The Southern Frontier of the Meroitic State: The View from Jebel Moya

The site of Jebel Moya, excavated in the early twentieth century, represents arguably the largest pastoral mortuary complex in Africa. Jebel Moya is resituated in relation to the neighbouring Meroitic-era agro-pastoral settlements and the only known Meroitic trading station (Sennar) in the southern Gezira Plain, Sudan. It is the first time that the known localities in the southern Gezira and southern Meroitic cemeteries have been compared, in an attempt to elucidate the different social organisation reflected in mortuary assemblages between the core and the periphery of the Meroitic State. New questions are posed for (1) the applicability of mortuary theory to pastoral cemeteries, and (2) the nature of zones of interaction on the frontier of the Meroitic State, through the application of new statistical and spatial analyses of the mortuary assemblages and the site’s reinterpretation as a pastoral, instead of an agro-pastoral, mortuary complex

Shutdown of the Federal Government: Causes, Processes, and Effects

[Excerpt] When federal agencies and programs lack appropriated funding, they experience a funding gap. Under the Antideficiency Act, they must cease operations, except in certain emergency situations or when law authorizes continued activity. Failure of the President and Congress to reach agreement on interim or full-year funding measures occasionally has caused government shutdowns, the longest of which lasted 21 days, from December 16, 1995, to January 6, 1996. Government shutdowns have necessitated furloughs of several hundred thousand federal employees, required cessation or reduction of many government activities, and affected numerous sectors of the economy. This report discusses the causes, processes, and effects of federal government shutdowns, including potential issues for Congress

Funding Gaps and Government Shutdowns: CRS Experts

[Excerpt] In the event of a funding gap, the potential impacts of a government shutdown will depend on a program’s or agency’s specific circumstances and how relevant law is interpreted. The following table provides names and contact information for CRS experts on policy concerns relating to funding gaps and the processes and effects that may be associated with a government shutdown. Policy areas identified include • cross-cutting shutdown issues; • domestic social policy-related programs and agencies; • foreign affairs, defense, and trade-related programs and agencies; • general government-related programs and agencies; and • resources, science, and technology-related programs and agencies

Design for Social and Environmental Enterprise

SEED Foundation undertakes action research to develop new, innovative ways for design to most effectively contribute towards sustainable development. The research that follows is not the result of academic investigations but rather, a culmination of 20 years direct professional involvement in the sector. By aligning current political goals with cutting edge design thinking and good business sense, this paper presents our ideas on how more designers can profitably solve social and environmental problems through their work. It specifically investigates how the still emerging discipline of service design, in dealing more with relationships and experiences than material objects, offers inherent social and environmental benefits and is naturally transferable to sectors broader than private business –where designers traditionally work. By working in public and third sectors, and especially with social businesses, this paper uncovers new roles and business models for comprehensively sustainable design practice. Keywords: Design, Service design, sustainable development, social enterprise, social and environmental</p

Experiences with Some Benchmarks for Deductive Databases and Implementations of Bottom-Up Evaluation

OpenRuleBench is a large benchmark suite for rule engines, which includes deductive databases. We previously proposed a translation of Datalog to C++ based on a method that "pushes" derived tuples immediately to places where they are used. In this paper, we report performance results of various implementation variants of this method compared to XSB, YAP and DLV. We study only a fraction of the OpenRuleBench problems, but we give a quite detailed analysis of each such task and the factors which influence performance. The results not only show the potential of our method and implementation approach, but could be valuable for anybody implementing systems which should be able to execute tasks of the discussed types.Comment: In Proceedings WLP'15/'16/WFLP'16, arXiv:1701.0014

Selection for cognitive control: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study on the selection of task-relevant information

The complex environment we live in makes it necessary to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information constantly and reliably. The aim of the present study was to investigate the neural substrate underlying the selection of task-relevant information. We devised a new paradigm in which participants had to switch between two different tasks that were instructed by task cues. The task cues had a relevant and an irrelevant cue dimension. In congruent trials, both cue dimensions indicated the same task; in incongruent trials, they indicated different tasks; and in neutral trials, only the relevant dimension indicated a task. By comparing trials in which both cue dimensions were informative (congruent and incongruent trials) with trials in which only the relevant dimension was informative (neutral trials), we were able to show that the lateral prefrontal cortex and a region in the intraparietal sulcus are involved in the selection of task-relevant information. Furthermore, the present paradigm allows the influence of the selected task and stimulus dimension to be investigated. No significant influence was found in the prefrontal cortex, indicating that this region serves a very abstract role in the selection of task-relevant information

Statistical mechanics of ontology based annotations

We present a statistical mechanical theory of the process of annotating an object with terms selected from an ontology. The term selection process is formulated as an ideal lattice gas model, but in a highly structured inhomogeneous field. The model enables us to explain patterns recently observed in real-world annotation data sets, in terms of the underlying graph structure of the ontology. By relating the external field strengths to the information content of each node in the ontology graph, the statistical mechanical model also allows us to propose a number of practical metrics for assessing the quality of both the ontology, and the annotations that arise from its use. Using the statistical mechanical formalism we also study an ensemble of ontologies of differing size and complexity; an analysis not readily performed using real data alone. Focusing on regular tree ontology graphs we uncover a rich set of scaling laws describing the growth in the optimal ontology size as the number of objects being annotated increases. In doing so we provide a further possible measure for assessment of ontologies.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figure

Jebel Moya (Sudan): new dates from a mortuary complex at the southern Meroitic frontier

This paper proposes a new chronology for the burial complex at Jebel Moya, south-central Sudan. It reassesses the body of evidence from Sir Henry Wellcome's original 1911–1914 excavations in order to place the site within a firm chronological framework by: (a) applying an attribute-based approach to discern discrete pottery assemblages; and (b) applying initial OSL dates to facilitate the reliable dating of this site for the first time. Jebel Moya is re-interpreted as a burial complex situated on the southern periphery of the late Meroitic state, and its potential to serve as a chronological and cultural reference point for future studies in south-central and southern Sudan is outlined