Michael Dean
Jul 1, 2001; 42:1007-1017
Thematic Reviews

Abdessamad Dehaj and Mohamed Guessous
Theor. Probability and Math. Statist. 111 (), 1-8.
Abstract, references and article information

A police sergeant who was shot and injured at his home in Portmore, St Catherine, on Thursday night succumbed to his injuries on Monday morning.

Review: the rise of Africa’s superwomen The World Today mhiggins.drupal 1 August 2022

From foster care in England to colonialism’s legacy in Zimbabwe, this set of essays on race, feminism and identity is searingly honest, says Masiyaleti Mbewe.

Black and Female
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Faber, £9.99

The 1988 novel Nervous Conditions by the Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga is considered one of Africa’s finest literary exports. It won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and alongside The Book of Not (2006) and This Mournable Body (2018), shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, forms a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels that grapple with the gendered colonial oppression of young black girls and women from Southern Rhodesia through to Zimbabwe. 

In Black and Female, Dangarembga continues the interrogation of these intersections in an unflinchingly honest and personal, if occasionally dense, collection of essays. Along the way, she examines the sheer magnitude of colonialism’s effects on African people, and how they ripple through her early childhood in England and her formative years as a writer, filmmaker and feminist activist in post-independence Zimbabwe.

‘Writing While Black and Female’

In 1961 Dangarembga’s parents relocated from Southern Rhodesia to the UK. While they worked and studied in London, they put their two-year-old daughter, her older brother and, later, her younger sister into private foster care in Dover, Kent (as many Africans did – a fact that was new to me). The first essay, ‘Writing While Black and Female’, takes a painful look at the four years she spent with her foster parents, Mummy-Gran and Daddy Henry. 

Blackness, she learned in those years, was a consequence of her non-whiteness. So Dangarembga writes of the momentary elation she felt when a stranger addressed her as a ‘lovely little piccaninny’, giving her ‘a category I could wield against the void of no longer being’. To cope with this sort of racialization and her abandonment, the young Dangarembga turned to disassociation and self-harm. 

As she writes: ‘Blackness is a condition imposed on me, rather than being an experienced identity.’ Instead of ‘black’ people, therefore, Dangarembga prefers the term ‘highly melanated people’. It is a resonant phrase, highlighting the inherently ridiculous nature of racism.

Dangarembga’s ‘Africanness’ shifts into focus upon her return to Rhodesia in 1965. At first, other children refused to play with her and her siblings, calling them ‘varungu’ (white people). As she describes it: ‘The dance of my identities … became frenetic’. 

In ‘Black, Female and the Superwoman Black Feminist’, the second essay, Dangarembga is adamant about the urgent necessity of a black feminist practice that is centred on action to provide real, material change. Along the way, she makes a distinction – a slightly uneasy one to my mind – between the patriarchy that western colonization imposed, based on private ownership, and the patriarchy of pre-colonial African society with its foundations in kinship that devolved power to an extent.

‘Hence women could and did become rulers and warriors, and royal spirit mediums called mhondoro,’ Dangarembga writes approvingly. She is making a nuanced point; but the idea of a more accommodating sort of patriarchy jars a little nonetheless.

While independence may have arrived for Zimbabwe more than 40 years ago, Dangarembga argues strongly that the subjugation of women and feminists at the hands of the ruling Zanu-PF government continues as an extension of colonial rule. Indeed, beyond Zimbabwe, black feminists remain ‘a small, often embattled group’ across Africa, believes Dangarembga. 

As a young black feminist who is part of this ‘small, embattled group’, I should say we have been able to foster large communities digitally and otherwise to work around the hostility we are often faced with. Despite internet shutdowns and restrictions, we resist – an act Dangarembga encourages.  

