Most obedient servants

Education policy was an integral component of Christian missionary activity in the Volta Basin, and remained central to the German administration's Germanization of Togo. Differences arose, however, as to the choice of language for instruction. This is interpreted as struggle of linguistic colonialism drawing on the model of Fabian. Documents from the period point to a complicated battle of desires and egos, and between the English, German and Ewe languages, that was a precusor to the nationalist struggle. In 1904 German administrators decided to eliminate English instruction in mission and state schools, and to this end pressured church leaders to ensure the spread of German language, customs, and economic practices. But the southern Togolese population had a very different opinion and took every opportunity at their disposal to learn English and aggrandize the influence of the new standardized and grammarized Ewe language.Des serviteurs très obéissants : la politique de la langue au Togo sous la colonisation allemande. -- La politique éducative représentait une composante majeure de l'activité missionnaire chrétienne dans le bassin de la Volta et elle fut un élément central de l'administration allemande du Togo dans son entreprise de germanisation de ce pays. Cependant, des divergences surgirent quant au choix de la langue d'éducation. L'auteur analyse cette situation en termes de colonialisme linguistique et s'appuie sur les travaux de Fabian. Les documents de l'époque révèlent l'existence d'un conflit entre d'une part des volontés et des personnalités, d'autre part les langues anglaise, allemande et ewe. Ce conflit est vu comme l'anticipation de la lutte nationaliste. En 1904, les administrateurs allemands décidèrent de supprimer l'instruction en anglais au sein des missions et des écoles publiques et à cette fin firent pression auprès des leaders écclesiastiques pour qu'ils propagent l'usage de la langue, des moeurs et des habitudes économiques allemandes. Mais la population du sud du Togo ne l'entendait pas de cette oreille et profita de chaque occasion pour apprendre l'anglais et accroître l'image de la langue ewe dans sa nouvelle forme standardisée

Schuerkens, Ulricke. – Du Togo allemand aux Togo et Ghana indépendants. Changement social sous régime colonial

With the historiography of Togo as miminal as it is, this new work by Schuerkens should by all accounts be of importance and originality. With the exceptional recent flourish of Ewe and borderland studies, particularly the three excellent works by Emmanuel Akyeamong, Sandra Greene and Paul Nugent, there is otherwise comparatively little written about the post-1914 colonial history of Togo. And while the majority of that which does exist is francophone, there is nothing at all, with the sole e..

Piot, Charles. -- Remotely Global : Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1999, index, bibl.

Inverser les modèles et les données a longtemps été la pierre angulaire de l'anthropologie culturelle américaine, avec, entre autres conséquences, le développement d'un groupe très critique d'universitaires orientés vers la théorie. Ce choix fondamental, entre autres caractéristiques clairement discernables, a rendu sa production scientifique bien distincte de celle des traditions britanniques, australiennes ou européennes. Actuellement en vogue au sein de certains cercles anthropologi..

Schuerkens, Ulricke. – Du Togo allemand aux Togo et Ghana indépendants. Changement social sous régime colonial

With the historiography of Togo as miminal as it is, this new work by Schuerkens should by all accounts be of importance and originality. With the exceptional recent flourish of Ewe and borderland studies, particularly the three excellent works by Emmanuel Akyeamong, Sandra Greene and Paul Nugent, there is otherwise comparatively little written about the post-1914 colonial history of Togo. And while the majority of that which does exist is francophone, there is nothing at all, with the sole e..

