• 2024-2024close
• Open Access close
• Closed Access close
• Open Source close
• Publications close
• Research software close
• Other research products close
• AU close
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Her... close

(1) Background: Indigenous chickens (Gallus domesticus) (ICs) are an essential component of agriculture and rural livelihood among 80% of small-scale farmers (SSFs) in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). However, in the past decade, significant losses of Indigenous Chicken Animal Genetic Resources (IC-AnGR) resulting from poultry diseases, imported exotic breeds, poor market access, and uncontrolled crossbreeding have been reported. This study aimed to investigate the status of IC-AnGR and assess the major challenges affecting the production of ICs. (2) Methods: We surveyed 358 households in eastern, central, and southern livelihood zones, comprising 81.6% males and 17.6% females. (3) Results: Our study shows that respondents owned 16,112 ICs, 3026 goats, and 5183 herds of cattle. Overall, 77.4% of chicken breeds were ICs and 22.6% were exotic. Across the three zones, 18–44% reported the introduction or adoption of exotic breeds in the past decade, with most households sourcing breeding stock from local communities and family and friends at 45% and 28.6%, respectively. Farmers gave various reasons for adopting new chicken breeds, including fast growth (21.7%), larger mature sizes (21.7%), and resistance to diseases at 15.2%. Overall, 92.5% of farmers agreed or strongly agreed that some IC breeds disappeared in the past decade and nearly 90% were concerned. Some attributed the loss to poultry diseases. (4) Conclusion: Deliberate policies to promote the sustainable use and conservation of ICs are critical in Zambia.

AbstractA newly proposed or implemented government policy often encounters challenges. Ghanaian citizens have always look down negatively upon their government’s policies, hence those are rarely appreciated. This paper ponders over the Ghanaian government’s proposal of electronic levy on mobile money transactions which was announced in the 2022 budget on November 17, 2021. We have scrutinized this governmental policy through the ordinary citizen's perspective using lexicon-based sentiment analysis on Twitter data. Lexicons are collections of words that express specific emotions, and deals with interpreting emotions like happiness, frustration, anger, and sadness. Twitter, serving as a means for people to share their views, provides enormous user generated content, beneficial for research purposes. We collected e-levy specific Twitter data in five phases, namely; policy introduction, popularity, discussion, feeble, and debate phases. The policy introduction phase recorded the least volume of data containing 1400 tweets, among which our sentiment analyzer classifies 8.93% as positive, 89.29% as neutral, and 1.78% as negative. The debate phase recorded the highest amount of data containing 18.423 tweets, among which 24.43% tweets are classified as positive, 59.29% as neutral, and 16.28% as negative. An analysis on the entire data containing 38,771 tweets reports 25.50% positive, 59.02% neutral, and 15.48% negative tweets. Our study determines that people are not largely unhappy established by the stable positive sentiment percentage, however, there is a high neutral score in all the phases.

AbstractThe Holocene (beginning around 12,000 years ago) encompassed some of the most significant changes in human evolution, with far-reaching consequences for the dietary, physical and mental health of present-day populations. Using a dataset of more than 1,600 imputed ancient genomes1, we modelled the selection landscape during the transition from hunting and gathering, to farming and pastoralism across West Eurasia. We identify key selection signals related to metabolism, including that selection at the FADS cluster began earlier than previously reported and that selection near the LCT locus predates the emergence of the lactase persistence allele by thousands of years. We also find strong selection in the HLA region, possibly due to increased exposure to pathogens during the Bronze Age. Using ancient individuals to infer local ancestry tracts in over 400,000 samples from the UK Biobank, we identify widespread differences in the distribution of Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age ancestries across Eurasia. By calculating ancestry-specific polygenic risk scores, we show that height differences between Northern and Southern Europe are associated with differential Steppe ancestry, rather than selection, and that risk alleles for mood-related phenotypes are enriched for Neolithic farmer ancestry, whereas risk alleles for diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease are enriched for Western hunter-gatherer ancestry. Our results indicate that ancient selection and migration were large contributors to the distribution of phenotypic diversity in present-day Europeans.

