Politics in everyday Kenyan street-life: the people’s parliament in Mombasa, Kenya

The presence of politics in everyday experiences – popular arts, culture and dialogue – is not new to the study of politics in Africa. Yet, most often, attention to political possibilities in the everyday appears preoccupied with their relationship to rule and authority, making it difficult to imagine political significance outside of an influence on forms of dominance. Hannah Arendt’s early political thought provides an alternative way to imagine politics in everyday publics by separating politics from rule and locating it in public speech and action. Drawing on Arendt’s ideas around political significance of publics, this paper examines the nature and scope of political possibilities of a street parliament in Mombasa, Kenya. It reveals how possibilities for Arendtian political action are present in informal practices of public discussion, which are both contingent upon and compromised by competing interests, including elite and partisan competition

Linguistically interesting: Dutch domain adverbials in contrast

One might infer from the literature that Dutch may not use word-formation strategies for the linguistic realisation of the functional category of domain adverbials. English and German, however, are claimed to have very productive derivational patterns for the creation of domain adverbs. English systematically uses -wise (e.g. weatherwise) and German uses -mäßig or -technisch (e.g. wettermäßig, wettertechnisch). Starting from the observation that genetically related suffixes -gewijs, -matig and -technisch exist in Dutch, I investigate their potential to derive domain adverbs. I try to explain synchronic similarities and contrasts between Dutch, English and German patterns from a diachronic point of view as converging or diverging developments. The overall aim is to show that a contrastive investigation may contribute to a better understanding and a more accurate description of individual languages

What Kenya’s street parliaments tell us about the value of in-person politics over online debates

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a reliance on more online political activity. New research in urban Kenya, however, which compares street-based and online political debate, shows the democratic value of continuing to invest in political debates that are face-to-face and informal

Duality-based Higher-order Non-smooth Optimization on Manifolds

We propose a method for solving non-smooth optimization problems on manifolds. In order to obtain superlinear convergence, we apply a Riemannian Semi-smooth Newton method to a non-smooth non-linear primal-dual optimality system based on a recent extension of Fenchel duality theory to Riemannian manifolds. We also propose an inexact version of the Riemannian Semi-smooth Newton method and prove conditions for local linear and superlinear convergence. Numerical experiments on l2-TV-like problems confirm superlinear convergence on manifolds with positive and negative curvature

Molecular Characterization of Two Endothelin Pathways in East African Cichlid Fishes

The adaptive radiations of cichlid fishes in East Africa have been associated with the acquisition of evolutionary novelties as well as the ecological opportunities existing in the East African Great lakes. Two remarkable evolutionary innovations are the pharyngeal jaw apparatus, found in all cichlid species, and the anal fin egg-spots of mouthbrooding cichlids. Based on their conserved functions during the development of both the jaw apparatus and pigmentation, the endothelin ligands and receptors form a putative link between these naturally and sexually selected traits. Here we study the evolutionary history of four members of two endothelin pathways (Edn1/EdnrAa and Edn3b/EdnrB1a) to elucidate their possible roles during the evolution and development of key innovations in East African cichlids species. The analyses performed on partial sequences (ca. 6,000bp per taxon) show that all four endothelin family members evolved under purifying selection, although both ligands are characterized by an accelerated rate of protein evolution in comparison to the receptors. In accordance with earlier findings, we show that the mature protein sequence of Edn1 and Edn3 are highly conserved, also in cichlids, whereas the preproendothelin parts are variable indicating relaxed selective constraints. In the receptors, nonsynonymous substitutions were mainly found in the ligand-binding domains suggesting functional divergence. Gene expression assays with Real-Time PCR indeed reveal that the two studied endothelin pathways are expressed in the cichlid pharyngeal jaw and in the haplochromine egg-spot (among other pigment-cell containing tissues), suggesting their involvement during morphogenesis of naturally and sexually selected traits in cichlid

Село і місто в постмодерному тексті

У статті розглядаються особливості зображення села та міста у сучасній постмодерній літературі. Матеріалом для дослідження слугують твори українських письменників Ю. Андруховича, Л. дереша, О. Ірванця. Ключові слова: постмодернізм, бінарна опозиція, село, місто.В статье рассматриваются особенности изображения села и города в современной постмодерной литературе. Материалом для исследования служат произведения украинских писателей Ю. Андруховича, Л. Дереша, А. Ирванца. Ключевые слова: постмодернизм, бинарная оппозиция, село, город.At the article author pay’s attention to the image of the village and town at the present postmodern literature. The Literary works of Ukrainian writers – J. Andruhovich, L. Deresh, A. Irvanets – was taken as the material of the research. Keywords: postmodern, binary opposition, village, town

Curvature corrected tangent space-based approximation of manifold-valued data

When generalizing schemes for real-valued data approximation or decomposition to data living in Riemannian manifolds, tangent space-based schemes are very attractive for the simple reason that these spaces are linear. An open challenge is to do this in such a way that the generalized scheme is applicable to general Riemannian manifolds, is global-geometry aware and is computationally feasible. Existing schemes have been unable to account for all three of these key factors at the same time. In this work, we take a systematic approach to developing a framework that is able to account for all three factors. First, we will restrict ourselves to the -- still general -- class of symmetric Riemannian manifolds and show how curvature affects general manifold-valued tensor approximation schemes. Next, we show how the latter observations can be used in a general strategy for developing approximation schemes that are also global-geometry aware. Finally, having general applicability and global-geometry awareness taken into account we restrict ourselves once more in a case study on low-rank approximation. Here we show how computational feasibility can be achieved and propose the curvature-corrected truncated higher-order singular value decomposition (CC-tHOSVD), whose performance is subsequently tested in numerical experiments with both synthetic and real data living in symmetric Riemannian manifolds with both positive and negative curvature

Rethinking publics in Africa in a digital age

The digital transformations taking place across the African continent present an urgent need for fresh thinking in the study of publics. This introduction lays out the impetus and contribution of this Special Issue to such a rethinking of the study of publics in Africa. Following in the footsteps of a wider body of scholarship, we draw on Africa’s pasts and present in order to move beyond the limiting assumptions, histories and languages that are embedded within the western scholarship on publics. We make the case that both de-westernising and capturing publics in a digital age in Africa require openness to a diversity of disciplines, approaches and questions. In addition, we explain how, collectively and individually, the articles in this Special Issue contribute to taking up this task. Taken together, the articles are an eye-opening collection on the unfolding practices of citizens convening and participating in discussions using both newer and older media and communication platforms across Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. Contributions cover diverse disciplinary perspectives and empirical cases that investigate publics convening around digital platforms from WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook to weblogs and dating apps on mobile phones. We see this endeavour of examining the complex and dynamic digital transformations across Eastern Africa as part of a crucial scholarly turn in which the study of African society and politics helps us to rethink ideas and concepts that have heritages elsewhere, and to understand them in a new light