What about The Rest of Us?

One had assumed that it was well known that American history with respect to slavery and race was (apart from South Africa) uniquely racist, and that people from, for instance, Asia or the Middle East perceive human races, human complexions and their significances, in ways that differ profoundly from American perceptions and understandings of race. And so one had assumed too that at a feminist conference on racism, it would not be we non Western peoples who must unlearn our attitudes and speak of races in the terminology of the currently globally powerful and dominant Americans. Sadly these proved unfounded assumptions, as one incident in particular brought home. An Indian who had come to America specifically to attend the NWSA Convention, shocked at being required to register for workshops according to her color, declared that she was not Colored. This was not taken for what it was, a refusal to define herself in the terminology developed from within a racist society but was taken as an inability on her part to recognize herself for what she was—to respond, that is, to the name with which Americans had named her

Encounter with American Feminism: A Muslim Woman\u27s View of Two Conferences

April 1980. The Barnard Conference, The Scholar and the Feminist —my first direct as opposed to page-mediated encounter with American feminism. And then it came home to me: how simple the one-dimensional experience of reading; how easy, ordered, and amenable to order it makes things seem—coherent and amenable to coherence. Sitting in that hall, listening to papers that often clearly drew on the rhetorical strategies of an oral tradition, quite different from those in scholarly writing, even in that feminist scholarship self-consciously dismantling the rigidities of tradition; being aware of the responses of a highly-and diversely-responsive audience; straining to catch verbal shortcuts; sometimes clearly missing nuances that relied on a depth of American experience: all this makes it impossible to respond to the conference as a coherent event-not because it was incoherent, obviously, but precisely because there was such a sense of vitality, ferment, such a richness and general manifoldness to it—and a sense too of the manifoldness of feminist stances in America

Working Paper 118 - Assessment of the Trade Finance Market in Africa Post-Crisis

The financial crisis, which began to hit the trade finance markets in 2008, caused a sharp slow-down in trade in 2008 and 2009. The tightening of global credit reduced capital inflows and curtailed the availability of trade finance. This sudden shortage of trade finance negatively impacted African economies. In response, the African Development Bank (AfDB) established, on March 2009, a multiphase USD 1 billion Trade Finance Initiative (TFI). As part of the Trade Finance Initiative, AfDB commissioned a trade finance survey conducted three times between 2009 and 2010. The financial institutions contacted during these market surveys are listed at the end of this document. During this research, banks in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Rwanda were contacted. In addition, financial institutions active in the international and regional trade finance markets based in the USA, UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands were contacted. Finally, development finance institutions active in supporting trade both within Africa and without were interviewed. Generally trade operations officers, international department management, treasury officers or senior commercial bankers were contacted. Participants were asked to: • Describe their trade finance related activities • Describe the state of the market for trade finance products • Describe how availability of facilities has changed •Describe how terms and conditions of facilities have changed •Discuss overall economic activity in their markets • Discuss potential roles for AfDB to play to facilitate access to trade finance The overall conclusions of these surveys are: • African trade grew rapidly during the pre-crisis period, spurred by growing south-south trade and the emergence of Asia as a major purchaser of African raw materials and primary products. Anecdotally, it appears that trade finance was increasingly available during this period. • The crisis has had a negative impact on African trade due to falling demand for African primary product exports. Trade finance availability was sharply constrained during the initial crisis period. • It is difficult to discern real trends in African trade finance as markets remain highly volatile. Liquidity and risk appetite vary widely across markets and counterparties. Across all markets, trade finance tenors have shortened. • There is an overall decrease in demand for trade products due to decreased economic activity but a higher proportion of the current transactions are using trade instruments. • International commercial banks that historically provided confirmation lines for trade instruments remain risk averse and seek to maintain/increase returns. • Low income countries and the smaller Regional Member Countries are hit hardest by the lack of availability of trade finance due to higher perceived risk, even for low risk transactions. • Basel II related capital allocation rules will have a negative impact on the cost and availability of trade finance across the continent. • Multilateral Development Banks in other regions play a variety of roles to support trade finance availability, from which AfDB could learn some lessons. • The African Development Bank can have a significant impact on trade finance availability and, consequently, RMC economic performance over the short/medium term.

