Japan?s National Economic Identity and African Development: An Analysis of the Tokyo International Conference on My email address

Japan has emerged in recent years as a leading donor country to African countries. At one level, Japan?s renewed assertiveness in providing foreign aid to Africa is on par with the more active approach by other donor countries. Some might argue that Japan?s motivations to lend capital and technical assistance to African countries are shared by all lending countries. However, I argue that Japan?s official development policy and, in particular, the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) process, seek to break away from the acceptance of the Washington consensus and to demonstrate Japan?s particular leadership position in the donor community. Rather than to focus on domestic bureaucratic politics to explain Japanese ODA or on the specific targets of foreign aid, this paper seeks to identify the basic features of Japanese national identity that explain its aid policy to Africa. These features will be highlighted through an analysis of the TICAD process. Taken as a whole, the TICAD process represents the Japanese government?s response to perceived inroads by globalization and neoliberal economic ideology. ...foreign aid, African development, Japanese-African foreign relations

Slaveholder Investment in Territorial Minnesota

Enslavers from slave states came to Minnesota during the Antebellum Era and invested in land and businesses there. The investors represented the diversity of slaveholders: owners of large plantations, operators of small farms, and urban residents. Some enslavers actively bought and sold people, but others had unwittingly inherited captives from deceased relatives. Most of them had brief stays in Minnesota during the spring and summer while making their investments, but a few of them sold all their captives in the South and then permanently relocated to Minnesota to buy the land for their new homes. Their investments provided sorely needed capital to communities throughout Minnesota, and they partly enabled the existence of local institutions such as the University of Minnesota. This article looks at the investors, the trail of their money from the labor of their captives into the hands of Minnesotans, and the ways in which Minnesotans spent that money from slave labor

The Contemplation of Our Righteousness : Vigilante Acts against African Americans in Southwest Minnesota, 1903

In 1903 an African American man came to Montevideo, Minnesota from out of state and was accused of physically assaulting a European American woman. The townspeople formed a posse and searched for the alleged assailant in southern Minnesota. At the time the African American population was in the single digits. None of the African American residents knew the alleged attacker or were related to him. Nevertheless, the victim\u27s family approached those residents and told them to leave town, and their subsequent departure left Montevideo without African Americans for well over half a century. The local press covered the alleged attack as a consequence of African American migration from the South to the North and bemoaned the impending arrival of the ethnic tensions that had plagued the South for generations. The removal of African Americans from Montevideo predated the lynching in Duluth by seventeen years, showing that the tension had seeped into life in Minnesota. This article looks at violent vigilantism in southern Minnesota during one of the most violent periods that African Americans faced in American history

Black Cloud: The Struggles of St. Cloud\u27s African American Community, 1880-1920

From the 1890s to the 1920s, a community of over one dozen African Americans existed in St. Cloud, Minnesota. It consisted of African Americans from the South and elsewhere in the North. Most found employment in low-wage jobs, but some--like John Webster and David Basfield--started their own businesses in town. Their children attended the same schools as the other local school-age children, and one of them--Ruby Cora Webster--became the first known graduate of what became St. Cloud State University. The children left St. Cloud by the 1920s, and their parents either stayed there or relocated with them. In the meantime, segregation by skin color intensified during the community\u27s existence, and a mob\u27s lynching of an African American nearly took place in town in 1917. This article looks at the people comprising St. Cloud\u27s African American community and their struggle for survival during one of the nation\u27s most violent periods for American Americans

Data-efficient Neuroevolution with Kernel-Based Surrogate Models

Surrogate-assistance approaches have long been used in computationally expensive domains to improve the data-efficiency of optimization algorithms. Neuroevolution, however, has so far resisted the application of these techniques because it requires the surrogate model to make fitness predictions based on variable topologies, instead of a vector of parameters. Our main insight is that we can sidestep this problem by using kernel-based surrogate models, which require only the definition of a distance measure between individuals. Our second insight is that the well-established Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm provides a computationally efficient distance measure between dissimilar networks in the form of "compatibility distance", initially designed to maintain topological diversity. Combining these two ideas, we introduce a surrogate-assisted neuroevolution algorithm that combines NEAT and a surrogate model built using a compatibility distance kernel. We demonstrate the data-efficiency of this new algorithm on the low dimensional cart-pole swing-up problem, as well as the higher dimensional half-cheetah running task. In both tasks the surrogate-assisted variant achieves the same or better results with several times fewer function evaluations as the original NEAT.Comment: In GECCO 201

