Things Fall Apart and Chinua Achebe’s Postcolonial Discourse

Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, is considered as one of the prominent figures in African anti-colonial literature. What makes his works specific is the way he approaches the issues of colonization of Africa in an objective manner and through an innovative language which aims at providing a pathology; a pathological reading meant to draw on the pre-colonial and colonial history without any presumptions so as to present the readers with possible alternative African discourses in future. His first novel Things Fall Apart can be taken as the best representative of such a penchant in Achebe. The present study seeks to approach Things Fall apart by reflecting on those discursive features which have provided the ground for constructing such a pathological reading and an alternative to the colonial discourse. To this end, some key terms introduced by Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin such as ‘hybridity’, ‘otherness’ and ‘polyphony’, constitute the cornerstone of this study. Presumably, such an innovative reading of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is to lead to a better understanding of his discourse and the efforts made by him to help the African readers figure out how to piece together what once fell apart; what they can rely on for building an independent future in the so-called postcolonial era

Theoretical and Numerical Investigation of Liquid-Gas Interface Location of Capillary Driven Flow During the Time Throughout Circular Microchannels

The main aim of this study is to find the best, most rapid, and the most accurate numerical method to find the liquid-gas interface of capillary driven flow during the time in circular Microchannels by using COMSOL Multiphysics software. Capillary driven flow by eliminating micropumps or any physical pressure gradient generators can make the microfluidic devices cheaper and more usable. Hence, by using this two-phase flow, the final costs of lots of microfluidic devices and lab-on-a-chip can significantly be decreased and help them to be commercialized. The first step to employing the capillary flow in these devices is the simulation of this flow inside the microchannels. One of the most common and valid software for this work is COMSOL Multiphysics; this fact reveals the importance of this study. In this research study, simulation results obtained by using two possible numerical methods in this software, for capillary flows of water and ethanol in two different circular microchannels, verified and compared with four other methods, which verified experimentally before. Finally, the most accurate and time-saving numerical method of this software will be specified. This appropriate technique can contribute to simulate microfluidic and lab-on-a-chip devices, which are made of different mechanical and electrical parts, in COMSOL Multiphysics software by choosing the best method.Comment: 7 pages, 13 figures, 7 tables, 2017 5th International Conference on Robotics and Mechatronics (ICROM

Generalized knowledge-based semantics for multi-valued logic programs

A generalized logic programming system is presented which uses bilattices as the underlying framework for the semantics of programs. The two orderings of the bilattice reflect the concepts of truth and knowledge. Programs are interpreted according to their knowledge content, resulting in a monotonic semantic operator even in the presence of negation. A special case, namely, logic programming based on the four-valued bilattice is carefully studied on its own right. In the four-valued case, a version of the Closed World Assumption is incorporated into the semantics. Soundness and Completeness results are given with and without the presence of the Closed World Assumption. The concepts studied in the four-valued case are then generalized to arbitrary bilattices. The resulting logic programming systems are well suited for representing incomplete or conflicting information. Depending on the choice of the underlying bilattice, the knowledge-based logic programming language can provide a general framework for other languages based on probabilistic logics, intuitionistic logics, modal logics based on the possible-worlds semantics, and other useful non-classical logics. A novel procedural semantics is given which extends SLDNF-resolution and can retrieve both negative and positive information about a particular goal in a uniform setting. The proposed procedural semantics is based on an AND-parallel computational model for logic programs. The concept of substitution unification is introduced and many of its properties are studied in the context of the proposed computational model. Some of these properties may be of independent interest, particularly in the implementation of parallel and distributed logic programs. Finally, soundness and completeness results are proved for the proposed logic programming system. It is further shown that for finite distributive bilattices (and, more generally, bilattices with the descending chain property), an alternate procedural semantics can be developed based on a small subset of special truth values which turn out to be the join irreducible elements of the knowledge part of the bilattice. The algebraic properties of these elements and their relevance to the corresponding logic programming system are extensively studied

Fairness of Exposure in Dynamic Recommendation

Exposure bias is a well-known issue in recommender systems where the exposure is not fairly distributed among items in the recommendation results. This is especially problematic when bias is amplified over time as a few items (e.g., popular ones) are repeatedly over-represented in recommendation lists and users' interactions with those items will amplify bias towards those items over time resulting in a feedback loop. This issue has been extensively studied in the literature in static recommendation environment where a single round of recommendation result is processed to improve the exposure fairness. However, less work has been done on addressing exposure bias in a dynamic recommendation setting where the system is operating over time, the recommendation model and the input data are dynamically updated with ongoing user feedback on recommended items at each round. In this paper, we study exposure bias in a dynamic recommendation setting. Our goal is to show that existing bias mitigation methods that are designed to operate in a static recommendation setting are unable to satisfy fairness of exposure for items in long run. In particular, we empirically study one of these methods and show that repeatedly applying this method fails to fairly distribute exposure among items in long run. To address this limitation, we show how this method can be adapted to effectively operate in a dynamic recommendation setting and achieve exposure fairness for items in long run. Experiments on a real-world dataset confirm that our solution is superior in achieving long-term exposure fairness for the items while maintaining the recommendation accuracy

Biochemical heterozygosity and morphologic variation in a colony of papio hamadryas hamadryas baboons

Journal ArticleThis analysis examines the association between genetic heterozygosity and individual morphologic variation in a captive population of Papio hamadryas hamadryas consisting of 403 juveniles and adults. The population structure of the colony was artificially generated and maintained and is thus rigorously defined. Subpopulations delimited by age, sex, and degree of inbreeding are also explored. Heterozygosity, as enumerated from six simple Mendelian biochemical loci, is compared with the residual morphologic variation of each individual for each of 20 quantitative traits. Use of a sequential Bonferroni technique nullifies all significant correlations. Principalcomponents analysis reduces the morphometries to a single or few significant axes in each population. The first axis of the total population contains 86.07% of the variation in the sample and the absolute values of the factor scores exhibit a significant positive correlation with heterozygosity at P < 0.05. Correcting for age- and sex-related variation in the total population with a linear model subsequently demonstrates that no significant correlation between heterozygosity and morphologic variation exists

Chinua Achebe, Homi Bhabha and the Language of Ambivalence in Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist is one of the most outstanding figures in modern African Literature. What bestows him such a credit might be taken to be his attempts to use literature as a discursive tool in the way of de-colonization. Precisely, what Achebe does in his novels is providing an alternative discourse which can depict not only an authentic picture of native African life with all its complexity, but also dynamic native characters in such a context with all their human and existential conflicts. Thus, it can be claimed that what makes Achebe’s novels different from the other novels produced at his time is the specific language he adopts; a language which is able to give birth into a kind of ‘ambivalence’ and can structure, in consequence, a discourse capable of drawing on the postcolonial condition his people face as inheritors of ‘hybridity’ and ‘otherness’. Accordingly, the present study intends to investigate the language, or discourse, adopted by Chinua Achebe in his first novel, Things Fall Apart, by approaching them through Homi Bhabha’s theory of ‘Ambivalence’, as it seems to be much illuminating in the case