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Arts education can be an important part of the elementary child's experience. However, keeping the arts in schools is often a challenge because of funding concerns and competing academic priorities. An important strategy in arts education advocacy and policy is arts integration. Arts integration creates a rationale for the arts based on the enhancement of the educational experience for all students and the potential to engage underserved or less engaged students with academic disciplines through the arts. This article examines teacher experiences within a statewide program that funds arts specialists in elementary schools with the requirement that they integrate the arts with other subjects. The researchers describe how the program works with particular focus on collaboration between arts specialists and classroom teachers. This is a multifaceted study across four school districts with 640 participants including classroom teachers and arts specialists. An understanding of both arts integration and how collaboration happens between elementary teachers and arts specialists was gained through interviews, classroom visits, and surveys. The data suggest that effective integration and collaboration can enhance teachers' professional growth but require structural and policy support as well as the creativity and energy of individual teachers. The professional life of arts specialists, teacher knowledge, and professional development emerged as important issues for teachers, school leaders, and arts advocates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spiritual dimensions of art and education have been explored for their potential to offer different ways of understanding or representing knowledge and their potential to inspire transcendence or cultivate wholeness. This article examines connections between transcendent or sacred territories of human existence, teaching, and contemporary art. Experiences of walking in the Himalayan mountains with Tibetan Buddhist monks, conversing with rabbis in Jerusalem, and teaching in state school classrooms are used to illustrate connections between education, spirituality, religion, and contemporary art. We seek to understand how the spiritual dimensions of education and contemporary art could be understood through the lenses of different spiritual traditions and cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability disclosures are frequently included within integrated reports, in order to provide disclosures relating to the capitals identified in the International Framework (the Framework). South Africa has been at the forefront of integrated reporting, following the guidance of King III and subsequently the Framework. This study draws on data previously presented by the authors, and identifies the relationships and correlation between the application of principles from the Framework, such as materiality and conciseness, as well as the total number of sustainability disclosures and the industry classification, age and size of the companies, through the lens of legitimacy theory. The study uses data collected through interpretive content analysis of the integrated reports of South African companies in 2011 and 2015, as well as company metrics, which are analysed using Spearman's rank correlation and a k-means cluster analysis. The results reveal that companies tend to consistently apply the principles from the Framework, and the size of the company was not consistently correlated. However, the age of the company was correlated to the materiality of disclosures provided. The findings are consistent with legitimacy theory and add to the legitimacy theory literature by identifying the sustainability reporting behaviour displayed by companies of various sizes, ages and industry classifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study examined the impact of Pathway Home™ (PH) transition services for high utilizers of psychiatric hospitalization on inpatient days and outpatient engagement post-hospital discharge. Methods: This case series study of forty PH graduates (5/22/2015–8/31/2018) used Medicaid claims to assess psychiatric inpatient days-per-month, average proportion of months with psychiatric emergency room, outpatient, and health home care management services. T-tests compared three time periods: the year prior, during, and after enrollment. Results: Graduates had significantly fewer psychiatric inpatient days/month during (M = 1.84, p < 0.001) and after PH enrollment (M = 1.88, p < 0.001) compared to prior to enrollment (M = 7.1), while emergency services were stable. Outpatient visits increased from 45% prior to 76% during enrollment (p < 0.001) and was sustained on follow-up (67%, p = 0.008). A similar pattern emerged for health home services (32%, 60%, and 50%). Conclusion: PH is a promising approach for improving outcomes for high utilizers of psychiatric inpatient services, with sustained impact on follow-up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Members of the Arts Education Policy Review editorial board have collaborated to update the 2002 article "Writing for Arts Education Policy Review." Authors interested in submitting to the journal will find this information helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emphasis on STEM disciplines in schools has caused advocates for art education to propose the addition of the arts to the study of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, transforming STEM into STEAM. However, it is important that the larger purposes of art and education that have traditionally been embraced by the liberal arts are not lost in STEAM education and that the arts are not reduced to a role of cognitive enhancer for other STEM subjects. STEAM education is closely linked to ideas and research about arts integration and is often implemented using the methods of 'design thinking'. The use of design thinking as a method for interdisciplinary collaboration has many connections to how STEAM education is practise d in schools. Research describing arts integration is also relevant to how art is included in STEAM education. This article describes rationales for STEAM education and how the work of contemporary artists provides generative examples of how STEAM education might be put into practice. Both the affordances and limitations of STEAM education are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on arts education being a vital part of the elementary child's learning experience. Topics include provide arts education to elementary-age students through a collaboration between art specialists and classroom teachers; illustrating some of the exciting possibilities of integrating the visual arts into teaching and learning.

