The Name Curriculum: Exploring Names, Naming, and Identity

The act of naming, or using and respecting one’s name, is a humanizing act: it is foundational to one’s sense of identity and belonging. Conversely, the act of ‘de-naming,’ or changing, forgetting, or erasing one’s name, is an act of dehumanization: it denies one’s sense of identity and belonging. The Name Curriculum provides an opportunity for third grade students to explore the role of names and naming as they relate to one’s sense of self and community. It draws on the role of developmental psychology, the urgency of historical context, and the power of children’s literature. Specifically, it explores how language development informs a connection between one’s name and sense of self, how patterns within and across historical events exemplify connections between naming and oppression, and how children’s literature can provide accessible entry points for meaningful conversations about naming, identity, and belonging. Over the course of the year, students consider questions related to names, identity, oppression, power, and belonging. Ultimately, the curriculum highlights the power of names to combat oppression with abolition

Land rights and urban tenure: ownership and the eradication of poverty in South Africa

Includes bibliographical references.This paper analyses De Soto's argument that the formalisation of property leads to economic development and accepts it on the premise that such formalisation is not a panacea but a possible weapon in the armoury against poverty in South Africa. A prerequisite to formalisation is land acquisition. However, the skewed land ownership statistic in South Africa necessitates a slow and cumbersome restitution process often impeded by excessive compensatory claims by land owners and exacerbated by the interpretation of section 25 of the Constitution by our Constitutional Court. An analysis of recent Constitutional Court decisions indicates that the court is developing a jurisprudence that takes into account the extreme nature and extent of past land dispossessions and the inequalities in wealth and land distribution. This approach could facilitate the expropriation and restitution of land as a deprivation, (in terms of section 25) which is found not to be arbitrary, is not an expropriation and in consequence would not require compensation. Formalisation can then follow. The paper argues further that formalisation in the strict De Sotan sense of western exclusivity of ownership is not suited to the South African situation. The 'bundle of sticks' approach to ownership on the other hand, allows formalisation to occur whilst taking cognisance of local realities. Thus, formalisation of tribal trust land could mean common ownership where the 'sticks' of exclusivity and alienation are excluded from the 'bundle' while other 'sticks', inter alia income, security, and right to manage are retained. In the urban context, it is mooted that formalisation could include all the 'sticks' (incidents of ownership) but may need to exclude the right to alienate (for a period) to combat the problem of reverse titling. The Richtersveld formalisation model is examined as a case study since it includes both the rural and urban contexts in one formalisation model. It is within this case study that a further 'stick' in the 'bundle' is identified, viz. capacity building and training, as it is seen to be essential that the affected community understands the formalisation model applied. This paper concludes that formalisation as postulated by De Soto could serve as a catalyst for poverty eradication if it takes proper account of South African realities, and on the understanding that formalisation should reflect 'sticks' in the 'bundle' which maximise a community's ownership whilst mitigating anticipated problems

Empirical Tests for Evaluation of Multirate Filter Bank Parameters

Empirical tests have been developed for evaluating the numerical properties of multirate M-band filter banks represented as N matrices of filter coe#cients. Each test returns a numerically observed estimate ofa1 M vector parameter in which the m element corresponds to the m filter band. These vector valued parameters can be readily converted to scalar valued parameters for comparison of filter bank performance or optimization of filter bank design. However, they are intended primarily for the characterization and verification of filter banks. By characterizing the numerical performance of analytic or algorithmic designs, these tests facilitate the experimental verification of theoretical specifications

On the energy leakage of discrete wavelet transform

The energy leakage is an inherent deficiency of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) which is often ignored by researchers and practitioners. In this paper, a systematic investigation into the energy leakage is reported. The DWT is briefly introduced first, and then the energy leakage phenomenon is described using a numerical example as an illustration and its effect on the DWT results is discussed. Focusing on the Daubechies wavelet functions, the band overlap between the quadrature mirror analysis filters was studied and the results reveal that there is an unavoidable tradeoff between the band overlap degree and the time resolution for the DWT. The dependency of the energy leakage to the wavelet function order was studied by using a criterion defined to evaluate the severity of the energy leakage. In addition, a method based on resampling technique was proposed to relieve the effects of the energy leakage. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been validated by numerical simulation study and experimental study

Frequency analysis of cytolytic T lymphocyte precursors (CTL-P) generated in vivo during lethal rabies infection of mice. II. Rabies virus genus specificity of CTL-P

