The economic rationale and modalities for rural infrastructure development: developmental local government in rural service delivery

The Policy Unit of the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) has developed a number of strategic themes embracing many cross-cutting issues. The main thrust of the Unit’s work, however, focuses on the core mandate of the Bank - infrastructure. In order to provide for a coherent whole, rural infrastructure must fit into a broader policy framework. Globally, the goals set for the first two decades of the next millennium are to address poverty and achieve food security. The DBSA can contribute to South Africa’s position on these global themes by addressing the issue of rural infrastructure delivery, taking cognisance of the South African government’s Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme. This discussion document will specifically address the local economic development activities of farm production and rural livelihoods in order to achieve food security, address poverty and foster economic growth in the marginalised, infrastructure-deprived rural areas of the country. It is assumed that additional entrepreneurial economic opportunities will arise at village and town level as producers become nett surplus producers, eg in small grain milling, cottage industry, village markets, processing (value adding), etc. In contrast to urban development, where economic activity is assumed by investing in infrastructure, the DBSA will actively have to support the transformation of economic activity in the rural scenario. One of the past successes of the DBSA has been the introduction of the Farmer Support Programme (FSP). The FSP’s provision of services and support, based on the needs of existing smallholders, is embedded in participatory planning and action. Without local initiatives, rural infrastructure cannot be delivered effectively to bolster economic growth, create jobs and redistribute income. Most of the country’s poor live in rural areas, and without rural development there can be no GEAR. Life in these areas needs to be made liveable by encouraging entrepreneurial development, which includes facilitating agriculture, creating jobs and increasing rural income through appropriate government actions for improving the welfare of rural households. One of the ways in which national, provincial and local government could have a broad-based impact is by providing rural economic infrastructure and, to this end, local government, including regional and district councils, has been mandated to develop integrated development plans. These plans have to include economic development plans, and entrepreneurial development has been singled out as important in this regard. From this it follows that district councils and municipalities have a prime responsibility for developing entrepreneurs, including farmers in their rural constituency

Panel. Revisioning Miscegenation and Trauma in Faulkner and the African American South

Miscegenation and Progression: The First Americans of Jean Toomer and William Faulkner / Andrew Leiter, Lycoming CollegeNatasha Trethewey\u27s Joe Christmas and the Reconstruction of Mississippi Nativity / Ted Atkinson, Mississippi State UniversityContemporary Black Writing and Southern Social Belonging Beyond the Faulknerian Shadow of Loss / Lisa Hinrichsen, University of Arkansa

Panel. Faulkner and the Civil Rights Movement: A Reassessment

Long Faulkner: Charting Legacy on a Civil Rights Continuum / Ted Atkinson, Mississippi State UniversityThe concept of a “civil rights continuum” functions as a critical framework for reflecting on Faulkner’s legacy in a time frame extending from post-World War II labor activism through the post-Civil Rights era. Responsive to the call for a “long Civil Rights Movement” to trouble conventional periodization, this continuum affords a revealing long view of Faulkner’s civil rights legacy, as illustrated by two key coordinates charted in the discussion: the spatial rendering of proliferating boundaries in Intruder in the Dust in relation to the enduring trope of Mississippi as “the closed society” and the temporal rendering of the past as “not even past” in Requiem for a Nun as strategically deployed in the discourse of post-racialism. Faulkner and the Inheritors of Slavery / David A. Davis, Mercer UniversityWilliam Faulkner’s short story “Pantaloon in Black” (1940) and Richard Wright’s documentary narrative Twelve Million Black Voices (1941) depict the misunderstanding between black and white southerners in the generation before the civil rights movement. Faulkner focuses on the white community’s confusion about Rider’s grief over his wife’s death, which has disastrous results. Wright attempts to explain the history and experience of blacks to whites, adopting a didactic, first-person plural narrative voice. Wright’s narrative approach helps to explain the abrupt shift from third-person narration to the white deputy sheriff’s voice in Faulkner’s story, which signals the mysterious separation between the races in the South. Who was William Faulkner to them?: Civil Rights Workers, Mississippi Moderates and Faulkner / Sharon Monteith, University of NottinghamIn an essay titled “Faulkner and the Racial Crisis” Louis Daniel Brodsky asserts that both groups in my title were Faulkner’s detractors as a result of his “gradualist” position on civil rights. This paper explores that claim by examining civil rights organizers and Mississippi’s Freedom Summer volunteers, black and white, who were inspired by his work, and crusading racial liberals with whom Faulkner aligned himself to write satirically about segregation. Literary scholar Louis Rubin once imagined the ghost of Faulkner on the University of Mississippi campus in 1962. He mused “I think perhaps he would have put on his coat and tie and hat and gone over to the campus and stood quietly alongside of James Meredith. Would it have made any difference? I doubt it. Most of the citizens who milled about the campus would not have known who he was, or if they had, they would not have cared. Who was William Faulkner to them?” This paper teases out some possible answers to that question

