The Dughwede in NE-Nigeria : montagnards interacting with the seasons

We can conclude that the Dughwede calendar lasts for two seasonal years, marked by the bull festival as a culminating and turning point. All ritual and agricultural activities are interlinked and need to be seen comprehensively together with the social and cosmological order to understand the underlying cultural pattern. The year is dramatized throughout the seasons to keep the communication between the natural and spiritual forces, both creatively reflected in the individual person. The traditional world was kept in balance as a functional equilibrium over a period of time not known to us, but is now moving towards a process of transformation initiated by structural historical change. The first step towards change is the change of moral values which affects possibly first individuals and then groups. This encourages them to give up the traditional way of interacting with their environment. This process can be described as secularisation and leads to another quality of relationship between man and his natural environment. The same process can also be described as socio-economic change

The New Model of Foreign Aid Drawn from the Experiences of Japan and the United States

This paper compares Japan and the US as they provide different types of capital to the developing world, focusing especially on foreign aid and, to some extent, also on remittances and the role of NGOs. The main focus is on the quality of aid and on past conceptual differences and on an emerging convergence between these two major donors, with Japan having the potential advantage of being able to bring its own historical experience in development to bear.foreign aid, remittances, NGO, Japan, U.S.

The H.E.S.S. View of the Central 200 Parsecs

The inner few hundred parsecs of our galaxy provide a laboratory for the study of the production and propagation of energetic particles. Very-high-energy gamma-rays provide an effective probe of these processes and, especially when combined with data from other wave-bands, gamma-rays observations are a powerful diagnostic tool. Within this central region, data from the H.E.S.S. instrument have revealed three discrete sources of very-high-energy gamma-rays and diffuse emission correlated with the distribution of molecular material. Here I provide an overview of these recent results from H.E.S.S.Comment: Proceedings of the Galactic Centre Workshop 200

Entertaining, Dining, and Novel Drinking: Rural Gentility and the Reverend John Hancock\u27s Household, Lexington, Massachusetts, 1700-1750

The rise of refined behavior paralleled the expansion of colonial markets and consumer choice. Objects related to the refined consumption of food and drink took center stage in the transformation of colonial entertaining. The availability of new foodstuffs and the associated equipage transformed sociability and the meaning of eating and drinking. These changes coupled with the high level of social mobility in eighteenth century Massachusetts, meant that performances with novel objects became dynamic symbols of one\u27s social status. Utilizing Bourdieu\u27s concept of cultural capital, this work explores how Rev. John Hancock, minister of Lexington, Massachusetts, expressed his social status through refined entertaining. During the same period, religion was in a state of flux as the Great Awakening called into question the authority and status of ministers. In an effort to re-assert their authority the clergy professionalized, highlighting the value of educated ministers. Ultimately, this research provides evidence that spiritual leaders of communities adopted the social protocols of polite society and used new status-laden goods. Genteel entertaining was used as a social strategy that allowed ministers to perform and solidify their social status and position in the secular community. Rev. Hancock exhibits many of the changes that occurred during the eighteenth century. His profession and education offered a certain level of status, however specialized objects for entertaining suggest that Hancock was also incorporating many of the new mannerly and novel consumption protocols that became part and parcel of gentility. Rev. Hancock as the spiritual leader of Lexington experienced a status transformation during the first half of the eighteenth century. Rev. Hancock, it seems, was economically middling, but culturally elite. It may appear that elements of gentility and religion would be in conflict, but in many ways the social role and high level of cultural capital that ministers assumed, required that they also assume polite ways of entertaining and living as way of signaling and performing their high level of social status to those around them

Exploring the diversity of promoter and 5’UTR sequences in ancestral, historic and modern wheat

A dataset of promoter and 5’UTR sequences of homoeo-alleles of 495 wheat genes that contribute to agriculturally important traits in 95 ancestral and commercial wheat cultivars is presented here. The high stringency myBaits technology used made individual capture of homoeo-allele promoters possible, which is reported here for the first time. Promoters of most genes are remarkably conserved across the 82 hexaploid cultivars used with <7 haplotypes per promoter and 21% being identical to the reference Chinese Spring. InDels and many high-confidence SNPs are located within predicted plant transcription factor binding sites, potentially changing gene expression. Most haplotypes found in the Watkins landraces and a few haplotypes found in T. monococcum, germplasms hitherto not thought to have been used in modern wheat breeding, are already found in many commercial hexaploid wheats. The full dataset which is useful for genomic and gene function studies and wheat breeding is available at https://rrescloud.rothamsted.ac.uk/index.php/s/3vc9QopcqYEbIUs/authenticate