9,163 research outputs found
Where goods are free but knowledge costs: Hunter-gatherer ritual economics in Western Central Africa
Forest hunter-gatherers in Western Central Africa participate in an unusual economic system that transacts material production in a very different way to intellectual production. While material goods, such as food, tools or clothing, are generally freely given when demanded, intellectual goods, such as the right to perform specific rituals or to receive certain remedies, are exchanged for goods and money. These hunter-gatherer groups trade certain types of knowledge for material goods with each other, but never trade material goods for other material goods with each other, despite doing so with neighbouring farmers. They simply demand them from one another. The distribution of key aspects of this economic system across linguistic and international frontiers suggests that it is likely to have great antiquity. The hunter-gatherer ritual system is valued for immediately producing goods. This contrasts with cult associations among farming societies in Central and West Africa that focus on ensuring that goods will come in the future
Play, Music, and Taboo in the Reproduction of an Egalitarian Society
An examination of musical participation and taboo among the egalitarian
Mbendjele BaYaka illustrates how cultural learning can be organized without
recourse to figures of authority. The chapter describes two complementary
pedagogic processes that accompany BaYaka as they move through life. One
acts on groups of people playing together (massana), the other on individuals
as they are differently affected by taboos (ekila). Both serve to lead growing
BaYaka into opportunities for learning more abstract cultural knowledge at
salient points in the life cycle.
In successfully performing the dense polyphony of BaYaka music
(massana), people experience what BaYaka consider to be desirable
emotions, ideal relationships, and interaction. They participate in an
enhanced learning environment that promotes peer-to-peer imitation rather
than direct instruction with its concomitant implication of authority and
status. Key economic strategies and political orientations are experienced
during massana in ways that stimulate their application to non-massana
contexts. The ethnography of ekila demonstrates how counterintuitive
explanations of striking hunting and reproductive prohibitions stimulate a
learner-motivated pedagogic process that does not depend on defining any
individual as a focus for learning important knowledge. These taboos anchor
key areas of cosmological knowledge, gender, and political ideology in the
physical and biological experiences of human growth and maturation
making gendered practices and cultural values take on a natural, inevitable
quality.
Together, massana and ekila provide major avenues for BaYaka children to
learn and to reproduce a distinctive and remarkably durable cultural system.
The chapter finishes by suggesting some structural features of these
culturally embedded pedagogic systems that contribute to their efficacy,
durability and ability to adapt to, and incorporate change
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Human Effects on the Environment
Every habitat and ecosystem on Earth has been affected by human activities. The three primary mechanisms through which humans affect the environment are climate change, the spread of invasive species, and habitat fragmentation. The rapid environmental changes associated with these factors have few parallels in Earth’s history, leading paradoxically to an extinction crisis and to the spread of a few dominant species. Because these effects are not uniformly distributed among locations or ecosystems, they are creating ecologic and economic winners and losers. These discrepancies, in turn, are a key factor driving global patterns of urbanization, and is projected to be a major, if not the major, cause of warfare and humanitarian crises during the 21st Century. Conversely, these changes also present opportunities for developing more sustainable cities and societies
Decentralization and Health: Case Studies of Kenya, Pakistan, and the Philippines
Decentralization, defined by the World Bank (2001) as, “the transfer of authority and responsibility for public functions from the central government to intermediate and local governments or quasi-‐independent government organizations and/or the private sector,” is a movement that has gained much traction in recent history. For many countries undergoing decentralization, a major driver has been a desire to increase the role and participation of local governments in the decision-‐making space. In doing this, it is hoped to create governance structures that are more accountable and responsive to the people. For health, decentralization has been touted as a potential way to improve responsiveness to local needs, improve service delivery, and improve equitability. In light of these goals, many countries as part of their political decentralization have also opted to decentralize healthcare.https://jdc.jefferson.edu/cwicposters/1020/thumbnail.jp
‘Our life has turned upside down! And nobody cares.’