Resistance, she says, starts with establishing community despite these difficulties. At the nucleus of Dangarembga’s argument is the ‘superwoman’ of the essay’s title, the African woman who doesn’t require external factors to be inspired to action but who continuously draws on what Dangarembga calls ‘internal agency’ that derives from ‘an unrelenting fight for survival and dignity’.

Pointedly, she criticizes global feminism’s greater focus on optics than activism in the practical sense. One only has to observe the performative allyship and ‘Instagram activism’ rampant on the internet today to see her point.
 

The complexities of decolonization

In the final essay, ‘Decolonization as Revolutionary Imagining’, Dangarembga turns her gaze upon the ‘highly stratified’ European societies that outsourced their violent inequality to their empires and ‘the work of decolonization’. However, decolonial discourse is complex, and it is here that the writing occasionally gets bogged down. Fewer recommendations with more elaboration perhaps would have helped.

She herself acknowledges the difficulties of decolonization. Centuries of the Enlightenment and its logic of ‘racism, slavery, genocide and colonization’ are hard to uproot ‘whatever one’s melanin concentration’, she writes.

Nevertheless, Dangarembga concludes with the radical determination to dismantle that is evident throughout this searing yet hopeful collection: ‘The trajectory of current and future generations depends on that uprooting.’

Visual Abstract

The kinesin-3 family contains the fastest and most processive motors of the three neuronal transport kinesin families, yet the sequence of states and rates of kinetic transitions that comprise the chemomechanical cycle and give rise to their unique properties are poorly understood. We used stopped-flow fluorescence spectroscopy and single-molecule motility assays to delineate the chemomechanical cycle of the kinesin-3, KIF1A. Our bacterially expressed KIF1A construct, dimerized via a kinesin-1 coiled-coil, exhibits fast velocity and superprocessivity behavior similar to WT KIF1A. We established that the KIF1A forward step is triggered by hydrolysis of ATP and not by ATP binding, meaning that KIF1A follows the same chemomechanical cycle as established for kinesin-1 and -2. The ATP-triggered half-site release rate of KIF1A was similar to the stepping rate, indicating that during stepping, rear-head detachment is an order of magnitude faster than in kinesin-1 and kinesin-2. Thus, KIF1A spends the majority of its hydrolysis cycle in a one-head-bound state. Both the ADP off-rate and the ATP on-rate at physiological ATP concentration were fast, eliminating these steps as possible rate-limiting transitions. Based on the measured run length and the relatively slow off-rate in ADP, we conclude that attachment of the tethered head is the rate-limiting transition in the KIF1A stepping cycle. Thus, KIF1A's activity can be explained by a fast rear-head detachment rate, a rate-limiting step of tethered-head attachment that follows ATP hydrolysis, and a relatively strong electrostatic interaction with the microtubule in the weakly bound post-hydrolysis state.

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 16, 2024 — Supermicro, Inc. is launching a new optimized storage system for high performance AI training, inference and HPC workloads. This JBOF (Just a Bunch […]

The post Supermicro Introduces JBOF Storage Platform Powered by NVIDIA BlueField-3 for Scalable AI and HPC appeared first on HPCwire.

Oct. 29, 2024 — NVIDIA has announced that xAI’s Colossus supercomputer cluster comprising 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs in Memphis, Tennessee, achieved this massive scale by using the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet […]

The post NVIDIA Ethernet Networking Accelerates xAI’s Colossus AI Supercomputer appeared first on HPCwire.

Oct. 31, 2024 — Giga Computing, a subsidiary of GIGABYTE and a leader in generative AI servers and advanced cooling technologies, will participate in today’s AI Accelerator Skyscraper Congress, hosted […]

The post GIGABYTE Joins AI Accelerator Skyscraper Congress to Highlight Sustainable Supercomputing Advances appeared first on HPCwire.

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 6, 2024 — Super Micro Computer, Inc. (Nasdaq: SMCI), a Total IT Solution Provider for AI, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, has provided an update from the independent […]

The post Supermicro Releases Preliminary Q1 Earnings Amid Ongoing Compliance Issues appeared first on HPCwire.

