What is this thing called Historical Archaeology?

Historical archaeology, in its narrow temporal sense -as an archaeology of the emergence and subsequent evolution of the Modern world- is steadily taking pace in Spanish academia. This paper aims at provoking a more robust debate through understanding how Spanish historical archaeology is placed in the international scene and some of its more relevant particularities. In so doing, the paper also stresses the strong links that have united historical and prehistorical archaeology since its inception, both in relation to the ontological, epistemological and methodological definition of the first as to the influence of socio-political issues in the latter. Such reflection is partly a situated reflection from prehistory as one of the paper’s authors has been a prehistorian for most of her professional life.

La fictohistoria o historiografía imaginaria en las literaturas románicas desde el siglo XIX: ensayo de tipología y panorama de un género formal insospechado (II)

El doble aspecto documental y artístico de la escritura de la historia ha quedado prácticamente oculto por la insistencia en el carácter científico de la disciplina y su expulsión subsiguiente del canon literario desde el siglo XIX. El cultivo de la historiografía ficticia o imaginaria (fictohistoria) surgió entonces como un modo de salvar la literariedad de la historia, en su calidad de género formal, mediante el uso del discurso historiográfico como procedimiento retórico para conseguir un efecto de historicidad en textos que son, no obstante, claramente ficticios, y que tienen a menudo un carácter satírico o admonitorio. Esto no está reñido con el hecho de que la mayoría manifieste en primer lugar una reflexión sobre el devenir de la humanidad, es decir, sobre la Historia. Los ejemplos de este género son relativamente abundantes y se pueden clasificar en varias categorías temáticas. Esta segunda parte del estudio se centra en la historia prospectiva.

Language use and language attitudes in Malawian universities

This study aims to investigate patterns of language use and language attitudes amongst students in Malawian universities. This will highlight whether language issues affect Malawians’ ability to engage with tertiary education. It has been claimed that ineffective language policies in developing countries restrict people’s ability to access systems such as education. As a result, this has a negative impact on their own, and their country's, development. Specifically, Malawi frequently has the lowest rates of university enrolment worldwide and is consistently ranked amongst the world’s poorest countries. Recent language policy changes within Malawi have brought the issue of language use within education to the fore, with increased debate over whether English or indigenous languages are suitable for use in education. Through targeting university students across Malawi’s universities using semistructured interviews, data was collected to illustrate aspects of the sociolinguistic situation within Malawian universities. The results reveal that both English and indigenous languages are used within the university environment, while also suggesting that issues do arise from language use within university. While students recognise both positive and negative aspects of using each language, they are generally more favourable towards the use of English as a medium of instruction within university

SSR genetic diversity assessment of popular pigeonpea varieties in Malawi reveals unique fingerprints

Background: Pigeonpea ( Cajanus cajan L. Millsp.) is a drought tolerant legume of the Fabaceae family and the only cultivated species in the genus Cajanus. It is mainly cultivated in the semi-arid tropics of Asia and Oceania, Africa and America. In Malawi, it is grown as a source of food and income and for soil improvement in intercropping systems. However, varietal contamination due to natural outcrossing causes significant quality reduction and yield losses. In this study, 48 polymorphic SSR markers were used to assess the diversity among all pigeonpea varieties cultivated in Malawi to determine if a genetic fingerprint could be identified to distinguish the popular varieties. Results: A total of 212 alleles were observed with an average of 5.58 alleles per marker and a maximum of 14 alleles produced by CCttc019 (Marker 40). Polymorphic information content (PIC), ranged from 0.03 to 0.89 with an average of 0.30. A neighbor-joining tree produced 4 clusters. The most commonly cultivated varieties, which include released varieties and cultivated land races, were well-spread across all the clusters observed, indicating that they generally represented the genetic diversity available in Malawi, although substantial variation was evident that can still be exploited through further breeding. Conclusion: Screening of the allelic data associated with the five most popular cultivated varieties, revealed 6 markers – CCB1, CCB7, Ccac035, CCttc003, Ccac026 and CCttc019 – which displayed unique allelic profiles for each of the five varieties. This genetic fingerprint can potentially be applied for seed certification to confirm the genetic purity of seeds that are delivered to Malawi farmers.

