The changing shape of malnutrition: obesity in sub-Saharan Africa

This repository item contains a single issue of Issues in Brief, a series of policy briefs that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. This paper is part of the Africa 2060 Project, a Pardee Center program of research, publications and symposia exploring African futures in various aspects related to development on continental and regional scales. For more information, visit www.bu.edu/pardee/research/This policy brief discusses the causes and consequences of over-nutrition in sub-Saharan Africa, highlighting rural/urban connections, notions of personhood, and dietary conservatism as important factors in understanding and addressing the growing epidemic. This paper is part of the Africa 2060 Project, a Pardee Center program of research, publications and symposia exploring African futures in various aspects related to development on continental and regional scales

Lucifer and the Arabic palaeography. A contribution on the Oriental glosses of the bible of Cava de' Tirreni

This contribution is intended to fill a gap in the series of studies already devoted to the glosses of the famous codex Cava 1, a Biblical manuscript written in early 9th-century Spain, and to contribute to its better understanding from a cultural and historical point of view. Sixteen glosses in Arabic language and script and one gloss in Hebrew script and Arabic language will be examined from a paleographical point of view, trying to propose a date and a place for their execution. Moreover, the paper will discuss the con- tents of these glosses, until now discarded by scholars

The Palaeographical Method under the Light of a Digital Approach

This paper has the twofold aim of reflecting upon a humanities computing approach to palaeography, and of making such reflections - together with its related experimental results - fruitful at the implementation level. Firstly, the paper explores the methodological issues related to the use of a digital tool to support the palaeographical analysis of medieval handwriting. It claims that humanities computing methods can assist in making explicit those processes of the palaeographical research that encompass detailed analyses, in particular of the handwriting and, more generally, of other idiosyncratic features of written cultural artefacts. Thus, palaeographical tools are to be contextualised and used within a broader methodological framework where their role is to mediate the vision, the comparison, the representation, the analysis and the interpretation of these objects. Secondly, the paper attempts to evaluate the experimentations carried out with a specific software and, in so doing, to test a humanities computing approach to palaeography at a practical level, so as to direct future implementations. Some of these implementations have already been carried out by the current developers of the application in question with whom the author collaborates closely, while others are still in progress and in need of future iterative refinements