Se presenta aquí la primera traducción al castellano del prefacio al Shi jizhuan 詩集傳 (Comentarios escogidos a la poesía), del pensador neoconfuciano Zhu Xi, en el que se ofrece una explicación condensada del papel menor y un tanto controversial que Zhu atribuye a la poesía lírica —y más globalmente, a los Cinco cánones chinos— respecto del estudio de la Vía; como tal, ofrece una mirada panorámica de la visión de Zhu sobre la canonicidad del Shijing 詩經 (Canon de la poesía), sus dimensiones tropológicas e históricas y los principios morales y epistemológicos que le subyacen. Así, esta traducción apunta no sólo a hacer el pensamiento poético de Zhu Xi accesible al mundo hispanohablante, sino también a ofrecer un punto de acceso a su epistemología y a su estética.
Solomon Debela Bekeko, Teshome Demis Nimani, Samuel Demissie Darcho
et al.
IntroductionThese individuals face psychological and physical trauma, loss of jobs, and emotional isolation, which may lead to the development of depression and anxiety. In 2022, 120 countries had over 71 million IDPs, a 20% increase from the previous year. In sub-Saharan Africa, natural disasters accounted for 40% of all new IDPs worldwide.MethodAn institutional-based cross-sectional study was conducted in Ethiopia. A systematic random sampling method was used to select 997 respondents. Data were collected using a structured interview questionnaire. STATA Version 17 and Amos Version 21 were used for the analysis. Descriptive statistics were summarized using frequency, percentage, table, graph, chart, figure, and summary statistics. Structural equation modeling was employed to assess the relationship.ResultThe overall prevalence of depression and anxiety was 79.64% (95% CI: 77.02 82.03) and 74.62% (95% CI =71.83%, 77.23%) respectively. age (adjusted β = 0.0034, 95% CI: 0.0012, 0.0056), history of the death of a loved one (adjusted β = 0.132, 95% CI: 0.0803, 0.185), had formal education (β = -0.164, 95% CI: -0.229, -0.098) occupation other (adjusted β = -0.183, 95% CI: -0.261, -0.105), Not having medically confirmed mental illness (adjusted β = -0.185, 95% CI: (-0.325, -0.045), PTSD score (adjusted β = 0.0082, 95% CI: 0.0048, 0.012) associated with anxiety.ConclusionDisplacement medically confirmed mental illness, death of a loved one, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) significantly impact anxiety. Policymakers should provide greater access to mental health management and prevention services, and medical practitioners should understand the connection between depression and anxiety.
This study argues that the Banyamulenge—a Tutsi-descended minority in South Kivu, DRC—have had their ethnic identity historically shaped by migration, contested citizenship, and regional wars. Based on fieldwork in Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC, as well as secondary sources, the article shows how nationality laws, the 1964 Simba Rebellion, the 1994 Vangu Report, and the creation of the Minembwe Commune framed them alternately as insiders and outsiders. While Banyamulenge leaders emphasized territorial belonging to claim Congolese identity, elites and neighboring states politicized it for their own purposes. Interviews reveal that community members, including younger generations, now stress civic belonging and interethnic cooperation, countering depictions of them as outsiders. The study argues that lasting peace in the Great Lakes Region requires inclusive citizenship and accountable institutions rather than ethnic exclusion.
History of Africa, African languages and literature
Oluwole Adewusi, Wallace S. Msagusa, Jean Pierre Imanirumva
et al.
The rapid adoption of Mobile Money Services (MMS) in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) offers a viable path to improve e-Government service accessibility in the face of persistent low internet penetration. However, existing Mobile Money Authentication (MMA) methods face critical limitations, including susceptibility to SIM swapping, weak session protection, and poor scalability during peak demand. This study introduces a hybrid MMA framework that combines Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD)-based multi-factor authentication with secure session management via cryptographically bound JSON Web Tokens (JWT). Unlike traditional MMA systems that rely solely on SIM-PIN verification or smartphone-dependent biometrics, our design implements a three-factor authentication model; SIM verification, PIN entry, and session token binding, tailored for resource-constrained environments. Simulations and comparative analysis against OAuth-based Single Sign-On (SSO) methods reveal a 45% faster authentication time (8 seconds vs. 12 to 15 seconds), 15% higher success under poor network conditions (95% vs. 80%), and increased resistance to phishing and brute-force attacks. Penetration testing and threat modeling further demonstrate a substantial reduction in vulnerability exposure compared to conventional approaches. The primary contributions of this work are: (1) a hybrid authentication protocol that ensures offline accessibility and secure session continuity; (2) a tailored security framework addressing threats like SIM swapping and social engineering in SSA; and (3) demonstrated scalability for thousands of users with reduced infrastructure overhead. The proposed approach advances secure digital inclusion in SSA and other regions with similar constraints.
Autoregressive video generation relies on history context for content consistency and storytelling. As video histories grow longer, efficiently encoding them remains an open problem - particularly for personal users and local workflows where compute and memory budgets are limited. We present a lightweight history encoder that maps long video histories into short-length embeddings, pretrained with a frame query objective that learns to attend to content features at arbitrary temporal positions. The pretraining stage provides the encoder with dense history coverage on large-scale video data; the subsequent finetuning stage adapts the pretrained encoder under an autoregressive video generation objective to establish content-level consistency. In this way, the lightweight embeddings achieve comparable performance to heavier alternatives. We evaluate the framework with ablative settings and discuss the architecture designs.
