An Examination of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection of /Xam Bushman Narratives, With Special Reference to the Trickster, Ikaggen.

During the 1870's a large collection of /Xam Bushman narratives was made by the linguist W.H.I. Bleek and his sister-in-law, Miss L.C. Lloyd, Parts of this collection have been published but the bulk of the narratives remains in manuscript only. The /Xam Bushmen, now extinct, lived as hunter-gatherers occupying much of the Republic of South Africa west of Port Elizabeth and south of the Orange River. On the basis of content, the narratives may be classified into legends concerning human characters; narratives relating to girls' puberty observances and to the supernatural being, IKhwa; sidereal narratives in which personifications of celestial bodies appear as characters; animal narratives, concerning the deeds of an early race of people, most of whom bear the names of the animals they were said to have later become; and narratives relating to the trickster /Kaggen. These texts display, to varying degrees, a range of features extending from conceptual templates traceable in other areas of /Xam culture, through social values and norms, and traditional fictive elements, to the narrative techniques of individual performers. The largest group of narratives concerned with a single character or group of characters is that concerned with the trickster, /Kaggen. Not only was /Kaggen a popular figure in /Xam narrative tradition, he was also believed in as a supernatural being who actively intervened in the lives of the /Xam. The beliefs and ritualistic practices relating to /Kaggen were situated in a complex of beliefs and practices surrounding the relationship between hunters and game animals. As a supernatural being /Kaggen had a dual personality. He was at once an incidental benefactor of mankind and a being who actively worked against the interests of hunters. In several ways his behaviour in the narratives represents a transformation into social terms of his position in the relationship between hunters and game animals. At the same time the duality of his supernatural role is also reflected in the structure and content of the narratives. While the stories concerning him are frequently light-hearted. They were also open to interpretations by individual narrators which could situate them deeply within a meaning system of utmost importance to the /Xam

2008 Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning for higher education in the UK

UCISA, JIS

Migration and traces of religious architecture in European urban areas: perceptions of youths ; part 2, First results from three research sites

'Die Autoren beschreiben die drei Forschungsstandorte des 'The Architecture of Contemporary Religious Transmission'-Projektes: Hamburg-St. Georg, Alt-Oslo/ Grönland und Finsbury Park, London. Hier führten sie ca. 50 Interviews sowohl mit religiösen - christlichen und muslimischen - als auch mit nicht-religiösen jungen Erwachsenen durch. Alle drei urbanen Räume sind stark von Migration und der durch sie mitgebrachten Religionen geprägt. In diese lokalen Kontexte betten die Autoren erste Forschungsergebnisse aus drei Forschungsstandorten ein. Der Teil über Hamburg-St. Georg behandelt eine Moschee als Bildungsstandort und Ort, an dem islamisches Wissen übertragen wird. Die Projektpartner in Alt-Oslo/ Grönland begegnen dem Phänomen der Ethnizität/ Rasse als Mediator und sichtbare Kennzeichnung von Religiosität. Sowohl junge Muslime als auch junge Christen formulieren ihre Narrationen in einer Sprache der Individualität. In Finsbury Park sind die Autoren einer dialogischen Auseinandersetzung der jugendlichen Muslime mit ihrem Glauben und einer Neubewertung des Materialismus bei zugewanderten pentekostalen Christen auf der Spur.' (Autorenreferat)'The authors describe their respective research sites in Hamburg-St. Georg, Old Oslo/ Gronland and the Finsbury Park area of London as part of the 'The Architecture of Contemporary Religious Transmission' project. In these sites they conducted approx. 50 interviews with religious - both Christian and Muslim - and non-religious youth. All three areas have been strongly influenced by migration and the religions it has introduced to these urban areas. In this context the authors embeded preliminary findings from each site. The section on Hamburg-St. Georg deals with a mosque as a space of education and venue of transmission of Islamic knowledge among Muslim youth leading to the objectification of Islam. The project partner researching in Old Oslo/ Gronland encounters the phenomenon of ethinicity/ race as mediator and ocular signifier of religiosity and how both Muslim and Christian youth frame their narratives on religion in a language of individualism. In Finsbury Park the authors find new dialogic engagements with faith amongst Muslim youth and the visibility of re-evaluated materialism amongst migrant and pentecostal Christians.' (author's abstract)

Climate services for managing societal risks and opportunities

The Earth’s climate and changes to it impact our lives, well-being and economy in numerous ways, some positive and some negative. Managing the risks that arise from changes in the climate over the coming months, years and decades is one of the most pressing challenges that society faces, but there are also some opportunities. The provision and use of climate information in decision-making (i.e. climate services) are central to managing the risks and opportunities. In this article we describe the seemingly complex climate service landscape, the actors in it, what the services are used for, and what next, to help stimulate further action to enable society to reduce risks and realise benefits, particularly timely as the world looks ahead to build a green recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic on the path to net zero emissions. Through a consideration of the value chain for climate services, we emphasise the importance of dialogue and collaboration between those developing, providing and using climate information in decision-making, and stress that a climate service is only worth delivering if it is going to be used by someone to influence an outcome. Co-production can be highly useful for enabling the dialogue and collaborating across the value chain, helping create services based on credible, salient and legitimate knowledge

Memetic: from meeting memory to virtual ethnography & distributed video analysis

The JISC-funded Memetic2 project was designed as knowledge management and project memory support for teams meeting via the Access Grid environment (Buckingham Shum et al, 2006). This paper describes how these capabilities also enable it to serve as a novel distributed video analysis tool to support interaction analysis. Memetic technologies can be used to record, annotate and discuss sessions recorded within a flexible, visual hypermedia environment called Compendium. We propose that beyond the use originally conceived, the Memetic toolset could find wide ranging applications within social science for virtual ethnography and data analysis