The cohesive urban social fabric between local architectural identity and climatic response

Ponència presentada a la sessió

Are Credit Cycles Different in the MENA Countries Compared to Advanced Countries?

This paper estimates private sector credit cycles for most of the oil-importing and oil-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Credit cycles are the medium-term component in spectral analysis of real private sector credit growth. Besides, the paper estimates the credit cycles for several developed countries. The analysis finds substantial differences and rare similarities between credit cycles in the Middle East and North Africa and advanced countries. Between 19642017, credit cycles in the Middle East and North Africa do not appear to be associated with GDP growth. They only explain a fraction of the growth in private sector credit, and they do not seem to be synchronized across oil exporters and oil importers

The Cohesive Urban Social Fabric Between Local Architectural Identity and Climatic Response

Mario Botta once said: «Architecture is the constant fight between man and nature, the fight to overwhelm nature, to possess it. The first act of architecture is to put a stone on the ground. That act transforms a condition of nature into a condition of culture; it’s a holy act». Through history, we see this interaction between us, nature and culture, this complicated relation shapes our life into social urban fabrics and architecture. Therefore, Architectural heritage is the most witness and expressive art and science to human being’s history book. Since our environments are different, the logical consequence of urban fabrics also would be different in point of view the compactness, units’ form, materials, urban layout and streets. For example, the Saharan urban fabrics seems to be more compact with narrow streets and patio-built units, this urban fabric are also a result of social order needs, the hierarchy of streets from public to private shows the intimacy relation between local habitants and visitors, public spaces for social gathering like plazas assure the mix use of spaces, the preservation of landscape of local environment to integrate the design with nature and to demonstrate agriculture spaces in that fabrics. Therefore, to clarify this crossed complex fabrics we should find the harmonic serrated wheels which touch this elements or criteria. The architectural community has had a strong and continuing interest in traditional and vernacular architecture. This has been rekindled by the need to develop an architecture that works with climate, rather than against it, to create more sustainable buildings. Earlier research and existing publications on traditional or vernacular architecture have followed an anthropological or archaeological approach, whereas books on climatic design and sustainable architecture tend to refer to contemporary principles and built precedents without direct reference to past experience.Peer Reviewe

Ground Truth Evaluation of Neural Network Explanations with CLEVR-XAI

The rise of deep learning in today's applications entailed an increasing need in explaining the model's decisions beyond prediction performances in order to foster trust and accountability. Recently, the field of explainable AI (XAI) has developed methods that provide such explanations for already trained neural networks. In computer vision tasks such explanations, termed heatmaps, visualize the contributions of individual pixels to the prediction. So far XAI methods along with their heatmaps were mainly validated qualitatively via human-based assessment, or evaluated through auxiliary proxy tasks such as pixel perturbation, weak object localization or randomization tests. Due to the lack of an objective and commonly accepted quality measure for heatmaps, it was debatable which XAI method performs best and whether explanations can be trusted at all. In the present work, we tackle the problem by proposing a ground truth based evaluation framework for XAI methods based on the CLEVR visual question answering task. Our framework provides a (1) selective, (2) controlled and (3) realistic testbed for the evaluation of neural network explanations. We compare ten different explanation methods, resulting in new insights about the quality and properties of XAI methods, sometimes contradicting with conclusions from previous comparative studies. The CLEVR-XAI dataset and the benchmarking code can be found at https://github.com/ahmedmagdiosman/clevr-xai.Comment: 37 pages, 9 tables, 2 figures (plus appendix 14 pages

Exploring the career aspirations of youths from a rural secondary school in the Eastern Cape Province