Many hunter-gatherers today find themselves caught between the dominance of neoliberal perspectives on development and progress that focus on extractive opportunities for supplying markets with natural resources, and on conservationists’ views of landscapes as wildernesses that require protection from any human activity, apart from their own. This dual occupation of hunter-gatherer land in the Congo Basin is putting huge pressure on the BaYaka Pygmies’ and their neighbours’ lifestyles and livelihoods. After giving their views to camera in a short film (https://ishgr.org/hunter-gatherer-voices/), the article examines some of the underlying assumptions about environments that legitimate the current structural and actual violence experienced by these hunter-gatherers. The article ends with a request for more accounts of the pressures facing hunter-gatherers, so we better understand them, and to assist in thinking about what we might do to support this vital part of humanity’s cultural diversity
Enhanced kinetic stability of [Pd2L4](4+) cages through ligand substitution
There is considerable interest in exploiting metallosupramolecular cages as drug delivery vectors. Recently, we developed a [Pd2L4]4+ cage capable of binding two molecules of cisplatin. Unfortunately, this first generation cage was rapidly decomposed by common biologically relevant nucleophiles. In an effort to improve the kinetic stability of these cage architectures here we report the synthesis of two amino substituted tripyridyl 2,6-bis(pyridin-3-ylethynyl)pyridine (tripy) ligands (with amino groups either in the 2-(2A-tripy) or 3-(3A-tripy) positions of the terminal pyridines) and their respective [Pd2(Ltripy)4]4+ cages. These systems have been characterised by 1H, 13C and DOSY NMR spectroscopies, high resolution electrospray mass spectrometry, elemental analysis and, in one case, by X-ray crystallography. It was established, using model palladium(II) N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) probe complexes, that the amino substituted compounds were stronger donor ligands than the parent system (2A-tripy > 3A-tripy > tripy). Competition experiments with a range of nucleophiles showed that these substitutions lead to more kinetically robust cage architectures, with [Pd2(2A-tripy)4]4+ proving the most stable. Biological testing on the three ligands and cages against A549 and MDA-MB-231 cell lines showed that only [Pd2(2A-tripy)4]4+ exhibited any appreciable cytotoxicity, with a modest IC50 of 36.4 ± 1.9 μM against the MDA-MB-231 cell line. Unfortunately, the increase in kinetic stability of the [Pd2(Ltripy)4]4+ cages was accompanied by loss of cisplatin-binding ability
Identification of sex hormone-binding globulin in the human hypothalamus
Gonadal steroids are known to influence hypothalamic functions through both genomic and non-genomic pathways. Sex hormone-binding globulin ( SHBG) may act by a non-genomic mechanism independent of classical steroid receptors. Here we describe the immunocytochemical mapping of SHBG-containing neurons and nerve fibers in the human hypothalamus and infundibulum. Mass spectrometry and Western blot analysis were also used to characterize the biochemical characteristics of SHBG in the hypothalamus and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of humans. SHBG-immunoreactive neurons were observed in the supraoptic nucleus, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, paraventricular nucleus, arcuate nucleus, the perifornical region and the medial preoptic area in human brains. There were SHBG-immunoreactive axons in the median eminence and the infundibulum. A partial colocalization with oxytocin could be observed in the posterior pituitary lobe in consecutive semithin sections. We also found strong immunoreactivity for SHBG in epithelial cells of the choroid plexus and in a portion of the ependymal cells lining the third ventricle. Mass spectrometry showed that affinity-purified SHBG from the hypothalamus and choroid plexus is structurally similar to the SHBG identified in the CSF. The multiple localizations of SHBG suggest neurohypophyseal and neuroendocrine functions. The biochemical data suggest that CSF SHBG is of brain rather than blood origin. Copyright (c) 2005 S. Karger AG, Base
Wild Voices: Mimicry, Reversal, Metaphor, and the Emergence of Language
Why is it that, out of 220 primate species, we are the only one that talks? The relative inflexibility of primate vocal signaling
reflects audience pressure for reliability. Where interests conflict, listeners’ resistance to being deceived drives signalers to
limit their vocal repertoire to signals that cannot be faked. This constraint was lifted in the human case, we argue, because
the original victims of our species’ first deceptive vocalizations were nonhuman animals. When our ancestors were
vulnerable hominins equipped with limited weaponry, they kept predators away by increasing the range and diversity of
their vocal calls. This led to choral singing, primarily by females, and deceptive mimicry of animal calls, primarily by
scavenging and hunting males. A critical feature of our model is the core principle of reversal, whereby deceptive signals
aimed originally by a coalition against an external target are subsequently redeployed for honest communicative purposes
within the group. We argue that this dynamic culminated ultimately in gestural, vocal, and ritual metaphor, opening the
way to word formation and the rapid emergence of grammar
TK: The Twitter Top-K Keywords Benchmark
Information retrieval from textual data focuses on the construction of
vocabularies that contain weighted term tuples. Such vocabularies can then be
exploited by various text analysis algorithms to extract new knowledge, e.g.,
top-k keywords, top-k documents, etc. Top-k keywords are casually used for
various purposes, are often computed on-the-fly, and thus must be efficiently
computed. To compare competing weighting schemes and database implementations,
benchmarking is customary. To the best of our knowledge, no benchmark currently
addresses these problems. Hence, in this paper, we present a top-k keywords
benchmark, TK, which features a real tweet dataset and queries with
various complexities and selectivities. TK helps evaluate weighting
schemes and database implementations in terms of computing performance. To
illustrate TK's relevance and genericity, we successfully performed
tests on the TF-IDF and Okapi BM25 weighting schemes, on one hand, and on
different relational (Oracle, PostgreSQL) and document-oriented (MongoDB)
database implementations, on the other hand
MetaboLab - advanced NMR data processing and analysis for metabolomics
Background\ud
Despite wide-spread use of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) in metabolomics for the analysis of biological samples there is a lack of graphically driven, publicly available software to process large one and two-dimensional NMR data sets for statistical analysis.\ud
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Results\ud
Here we present MetaboLab, a MATLAB based software package that facilitates NMR data processing by providing automated algorithms for processing series of spectra in a reproducible fashion. A graphical user interface provides easy access to all steps of data processing via a script builder to generate MATLAB scripts, providing an option to alter code manually. The analysis of two-dimensional spectra (1H,13C-HSQC spectra) is facilitated by the use of a spectral library derived from publicly available databases which can be extended readily. The software allows to display specific metabolites in small regions of interest where signals can be picked. To facilitate the analysis of series of two-dimensional spectra, different spectra can be overlaid and assignments can be transferred between spectra. The software includes mechanisms to account for overlapping signals by highlighting neighboring and ambiguous assignments.\ud
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Conclusions\ud
The MetaboLab software is an integrated software package for NMR data processing and analysis, closely linked to the previously developed NMRLab software. It includes tools for batch processing and gives access to a wealth of algorithms available in the MATLAB framework. Algorithms within MetaboLab help to optimize the flow of metabolomics data preparation for statistical analysis. The combination of an intuitive graphical user interface along with advanced data processing algorithms facilitates the use of MetaboLab in a broader metabolomics context.\ud
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