Ethnological approach of terrace farming

The vast distribution of terraces in the geographical Sudan zone of West Africa leads to the question why and under which conditions an agrarian society might apply this particular form of farming. From an anthropologist's point of view it is essential to understand why farmers practise this form of farming and therefore try to explain the reason for it. The best way to gain insight is the description of terrace farming and when taking a closer look, we realize that farming is nowhere only an isolated agricultural activity

Städtische Lebenswelten in Bewegung: In Afrika und darüber hinaus

Although throughout the history of anthropology the ethnography of urban societies was never an important topic, investigations on cities in Africa contributed to the early theoretical development of urban studies in social sciences. As the ethnography of rural migrants in towns made clear, cultural diversity and creativity are foundational and permanent elements of urban cultures in Africa (and beyond). Currently, two new aspects complement these insights: 1) Different forms of mobility have received a new awareness through the concept of transnationalism. They are much more complex, including not only rural–urban migration, but also urban–urban migration, and migrations with a destination beyond the continent. 2) Urban life-worlds also include the appropriation of globally circulating images and lifestyles, which contribute substantially to the current cultural dynamics of cities in Africa. These two aspects are the reasons for the high complexity of urban contexts in Africa. Therefore, whether it is still appropriate to speak about the “locality” of these life-worlds has become questionable. At the same time, these new aspects explain the self-consciousness of members of urban cultures in Africa. They contribute to the expansive character of these societies and to the impression that cities in Africa host the most innovative and creative societies worldwide.Auch wenn die Ethnographie städtischer Gesellschaften in der Geschichte der Ethnologie nie eine große Rolle gespielt hat, leisteten doch Untersuchungen zu urbanen Lebenswelten in Afrika einen wichtigen Beitrag zur frühen theoretischen Entwicklung sozialwissenschaftlicher Stadtforschung. Wie die Ethnographie von Migranten aus ländlichen Räumen in afrikanischen Städten schon damals deutlich machte, sind kulturelle Diversität und Kreativität grundlegende und dauerhafte Elemente urbaner Kultur in Afrika (und weltweit). In letzter Zeit haben zwei wichtige Aspekte diese frühen Einsichten ergänzt: 1) Verschiedene Formen der Mobilität haben durch das Konzept der Transnationalität neue Relevanz gewonnen. 2) Zu urbanen Lebenswelten gehört auch die aktive Aneignung global zirkulierender Bilder und Lebensstile; sie trägt wesentlich zur kulturellen Dynamik afrikanischer Städte bei. Beide Aspekte sind ursächlich für die außerordentliche Komplexität heutiger urbaner Lebenswelten in Afrika. Daher steht infrage, ob es noch angemessen ist, von der „Lokalität“ dieser Lebenswelten zu sprechen. Zugleich erklären diese Aspekte das Selbstbewusstsein der Angehörigen urbaner Gesellschaften in Afrika. Sie tragen zum expansiven Charakter dieser Gesellschaften bei sowie zu dem Eindruck, städtische Gesellschaften in Afrika gehörten zu den innovativsten und kreativsten weltweit

Message-Passing Protocols for Real-World Parsing -- An Object-Oriented Model and its Preliminary Evaluation

We argue for a performance-based design of natural language grammars and their associated parsers in order to meet the constraints imposed by real-world NLP. Our approach incorporates declarative and procedural knowledge about language and language use within an object-oriented specification framework. We discuss several message-passing protocols for parsing and provide reasons for sacrificing completeness of the parse in favor of efficiency based on a preliminary empirical evaluation.Comment: 12 pages, uses epsfig.st

Is Trillion the New Billion?

Not so long ago, $1 billion seemed worth worrying about - as Everett Dirksen, the late senator from Illinois, was supposed to have said, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Today, another trillion-dollar commitment by the Federal Reserve makes headlines for only a day or two, and a projected federal budget deficit exceeding$1 trillion is widely viewed with equanimity. Are we courting disaster in this indifference to inconceivably large sums? Or have the extraordinary challenges faced by the economy today fundamentally altered the arithmetic of government finance? The answer is yes - and yes.Other Topics

Stimulate Car Buyers, Not Car Makers.