Panel. Currency Conversions: Calculating Performances in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha

“That Delta”: Land, Women’s Sexuality, and the Miscegenation of Money / John N. Duvall, Purdue UniversityMy talk explores an underlying connection in Faulkner’s fiction between the cotton market and the marketing of women’s sexuality, a connection that unites Freud’s sexual fetish with Marx’s commodity fetishism. Starting with statements by Horace Benbow and Ike McCaslin about the easy money that can be made growing cotton in the Mississippi Delta, I consider the sexualized and racialized subtexts of their words. These subtexts emerge from another meaning of Delta (the triangle as an ancient symbol of female sexuality) lurking both in their comments and in the context of their comments. Taken together, these men’s comments suggest that capitalist accumulation undermines the color line. Capital, quite simply, doesn’t care about whiteness. With this understanding, I turn to the way that Jason Compson’s sense of his white masculinity is imperiled by his failed speculation in both the cotton market and the prostitution market.Too Small to Fail: Jason Compson’s Day of Diminishing Returns / Ted Atkinson, Mississippi State UniversityFor Jason Compson III, in The Sound and the Fury, April 6, 1928, is a day of setbacks that undermine the narrative of financial acumen thwarted by stolen opportunity he has constructed in response to declining family fortunes and class status. Jason’s unsatisfying job in the feed store leaves him mired in the quotidian getting and spending of the tertiary economy. He acts out by eschewing customer service and channeling aggrievement in pursuit of the means to reverse his precipitous fall. The power that Jason imagines money affording him makes it a currency of ever-increasing necessity and symbolic value in his struggle against diminishment. The humiliation Jason experiences reveals the folly of investing in money as a sure thing for egoistic enhancement and culminates in a moment of crisis and public spectacle when he must confront the reality of how small his stature has become.Dress for Success: Clothing as Currency in The Hamlet / Christopher Rieger, Southeast Missouri State UniversityIn this paper, I examine the notion of clothing as currency in The Hamlet, arguing that clothes function similarly to money in the novel, facilitating exchange while also conveying a certain social capital.. Not only do we see the value of clothing in the eyes of others shift in the novel, but also the social standing of the people wearing the clothes. My primary focus is on Flem Snopes and the ways that he uses dress to “fashion” a new image of himself, an image that paves the way for a new social position and, indeed, a new life. In a sense, Flem engages in cross-dressing, transgressing boundaries not of gender but of class. I will conclude by introducing the newly theorized psychological concept of “enclothed cognition” to show how recent research suggests a measurable effect of sartorial choices on the wearer of clothes, not just the observers of them

Deconstructing dams and disease: predictions for salmon disease risk following Klamath River dam removals

