Voice and Heart of Darkness:Centrality and Discourse in Colonialism

My essay on Heart of Darkness explores Conrad’s dramatization of the voice and heart dynamic in the novella as a penetration of the deep-lying rationale of colonial operation and more generally the human condition at the turn of the 20th century.Three different forms of assumed centrality in the novella-capital,Eurocentrism,and the African interior as detrimental void symbolized by the heart of darkness form concentric circles that interconnect and work in concert as the core colonial ideology and produce a sense of incongruity and absurdity.The voice of this colonial ideological apparatus disguised as the universal subject of humanity and rationality finds its best expression in the eloquence of Kurtz,the specimen of culture seduced by its very opposite-the wilderness-right in the heart of darkness.“The horror”,as his final verdict of life as a European with real intent of living on his own terms at the turn of the 20th century,sums up the predicament of a civilization with too much culture and self-absorption for its own good.

Conrad's growing criticism of British colonialism in Youth volume

In Youth volume,Conrad shows his growing criticism of British colonialism.But because of his special favor to Britain,his disaffection with British colonialism is implicit,which is presented by a western voice in Youth,Kurtz’s non-pure British heritage in Heart of Darkness,and Whalley’s pure English seaman in The End of the Tether.

Iodine deficiency and women’s health: Colonialism’s malign effect on health in Oromia region, in Ethiopia

Objectives: Iodine is an essential nutrient needed for the synthesis of hormone thyroxin. Hormone thyroxin is involved in the metabolism of several nutrients, the regulation of enzymes and differentiation of cells, tissues and organs. Iodine deficiency (ID) impairs the development of the brain and nervous system. It affects cognitive capacity, educability, productivity and child mortality. ID hinders physical strength and causes reproductive failure. The objective of this paper is to explore if the health impacts of ID are more common and severe among women. Design: Using primary data (notes from a visit) and secondary data, this paper examines if the effects of ID are more common and severe among Oromo women inEthiopia. Findings: The health impacts of ID are more common and severe among women. Conclusions: ID is an easily preventable nutritional problem. In Oromia, the persistence of ID is explained by the Ethiopian government’s colonial social policies. Preventing ID should be seen as part of the efforts we make to enhance capacity building, promote health, gender equity and social justice. Implications: Iodine deficiency has a wide range of biological, social, economic and cultural impacts. Preventing ID can be instrumental in bringing about gender equity and building the capacity of people.

Criticism of Colonialism and the Colonial Memory Work in Germany

Colonialism is an ideological system that was not only contrary to traditional African law(family law,popular law,etc.),but was also incompatible with the dignity of man.Colonial tyranny in Africa began with the political implementation of the decisions adopted at the Berlin Conference of 1884/85,its essential principles of international law being the inviolability and the purity of colonial borders.Thus the European colonial powers managed to avoid wars of aggression and prevent uprisings by African people.Since the dominant theories of colonialism were Eurocentric,they could scarcely contribute to adequately investigating the nature of colonialism,let alone adequately describing its dimension in Africa.Instead of examining the shades of the colonial system from different cultural perspectives to inform people objectively,Eurocentric theories prevented any attempt at truth about colonial injustice.Unfortunately,some Europeans still tend to endorse the colonial injustice system in Africa with cheap and cynical Downplaying terms.The fact that colonial policy has a long history,however,in no way indicates that it should necessarily be accepted or legitimized.On the contrary,since its inception colonialism met with violent and intellectual opposition until African countries attained national sovereignty and territorial integrity.This article demonstrates the significance colonialism has in Africans’intellectual discourse and shows how the colonial question is discussed in Germany.

An Analysis of the Colonialism in The Old Chief Mshlanga from the Perspective of Narratology

Doris Lessing is one of the most influential writers in English. The colonialism, one of her most concerned topics, is often revealed in many of her early works and so is in The Old Chief Mshlanga. In this story, Lessing first employs a third-person narrator and then a first-person narrator, both of whom adopt the narrative perspective from the protagonist within the story.What the two different person-narrators really differ is in the narrative voice. The narrative voice of the third-person narrator comes from the narrator outside the story, while the other one comes from the protagonist within the story. It is by means of the same perspective and the different narrative voice that Lessing vividly reveals the colonialism in The Old Chief Mshlanga.