Growth of gig work – short-term tasks organized and mediated by digital labor platforms such as Uber and Upwork – is the focus for an increasing body of research. Yet there has been a lack of systematic frameworks that could evaluate this type of labor against decent work standards, and inform consumers and others about relative adherence to those standards across platforms and sectors. In this article we report the development of the "Fairwork framework", based on five decent work principles of fair pay, conditions, contracts, management, and representation. The framework and its associated methodology were first field-tested in South Africa and we report on its use to rate seven gig economy platforms. A league table of platforms was widely publicized and one platform was persuaded to improve working conditions. We reflect on the use and content of the framework, and its role in future action research on decent gig work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a qualitative study of pre-service art education students that was designed to explore relationships between mindfulness, self-inquiry, and artistic practices. The researchers, who are art educators, were curious about how mindfulness practices might connect, overlap or influence the personal artistic practice of the participants. Although mindfulness is often used as an intervention to counter the stresses of school and teaching, mindfulness can also be thought of as a counter cultural phenomenon that explores possibilities of a critical pedagogy. While mindfulness and self-care practices can have important positive benefits and may lead to deeper personal understanding, these practices might also have more problematic purposes such as helping teachers and students adapt to oppressive social, political, or cultural positionings in education. The study explored mindfulness as a form of education through the practice of art-making. Artistic applications of data visualization emerged as a significant connection between art and self-inquiry. The study investigated how the critical responsiveness and awareness of the artist might contribute to an understanding of mindfulness and create an awareness of how mindfulness might be practiced within existing social and cultural structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital labour platforms do not attempt to build trust between worker, client, and platform on the basis of strong and durable ties. Instead, platforms utilize a double articulation of algorithmic power to govern spatially dispersed workforces in both material and discursive ways. However, algorithms do not have hegemonic outcomes, and they do not entirely strip away agency from platform workers. Through manipulation, subversion, and disruption, workers bring fissures in algorithmic power into being. Fissures in algorithmic power are moments in which algorithms do not govern as intended. While these moments do not simply result in positive outcomes for workers, they show that algorithmic power is inherently only ever partial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arts education advocates sometimes point to extrinsic benefits of arts learning, including Social Emotional Learning (SEL). This study considers if and how the National Core Arts Standards (NCAS) in dance, media arts, music, theater, and visual art may align with SEL standards adopted by the state of Illinois, upon which other SEL standards have been modeled. A team of arts education experts coded 15,500 intersections of arts standards & SEL goals. They found a great deal of indirect alignment between the NCAS and SEL objectives, but direct alignment was rare. As the types and degrees of alignment varied by discipline, broad discussions of "arts education" that assume similar types of SEL happens in similar ways in all arts disciplines are problematic. Given the generally indirect alignment of the NCAS and SEL goals, the authors recommend that educators who wish to pursue both arts learning and SEL goals engage in conscious planning to ensure both types of learning occur. From a theoretical, standards-based perspective it seems unlikely that SEL will automatically take place in arts learning scenarios without deliberate planning. While recognizing the potential for deliberately structured lessons to promote both arts learning and SEL, the authors caution against advocating for arts education programs primarily on the basis of presumed extrinsic benefits such as SEL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital labour platforms do not attempt to build trust between worker, client, and platform on the basis of strong and durable ties. Instead, platforms utilise a double articulation of algorithmic power to govern spatially dispersed workforces in both material and discursive ways. However, algorithms do not have hegemonic outcomes, and they do not entirely strip away agency from platform workers. Through manipulation, subversion, and disruption, workers bring fissures in algorithmic power into being. Fissures in algorithmic power are moments in which algorithms do not govern as intended. While these moments do not simply result in positive outcomes for workers, they show that algorithmic power is inherently only ever partial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any clinically-deployed image-processing pipeline must be robust to the full range of inputs it may be presented with. One popular approach to this challenge is to develop predictive models that can provide a measure of their uncertainty. Another approach is to use generative modelling to quantify the likelihood of inputs. Inputs with a low enough likelihood are deemed to be out-of-distribution and are not presented to the downstream predictive model. In this work, we evaluate several approaches to segmentation with uncertainty for the task of segmenting bleeds in 3D CT of the head. We show that these models can fail catastrophically when operating in the far out-of-distribution domain, often providing predictions that are both highly confident and wrong. We propose to instead perform out-of-distribution detection using the Latent Transformer Model: a VQ-GAN is used to provide a highly compressed latent representation of the input volume, and a transformer is then used to estimate the likelihood of this compressed representation of the input. We demonstrate this approach can identify images that are both far- and near- out-of-distribution, as well as provide spatial maps that highlight the regions considered to be out-of-distribution. Furthermore, we find a strong relationship between an image's likelihood and the quality of a model's segmentation on it, demonstrating that this approach is viable for filtering out unsuitable images. • We develop Latent Transformer Models for unsupervised out-of-distribution detection in 3D. • This approach combines a VQ-VAE with a transformer for likelihood evaluation. • Our method can successfully identify both far- and near-OOD data. • The method further provides spatial maps to localise anomalies. • Experiments on 2D computer vision datasets help further explain the success of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the introduction of integrated reporting, organisations are now encouraged to integrate sustainability disclosures within their integrated reports, in addition to traditional sustainability reporting practices. