130,793 research outputs found
Effective engagement and involvement with community stakeholders in the co-production of global health research.
No full textDoreen Tembo and colleagues argue that small changes as well as larger system-wide changes can strengthen citizens’ contribution to knowledge in health researc
Mampi the Queen Diva: Articulating Feminism in Zambia’s Fast Music
No full textDrawing on fieldwork and published literature on Zambia’s popular music and feminism, I analyze how Zambia’s fast music has provided spaces in which Zambian women musicians articulate feminism as they contest and challenge patriarchal hegemony. Zambia’s fast music is produced quickly, for profit, and consumed by a mass audience. Also colloquially known as Zed Beats, fast music blends indigenous Zambian rhythms with R&B, reggae, rap, Jamaican dancehall, hip-hop, and other popular music genres. Zambia’s fast music is sung in local languages, mostly urban vernaculars Bemba, Nyanja, and English, and celebrates the pleasures of the body.
This thesis consists of three main sections. In the first section, I introduce Zambia’s fast music. The second section focuses on the emergence of feminist movements of the 1990s in Zambia. The third section explores female musicians’ participation in Zambia’s popular music industry since the introduction of fast music.
I posit that the democratization of Zambia’s national politics in the 1990s coupled with the liberalization of Zambia’s economy that followed the change of government facilitated the emergence of Zambia’s fast music. The democratization of national politics led to the mushrooming of feminist organizations which campaigned for women’s rights. The feminist movements of the 1990s inspired female musicians including Mirriam Mukupe (a.k.a. “Mampi, the Queen Diva”) to start using music as a platform for articulating a feministic agenda. Since the 1990s, when fast music debuted on Zambia’s music scene, female musicians have participated more in the music industry. An analysis of one of Mirriam Mukupe’s most popular songs “Why” exemplifies the articulation of feminism in Zambia’s fast music
Uncovering the Signaling Mechanisms of TransMEMbrane 16A
No full textThe Ca2+-activated Cl- channel, TransMEMbrane member 16A (TMEM16A), regulates diverse physiological functions including smooth muscle contraction, mucosal secretion and signal transduction. TMEM16A is an essential protein that we cannot live without. In fact, changes that enhance or reduce TMEM16A’s activity result in diseases such as hypertension and inflammatory airway diseases, respectively. Despite its importance, we are just beginning to understand how TMEM16A channel activity is regulated. To study TMEM16A’s regulation, I used electrophysiology techniques. Specifically, I recorded endogenous TMEM16A currents from Xenopus laevis oocytes using the inside-out configuration of the patch clamp technique. I observed that TMEM16A-conducted currents diminished within seconds of patch excision despite the continued presence of Ca2+. Current rundown is common amongst channels regulated by the fatty acid phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PI(4,5)P2). I demonstrated that TMEM16A current depletion in the membrane patch was due to loss of PI(4,5)P2, thereby revealing that PI(4,5)P2 is required for TMEM16A to conduct Cl- currents. Because PI(4,5)P2 is just one of eight cell membrane phosphoinositides that share a common backbone but differ in phosphate group number and location on the inositol ring, I sought to determine which features of PI(4,5)P2 enabled the lipid-channel interaction. I found that PI(4,5)P2 recovered the most current compared to the other phosphoinositides, and phosphoinositides containing at least one phosphate group on position 4 were capable of recovering intermediate levels of current. The extent of recovery was dependent on whether or not the phospholipid included a phosphate at position 4 rather than the number of negatively charged phosphates. In a separate line of experimentation, I determined that the rate of current rundown was influenced by the concentration of Ca2+ applied to excised patches in a way that activates a Ca2+-sensitive phospholipase C (PLC) to then deplete PI(4,5)P2. Taken together, my data reveal that PI(4,5)P2 regulates TMEM16A, and that the phosphate at position 4 is key in this interaction. Overall, my work revealed key mechanisms in how signals other than intracellular Ca2+ alter opening and closing of these critical channels. Expanding our understanding of TMEM16A’s regulatory mechanisms may lay the foundation for developing novel therapeutics for TMEM16A-associated diseases
MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations
No full textInformation overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank
Zed Beats: A Historical Ethnography of Musical Production and Musical Labor in Zambian Popular Music
No full textDrawing on participant-observation, interviews, musical analysis and published literature on Zambia’s socio-economic history, I analyze shifts in musical labor and musical production of Zambian popular music between 1986 and 2024. I define musical labor as any activity that contributes to the production of music in recording studios and other creative spaces for financial gain or otherwise. Zed Beats, a blend of indigenous Zambian musical elements with musical influences drawn from R&B, reggae, rap, Jamaican dancehall, hip-hop, and other music genres, exposes these shifts.
Socio-economic conditions prevalent in the late-1980s and 1990s, including the decline of Zambia’s economy, the rise in the number of disk jockeys (DJs) and their mobile discos, the dominance of foreign music on Zambia’s radio and television, the demise of many musicians due to HIV/AIDS, and the economic liberalization of Zambia’s economy, facilitated shifts in musical labor and musical production in recording studios.
This dissertation consists of five chapters. In Chapter 1, I present the history of Zambian popular music and examine the socio-economic conditions that led to the emergence of Zed Beats and its subgenres in home studios. In the second chapter, I analyze musical labor and musical production in semi-professional studios between 1986 and 2000 before the emergence of Zed Beats. In chapters three and four, I examine shifts in musical labor and musical production based on ethnographic research I conducted in Zambia between 2021 and 2024. In Chapter 5, I analyze the seeming omnipotence of producers in home studios as they transformed their Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) into musical instruments. The producer’s omnipotence in the production of Zed Beats has significantly influenced its sound and blurred the roles of the musician, engineer, composer, arranger, songwriter, and producer in home studios. In this chapter, I further explore “liveness” as an aesthetic choice by producers who have reincorporated live instrumentation in the production of Zed Beats. I demonstrate how producers’ access to more affordable audio recording equipment, music software, computers and other related accessories has given them a new kind of influence and power over the production of popular music in Zambia
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
"Closing the R&D Gap, Evaluating the Sources of R&D Spending"
No full textBoth spending and tax policies have been implemented in the United States with the goal of stimulating private sector research and development (R&D). Karier questions whether current R&D policy, especially the research and experimentation tax credit, can contribute to closing the gap between nondefense expenditures on R&D in the United States and such expenditures in other countries, such as Japan and Germany. He also explores possible changes to our current R&D policy to make it more effective.
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Scholarly Communication and Publishing Lunch and Learn Talk #11: The ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund
No full textAt the May 2014 talk, you will learn about the ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund--what it is, why we do it, how it works, and how the program is going so far
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