Path Planning for AUVs Based on Improved APF-AC Algorithm

With the increase in ocean exploration activities and underwater development,the autonomous underwater vehicle(AUV)has been widely used as a type of underwater automation equipment in the detection of underwater environments.However,nowadays AUVs generally have drawbacks such as weak endurance,low intelligence,and poor detection ability.The research and implementation of path-planning methods are the premise of AUVs to achieve actual tasks.To improve the underwater operation ability of the AUV,this paper studies the typical problems of path-planning for the ant colony algorithm and the artificial potential field algorithm.In response to the limitations of a single algorithm,an optimization scheme is proposed to improve the artificial potential field ant colony(APF-AC)algorithm.Compared with traditional ant colony and comparative algorithms,the APF-AC reduced the path length by 1.57%and 0.63%(in the simple environment),8.92%and 3.46%(in the complex environment).The iteration time has been reduced by approximately 28.48%and 18.05%(in the simple environment),18.53%and 9.24%(in the complex environment).Finally,the improved APF-AC algorithm has been validated on the AUV platform,and the experiment is consistent with the simulation.Improved APF-AC algorithm can effectively reduce the underwater operation time and overall power consumption of the AUV,and shows a higher safety.

Hybrid Hierarchical Particle Swarm Optimization with Evolutionary Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Task Scheduling in Cloud Computing

Task scheduling plays a key role in effectively managing and allocating computing resources to meet various computing tasks in a cloud computing environment.Short execution time and low load imbalance may be the challenges for some algorithms in resource scheduling scenarios.In this work,the Hierarchical Particle Swarm Optimization-Evolutionary Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm(HPSO-EABC)has been proposed,which hybrids our presented Evolutionary Artificial Bee Colony(EABC),and Hierarchical Particle Swarm Optimization(HPSO)algorithm.The HPSO-EABC algorithm incorporates both the advantages of the HPSO and the EABC algorithm.Comprehensive testing including evaluations of algorithm convergence speed,resource execution time,load balancing,and operational costs has been done.The results indicate that the EABC algorithm exhibits greater parallelism compared to the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm.Compared with the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm,the HPSO algorithmnot only improves the global search capability but also effectively mitigates getting stuck in local optima.As a result,the hybrid HPSO-EABC algorithm demonstrates significant improvements in terms of stability and convergence speed.Moreover,it exhibits enhanced resource scheduling performance in both homogeneous and heterogeneous environments,effectively reducing execution time and cost,which also is verified by the ablation experimental.

Intermittent fasting boosts antitumor immunity by restricting CD11b^(+)Ly6C^(low)Ly6G^(low) cell viability through glucose metabolism in murine breast tumor model

Intermittent fasting can benefit breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy or immunotherapy.However,it is still uncertain how to select immunotherapy drugs to combine with intermittent fasting.Herein we observed that two cycles of fasting treatment significantly inhibited breast tumor growth and lung tissue metastasis,as well as prolonged overall survival in mice bearing 4T1 and 4T07 breast cancer.During this process,both the immunosuppressive monocytic-(M-)and granulocytic-(G-)myeloid-derived suppressor cell(MDSC)decreased,accompanied by an increase in interleukin(IL)7R^(+)and granzyme B^(+)T cells in the tumor microenvironment.Interestingly,we observed that Ly6G^(low)G-MDSC sharply decreased after fasting treatment,and the cell surface markers and protein mass spectrometry data showed potential therapeutic targets.Mechanistic investigation revealed that glucose metabolism restriction suppressed the splenic granulocytemonocyte progenitor and the generation of colony-stimulating factors and IL-6,which both contributed to the accumulation of G-MDSC.On the other hand,glucose metabolism restriction can directly induce the apoptosis of Ly6G^(low)G-MDSC,but not Ly6G^(high)subsets.In summary,these results suggest that glucose metabolism restriction induced by fasting treatment attenuates the immune-suppressive milieu and enhances the activation of CD3^(+)T cells,providing potential solutions for enhancing immune-based cancer interventions.

An Improved Lung Cancer Segmentation Based on Nature-Inspired Optimization Approaches

