Charisma and community in a Ghanaian independent church.

In 1919, J. W. Appiah, a Methodist catechist in the Gold Coast, sought the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and began to prophesy and pray for the sick. He and his followers were expelled from the Church, and formed both a new community and a denomination known as the Musama Disco Christo Church (MDCC). It has often been argued that African Independent Churches result as a reaction to Western domination of land or people, but it is shown that this was not the primary issue with the MDCC. The initial quest was for spiritual empowerment, which resulted in prophetic revelation and the formation of a church with distinctively African characteristics. Following Appiah's death, his son (Akaboha II) became the head of the growing church, which was affected by two contemporary developments. The first was the nationalist movement led by Nkrumah, which stimulated the MDCC to a mission of the spiritual liberation of Christianity from remaining Western elements. This was achieved through the innovation of rituals and practices based upon traditional African forms. The second was revivalist teaching brought to Ghana by Pentecostal evangelists, which the MDCC adopted as "instantaneous healing". Although the church continued to grow after the fall of Nkrumah and the death of Akaboha II, in the late 1980s it started to decline. This thesis argues that the innovation of African traditions resulted in a form of contextualization that was inflexible, so the church was unable to adapt to social change and has become less relevant. Former members are now seeking a more relevant charisma of the Holy Spirit in other churches. The illiterate members prefer the Pentecostal churches, and the educated younger generation are attracted to the newer Charismatic churches

Crowdsourcing good landmarks for in-vehicle navigation systems

Augmenting navigation systems with landmarks has been posited as a method of improving the effectiveness of the technology and enhancing drivers’ engagement with the environment. However, good navigational landmarks are both laborious to collect and difficult to define. This research aimed to devise a game concept, which could be played by passengers in cars, and would collect useful landmark data as a by-product. The paper describes how a virtual graffiti tagging game concept was created and tested during on-road trials with 38 participants. The data collected in the road trials were then validated using a survey, in which 100 respondents assessed the quality of the landmarks collected and their potential for reuse in navigation applications. Players of the game displayed a consensus in choosing where to place their graffiti tags with over 30% of players selecting the same object to tag in 10 of the 12 locations. Furthermore, significant correlation was found between how highly landmarks were rated in the survey and how frequently they were tagged during the game. The research provides evidence that using crowdsourcing games to collect landmarks does not require large numbers of people, or extensive coverage of an area, to produce suitable candidate landmarks for navigation

Quantitative analysis of cell types during growth and morphogenesis in Hydra

Tissue maceration was used to determine the absolute number and the distribution of cell types in Hydra. It was shown that the total number of cells per animal as well as the distribution of cells vary depending on temperature, feeding conditions, and state of growth. During head and foot regeneration and during budding the first detectable change in the cell distribution is an increase in the number of nerve cells at the site of morphogenesis. These results and the finding that nerve cells are most concentrated in the head region, diminishing in density down the body column, are discussed in relation to tissue polarity

Endogenous and exogenous testosterone and the risk of prostate cancer and increased prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level: a meta-analysis

Objective: To review and quantify the association between endogenous and exogenoustestosterone and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and prostate cancer. Methods: Literature searches were performed according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Prospectivecohort studies that reported data on the associations between endogenous testosterone and prostate cancer, and placebo-controlled randomized trials of testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) that reported data on PSA and/or prostate cancer cases were retained. Meta-analyses were performed using random-effects models, with tests for publication bias and heterogeneity. Results: Twenty estimates were included in a meta-analysis, which produced a summary relative risk (SRR) of prostate cancer for an increase of 5 nmol/L of testosterone of 0.99 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.96, 1.02) without heterogeneity (I2 = 0%).Based on 26 trials, the overall difference in PSA levels after onset of use of TRT was 0.10 ng/mL (-0.28, 0.48). Results were similar when conducting heterogeneity analyses by mode of administration, region, age at baseline, baseline testosterone, trial duration, type of patients and type of TRT. The SRR of prostate cancer as an adverse effect from 11 TRT trials was 0.87 (95% CI0.30; 2.50). Results were consistent across studies. Conclusions: Prostate cancer appears to be unrelated to endogenous testosterone levels. TRT for symptomatic hypogonadism does not appear to increase PSA levels nor the risk of prostate cancer development. The current data are reassuring, although some caution is essential until multiple studies with longer follow-up are available

Completeness of reporting of randomised controlled trials including people with transient ischaemic attack or stroke: A systematic review

Objective: To assess the adherence of stroke randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to CONSORT reporting guidelines, and investigate the factors that are associated with completeness of reporting. Design: Two reviewers assessed the published report of the final primary results of stroke RCTs with a 10-point truncated CONSORT reporting checklist, to investigate adherence over time, univariable associations, and independent associations with total CONSORT reporting score in a multiple linear regression model. Data sources: Random sample of stroke RCTs from the Cochrane Stroke Group’s Trial Register. Eligibility criteria: Primary published report of the final results of transient ischaemic attack (TIA) or stroke RCTs, published in English in 1997-2016 inclusive. Results: In this random sample of 177 stroke RCTs, the mean score on the truncated CONSORT checklist was 5.8 (SD 2.2); reporting improved from 1997-2000 (4.9 SD 2.0) to 2001-2009 (5.8 SD 2.1) and to 2010-2016 (6.8 SD 2.1). A higher CONSORT score was independently associated with publication during epochs following a revision of CONSORT reporting guidelines (pandlt;0.001), journal endorsement of the CONSORT reporting guideline at the time of RCT publication (pandlt;0.001), and modified journal impact factor using median citation distribution (p=0.012). Conclusions: Stroke RCT reporting to CONSORT standards has improved over time, but could be better. Journal endorsement and enforcement of CONSORT reporting guidelines could further improve the reporting of stroke RCTs.</p

