Transoceanic print histories: twentieth-century Swahili Muslim networks in the Indian Ocean

At a time of sociocultural changes that started questioning established Islamic learning traditions (independence years, post-Cold War/book market liberalization), printing diasporas exerted influence on the circulation of Islamic texts in East Africa: published overseas (Cairo, Beirut, and the Indian subcontinent) and/or locally reprinted on the Swahili-speaking Islamic coast, they came to play a seminal role in negotiating Swahili Muslim literary culture. How have transoceanic religious and intellectual networks operating beyond national borders become intertwined? In this paper, the beginnings of Swahili Muslim book publishing—and the entities underpinning it, such as Nairobi’s Islamic Foundation Center, a Pakistani-oriented charitable foundation—will be outlined. I will then delve into the history of Indian-and-Swahili family-run publishers Adam Traders based in Mombasa in order to tackle hitherto neglected transoceanic connections and patterns of influence across the sea.ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Texts, voices and tapes: mediating poetry on the Swahili Muslim Coast in the 21st century

In this paper, I seek to investigate the manifold relationships between traditional and contemporary, oral and written Swahili poetry—in the utendi and mashairi forms—and its recitation in terms of the following considerations: how have advances in technology changed the production, transmission and reception of Swahili Islamic poetry? To what extent do writing and orality coexist in a recited text? What is the nature of performer identity formation within a “discourse network” of artists—the composer (mtungaji), reader (msomaji), and singer (mwimbaji)—who, in Goffman’s words, play “participation roles” and appropriate poetry belonging to other living poets or to their own (sometimes anonymous) ancestors? In an attempt to answer these questions, I provide examples of performers and their performative craft.ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Mabanati in search of an author: portable reform texts and multimodal narrative media among Swahili Muslim communities

ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

A network of copies: transmission and textual variants of manuscript traditions from the J. W. T. Allen Collection (Dar es Salaam)

ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Seeking ʿilm on Lamu: Ustadh Mau’s library and services for the benefit of his community

ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Arothron: an R package for virtual anthropology to build endocast and to perform digital reconstruction

Arothron is an R package [1] containing brand new tools for geometric morphometric analysis. The package comes with examples pertaining to the field of virtual anthropology, yet it is addressed to the entire audience of geometric morphometricians. The functions embedded in the package allow aligning disarticulated parts belonging to a single specimen (i.e. broken skull fragments), to build internal cavities such as endocasts, and to reproduce and analyse the shapes of three-dimensional objects. Arothron functions import and export landmark coordinates and 3D paths into ’landmarkAscii’ and ’am’ format files. The Digital Tool for Alignment (DTA) is a landmark-based methodology which allows aligning two or more portions of a 3D mesh (i.e. a disarticulated model, DM) by using a reference sample or model (RM) for comparison. To run DTA, a set of anatomical landmarks is defined on two separated portions of the DM. Each point of the landmark sets is moved to the nearest vertex of the triangles. This way, each landmark is identified by a number corresponding to a row of the vertex matrix of the mesh and its position is tracked on the 3D models moved in the Cartesian coordinate system.The second step is the alignment via Generalized Procrustes Analysis (GPA) of each part of the DM on each RM of the comparative sample, where the same landmark configuration as with the DM has been previously defined. The items of the reference sample are previously scaled to the mean of the single scale factors calculated for each half of the DM, separately, and symmetrized via reflection and relabelling, thereby producing a perfectly symmetrical, bilateral, and scaled landmark configurations (to avoid alignment error as introduced by asymmetry). The last step consists in the quantification of the morphological (Euclidean) distances between each part of the DM and the corresponding landmark configurations on each item in the RM set. Computer-Aided Laser Scanner Emulator (CA-LSE) and Automatic Segmentation Tool for 3D objects (AST-3D) are two new tools designed for the reconstruction of virtual cavities and external shapes [2]. CA-LSE provides the reconstruction of the external portions of a 3D mesh by simulating the action of a laser scanner. AST-3D performs the digital reconstruction of anatomical cavities as endocasts. Both tools use the definition of points of views that can be placed externally to the object (CA-LSE) or inside the object (AST-3D). By applying these tools is possible in few minutes to build virtual cavities as endocast, maxillary sinuses and trabecular bone. In the Arothron R package, we supplied three examples of reconstructing: the dental pulp cavity within a deciduous Neanderthal tooth, the network of blood vessels within a human malleus bone, and an endocast of a human skull.The tools could be used in virtual anthropology application.The digital alignment tool is efficient in find ideal alignments of broken pieces. It could be applied as the first step in virtual reconstruction on human fossil specimens that often consist of a disarticulated fragments such as BOU-VP12/130 (Australopithecus garhi), AL-442 (Australopithecus afarensis), OH5 (Paranthropus boisei), ATD6-15 and ATD6-69 (Homo antecessor), Amud 1 (Homo neanderthalensis), Le Moustier 1 (Homo neanderthalensis). The easily and quickly use of the Arothron R package to build virtual cavities may provide a new means largely applicable in virtual Anthropology. References:[1] Profico A., Veneziano A., Melchionna M., Piras P. & Raia P., 2018. Arothron: Geometric Morphometrics Analyses. R package version 1.0.1, developer version available at https://github/Arothron DOI:10.5281/zenodo.1218712.[2] Profico A., Schlager S., Valoriani V., Buzi C., Melchionna M., Veneziano A., Raia P., MoggifiCecchi J. & Manzi G., 2018. Reproducing the internal and external anatomy of fossil bones: Two new automatic digital tools. American Journal of Physical Anthropology