Many inequalities still exist among those living in both rural and urban areas despite the abolishment of apartheid in 1994. Addressing these inequalities has been deemed important and require urgent attention, especially career education among rural youth, as this is a social justice issue (Watson, 2010). There also appears to be a lack of qualitative research pertaining to the aspirations of rural youth. During sessions with the research team, the teachers and school governing board (SGB) members, it was indicated that the youth in the community seem to be without hope for the future and that career aspirations were lacking. Based on the background and problem identified, the main research question of this study aimed to explore how youths in a rural secondary school perceive how they might actualise their future career aspirations. This research was set within the interpretivist and critical paradigm. Qualitative data was gathered to gain an understanding of how the participants constructed meaning with regard to ways in which they might actualise their career aspirations, the challenges they faced and pathways to overcome these challenges. This study began with nine secondary school rural youths as participants but this number decreased to four as the research progressed. Four data sets were generated, namely photovoice, participant PowerPoint artefact creation, focus group interviews and PowerPoint presentations by participants to the community, learners and school. The data was generated using a qualitative thematic analysis guided by the utilisation of Creswell’s application of Tesch’s (1990) framework. Measures were employed to ensure trustworthiness, credibility, transferability and dependability (Ary, Jacobs, Razavieh & Sorensen, 2010). Both the primary and secondary researchers had access to identical files that contained all the data that was generated and stored by the primary researcher. Ethical approval to conduct the study was obtained from the ethics committee at the university and consent was obtained in writing from all relevant parties participating. This research found that the research participants had future career aspirations that included careers in the medical field, law enforcement, business, IT as well as the music industry. The participants envisaged a hopeful future for themselves, their families, their school and the community. Their aspirations focused on transcending their current lived experiences and attaining financial stability. They wished to give back to their communities and schools to ensure a better future for all. The participants aspired to be instruments of social change. The participants were aware that they would encounter various challenges along their path to actualise their dreams. The anticipated challenges included peer-pressure and negative influences, being confronted by various social ills such as violence, drugs and alcohol, abuse and gangsterism. They understood that a lack of self-belief would lead to hopelessness. The participants were concerned that if they did not succeed at school they would not be promoted to the next grade. They also indicated that parental involvement was a challenge and that they did not receive adequate support from their parents. The participants also mentioned that underperforming teachers and conflict with the SGB could derail their career aspirations. They were also concerned about their lack of financial means, as they did not have the necessary funding to gain access to a university but were aware of ways to overcome these challenges. They indicated that drawing on the spiritual domain is important to them and this included the church and their faith in God as a means to overcome their challenges. Education was also key to actualise their aspirations and the participants mentioned that being focused at school and knowing that education has the potential to open doors served as a form of motivation. They were prepared to work hard to succeed at school. It was important for their teachers to be committed, as this would assist in ensuring their success. They indicated the importance of having access to social capital through networking. This included guidance, support and mentoring, as well as using social media to inform society of their plight in order to receive encouragement and support. It was also noted that the aspirations project of which they were part, afforded the participants with transformative possibilities, as they began to critically reflect on the future. They shared their vision, hope and goals with those around them, which further motivated them to aspire to achieving their goals. The participants became selfconfident as a result of their new abilities. They were open to exploring alternative career opportunities and developed a sense of self-belief that they can realise their goals. The participants began to take a stand, as they were aware that agency begins with them. The findings revealed that the rural youth, their parents, the school as a whole, the life orientation teacher(s), the school principal, the school governing body, the community as well as the Department of Basic Education could guide them and assist rural secondary youths to actualise their aspirations

Optical Coherence Tomographic Findings in Berlin’s Edema

Purpose: To describe optical coherence tomography (OCT) findings in a patient with Berlin′s edema following blunt ocular trauma. Case Report: A 26-year-old man presented with acute loss of vision in his left eye following blunt trauma. He underwent a complete ophthalmologic examination and OCT. Fundus examination revealed abnormal yellow discoloration in the macula. OCT disclosed thickening of outer retinal structures and increased reflectivity in the area of photoreceptor outer segments with preservation of inner retinal architecture. Re-examination was conducted one month later at the time which OCT changes resolved leading to a surprisingly normal appearance. Conclusion: OCT can be a useful tool in the diagnosis and follow-up of eyes with Berlin′s edema and may reveal ultrastructural macular changes