mwalimu 1 week ago • 100%
No fucking roots shall hold.
mwalimu 1 week ago • 100%
A classic!
mwalimu 3 weeks ago • 100%
Like workday hours v weekend hours.
mwalimu 3 weeks ago • 100%
The grey is faster than the red, then I ask to myself, what a wonderful world.
mwalimu 4 weeks ago • 100%
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse removed. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
James D. Nicoll
mwalimu 1 month ago • 100%
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.
> It takes time to change attitudes. It is not easy. But saying we love Ethiopia while hating Ethiopian people doesn’t make sense.
mwalimu 2 months ago • 100%
Choice sounds like something people should not be fighting over :)
mwalimu 3 months ago • 100%
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.
mwalimu 3 months ago • 97%
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
mwalimu 4 months ago • 100%
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"!!!
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
mwalimu 5 months ago • 100%
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/
mwalimu 5 months ago • 80%
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.
mwalimu 5 months ago • 100%
I call it TED. Temporary Employee Discount. Don't forget to ring your TED. Always.
mwalimu 5 months ago • 100%
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.
mwalimu 5 months ago • 100%
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.
mwalimu 5 months ago • 100%
Findroid/Finamp? Quite robust.
> 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
mwalimu 6 months ago • 100%
Retired mouth and bum.
mwalimu 6 months ago • 100%
Tanzania tried this sometime back. Foreign billionaires made local millionaires partners. All check boxes were ticked. Still a good idea.
> 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.
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.
mwalimu 6 months ago • 100%
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.
mwalimu 6 months ago • 100%
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.
> 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.
mwalimu 7 months ago • 62%
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.
mwalimu 7 months ago • 76%
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.
mwalimu 7 months ago • 97%
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> “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."
> 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.
> 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.
mwalimu 7 months ago • 100%
The audacity of justifying looting! - https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/maqdala-collection
Contemporary written accounts describe widespread looting of the fortress and church by soldiers and the released hostages. Many of the pillaged objects were subsequently re-assembled and auctioned. This auction was presented as a means of generating 'prize money' for the troops. After Maqdala was destroyed the expedition force soon left Maqdala and shortly afterwards departed Ethiopia.
Accompanying the expedition in an official capacity as 'archaeologist' was Richard Rivington Holmes, assistant in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum. Holmes was one of the principal buyers at the auction and returned to the UK with a significant collection of objects including over 300 manuscripts (now in the collections of the British Library (Opens in new window)), regalia, sacred vessels and liturgical equipment from the imperial treasury, library and church at Maqdala. Objects entered the British Museum collections via Holmes and through the Secretary of State for India in 1868.
> 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.
> 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.”
mwalimu 7 months ago • 100%
I like the testing and hopefully they will share more detailed research findings in the next 6months. Especially on content moderation knowing they have decades of experience on this.
mwalimu 7 months ago • 100%
Those are not “thieves”. The real thieves are these AngloAmericans who stole hundreds of thousands of prime land then forced natives to work there (state forced taxation that could only be paid in cash which could only be got from these settler farms). Fuxked up system.
mwalimu 7 months ago • 100%
Cheap - relatively Reliable - hardly
Ethiopians in Addis (the capital) can go for a full day without lights. I would want to know whether they have a special connection with ET power company to avoid the extended blackouts.
mwalimu 7 months ago • 100%
The unsang heroes who brought in wisdom and competency! 🤟
mwalimu 7 months ago • 100%
Dess should tell us why Valentines. Probably a missed date and vented out on AGPL-3 legendary code. If true, long live heartbreaks!
> The digital memory of civilians and marginalized communities has become a crucial resource for documenting and writing about conflict, atrocities, and people; ultimately contributing to long-term transitional justice.
cross-posted from: https://baraza.africa/post/1144422 > The first commit was on Feb 14 2019. Amazing what [@dessalines@lemmy.ml](https://lemmy.ml/u/dessalines) and the team have managed to build, attracting a great community along. > >
The first commit was on Feb 14 2019. Amazing what [@dessalines@lemmy.ml](https://lemmy.ml/u/dessalines) and the team have managed to build, attracting a great community along.
mwalimu 9 months ago • 100%
I once read that the failure of British industrial policy to engage labour as a long term competitive edge instead of a dispensable short term concern saw Germany overtake British car makers. Germany dealt with labour strikes more comprehensively by engaging labour in policy structures. Like including Labour representatives in boardrooms.