Dark spinor models in gravitation and cosmology

We introduce and carefully define an entire class of field theories based on non-standard spinors. Their dominant interaction is via the gravitational field which makes them naturally dark; we refer to them as Dark Spinors. We provide a critical analysis of previous proposals for dark spinors noting that they violate Lorentz invariance. As a working assumption we restrict our analysis to non-standard spinors which preserve Lorentz invariance, whilst being non-local and explicitly construct such a theory. We construct the complete energy-momentum tensor and derive its components explicitly by assuming a specific projection operator. It is natural to next consider dark spinors in a cosmological setting. We find various interesting solutions where the spinor field leads to slow roll and fast roll de Sitter solutions. We also analyse models where the spinor is coupled conformally to gravity, and consider the perturbations and stability of the spinor.Comment: 43 pages. Several new sections and details added. JHEP in prin

Calling structural variants with confidence from short-read data in wild bird populations

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available on open access from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this recordData Availability: The Illumina reads and assembled reference genome from this article are available at NCBI, Bioproject number PRJNA255814 (P. domesticus reference accession number SAMN02929199). Additional data and script are available at the Dryad database: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6q573n647Comprehensive characterisation of structural variation in natural populations has only become feasible in the last decade. To investigate the population genomic nature of structural variation (SV), reproducible and high-confidence SV callsets are first required. We created a population-scale reference of the genome-wide landscape of structural variation across 33 Nordic house sparrows (Passer domesticus) individuals. To produce a consensus callset across all samples using short-read data, we compare heuristic-based quality-filtering and visual curation (Samplot/PlotCritic and Samplot-ML) approaches. We demonstrate that curation of SVs is important for reducing putative false positives and that the time invested in this step outweighs the potential costs of analysing short-read discovered SV datasets that include many potential false positives. We find that even a lenient manual curation strategy (e.g. applied by a single curator) can reduce the proportion of putative false positives by up to 80%, thus enriching the proportion of high-confidence variants. Crucially, in applying a lenient manual curation strategy with a single curator, nearly all (>99%) variants rejected as putative false positives were also classified as such by a more stringent curation strategy using three additional curators. Furthermore, variants rejected by manual curation failed to reflect expected population structure from SNPs, whereas variants passing curation did. Combining heuristic-based quality-filtering with rapid manual curation of structural variants in short-read data can therefore become a time- and cost-effective first step for functional and population genomic studies requiring high-confidence SV callsets.Swedish Research CouncilResearch Council of NorwayDepartment of Ecology and Genetics, Uppsala UniversityBiotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC

A Search for Jet Handedness in Hadronic Z0Z^0 Decays

We have searched for signatures of polarization in hadronic jets from $Z^0 \to q \bar{q}$ decays using the ``jet handedness'' method. The polar angle asymmetry induced by the high SLC electron-beam polarization was used to separate quark jets from antiquark jets, expected to be left- and right-polarized, respectively. We find no evidence for jet handedness in our global sample or in a sample of light quark jets and we set upper limits at the 95% C.L. of 0.063 and 0.099 respectively on the magnitude of the analyzing power of the method proposed by Efremov {\it et al.}Comment: Revtex, 8 pages, 2 figure

(M,Ru)O2 (M = Mg, Zn, Cu, Ni, Co) rutiles and their use as oxygen evolution electrocatalysts in membrane electrode assemblies under acidic conditions

The rutiles (M,Ru)O2 (M = Mg, Zn, Co, Ni, Cu) are formed directly under hydrothermal conditions at 240 °C from potassium perruthenate and either peroxides of zinc or magnesium, or poorly crystalline oxides of cobalt, nickel or copper. The polycrystalline powders consist of lath-shaped crystallites, tens of nanometres in maximum dimension. Powder neutron diffraction shows that the materials have expanded a axis and contracted c axis compared to the parent RuO2, but there is no evidence of lowering of symmetry to other AO2-type structures, supported by Raman spectroscopy. Rietveld refinement shows no evidence for oxide non-stoichiometry and provides a formula (MxRu1-x)O2 with 0.14 < x < 0.2, depending on the substituent metal. This is supported by energy-dispersive X-ray analysis on the transmission electron microscope, while Ru K-edge XANES spectroscopy shows that upon inclusion of the substituent the average Ru oxidation state is increased to balance charge. Variable temperature magnetic measurements provide evidence for atomic homogeneity of the mixed metal materials, with suppression of the high temperature antiferromagnetism of RuO2 and increased magnetic moment. The new rutiles all show enhanced electrocatalysis compared to reference RuO2 materials for oxygen evolution in 1 M H2SO4 electrolyte at 60 °C, with higher specific and mass activity (per Ru) than a low surface area crystalline RuO2, and with less Ru dissolution over 1000 cycles compared to an RuO2 with a similar surface area. Magnesium substitution provides the optimum balance between stability and activity, despite leaching of the Mg2+ into solution, and this was proved in membrane electrode assemblies