The Struggling State

Following independence from Ethiopia, Eritrea’s leaders were praised for their success at building a coherent nation, but over the last two decades the government has increasingly turned to coercion particularly by forcing citizens into endless military service. The Struggling State: Teachers, Mass Militarization and the Reeducation of Eritrea is an ethnographic exploration of how citizens’ redefined their relationship with the nation in response to the state’s increased authoritarianism and use of force. Extremes of coercion and control led Eritreans’ to imagine the once-heroic ruling party as turning against them, which, in turn unraveled the legitimacy of state-produced imaginaries of the nation. The book focuses on teachers, who were situated to do the work of hyphenating, or gluing, nation to state but instead had to navigate between their devotion to educating the nation and their discontent with their role in the government program of mass militarization

Ecological profiling of bird-mosquito interactions in Central Virginia

Current methods of mosquito surveillance estimate general population abundances, but fail to represent the relationship of vector abundance to host density important to determining transmission risk of mosquito-borne pathogens (MBP). We sought to address this limitation by creating a novel mosquito trap that directly sampled mosquitoes seeking to feed on nesting birds. The primary objectives of this study were to (1) assess the efficiency of the Nest Mosquito Trap (NMT) and how this is affected by nest box size. (2) assess whether the NMT affects bird, specifically nest success in Prothonotary Warblers (Protonotaria citrea), and adult behavior. (3) compare our novel trap to existing methods. (4) profile the ecological parameters associated with bird/ mosquito interactions. Our results allow us to conclude that the NMT is not only an effective means of capturing host-seeking mosquitoes and measuring mosquito/ bird interactions, but does not have a deleterious effect on avian nesting success

Vignette 3. Homo economicus and the developmentalist state. Controversies over citizenship education in Ethiopia

The author analyzes a classroom observation of a lesson on traditional versus modern practices of saving money, given in the context of Ethiopia\u27s Civic and Ethical Education (CEE) program. This program\u27s curriculum was central to Ethiopia\u27s post-1991 nation-building project and is in many respects a blueprint for a particular notion of citizenship and personhood, and for relationships between Ethiopians, their nation, and the world. This vignette unveils the deeply controversial nature of the lesson\u27s content and juxtaposes this with the lack of debate encouraged in the classroom. It shows how the CEE curriculum espouses a set of financial priorities here that may be unrealistic for students on the one hand, and antithetical to their religious, community and cultural values on the other. (DIPF/Orig.

A political biography of Thomas Bahnson Stanley

Thomas Bahnson Stanley was born on a farm near Spencer, Henry County, Virginia, July 16, 1890. His mother was Susan Walker Stanley, a native of Walkertown, North Carolina; a daugh­ter of R.L.Walker and a niece of judge Henry Mullins of Martins­ville. His father was Crockett Stanley who served with Company H, Twenty-fourth Virginia Infantry, Pickett\u27s Division, and was wounded at Gettysburg, during the Civil War. He recovered from his wounds to return to Henry County. He was greatly interested in public affairs, being Commissioner of Revenue for Henry County for some twenty years, and filled every public duty carefully and conscientiously

The Struggling State

Following independence from Ethiopia, Eritrea’s leaders were praised for their success at building a coherent nation, but over the last two decades the government has increasingly turned to coercion particularly by forcing citizens into endless military service. The Struggling State: Teachers, Mass Militarization and the Reeducation of Eritrea is an ethnographic exploration of how citizens’ redefined their relationship with the nation in response to the state’s increased authoritarianism and use of force. Extremes of coercion and control led Eritreans’ to imagine the once-heroic ruling party as turning against them, which, in turn unraveled the legitimacy of state-produced imaginaries of the nation. The book focuses on teachers, who were situated to do the work of hyphenating, or gluing, nation to state but instead had to navigate between their devotion to educating the nation and their discontent with their role in the government program of mass militarization

Trans-gender Themes in Japanese Literature From the Medieval to Meiji Eras

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze various texts from Japanese literary history and extract the instances of trans-gender performances from those texts. I define “trans-gender” behaviors as actions that are culturally expected of the gender opposite that of the gender assigned to the performer at birth. In each text, I identify which character or characters perform actions that go against the expectations of the gender they were assigned at birth. I analyze how their performance is portrayed within the narrative, as well as how other characters in the narrative react to their performance. In this way, nuances are extracted that relate to the trope of gender play in these four historical eras. The literary representations of this trans-gender play respond to the needs and values systems of the time periods within which they exist. In the Heian period, this play is caused by external forces and ends due to sexual acts. In the Muromachi period, the character chooses to perform, but eventually revokes the world. By the Edo period, performance is more widely accepted and culturally ingrained because of the availability of spaces where trans-gender performance is allowed. The performers in Edo period literature usually perform in the context of receiving privileges or being allowed into gendered spaces. Finally, In the Meiji period, heteronormative gender roles are strictly enforced, and the literature reflects negative reactions to non-normative behavior. Trans-gender performers in the Meiji period are often punished in the narratives they inhabit

Joint-SRVDNet: Joint Super Resolution and Vehicle Detection Network

In many domestic and military applications, aerial vehicle detection and super-resolutionalgorithms are frequently developed and applied independently. However, aerial vehicle detection on super-resolved images remains a challenging task due to the lack of discriminative information in the super-resolved images. To address this problem, we propose a Joint Super-Resolution and Vehicle DetectionNetwork (Joint-SRVDNet) that tries to generate discriminative, high-resolution images of vehicles fromlow-resolution aerial images. First, aerial images are up-scaled by a factor of 4x using a Multi-scaleGenerative Adversarial Network (MsGAN), which has multiple intermediate outputs with increasingresolutions. Second, a detector is trained on super-resolved images that are upscaled by factor 4x usingMsGAN architecture and finally, the detection loss is minimized jointly with the super-resolution loss toencourage the target detector to be sensitive to the subsequent super-resolution training. The network jointlylearns hierarchical and discriminative features of targets and produces optimal super-resolution results. Weperform both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our proposed network on VEDAI, xView and DOTAdatasets. The experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves better visual quality than thestate-of-the-art methods for aerial super-resolution with 4x up-scaling factor and improves the accuracy ofaerial vehicle detection

Building District Capacity for System-Wide Instructional Improvement in Cincinnati Public Schools

This report summarizes findings from one component of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education’s (CPRE) evaluation of the General Electric Foundation’s (GEF) Developing FuturesTM in Education program in Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS). The purpose was to closely analyze the district’s capacity to support system-wide instructional improvement. To understand how CPS, one of the four Developing FuturesTM districts that were examined, built capacity for system-wide instructional improvement, our study during Phase Two focused on a single, overarching question: to what extent has CPS central office adopted and institutionalized the seven core principles of Developing FuturesTM

Building District Capacity for System-Wide Instructional Improvement in Stamford Public Schools

This report summarizes findings from one component of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education’s (CPRE) evaluation of the General Electric Foundation’s (GEF) Developing FuturesTM in Education program in Stamford Public Schools (SPS). The purpose was to closely analyze the district’s capacity to support system-wide instructional improvement. To understand how SPS, one of the four Developing FuturesTM districts that were examined, built capacity for system-wide instructional improvement, our study focused on a single, overarching question: to what extent has SPS central office adopted and institutionalized the seven core principles of Developing FuturesTM