Language between powers, power between languages

In a follow-up to his article on linguistic colonialism during the German occupation of Togo, in a recent volume of the Cahiers d'Études africaines, the author examines the evolution of language and schooling under the French mandate administration (1919-1945). This era, marked by the absence of a concrete government education policy, presents a particularly complex and ambiguous problematic for the historian. Three themes guide the narrative: the development of schooling under the mandate; the anglophilia of the southern Togolese population; and the destabilization of the main indigenous language, Ewe. The first section offers also a critical review of a recent work on the subject by Marie-France Lange. Central to the argument is the desire to provoke a discussion of the role of language in colonial education policy. But above ail, in order to further advance the issue of African agency in African history, the author evokes the concept of “engagement” to explain the indigenous participation in their social, and economic and political development.Faisant suite à son article sur le colonialisme linguistique allemand paru récemment dans un numéro des Cahiers d’Études africaines, l’auteur analyse l’évolution linguistique et scolaire pendant l’époque mandataire française. Cette ère, ayant été marquée par l’absence d’une politique scolaire gouvernementale définitive ou concrète, présente une problématique plus complexe et plus ambiguë. Trois thèmes-guident le récit : le développement de la scolarisation sous le mandat ; l’anglophilie de la population sud-togolaise ; et la marginalisation de la langue indigène principale, l’éwé. Aussi, la première section offre un compte rendu de l’ouvrage récent de Marie-France Lange. L’argument central de notre sujet s’appuie sur le désir de provoquer une discussion sur le rôle du langage dans la politique coloniale de l’éducation. Il évoque l’idée de l’engagement des indigènes dans leur formation sociale, économique et politique afin de faire avancer l’autonomie indigène dans l’histoire africaine

Industry Feedback : Opportunities for Autonomous Monitoring and Intervention in Marine Renewable Energy Arrays

Underwater monitoring and manipulation with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are active avenues of research in the Field Robotics Community. The purpose of this document is to briefly summarize some of the more promising research applications as well as provide information from four companies working in the area of marine renewable energy. This industry review demonstrates the potential benefit of autonomy in the marine renewable energy industry

Online Informative Path Planning for Active Information Gathering of a 3D Surface

This paper presents an online informative path planning approach for active information gathering on three-dimensional surfaces using aerial robots. Most existing works on surface inspection focus on planning a path offline that can provide full coverage of the surface, which inherently assumes the surface information is uniformly distributed hence ignoring potential spatial correlations of the information field. In this paper, we utilize manifold Gaussian processes (mGPs) with geodesic kernel functions for mapping surface information fields and plan informative paths online in a receding horizon manner. Our approach actively plans information-gathering paths based on recent observations that respect dynamic constraints of the vehicle and a total flight time budget. We provide planning results for simulated temperature modeling for simple and complex 3D surface geometries (a cylinder and an aircraft model). We demonstrate that our informative planning method outperforms traditional approaches such as 3D coverage planning and random exploration, both in reconstruction error and information-theoretic metrics. We also show that by taking spatial correlations of the information field into planning using mGPs, the information gathering efficiency is significantly improved.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, to be published in 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA

The prototype colliding-wind pinwheel WR 104

Results from the most extensive study of the time-evolving dust structure around the prototype "Pinwheel" nebula WR 104 are presented. Encompassing 11 epochs in three near-infrared filter bandpasses, a homogeneous imaging data set spanning more than 6 years (or 10 orbits) is presented. Data were obtained from the highly successful Keck Aperture Masking Experiment, which can recover high fidelity images at extremely high angular resolutions, revealing the geometry of the plume with unprecedented precision. Inferred properties for the (unresolved) underlying binary and wind system are orbital period 241.5 +/- 0.5 days and angular outflow velocity of 0.28 +/- 0.02 mas/day. An optically thin cavity of angular size 13.3 +/- 1.4 mas was found to lie between the central binary and the onset of the spiral dust plume. Rotational motion of the wind system induced by the binary orbit is found to have important ramifications: entanglement of the winds results in strong shock activity far downstream from the nose of the bowshock. The far greater fraction of the winds participating in the collision may play a key role in gas compression and the nucleation of dust at large radii from the central binary and shock stagnation point. Investigation of the effects of radiative braking pointed towards significant modifications of the simple hydrostatic colliding wind geometry, extending the relevance of this phenomena to wider binary systems than previously considered. Limits placed on the maximum allowed orbital eccentricity of e < 0.06 argue strongly for a prehistory of tidal circularization in this system. Finally we discuss the implications of Earth's polar (i < 16 deg) vantage point onto a system likely to host supernova explosions at future epochs.Comment: 35 pages, 8 figures, Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journa

Inherited determinants of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis phenotypes: a genetic association study

Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis are the two major forms of inflammatory bowel disease; treatment strategies have historically been determined by this binary categorisation. Genetic studies have identified 163 susceptibility loci for inflammatory bowel disease, mostly shared between Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. We undertook the largest genotype association study, to date, in widely used clinical subphenotypes of inflammatory bowel disease with the goal of further understanding the biological relations between diseases