The health of fish populations and the river systems they inhabit have broad ecological, cultural, recreational, and economic relevance. This is exemplified by the iconic anadromous salmonid fishes native to the West Coast of North America. Salmon populations have been constrained since the mid nineteenth century by dam construction and water reallocation. In the Klamath River (Oregon and California, USA), a series of dams built in the early-mid 20th century cut the basin in two and blocked anadromous fish access to more than 600 river kilometers. This dramatic loss of habitat, coupled with infectious diseases and resulting epizootics, have impacted the wellbeing of these salmonid populations. In 2023-2024, the Klamath River will undergo the largest river restoration project in US history. Removal of the four lowermost dams will cause profound physical changes to the river, including flow, water temperature, and channel geomorphology. The dam removals will reconnect the lower and upper portions of the basin, and provide fish passage after a century of segregation. Reestablishment of upstream and downstream fish movements will also alter the occupancy and abundance of the salmonid hosts and their pathogens. The increased habitat availability and longer migration routes will increase duration of pathogen exposure and potential impacts on juvenile survival and adult pre-spawn mortality. However, restoration of more natural flow and sediment regimes will decrease overall fish disease risk by disrupting complex parasite life cycles. To better understand these multifarious, competing factors, we review the salmonid species in the Klamath River, and provide an overview of their historical pathogen challenges and associated diseases and use this as a framework to predict the effects of dam removals on disease dynamics. Our review and predictions are a synthesis of expertise from tribal biologists, fish health specialists and fish biologists, many of whom have lived and worked on the Klamath River for decades. We conclude with recommendations for expansion of current pathogen monitoring and research efforts to measure changes in host-pathogen dynamics basin-wide

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission: Optical Telescope Element Design, Development, and Performance

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a large, infrared space telescope that has recently started its science program which will enable breakthroughs in astrophysics and planetary science. Notably, JWST will provide the very first observations of the earliest luminous objects in the Universe and start a new era of exoplanet atmospheric characterization. This transformative science is enabled by a 6.6 m telescope that is passively cooled with a 5-layer sunshield. The primary mirror is comprised of 18 controllable, low areal density hexagonal segments, that were aligned and phased relative to each other in orbit using innovative image-based wavefront sensing and control algorithms. This revolutionary telescope took more than two decades to develop with a widely distributed team across engineering disciplines. We present an overview of the telescope requirements, architecture, development, superb on-orbit performance, and lessons learned. JWST successfully demonstrates a segmented aperture space telescope and establishes a path to building even larger space telescopes.Comment: accepted by PASP for JWST Overview Special Issue; 34 pages, 25 figure

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Faulkner on Omnibus: A Portrait of the Artist as a Cultural Ambassador in the Making

When the popular television news magazine Omnibus aired late in the afternoon of December 28, 1952, the episode included a fourteen-minute film featuring William Faulkner as himself. Largely neglected by scholars, the Omnibus production is a cultural artifact from the post-Nobel Prize phase of the author’s career that warrants closer examination. Faulkner’s big TV moment gave him access to the largest audience he was ever able to reach at once, since the viewership of Omnibus averaged seventeen million. The short film preserves in an encapsulated form a juncture at which Faulkner was poised to become an actor in a geopolitical theater of cultural Cold War. A series of connections between the Radio-Television Workshop, the Ford Foundation-supported production company responsible for Omnibus, and the cultural operations of the U.S. State Department suggest that Faulkner’s appearance on the program factored into his becoming an official cultural ambassador during the mid-1950s. The producers employed the increasingly influential new medium of television as an instrument for rendering the local and global domains Faulkner now inhabited as a worldly Mississippian. The version of Faulkner portrayed on screen is responsive to key concerns prevalent in Cold War culture: fraught southern race relations, compromised American masculinity, and Atomic Age fears. A combination of televisual image-making and trademark self-fashioning in the Omnibus production helped to cultivate the persona that Faulkner, a writer-diplomat in the making, would soon take to the far-flung places where he was dispatched in the interest of advancing U.S. interests amid a heated ideological conflict