Hopefully there has been enough contact between humanists and social scientists in recent years and enough attempt at creating a common concern with common problems so that the one no longer entirely distrusts the cold and myopic eye of science peering into the literary intricacies of folklore and the other no longer thinks of folklore as a kind of folk entertainment, “a floating segment of culture,” which is marginal to his main concerns. I cannot speak for the humanist, though I should imagine he has learned to put up with the sometimes heavy hand of the anthropologist or political scientist for the sake of the wealth of contextual crosscultural data he gets from him. But speaking for the anthropologist, I would be surprised if there are any of us left today who would not collect what oral narrative we could, exploiting to the fullest the potentialities of such data in arriving at explanations for the workings of society and culture. We recognize well enough that folklore functions within a social and cultural context whose cultural content and social integration it both reflects and determines; We should therefore find some agreement in regarding folklore as having efficacy in human affairs - as being an agent.

That folklore is an agent of particular vitality and potential in Africa is something that can hardly be denied by those who have been there. We have evidence for this in the many extensive collections of traditional verbal art from the different quarters of that continent, and most recently we have only to mention the Herskovits collection inDahomean Narrative. But folklore is not to be seen only as a manifestation of tribal tradition now on the wane. It must be seen as an aspect of African culture that willenjoy and suffer the greatest exploitation for the sake of the African future. This should surprise neither humanist nor social scientist for they both know well “how inviting, from its very nature the field of folklore is for those who wish to exalt national character and a national destiny.” (Herskovits, 1959: 219). We have watched it being used to these ends in countries as far removed as Ireland and Argentina, and now we see the same thing in Africa. We see, for example, how the concepts and the circumnambient mythologies of “African personality” and “negritude” depend in their expression upon authentic or reinterpreted African folklore. In the matter of migration legends alone one has only to read the work of one of the early African intellectuals to articulate these notions-Cheik Anta Diop's Nations Negres et Culture (1948)-to realize how crucial to the arguments of these cultural pan-Africanists are the migration legends of the various African peoples.

Proper nutrition enhances athletes’ performance and recovery during sports activities. This review aims to investigate the effects of nutrition education interventions on dietary intake, nutrition knowledge, and body composition of female athletes. From a comprehensive search, we identified 20 single-arm and 8 double arm studies that met the inclusion criteria. The interventions in these studies ranged from personalized consultations to group workshops. The mode of delivery was mainly face-to-face. Most of these interventions consisted of group sessions with variable duration and frequency. From the studies finally included, nutrition education intervention significantly increased the nutrition knowledge of female athletes in 76% and improved their dietary intake in 67%. However, only 44% of the studies that measured changes in body composition reported significant changes. Moreover, only a minority of studies (14%) maintained follow-up assessments to measure the lasting impact of the interventions. Sixty percent of interventions were delivered by professional nutritionists or dietitians, ensuring high-quality education. There is a need for standardized methodologies and more robust study designs to better assess the effectiveness of nutrition education interventions. Knowing athletes’ preferences when planning education may improve engagement and intervention efficacy. Also, longer-term follow-up of athletes would allow for a more accurate evaluation of the consolidation of acquired knowledge. Including coaches in nutrition education interventions would probably amplify the impact on athletes’ dietary behaviours. Nutrition education can positively influence the knowledge and eating habits of female athletes, but its effect on body composition represents an area where much remains to be explored.

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning technique that distributes model training to multiple clients while allowing clients to keep their data local. Although the technique allows one to break free from data silos keeping data local, to coordinate such distributed training, it requires an orchestrator, usually a central server. Consequently, organisational issues of governance might arise and hinder its adoption in both competitive and collaborative markets for data. In particular, the question of how to govern FL applications is recurring for practitioners. This research commentary addresses this important issue by inductively proposing a layered decision framework to derive organisational archetypes for FL’s governance. The inductive approach is based on an expert workshop and post-workshop interviews with specialists and practitioners, as well as the consideration of real-world applications. Our proposed framework assumes decision-making occurs within a black box that contains three formal layers: data market, infrastructure, and ownership. Our framework allows us to map organisational archetypes ex-ante. We identify two key archetypes: consortia for collaborative markets and in-house deployment for competitive settings. We conclude by providing managerial implications and proposing research directions that are especially relevant to interdisciplinary and cross-sectional disciplines, including organisational and administrative science, information systems research, and engineering.

