I think this is something most people rarely talk about but it strikes home to many of us. As a parent, I have a responsibility to defend my children against this persistent cognitive manipulation and experimentation. Just as I would not want a random stranger at the corner have exclusive attention of my kid and sell them insurance or grammarly or mesothelioma, I would also never want them to have that unfiltered access to my kids online. One can then say AdBlocks are a parental obligation.
My Interview with Hachalu Hundessa: “The Other Is a Divine Creation”
My Interview with Hachalu Hundessa: “The Other Is a Divine Creation” Addis Standard -
> It takes time to change attitudes. It is not easy. But saying we love Ethiopia while hating Ethiopian people doesn’t make sense.
Choice sounds like something people should not be fighting over :)
Cash provides essential fallback when digital payments break down, Payment Choice Alliance points out
The long read: When Abiy Ahmed took power in Ethiopia, he was feted at home and abroad as a great unifier and reformer. Two years later, terrible violence was raging. How did people get him so wrong?
May I have the honor of introducing you to African Rhumba: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O3BexfHBTIg
That is a favorite one. The album is by two of the greatest in African music: Franco Luambo (of TPOK Jazz) and Tabu Ley (of Afrisa International). They did this album to cool down rumours that they were fighting and don’t see eye to eye. They called it Lisanga ya Banganga (Congress of the Wizards).
This specific song I share is solemn, as they are mourning the death of their mentor, Kabaselle.
Check their respective Wikipedia entries. It is a whole new world you are peeking into.
Luddites were not as opposed to new technology as you say it here. They were mainly concerned about what technology would do to whom.
A helpful history right here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/?lens=little-brown
No matter how far we have come as a society, you look again and realize on some things we have really not moved much. if anything, there might be regression. Think of Belgium owning forests in DR Congo for "carbon credits"!!!
Belgium's King Leopold II as a rubber snake
By Edward Linley Sambourne - http://www.punchcartoons.com/More-Categories-history-&-politics-personalities/c200_32_107/p379/In-The-Rubber-Coils/product_info.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5279252
This kind of research is interesting. There are several of these that I know of (Ethiopia's Injera cost, Kenya's Kikapu, Tanzania's gharama etc). Hopefully someone can put these indices in comparison to other cost-of-living/inflation measures. Link to the report page - https://www.sbmintel.com/2024/04/the-sbm-jollof-index-crisis-at-the-table/
I am not into the political economy weeds of this situation but is there a reason why this is so hard to do? I can think of a host of reasons but is there agreement within African(-ist) thinking why this is usually the case?
We demonstrate that political orientation can be predicted from neutral facial images by both humans and algorithms, even when factors like age, gender, and ethnicity are accounted for. This indicates a connection between political leanings and inherent facial characteristics, which are largely beyond an individual’s control. Our findings underscore the urgency for scholars, the public, and policymakers to recognize and address the potential risks of facial recognition technology to personal privacy.
"peer-reviewed" bullshit.
It would be more complex if the US didn’t believe in 13th floor story and UK did. Even though both would have 14th floor on the same level from the ground, there is a lot that would be missed if you only elevated straight from the parking basement to your 14th floor.
Images could as well be copies of immigration documents for secretive efforts to run away from abusive family relationships or financial details for whatever plans or projects.
Findroid/Finamp? Quite robust.
How Gulf princes, the safari industry, and conservation groups are displacing the Maasai from the last of their Serengeti homeland
> He and other officials I spoke with said that they disliked even using the term Maasai. They invoked the spirit of Nyerere, saying that Tanzania was supposed to have a national identity, not tribal ones. Msando said he could understand the Maasai’s concern about losing their culture, even if he had little sympathy for it. “Culture is a fluid thing,” he said. “I am Chaga—the Chaga were on the verge of having their own nation. Today look at me. People do not even know I’m Chaga. My kids don’t even speak Chaga.” He was unapologetic: “The Maasai are not exempted from acculturation or cultural acclimatization, or cultural extinction.”
Archive: https://web.archive.org/save/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fmagazine%2Farchive%2F2024%2F05%2Fmaasai-tribe-tanzania-forced-land-evictions-serengeti%2F677835%2F
Tanzania: Surge in online LGBTIQ censorship and other targeted blocks
> The results of our analysis show that most ISPs in Tanzania appear to implement blocks by means of TLS interference, specifically by timing out the session after the ClientHello message during the TLS handshake. As the timing of the blocks and the types of URLs blocked are (mostly) consistent across (tested) networks, ISPs in Tanzania likely implement blocks in a coordinated manner (possibly through the use of Deep Packet Inspection technology).