The distinction and precise identification of tumor nodules are crucial for timely lung cancer diagnosis andplanning intervention. This research work addresses the major issues pertaining to the field of medical imageprocessing while focusing on lung cancer Computed Tomography (CT) images. In this context, the paper proposesan improved lung cancer segmentation technique based on the strengths of nature-inspired approaches. Thebetter resolution of CT is exploited to distinguish healthy subjects from those who have lung cancer. In thisprocess, the visual challenges of the K-means are addressed with the integration of four nature-inspired swarmintelligent techniques. The techniques experimented in this paper are K-means with Artificial Bee Colony (ABC),K-means with Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA), K-means with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Kmeanswith Firefly Algorithm (FFA). The testing and evaluation are performed on Early Lung Cancer ActionProgram (ELCAP) database. The simulation analysis is performed using lung cancer images set against metrics:precision, sensitivity, specificity, f-measure, accuracy,Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC), Jaccard, and Dice.The detailed evaluation shows that the K-means with Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA) significantly improved thequality of lung cancer segmentation in comparison to the other optimization approaches utilized for lung cancerimages. The results exhibit that the proposed approach (K-means with CSA) achieves precision, sensitivity, and Fmeasureof 0.942, 0.964, and 0.953, respectively, and an average accuracy of 93%. The experimental results prove thatK-meanswithABC,K-meanswith PSO,K-meanswith FFA, andK-meanswithCSAhave achieved an improvementof 10.8%, 13.38%, 13.93%, and 15.7%, respectively, for accuracy measure in comparison to K-means segmentationfor lung cancer images. Further, it is highlighted that the proposed K-means with CSA have achieved a significantimprovement in accuracy, hence can be utilized by researchers for improved segmentation processes of medicalimage datasets for identifying the targeted region of interest.

Optimal Location and Sizing ofMulti-Resource Distributed Generator Based onMulti-Objective Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

Distribution generation(DG)technology based on a variety of renewable energy technologies has developed rapidly.A large number of multi-type DG are connected to the distribution network(DN),resulting in a decline in the stability of DN operation.It is urgent to find a method that can effectively connect multi-energy DG to DN.photovoltaic(PV),wind power generation(WPG),fuel cell(FC),and micro gas turbine(MGT)are considered in this paper.A multi-objective optimization model was established based on the life cycle cost(LCC)of DG,voltage quality,voltage fluctuation,system network loss,power deviation of the tie-line,DG pollution emission index,and meteorological index weight of DN.Multi-objective artificial bee colony algorithm(MOABC)was used to determine the optimal location and capacity of the four kinds of DG access DN,and compared with the other three heuristic algorithms.Simulation tests based on IEEE 33 test node and IEEE 69 test node show that in IEEE 33 test node,the total voltage deviation,voltage fluctuation,and system network loss of DN decreased by 49.67%,7.47%and 48.12%,respectively,compared with that without DG configuration.In the IEEE 69 test node,the total voltage deviation,voltage fluctuation and system network loss of DN in the MOABC configuration scheme decreased by 54.98%,35.93%and 75.17%,respectively,compared with that without DG configuration,indicating that MOABC can reasonably plan the capacity and location of DG.Achieve the maximum trade-off between DG economy and DN operation stability.

History Teacher Training from Decolonial Curriculum Practices to Combat Racism at UniProjeção in the Federal District-A Secondary Publication

This article aims to understand the training process of history undergraduates,to see if there are decolonial curricular practices to combat racism at the Centro Universitário e Faculdade Projeção(UniProjeção)in the Federal District,to understand how coloniality has corroborated the exclusion of different epistemologies and the erasure of different cultures,and how this exclusionary process of coloniality interferes in the training of history teachers.In order to combat this practice,we are looking for alternatives that can break these suppressions carried out by Europeans.In this way,we turn to decolonial ideas that aim to break with the logic of coloniality.We can conclude that these practices are poorly developed in the institution,so we proposed active problem-based methodology and music as a didactic resource.As playful educational tools that strengthen the teaching-learning process,they are active agents in the decolonial work of combating racism,and it is essential to train responsible and ethical teachers in the fight against racism and any form of oppression.

European Colonialism and the Berlin Debate about the New World:Cornelius de Pauw,Frederick the Great and the Taste of Conquest

After Cornelius de Pauw,one of the most eminent representatives of the European Enlightenment,had published the second volume of his Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains,which in many ways was even more provocative than the first,a violent debate arose in Berlin,spreading quickly to a number of European countries and especially overseas.There is good reason to identify the first phase of this dispute as the Berlin Debate about the New World,especially when considering that Brandenburg and Prussia had been active colonists and had attempted to secure their share in the European move towards expansion.Was it a coincidence that,in 1769,of all places,this debate entered the heated phase of international dispute about the New World in the Prussian capital,which—after all—was a tranquil and idyllic spot compared to Paris,Amsterdam,or London?Certainly,as King of Prussia,Frederick II was the type of leader who made it clear that he was planning to write new music for the symphony of great political powers.From the beginning,the Prussian King was aware of the far-ranging political dimensions of his most-famous operatic project Montezuma.As he told Francesco Algarotti as early as October 1753,he was aiming to send a precise and memorable political message.Is it possible to understand the libretto from Frederick’s royal hands,the performance of“his”opera with Carl Heinrich Graun’s music,Giuseppe Galli Bibiena’s stage architecture,Giovanna Astrua’s arias,and hundreds of other people involved as a prelude to the Berlin Debate about the New World,which had led to heated discussion in the worldwide République des Lettres since the late 1760s?