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the International < IR > Framework (the Framework) led to a change in how South African listed companies included sustainability disclosures in their integrated reports, looking specifically at the degree of integration of sustainability disclosures, the use of sustainability key performance indicators (KPIs), and the materiality and balance of sustainability disclosures included, which are all based on principles in the Framework. Interpretive content analysis is used to compare the integrated reports in 2011, when integrated reporting became mandatory in South Africa, and 2015, when the Framework was adopted. The results show that there was a significant change in the level of integration and materiality of sustainability disclosures, but there was no significant change in the use of KPIs and the balance of disclosures. This study does not seek to measure the quality of the sustainability disclosures included in the integrated reports beyond the level of the application of Framework principles. This study provides unique insight into how South African companies adapted their sustainability disclosures within their integrated reports in response to the Framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wikipedia is an information geography made up of millions of geotagged articles, which augment places with digital layers. These layers shape how people understand, move through, and interact with the world. As such, it is crucial to interrogate how places are augmented with digital layers and by whom. This article builds on the digital geography literature with a novel methodology that can be used to understand the digital representations of cities on Wikipedia, their provenance, as well as the scope and scale of "edit wars" that have shaped such layers. This methodology is demonstrated through a case study on Berlin, Germany. Cartographic analysis of about 8,000 geotagged articles reveals that these articles cluster in the city center, whereas outer districts are largely unrepresented on Wikipedia. Ten articles have had "edit wars" and nine of these are about contentious historical periods. Cartographic analysis of the locations of the editors of these articles reveals that the edit wars were mostly waged outside of Germany, raising questions about whose voices prevail in the digital representation of local places. The article concludes with a discussion of the results and directions for future work on the development of the methodology and the analysis of further cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine how remote gig workers in Africa exercise agency to earn and sustain their livelihoods in the gig economy. In addition to the rewards reaped by gig workers, they also face significant risks, such as precarious working conditions and algorithmic workplace monitoring, thus constraining workers' autonomy and bargaining power. Gig workers, as a result, are expected to have fewer opportunities to exert their agency – particularly so for workers in Africa, where the high proportion of informal economy and a lack of employment opportunities in local labour markets already constrain workers' ability to earn livelihoods. Instead, we demonstrate how remote workers in Africa manage various constraints on one of the world's biggest gig economy platforms through their diverse everyday resilience, reworking and resistance practices (after Katz, 2004). Drawing from a rich labour geography tradition, which considers workers to 'actively produce economic spaces and scales', our main theoretical contribution is to offer a reformulation of Katz's notions of 'resistance', 'resilience' and 'reworking' as everyday practices of gig workers best understood as 'hidden transcripts' of the gig economy (Scott, 1990). The article draws on in-depth interviews (N=65) conducted with remote workers during the fieldwork in five selected African countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article criticizes the so-called "stewardship paradigm," which forms the theological basis for Catholic environmentalism, and argues that Thomas Berry's cosmology provides a more theologically palatable platform for developing Catholic environmentalism. The substantive ethical shift emerging from Berry's cosmology is the displacement of human well-being as the proximate norm for human behavior in favor of promoting biodiversity on planet Earth. In other words, biodiversity is the primary ethical good, and human well-being is secondary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose the construction of a Digital Knowledge Economy Index, quantified by way of measuring content creation and participation through digital platforms, namely the code sharing platform GitHub, the crowdsourced encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and Internet domain registrations and estimating a fifth sub-index for the World Bank Knowledge Economy Index for year 2012. This approach complements conventional data sources such as national statistics and expert surveys and helps reflect the underlying digital content creation, capacities, and skills of the population. An index that combines traditional and novel data sources can provide a more revealing view of the status of the world's digital knowledge economy and highlight where the (un)availability of digital resources may actually reinforce inequalities in the age of data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyanobacterial blooms in lakes of low nutrient status are recent ecological surprises. Culling of planktivorous fish may help suppress phytoplankton blooms via a trophic cascade effect. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a 90-day experiment adjacent to a shallow oligomesotrophic lake increasingly beset by midsummer cyanobacterial blooms in the presence of high abundances of minnows and sparse herbivorous zooplankton. The single-factor (± three spottail shiners, Notropis hudsonius) experimental design was replicated 10 times for a total of twenty 1200 L capacity mesocosms. Contrary to the trophic cascade hypothesis, minnow removal decreased the abundance of bosminids capable of grazing cyanobacteria. Nevertheless, removal of the minnows significantly both suppressed phytoplankton biomass and offset the development of cyanobacteria, such as Gloeotrichia echinulata. Lower concentrations of phosphorus and nitrogen in the fishless relative to stocked mesocosms best explained these differences in the phytoplankton community. Our findings highlight how fisheries management practices that enhance minnow populations in lakes of low productivity may inadvertently contribute to cyanobacterial blooms through increased nutrient cycling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the (dis)embeddedness of digital labour within the remote gig economy. We use interview and survey data to highlight how platform workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are normatively disembedded from social protections through a process of commodification. Normative disembeddedness leaves workers exposed to the vagaries of the external labour market due to an absence of labour regulations and rights. It also endangers social reproduction by limiting access to healthcare and requiring workers to engage in significant unpaid 'work-for-labour'. However, we show that these workers are also simultaneously embedded within interpersonal networks of trust, which enable the work to be completed despite the low-trust nature