Musical borderlands: A cultural perspective of regional integration in Africa

This paper deploys a notion of "musical borderlands" to understand the practice and meaning of music production in an African context. This concept stresses flow rather than stasis, and liminal not dualistic thinking and being; it also relates economic and social practices to cultural content. It shows how Francophone (West and Central) African participants in hip hop music use translocal networks to sustain their community, and demonstrate dynamic relationships between material production and social reproduction. This enables new socialities to emerge with the potential to rearticulate political relations, which reaffirm trans-local, trans-urban, trans-border solidarities

Differential expression of the heat shock protein Hsp70 in natural populations of the tilapia, Sarotherodon melanotheron, acclimatised to a range of environmental salinities

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The relationship between environmental variation and induction of heat shock proteins <it>(Hsps) </it>has been much documented under experimental conditions. However, very little is known about such induction in natural populations acclimatised to prevailing environmental conditions. Furthermore, while induction of stress proteins has been well documented in response to environmental contaminants and thermal stressors, little is known about whether factors, such as extreme salinity, are also potential inductors. The black-chinned tilapia <it>Sarotherodon melanotheron </it>is unusual for its ability to colonise estuarine environments in West Africa that are characterised by extremely high salinities. The relationships between mRNA levels of the 70 kDa heat shock protein (<it>Hsp70</it>) and Na⁺, K⁺-ATPase1α (<it>Naka</it>) in the gills, environmental salinity, and a life-history trait (condition factor) were investigated in wild populations of this species sampled from three locations in the Saloum estuary, at salinities ranging from 40 to 100 psu.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The highest <it>Hsp70 </it>and <it>Naka </it>mRNA levels, and the poorest condition factors were recorded in the most saline sampling site (100 psu). The <it>Hsp70 </it>and <it>Naka </it>mRNA were correlated amongst themselves and showed a direct positive correlation with environmental salinity, and a negative correlation with fish condition factor. Thus, the <it>Hsp70 </it>is constitutively overexpressed by <it>S. melanotheron </it>acclimatised to extreme hypersalinity.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These results indicate that, although <it>S. melanotheron </it>can colonise extremely saline environments, the overexpression of <it>Hsp70 </it>combined with the higher <it>Naka </it>mRNA expression reveals that this represents a chronic stress. The induction of <it>Hsp70 </it>was, therefore, a biomarker of chronic hyper-osmotic stress which presumably can be linked to the impaired growth performance and precocious reproduction that have been demonstrated in the populations at the extremely saline sites.</p

Distributed Database Management Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks

Authors and/or their employers shall have the right to post the accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles on their own personal servers or the servers of their institutions or employers without permission from IEEE, provided that the posted version includes a prominently displayed IEEE copyright notice and, when published, a full citation to the original IEEE publication, including a link to the article abstract in IEEE Xplore. Authors shall not post the final, published versions of their papers.In sensor networks, the large amount of data generated by sensors greatly influences the lifetime of the network. In order to manage this amount of sensed data in an energy-efficient way, new methods of storage and data query are needed. In this way, the distributed database approach for sensor networks is proved as one of the most energy-efficient data storage and query techniques. This paper surveys the state of the art of the techniques used to manage data and queries in wireless sensor networks based on the distributed paradigm. A classification of these techniques is also proposed. The goal of this work is not only to present how data and query management techniques have advanced nowadays, but also show their benefits and drawbacks, and to identify open issues providing guidelines for further contributions in this type of distributed architectures.This work was partially supported by the Instituto de Telcomunicacoes, Next Generation Networks and Applications Group (NetGNA), Portugal, by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion, through the Plan Nacional de I+D+i 2008-2011 in the Subprograma de Proyectos de Investigacion Fundamental, project TEC2011-27516, by the Polytechnic University of Valencia, though the PAID-05-12 multidisciplinary projects, by Government of Russian Federation, Grant 074-U01, and by National Funding from the FCT-Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia through the Pest-OE/EEI/LA0008/2013 Project.Diallo, O.; Rodrigues, JJPC.; Sene, M.; Lloret, J. (2013). Distributed Database Management Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. PP(99):1-17. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2013.207S117PP9

