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Abstract Background Hunter-gatherer lifestyles dominated the southern African landscape up to ~ 2000 years ago, when herding and farming groups started to arrive in the area. First, herding and livestock, likely of East African origin, appeared in southern Africa, preceding the arrival of the large-scale Bantu-speaking agro-pastoralist expansion that introduced West African-related genetic ancestry into the area. Present-day Khoekhoe-speaking Namaqua (or Nama in short) pastoralists show high proportions of East African admixture, linking the East African ancestry with Khoekhoe herders. Most other historical Khoekhoe populations have, however, disappeared over the last few centuries and their contribution to the genetic structure of present-day populations is not well understood. In our study, we analyzed genome-wide autosomal and full mitochondrial data from a population who trace their ancestry to the Khoekhoe-speaking Hessequa herders from the southern Cape region of what is now South Africa. Results We generated genome-wide data from 162 individuals and mitochondrial DNA data of a subset of 87 individuals, sampled in the Western Cape Province, South Africa, where the Hessequa population once lived. Using available comparative data from Khoe-speaking and related groups, we aligned genetic date estimates and admixture proportions to the archaeological proposed dates and routes for the arrival of the East African pastoralists in southern Africa. We identified several Afro-Asiatic-speaking pastoralist groups from Ethiopia and Tanzania who share high affinities with the East African ancestry present in southern Africa. We also found that the East African pastoralist expansion was heavily male-biased, akin to a pastoralist migration previously observed on the genetic level in ancient Europe, by which Pontic-Caspian Steppe pastoralist groups represented by the Yamnaya culture spread across the Eurasian continent during the late Neolithic/Bronze Age. Conclusion We propose that pastoralism in southern Africa arrived through male-biased migration of an East African Afro-Asiatic-related group(s) who introduced new subsistence and livestock practices to local southern African hunter-gatherers. Our results add to the understanding of historical human migration and mobility in Africa, connected to the spread of food-producing and livestock practices.

Review: Axel Hörstedt. Latin Dissertations and Disputations in the Early Modern Swedish Gymnasium: A Study of a Latin School Tradition c. 1620–c. 1820. Göteborgs universitet (PhD diss.), 2018, 502 pp.

This paper demonstrates a method to transform and link textual information scraped from companies' websites to the scientific body of knowledge. The method illustrates the benefit of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in creating links between established economic classification systems with novel and agile constructs that new data sources enable. Therefore, we experimented on the European classification of economic activities (known as NACE) on sectoral and company levels. We established a connection with Microsoft Academic Graph hierarchical topic modeling based on companies' website content. Central to the operationalization of our method are a web scraping process, NLP and a data transformation/linkage procedure. The method contains three main steps: data source identification, raw data retrieval, and data preparation and transformation. These steps are applied to two distinct data sources.

AbstractThousands of Roma were killed in Ukraine by the Nazis and auxiliary police on the spot. There are more than 50,000 Roma in today’s Ukraine, represented by second and third generation decendants of the genocide survivors. The discussion on Roma identity cannot be isolated from the memory of the genocide, which makes the struggle over the past a reflexive landmark that mobilizes the Roma movement. About twenty Roma genocide memorials have been erected in Ukraine during last decade, and in 2016 the national memorial of the Roma genocide was opened in Babi Yar. However, scholars do not have a clear picture of memory narratives and memory practices of the Roma genocide in Ukraine. A comprehensive analysis of the contemporary situation is not possible without an examination of the history and memory of the Roma genocide before 1991.

AbstractClimate change impacts are being felt across sectors in all regions of the world, and adaptation projects are being implemented to reduce climate risks and existing vulnerabilities. Climate adaptation actions also have significant synergies and tradeoffs with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG 5 on gender equality. Questions are increasingly being raised about the gendered and climate justice implications of different adaptation options. This paper investigates if reported climate change adaptation actions are contributing to advancing the goal of gender equality (SDG 5) or not. It focuses on linkages between individual targets of SDG 5 and climate change adaptation actions for nine major sectors where transformative climate actions are envisaged. The assessment is based on evidence of adaptation actions documented in 319 relevant research publications published during 2014–2020. Positive links to nine targets under SDG 5 are found in adaptation actions that are consciously designed to advance gender equality. However, in four sectors—ocean and coastal ecosystems; mountain ecosystems; poverty, livelihood, sustainable development; and industrial system transitions, we find more negative links than positive links. For adaptation actions to have positive impacts on gender equality, gender-focused targets must be intentionally brought in at the prioritisation, designing, planning, and implementation stages. An SDG 5+ approach, which takes into consideration intersectionality and gender aspects beyond women alone, can help adaptation actions move towards meeting gender equality and other climate justice goals. This reflexive approach is especially critical now, as we approach the mid-point in the timeline for achieving the SDGs.

Talking about Balkanism in Romanian contemporary poetry means to betray, to a certain extent required by degradation or alteration, some literary themes and motifs. Finding ourselves in a geographical area of cultural contaminations, the influence of other peoples in Balkans comes naturally: the nostalgia of Byzantium perfection, continuous reporting at an ideal time, abstraction of the chronology. Balkan themes and motives in poetry are identifiable from the early writings of Romanian literature, including the folklore, with Anton Pann, the Vacarescu and Conachi poets – and their ludic descriptivism – , to Ion Barbu, who strikes a metaphysical note in the Balkan motifs, and later, in the second part of twentieth century, with the species of parody. The Romanian native receptivity allowed continuous assimilations without creating an unpleasant heterogeneous feeling. This openness has contributed decisively in a formative way to bring Byzantium on a new soil in a perfect and saturated array; the perfectibility is not possible anymore, so the failure was natural, in a degraded status – Constantinople. Oriental-Byzantine gravity becomes in Oriental-Balkan tragedy or comedy, balance slid to one extreme, sometime becoming ridiculous. Contemporary poetry does not express any more a true lament, but a kind of parody (in ludic poetry) or sheer contempt (in the solemn poetry). The Balkan intelligence is not critical, but creative, with the risk of perpetuating monstrous forms, beyond good and evil. Byzantium established itself through a double filter – for the East and for the West – influencing and being influenced, in turn. Romanian poetry has the full sequence of themes and aesthetic formulae, from tragic to comic, often switching rapidly from one edge to the other, taking into account the old Thracian solemn part, then the proud Byzantium and its absorption in Constantinople – all rolling in a series of formal expressions reflected in themes and vocabulary.

While transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) have dominated a number of NLP applications, these models are heavy to deploy and expensive to use. Therefore, effectively compressing large-scale PLMs becomes an increasingly important problem. Quantization, which represents high-precision tensors with low-bit fix-point format, is a viable solution. However, most existing quantization methods are task-specific, requiring customized training and quantization with a large number of trainable parameters on each individual task. Inspired by the observation that the over-parameterization nature of PLMs makes it possible to freeze most of the parameters during the fine-tuning stage, in this work, we propose a novel ``quantize before fine-tuning'' framework, PreQuant, that differs from both quantization-aware training and post-training quantization. PreQuant is compatible with various quantization strategies, with outlier-aware parameter-efficient fine-tuning incorporated to correct the induced quantization error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PreQuant on the GLUE benchmark using BERT, RoBERTa, and T5. We also provide an empirical investigation into the workflow of PreQuant, which sheds light on its efficacy. Findings of ACL2023