of the gig economy. In bringing together the concepts of normative and network embeddedness, we reconnect the two sides of Polanyi's thinking and demonstrate the value of an integrated understanding of Polanyi's approach to embeddedness for understanding contemporary economic transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the inception of the British Museum (Natural History) in 1881 (now the Natural History Museum, London), the collection, development and mounting of fossils for scientific study and public exhibition have been undertaken by fossil preparators. Originally known as masons, because of their rock-working skills, their roles expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when, at the forefront of the developing science of palaeontology, the Museum was actively obtaining fossil material from the UK and abroad to build the collections. As greater numbers of more impressive specimens were put on public display, these preparators developed new and better methods to recover and transport fossils from the field, and technical improvements, in the form of powered tools, enabled more detailed mechanical preparation to be undertaken. A recurring theme in the history of palaeontological preparation has been that sons often followed in their fathers' footsteps in earth sciences. William and Thomas Davies, Caleb and Frank Barlow, and Louis and Robert Parsons were all father-and-son geologists and preparators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is seen by the South African government as key to employment generation. BPO operations are reasonably footloose and the industry's immense focus on workplace control and high levels of attrition means that the development potential of the BPO industry on workers in South Africa is a matter of critical concern. This article uses the global production network (GPN) framework to understand the developmental potentials of contact center jobs for workers in South Africa. The key argument is that economic upgrading among contact center firms can lead to both social upgrading and downgrading among workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment in art is notoriously difficult and is probably best approached with skepticism. Artistry is notoriously difficult to assess. Yet measures of student learning in art are needed for both advocacy and art education policy. Assessments, particularly large-scale assessments, influence funding and educational policy at all levels. This article explores some of the challenges of assessment in the visual arts and critically examines the Advanced Placement Studio Art Portfolio to illustrate how a product-oriented assessment might influence teaching and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wikipedia is one of the predominant ways in which internet users obtain knowledge about the world. It is also one of the most important mirrors, or augmentations, of the world: it contains representations of all manner of places. However, Wikipedia's knowledge of the world is characterised by a linguistic inequality. Although it is written in a growing number of languages, some languages are overrepresented and contribute significantly more to Wikipedia's body of knowledge than others. This deeply affects how the world is represented on Wikipedia, and by whom: it has been shown that for many countries in the Global South, there are more articles written in English than in their respective native languages. As a result, a significant number of people are being excluded from the collective process of knowledge production, solely on the basis of their native language. Who writes these representations of local places, and for which audiences? We present early findings from the first study of Wikipedia's geolinguistic contours. We investigate to what extent local languages are involved in the process of creating local representations. In a large-scale quantitative analysis across the almost 300 language versions of Wikipedia, we identify regions of the world where local languages such as Armenian, Catalan or Malay are dominant sources of representation for local places, and we contrast these findings with instances where representations are significantly shaped by foreign languages. Where do, and do not, we see significant amounts of local content available in local languages? Where are the most detailed local representations largely written in foreign languages, intended for foreign audiences? And what factors can explain this?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information‐technologies are essential for global capitalism to function at speed across scale, space and complexity. The importance of software and algorithms in the governance of these systems is reflected in the attention of scholars to the ways digital code and materiality (re)combine to create hybrid digital/material spaces of economic activity, movement and everyday life. This paper extends this work in two key ways: first by emphasising the relational aspect of these code/spaces, and second by showing how the digital algorithms of code/spaces are hackable rather than hegemonic. Using the case study of frequent flyer programmes we demonstrate how networked knowledge‐sharing reshapes code/spaces to provide unintended opportunities such as low‐cost travel and access to spaces normally only frequented by global elites. Although this case highlights vulnerabilities in the code of global capitalism, it is primarily only those with significant lifestyle privilege who are able to fully participate in these subversions. Moreover, while much of the value captured by “airline hackers” comes from airlines’ profit margins, the relationality of code/spaces can impact citizens and consumers not directly connected to or interested in airline travel. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that in contrast to characterisations of omnipresence and hegemony, the information networks and algorithms of global capitalism contain moments of uneven porousness and selective hackability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quality control (QC) is a fundamental component of any study. Diffusion MRI has unique challenges that make manual QC particularly difficult, including a greater number of artefacts than other MR modalities and a greater volume of data. The gold standard is manual inspection of the data, but this process is time-consuming and subjective. Recently supervised learning approaches based on convolutional neural networks have been shown to be competitive with manual inspection. A drawback of these approaches is they still require a manually labelled dataset for training, which is itself time-consuming to produce and still introduces an element of subjectivity. In this work we demonstrate the need for manual labelling can be greatly reduced by training on simulated data, and using a small amount of labelled data for a final calibration step. We demonstrate its potential for the detection of severe movement artefacts, and compare performance to a classifier trained on manually-labelled real data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We measure ..., a proxy for galaxy specific stellar angular momentum within one effective