Exploring the Transformative Power of Play in African Children’s Games

The transformative power of indigenous African children’s games can be demonstrated by how they were framed by the aesthetics of play such as imitation, imagination, make-believe, repetition, spontaneity, and improvisation. Such games could be regarded as ‘rites of passage’ for children’s initiation into adulthood as they occupied a crucial phase in the process of growing up. Using the illustrative paradigm of indigenous children’s games from the Shona-speaking peoples of Zimbabwe, this paper explores the transformative power of play as a means by which children engaged with reality. The paper proceeds to argue that the advent of modern agents of social change such as Christianity, formal education, urbanization, industrialization, scientific technology, and the cash economy not only created a fragmentation of African people’s cultural past but also threatened the survival of African cultural performance traditions. Although indigenous African children’s games were disrupted by modernity, they have managed to survive in a modified form.

Role of the Stria Vascularis in the Pathogenesis of Sensorineural Hearing Loss: A Narrative Review

Sensorineural hearing loss is a common sensory impairment in humans caused by abnormalities in the inner ear. The stria vascularis is regarded as a major cochlear structure that can independently degenerate and influence the degree of hearing loss. This review summarizes the current literature on the role of the stria vascularis in the pathogenesis of sensorineural hearing loss resulting from different etiologies, focusing on both molecular events and signaling pathways, and further attempts to explore the underlying mechanisms at the cellular and molecular biological levels. In addition, the deficiencies and limitations of this field are discussed. With the rapid progress in scientific technology, new opportunities are arising to fully understand the role of the stria vascularis in the pathogenesis of sensorineural hearing loss, which, in the future, will hopefully lead to the prevention, early diagnosis, and improved treatment of sensorineural hearing loss.

Advanced Art Authentication in Oil Paintings Using Precise 3D Morphological Analysis of Craquelure Patterns

The development of scientific technology for art authentication have elicited multidimensional evidence to distinguish forgeries from original artworks. Here, we analyzed three-dimensional morphology of cracks that contain information such as painting features of artworks using an optical coherence tomography (OCT). The forgeries were produced by an expert from the original oil paintings with cracks that occur as paint drying, canvas aging, and physical damage. The parameters such as shape, width, and depth were compared based on cross-sectional images of original and fake cracks. The shapes of original cracks were a rectangular and an inverted triangle, but fake cracks were a relatively simple inverted triangle. The original cracks were as deep as the thickness of the upper layer and mostly have ‘thin/deep' or 'wide/shallow'. The fake cracks were observed as 'thin/shallow' or 'wide/deep'. This study will improve the understanding of the crack characteristics and promote development of techniques for art authenticity.

Invisible Corporate Man

The Reconstruction era Fourteenth Amendment (1868) has long been the primary U.S. statutory source for corporate personhood. But for nearly fifty years the story of the rise of corporate personhood rights entwined with the fraught story of legal personhood for African Americans was effectively ignored. This chapter fills a gap in legal and cultural scholarship to begin to address this blind spot, first by analyzing the period’s jurisprudence of the “corporation sole” (a corporation of one person) in contrast to that of African American persons. Drawing together case analysis, discussions of legal formalism, and interpretations of two major novels—George Schuyler’s satirical Black No More (1931) and Ralph Ellison’s acclaimed Invisible Man (1952)—this chapter depicts the legal and literary effects of a half-century’s misconstruing of the Fourteenth Amendment, in which “any person” was defined not to mean any married woman, child, and/or African American person, but, rather, any corporate or white male person. To imagine a less racist world, Schuyler hypothesizes African American rights and freedoms secured by the abstract corporate form and a new scientific technology protected by the laws of intellectual property. Later, Ellison provides a powerful and very different critique of state-sanctioned personhood as irretrievably debased because it is abstract. Both authors expose and challenge through satire and fantasy the obscene, unmentionable inequality between reduced rights for African Americans and human rights for corporate persons.

Development of a Test to Measure the Knowledge Level of Small Tea Growers on Scientific Tea Cultivation Practices

The present study was conducted to construct and standardize a test to measure the knowledge level of small tea growers on scientific technology on tea cultivation. The major steps followed for developing the test were construction of items, primary and final selection of items through difficulty index, discrimination index and biserial correlation. The final test comprised of 24 objective questions, referred to as items. The procedure adopted in the study can also be followed for developing knowledge test on any other aspect.