Brenda Mbabazi, Patience Muwanguzi, Connie Olwit
et al.
Aim/objective: This study explored the experiences of final-year nursing and midwifery students at Mulago School of Nursing and Midwifery during their clinical placements. Background: Preceptorship plays a critical role in bridging the gap between theoretical learning and clinical practice in nursing and midwifery education. Design: A qualitative exploratory study design was conducted. Methods: Data were collected through six focus group discussions with final-year students and thematically analyzed using a deductive approach informed by the Preceptorship Framework. Results: Core themes as guided by the preceptorship framework included: communication, collaboration, contribution, commitment, competence and confidence. Students described preceptorship as an opportunity to engage in hands-on practice under the guidance of experienced professionals. Collaborative relationships with preceptors and other healthcare team members contributed to a sense of inclusion and learning through shared responsibilities. Students reported gaining confidence through progressive exposure to clinical tasks, supported decision-making, and constructive feedback. The development of clinical competence was closely linked to consistent mentorship, opportunities to observe best practices, and gradually assuming independent roles. Despite the experiences, some negative aspects of the experience emerged. Students reported being inadequately supervised or feeling used as substitutes for regular staff, which compromised the intended learning experience. Others expressed difficulty navigating inconsistent expectations and limited access to supportive mentors. These tensions, at times, created anxiety and hindered their ability to benefit from the clinical learning environment fully. Conclusions: These findings underscore the importance of strengthening the preceptorship structure to ensure consistent, learner-focused support that facilitates meaningful professional development in clinical settings.
Heidi Prozesky, Francois van Schalkwyk, Johann Mouton
This report provides the first comprehensive analysis of postdoctoral research fellows (postdocs) in South African public universities. It combines an analysis of existing data with the analysis of primary data collected in the form of a survey of institutions on the postdocs they host, a bibliometric study of the research output of postdocs, and an individual survey of postdocs. The number of postdocs has been increasing steadily from 2016 to 2022 and varies across universities, with larger research-intensive universities hosting more postdocs. In terms of demographics, the proportion of black African postdocs has increased; the proportion of female postdocs has remained lower than that of males; there is an increasing proportion of older postdocs; and more than 60 percent of postdocs are foreign-born. The bibliometric analysis of the publication output of postdocs shows that it increased substantially from 2005 to 2022. Some main results of the individual survey are that a postdoc position is taken primarily to enhance prospects for employment in a permanent academic position. However, securing such positions is reported as challenging, which is supported by results that one in every four postdocs has held multiple consecutive postdoc positions, and postdocs in general, but especially non-South Africans, perceive the job market as poor. Postdocs plan to leave South Africa primarily to seek better job opportunities, but also due to immigration rules or visa issues, which constitute major challenges for non-South Africans. Most postdocs desire to contribute to teaching and supervision but often lack the opportunity to do so. Dissatisfaction stems mostly from low levels of remuneration, difficulties created by the precarious nature of their positions and a lack of support for training and career development in their hosting institutions.
Robert Benassai-Dalmau, Vasiliki Voukelatou, Rossano Schifanella
et al.
Food market accessibility is a critical yet underexplored dimension of food systems, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Here, we present a continent-wide assessment of spatial food market accessibility in Africa, integrating open geospatial data from OpenStreetMap and the World Food Programme. We compare three complementary metrics: travel time to the nearest market, market availability within a 30-minute threshold, and an entropy-based measure of spatial distribution, to quantify accessibility across diverse settings. Our analysis reveals pronounced disparities: rural and economically disadvantaged populations face substantially higher travel times, limited market reach, and less spatial redundancy. These accessibility patterns align with socioeconomic stratification, as measured by the Relative Wealth Index, and moderately correlate with food insecurity levels, assessed using the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. Overall, results suggest that access to food markets plays a relevant role in shaping food security outcomes and reflects broader geographic and economic inequalities. This framework provides a scalable, data-driven approach for identifying underserved regions and supporting equitable infrastructure planning and policy design across diverse African contexts.
Language models have led to a leap forward in web automation. The current web automation approaches take the current web state, history actions, and language instruction as inputs to predict the next action, overlooking the importance of history states. However, the highly verbose nature of web page states can result in long input sequences and sparse information, hampering the effective utilization of history states. In this paper, we propose a novel web history compressor approach to turbocharge web automation using history states. Our approach employs a history compressor module that distills the most task-relevant information from each history state into a fixed-length short representation, mitigating the challenges posed by the highly verbose history states. Experiments are conducted on the Mind2Web and WebLINX datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Results show that our approach obtains 1.2-5.4% absolute accuracy improvements compared to the baseline approach without history inputs.