radius, and the ellipticity, ε, for about 2300 galaxies of all morphological types observed with integral field spectroscopy as part of the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory survey, the largest such sample to date. We use the (..., ε) diagram to separate early-type galaxies into fast and slow rotators. We also visually classify each galaxy according to its optical morphology and two-dimensional stellar velocity field. Comparing these classifications to quantitative ... measurements reveals tight relationships between angular momentum and galaxy structure. In order to account for atmospheric seeing, we use realistic models of galaxy kinematics to derive a general approximate analytic correction for .... Thanks to the size of the sample and the large number of massive galaxies, we unambiguously detect a clear bimodality in the (.., ε) diagram which may result from fundamental differences in galaxy assembly history. There is a sharp secondary density peak inside the region of the diagram with low .. and ε< 0.4, previously suggested as the definition for slow rotators. Most of these galaxies are visually classified as non-regular rotators and have high velocity dispersion. The intrinsic bimodality must be stronger, as it tends to be smoothed by noise and inclination. The large sample of slow rotators allows us for the first time to unveil a secondary peak at ±90° in their distribution of the misalignments between the photometric and kinematic position angles. We confirm that genuine slow rotators start appearing above M ≥ 2 x 1011 M... where a significant number of high-mass fast rotators also exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the elementary art education at the John Philips Sousa School in Port Washington, New York. It describes how the school decorates its walls by students' artwork and discusses student's engagement in school's art room and Steve Moore's art class. It discusses education innovation with improvisation and collaboration and the process of Darwin's Paradox.

Because of their low bandwidth in the phase-encode (PE) direction, the susceptibility-induced off-resonance field causes distortions in echo planar imaging (EPI) images. It is therefore crucial to correct for susceptibility-induced distortions when performing diffusion studies using EPI. The susceptibility-induced field is caused by the object (head) disrupting the field and it is typically assumed that it remains constant within a framework defined by the object, ( i.e. it follows the object as it moves in the scanner). However, this is only approximately true. When a non-spherical object rotates around an axis other than that parallel with the magnetic flux (the z -axis) it changes the way it disrupts the field, leading to different distortions. Hence, if using a single field to correct for distortions there will be residual distortions in the volumes where the object orientation is substantially different to that when the field was measured. In this paper we present a post-processing method for estimating the field as it changes with motion during the course of an experiment. It only requires a single measured field and knowledge of the orientation of the subject when that field was acquired. The volume-to-volume changes of the field as a consequence of subject movement are estimated directly from the diffusion data without the need for any additional or special acquisitions. It uses a generative model that predicts how each volume would look predicated on field change and inverts that model to yield an estimate of the field changes. It has been validated on both simulations and experimental data. The results show that we are able to track the field with high accuracy and that we are able to correct the data for the adverse effects of the changing field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining data from a sample survey, the 2013 Oxford Internet Survey, with the 2011 UK Census, we employ small area estimation to estimate Internet use in small geographies in Britain. This is the first attempt to estimate Internet use at any small-scale level. Doing so allows us to understand the local geographies of British Internet use, showing that the area with least use is in the North East, followed by central Wales. The highest Internet use is in London and southeastern England. The most interesting finding is that after controlling for demographic variables, geographic differences become nonsignificant. The apparent geographic differences appear to be due to differences in demographic characteristics. We conclude by considering the policy implications of this fact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Internet connectivity has greatly improved across the African continent. This article examines the consequences that this shift has had for East African firms that are part of global value chains (GVCs). Prior work yielded contradictory expectations: firms might benefit from connectivity through increased efficiencies and improved access to markets, although they might also be further marginalized through increasing control of lead firms. Drawing on extensive qualitative research in Kenya and Rwanda, including 264 interviews, we examine 3 sectors (tea, tourism, and business process outsourcing) exploring overarching, cross-cutting themes. The findings support more pessimistic expectations: small African producers are only thinly digitally integrated in GVCs. Moreover, shifting modes of value chain governance, supported by lead firms and facilitated by digital information platforms and data standards are leading to new challenges for firms looking to digitally integrate. Nevertheless, we also find examples in these sectors of opportunities where small firms are able to cater to emerging niche customers, and local or regional markets. Overall, the study shows that improving connectivity does not inherently benefit African firms in GVCs without support for complementary capacity and competitive advantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every day, billions of Internet users rely on search engines to find information about places to make decisions about tourism, shopping, and countless other economic activities. In an opaque process, search engines assemble digital content produced in a variety of locations around the world and make it available to large cohorts of consumers. Although these representations of place are increasingly important and consequential, little is known about their characteristics and possible biases. Analyzing a corpus of Google search results generated for 188 capital cities, this article investigates the geographic dimension of search results, focusing on searches such as “Lagos” and “Rome” on different localized versions of the engine. This study answers these questions: To what degree is this city-related information locally produced and diverse? Which countries are producing their own representations and which are represented by others? Through a new indicator of localness of search results, we identify the factors that contribute to shape this uneven digital geography, combining several development indicators. The development of the publishing industry and scientific production appears as a fairly strong predictor of localness of results. This empirical knowledge will support efforts to curb the digital divide, promoting a more inclusive, democratic information society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Henri Lefebvre talked of the 'right to the city' alongside a right to information. As the urban environment becomes increasingly layered by abstract digital representation, Lefebvre's broader theory warrants application to the digital age. Through considering what is entailed by the urbanization of information, this paper examines the problems and implications of any 'informational right to the city'. In directing Tony Benn's five questions of power towards Google, arguably the world's most powerful mediator of information, this paper exposes processes that occur when geographic information is mediated by powerful digital monopolies. We argue that Google currently occupies a dominant share of any informational right to the city. In the spirit of Benn's final question-'How do we get rid of you?'