Table of Contents for Volume 26 of Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, 2023

Table of Contents for Volume 27 of Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, 2024

A party that signs a document is conclusively bound by its terms absent a valid excuse for having failed to read it.

Kim Hyung-Il the leader of Northern American Business sector of Naver Webtoon, said, "We are happy to be recognized for our efforts to steadily promote webtoons to the U.S. market from the beginning.

Kakao Piccoma is constantly expanding opportunities for users to meet comics, webtoons, and novels through various channels.

This event was held by Smilegate accumulating donations and donates money when a TalesRunner user performs the quest to pick up trash scattered around the sea in the summer update theme

KRAFTON is recruiting teams to participate in the 'BATTLEGROUNDS MOBILE Open Challenge Phase 2' from the 20th to the 3rdof next month. The top-performing teams will be given opportunities to participate in the BATTLEGROUND Pro Series Season 4.

Wave Company's conductive silicone electrode is only 0.78mm 15mm in addition to theincluding fabric, making it the thinnest and most flexible productelectrode.

Ministry of Science and ICT is looking for various ways to support Alliance based on its suggestions. In particular, it is planning to focus on supporting an open metaverse platform to revitalize the metaverse ecosystem.

Dutch company Airback has invented a backpack that can shrink its contents. Their eponymous backpack ($185) features a zippered airtight compartment with a port; once you've stuffed this compartment full, you attach either a household vacuum cleaner, or the company's small electric pump, to the port.

All of the air gets sucked out of the compartment, compressing the clothing within. The company reckons this allows you to cram in 50% more stuff.

The backpack also has a scale built into the handle, so you can avoid exceeding airline weight limits and being forced to check it at the airport.

The overall design is quite intelligent, featuring a passport stash pocket, a locking laptop compartment, bottle holder and more:

Following the popularity of the backpack—which was Kickstarted to the tune of €350,000 (USD ~$380,000), they designed a smaller Airback Go ($152) which fits beneath an airplane seat. This design lacks the scale in the handle.

There's also a larger Airback Max ($361), which boasts rollers and a telescoping handle…

…as well as the Airback Next ($416), a hard-sided carry-on roller.

All of the bags feature a built-in USB-C port, to which you can connect your own powerbank.

The company's separately-sold pump runs $52. One does wonder what to do if either that or the handle scale breaks. For their part, the company says "we've committed to a circular system - allowing you to send your bag back to us when it's lived its life, whereupon we, along with our partners, will give it a new purpose." However, what I'd prefer to see is some mention of repair options.

In this episode of Ask Annissa, Annissa Coy answers the following question: “I was wondering how you handle so many different specialty type things that we need to clean when it comes to contents restoration. For instance, I have a home that had a light fire and they have a six-foot, mounted bear that was in the living room.” 

How big of a facility do you need to conduct contents restoration? And, if you want to work with hard and soft contents, which should you get started with first? Annissa Coy answers these two questions.

This edition of Ask Annissa tackles the question of whether or not it’s possible to come up with square foot pricing for a content restoration job.

This edition of Ask Annissa addresses when, how and what to train for at your restoration business.

This edition of Ask Annissa addresses whether it’s better to charge by the box or for time and materials.

Annissa gives us best practices on using the Like Cleaning Method.

HSTP-IPTV-AISC - Access to Internet-sourced contents

ITU-T D.170 - Supplement on guidelines for contents of an international interconnection agreement

Zero-click searches zijn, met de opkomst van featured snippets in zoekresultaten en de steeds grotere rol van AI, aan de orde van de dag. De zero-click-contenttrend heeft een enorme vlucht genomen. De algoritmes van platforms zoals Google en LinkedIn evolueren continu om gebruikers sneller en directer van antwoorden te voorzien. Het tijdperk van zero-click-content breidt […]

Join the Program in Judaic Studies and the Department of Religion on Tuesday, November 19, for this talk delivered by Ilana Pardes. Lunch will be available before the event's start, between 11:30am–12:00pm only. The account of the rise of Israelite kingship in the Book of Samuel is one of the greatest narratives of antiquity that has been passed down to us. Far from being a dry chronicle, it offers both an unblinking perspective on political realities and a daring representation of the humanness, the nakedness, of royal figures. The talk will revolve around the encounter of King David and the wise woman of Tekoa (2 Samuel 14). Special attention will be given to the dramas behind the scenes, to the hidden links between the parabolic tale of the wise woman and the story of the House of David. All are welcome to attend, but space is limited – please RSVP to judaic@princeton.edu and note any dietary needs. More about Ilana Pardes Ilana Pardes is the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Program in Judaic Studies Program at Princeton University. Her work has focused on the nexus of Bible, literature, and culture as well as on questions of gender, aesthetics, and hermeneutics. She is the author of Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (University of California Press, 2000), Melville's Bibles (University of California, 2008), Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, University of Washington Press, 2013), The Song of Songs: A Biography (Princeton University Press, Lives of Great Religious Books, 2019), and Ruth: A Migrant’s Tale (Yale University Press, Jewish Lives, 2022).

