Review of script displays of African languages by current software

All recorded African languages that have a writing system have orthographies which use the Roman or Arabic scripts, with a few exceptions. Whilst Unicode successfully handles the encoding of both these scripts, current software, in particular web browsers, take little account of users wishing to operate in a minority script. Their use for displaying African languages has been limited by the availability of facilities and the desire to communicate with the ‘world’ through major languages such as English and French. There is a need for more use of the indigenous languages to strengthen their language communities and the use of the local scripts in enhancing the learning, teaching and general use of their own languages by their speaking communities

Heinrich Zille and the politics of caricature in Germany 1903-1929

Apparently, at Heinrich Zille’s funeral in Berlin in 1929 the respective delegates from the socialist town council and the communist party entered into a violent public dispute over his artistic legacy. At the time of his death Zille was a legendary figure. He was so well known and loved in the city that each side of the warring left had an interest in appropriating his work and reputation. And the work was sufficiently open to allow them to do so. Indeed, in 1933 one of his main critical champions, the sociological journalist Hans Ostwald, attempted to defend it from censorship on the grounds that Zille had ‘exposed in order to help all his compatriots towards a better life. Unconsciously, he prepared the way for the national socialist movement and the new Germany’. This essay examines the character of Zille’s published representations of Berlin life, particularly in the pre-war years, in the light of both its enormous popularity and its political ambivalence, which were, of course, not unconnected

Leveraging the Public School System to Combat Adolescent Obesity: The Limits of Arkansas’s Statewide Policy Initiative

Purpose: This study assessed the effectiveness of one of the earliest statewide policy initiatives to address obesity via schools—Arkansas’s Act 1220 of 2003—on adolescent obesity. The Act required public schools in Arkansas to conduct body mass index (BMI) screening and reporting, restrict access to vending machines and establish physical education and nutrition standards.Methods: To determine the effect of Act 1220 as a whole, this study analyzed data representative of adolescents in grades 9-12 from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) using the quasi-experimental method of difference-in-differences. Changes in adolescents’ weight outcomes in Arkansas before (1999 and 2001) and after (2005, 2007 and 2009) the implementation of Act 1220 were compared to changes in weight outcomes for adolescents from the neighboring state of Missouri across the same time period.Results: Arkansas’s Act 1220 did not significantly influence adolescents’ BMI-for-age z-scores (zBMI) (-0.017; 95% confidence interval [CI] [-0.097, 0.063]; p=.68). Further, the Act did not lead to significant reductions in zBMI among adolescents who were either overweight (-0.003; 95% CI [-0.043, 0.036]; p=.86) or obese (-0.010; 95% CI [-0.070, 0.051]; p=.75). Results remain robust to adjustments for self-report bias in height and weight as well as a set of alternative comparison states.Conclusions: Preventing adolescent overweight and obesity is unlikely to occur through such large-scale policy initiatives alone

WWJP: Where Would Jesus Publish?

Christians seek to follow the teachings of Jesus in every aspect of our lives. For academics who publish and librarians who purchase and license publications, where articles are published is important. The debates over scholarly communication, the future of publishing, and the impact of Web 2.0 technologies influence how information content is released, accessed, and archived. Therefore, by discussing Open Access publishing, traditional publishing, and new media content distribution with parallel references to the life and teachings of Jesus, as drawn from Scripture, we Christians can more faithful apply our Biblical viewpoint to our role in the publishing process

Strong S-equivalence of ordered links

Recently Swatee Naik and Theodore Stanford proved that two S-equivalent knots are related by a finite sequence of doubled-delta moves on their knot diagrams. We show that classical S-equivalence is not sufficient to extend their result to ordered links. We define a new algebraic relation on Seifert matrices, called Strong S-equivalence, and prove that two oriented, ordered links L and L' are related by a sequence of doubled-delta moves if and only if they are Strongly S-equivalent. We also show that this is equivalent to the fact that L' can be obtained from L through a sequence of Y-clasper surgeries, where each clasper leaf has total linking number zero with L.Comment: 23 pages, 14 figure