encompassing the wider museum visiting experience. Drawing upon research from Museum Studies and Psychology, we explore the empirical evidence that characterises the experiences of mainstream sighted visitors and discuss the implications for museum AD. If it is to offer true access to the museum experience, then museum AD must consider not only the assimilation of visual information, but also the social, cognitive and emotional elements of visits. From this perspective, the emphasis is shifted from visual to verbal translation to the creative possibilities of re-creation in museum AD

Tanzania's role in Burundi's peace process

ABSTRACT The Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement was signed in Arusha Tanzania in August 2000. This was a result of countless efforts involving countless players; a process which took nearly six years to find a durable solution to the decades - long Burundi crisis. Tanzania government is one of these players. This study therefore focuses on the role of Tanzania in the Burundi’s Peace Process. The primary argument put forth by the study is that Tanzania played multiple roles including mediation and facilitation, hosting peace talks and Burundi refugees. The study argues that whereas moral obligation could be counted for Tanzania’s involvement, the negative impacts of the Burundi crisis to Tanzania were central to its engagement. The negative impacts were perceived by Tanzanian government authorities as a threat to its national interests, hence warranted a direct response. The study acknowledges that Tanzania’s mediation and facilitation roles were marred by two controversial issues namely; being perceived as ‘biased’ (in favour of the Hutus and hostile to the Tutsis) and also as one which favoured military solutions to the conflict as opposed to other approaches advocated by other players. These allegations are discussed to determine their authenticity and conclusions are made. The study also examines whether or not the coming of Nelson Mandela (and South Africa for that matter) did influence Tanzania’s role and the conclusion is that it did influence because competition for influence between the two countries was obvious when Mandela replaced Mwalimu Nyerere as the major facilitator. The point raised here is that whereas Tanzania wanted to preserve and continue with its influence in the sub-region, South Africa on its part wanted to use that opportunity to penetrate both politically and diplomatically on the one hand and consolidate its economic presence in the sub-region on the other hand. The study asserts that although Burundi has managed to sign the Arusha Accord, secure ceasefire agreements between the Government and the rebel movements and successfully completed the transitional period, the country still faces many challenges which it needs to overcome if it is to build a new, peaceful and united society. In this regard, the study recommends continued support and responsibility by regional states and the international community coupled with close monitoring of the situation in the country. Besides, the study recognises that Tanzania’s role will still remain influential for many years to come in the peace building process in Burundi

A comparison of the CAR and DAGAR spatial random effects models with an application to diabetics rate estimation in Belgium

When hierarchically modelling an epidemiological phenomenon on a finite collection of sites in space, one must always take a latent spatial effect into account in order to capture the correlation structure that links the phenomenon to the territory. In this work, we compare two autoregressive spatial models that can be used for this purpose: the classical CAR model and the more recent DAGAR model. Differently from the former, the latter has a desirable property: its ρ parameter can be naturally interpreted as the average neighbor pair correlation and, in addition, this parameter can be directly estimated when the effect is modelled using a DAGAR rather than a CAR structure. As an application, we model the diabetics rate in Belgium in 2014 and show the adequacy of these models in predicting the response variable when no covariates are available

A Statistical Approach to the Alignment of fMRI Data

Multi-subject functional Magnetic Resonance Image studies are critical. The anatomical and functional structure varies across subjects, so the image alignment is necessary. We define a probabilistic model to describe functional alignment. Imposing a prior distribution, as the matrix Fisher Von Mises distribution, of the orthogonal transformation parameter, the anatomical information is embedded in the estimation of the parameters, i.e., penalizing the combination of spatially distant voxels. Real applications show an improvement in the classification and interpretability of the results compared to various functional alignment methods