Review: Decolonization and its discontents The World Today mhiggins.drupal 1 August 2022

Jenna Marshall on a lively if flawed argument to find a way forward in a debate that has descended ‘into acrimony’.

Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously
Olufemi Taiwo, Hurst, £14.99

Decolonization was once heralded as a moment of potential and possibility for the formerly imperial world to chart a new way forward no longer tied to the apparatus of empire.

It marked a period of transition to nation states – and an expansion of a rights-based international community that would dispense with the morally bankrupt regime of racism, dispossession and subjugation that characterized colonialism.  
 

The descent of the decolonization debate

Half a century later, the debate surrounding decolonization has descended into acrimony. Some factions cast the issue of decolonization as a sustained attack on British and western culture writ large; other disparate voices coalesce around related social justice issues such as inequality, climate change and education. 

Decolonization has become ubiquitous in the public domain – and its ubiquity is the problem. In Against Decolonization, Olufemi Taiwo renounces a concept he conceives as having been emptied of serious study and analytical purchase; one incapable of addressing the complexities of modern global politics and more importantly, Africa’s place in it. 

Although the book attacks the inexhaustible ways in which the ‘trope of decolonization’ has been deployed, Taiwo is less bothered by the purported failures of scholars he deems ‘decolonizers’ and focuses his attention instead on the political landscape of African countries, past and present. 

Central to the book’s argument are two distinct scholarly strands on decolonization. The first, legal focus, centres on the political and economic forces of state-building. The second essays an ‘ideology’ of decolonization that rests on ‘forcing an ex-colony to forswear on pain of being forever under the yoke of colonization any and every cultural, political, intellectual, social and linguistic artefact, idea, process, institution and practice that retains even the slightest whiff of the colonial past’. 

Whether one should characterize the latter as simply a field of study or a potential set of policy arrangements remains unclear – yet what is certain is that it is too nebulous, too elastic, too open-ended to offer any substantive model or mechanism to understand postcolonial Africa. 
 

Correcting Eurocentric narcissism

 The decolonization research agenda in Africa came to prominence during the Cold War period of national liberation struggles.

The intellectual project that followed centred on dismantling Eurocentrism as colonial subjugation through its promotion of the West as the crucible of legitimate and scientific knowledge. Since then, scholars have argued that decolonization itself has become compromised by its enduringly Eurocentric gaze at the expense of the agency of African thinkers, creatives and statesmen and women. 

Taiwo seeks to correct this narcissism – and the omissions left in its wake – by introducing lesser-known Africans and pan-African scholars and cultural figures. These voices, he hopes, will illuminate issues often ignored by ‘decolonizers’ and spark a ‘renewed interest in an appreciation of the many different ways in which African thinkers have responded to the colonial experience’.
 

The decolonization of language

Taiwo challenges the decolonization of language as an oversold promise.

Romanticizing an imagined, pristine African pre-colonial past, he says, ultimately leads to nativism and atavism. As a case in point, Taiwo highlights bureaucratic instances of ‘language policy planning’ to deploy African languages in places such as Niger, Mali, Cameroon, Senegal and Nigeria that were hindered by multilingualism, education and high rates of illiteracy.

The author goes on to confront the abstract language of decolonization, which, he says, allows western scholars to unproblematically engage with the concept without any serious consideration of their own complicity in upholding systems of exclusion. It entrenches their own institutional power within the academy, amplifies their perspectives at the expense of others, and limits the possibilities for understanding the problems of world politics with deleterious effects on policy.

It is a serious claim, but there are issues to be addressed: Taiwo assumes there is coherence among scholars of decolonization, which is not the case. 

When Taiwo approaches how to foster political systems that cater to the needs of their citizens he dismantles the binary of ‘West as modern’ v ‘Africa as traditional’. Chieftaincies as traditional African governance, he points out, were the product of colonial anthropology, not Africans themselves. From the Fanti Confederation of 1871 to the Egba United Government in what is now Nigeria, Taiwo demonstrates that there has been a sustained tradition towards demands for democratic values. 

As he concedes an intellectual neglect of African philosophers that underlies the design and operations of Africa’s political institutions, Taiwo’s initial dismissal of the significance of cultural decolonization deserves another look. How should political and economic drives toward self-determination be advanced in the absence of knowledge shaped and mediated through African lived experiences?

In this respect, the tale of two decolonizations – the legal alongside the ideological – suggest an unhelpful, if not false, binary.
 