COLOGNE, Germany, Nov. 1, 2024 — DeepL has announced it will be among the first to commercially deploy the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD with DGX GB200 systems. The Nvidia DGX SuperPOD, […]

The post DeepL to Debut Nvidia DGX SuperPOD with DGX GB200 Systems in Europe appeared first on HPCwire.

MILAN, Nov. 6, 2024 — ENEA, Italy’s National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, has selected Lenovo for the installation of an HPC system at the Portici […]

The post ENEA Chooses Lenovo for Supercomputer to Accelerate Sustainable Energy Research appeared first on HPCwire.

The fantastic Supercomputing 2024 show is coming back to Atlanta this year. If last year was any indication, there will be plenty of coffee flowing and lots of discussions around […]

The post Top500 Wild Cards Could Add Thrills to Supercomputing 2024 Show appeared first on HPCwire.

NASA engineers fired the engines on the X-59 research aircraft in advance of planned test flights to determine if the aircraft can reduce sonic booms and make supersonic flight over land quieter.

"Georgia is not heard or seen in the world, and many don't even know the location of the country," says TED Fellow and photographer Daro Sulakauri. Through her striking photographs of life in the shadows of Russian occupation, she uses her camera to create a living archive of her home country and defend against the erasure of its borders, culture and history.

Matthew Utterback, the superintendent of the North Clackamas district in Oregon, was named last week as the 2017 National Superintendent of the Year.

The new curriculum would teach all students about tribes and Indian culture in North Dakota.

Maryland's state school board will allow noneducators to be appointed as superintendents of school systems.

A vote by a professional-standards board means Maryland will not permit noneducators to be appointed as schools superintendents, after all.

The state's "Influence 100" project includes a leadership development program that will give aspiring district leaders a hands-on opportunity to work through an equity issue in their home districts.

With many school buildings closed for the rest of the academic year—and more to follow—district leaders turn their attention to making up for what may be deep learning losses.

With many school buildings closed for the rest of the academic year—and more to follow—district leaders turn their attention to making up for what may be deep learning losses.

Gov. Paul LePage believes Maine has a glut of school superintendents, and he intends to pressure districts into consolidating administrations with the two-year budget he will propose in early 2017.

The state's last superintendent resigned under pressure after he attempted to take over Montgomery's school system and figure out a way to grade the state's schools.

Hopson became the interim superintendent in Shelby County, Tenn., in 2013 after the Memphis City School system merged with Shelby County schools. That merger then led six suburban communities to break away from the merged school system to form their own school districts.

Now Newark, New Jersey, is exploding, thanks to the attempts at intimidation by Governor Christie's hand-picked superintendent of schools, Cami Anderson.

With many school buildings closed for the rest of the academic year—and more to follow—district leaders turn their attention to making up for what may be deep learning losses.

After years of shepherding the state’s K-12 system, Democrat Tony Evers will be called on to make good as governor on his pledge of more funding for K-12.

Curtis Jones, a U.S. Army veteran, has led Georgia's Bibb County school system since 2015.

Curtis Jones, a U.S. Army veteran who has led Georgia's Bibb County school system since 2015, has been named the 2019 AASA National Superintendent of the Year.

State lawmakers must create a plan to improve rural schools in response to a 2014 state Supreme Court ruling.

Controversy over an intiative aimed a reducing inequities in Lee's Summit, Mo., schools led the police department to provide security protection for the district's first African-American superintendent. Now the school board has reversed course.

Many are whipsawed by shutdown recommendations aimed at stemming the coronavirus, and the logistical and financial consequences of those actions.

Michael Martirano led the state's schools through dramatic budget cuts, academic challenges, and a state-versus-local battle over school construction.

David Schuler, the superintendent of Township High School District 214 in Arlington Heights, Ill., has been named 2018 National Superintendent of the Year.