I wonder how this may reflect on Chinese / Western competitiveness.
Found the piece: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23406467
mwalimu 9 months ago • 100%
Used to be the first thing we installed on phones and PCs. Opera was blazing fast on basic phones as far back as 2008sh.
mwalimu 9 months ago • 100%
Sadly, yes. One would hope the more core sectors use it, the more the general population would use such tools. But alas!
mwalimu 9 months ago • 100%
Cold plain metrics can easily hide social complexity.
Assume 10 investigative journalists use modded privacy-friendly Firefox for year long investigation. Then their report is read by 10 million average news reader on stock browsers like Chrome. Network logics tell us that Firefox browser has asymmetrical value in the ecosystem than plain usage metrics can ever reveal.
The obsession with numbers (the more the better) is a major blinding effect in societies driven by hierarchical cultures.
mwalimu 9 months ago • 100%
Thank you for the share.
mwalimu 9 months ago • 60%
Why are you letting facts come in between the truth?
mwalimu 9 months ago • 100%
That sucks! As long as a device can decode the signals, I don’t see why they should phase it out just to be compatible with DAB+ (especially when infrastructural costs are not a major factor).
mwalimu 9 months ago • 100%
FM receiver on phones + 3.5mn jack was a crucial source of local radio transmissions. I suspect some phones still ship radio receivers but the popular types like Samsungs and iPhones don’t seem to care (or perhaps that competes with their music and podcast markets).
mwalimu 9 months ago • 100%
My kind of hopes.
MARTIN: There's a report that the military was using artificial intelligence to try to map these tunnels. Do you have any sense of how that would work? AL-SIRHID: I mean, I know that they're using AI to make their bombing maps. That's what I read about. I am skeptical of any claim of technology being developed to find tunnels. Because, listen, tunnels have been everywhere. There's tunnels at the U.S.-Mexico border. There's no technology to detect them. There's tunnels at the DMZ between North and South Korea. Tunnels were used in the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam during the American war. I've had a Google alert for over 10 years for any time tunnels come in the news, and every couple of months or so, a new city discovers tunnels underneath them. So all this to say that tunnels are literally underground and secretive. Anybody who claims to have any accurate information about the current tunnel system will be not telling you the truth. I don't know where they are. Ordinary Gazans don't know where they are. So the tunnels that are being used now as combat tunnels are deeply, deeply secretive. MARTIN: That was the Palestinian American scholar and writer who publishes under the pen name Bint al-Sirhid.
> we conclude that the Court of Appeal was correct to reverse the decision of the Divisional Court, and was entitled to find that there are substantial grounds for believing that the removal of the claimants to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill-treatment by reason of refoulement. It was accordingly correct to hold that the Secretary of State’s policy is unlawful.
> It is therefore right to say that the Kenyan government and its respective seed policies undervalues farmer managed seed systems. Smallholder farmers in Kenya account for 80% of the farming population yet they are actively discouraged from farming by state agricultural policy that promotes commercial seed provision and modernisation of agriculture. Farmer seed systems provide equal access to seeds to farmers regardless of their economic status. Which begs the question: Why should policy support be geared towards formal seed systems when informal seed systems are currently supporting agricultural production?
> “The truth is there might never be a sustainable way to address migration, but African countries need to work better to increase legal pathways within Africa,” Oucho said. “Perhaps West Africans could move to East Africa where I’m from to share fishing expertise and vice versa. When people move they bring challenges but they also bring talents.”
> The difference between the established religions indicated above the Irreecha festival is that the former came from outside the country, Orthodox Christianity back in the 4th century and Islam in the 7th, wd while the Waqa belief system is entirely indigenous, created and nurtured by the common people whose lives depend on this very belief system.
> A government contractor is charged by criminal complaint, unsealed today, with espionage. Abraham Teklu Lemma, 50, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Ethiopian descent living in Silver Spring, Maryland, is charged with gathering or delivering national defense information to aid a foreign government; conspiracy to gather or deliver national defense information to aid a foreign government; and having unauthorized possession of national defense information and willfully retaining it.