Age-Based Differences in Care Setting Transitions over the Last Year of Life

Context. Little is known about the number and types of moves made in the last year of life to obtain healthcare and end-of-life support, with older adults more vulnerable to care setting transition issues. Research Objective. Compare care setting transitions across older (65+ years) and younger individuals. Design. Secondary analyses of provincial hospital and ambulatory database data. Every individual who lived in the province for one year prior to death from April 1, 2005 through March 31, 2007 was retained (N = 19, 397). Results. Transitions averaged 3.5, with 3.9 and 3.4 for younger and older persons, respectively. Older persons also had fewer ER and ambulatory visits, fewer procedures performed in the last year of life, but longer inpatient stays (42.7 days versus 36.2 for younger persons). Conclusion. Younger and older persons differ somewhat in the number and type of end-of-life care setting transitions, a matter for continuing research and healthcare policy

GPs’ role in caring for children and young people with life-limiting conditions: a retrospective cohort study

Background: GPs are rarely actively involved in healthcare provision for children and young people (CYP) with life-limiting conditions (LLCs). This raises problems when these children develop minor illness or require management of other chronic diseases. Aim: To investigate the association between GP attendance patterns and hospital urgent and emergency care use. Design and setting: Retrospective cohort study using a primary care data source (Clinical Practice Research Datalink) in England. The cohort numbered 19 888. Method: CYP aged 0–25 years with an LLC were identified using Read codes (primary care) or International Classification of Diseases 10 th Revision (ICD-10) codes (secondary care). Emergency inpatient admissions and accident and emergency (A&E) attendances were separately analysed using multivariable, two-level random intercept negative binomial models with key variables of consistency and regularity of GP attendances. Results: Face-to-face GP surgery consultations reduced, from a mean of 7.12 per person year in 2000 to 4.43 in 2015. Those consulting the GP less regularly had 15% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 10% to 20%) more emergency admissions and 5% more A&E visits (95% CI = 1% to 10%) than those with more regular consultations. CYP who had greater consistency of GP seen had 10% (95% CI = 6% to 14%) fewer A&E attendances but no significant difference in emergency inpatient admissions than those with lower consistency. Conclusion: There is an association between GP attendance patterns and use of urgent secondary care for CYP with LLCs, with less regular GP attendance associated with higher urgent secondary healthcare use. This is an important area for further investigation and warrants the attention of policymakers and GPs, as the number of CYP with LLCs living in the community rises

Enabling climate action: Messages from ECCA2021 calling for re-imagining the provision and use of knowledge and information

As the need for climate action increases in terms of timing, nature and scope there is a commensurate call for knowledge and information that can enable such action consistent with policy targets. The European Climate Change Adaptation Conference ECCA2021 virtual session ‘At your Service: Climate knowledge and information as enablers for climate action' engaged users and providers of these enablers to seek views and insights as to how knowledge and information are and could better inform and inspire the required action for climate adaptation, resilience and mitigation. The intention of this engagement was to identify successes and where urgent and priority action is needed to enhance the relevance, quality and use of that knowledge and information. The results of deliberations revealed perceptions of successes and actions needed under the four ECCA2021 themes – sharing knowledge, inspiring action on transformation, creating connections and collaborations, and implementing action. Central to most of the highlighted successes and required action is the need to re-imagine the knowledge and information being provided and how they are used to be consistent with and supportive of the evolving nature and scope of required climate action

The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array Dish II: Characterization of Spectral Structure with Electromagnetic Simulations and its science Implications

We use time-domain electromagnetic simulations to determine the spectral characteristics of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Arrays (HERA) antenna. These simulations are part of a multi-faceted campaign to determine the effectiveness of the dish's design for obtaining a detection of redshifted 21 cm emission from the epoch of reionization. Our simulations show the existence of reflections between HERA's suspended feed and its parabolic dish reflector that fall below -40 dB at 150 ns and, for reasonable impedance matches, have a negligible impact on HERA's ability to constrain EoR parameters. It follows that despite the reflections they introduce, dishes are effective for increasing the sensitivity of EoR experiments at relatively low cost. We find that electromagnetic resonances in the HERA feed's cylindrical skirt, which is intended to reduce cross coupling and beam ellipticity, introduces significant power at large delays ($-40$ dB at 200 ns) which can lead to some loss of measurable Fourier modes and a modest reduction in sensitivity. Even in the presence of this structure, we find that the spectral response of the antenna is sufficiently smooth for delay filtering to contain foreground emission at line-of-sight wave numbers below $k_\parallel \lesssim 0.2$ $h$Mpc$^{-1}$, in the region where the current PAPER experiment operates. Incorporating these results into a Fisher Matrix analysis, we find that the spectral structure observed in our simulations has only a small effect on the tight constraints HERA can achieve on parameters associated with the astrophysics of reionization.Comment: Accepted to ApJ, 18 pages, 17 Figures. Replacement matches accepted manuscrip

School violence, school differences and school discourses

This article highlights one strand of a study which investigated the concept of the violenceresilient school. In six inner-city secondary schools, data on violent incidents in school and violent crime in the neighbourhood were gathered, and compared with school practices to minimise violence, accessed through interviews. Some degree of association between the patterns of behaviour and school practices was found: schools with a wider range of wellconnected practices seemed to have less difficult behaviour. Interviews also showed that the different schools had different organisational discourses for construing school violence, its possible causes and the possible solutions. Differences in practices are best understood in connection with differences in these discourses. Some of the features of school discourses are outlined, including their range, their core metaphor and their silences. We suggest that organisational discourse is an important concept in explaining school effects and school differences, and that improvement attempts could have clearer regard to this concept