Progressive Neural Networks

Learning to solve complex sequences of tasks--while both leveraging transfer and avoiding catastrophic forgetting--remains a key obstacle to achieving human-level intelligence. The progressive networks approach represents a step forward in this direction: they are immune to forgetting and can leverage prior knowledge via lateral connections to previously learned features. We evaluate this architecture extensively on a wide variety of reinforcement learning tasks (Atari and 3D maze games), and show that it outperforms common baselines based on pretraining and finetuning. Using a novel sensitivity measure, we demonstrate that transfer occurs at both low-level sensory and high-level control layers of the learned policy

Comparison between adenosine triphosphate bioluminescence and aerobic colony count to assess surface sanitation in the hospital environment

Background: Adenosine triphosphate bioluminescence produced by the firefly luciferase has been successfully introduced to verify cleaning procedures in the food industry according to the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point program. Our aim was to evaluate the reliability of bioluminescence as a tool to monitor the effectiveness of sanitation in healthcare settings, in comparison with the microbiological gold standard. Methods: 614 surfaces of various material were randomly sampled in Policlinico University Hospital units in Palermo, Italy, to detect adenosine triphosphate bioluminescence and aerobic colony count. Linear regression model and Pearson correlation coefficient were used to estimate the relationship between the two variables of the study. Results: Aerobic colony count median was 1.71 colony forming units/cm2 (interquartile range = 3.8), whereas adenosine triphosphate median was 59.9 relative light units/cm2 (interquartile range = 128.3). Pearson coefficient R2 was 0.09. Sensitivity and specificity of bioluminescence test with respect to microbiology were 46% and 71%, whereas positive predictive value and negative predictive value were 53% and 65%, respectively. Conclusion: According to our results, there seemed to be no linear correlation between aerobic colony count and adenosine triphosphate values, suggesting that current bioluminescence technology has not any proportional relationships with culturable microbes contaminating environmental surfaces in health-care settings

TAS2R38 is a novel modifer gene in patients with cystic fbrosis

The clinical manifestation of cystic fbrosis (CF) is heterogeneous also in patients with the same cystic fbrosis transmembrane regulator (CFTR) genotype and in afected sibling pairs. Other genes, inherited independently of CFTR, may modulate the clinical manifestation and complications of patients with CF, including the severity of chronic sinonasal disease and the occurrence of chronic Pseudomonas aeruginosa colonization. The T2R38 gene encodes a taste receptor and recently its functionality was related to the occurrence of sinonasal diseases and upper respiratory infections. We assessed the T2R38 genotype in 210 patients with CF and in 95 controls, relating the genotype to the severity of sinonasal disease and to the occurrence of P. aeruginosa pulmonary colonization. The frequency of the PAV allele i.e., the allele associated with the high functionality of the T2R38 protein, was signifcantly lower in i) CF patients with nasal polyposis requiring surgery, especially in patients who developed the complication before 14 years of age; and ii) in CF patients with chronic pulmonary colonization by P. aeruginosa, especially in patients who were colonized before 14 years of age, than in control subjects. These data suggest a role for T2R38 as a novel modifer gene of sinonasal disease severity and of pulmonary P. aeruginosa colonization in patients with CF