Se presenta una interpretación del poema “Ka-Ḥādiṯatin Ġāmiḍatin” (Como un incidente misterioso), de Mahmud Darwish, con base en una traducción personal (árabe-español) del poema y en la filosofía de Martin Heidegger sobre lenguaje y poesía, así como en el concepto de escritor comprometido de Jean-Paul Sartre. El poema explora el significado y la creación de la poesía. Sus versos contienen comentarios esperanzadores que el poeta griego Yanis Ritsos dirigió a Palestina hace más de treinta años y que vuelven a adquirir valor en las condiciones actuales en esa región.
Advances in Artificial Intelligence are challenged by the biases rooted in the datasets used to train the models. In image geolocation estimation, models are mostly trained using data from specific geographic regions, notably the Western world, and as a result, they may struggle to comprehend the complexities of underrepresented regions. To assess this issue, we apply a state-of-the-art image geolocation estimation model (ISNs) to a crowd-sourced dataset of geolocated images from the African continent (SCA100), and then explore the regional and socioeconomic biases underlying the model's predictions. Our findings show that the ISNs model tends to over-predict image locations in high-income countries of the Western world, which is consistent with the geographic distribution of its training data, i.e., the IM2GPS3k dataset. Accordingly, when compared to the IM2GPS3k benchmark, the accuracy of the ISNs model notably decreases at all scales. Additionally, we cluster images of the SCA100 dataset based on how accurately they are predicted by the ISNs model and show the model's difficulties in correctly predicting the locations of images in low income regions, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, our results suggest that using IM2GPS3k as a training set and benchmark for image geolocation estimation and other computer vision models overlooks its potential application in the African context.
This paper explores the potential of contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) as a new tool in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS) for studying contextual and evolving meanings of scientific concepts. Using the term "Planck" as a test case, I evaluate five BERT-based models with varying degrees of domain-specific pretraining, including my custom model Astro-HEP-BERT, trained on the Astro-HEP Corpus, a dataset containing 21.84 million paragraphs from 600,000 articles in astrophysics and high-energy physics. For this analysis, I compiled two labeled datasets: (1) the Astro-HEP-Planck Corpus, consisting of 2,900 labeled occurrences of "Planck" sampled from 1,500 paragraphs in the Astro-HEP Corpus, and (2) a physics-related Wikipedia dataset comprising 1,186 labeled occurrences of "Planck" across 885 paragraphs. Results demonstrate that the domain-adapted models outperform the general-purpose ones in disambiguating the target term, predicting its known meanings, and generating high-quality sense clusters, as measured by a novel purity indicator I developed. Additionally, this approach reveals semantic shifts in the target term over three decades in the unlabeled Astro-HEP Corpus, highlighting the emergence of the Planck space mission as a dominant sense. The study underscores the importance of domain-specific pretraining for analyzing scientific language and demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of adapting pretrained models for HPSS research. By offering a scalable and transferable method for modeling the meanings of scientific concepts, CWEs open up new avenues for investigating the socio-historical dynamics of scientific discourses.
In this paper, we revisit Johanna Drucker's question, "Is there a digital art history?" -- posed exactly a decade ago -- in the light of the emergence of large-scale, transformer-based vision models. While more traditional types of neural networks have long been part of digital art history, and digital humanities projects have recently begun to use transformer models, their epistemic implications and methodological affordances have not yet been systematically analyzed. We focus our analysis on two main aspects that, together, seem to suggest a coming paradigm shift towards a "digital" art history in Drucker's sense. On the one hand, the visual-cultural repertoire newly encoded in large-scale vision models has an outsized effect on digital art history. The inclusion of significant numbers of non-photographic images allows for the extraction and automation of different forms of visual logics. Large-scale vision models have "seen" large parts of the Western visual canon mediated by Net visual culture, and they continuously solidify and concretize this canon through their already widespread application in all aspects of digital life. On the other hand, based on two technical case studies of utilizing a contemporary large-scale visual model to investigate basic questions from the fields of art history and urbanism, we suggest that such systems require a new critical methodology that takes into account the epistemic entanglement of a model and its applications. This new methodology reads its corpora through a neural model's training data, and vice versa: the visual ideologies of research datasets and training datasets become entangled.
Neural Language Models (LMs) offer an exciting solution for general-purpose embodied control. However, a key technical issue arises when using an LM-based controller: environment observations must be converted to text, which coupled with history, results in long and verbose textual prompts. As a result, prior work in LM agents is limited to restricted domains with small observation size as well as minimal needs for interaction history or instruction tuning. In this paper, we introduce diff history, a simple and highly effective solution to these issues. By applying the Unix diff command on consecutive text observations in the interaction histories used to prompt LM policies, we can both abstract away redundant information and focus the content of textual inputs on the salient changes in the environment. On NetHack, an unsolved video game that requires long-horizon reasoning for decision-making, LMs tuned with diff history match state-of-the-art performance for neural agents while needing 1800x fewer training examples compared to prior work. Even on the simpler BabyAI-Text environment with concise text observations, we find that although diff history increases the length of prompts, the representation it provides offers a 25% improvement in the efficiency of low-sample instruction tuning. Further, we show that diff history scales favorably across different tuning dataset sizes. We open-source our code and data to https://diffhistory.github.io.