Tanzania tried this sometime back. Foreign billionaires made local millionaires partners. All check boxes were ticked. Still a good idea.
A Decade of Documenting Migrant Deaths
The International Organization for Migration (IOM)’s Missing Migrants Project records incidents in which migrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, have died at state borders or in the process of migrating to an international destination. It was developed in response to disparate reports of pe...
> In the past decade, more than 63,000 deaths of migrants have been recorded by MMP. Notably, more than one in three of those identified come from countries in conflict, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Ethiopia. With that said, more than two-thirds of those whose deaths are documented in the MMP dataset in the last decade have little to no information on their identities, meaning that each one of these tens of thousands of individuals are unidentified.
Adaptive foraging behaviours in the Horn of Africa during Toba supereruption
The archaeological site Shinfa-Metema 1 in the lowlands of northwest Ethiopia provides early evidence of intensive riverine-based foraging aided by the likely adoption of the bow and arrow.
Archived link: https://web.archive.org/save/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticles%2Fs41586-024-07208-3
DOI for the highseas: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07208-3
> Adaptive foraging along dry-season waterholes would have transformed seasonal rivers into ‘blue highway’ corridors, potentially facilitating an out-of-Africa dispersal and suggesting that the event was not restricted to times of humid climates. The behavioural flexibility required to survive seasonally arid conditions in general, and the apparent short-term effects of the Toba supereruption in particular were probably key to the most recent dispersal and subsequent worldwide expansion of modern humans.
Swahili. If you want to translate “she/he went to the river”, you say “Alienda mtoni” which collapses she/he into the subject A- (Alienda) to mean “the person”. You always need context to use a gendered word (like mwanamke for woman) otherwise general conversation does not foreground it. There is literally no word for he/she in Swahili, as far as I know.
Same here. My native langauge is not gendered and I rarely associate “man” in academic spaces with “gender” category. I usually need more info to tilt to gender in discussions.
The 2020 Primary felt like high strategy game. I don’t know much about Américan politics but I do remember seeing Bernie Sanders continue the 2016 momentum only for Biden to pick up in South Carolina. The orchestration they did to keep primary candidates in to weaken Bernie while working for Biden felt to me less a Biden thing and more of Biden as a chess-piece. He was not the force behind it. His familiarity and seemingly calm demeanor appealed to most voters compared to the erratic image of Trump. But deep down there was a feeling of “screw you Bernie”. Luckily for Dems, that is not a fault line Republicans are exploiting.
Peoples who live close to nature have a rich lore of plants, animals and landscapes embedded in their mother tongues — which may hold vital clues to protecting biodiversity
> Harrison has since studied Indigenous languages in other parts of the world — from the Pacific islands of Vanuatu to the highlands of Vietnam — and learned that many of them are nature-centric in this way, reflecting millennia of deep observation of the natural world. Scholars increasingly recognize that many of these tongues encode much knowledge about the world’s species and ecosystems that is unknown to Western science — knowledge, Harrison argues, that may prove critical to protecting nature amid a global extinction crisis.
Still fair point. The grind is in placing the new reimplementation of federated link aggregator in opposition to Lemmy as if they are competing, and sadly to trash Lemmy and its developers.
And if they develop a good tool, that is also fine. The more the merrier. But I think their resources may have served more people if they were not duplicating effort and rather contributed into existing work. To each their own.
Something feels off with this post. It comes off as “we are better than Lemmy” as if there is any competition and awards to be won. To say Lemmy’s development is “toxic” and this project is “more inclusive and less toxic” without backing it up with evidence is unfair.
One of history's earliest mixed drinks was made to appease a ferocious goddess.
> To halt the carnage, the sun god resorted to trickery. One version of the story recounts that Ra flooded a field of barley and allowed it to ferment, while another claims he simply poured out 7,000 jars of beer. In either case, Ra cleverly dyed the beer crimson using red ochre, a type of edible clay rich in iron oxide. > > “When Hathor arrived, she started drinking what she thought was blood,” Goldsmith says. After guzzling the better part of a field of beer, the goddess became too drunk to continue her murder spree and took a nap, thus saving humanity.