Self-wetting is the leakage of urine, either due to the medical condition of urinary incontinence (UI), or because a person does not want to, or cannot, access a toileting facility in time. This study explored the attitudes towards self-wetting and experiences of children (aged five to 11), their caregivers, community leaders and humanitarian practitioners in the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. We particularly focused on how water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and protection interventions might assist in improving these experiences. We purposively selected participants from two camps where our partner organisation works. We conducted Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) with community leaders and camp officials, Story Book (SB) sessions with Rohingya children and in-depth Interviews (IDIs) with caregivers of children who participated in the SB sessions, as well as surveying communal toilets. Self-wetting by children was common and resulted in them feeling embarrassed, upset and uncomfortable, and frightened to use the toilet at night; many children also indicated that they would be punished by their caregivers for self-wetting. Key informants indicated that caregivers have difficulty handling children’s self-wetting due to a limited amount of clothing, pillows, and blankets, and difficulty cleaning these items. It was evident that the available toilets are often not appropriate and/or accessible for children. Children in the Rohingya camps appear to self-wet due to both the medical condition of UI and because the sanitation facilities are inappropriate. They are teased by their peers and punished by their caregivers. Although WASH and protection practitioners are unable to drastically alter camp conditions or treat UI, the lives of children who self-wet in these camps could likely be improved by increasing awareness on self-wetting to decrease stigma and ease the concerns of caregivers, increasing the number of child-friendly toilets and increasing the provision of continence management materials.

Departing from an appraisal of the topical relevance of what Canadian based geographer Derek Gregory has perceptively called 'the colonial present', this article presents a number of departures for an investigation of the ways in which the codes of a colonial conditions have infiltrated the metropolitan west (Gregory 2004). This article suggests a number of possible starting points for further discussion and focuses on an analysis of the long term process of transfer of colonial forms from colony to core and on an appraisal of migrations and their governance as one privileged site for the production and reproduction of coloniality.

Evidence from Classical Athens is full of examples of animals and the impacts of their interactions with people across social, political, religious, and philosophical contexts. Within this body of evidence, the dog stands out for the scope of its presence across both the historical record and particularly within Athenian life. Men and women, children and adults, elite and ordinary citizens, citizens, metics, and slaves, urban and rural inhabitants, labourers, the poor, and the healthy and sick – dogs were there with them, on the land, in their thoughts, in their literature, on their art, and in their practices - hidden in plain sight. As such, dogs offer us multiple perspectives through which to examine Athenian society and the expressions of its individual and collective identities and experiences. The principal aim of this dissertation is to highlight the benefits of including human-animal relations in the histories we write. It approaches the period of Classical Athens through the lens of its different human-canine interactions and applies an interdisciplinary method that integrates classics, historical inquiry, classical archaeology, and archaeology with principles from Human-Animal Studies. This thesis asks how and why numerous real and figurative dogs featured in the ancient evidence and how this related to real-life human-canine interactions in Classical Athens. Exploring dogs as guards, military auxiliaries, companions, commodities, and philosophical subjects, this study demonstrates the significant historical value of dogs and the tangible insights they provide into different experiences of ancient Athenian life.

This research aims to explore the comprehension of historical Korean archives authored by common literati. Numerous endeavors have been made to study Korean historical documents; however, the majority of these endeavors focus solely on royal documents. By comparing the distinct linguistic characteristics between royal and commoner languages, this study challenges the applicability of the royal language-centric approach to commoner documents. In particular, we investigate the feasibility and limitations of existing resources that share the same writing system (Hanja) as historical Korean documents for processing Korean common literati documents. Through our investigation, we propose a simple yet effective methodology that enables the utilization of Hanja-based language resources in processing Korean common literati documents: the removal of special characters. We demonstrate that aligning characteristics of Hanja-based resources allows considerable performance improvements. To the best of our knowledge, our study represents the first research endeavor to concentrate on the comprehension of common literati documents.

Rice is a major grain crop in numerous countries. In lowland areas, high iron levels in the soil severely hinder its cultivation. The current study explored high-yielding and Fe-toxicity-tolerant irrigated lowland rice (340 lines) among a population derived from a cross between Suakoko 8 and Bao Thai in Edozighi and Ibadan, Nigeria. In contrast to Ibadan, the soils in Edozighi contain a significant amount of iron. For the stated purpose, we carried out a two-year experiment using an alpha lattice design. The data showed significant differences between genotypes for the days to heading, plant height, number of tillers per plant, number of panicles per plant, panicle length, and grain yield. The results revealed that multiple characteristics had both direct and indirect effects on cultivated rice yields. There was a direct and positive influence on the number of days in the 50% heading period (0.31), a direct and negative effect on plant height (−0.94), a direct and positive effect on tiller and panicle numbers, and a direct but negative effect on panicle length (−0.56). The leaf bronzing score was adversely correlated with yield, panicle length, and plant height, while it was positively correlated with the number of panicles, tillers, and days to heading. The findings showed significant changes in yield and yield characteristics between genotypes. Grain yields ranged from 283 to 11,700 kg/ha in the absence of iron in the soil, contrary to 0 to 8230 kg/ha in soil with iron toxicity, with losses estimated between 6 and 94%, demonstrating the resulting disaster. In contrast to the elite parents and varieties used in this study, the ten top genotypes exhibited smaller losses in yield. The authors strongly recommend using these lines for further studies as donors or releasing them in farmer fields in Africa.