Cytolytic T lymphocyte precursors (CTL-P) were sensitized in vivo by intraplantar infection of C57BL/6 mice with a lethal dose of rabies virus, strain ERA (ERA). As a result of sensitization CTL-P matured to interleukin-receptive CTL-P (IL-CTL-P) that could be expanded in vitro to Thy-1+, Lyt-2+ CTL clones in the presence of IL without subjection to antigen-driven selection. After infection with ERA, IL-CTL-P-derived CTL lysed fibroblasts infected with rabies virus but not those infected with another rhabdovirus, the vesicular stomatitis virus. These CTL, however, did not discriminate between fibroblasts infected with the serologically closely related laboratory strains of classic rabies virus, ERA and HEP-Flury, and the serologically distinct rabies-related African isolate Mokola. This finding implies that in vivo sensitized IL-CTL-P recognize common genus-specific determinants expressed on cells infected with members of the lyssavirus genus

THE ROLE OF THE VENTRAL STRIATUM AND AMYGDALA IN REINFORCEMENT LEARNING

Adaptive behavior requires that organisms choose wisely to gain rewards and avoid punishment. Reinforcement learning refers to the behavioral process of learning about the value of choices, based on previous choice outcomes. From an algorithmic point of view, rewards and punishments exist on opposite sides of a single value axis. However, simple distinctions between rewards and punishments and their theoretical expression on a single value axis hide considerable psychological complexities that underlie appetitive and aversive reinforcement learning. A broad set of neural circuits, including the amygdala and frontal-striatal systems, have been implicated in mediating learning from gains and losses. The ventral striatum (VS) and amygdala have been implicated in several aspects of this process. To examine the role of the VS and amygdala in learning from gains and losses, we compared the performance of macaque monkeys with VS lesions, with amygdala lesions, and un-operated controls on a series of reinforcement learning tasks. In these tasks monkeys gained or lost tokens, which were periodically cashed out for juice, as outcomes for choices. We found that monkeys with VS lesions had a deficit in learning to choose between cues that differed in reward magnitude. Monkeys with VS lesions performed as well as controls when choices involved a potential loss. In contrast, we found that monkeys with amygdala lesions performed as well as controls across all conditions. Further analysis revealed that the deficits we found in monkeys with VS lesions resulted from a reduction in motivation, rather than the monkeys’ inability to learn the stimulus-outcome contingency

Motivating and Maintaining Ethics, Equity, Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Expertise in Peer Review

Scientists who engage in science and the scientific endeavor should seek truth with conviction of morals and commitment to ethics. While the number of publications continues to increase, the number of retractions has increased at a faster rate. Journals publish fraudulent research papers despite claims of peer review and adherence to publishing ethics. Nevertheless, appropriate ethical peer review will remain a gatekeeper when selecting research manuscripts in scholarly publishing and approving research applications for grant funding. However, this peer review must become more open, fair, transparent, equitable, and just with new recommendations and guidelines for reproducible and accountable reviews that support and promote fair citation and citational justice. We should engineer this new peer-review process with modern informatics technology and information science to provide and defend better safeguards for truth and integrity, to clarify and maintain the provenance of information and ideas, and to rebuild and restore trust in scholarly research institutions. Indeed, this new approach will be necessary in the current post-truth era to counter the ease and speed with which mis-information, dis-information, anti-information, caco-information, and mal-information spread through the internet, web, news, and social media. The most important question for application of new peer-review methods to these information wars should be ‘Who does what when?’ in support of reproducible and accountable reviews. Who refers to the authors, reviewers, editors, and publishers as participants in the review process. What refers to disclosure of the participants' identities, the material content of author manuscripts and reviewer commentaries, and other communications between authors and reviewers. When refers to tracking the sequential points in time for which disclosure of whose identity, which content, and which communication at which step of the peer-review process for which audience of readers and reviewers. We believe that quality peer review, and peer review of peer review, must be motivated and maintained by elevating their status and prestige to an art and a science. Both peer review itself and peer review analyses of peer reviews should be incentivised by publishing peer reviews as citable references separately from the research report reviewed while crossreferenced and crosslinked to the report reviewed

Significance of herpesvirus immediate early gene expression in cellular immunity to cytomegalovirus infection

Interstitial pneumonia linked with reactivation of latent human cytomegalovirus due to iatrogenic immunosuppression can be a serious complication of bone marrow transplantation therapy of aplastic anaemia and acute leukaemia1. Cellular immunity plays a critical role in the immune surveillance of inapparent cytomegalovirus infections in man and the mouse1−7. The molecular basis of latency, however, and the interaction between latently or recurrently infected cells and the immune system of the host are poorfy understood. We have detected a so far unknown antigen in the mouse model. This antigen is found in infected cells in association with the expression of the herpesvirus 'immediate early' genes and is recognized by cytolytic T lymphocytes (CTL)8. We now demonstrate that an unexpectedly high proportion of the CTL precursors generated in vivo during acute murine cytomegalovirus infection are specific for cells that selectively synthesize immediate early proteins, indicating an immunodominant role of viral non-structural proteins