Colonialism, Occupation & Apartheid: African Countries See “Shared Experiences” with Palestinians
Leaders at this year’s African Union summit have condemned Israel’s assault on Gaza and called for its immediate end. Kenyan writer and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola explains the long history of African solidarity with Palestine, continuing with today’s efforts to end the destruction of Gaza. Af...
> It’s important, though, to distinguish the position of the African Union from the position of individual member states. So, while the union itself has been consistent and has always held the line that Palestinian independence was an integral part of the African Union’s foundational documents and foundational position in international relations, various African nations — because there is no impetus from the African Union for there to be always a single position within each country, various African nations do have different relationships with both Israel and Palestine. So, for example, while every single country in Africa except one recognizes the state of Palestine, the recognition of the state of Israel has varied. There was a time after that 1972 war where African nations wholesale declared that they would not recognize the state of Israel, but that has changed considerably.
Amharic on its way to becoming a pan-African language
Not very sure how this is convincing as it is spoken by one country (and its diaspora). Hausa/Kikongo/Kanuri are spoken across more regions and may be seen as more inclusive than Amharic which has its own imperial baggage in Ethiopia. This is not to say that it is off. It is actually a language I love. Very rich in its expressions.
> There are many indigenous languages in Africa with millions of speakers as native or second languages. Among them, Amharic stands next only to Arabic in the number of speakers. Amharic is now being used by diverse communities across the world. Most notably Ethiopian diaspora community that are estimated at over 5 million use it in their respective countries of residence.
In Ethiopia, a secret committee orders killings and arrests to crush rebels
> “I used to believe in the reform agenda of Abiy, I really wanted to be part of the transition,” the judge said. “At first I justified the behaviour of the security forces and thought it was linked to a particular moment, but at some point I realised the problem was systemic. Everyone who disagreed with the Koree Nageenyaa would be removed."
Fermentation technology as a driver of human brain expansion
As brain tissue is metabolically expensive, the evolutionary expansion of human brains required shifts in energy intake and metabolism. The External Fermentation Hypothesis proposes that a shift to consumption of externally fermented foods in human ancestors permitted a reduction in gut tissue requi...
> Here, we propose the initial metabolic trigger of hominid brain expansion was the consumption of externally fermented foods. We define “external fermentation” as occurring outside the body, as opposed to the internal fermentation in the gut. External fermentation could increase the bioavailability of macro- and micronutrients while reducing digestive energy expenditure and is supported by the relative reduction of the human colon.
A Reflection piece on "La Prensa de Minnesota," a newly available collection in the Immigration History Research Center Archives
Minnesota is home to a large number of Latine community members, including immigrants. Since the...
> During the initial stage of rehousing the materials as well as entering their details into ArchivesSpace, I had a lot of time to think as I worked. I found myself reflecting on all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making archival information accessible both in analog form and digitally. So much archival labor occurs behind the scenes, away from the eye of users. As archivists very well know, processing work is an invisible and at times tedious, but essential part of making records available. By the time a user receives a box of materials or a digital file in front of them, someone would have already worked hours upon hours on the backend preparing those materials for use. As a result of my work during the past year, I now have a much better understanding and appreciation of this work.
Kigali, 18 February 2024 Rwanda is deeply concerned by the abandonment of the Luanda and Nairobi Processes by the Government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and by the international community’s indifference to DRC’s dramatic military build-up.
> The statement issued by the U.S. Department of State on 17 February 2024 fundamentally distorts these realities, and stands in puzzling contradiction with the substance and tone of the confidence-building process initiated by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence in November 2023, which created a productive framework for de-escalation. Rwanda will seek clarification from the U.S. Government to ascertain whether its statement represents an abrupt shift in policy, or simply a lack of internal coordination.
Discussions are ongoing between the Dean at Westminster and the Ethiopian Church over the possible restitution of the sacred object
> An Abbey spokesperson tells The Art Newspaper: “The Dean [David Hoyle] and Chapter has decided in principle that it would be appropriate to return the Ethiopian tabot to the Ethiopian Church. We are currently considering the best way to achieve this, and we are in ongoing discussions with representatives of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. This is a complex matter, and it may take some time.”
Lemmy the software will be 5 years soon (Feb 14)
🐀 A link aggregator and forum for the fediverse. Contribute to LemmyNet/lemmy development by creating an account on GitHub.
cross-posted from: https://baraza.africa/post/1144422
> The first commit was on Feb 14 2019. Amazing what @[email protected] and the team have managed to build, attracting a great community along. > >