-the paper seeks to apply post-political theory in exploring a path to the possibility of more just information geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Epidemiologic and genomewide association studies have linked loss-of-function variants in ANGPTL3, encoding angiopoietin-like 3, with low levels of plasma lipoproteins.Methods: We evaluated antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) targeting Angptl3 messenger RNA (mRNA) for effects on plasma lipid levels, triglyceride clearance, liver triglyceride content, insulin sensitivity, and atherosclerosis in mice. Subsequently, 44 human participants (with triglyceride levels of either 90 to 150 mg per deciliter [1.0 to 1.7 mmol per liter] or >150 mg per deciliter, depending on the dose group) were randomly assigned to receive subcutaneous injections of placebo or an antisense oligonucleotide targeting ANGPTL3 mRNA in a single dose (20, 40, or 80 mg) or multiple doses (10, 20, 40, or 60 mg per week for 6 weeks). The main end points were safety, side-effect profile, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic measures, and changes in levels of lipids and lipoproteins.Results: The treated mice had dose-dependent reductions in levels of hepatic Angptl3 mRNA, Angptl3 protein, triglycerides, and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, as well as reductions in liver triglyceride content and atherosclerosis progression and increases in insulin sensitivity. After 6 weeks of treatment, persons in the multiple-dose groups had reductions in levels of ANGPTL3 protein (reductions of 46.6 to 84.5% from baseline, P<0.01 for all doses vs. placebo) and in levels of triglycerides (reductions of 33.2 to 63.1%), LDL cholesterol (1.3 to 32.9%), very-low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (27.9 to 60.0%), non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (10.0 to 36.6%), apolipoprotein B (3.4 to 25.7%), and apolipoprotein C-III (18.9 to 58.8%). Three participants who received the antisense oligonucleotide and three who received placebo reported dizziness or headache. There were no serious adverse events.Conclusions: Oligonucleotides targeting mouse Angptl3 retarded the progression of atherosclerosis and reduced levels of atherogenic lipoproteins in mice. Use of the same strategy to target human ANGPTL3 reduced levels of atherogenic lipoproteins in humans. (Funded by Ionis Pharmaceuticals; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT02709850 .). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most motion correction methods work by aligning a set of volumes together, or to a volume that represents a reference location. These are based on an implicit assumption that the subject remains motionless during the several seconds it takes to acquire all slices in a volume, and that any movement occurs in the brief moment between acquiring the last slice of one volume and the first slice of the next. This is clearly an approximation that can be more or less good depending on how long it takes to acquire one volume and in how rapidly the subject moves. In this paper we present a method that increases the temporal resolution of the motion correction by modelling movement as a piecewise continous function over time. This intra-volume movement correction is implemented within a previously presented framework that simultaneously estimates distortions, movement and movement-induced signal dropout. We validate the method on highly realistic simulated data containing all of these effects. It is demonstrated that we can estimate the true movement with high accuracy, and that scalar parameters derived from the data, such as fractional anisotropy, are estimated with greater fidelity when data has been corrected for intra-volume movement. Importantly, we also show that the difference in fidelity between data affected by different amounts of movement is much reduced when taking intra-volume movement into account. Additional validation was performed on data from a healthy volunteer scanned when lying still and when performing deliberate movements. We show an increased correspondence between the “still” and the “movement” data when the latter is corrected for intra-volume movement. Finally we demonstrate a big reduction in the telltale signs of intra-volume movement in data acquired on elderly subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global production networks (GPNs) have become a key framework in conceptualizing linkages, power and structure in globalized production. However, this framework has been less successful in integrating the influence of digital information and ICTs in production, and this problematic in a world where relationships and power are increasingly mediated by digital information flows and resources. We thus look to adapt the GPN framework to allow more substantive analysis of 'the digital'. Primarily, this is done through a theoretical analysis of the three core categories of the GPN framework - embeddedness, value and networks - to highlight how these categories can better integrate a more dynamic and contested conceptualization of the digital. Illustrations from research on the digitalization of tea sector GPNs in East Africa highlight how these theoretical advances provide new insights on the digital and its expanding role in economic production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of search engines to shape our understandings of the world by controlling what people discover when looking for information is well known. We argue that the power of search engines has become further entrenched in the wake of the current move to restructure the Web according to the logics of ‘linked data’ and the ‘semantic Web’. With the goal of sharing information according to structured formats that computers (rather than humans) can easily process and analyse, linked data engineers are abstracting information from fact sharing websites like Wikipedia into short, uniform statements that can be more efficiently shared, compared and analysed. In response to this enhanced power by search engines and the corresponding loss of agency by ordinary users, some Wikipedians have challenged the ways in