Chester J. Sands, Chester J. Sands, William P. Goodall-Copestake
et al.
The Southern Ocean benthos is remarkably rich and diverse, and managed under a complexity of treaties and conventions, further complicated by geopolitical boundaries. Traditionally, conservation management is largely informed by species lists augmented, when data are available, by known vulnerability of the taxa. Species presence absence database resources are valuable tools with proven and positive management outcomes, however, in a vast, difficult to access and thus understudied region such as the Southern Ocean, there are large gaps in knowledge regarding the ecology, ecophysiology, life history and even species identity. Conservation biogeography identifies regions of conservation concern, rather than a species-by-species approach, but also relies on the availability of high-quality presence data from species lists and thus both approaches are undermined when species lists are inaccurate or species in general are poorly described. In addition, the data provide a snapshot of the current species diversity and have inadequate power to identify the processes underlying the patterns uncovered. Identifying historical processes common to shaping diversity (species or genetic) can be generalized across assemblages and regions, providing a more robust basis for conservation policy and decisions. In this study, largely based on consideration of Southern Ocean ophiuroids, we discuss the challenges inherent in using species lists, the power and limitations of genetic analyses, and revisit previous suggestions of building a spatial model of diversity that includes underlying evolutionary relationships transcending the simple species diversity approach, and that is applicable to assemblages, rather than just to individual taxa.
Se-eun Yoon, Ahmad Bin Rabiah, Zaid Alibadi
et al.
Customers reach out to online live chat agents with various intents, such as asking about product details or requesting a return. In this paper, we propose the problem of predicting user intent from browsing history and address it through a two-stage approach. The first stage classifies a user's browsing history into high-level intent categories. Here, we represent each browsing history as a text sequence of page attributes and use the ground-truth class labels to fine-tune pretrained Transformers. The second stage provides a large language model (LLM) with the browsing history and predicted intent class to generate fine-grained intents. For automatic evaluation, we use a separate LLM to judge the similarity between generated and ground-truth intents, which closely aligns with human judgments. Our two-stage approach yields significant performance gains compared to generating intents without the classification stage.
Hindu Namyalo, Joyce Nankumbi, Tom Dennis Ngabirano
Background: The most cited reason for early cessation or reduced exclusivity of breastfeeding is perceived breastmilk insufficiency. However, minimal work has been reported on perceived breast milk insufficiency, especially in Africa, where the practice of EBF remains low, hence the need to conduct the study. Objective: This study aimed at identifying the prevalence and factors associated with perceived breast milk insufficiency. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted among 180 mother-baby dyads with infants less than six months of age. The mothers attended an infant and young child clinic (IYCC) at an urban facility in Kampala. Data were collected using a structured interviewer-administered questionnaire using a systematic sampling procedure. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression were the major analysis techniques. Results: The prevalence of perceived breast milk insufficiency was (26 %). The reported indicators for PMI were; infant not gaining enough weight (38 %) and infant crying even after breastfeeding (38 %). Mothers who were unmarried (aOR = 0.18; 95 % CI = 0.05–0.61), and mothers who consumed less than two liters of fluid daily (aOR = 0.045; 95 % CI = 0.005–0.37) were more likely to experience perceived breast milk insufficiency. There is a need for continued reassurance and professional support for women to breastfeed their babies successfully.
Lesley Gittings, Christopher Colvin, Rebecca Hodes
Men are less vulnerable to HIV acquisition than women, but have poorer HIV-related health outcomes. They access HIV services less, and are more likely to die on antiretroviral therapy. The adolescent epidemic presents further challenges, and AIDS-related illness is the leading cause of death among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa. We explored the health practices of adolescent boys and young men (aged 13–22) living with perinatally-acquired HIV and the processes through which these practices are formed and sustained. We engaged health-focused life history narratives (n = 35), semi-structured interviews (n = 32) and analysis of health facility files (n = 41), alongside semi-structured interviews with traditional and biomedical health practitioners (n = 14) in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Participants did not access traditional products and services for HIV, a finding that deviates from much of the literature. Findings suggest that health practices are mediated not only by gender and culture, but also childhood experiences of growing up deeply embedded in the biomedical health system.
Illustrated manuscripts in the Ethiopic language, as material objects that carry textual and visual information, are among the most valuable sources of data for art historians specializing in this area. This article provides a handlist of illustrated early Solomonic manuscripts housed in German libraries and museums. The contribution was created within the framework of the AHRC-DFG project Demarginalizing medieval Africa: Images, texts, and identity in early Solomonic Ethiopia (1270–1527) so our data reflects the project’s research focus on visual matter. This is the first time that the illuminations of the manuscripts included in the handlist are analysed comprehensively. We believe that the resulting work sheds new light on the history of book illustration in early Solomonic Ethiopia and hope that it will provide researchers with a valuable instrument to foster comparative research and a more integrative approach to the study of Ethiopian art.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Philology. Linguistics
Thousands of users consult digital archives daily, but the information they can access is unrepresentative of the diversity of documentary history. The sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for optical character recognition (OCR) - which jointly learns a vision and language model - is poorly extensible to low-resource document collections, as learning a language-vision model requires extensive labeled sequences and compute. This study models OCR as a character level image retrieval problem, using a contrastively trained vision encoder. Because the model only learns characters' visual features, it is more sample efficient and extensible than existing architectures, enabling accurate OCR in settings where existing solutions fail. Crucially, the model opens new avenues for community engagement in making digital history more representative of documentary history.
