Politics, penality and (post-)colonialism : an introduction

Politics, Penality and (Post-)Colonialism: An Introductio

African soldiers in the USSR: oral histories of ZAPU intelligence cadres’ Soviet training, 1964–1979

A growing literature has shed new light on interactions between the Soviet Union and Africa, notably through studies of the large numbers of African students who arrived in Moscow from 1960. Scholars have, however, largely ignored the many thousands of African military trainees who arrived in the same period. Here we begin to explore soldiers’ experiences through a focus on intelligence cadres of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). We ask how their Soviet sojourns shaped their lives and ZAPU’s struggle, and consider the strengths and limits of oral histories in going beyond questions of strategy and Cold War binaries. ZAPU trainees depicted themselves as men of education and political sophistication who were able to shape the content of their training and make efficacious use of it. Their most abiding political lessons came from the understanding they gained of Soviet history – particularly the sacrifices of the Great Patriotic War – and their experiences of ‘living socialism’. What these cadres depicted as Soviet egalitarianism, anti-racism, and state provision for basic needs held a powerful appeal due to the dramatic contrast to settler-ruled Rhodesia. Soviet support certainly influenced ZAPU, but these accounts indicate that it did so in negotiated, pragmatic and at times surprising ways that were shaped by interactions with many other foreign hosts, the influence of a specifically Rhodesian history of discrimination and oppression, and ZAPU’s own assessment of its military needs

[Editorial] The transnational histories of Southern African liberation movements: an introduction

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Comparing the 2013 ACC/AHA & 2014 NLA Dyslipidemia Guidelines and Their Impact on Clinical Decision Making

This home-study CPE activity has been developed to educate pharmacists on the similarities and differences between the 2014 NLA Recommendations for Dyslipidemia Management and the 2013 ACC/AHA Guidelines for Treatment of Blood Cholesterol

Crawling in a fluid

There is increasing evidence that mammalian cells not only crawl on substrates but can also swim in fluids. To elucidate the mechanisms of the onset of motility of cells in suspension, a model which couples actin and myosin kinetics to fluid flow is proposed and solved for a spherical shape. The swimming speed is extracted in terms of key parameters. We analytically find super- and subcritical bifurcations from a non-motile to a motile state and also spontaneous polarity oscillations that arise from a Hopf bifurcation. Relaxing the spherical assumption, the obtained shapes show appealing trends

Robust energy harvesting from walking vibrations by means of nonlinear cantilever beams

In the present work we examine how mechanical nonlinearity can be appropriately utilized to achieve strong robustness of performance in an energy harvesting setting. More specifically, for energy harvesting applications, a great challenge is the uncertain character of the excitation. The combination of this uncertainty with the narrow range of good performance for linear oscillators creates the need for more robust designs that adapt to a wider range of excitation signals. A typical application of this kind is energy harvesting from walking vibrations. Depending on the particular characteristics of the person that walks as well as on the pace of walking, the excitation signal obtains completely different forms. In the present work we study a nonlinear spring mechanism that is composed of a cantilever wrapping around a curved surface as it deflects. While for the free cantilever, the force acting on the free tip depends linearly on the tip displacement, the utilization of a contact surface with the appropriate distribution of curvature leads to essentially nonlinear dependence between the tip displacement and the acting force. The studied nonlinear mechanism has favorable mechanical properties such as low frictional losses, minimal moving parts, and a rugged design that can withstand excessive loads. Through numerical simulations we illustrate that by utilizing this essentially nonlinear element in a 2 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) system, we obtain strongly nonlinear energy transfers between the modes of the system. We illustrate that this nonlinear behavior is associated with strong robustness over three radically different excitation signals that correspond to different walking paces. To validate the strong robustness properties of the 2DOF nonlinear system, we perform a direct parameter optimization for 1DOF and 2DOF linear systems as well as for a class of 1DOF and 2DOF systems with nonlinear springs similar to that of the cubic spring that are physically realized by the cantilever–surface mechanism. The optimization results show that the 2DOF nonlinear system presents the best average performance when the excitation signals have three possible forms. Moreover, we observe that while for the linear systems the optimal performance is obtained for small values of the electromagnetic damping, for the 2DOF nonlinear system optimal performance is achieved for large values of damping. This feature is of particular importance for the system׳s robustness to parasitic damping.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Naval Engineering Education Center. (Grant 3002883706)National Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowship Program (Grant 1122374)MIT Energy Initiativ

The Advent of Digital Productivity Assistants: The Case of Microsoft MyAnalytics

Modern digital work environments allow for great flexibility, but can also contribute to a blurring of work/life boundaries and technostress. An emerging class of intelligent tools, that we term Digital Productivity Assistant (DPA), helps knowledge workers to improve their productivity by creating awareness of their collaboration behaviour and by suggesting improvements. In this revelatory case study, we combine auto-ethnographic insights with interview data from three organisations to explore how one such tool works to influence collaboration and productivity management behaviours, using the lens of persuasive IS design. We also identify barriers to DPAs’ effective use as a partner in personal productivity management

Effects of early marine diagenesis and site-specific depositional controls on carbonate-associated sulfate : insights from paired S and O isotopic analyses

Acknowledgment is made to the donors of the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund (#57548-ND2) to D.F. for partial support of this research and from the Estonian Research Council (#PUT611, #PRG836) to O.H and A.L.Carbon, sulfur and oxygen isotope profiles in Silurian strata of the Baltoscandian Basin (Estonia), coincident with the Ireviken Bioevent, provide insights into basin-scale and platform-specific depositional processes. Paired carbon isotope records preserve a positive isotope excursion during the early Wenlock, coincident with faunal turnover, yet δ13C variability of this excursion compared to other locations within the paleobasin reflects local depositional influences superimposed on a global signal. In comparison, sulfur isotope records do not preserve a systematic isotopic excursion over the same interval. Instead, sulfur isotope records have high sample-to-sample stratigraphic variability, particularly in shallow-water carbonate rocks (scatter up to ~10‰ for δ34SCAS and ~ 25‰ for δ34Spyr). This pattern of isotopic variability is also found between sites from the same carbonate platform, where the magnitude and isotopic variability in δ34SCAS and δ34Spyr differ depending on relative local sea level (and therefore facies). Such facies-dependent variability reflects more closed- versus more open-system diagenetic conditions where pulses of increased sedimentation rate in the shallow water environments generates greater isotopic variability in both δ34SCAS and δ34Spyr. Increased reworking and proximity to the shoreline results in local sulfide oxidation, seen as a decrease in δ34SCAS in the most proximal settings. Platform-scale evolution of isotopically distilled pore-fluids associated with dolomitization results in increased δ34SCAS in deep water settings. Correlations in paired δ34SCAS-δ18OCAS data support these conclusions, demonstrating the local alteration of CAS during deposition and early marine diagenesis. We present a framework to assess the sequence of diagenetic and depositional environmental processes that have altered δ34SCAS and find that δ34S of ~27–28‰ approximates Silurian seawater sulfate. Our findings provide a mechanism to understand the elevated variability in many deep-time δ34SCAS records that cannot otherwise be reconciled with behavior of the marine sulfate reservoir.PostprintPeer reviewe