which data from the encyclopedia has been used (often without credit) by search engines like Google. Using the capabilities approach first developed by Amartya Sen, we interrogate exactly what some Wikipedians believe they are losing when they complain about how Google represents facts about the world obtained from Wikipedia and other sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its great potential in studying brain anatomy and structure, diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) is marred by artefacts more than any other commonly used MRI technique. In this paper we present a non-parametric framework for detecting and correcting dMRI outliers (signal loss) caused by subject motion. Signal loss (dropout) affecting a whole slice, or a large connected region of a slice, is frequently observed in diffusion weighted images, leading to a set of unusable measurements. This is caused by bulk (subject or physiological) motion during the diffusion encoding part of the imaging sequence. We suggest a method to detect slices affected by signal loss and replace them by a non-parametric prediction, in order to minimise their impact on subsequent analysis. The outlier detection and replacement, as well as correction of other dMRI distortions (susceptibility-induced distortions, eddy currents (EC) and subject motion) are performed within a single framework, allowing the use of an integrated approach for distortion correction. Highly realistic simulations have been used to evaluate the method with respect to its ability to detect outliers (types 1 and 2 errors), the impact of outliers on retrospective correction of movement and distortion and the impact on estimation of commonly used diffusion tensor metrics, such as fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD). Data from a large imaging project studying older adults (the Whitehall Imaging sub-study) was used to demonstrate the utility of the method when applied to datasets with severe subject movement. The results indicate high sensitivity and specificity for detecting outliers and that their deleterious effects on FA and MD can be almost completely corrected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mutations in NOTCH 3 are the cause of cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL), a neurological disorder characterized by stroke, and vascular cognitive impairment and dementia. Loss of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC) and accumulation of granular osmiophilic material (GOM) deposits are hallmarks of CADASIL. There are no therapies for CADASIL and experimental endpoints to examine the preclinical efficacy of potential drugs are lacking. This study aims to use a mouse carrying the C455R mutation in Notch 3 to identify biomarkers associated with CADASIL. Mass spectrometry and antibody arrays were used to explore the aorta and blood proteomes of CADASIL mice, ELISA assays were utilized for biomarker validation, a ligand-dependent assay was applied to examine the relationship between Notch signaling and biomarker expression, and retinal histology was performed for quantification of VSMC loss in arteries. Two-hundred day-old mice with the C455R CADASIL mutation in Notch 3 mice display robust VSMC loss in retinal arteries and had increased plasma levels of collagen18α1/endostatin (col18α1) and high-temperature requirement A serine peptidase 1 (HTRA1) and reduced levels of Notch 3 extracellular domain (N3ECD), compared to control wild type mice. Measurements of plasma endostatin, HTRA1 and N3ECD, along with VSMC quantification in retinal arteries, may serve as surrogate endpoints for assessing efficacy in preclinical therapeutic studies of CADASIL using mice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After observing the growth of the Indian and Filipino Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sectors, Kenyan policy-makers and managers made substantial investments in international internet infrastructure and BPO marketing campaigns. While observers continue to discuss the sector in terms of its international work opportunities, in recent years the sector has increasingly focused on contracts sourced from Kenyan and other East African clients. The government has also refocused efforts on attracting international BPO companies. This domestic turn signals both the difficulties of gaining access to overseas work due to the power of incumbents and the increasing use of the internet and ICT-enabled automation within Kenyan organisations. In effect, better connectivity has enabled a two-way globalisation of services: Kenyan BPO companies can access international work opportunities but connectivity has also contributed to the inflow of international business practices into Kenya. The conclusion examines what these shifts might entail for the sector and its workers in future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information about the roundtable discussion presented at the European Association of Social Anthropologists' biennial conference held in Tallinn, Estonia on July 31 through August 3, 2014 is presented. The aim of the discussion explores the meaning of anthropology for LGBT people and its contribution to the discipline after its emergence in the academia. The discussion was participated by several anthropologists including Paul Boyce, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, and EJ Gonzalez-Polledo.

In this paper we demonstrate a simulation framework that enables the direct and quantitative comparison of post-processing methods for diffusion weighted magnetic resonance (DW-MR) images. DW-MR datasets are employed in a range of techniques that enable estimates of local microstructure and global connectivity in the brain. These techniques require full alignment of images across the dataset, but this is rarely the case. Artefacts such as eddy-current (EC) distortion and motion lead to misalignment between images, which compromise the quality of the microstructural measures obtained from them. Numerous methods and software packages exist to correct these artefacts, some of which have become de-facto standards, but none have been subject to rigorous validation. In the literature, improved alignment is assessed using either qualitative visual measures or quantitative surrogate metrics. Here we introduce a simulation framework that allows for the direct, quantitative assessment of techniques, enabling objective comparisons of existing and future methods. DW-MR datasets are generated using a process that is based on the physics of MRI acquisition, which allows for the salient features of the images and their artefacts to be reproduced. We apply this framework in three ways. Firstly we assess the most commonly used method for artefact correction, FSL's eddy_correct, and compare it to a recently proposed alternative, eddy. We demonstrate quantitatively that using eddy_correct leads to significant errors in the corrected data, whilst eddy is able to provide much improved correction. Secondly we investigate the datasets required to achieve good correction with eddy, by looking at the minimum number of directions required and comparing the recommended full-sphere acquisitions to equivalent half-sphere