Ruling nature, controlling people: nature conservation, development and war in North-Eastern Namibia since the 1920s

Recent nature conservation initiatives in Southern Africa such as communal conservancies and peace parks are often embedded in narratives of economic development and ecological research. They are also increasingly marked by militarisation and violence. In Ruling Nature, Controlling People, Luregn Lenggenhager shows that these features were also characteristic of South African rule over the Caprivi Strip region in North-Eastern Namibia, especially in the fields of forestry, fisheries and, ultimately, wildlife conservation. In the process, the increasingly internationalised war in the region from the late 1960s until Namibia’s independence in 1990 became intricately interlinked with contemporary nature conservation, ecology and economic development projects. By retracing such interdependencies, Lenggenhager provides a novel perspective from which to examine the history of a region which has until now barely entered the focus of historical research. He thereby highlights the enduring relevance of the supposedly peripheral Caprivi and its military, scientific and environmental histories for efforts to develop a deeper understanding of the ways in which apartheid South Africa exerted state power

The Ideal Female Candidate

Why are there so few women elected to positions in both gubernatorial and senatorial contests? Since the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920—through which women obtained the right to vote and the right to full political participation—few women have actually held elective office. While women have increased their political participation by means of voting and activism, they are still vastly underrepresented in terms of elected positions (Clark, 1991: 64). Women make up over 50 percent of the United States population; however, they only comprise about 10 percent of the U.S. Congress (McGlen, 1995: 77). The problems women encounter are not only found on a domestic level, but on a global level as well. A 1986 study of women legislators in Western democracies determined that only three countries, Greece, Japan, and Australia, had smaller percentages of women in their national legislatures than the United States (McGlen, 1995: 85)

Vestibular Contributions to the Sense of Body, Self, and Others

There is increasing evidence that vestibular signals and the vestibular cortex are not only involved in oculomotor and postural control, but also contribute to higher-level cognition. Yet, despite the effort that has recently been made in the field, the exact location of the human vestibular cortex and its implications in various perceptional, emotional, and cognitive processes remain debated. Here, we argue for a vestibular contribution to what is thought to fundamentally underlie human consciousness, i.e., the bodily self. We will present empirical evidence from various research fields to support our hypothesis of a vestibular contribution to aspects of the bodily self, such as basic multisensory integration, body schema, body ownership, agency, and self-location. We will argue that the vestibular system is especially important for global aspects of the self, most crucially for implicit and explicit spatiotemporal self-location. Furthermore, we propose a novel model on how vestibular signals could not only underlie the perception of the self but also the perception of others, thereby playing an important role in embodied social cognition

Left Button Picture, Right Button Bomb: Nature, Warfare and Technology in a Southern African Border Region

In this paper, we argue that the relationship between nature conservation and warfare was and continues to be actualized through socio-technical relationships and shared infrastructures. We historicize “green militari zation”—defined as the use of military techniques, technologies and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation (Lunstrum 2014)—showing that the partnership between military and nature conservation in Southern Africa has a long and violent history. Our paper accounts for the entanglements of war and nature through a shared technological infrastructure used in north-eastern Namibia during the Namibian War of Liberation (1966–1989). In particular, we focus on the Mirage IIIR2Z, an aerial reconnaissance and ground-attack supersonic jet which provided both the South African Defence Force and the civil administration’s nature conservationists with aerial photography and remote sensing data. The spatial information produced jointly by the military and the civil nature conservation department was used to produce strategic maps, but also to fight invasive plants and protect wildlife. Our reading of green militarization against this background sheds light on the long-lasting connections between warfare, conservation and ecology along Southern African border regions and contributes to a novel understanding of the contemporary “war on poachers” through a study of the techno-scientific networks that made it possible. Since there is nothing inevitable about the way technologies emerge or change over time (Bijker and Law 1992), this paper develops an empirically grounded and sustained analysis of technological change in the domain of green militarization through three interlinked concepts: “multiple” (Law 2002), “shifting down” (Latour 1994; 1999), and “firming up” (Bijker and Law 1992)

Clinicopathologic features and pathologic diagnosis of hepatitis E

Infection with the hepatitis E virus (HEV) is one of the most common causes, if not the most common, of acute hepatitis worldwide. In the last decade, we have learned that in addition to the endemically and epidemically occurring form of hepatitis E, which is predominantly transmitted by contaminated drinking water, and constitutes a significant health problem in resource-poor countries, there is a globally existing form of hepatitis E, which is a zoonosis, and as such primarily transmitted by the consumption of contaminated meat products. Although in most cases hepatitis E is subclinical or mild and self-limiting, pregnant women and patients with liver cirrhosis may have severe, occasionally even fatal disease, and immunocompromised individuals may develop chronic hepatitis E. Considering the substantial global health burden caused by HEV infection, it is surprising how limited our knowledge of hepatitis E pathology still is. In this paper, we describe localization studies on HEV infection and discuss their implications for everyday diagnostics. Furthermore, we outline and discuss the spectrum of histologic changes, which can be found in HEV infection in various clinical contexts

Optimal Renormalization Group Transformation from Information Theory

Recently a novel real-space RG algorithm was introduced, identifying the relevant degrees of freedom of a system by maximizing an information-theoretic quantity, the real-space mutual information (RSMI), with machine learning methods. Motivated by this, we investigate the information theoretic properties of coarse-graining procedures, for both translationally invariant and disordered systems. We prove that a perfect RSMI coarse-graining does not increase the range of interactions in the renormalized Hamiltonian, and, for disordered systems, suppresses generation of correlations in the renormalized disorder distribution, being in this sense optimal. We empirically verify decay of those measures of complexity, as a function of information retained by the RG, on the examples of arbitrary coarse-grainings of the clean and random Ising chain. The results establish a direct and quantifiable connection between properties of RG viewed as a compression scheme, and those of physical objects i.e. Hamiltonians and disorder distributions. We also study the effect of constraints on the number and type of coarse-grained degrees of freedom on a generic RG procedure.Comment: Updated manuscript with new results on disordered system

Happiness feels light and sadness feels heavy: introducing valence-related bodily sensation maps of emotions.

Bodily sensation mapping (BSM) is a recently developed self-report tool for the assessment of emotions in which people draw their sensations of activation in a body silhouette. Following the circumplex model of affect, activity and valence are the underling dimensions of every emotional experience. The aim of this study was to introduce the neglected valence dimension in BSM. We found that participants systematically report valence-related sensations of bodily lightness for positive emotions (happiness, love, pride), and sensations of bodily heaviness in response to negative emotions (e.g., anger, fear, sadness, depression) with specific body topography (Experiment 1). Further experiments showed that both computers (using a machine learning approach) and humans recognize emotions better when classification is based on the combined activity- and valence-related BSMs compared to either type of BSM alone (Experiments 2 and 3), suggesting that both types of bodily sensations reflect distinct parts of emotion knowledge. Importantly, participants found it clearer to indicate their bodily sensations induced by sadness and depression in terms of bodily weight than bodily activity (Experiment 2 and 4), suggesting that the added value of valence-related BSMs is particularly relevant for the assessment of emotions at the negative end of the valence spectrum

Vestibular sense and perspectival experience : a reply to Adrian Alsmith

To answer Alsmith’s questions about the existence of a vestibular sense, we outline in the first part of our reply why we believe the vestibular sense is a true “sixth sense”. We argue that vestibular information constitutes distinct sensory events and that absolute coding of body orientation and motion in the gravity-centered space is the important unique feature of the vestibular system. In the last part of our reply, we extend Alsmith’s experimental suggestions to investigate the vestibular contribution to various perspectival experiences