Politics of pension sharing in urban South Africa

Analysing the practice of pension sharing, this article looks at social and cultural dimensions of ageing in an urban African residential area, Cape Town's Khayelitsha. First, the paper discusses pension sharing as a futureoriented security strategy. Many older Africans in Khayelitsha believe that if they do not share their pensions with their kin, they do not have much chance of being helped in times of need. Pension sharing as an instrumental act is rooted in the perceived underdevelopment of the state social security system on the one hand, and in the very character of African kinship and the ¯uidity of today's urban domestic units on the other. Partly triggered by poverty and mass unemployment, African pensioners are under severe normative pressure to share their grants within their families. Taking into account African notions of old age and of personhood, and considering the widespread devaluation of older Africans in social constructions, pension sharing provides older Africans with an (easily available) means by which they can earn (self-)respect. Further, state policies indirectly enhance the normative pressure on pensioners to share their old-age pensions. On a symbolic plane the practice may be construed as a political model that conceptualises duty as the inner bond of the social world. In conclusion, it is propounded that the concept of (intergenerational) reciprocity is inadequate to account for pension sharing or practical provision of old-age care

Reflections on the construction and study of elderliness

The institutional approach with its focus on the roles and the socio-economic status of elderly people still prevails in African research on ageing. To be sure, this perspective is not without value, at least if we take it beyond the confines of orthodox modernization theory. Nevertheless, if we want to save older Africans from macro-sociological extinction in general and from structural-functionalist elimination in particular, we need to pay closer attention to the multiplexity of their everyday lives and to their subjective experiences, without, of course, thereby neglecting the institutional structure of society

Ageing and old age in pre-industrial Africa: elderly persons among 19th-century Xhosa-speaking peoples

Thusfar, African gerontologists have not attended to precolonial ageing, except to subscribe to a timeless perspective rooted in modernization theorys 'golden age narrative.' This paper sketches some dimensions of the ageing experience in a pre-industrial African "nation, the Xhosa-speaking societies in South Africa. It begins with a reconstruction of precolonial residence patterns and the economic status of elderly persons before it turns to the issue of cultural representations of ageing and old age in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Notwithstanding the intimate association of (male) ageing with accumulation of economic resources, the belief in ancestors functioned as a fundamental instrument by which old-age authority was upheld, apart from its colouring the very notion of Xhosa old age. Having examined the religious basis of the ageing experience, finally the gendered nature of old-age security is discussed. In a nutshell, it is argued that even though age was different in social and cultural terms and was thus an important aspect of any individual's identity, age alone never defined any persons economic status or social identity. Gender and kinship, but also biographically conditioned factors, affected the experience of old age. The notion of old age as an abstract entity is a Western-based construct which reflects an ageist conception, i.e. (chronological) old age as the determinant of old people's identity, and the inadequate comprehension of other prime social processes that moulded the lives of elderly persons rather than the reality of old age in precolonial Xhosa communities

Проблема разлива масла на масляных выключателях

В данной статье рассмотрены нарушение норм экологии на подстанциях и распределительных станциях. Выявлена проблема разлива масла на рельеф местности при обслуживании масляных выключателей. Приведен принцип действия многобакового масляного выключателя ВМ-35. Проанализированы минусы использования данного выключателя. На основе проведенного исследования автором предлагается замена масляных выключателей на элегазовые, что позволит повысить экологическую безопасность объектов.This article describes the violation of environmental standards at substations and distribution stations. The problem of oil spill on the terrain during maintenance of oil switches is revealed. The principle of operation of a lot of tank oil switch VM-35. The disadvantages of using this switch are analyzed. On the basis of the study, the author proposes to replace oil switches with gas-insulated ones, which will improve the environmental safety of objects

Quantitative methods to study epithelial morphogenesis and polarity

International audienceMorphogenesis of an epithelial tissue emerges from the behavior of its constituent cells, including changes in shape, rearrangements, and divisions. In many instances the directionality of these cellular events is controlled by the polarized distribution of specific molecular components. In recent years, our understanding of morphogenesis and polarity highly benefited from advances in genetics, microscopy, and image analysis. They now make it possible to measure cellular dynamics and polarity with unprecedented precision for entire tissues throughout their development. Here we review recent approaches to visualize and measure cell polarity and tissue morphogenesis. The chapter is organized like an experiment. We first discuss the choice of cell and polarity reporters and describe the use of mosaics to reveal hidden cell polarities or local morphogenetic events. Then, we outline application-specific advantages and disadvantages of different microscopy techniques and image projection algorithms. Next, we present methods to extract cell outlines to measure cell polarity and detect cellular events underlying morphogenesis. Finally, we bridge scales by presenting approaches to quantify the specific contribution of each cellular event to global tissue deformation. Taken together, we provide an in-depth description of available tools and theoretical concepts to quantitatively study cell polarity and tissue morphogenesis over multiple scales

PreMosa: Extracting 2D surfaces from 3D microscopy mosaics.

International audienceA significant focus of biological research is to understand the development, organization and function of tissues. A particularly productive area of study is on single layer epithelial tissues in which the adherence junctions of cells form a 2D manifold that is fluorescently labeled. Given the size of the tissue, a microscope must collect a mosaic of overlapping 3D stacks encompassing the stained surface. Downstream interpretation is greatly simplified by preprocessing such a dataset as follows: (a) extracting and mapping the stained manifold in each stack into a single 2D projection plane, (b) correcting uneven illumination artifacts, (c) stitching the mosaic planes into a single, large 2D image, and (d) adjusting the contrast.We have developed PreMosa, an efficient, fully automatic pipeline to perform the four preprocessing tasks above resulting in a single 2D image of the stained manifold across which contrast is optimized and illumination is even. Notable features are as follows. First, the 2D projection step employs a specially developed algorithm that actually finds the manifold in the stack based on maximizing contrast, intensity and smoothness. Second, the projection step comes first, implying all subsequent tasks are more rapidly solved in 2D. And last, the mosaic melding employs an algorithm that globally adjusts contrasts amongst the 2D tiles so as to produce a seamless, high-contrast image. We conclude with an evaluation using ground-truth datasets and present results on datasets from Drosophila melanogaster wings and Schmidtae mediterranea ciliary components.PreMosa is available under https://cblasse.github.io/[email protected], [email protected]