Reconsidering cultural entrepreneurship: hip hop music economy and social change in Senegal, francophone West Africa

The increasing interest in the cultural economy is part of an attempt to invent new industrial development strategies that comprises a capacity to transform locations. In policy-making, the cultural economy is commonly framed from an economic perspective that salutes the role of the cultural economy and the dynamics of entrepreneurship in processes of urban and regional developments. Moreover, explorations of cultural economy and entrepreneurship are mainly represented by studies of Europe and North America. This thesis departs from such a normative perspective, and critically examines the links between a situated music economy, its cultural entrepreneurs and social change in West Africa. The empirical investigation of West African hip hop musical practitioners is framed by the notion of “community of practice”. The situated practices of these cultural workers and their music production ecology are investigated – methodologically – from a grounded perspective in order to grasp the originality of their materiality and aesthetics. The empirical focus of this thesis research is Dakar, one Francophone West African urban locale, which is contrasted with the ‘test case’ site of Ouagadougou. The case study locations are ‘experientially situated’, and over seventy semi-structured interviews were conducted with a range of participants both directly and indirectly involved in the hip hop music economy. Underpinning this research is the starting point that using “community of practice” as a conceptual framework offers a theoretically informed empirical basis for situating cultural entrepreneurship in the context of the West African music economy. In response, this thesis introduces the transcultural dimension of Hip Hop to frame its radical culturalisation of the West African music economy. This is done by singling out the political, social and theoretical significance of how hip hop entrepreneurship has become a force to be reckoned within social change in Francophone West Africa: this is a significant contribution of the thesis

Curating Dakar as an art world city

This chapter explores the contours and dynamics that forge Dakar as a contemporary ‘art world city,’ inquiring into initiatives that operate at the crossroads of art, citizenship and society. In a context marked by a monopolistic role of the state, the chapter interrogates the practices of two independent art organizations, RAW Material Company and Kër Thiossane, and their different engagements with and through the city. Delving into the processes of alterna tive, independent ‘art institution-building,’ we draw on AbdouMaliq Simone’s notion of ‘rhythms of endurance’ to explore the ways in which new methods of sharing and producing knowledge are developed and curated. Located at the intersections of creativity, cultural politics, and urban transformation, our contribution focuses on the subjects of such creative and transformative processes. In doing so, we emphasize the capacity of ordinary citizens to engage in the practical and symbolic re-imagining of their city. This chapter demonstrates that curatorial interventions and critical perspectives, through engaging with multiple audiences and investing in ‘art as a thinking system,’ can create spaces of encounters, of expression, exchange, reflection, and speculation to produce an ‘art world city’ in constant recreation

Praziquantel: its use in control of schistosomiasis in sub-Saharan Africa and current research needs

Treatment with praziquantel (PZQ) has become virtually the sole basis of schistosomiasis control in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, and the drug is reviewed here in the context of the increasing rate that it is being used for this purpose. Attention is drawn to our relative lack of knowledge about the mechanisms of action of PZQ at the molecular level, the need for more work to be done on schistosome isolates that have been collected recently from endemic areas rather than those maintained in laboratory conditions for long periods, and our reliance for experimental work mainly on Schistosoma mansoni, little work having been done on S. haematobium. There is no evidence that resistance to PZQ has been induced in African schistosomes as a result of its large-scale use on that continent to date, but there is also no assurance that PZQ and/or schistosomes are in any way unique and that resistant organisms will not be selected as a result of widespread drug usage. The failure of PZQ to produce complete cures in populations given a routine treatment should therefore solicit considerable concern. With few alternatives to PZQ currently available and/or on the horizon, methods to monitor drug-susceptibility in African schistosomes need to be devised and used to help ensure that this drug remains effective for as long a time as possibl