Should Uncle Sam do whatever is necessary to prevent General Motors, Ford and Chrysler from bankruptcy? If these were normal times, we suspect that most mainstream economists (and many mainstream legislators) would be inclined to let their stockholders, creditors and unions suffer the consequences of decades of myopic decisions. But with financial markets still in turmoil and the economy on the cusp of a nasty recession, these are hardly normal times.Technology and Industry

The Economics of Allowing More Domestic Oil Drilling

The recent sharp increase in the price of oil has generated renewed interest in U.S. oil exploration and development. This paper examines the likely impact of developing new energy resources on oil and gasoline prices. In addition, we use a benefit-cost framework to analyze the impact of allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the portions of the Outer Continental Shelf that are currently closed to development. We find that development of ANWR and off-limits OCS is likely to have only a modest impact on future world (and thus domestic) oil prices—on the order of one percent. Therefore, we believe that the impact of opening the new resource areas on current prices would be modest as well. Our benefit-cost analysis of developing offlimits OCS suggests that the benefits are very likely to exceed the costs. We are less confident in the case of ANWR, but still believe that the expected benefits of development are likely to exceed the costs.We suggest an alternative way of framing the issue of resource development that may give both policy makers and the public a better sense of the tradeoffs involved.

Testing, Comparing, and Combining Value at Risk Measures

Value-at-Risk (VaR) has emerged as the standard tool for measuring and reporting financial market risk. Currently, more than eighty commercial vendors offer enterprise or trading risk management systems which report VaR-like measures. Risk managers are therefore often left with the daunting task of having to choose from this plethora of risk measures. Accordingly, this paper develops a framework for answering the following questions about VaRs: 1) How can a risk manager test that the VaR measure at hand is properly specified, given the history of asset returns? 2) Given two different VaR measures, how can the risk manager compare the two and pick the best in a statistically meaningful way? Finally, 3) How can the risk manager combine two or more different VaR measures in order to obtain a single statistically superior measure? The usefulness of the methodology is illustrated in an application to daily returns on the S&P500. In the application, competing VaR measures are calculated from either historical or option-price based volatility measures, and the VaRs are then tested and compared.

Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy Toward the Arab Israeli Conflict, 1945-1961

Streaming audio requires RealPlayer.The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Hahn explained that immediately after the end of World War II politicians implemented policies that influence current U.S. policy, and by looking at this period, it is possible to understand the “what and why” of Washington's actions in Israel today.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent webpage, streaming audio, lecture summar

Archaeology and ethnology: what are the common foundations?

Fraglos gibt es viele wichtige gemeinsame Grundlagen in Archäologie und Ethnologie. Der folgende Beitrag geht der Frage nach, welchen Gemeinsamkeiten welcher Erklärungswert zukommt und wie sie für zukünftige Forschung nutzbar gemacht werden könnten.Anthropology and archaeology have much more in common than might be expected from a rapid look at current research and teaching practices. In particular, they share common foundations in the concept of culture, stemming from the first half of the 19th century. At that time, and in contrast to the usage of the notion in later times, culture was predominantly thought of as a universal: all humans are characterized by the fact of having culture. Only after 1850 was the idea of distinctiveness through cultures promoted by the idea, among others, of the evolution of societies. After 1850 systematic empirical methods were established in both anthropology and archaeology, and the concept of culture as a container was thereby operationalized. Cultures were thought of as distinctive and autonomous units that should be investigated separately. However, with the emergence of globalization, the concept of culture has changed again. Connections between cultures and societies have been pushed into the foreground of research. It is not by accident that both archaeology and anthropology have experienced a real boom during these years. Their roots give them reason to claim to be experts in worldwide and universal connections as well as in the diversity of cultures. The current challenge is whether both disciplines will find a way to make the shared potential explicit and design new research paradigms with reference to it