[Review of] John Reed and Clive Wake, eds . A New Book of African Verse

A New Book of African Verse, edited by John Reed and Clive Wake, is actually a new edition of A Book of African Verse, which appeared in 1964 just as black literature of Africa and of the United States was gaining recognition, particularly in academic circles. The authors\u27 intention has been consistently modest. From the first, the authors chose works from contemporary poets of French or English expression from Africa south of the Sahara. Certainly in 1964 their first volume brought attention to almost unknown poetry and was useful as an introduction to new readers of African poetry

[Review of] Ngugi wa Thiong\u27O. Devil on the Cross

James Ngugi without question is Kenya\u27s most prominent and most highly regarded novelist to date. Of the same generation of writers as Achebe, Armah, Soyinka, and Owoonor of West Africa, Ngugi, like them, after a local university education, went abroad for advanced work. In 1964 at Leeds, Ngugi published his novel Weep Not, Child, written when he was a student at Makerere. Shortly thereafter, in 1965, he published The River Between which he had composed even earlier. With A Grain of Wheat the writer completed in 1967 a kind of trilogy, depicting for a western readership a literary explanation and clarification of the historic Kenyan struggle for independence. These novels, written in English, and some plays and short stories brought Ngugi an award in 1965 at the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts and subsequent critical acclaim and broad readership

[Review of] Beverley Ormerod. An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel

Beverley Ormerod displays real expertise in An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel. She is a West Indian herself, and she knows the background and culture of the Caribbean: its African slave origins and the present quest for pan-Caribbean identity. After post-graduate research at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris , she earned her doctorate in French at Cambridge University. When necessary, she translates the French originals into English. She also knows various creoles of the islands and appreciates the linguistic variety there. She has taught Caribbean literature for twenty years

[Review of] Mazisi Kunene. The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain

Mazisi Kunene is admirably qualified to transmit both the traditional and his original Zulu poetry to an anglophone audience. He is a scholar and a performer of Zulu oral folk poetry. As leader for his own people, for ten years Chief Representative for the African National Congress in Europe and in the United States, he can interpret the heroic epics of ancestral worth. He has translated into English the great epic poem of the Zulu hero Shaka. Long an exile from South Africa, Kunene was a founder member of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain. He has been Lecturer of African Literature at Roma in Lesotho, at Stanford and the University of California, and most recently at Nairobi. Thus he can reach audiences with his translations even though the originals in Zulu are banned in his homeland

Sensemaking Practices in the Everyday Work of AI/ML Software Engineering

This paper considers sensemaking as it relates to everyday software engineering (SE) work practices and draws on a multi-year ethnographic study of SE projects at a large, global technology company building digital services infused with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. Our findings highlight the breadth of sensemaking practices in AI/ML projects, noting developers' efforts to make sense of AI/ML environments (e.g., algorithms/methods and libraries), of AI/ML model ecosystems (e.g., pre-trained models and "upstream"models), and of business-AI relations (e.g., how the AI/ML service relates to the domain context and business problem at hand). This paper builds on recent scholarship drawing attention to the integral role of sensemaking in everyday SE practices by empirically investigating how and in what ways AI/ML projects present software teams with emergent sensemaking requirements and opportunities

Effective Assessment Plan Leading to Strong Reform of Petroleum Engineering Graduate Program

The Bob L. Herd Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas Tech University has made a lot of significant actions of improvement to its graduate program that was motivated by a systematic SACSCOC assessment plan. This paper shows how the SACSCOC assessment plan aided in making continuous actions of improvement and as a conclusion of these actions, how the current graduate curriculum plan was improved. This paper highlights the details of the graduate department assessment plan, such as how graduate program objectives are assessed, what assessment tools are used, when data are gathered and evaluated, and when actions of improvement are made. This paper will also detail how the analysis of data was utilized in making actions of continuous improvement. At the end of the paper examples of the significant actions of improvement made based on the department assessment and evaluation plan are presented.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Re-Purposing the Elderly Body

In cross-disciplinary scholarship, an emerging “trash” discourse considers the implications of excessive production and consumption and their inevitable corollary—the sense that all things are disposable. Nature has been reconfigured as a landfill, an artificial landscape of discarded matter. Objects possess a shrinking lifespan, quickly replaced by a newer upgrade. Driven by a need for constant rejuvenation, consumers fetishize the new and dismiss obsolescent products. I wish to posit aging – more specifically, the elderly female body—against the “landscape” of trash in order to engage its vocabulary of entropy and decay as well as to deploy the repurposing of discarded materials as a means to reconceptualize aging. In her film, The Gleaners and I (2001), Agnes Varda interposes her body between the spectator and her consideration of different forms of gleaning in France. Our awareness of her mediation recasts the symbiosis of women and nature in terms of aging. The organic matter recovered by gleaners functions metaphorically to “repurpose” Varda’s aging perspectives and continuing immersion in and engagement with her environment and intersecting communities. While Varda’s documentary is concerned with organic waste, inorganic landfill—particularly “old” technologies—also informs perceptions of youth, age, and life cycles