The Right to Research in Africa: Making African Copyright Whole

The imbalance existing within the African copyright ecosystem in relation to access to information for research and education became more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic. As teaching, learning and research inevitably occur on digital platforms, learners and researchers continue to grapple with the challenges of accessing materials owing largely to the protection of these resources under copyright law. Similarly, African libraries and knowledge curators found themselves ill-equip to perform their role of enabling access to information. To create the balance, therefore, there is a dire need for the recalibration of the African copyright system from the perspective of human rights law. Can the balance be achieved through the construction of a human right to research? In view of the existing broad freedom of expression, right to science and culture, education, and property in the global, regional and national human rights regime, is a specific right to research in Africa necessary and justifiable? If it is necessary and justifiable, what should be its minimum core components? Are there existing international and national regimes to support the formulation of a human right to research in Africa? Conducted as desk research and scoping study, this work unpacks and addresses the issues with the aim of constructing a human right to research in Africa

Entre Hegel e Desmond: o absoluto e a origem agápica do ser

William Desmond´s metaxological thought tries to go beyond the erotic origins of the Hegelian Absolute. For Desmond, the origin is an overdetermined excess that cannot be circumscribed by the dialectical circle of Hegel´s Absolute. Instead of the mediation of the whole with itself, Desmond conceives of a plurivocal metaxological intermediation of the Absolute that both mediates with itself as well as intermediates with its others. It goes beyond all Eros of a complete conceptual determination of being. Thought should recognize those more originating sources of wonder to which our mindfulness is indebted. This makes room to Philosophy's others: Religion and Theology.O pensamento metaxológico de William Desmond busca ir além da origem erótica do absoluto hegeliano. Para Desmond, a origem é um excesso supradeterminado, que não pode ser circunscrito pelo círculo dialético do absoluto de Hegel. Ao invés da mediação do todo consigo mesmo, Desmond concebe uma intermediação metaxológica plurívoca que medeia consigo mesmo, ao mesmo tempo em que intermedeia com os seus outros. A metaxologia vai além do Eros da total determinação conceitual do ser. O pensamento deve reconhecer as fontes originadoras do espanto primeiro, do qual a nossa plena-atenção é, de fato, derivada. Em outras palavras, o pensamento desmondiano abre assim um espaço intermediado para os outros da filosofia: a religião e a teologia

Comital Ireland, 1333–1534

The history of late-medieval Ireland is not exactly littered with dates that command general recognition, so it is surely suggestive that two which have achieved a degree of notoriety concern the fortunes, or rather misfortunes, of Ireland’s earls and earldoms: the murder of William Burgh, the ‘brown’ earl of Ulster, in 1333; and the rebellion in 1534 of Thomas Fitzgerald (‘Silken Thomas’), soon-to-be tenth earl of Kildare. These are dates of demarcation. In the broadest terms, 1333 has been understood to mark the end of the expansion of royal power under the Plantagenets, 1534 the start of its vigorous reassertion under the Tudors. What occurred between these chronological bookends? For Goddard Orpen (d. 1932), writing in 1920 when the Anglo-Irish tradition he cherished seemed imperilled by the prospect of Irish secession from the United Kingdom, the murder of the earl of Ulster in 1333 was a moment of dark, almost metonymic, significance: ‘the door was now closed on a century and a half of remarkable progress, vigour, and comparative order, and two centuries of retrogression, stagnation, and comparative anarchy were about to be ushered in’

Data Journalism: Placing Content and Practice among Nigerian Journalists

This study attempts to provide the basis for restructuring data-driven reporting among Nigerian journalists by examining its content and practice. Field Theory and Normalization Theory provide the theoretic framework, while focus group discussions by 30 respondents help generate the requisite data. Findings show that Nigerian journalists are not only knowledgeable about the concept of data-driven journalism, but they are also actively engaged as practitioners. Discussants attest to the factuality, verifiability, and reliability associated with data-driven journalism, the challenges notwithstanding. It turned out that its reshaping and sustainability would hinge on two factors. The first is to intensify data-driven journalism training and research. The second is for government to formulate policies or popularize the legislations that guarantee access to data and make data-driven journalism more professional

CSSP Newsletter-No.5 (1970)

February 1970, No. 5, Special Issue on East Central Nigeria Indictment: Commissioner of Police versus Lawrence Desmond O\u27Sullivan (m) -- (p. 1) Ihioma Mission; Diary of Events -- (p. 2) Christmas 1969 by Fr. Robert Eberhardt CSSp. -- (p. 5) Spiritans and the Last Days of Biafra --(p.6) Facts and Figures -- (p. 8) The Following is a Letter from Bishop G.E.I. Cockin to the Editor of the London Times -- (p. 10

Uncorrelated velocity and size residuals across galaxy rotation curves

The mass--velocity--size relation of late-type galaxies decouples into independent correlations between mass and velocity (the Tully-Fisher relation), and between mass and size. This behaviour is different to early-type galaxies which lie on a Fundamental Plane. We study the coupling of the Tully-Fisher and mass-size relations in observations (the SPARC sample) and in empirical galaxy formation models based on halo abundance matching, and rotation curve fits with a hydrodynamically motivated halo profile. We systematically investigate the correlation coefficient between the Tully-Fisher residuals $\Delta V_r$ and mass-size residuals $\Delta R$ as a function of the radius $r$ at which the velocity is measured, and thus present the $\Delta V_r-\Delta R$ relation across rotation curves. We find no significant correlation in either the data or models for any $r$, aside from $r \ll R_\text{eff}$ where baryonic mass dominates. We show that this implies an anticorrelation between galaxy size and halo concentration (or halo mass) at fixed baryonic mass, and provides evidence against the hypothesis that galaxy and halo specific angular momentum are proportional. Finally, we study the $\Delta V_r-\Delta R$ relations produced by the baryons and dark matter separately by fitting halo profiles to the rotation curves. The balance between these components illustrates the "disk-halo conspiracy" required for no overall correlation.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures; revised to match MNRAS published versio

Ecological Economics and Human Ecology

While economic theory has been enormously influential since the eighteenth century, the level of dominance of culture, politics and ethics gained by it in the last few decades is unprecedented. Not only has economic theory taken the place of political philosophy and ethical discourse and imposed its own concepts and image of society on other social sciences, it has redefined the natural sciences through its own categories as nothing but instruments of production, investment in which is to be judged in terms of its profitability. In this chapter I challenge all this, arguing for the primacy of political philosophy inspired by T.H. Green, showing how A.N. Whitehead provided the natural philosophy to defend Green's social liberalism. I then defend ecological economics and human ecology based on assumptions deriving from Whitehead to replace current economic and political doctrines as the basis for formulating public policy

Dynamic communicability predicts infectiousness

Using real, time-dependent social interaction data, we look at correlations between some recently proposed dynamic centrality measures and summaries from large-scale epidemic simulations. The evolving network arises from email exchanges. The centrality measures, which are relatively inexpensive to compute, assign rankings to individual nodes based on their ability to broadcast information over the dynamic topology. We compare these with node rankings based on infectiousness that arise when a full stochastic SI simulation is performed over the dynamic network. More precisely, we look at the proportion of the network that a node is able to infect over a fixed time period, and the length of time that it takes for a node to infect half the network.We find that the dynamic centrality measures are an excellent, and inexpensive, proxy for the full simulation-based measures