The problem of reconciling modernity and colonialism

What resonates throughout the book is the idea that Europe cannot profess to hold an exclusive intellectual claim to modernity. Its universal aspirations are open to all of humanity, allowing those who have historically been marginalized to be worldmakers. 

The idea that modernity and colonialism are irreconcilable is problematic. For instance, Taiwo argues that the curtailment of capitalism in Africa by restricting the growth of the middle classes while limiting competition between African capitalists and the metropole is the consequence of colonialism.

Yet the celebrated cultural anthropologist Sidney Mintz established an understanding that the matter for debate is not whether non-westerners were part of the modern system, but how and to what degree they were included and able to actualise its ideals. 

The emerging capitalist world economy needed non-western lands and labour, and so they were conscripted to this end. Recent abolitionist and black radical scholarship has built on this argument to maintain that capitalism not only requires inequality for it to function but that race – as a mechanism for producing ‘difference’ – enshrines it.

Acknowledging the unacknowledged

In the end, Taiwo communicates a palpable frustration at the state of academic discourses on contemporary Africa under the guise of emancipatory and radical scholarship. He offers an alternative approach whereby African students might rid themselves of a faddism that is ‘at best unsatisfactory’ and at worst produces ‘confusion, obscurantism, if not outright distortion and falsification’.

Yet out of this irritation, Taiwo’s greatest contribution in Against Decolonization might be to urge an acknowledgement of how and to what degree decolonization has become subdued and its political possibilities curtailed. He ultimately urges us to reconsider the purpose of the decolonization academic movement as an ethics to abide by rather than a social theory of the postcolonial world. 

This requires those ‘decolonizers’ on whose careers the term is built to adopt greater intellectual humility – to resist the posture of the anarchist radical scholar armed for the ‘good fight’. Instead, they should apply a scholarly curiosity to genuinely engage with those already on the battlefield, so to speak; those ‘doing the work’ in practice, but who have been unacknowledged until now.

David Wald claims Crunchyroll opened his private mail, threw away letters, gave away contents to staff

Macho Man Randy Standards stops by for a quick chat, Passkeys follow up, discussing the safety of Display: contents, the yellow fade technique, how hot CSS is right now (so hot), and a check in on how everyone's doing with Tears of the Kingdom.

The quality of the statistics of a country is a measure of its goodness, say the authors

There are people you just need to say “yes” to.

I consider myself fortunate to have known and worked with Erin Kissane for years, and I’ve admired her writing for quite some time before that. Krista Stevens has been a friendly fixture throughout my career; she used to run an impossibly tight ship at Digital Web, where some of my first articles were published, before doing wonderful and incredible things at A List Apart. So yeah, when they asked me to work with them on their New Secret Project©, I basically signed up before they could finish telling me what it was all about.

And with that, I’m thrilled to announce that Contents, a new magazine focusing on content strategy, will be launching this fall.

Here’s Erin’s introduction:

The conversation about content strategy, online publishing, and all the subfields and specializations that surround them is flourishing. Wonderfully, it’s no longer possible to keep track of the posts, comments, talks, and events that take place every week within our world. And it’s not just that we’re voluble: our community is extraordinarily generous with knowledge, help, and professional support.

After benefiting from this conversation in so many ways, we’d like to give something back. A bounded collection of ideas and connections. A place to catch up with the movement of our fledgling industry and the much older fields from which it emerged. An editorial lens.

As a designer-person who benefitted immensely from Erin’s and Kristina’s respective books on the subject, this is all music to the ol’ ears. Because I think Contents is going to be a wonderful, oh-so-valuable resource for those of us looking to better understand content strategy (myself included), and I’m excited to contribute a little bit to making that happen.

In short: because of folks like Erin, Krista, and the oh-so-capable Erik Westra, I know Contents will be something special. You should check us out on Twitter, and maybe contribute an article or eight if you’re so inclined.

In certain scenarios, a Subsystem Reference block changes its position. It can happen during: 

1. Loading of top model which contains the Subsystem Reference block 
2. Synchronization of Subsystem Reference block's contents
3. Converting a subsystem to Subsystem Reference block 

The present invention relates to an apparatus for mixing and controlling the temperature of laboratory vessel contents with an accommodating device in detachable connection with an exchangeable block for accommodating and controlling the temperature of laboratory vessels and with a drive by which the accommodating device can be set in a mixing motion, and with a temperature control device with a heat source or sink in heat-conducting connection with the exchangeable block at least through in each case at least one adjoining contact face firstly on the accommodating device and secondly on the exchangeable block, which is characterized in that the detachable connection is maintained by a spring element which, by virtue of its spring force, horizontally clamps together a first undercut between the accommodating device and the exchangeable block in at least one first direction.