The superior colliculus receives a direct projection from retinal ganglion cells. In primates, it remains unknown if the same ganglion cells also supply the lateral geniculate nucleus. To address this issue, a double-label experiment was performed in two male macaques. The animals fixated a target while injection sites were scouted in the superior colliculus by recording and stimulating with a tetrode. Once suitable sites were identified, cholera toxin subunit B-Alexa Fluor 488 was injected via an adjacent micropipette. In a subsequent acute experiment, cholera toxin subunit B-Alexa Fluor 555 was injected into the lateral geniculate nucleus at matching retinotopic locations. After a brief survival period, ganglion cells were examined in retinal flatmounts. The percentage of double-labeled cells varied locally, depending on the relative efficiency of retrograde transport by each tracer and the precision of retinotopic overlap of injection sites in each target nucleus. In counting boxes with extensive overlap, 76–98% of ganglion cells projecting to the superior colliculus were double labeled. Cells projecting to the superior colliculus constituted 4.0–6.7% of the labeled ganglion cell population. In one particularly large zone, there were 5,746 cells labeled only by CTB-AF555, 561cells double labeled by CTB-AF555 and CTB-AF488, but no cell labeled only by CTB-AF488. These data indicate that retinal input to the macaque superior colliculus arises from a collateral axonal branch supplied by ~5% of the ganglion cells that project to the lateral geniculate nucleus. Surprisingly, there exist no ganglion cells that project exclusively to the SC.

Systemic study of pathogenic pathways and interrelationships underlying genes associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) facilitates the identification of new targets for effective treatments. Recently available large-scale multiomics datasets provide opportunities to use computational approaches for such studies. Here, we devised a novel disease gene identification (digID) computational framework that consists of a semi-supervised deep learning classifier to predict AD-associated genes and a protein–protein interaction (PPI) network-based analysis to prioritize the importance of these predicted genes in AD. digID predicted 1,529 AD-associated genes and revealed potentially new AD molecular mechanisms and therapeutic targets including GNAI1 and GNB1, two G-protein subunits that regulate cell signaling, and KNG1, an upstream modulator of CDC42 small G-protein signaling and mediator of inflammation and candidate coregulator of amyloid precursor protein (APP). Analysis of mRNA expression validated their dysregulation in AD brains but further revealed the significant spatial patterns in different brain regions as well as among different subregions of the frontal cortex and hippocampi. Super-resolution STochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM) further demonstrated their subcellular colocalization and molecular interactions with APP in a transgenic mouse model of both sexes with AD-like mutations. These studies support the predictions made by digID while highlighting the importance of concurrent biological validation of computationally identified gene clusters as potential new AD therapeutic targets.

Watch a course video excerpt from Rise of the Superheroes: The legendary Stan Lee, creator of the Avengers, Spiderman and Iron Man, has partnered with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History to launch the first global online course about superheroes to fans around the world.

The legendary Stan Lee, creator of the Avengers, Spiderman and Iron Man, has partnered with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History to launch the first global online course about superheroes to fans around the world. Register now: smithsonian.com/edx/superheroes

The legendary Stan Lee, creator of the Avengers, Spiderman and Iron Man, has partnered with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History to launch the first global online course about superheroes to fans around the world. Taught by "The Dark Knight" producer Michael Uslan, students will go into the vaults of the Smithsonian collection and hear from industry experts. Register now (http://bit.ly/1DsdJ3W) and beginning May 5, 2015, you can become a certified expert on superheroes. Sign up for the verified certificate to earn an original piece of artwork from top artist Phil Jimenez (Wonder Woman, New X-Men) with Phil's, Stan Lee’s, and Michael Uslan’s signatures.

This week's supermoon is closer to Earth than any other in 2024

Since her birth in 1909, Francis lived through two world wars, segregation, the fall of the Soviet Union, multiple pandemics and the invention of the cellphone