This study examines the role of the timing of obligatory disambiguating information – obligatory cues – and presence/absence of optional morphological markers in resolving temporary syntactic ambiguity in Spanish object relative clauses. Native adult comprehension (Study 1) reveals similar accuracy for clauses with relatively early obligatory cues, regardless of the presence/absence of additional markers, and those with late obligatory cues with additional markers, but reduced accuracy for those with late obligatory cues without additional markers. Given the phonetic resemblance of the late-disambiguated variant with its corresponding subject relative, we conduct two follow-up perceptual identification tasks with the whole relative clause, including the head (Study 2), and relative clause fragments (Study 3). The identification tasks show that, when instructed to attend to the form of the structures, participants perceive acoustic differences but retain a bias towards subject-relative interpretations. Our results suggest that additional markers aid comprehension of non-canonical structures when obligatory cues occur relatively late within the structure and highlight the dominance of predictive processing over perceptual information in such cases of late disambiguation.

An analytical formulation is provided that describes the first two natural modes of the fluid–structure interaction of an incompressible current with a pitching and heaving flexible plate. The objective is twofold: first, to present a general derivation of analytical expressions for the lift, moment and the flexural moments exerted by an inviscid flow on a pitching and heaving plate whose deformation is general enough that the coupling of the flexural moments with the structural equations allows solving analytically the first two natural modes of the system; second, to analyse the propulsion performance of the foil when actuated near the first two natural frequencies. For the second purpose, one also needs the thrust force generated through the motion and the general deformation of the foil considered, which is analytically derived using the linearized vortex impulse theory, extending and systematizing previous works. The analytical expressions, once viscous effects are taken into consideration through nonlinear transverse damping and offset drag coefficients, are compared with small-amplitude available experimental data, discussing their limitations. It is found that low stiffness pitching and heaving are quite different, with a pitching flexible foil only generating thrust near the second resonant frequency, whereas heaving always generates thrust, with the maximum slightly below the second natural frequency. Maximum thrust for large stiffness pitching is around the first natural frequency. The maximum efficiency occurs at frequencies close to the first natural mode if the foil is sufficiently rigid, but it is not related to the natural frequencies as the rigidity decreases.

Unintended technical interactions across system interfaces can lead to costly failures and rework, particularly in the early design stages of complex products. This study examines how structured risk assessment tools influence teams’ ability to identify, evaluate and mitigate risks from such indirect interactions. In a controlled experiment, 14 engineering teams (comprising professionals and graduate students) engaged in simulated design decisions across three system configurations. Tool usage – including models of direct and indirect risk propagation and value-based trade-offs – was continuously logged and linked to outcomes. Teams that engaged earlier and more deliberately with the tools identified risks sooner and selected mitigation actions with more favourable cost–benefit profiles. Results show that strategic, not merely frequent, tool use improves risk management performance, particularly when addressing cascading effects from indirect physical interactions. These findings support the use of structured supports to enhance both the efficiency of early-stage risk evaluation and the efficacy of risk treatment.

Lagostonema ecasiense is a bursate nematode parasite of Lagostomus maximus in Argentina. New morphological data, geographical distribution, ecological data, molecular characterization and exploratory phylogenetic analysis are provided. The general morphology and measurements agree with the original description with minimal discrepancies. The geographical distribution of Lagostonema is expanded with 3 new provinces and 9 new departments in Argentina. The molecular characterization constitutes the first molecular contribution for the genus Lagostonema. The analysis of genetic distances and phylogenetic exploration allow considering L. ecasiense as a nominal species, confirming its nomenclatural taxonomic identity. Likewise, although morphological studies allow the identification of specimens from all populations as L. ecasiense, molecular studies show a major genetic distance in the population from Santiago del Estero Province concerning the rest of the populations. Consequently, the haplotypes are mentioned as Lagostonema sp. with the possibility that these specimens belong to a new species. This study is valuable because it contributes to the ratification of a nominal species described decades ago, adding new morphological aspects and providing an understanding of their value as a marker of host populations.

Recent changes instituted by the US government pose a sinister threat to the integrity of science worldwide. We roundly refute the many contrived assertions that have been unfairly levelled against scientists and their natural philosophy and implore them to champion the apodictic principles of science.