protocols. Finally, we investigate the impact of correction quality by examining the fits from microstructure models to real and simulated data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are now more than 3 billion Internet users on our planet. The connections afforded to all of those people, in theory, allow for an unprecedented amount of communication and public participation. The goal of this article is to examine how those potentials match up to actual patterns of participation. By focusing on Wikipedia, the world's largest and most used repository of user-generated content, we are able to gain important insights into the geographies of voice and participation. This article shows that the relative democratization of the Internet has not brought about a concurrent democratization of voice and participation. Despite the fact that it is widely used around the world, Wikipedia is characterized by highly uneven geographies of participation. The goal of highlighting these inequalities is not to suggest that they are insurmountable. Our regression analysis shows that the availability of broadband is a clear factor in the propensity of people to participate on Wikipedia. The relationship is not a linear one, though. As a country approaches levels of connectivity above about 450,000 broadband Internet connections, the ability of broadband access to positively affect participation keeps increasing. Complicating this issue is the fact that participation from the world's economic peripheries tends to focus on editing about the world's cores rather than their own local regions. These results ultimately point to an informational magnetism that is cast by the world's economic cores, virtuous and vicious cycles that make it difficult to reconfigure networks and hierarchies of knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses and compares two transformative moments of technologically mediated change in East Africa, the construction of the Uganda railway between Mombasa and Lake Victoria (1896-1903) and the introduction of fibre-optic cables that landed into the ports of Dar Es Salaam and Mombasa in 2009. The paper uses discourse analysis to examine how technologically mediated connectivity has been represented by political and economic actors during these transformative moments. In both cases we explore the origins of the expectations of connectivity and the hope and fear associated with them. Building on Massey's notion of power-geometry and Sheppard's concept of positionality, the paper focuses on power relationships in discussions of connectivity and asks how people understand the abilities of transformative technologies to modify positionalities and alter relational distance and proximity. Ultimately, by examining historical and contemporary expectations of connectivity in East Africa, this paper works towards more grounded and historicised understandings of the coming-together of technology and connectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gazetteers are dictionaries of geographic place-names that have important implications far beyond the worlds of geographers and cartographers. By containing ‘definitive’ lists of places, gazetteers have the ontological power to define what will and will not be geocoded and represented in databases, maps, search engines, and ultimately our spatial understandings of place. This paper focuses attention on GeoNames, which is the world's largest freely available and widely used gazetteer. We illustrate how content in GeoNames is characterised by highly uneven spatial distributions. There are dense clusters of place-names in some parts of the world and a relative absence of geographic content in others. These patterns are related not just to the wealth and population size of a country, but also to its policies on Internet access and open data. The paper then traces some of the specific implications of this information inequality: showing how biases in gazetteers are propagated in a variety of geographic meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E ast A frica has traditionally been characterized by stark b arriers to nonproximate communication and flows of information. It was the world's last major region without fibre-optic b roadband Internet access, and until the summer of 2009 had been forced to rely on slow and costly satellite connectivity. This all changed when the first of four fibreoptic cables was connected in Kenya: bringing with it the promise of fast and affordable Internet access for the masses, and the ability of the country to move towards a knowledgebased economy. Within the context of this moment of change, this paper explores the ways that managers of outsourcing firms envisage 'connectivity.' Over the course of forty-one interviews, contradictory spatial imaginaries were discovered. When describing their perceptions of the country's new technomediated positionalities, many interviewees repeated visions that allowed geographic frictions to evaporate. But when managers were asked about their actual mediated positionalities, they presented a very different world: one of barriers, frictions, and the very real role that distance continues to play in the world's economic peripheries. The goal of this paper is to interrogate why we see such stark disconnects between perceptions and practices of connectivity. The contradictions could be seen as an exposition of a scalar schism between internationally operating regimes of tru th (ie, powerful discourses that have their origin nonlocally) and local experiences and practices in Kenya. Alternatively, we can think about the contradictory accounts of connectivity as emergent from strategic spatial essentialisms that are practised to achieve particular goals. By focusing on the contradictions embedded into the ways in which people speak about connectivity in the Kenyan outsourcing sector, we can learn much about how arguments about the entanglement of connectivity, growth, and development are operationalized. 'Connectivity' is offered as a necessary, and sometimes even sufficient, condition from which growth and economic development can be brought into being: a set of spatial imaginaries th a t conveniently support a national development strategy of remaking Kenya in the contemporary knowledge economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hypertriglyceridemia is a common feature of many metabolic disorders and has been identified as risk factor for cardiovascular disease. ApoC-III is commonly associated with triglyceride rich lipoproteins and has been identified as a potent modulator of plasma TG levels. The purpose of this review is to provide background on apoC-III and its role in the regulation of plasma TG and lipoprotein metabolism and to highlight preclinical and genetic evidence supporting apoC-III as a central target in cardiovascular disease progression. Finally, recent results from clinical trials evaluating a second generation antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) inhibitor of apoC-III will be summarized and the potential impact such a drug could have in the treatment of hypertriglyceridemia and associated comorbidities will be highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]