Subtitling Chinese cinema: a case study of Zhang Yimou’s films

In recent years, more and more Chinese films have been exported abroad. This thesis intends to explore the subtitling of Chinese cinema into English, with Zhang Yimou’s films as a case study. Zhang Yimou is arguably the most critically and internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker, who has experimented with a variety of genres of films. I argue that in the subtitling of his films, there is an obvious adoption of the domestication translation strategy that reduces or even omits Chinese cultural references. I try to discover what cultural categories or perspectives of China are prone to the domestication of translation and have formulated five categories: humour, politeness, dialect, history and songs and the Peking Opera. My methodology is that I compare the source Chinese dialogue lines with the existing English subtitles by providing literal translations of the source lines, and I will also give my alternative translations that tend to retain the source cultural references better. I also speculate that the domestication strategy is frequently employed by subtitlers possibly because the subtitlers assume the source cultural references are difficult for target language subtitle readers to comprehend, even if they are translated into a target language. However, subtitle readers are very likely to understand more than what the dialogue lines and the target language subtitles express, because films are multimodal entities and verbal information is not the only source of information for subtitle readers. The image and the sound are also significant sources of information for subtitle readers who are constantly involved in a dynamic film-watching experience. They are also expected to grasp visual and acoustic information. The complete omission or domestication of source cultural references might also affect their interpretation of the non-verbal cues. I also contemplate that the translation, which frequently domesticates the source culture carried out by a translator who is also a native speaker of the source language, is ‘submissive translation’.

Fire in relation to primitive agriculture and grazing in the Tropics ; annotated bibliography.

Vol. 2 was presented at the Ninth Pacific Science Congress, Bangkok, Thailand, Nov. 18-30, 1957.

Pediatric deceased donation — a report of the Transplantation Society meeting in Geneva

The Ethics Committee of The Transplantation Society convened a meeting on pediatric deceased donation of organs in Geneva, Switzerland, on March 21 to 22, 2014. Thirty-four participants from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, Europe, and North and South America explored the practical and ethical issues pertaining to pediatric deceased donation and developed recommendations for policy and practice. Their expertise was inclusive of pediatric intensive care, internal medicine, and surgery, nursing, ethics, organ donation and procurement, psychology, law, and sociology. The report of the meeting advocates the routine provision of opportunities for deceased donation by pediatric patients and conveys an international call for the development of evidence-based resources needed to inform provision of best practice care in deceased donation for neonates and children.

Worldwide trends in blood pressure from 1975 to 2015: a pooled analysis of 1479 population-based measurement studies with 19·1 million participants

Background: Raised blood pressure is an important risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and chronic kidney disease. We estimated worldwide trends in mean systolic and mean diastolic blood pressure, and the prevalence of, and number of people with, raised blood pressure, defined as systolic blood pressure of 140 mm Hg or higher or diastolic blood pressure of 90 mm Hg or higher. Methods: For this analysis, we pooled national, subnational, or community population-based studies that had measured blood pressure in adults aged 18 years and older. We used a Bayesian hierarchical model to estimate trends from 1975 to 2015 in mean systolic and mean diastolic blood pressure, and the prevalence of raised blood pressure for 200 countries. We calculated the contributions of changes in prevalence versus population growth and ageing to the increase in the number of adults with raised blood pressure. Findings: We pooled 1479 studies that had measured the blood pressures of 19·1 million adults. Global age-standardised mean systolic blood pressure in 2015 was 127·0 mm Hg (95% credible interval 125·7–128·3) in men and 122·3 mm Hg (121·0–123·6) in women; age-standardised mean diastolic blood pressure was 78·7 mm Hg (77·9–79·5) for men and 76·7 mm Hg (75·9–77·6) for women. Global age-standardised prevalence of raised blood pressure was 24·1% (21·4–27·1) in men and 20·1% (17·8–22·5) in women in 2015. Mean systolic and mean diastolic blood pressure decreased substantially from 1975 to 2015 in high-income western and Asia Pacific countries, moving these countries from having some of the highest worldwide blood pressure in 1975 to the lowest in 2015. Mean blood pressure also decreased in women in central and eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and, more recently, central Asia, Middle East, and north Africa, but the estimated trends in these super-regions had larger uncertainty than in high-income super-regions. By contrast, mean blood pressure might have increased in east and southeast Asia, south Asia, Oceania, and sub-Saharan Africa. In 2015, central and eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and south Asia had the highest blood pressure levels. Prevalence of raised blood pressure decreased in high-income and some middle-income countries; it remained unchanged elsewhere. The number of adults with raised blood pressure increased from 594 million in 1975 to 1·13 billion in 2015, with the increase largely in low-income and middle-income countries. The global increase in the number of adults with raised blood pressure is a net effect of increase due to population growth and ageing, and decrease due to declining age-specific prevalence. Interpretation: During the past four decades, the highest worldwide blood pressure levels have shifted from high-income countries to low-income countries in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa due to opposite trends, while blood pressure has been persistently high in central and eastern Europe.