Due to the unfavourable climatic conditions in Qatar during summertime, the FIFA World Cup 2022 will be played during on-going seasons of the major European leagues. This study investigates how national teams' tournaments scheduled at such a time window impact the playing time of released players, using data from the Africa Cups of Nations (AFCON). For 262 internationals playing at the 2013, 2015 and 2021 AFCON, we compared the share of possible games and minutes played before and after the tournament using Mann-Whitney-U tests. We found a significant decrease of 3.3% for games (p=.029, CL_Effect_Size=44.5%) and 3.1% for minutes played respectively (p=.018, CL_Effect_Size=44.9%). For a subsample of 163 players, which played for the same club the preceding seasons, we found that these players tend to have played more in the second half of the previous season, resulting in a net decrease of 6.8% for games (p=.011, CL_Effect_Size=42.3%) and 7.1% for minutes played (p=.007, CL_Effect_Size=41.9%). Conclusions for the FIFA World Cup 2022 should only be drawn carefully as the number of released players was comparatively low. However, the findings give some indication that releasing clubs might suffer the rest of the season after this tournament.
Cloud computing is a technology that has become increasingly popular over the past decade within several enterprises. This popularity can be attributed to its benefits, including lower operating costs, improved computational capabilities, increased flexibility and on-demand storage space. As a result, many enterprises are already in various Cloud Computing (CC) adoption and implementation stages. This study investigates the decision criteria used by large enterprises in South Africa (SA) for the adoption of cloud technology. The majority of large enterprises have comprehensive resources, resulting in established Information Technology (IT) systems and infrastructure set up within their organizations. Though this is the case, the adoption of CC by large enterprises has been on the rise. This may not be a surprise as CC literature points out to benefits and influencers of CC adoption. However, the decision criteria used by large enterprises in SA in adopting CC are lacking in the literature reviewed. The study followed an inductive approach making use of qualitative methods. Findings revealed that large enterprises do not make use of a formalized or standardized decision criteria. However, operational cost, enterprise strategic intent and product efficiency formed key criteria for adopting CC. In addition, security, cloud service provider adoption frameworks and data sovereignty were the key criteria used to select a CC service provider. The research will contribute towards CC technology adoption literature, particularly for developing countries.
The growth of the Internet and its associated technologies; including digital services have tremendously impacted our society. However, scholars have noted a trend in data flow and collection; and have alleged mass surveillance and digital supremacy. To this end therefore, nations of the world such as Russia, China, Germany, Canada, France and Brazil among others have taken steps toward changing the narrative. The question now is, should Africans join these giants in this school of thought on digital sovereignty or fold their hands to remain on the other side of the divide? This question among others are the main reasons that provoked the thoughts of putting this paper together. This is with a view to demystifying the strategies to reconfigure data infrastructure in the context of Africa. It also highlights the benefits of digital technologies and its propensity to foster all round development in the continent as it relates to economic face-lift, employment creation, national security, among others. There is therefore a need for African nations to design appropriate blueprint to ensure security of her digital infrastructure and the flow of data within her cyber space. In addition, a roadmap in the immediate, short- and long-term in accordance with the framework of African developmental goals should be put in place to guide the implementation.
Abstract Background Positive blood cultures showing Gram positive cocci in clusters signifies either Staphylococcus aureus or the less-virulent coagulase-negative staphylococci. Rapid identification and methicillin susceptibility determination with the Xpert MRSA/SA BC assay can improve management of S. aureus bloodstream infection and reduce inappropriate antibiotic use. Methods We prospectively evaluated the Xpert MRSA/SA BC assay in comparison with culture, on samples referred to our laboratory in the Western Cape, South Africa. We interviewed attending clinicians upon culture result availability, to assess antibiotic choices and estimate potential impact of the assay. Results Of the 231 samples included, there was 100% concordance between the Xpert MRSA/SA BC assay and culture (methicillin-resistant S. aureus 15/15, methicillin-susceptible S. aureus 42/42, coagulase-negative staphylococci 170/170). Time to final result could be reduced by approximately 30 h with the assay. Of the 178 patients with adequate antibiotic history, optimisation of antistaphylococcal therapy could have occurred more than 1 day sooner in 68.9% with S. aureus bloodstream infection (31/45, 95% CI 53.2–81.4%). Six of the 11 patients with methicillin-resistant S. aureus bloodstream infection (54.5%) could have received anti-MRSA cover sooner. Fifty-four days of antibiotic therapy could have been spared, equating to 0.3 days (95% CI, 0.2–0.4) saved per patient, driven by broad-spectrum beta-lactams (32 days, in 18.0% of the cohort). Conclusion This assay has potential as an antimicrobial stewardship tool; costing and impact on clinical outcome in patients with S. aureus bloodstream infection should be assessed.
