Highlife in the Ghanaian Music Scene: A Historical and Socio-Political Perspective

I lived in the cities of Accra and Kumasi for a total of 30 days during the month of November, 2011. To achieve my research objectives, I used a combination of formal and informal interviews, participant observation, and non-participant observation. I interviewed 7 musicians and 1 professor/musician in Accra, as well as 1 musician, 1 CD shop owner, and 1 DJ in Kumasi, making a total of 11 interviews most of which I recorded. For my participant observation, I observed 4 concerts total in Accra, all consisting of a mixture of genres including Highlife and Gospel. I participated in 2 Highlife keyboard lessons, 2 Palmwine guitar lessons, and 3 drum lessons, as well as playing a brief saxophone solo with a live band. For my non-participant observation, I observed a total of 4 live band shows in Accra, as well as casually listening to and often recording many other musical instances during my overall stay in Ghana. My review of the socio-political, musical, and cultural history of Highlife revealed that the genre and its various offshoots are the product of a constant melding and reformation of cultural influences both foreign and domestic. This phenomenon was also related to Highlife’s effect on and influence from the broader socio-political and economic changes in Ghana’s history. The second part of my findings, consisting of my interview and observational data, shed light on the more recent historical changes in Ghana’s popular music such scene as the popularity of church music, economic instability in the late 1970’s, the explosion of synthesizer usage, and the influx of Westernized media via television, radio, CDs, and the internet. My data revealed that making a living through music in Ghanaian cities has many difficulties often depending on various middlemen, and requires musicians to be versatile. I also discovered that musicians regard classic Highlife as Ghana’s original popular art form and have complicated opinions regarding its continued preservation through factors including education, the impact of Western culture on the youth, and the promotion of live music. I state that many of the forces influencing change in Ghana’s music scene have a complicated multitude of often contrasting effects. As history has proven, I assert that the tradition of Highlife and live music will continue to be culturally reinterpreted through a mixture of these forces, therefore not dying out but simply taking a new form

Effect of Ice and Hydrate Formation on Thermal Conductivity of Sediments

Thermal conductivity of ice- and hydrate-bearing fine-grained porous sediments (soils) has multiple controls: mineralogy, particle size, and physical properties of soil matrix; type, saturation, thermal state, and salinity of pore fluids; and pressure and temperature. Experiments show that sediments generally increase in thermal conductivity upon freezing. The increase is primarily due to fourfold difference between thermal conductivity of ice and water (~2.23 against ~0.6 W/(m·K)) and is controlled by physicochemical processes in freezing sediments. Thermal conductivity of frozen soils mainly depends on lithology, salinity, organic matter content, and absolute negative temperature, which affect the amount of residual liquid phase (unfrozen water). It commonly decreases as soil contains more unfrozen water, in the fining series ‘fine sand – silty sand – sandy clay – clay’, as well as at increasing temperatures, salinity, or organic carbon contents. According to experimental evidence, the behavior of thermal conductivity in hydrate-bearing sediments strongly depends on conditions of pore hydrate formation. It is higher when pore hydrates form at positive temperatures (t > 0оC) than in the case of hydrate formation in frozen samples. Freezing and thawing of hydrate-bearing sediments above the equilibrium pressure reduces their thermal conductivity due to additional hydrate formation

Using WormBase: A Genome Biology Resource for Caenorhabditis elegans and Related Nematodes

WormBase (www.wormbase.org) provides the nematode research community with a centralized database for information pertaining to nematode genes and genomes. As more nematode genome sequences are becoming available and as richer data sets are published, WormBase strives to maintain updated information, displays, and services to facilitate efficient access to and understanding of the knowledge generated by the published nematode genetics literature. This chapter aims to provide an explanation of how to use basic features of WormBase, new features, and some commonly used tools and data queries. Explanations of the curated data and step-by-step instructions of how to access the data via the WormBase website and available data mining tools are provided

Harmonizing model organism data in the Alliance of Genome Resources.

The Alliance of Genome Resources (the Alliance) is a combined effort of 7 knowledgebase projects: Saccharomyces Genome Database, WormBase, FlyBase, Mouse Genome Database, the Zebrafish Information Network, Rat Genome Database, and the Gene Ontology Resource. The Alliance seeks to provide several benefits: better service to the various communities served by these projects; a harmonized view of data for all biomedical researchers, bioinformaticians, clinicians, and students; and a more sustainable infrastructure. The Alliance has harmonized cross-organism data to provide useful comparative views of gene function, gene expression, and human disease relevance. The basis of the comparative views is shared calls of orthology relationships and the use of common ontologies. The key types of data are alleles and variants, gene function based on gene ontology annotations, phenotypes, association to human disease, gene expression, protein-protein and genetic interactions, and participation in pathways. The information is presented on uniform gene pages that allow facile summarization of information about each gene in each of the 7 organisms covered (budding yeast, roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, fruit fly, house mouse, zebrafish, brown rat, and human). The harmonized knowledge is freely available on the alliancegenome.org portal, as downloadable files, and by APIs. We expect other existing and emerging knowledge bases to join in the effort to provide the union of useful data and features that each knowledge base currently provides