A method for virtual channel management is provided. The method includes the following steps. In response to a command, a control unit of a network-based multimedia reproduction system determines whether the command is associated with virtual channel switching. When the command is associated with virtual channel switching, the control unit checks whether a channel value corresponding to the command exists in an application virtual channel table. When the channel value exists in the application virtual channel table, the control unit determines an application corresponding to the channel number from the application virtual channel table, and executes the application. According to a first operation parameter set corresponding to the application, the control unit sets the executed application to retrieve digital contents through a network unit of the network-based multimedia reproduction system.

The present invention provides a content data recording/reproducing device, comprising a communication unit that engages in communication with an external device, a storage unit that stores content data and additional data related to the content data, a content data extraction unit that selectively extracts the content data from the storage unit based upon condition data received at the communication unit from the external device and the additional data stored in the storage unit and a contents list generation unit that generates a contents list based upon the condition data and additional data corresponding to the content data extracted by the content data extraction unit.

Wood particles having fibers aligned in a grain, wherein: the wood particles are characterized by a length dimension (L) aligned substantially parallel to the grain, a width dimension (W) normal to L and aligned cross grain, and a height dimension (H) normal to W and L; the L×H dimensions define two side surfaces characterized by substantially intact longitudinally arrayed fibers; the W×H dimensions define two cross-grain end surfaces characterized individually as aligned either normal to the grain or oblique to the grain; the L×W dimensions define two substantially parallel top and bottom surfaces; and, a majority of the W×H surfaces in the mixture of wood particles have end checking.

The present invention is related to the field of environmental protection, more specifically, to a foliage silicon fertilizer and a method for production of the fertilizer, which is a molybdenum-silica compound sol used for reducing heavy metal and nitrates in vegetables. The fertilizer, which is a molybdenum-silica compound sol, comprises 10-25 wt % silica, 0.05-5.5 wt % molybdenum ions. More preferably, the fertilize, which is a rare earth-molybdenum-silica compound sol, comprises 10-25 wt % silica, 0.05-5.5 wt % molybdenum ions and 0.1-7.5 wt % rare earth ions. By the combination of silica with molybdenum in the present invention, it is effective for preventing the absorption/accumulation of nitrates in vegetables. In addition, by the further combination with rare earth element, the prevention ability of the fertilizer from absorbing heavy metal and nitrates into vegetables is even enhanced. With a preparation method with normal pressure and relatively, low temperature, that is, with mild condition, simple process and high operability, large scale production of the present invention may be readily executed.

The March-April 2020 issue of TR News (#326) - including a cover feature on TRB's "century of progress and foundation for the future" of transportation research - is available in hard copy and digital copy for subscribers. For those who are not subscribers, the table of contents is available. Other feature articles in the issue include ones on whether research processes can keep up, accessible rail sleeper compartments, drones and lasers for railroad bridges, implications of California wildfires, and muc...

The March-April 2020 issue of TR News (#326) - including a cover feature on TRB's "century of progress and foundation for the future" of transportation research - is available in hard copy and digital copy for subscribers. For those who are not subscribers, the table of contents is available. Other feature articles in the issue include ones on whether research processes can keep up, accessible rail sleeper compartments, drones and lasers for railroad bridges, implications of California wildfires, and muc...

Chomsky, Noam -- Political and social views.

I have a modeless informational dialog box defined at the beginning of a SKILL script, but its contents don't display until the script finishes.

How do you get a modeless dialog box contents to display while a SKILL script is running?

procedure(myproc()

   prog((myvars)

     hiDisplayAppDBox()    ; opens blank dialog box - no dboxText contents show until script completes!

     ....rest of SKILL code in script...launches child processes

   );prog

);proc

Dr. Azza Karam is the Secretary General of Religions for Peace International and Professor of Religion and Development at the Vrije Universiteit (VU), Amsterdam; Dr. Mustafa Y. Ali is the Secretary General of the Global Network of Religions for Children (GNRC) based in Nairobi, Kenya.

The post Religion & its Discontents: Considerations Around COVID-19 & Africa appeared first on Inter Press Service.

For any journal issue that has at least one open access or early access article, PMC is now displaying the table of contents (TOC) in advance of the whole issue becoming available. Not to worry, though—only those articles specified for early release are immediately viewable in PMC. As consistent with the terms of access in the journal agreement, the other articles will only become available on their specified release date, as shown in the TOC below.

The journal's accessiblity, as indicated on the PMC Journal list also has not changed; for example, Plant Physiology's embargo period is still 12 months. What has changed is that the issues with “preview” TOCs now additionally appear on the journal's archive page. Publishers and others can rest assured, however, that no access terms for any journal have been changed with the unveiling of this new format.

A woman allegedly spat at and threw the contents of a sick bowl over a nurse while being treated for Covid-19 symptoms.

Newly discovered documents have revealed the first telegraph messages and joy when England was linked for the first time with India on 23 June, 1870.

Get the royally-approved glow