SLEDZEVSKII Igor Vasilevich, KHAYRULLIN Timur Radikovich
The paper is the result of a conference held on December 9, 2020 by the Center for Civilizational and Regional Studies of the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the topic «The Role of Christianity and Islam in the civilizational development of Modern Africa».The conference program consisted of three working sessions. The problems of the organized conference went beyond the issues stated for discussion and were of an interdisciplinary nature. In particular, several conflict points were identified that arose during the events of the Arab Spring and have not been resolved until today. First of all, this is the problem of radical Islamism, which is actively manifested in the region of Northern and Tropical Africa. The problem of the forms and features of Christianity as one of the most important confessions of modern Africa received special attention at the conference. The problem of the clash of secular and religious trends in the civilizational development of post-colonial Africa turned out to be of no small importance.
The structure of the paper consists of an introduction, which reflects the topic, problems, purpose, as well as the issues stated for discussion, followed by the short theses of the conference participants, representatives of the leading scientific and educational centers of Russia. At the end of the work, a conclusion is given, which summarizes the main results of the conference.
History of Africa, Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology
Hélio Manhica, Paulo Kidayi, Isabella Carelli
et al.
Background: Adolescent pregnancy is a global health problem. In Uganda, the rate of teenage pregnancies is approximately 25% and these are associated with both poor maternal- and perinatal health outcome. Objective: This qualitative case study aimed to examine health workers’ experiences of promoting sustainable health and well-being for pregnant adolescent girls in Uganda. Method: A qualitative study design was used. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews of four health workers working for a Non-Government Organization (NGO) based in Uganda. Data was inductively analyzed by content analysis. Result: Three categories emerged: social structure, organization’s work – rehabilitation and therapy, and outcome. Healthcare workers worked with health promotion using a person-centered approach, emphasizing therapies and empowerment strategies and an overall faith-based approach. Furthermore, the result showed that girls were abandoned by their families when entering the center, but with help from the NGO they increased their understanding of the girls situation, due to resettlement of plan and follow up made by the health workers. Conclusion: Health workers can promote health and well-being among pregnant adolescent by applying person-centered care, including therapies and empowerment strategies by a faith-based approach. Social structures and families should be encouraged to provide support to pregnant adolescent girls.
As the History of Science Society, which is based in America, holds its annual meeting in Utrecht, one of the key academic centers on the European continent, one may surmise that the field has returned home. Yet, this hardly reflects how today's world of scholarship is constituted: in the historiography of science, 'provincializing Europe' has become an important theme, while the field itself, as is the case across the world of academia, is centered around a predominantly American literature. At the same time, ever since historians of science have emancipated themselves from the sciences a long time ago, they often have appeared, in the public eye, to question rather than to seek to bolster the authority of the sciences. How has this situation come about, and what does it tell us about the world we live in today? What insight is sought and what public benefit is gained by the historical study of science? As we try to answer these questions, we will follow a number of key mid-twentieth century historians--Eduard Dijksterhuis, Thomas Kuhn and Martin Klein--in their Atlantic crossings. Their answers to debates on the constitution of the early modern scientific revolution or the novelty of the work of Max Planck will illustrate how notions of 'center' and 'periphery' have shifted--and what that may tell us about being 'in Europe' today.
Gábor Timár, Rui A. da Costa, Sergey N. Dorogovtsev
et al.
The structure of an evolving network contains information about its past. Extracting this information efficiently, however, is, in general, a difficult challenge. We formulate a fast and efficient method to estimate the most likely history of growing trees, based on exact results on root finding. We show that our linear-time algorithm produces the exact stepwise most probable history in a broad class of tree growth models. Our formulation is able to treat very large trees and therefore allows us to make reliable numerical observations regarding the possibility of root inference and history reconstruction in growing trees. We obtain the general formula $\langle \ln \mathcal{N} \rangle \cong N \ln N - cN$ for the size-dependence of the mean logarithmic number of possible histories of a given tree, a quantity that largely determines the reconstructability of tree histories. We also reveal an uncertainty principle: a relationship between the inferrability of the root and that of the complete history, indicating that there is a tradeoff between the two tasks; the root and the complete history cannot both be inferred with high accuracy at the same time.