The study protocol of a cluster-randomised controlled trial of family-mediated personalised activities for nursing home residents with dementia

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Following admission to a nursing home, the feelings of depression and burden that family carers may experience do not necessarily diminish. Additionally, they may experience feelings of guilt and grief for the loss of a previously close relationship. At the same time, individuals with dementia may develop symptoms of depression and agitation (BPSD) that may be related to changes in family relationships, social interaction and stimulation. Until now, interventions to alleviate carer stress and BPSD have treated carers and relatives separately rather than focusing on maintaining or enhancing their relationships. One-to-one structured activities have been shown to reduce BPSD and also improve the caring experience, but barriers such as a lack of resources impede the implementation of activities in aged care facilities. The current study will investigate the effect of individualised activities based on the Montessori methodology administered by family carers in residential care.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>We will conduct a cluster-randomised trial to train family carers in conducting personalised one-to-one activities based on the Montessori methodology with their relatives. Montessori activities derive from the principles espoused by Maria Montessori and subsequent educational theorists to promote engagement in learning, namely task breakdown, guided repetition, progression in difficulty from simple to complex, and the careful matching of demands to levels of competence. Persons with dementia living in aged care facilities and frequently visiting family carers will be included in the study. Consented, willing participants will be randomly assigned by facility to a treatment condition using the Montessori approach or a control waiting list condition. We hypothesise that family carers conducting Montessori-based activities will experience improvements in quality of visits and overall relationship with the resident as well as higher self-rated mastery, fewer depressive symptoms, and a better quality of life than carers in the waiting list condition.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>We hypothesise that training family carers to deliver personalised activities to their relatives in a residential setting will make visits more satisfying and may consequently improve the quality of life for carers and their relatives. These beneficial effects might also reduce nursing staff burden and thus impact positively on residential facilities.</p> <p>Trial Registration</p> <p>Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry - <a href="http://www.anzctr.org.au/ACTRN12611000998943.aspx">ACTRN12611000998943</a></p

Assessing health-related quality-of-life changes in informal caregivers: an evaluation in parents of children with major congenital anomalies

Purpose: Relatively few attempts to measure the effects on the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of informal caregivers within the context of economic evaluations have been reported. This paper is an exploratory attempt to find suitable methods to assess caregi

Analysis of gene expression in the nervous system identifies key genes and novel candidates for health and disease

The incidence of neurodegenerative diseases in the developed world has risen over the last century, concomitant with an increase in average human lifespan. A major challenge is therefore to identify genes that control neuronal health and viability with a view to enhancing neuronal health during ageing and reducing the burden of neurodegeneration. Analysis of gene expression data has recently been used to infer gene functions for a range of tissues from co-expression networks. We have now applied this approach to transcriptomic datasets from the mammalian nervous system available in the public domain. We have defined the genes critical for influencing neuronal health and disease in different neurological cell types and brain regions. The functional contribution of genes in each co-expression cluster was validated using human disease and knockout mouse phenotypes, pathways and gene ontology term annotation. Additionally a number of poorly annotated genes were implicated by this approach in nervous system function. Exploiting gene expression data available in the public domain allowed us to validate key nervous system genes and, importantly, to identify additional genes with minimal functional annotation but with the same expression pattern. These genes are thus novel candidates for a role in neurological health and disease and could now be further investigated to confirm their function and regulation during ageing and neurodegeneration. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10048-017-0509-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

The gratifications, frustrations, and well-being of older women caring at home for husbands with Alzheimer's disease or a related disorder

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityPLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you.There is growing evidence of the burden of family care giving, particularly among spouses. but little attention has been paid to the gratifications experienced. A cross-sectional, non-probability, interview study conducted in Massachusetts of 50 wives ages 58 and older supports the hypothesis that caregivers who are more gratified have greater well-being and those who experience greater frustration are more distressed. The caregivers were gratified by having their husbands at home; by believing that caregiving involved reciprocity and nurturing; enjoying moments of warmth. comfort, and pleasure: having gratification from their emotional support systems; and experiencing no change in marital closeness since the illness. Caregivers at risk of mental health problems are those who are highly frustrated and not gratified by the care giving experience. The general frustrations of feeling overwhelmed, resentful, fearful and not resigned were associated with low well-being. Frustration of wives with husbands' ADL ability, with inadequate time for themselves. with constraints of caregiving, with household chore responsibility. and with changes in their emotional support systems also contributed to low well-being. Comparison of the sample with national studies all utilizing the Dupuy WellBeing Scale, shows that the majority of caregivers are in no more distress than the general adult population. Thirty-two percent, however, are in severe distress. Caregiver distress is associated primarily with anxiety, not with depression as widely believed. Distress is not associated with caregiver age or health or with patient illness characteristics, factors that should no longer be used in clinical circles to assess the status of caregivers. Maintaining continuity in preferences and patterns is important to the well-being of caregivers. The study findings can guide the mental health treatment of caregivers particularly as the data lends support to the theory that disruption in the lives of caregivers is a stressor.2031-01-0