We argue that observations of the reionization history can be used as a probe of primordial density fluctuations, particularly on small scales. Although the primordial curvature perturbations are well constrained from measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and large-scale structure, these observational data probe the curvature perturbations only on large scales, and hence its information on smaller scales will give us further insight on primordial fluctuations. Since the formation of early galaxies is sensitive to the amplitude of small-scale perturbations, and then, in turn, gives an impact on the reionization history, one can probe the primordial power spectrum on small scales through observations of reionization. In this work, we focus on the running spectral indices of the primordial power spectrum to characterize the small-scale perturbations, and investigate their impact on the reionization history using the numerical code \texttt{21cmFAST}, which adopts a simple but commonly used reionization model. We also derive the constraints on the running spectral indices from observations of the reionization history indicated by the luminosity function of the Lyman-$α$ emitters. We show that the reionization history, in combination with large-scale observations such as CMB, would be a useful tool to investigate primordial density fluctuations.
Salt has been extracted since prehistoric times in many regions of sub‐Saharan Africa and from a variety of marine sites, inland riverine, lake, marsh, and land deposits, and plant ash. Early techniques were employed seasonally and relied on both solar evaporation and boiling, using basketry and sometimes pottery for the refining processes. Salt was used in animal husbandry, tanning, dyeing, food preservation, and culinary recipes. Exploitation of salt resources resulted in opportunities for long‐distance trade that became the foundation for identity formation, population growth, and political development. References to salt and the salt trade are found in written records, proverbs, toponyms, and the evidence from archaeological investigations and historical linguistics.
Pentecostal phenomenon from history has always moved with migration. Reading Acts 1:8, Jesus linked the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the migration of his disciples and the gospel from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. Migration has become a worldwide, multi-directional phenomenon which is reshaping the Christian landscape. In this light, the article discussed Pentecostalism and migration by using two Ghanaian Classical Pentecostal churches in South Africa as a case study. The article looked at their history, leadership development, transfer of missionaries from Ghana and its implications, their concept of contextualisation as well as some of their impact in South Africa. The article submits that it is time for both churches to start thinking of decolonising their foreign mission churches by helping them have autonomous status.
Contribution: The article contributes to the on-going body of knowledge and research on migration with special emphasis on African classical Pentecostalism and migration. The study used Ghanaian Classical Pentecostal Churches in South Africa as a case study.
Critical scholarship investigating media and the Arab uprisings has called for “a return to history.” This article argues that researching the contemporary constraints and opportunities of social movement media in the Arab region requires historicizing such practices. Reflecting on the role of media activism within the Arab uprisings necessitates broadening the historical context of social movement media in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region by investigating the diversity of media tactics and alternative political economies mobilized to resist the military-industrial communications complex. This article develops a political economy framework to historicize social movement media practices from Chiapas to Palestine and provides a critical reflection on the use of media for revolution before and beyond the Arab uprisings. Learning from the long and global history of revolutionary media struggle is beneficial to media activists and researchers working in the MENA region.
Jan Zapletal, Raphael Watschinger, Günther Of
et al.
The presented paper concentrates on the boundary element method (BEM) for the heat equation in three spatial dimensions. In particular, we deal with tensor product space-time meshes allowing for quadrature schemes analytic in time and numerical in space. The spatial integrals can be treated by standard BEM techniques known from three dimensional stationary problems. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, we provide temporal antiderivatives of the heat kernel necessary for the assembly of BEM matrices and the evaluation of the representation formula. Secondly, the presented approach has been implemented in a publicly available library besthea allowing researchers to reuse the formulae and BEM routines straightaway. The results are validated by numerical experiments in an HPC environment.
In evolutionary algorithms, genetic operators iteratively generate new offspring which constitute a potentially valuable set of search history. To boost the performance of crossover in real-coded genetic algorithm (RCGA), in this paper we propose to exploit the search history cached so far in an online style during the iteration. Specifically, survivor individuals over past few generations are collected and stored in the archive to form the search history. We introduce a simple yet effective crossover model driven by the search history (abbreviated as SHX). In particular, the search history is clustered and each cluster is assigned a score for SHX. In essence, the proposed SHX is a data-driven method which exploits the search history to perform offspring selection after the offspring generation. Since no additional fitness evaluations are needed, SHX is favorable for the tasks with limited budget or expensive fitness evaluations. We experimentally verify the effectiveness of SHX over 4 benchmark functions. Quantitative results show that our SHX can significantly enhance the performance of RCGA, in terms of accuracy.