> In total 3,000 Ethiopians were approved to come to Israel under a government decision from November, which also budgeted NIS 570 million for their absorption. Unlike those who qualify to immigrate under the Law of Return – which grants citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent – those arriving on the Jewish Agency-organized flights from Addis Ababa qualify under the Law of Entry.
> This woman, as Win observes, is often reminded that development work is about aiding the resource-poor and that her own experiences of patriarchy and oppression are not relevant to this narrative. In the meantime, if she happens to work in the development field, her ‘legitimacy’ is only realised in her role as mediator, connecting grassroots women and issues to the language and practice of international development.
> The Intellectuals go on to diagnose several key symptoms felt by the NGO-ization of Kenyan movements. Telling the story of Bunge La Mwananchi (The Peoples Parliament) in the early 1990s, Kinuthia Ndungu explains how the movement became a shadow of its original self as NGOs capitalized on poor members’ material conditions and turned them into ‘guns for hire’ by mobilizing them to join activities and demonstrations – whatever the cause – in exchange for monetary reimbursements. This is but one way how NGOs create a culture of dependency within a movement, making it challenging for grassroots leaders to organize activities without adequate finances and payments to those supporting a cause. Reliance on NGO resource support – in the form of staff time, printed materials, computers, etc. – can influence movement dependence, which can experience severe strain when donor funds shift to other alliances or causes. Additionally, movements that accept NGO resource and advocacy support often become softer in their critique of NGO positionality, dismissing the historical relationship between imperialism and NGOs.
cross-posted from: https://baraza.africa/post/510085 > > The Ethiopian Immigration Service (EIS) has placed the country’s largest passport order in years – a whopping 1.5 million new documents from manufacturers in Paris. Around 190,000 passports have already arrived in Ethiopia over the past few weeks.
> The Ethiopian Immigration Service (EIS) has placed the country’s largest passport order in years – a whopping 1.5 million new documents from manufacturers in Paris. Around 190,000 passports have already arrived in Ethiopia over the past few weeks.
> We refer to the exploit chain as BLASTPASS. The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim.
> Psychologists James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, who were paid at least $81 million by the CIA to develop and then implement the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, had waterboarded al-Nashiri at a CIA black site. We get response from Roy Eidelson and discuss his new book, Doing Harm, which investigates the American Psychological Association’s complicity in post-9/11 torture programs and the struggle to reform the psychology field.
Archived url: https://archive.ph/F51u6 > Ms. Charlier voiced doubt that the Kenyan-led force would be large enough to make headway against the gangs, which are thought to control roughly 80 percent of the capital. The plan calls for the deployment 1,000 Kenyan police officers and several hundred officers or soldiers from Caribbean countries. > “Fighting the gangs will require going into shantytowns, hillsides, terrain that you need to know very well,” said Ms. Charlier. She said that money going to an outside force would be better spent on strengthening Haiti’s own depleted police forces.
Mozambique’s president cannot be sued in the UK over the long-running $2bn “tuna bonds” scandal against Credit Suisse et al. > With these considerations in mind, I conclude that the modification proposed by Vos J where it alters the territorial extent of the commercial activities exception is, with respect, not necessary. Necessity was the threshold that Parliament had set for modifications. I accept the submission of Mr Rodney Dixon KC and Russell Hopkins, appearing for President Nyusi, that to remove what is a clear territorial restriction to what are narrow exceptions for diplomatic immunity in a receiving State in Art. 31(1)(c) does not fall within the category of “necessary modifications”.
Note: This article is an advertorial, but I found it interesting for general readership. > Mogzit aims to provide a variety of childcare solutions that cater to the individual preferences and requirements of families. From planning and supervising activities, preparing meals, helping with homework, tidying children's areas, and even administering medicine with parents' consent, the nannies from Mogzit are trained to handle a broad spectrum of tasks. I would like to know how much the nannies are paid, noting the incredibly low wages labour is compensated for in that great country.
> Netanyahu argued that migration from African countries constituted “a real threat to Israel’s character and future as a Jewish and democratic state.” > > The Israeli right largely rejects African migrants’ claims of asylum-seeking and routinely refers to all migrants, regardless of motives and circumstances, as “infiltrators.”