Punctuated Equilibrium in Software Evolution

The approach based on paradigm of self-organized criticality proposed for experimental investigation and theoretical modelling of software evolution. The dynamics of modifications studied for three free, open source programs Mozilla, Free-BSD and Emacs using the data from version control systems. Scaling laws typical for the self-organization criticality found. The model of software evolution presenting the natural selection principle is proposed. The results of numerical and analytical investigation of the model are presented. They are in a good agreement with the data collected for the real-world software.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX, 2 Postscript figure

Altering the stability of the Cdc8 overlap region modulates the ability of this tropomyosin to bind cooperatively to actin and regulate myosin.

Tropomyosin (Tm) is an evolutionarily conserved ?-helical coiled-coil protein, dimers of which form end-to-end polymers capable of associating with and stabilising actin-filaments and regulate myosin function. The fission yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, possesses a single essential Tm, Cdc8, which can be acetylated on its amino terminal methionine to increase its affinity for actin and enhance its ability to regulate myosin function. We have designed and generated a number of novel Cdc8 mutant proteins with amino terminal substitutions to explore how stability of the Cdc8-polymer overlap region affects the regulatory function of this Tm. By correlating the stability of each protein, its propensity to form stable polymers, its ability to associate with actin and to regulate myosin, we have shown the stability of the amino terminal of the Cdc8 ?-helix is crucial for Tm function. In addition we have identified a novel Cdc8 mutant with increased amino-terminal stability, dimers of which are capable of forming Tm-polymers significantly longer than the wild-type protein. This protein had a reduced affinity for actin with respect to wild type, and was unable to regulate actomyosin interactions. The data presented here are consistent with acetylation providing a mechanism for modulating the formation and stability of Cdc8 polymers within the fission yeast cell. The data also provide evidence for a mechanism in which Tm dimers form end-to-end polymers on the actin-filament, consistent with a cooperative model for Tm binding to actin

FABRIC: A National-Scale Programmable Experimental Network Infrastructure

FABRIC is a unique national research infrastructure to enable cutting-edge and exploratory research at-scale in networking, cybersecurity, distributed computing and storage systems, machine learning, and science applications. It is an everywhere-programmable nationwide instrument comprised of novel extensible network elements equipped with large amounts of compute and storage, interconnected by high speed, dedicated optical links. It will connect a number of specialized testbeds for cloud research (NSF Cloud testbeds CloudLab and Chameleon), for research beyond 5G technologies (Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research or PAWR), as well as production high-performance computing facilities and science instruments to create a rich fabric for a wide variety of experimental activities

Accounting for decarbonisation and reducing capital at risk in the S&P500

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Colin Haslam, Nick Tsitsianis, Glen Lehman, Tord Andersson, and John Malamatenios, ‘Accounting for decarbonisation and reducing capital at risk in the S&P500’, Accounting Forum, Vol. 42 91): 119-129, March 2018. Under embargo until 7 August 2019. The final, definitive version is available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.accfor.2018.01.004.This article accounts for carbon emissions in the S&P 500 and explores the extent to which capital is at risk from decarbonising value chains. At a global level it is proving difficult to decouple carbon emissions from GDP growth. Top-down legal and regulatory arrangements envisaged by the Kyoto Protocol are practically redundant given inconsistent political commitment to mitigating global climate change and promoting sustainability. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and European Commission (EC) are promoting the role of financial markets and financial institutions as drivers of behavioural change mobilising capital allocations to decarbonise corporate activity.Peer reviewe