A bibliography on the Jews of Malta

A bibliographical list of sources on the Jews of Maltapeer-reviewe

I am/am I an African? A relational reading of 'Diaspora and Identity in South African Fiction' by J.U. Jacobs

The publication of Diaspora and Identity in South African Fiction (2016) by J.U. Jacobs is a timely intervention, in that it is the first comprehensive study of South African fiction to sustain the argument that South African writing is always already diasporic. Although Jacobs' diasporic framework undoubtedly serves as an important addition to the recent trends identified by literary scholars, his focus on 12 well-established writers (including Coetzee, Wicomb, Mda, Gordimer and Ndebele), highlights some of the gaps that need to be filled in a study of this kind. For instance, what about the younger generation of writers, including those from elsewhere in Africa who are writing about living in South Africa? How do they deal with what has been termed the new diaspora, with debates around Afropolitanism and the experiences of internal, inter-continental and trans-continental migrancy in an increasingly globalising world? Despite these shortcomings, Jacobs' premise about the inevitably diasporic identifications that are narrativised in the 20 novels analysed here can provide a useful foundation for further scholarship on how the diasporic condition informs and is mediated in other texts. These, as I will show, range from works by a new generation of emerging writers on the one hand to the performing arts on the other hand.DHE

Becoming-Bertha: virtual difference and repetition in postcolonial 'writing back', a Deleuzian reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Critical responses to Wide Sargasso Sea have seized upon Rhys’s novel as an exemplary model of writing back. Looking beyond the actual repetitions which recall Brontë’s text, I explore Rhys’s novel as an expression of virtual difference and becomings that exemplify Deleuze’s three syntheses of time. Elaborating the processes of becoming that Deleuze’s third synthesis depicts, Antoinette’s fate emerges not as a violence against an original identity. Rather, what the reader witnesses is a series of becomings or masks, some of which are validated, some of which are not, and it is in the rejection of certain masks, forcing Antoinette to become-Bertha, that the greatest violence lies

What to Do About Rural American Disproportionate Disadvantage & Disproportionate Inattention

This thesis has highlighted that the farm bill is the largest source of federal policy concerning rural America, while arguing that it doesn’t directly, nor proportionately address the majority of rural Americans’ industries metrics of disadvantage. Rather, the farm bill disproportionately favors agricultural and other “special interests”. This is reflected through the farm bill’s provisions concerning various agricultural financial instruments and SNAP provisions (making up for 99.9% of total farm bill provisions), and its typical lobbying profiles. Meanwhile, “rural development” provides rural Americans with industry-indiscriminate, special-interest-avoiding assistance such as small business loans and infrastructure development, but it receives just 0.1% of total farm bill provisions. Because only 1 in 10 rural Americans are in the agriculture industry, roughly 9 out of 10 of Americans, then, receive disproportionate federal inattention especially as a result of the current nature of the farm bill. The Introduction includes an overview while including highlights from interviews performed with a rural resident and a C-Suite executive at a Fortune 500 company within the food industry. Chapter 1 addresses various disproportionate metrics of rural American disadvantage (as compared to urban areas), addresses three popular misconceptions of rural America, includes a highlight from a third interview with a rural resident, and sets the larger argument forward that rural America faces “disproportionate disadvantage and disproportionate inattention”. Chapter 2 reviews political science and sociological literatures and largely brings forward respective arguments for: one, how collective-action and an understanding of institutions (generally) is essential for changing current policy practically; and two, how rural disadvantage has largely been treated through cultural explanations while urban disadvantage largely continues receiving institutional explanations. Chapter 3’s extensive analysis of rural counties builds on USDA “County Typology” data: my rural county analysis by region, industry specialization, and particular metrics of disadvantage (e.g., child poverty and population loss) demonstrates rural economic and disadvantage diversity across six geographic regions in America that the farm bill especially fails to address. Case studies of key states within each region (demonstrating particularly prevalent disadvantages) are included throughout the chapter to further illustrate regional findings, relate them to current federal policy concerning rural America, and convey current policy limitations. Finally, Chapter 4 builds on multidisciplinary findings from all previous chapters in making an argument that the share of “rural development” under the farm bill should be substantially increased, for it has the greatest potential within federal policy to achieve proportionate attention and assistance for the majority of rural Americans experiencing diverse disadvantage. However, policy recommendations within the chapter for doing so rest upon understanding collective action and its challenges: rural American business leaders should form a national collective while overcoming several collective action challenges (outlined in the chapter) to achieve the strength possible to lobby the farm bill for the purpose of directing attention and assistance to the majority of rural Americans via rural development strategies

The role of law in Russian international business transactions

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Categorization of free-text drug orders using character-level recurrent neural networks

Background and purpose Manual annotation and categorization of non-standardized text (“free-text”) of drug orders entered into electronic health records is a labor-intensive task. However, standardization is required for drug order analyses and has implications for clinical decision support. Machine learning could help to speed up manual labelling efforts. The objective of this study was to analyze the performance of deep machine learning methods to annotate non-standardized text of drug order entries with their therapeutically active ingredients. Materials and methods The data consisted of drug orders entered 8/2009-4/2014 into the electronic health records of inpatients at a large tertiary care academic medical center. We manually annotated the most frequent order entry patterns with the active ingredient they contain (e.g. “Prograf”⟵“Tacrolimus”). We heuristically included additional orders by means of character sequence comparisons to augment the training dataset. Finally, we trained and employed character-level recurrent deep neural networks to classify non-standardized text of drug order entries according to their active ingredients. Results A total of 26,611 distinct order patterns were considered in our study, of which the top 7.6% (2028) had been annotated with one of 558 distinct ingredients, leaving 24,583 unlabeled observations. Character-level recurrent deep neural networks achieved a Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of 98% and outperformed the best representative baseline, a trigram-based Support Vector Machine, by 2 percentage points. Conclusion Character-level recurrent deep neural networks can be used to map the active ingredient to non-standardized text of drug order entries, outperforming other representative techniques. While machine learning might help to facilitate categorization tasks, still a considerable amount of manual labelling and reviewing work is required to train such systems

3. Adjacency pairs and argumentative steps in the halakhic give-and-take conversations in the Mishnah

1. The discourse unit of the halakhic give-and-take conversation and its features Two types of halakhic texts form the core of Tannaitic literature, in general, and of the Mishnah, in particular: the formulation of law and halakhic give-and-take. The formulation of law is an abstract presentation of the laws, whereas halakhic give-and-take is a presentation of the Sages’ views on halakhic subjects in order to determine the laws. For example, citation [1] presents a formulation of law concerni..

Categorization of free-text drug orders using character-level recurrent neural networks

ISSN:1386-5056ISSN:1872-824