Beyond postcolonialism： New directions for the history of nonwestern architecture

Overturning assumptions that nonwestern architecture has been static over time, new scholar- ship focused on colonial and postcolonial architecture and urbanism and on nonwestern modernism has made a significant contnbution to our understanding of the history of architecture. Much more, however, remains to be done. Comparative studies of colonialism, especially between empires, attention to innovation outside Europe and the English-speaking world and more consideration of memory and migration are among the most exciting possible new directions.

A Hierarchy of Geographies： A Skinnerian Model of Indochina＇s Overseas Chinese Congregations and Their Influence on French Colonialism

In Indochina, overseas Chinese were organized by dialect group into associations called congregations, which shared many of the functions of huiguan in China. The spread of overseas Chinese economic and social networks followed a Skinnerian model in which large urban congrggations wielded more political and economic authority than did smaller, rural congr@ations. By examining the impacts of French colonialism upon overseas Chinese networks within Indochina and upon overseas connections with their Chinese native places, this paper proposes that the Skinnerian model of local-system hierarchy fits quite comfortably when applied to the world of French colonial Indochina and its overseas Chinese. Furthermore, it argues that French colonialism actually reinforced the Skinnerian hierarchy of politics and markets in ways that endured long after the collapse of Imperial China.

The improved artificial bee colony algorithm for mixed additive and multiplicative random error model and the bootstrap method for its precision estimation

To solve the complex weight matrix derivative problem when using the weighted least squares method to estimate the parameters of the mixed additive and multiplicative random error model(MAM error model),we use an improved artificial bee colony algorithm without derivative and the bootstrap method to estimate the parameters and evaluate the accuracy of MAM error model.The improved artificial bee colony algorithm can update individuals in multiple dimensions and improve the cooperation ability between individuals by constructing a new search equation based on the idea of quasi-affine transformation.The experimental results show that based on the weighted least squares criterion,the algorithm can get the results consistent with the weighted least squares method without multiple formula derivation.The parameter estimation and accuracy evaluation method based on the bootstrap method can get better parameter estimation and more reasonable accuracy information than existing methods,which provides a new idea for the theory of parameter estimation and accuracy evaluation of the MAM error model.

Improved Ant Colony Algorithm for Vehicle Scheduling Problem in Airport Ground Service Support

Support vehicles are part of the main body of airport ground operations,and their scheduling efficiency directly impacts flight delays.A mathematical model is constructed and the responsiveness of support vehicles for current operational demands is proposed to study optimization algorithms for vehicle scheduling.The model is based on the constraint relationship of the initial operation time,time window,and gate position distribution,which gives an improvement to the ant colony algorithm(ACO).The impacts of the improved ACO as used for support vehicle optimization are compared and analyzed.The results show that the scheduling scheme of refueling trucks based on the improved ACO can reduce flight delays caused by refueling operations by 56.87%,indicating the improved ACO can improve support vehicle scheduling.Besides,the improved ACO can jump out of local optima,which can balance the working time of refueling trucks.This research optimizes the scheduling scheme of support vehicles under the existing conditions of airports,which has practical significance to fully utilize ground service resources,improve the efficiency of airport ground operations,and effectively reduce flight delays caused by ground service support.

HybridHR-Net:Action Recognition in Video Sequences Using Optimal Deep Learning Fusion Assisted Framework

The combination of spatiotemporal videos and essential features can improve the performance of human action recognition(HAR);however,the individual type of features usually degrades the performance due to similar actions and complex backgrounds.The deep convolutional neural network has improved performance in recent years for several computer vision applications due to its spatial information.This article proposes a new framework called for video surveillance human action recognition dubbed HybridHR-Net.On a few selected datasets,deep transfer learning is used to pre-trained the EfficientNet-b0 deep learning model.Bayesian optimization is employed for the tuning of hyperparameters of the fine-tuned deep model.Instead of fully connected layer features,we considered the average pooling layer features and performed two feature selection techniques-an improved artificial bee colony and an entropy-based approach.Using a serial nature technique,the features that were selected are combined into a single vector,and then the results are categorized by machine learning classifiers.Five publically accessible datasets have been utilized for the experimental approach and obtained notable accuracy of 97%,98.7%,100%,99.7%,and 96.8%,respectively.Additionally,a comparison of the proposed framework with contemporarymethods is done to demonstrate the increase in accuracy.

Optimal Machine Learning Driven Sentiment Analysis on COVID-19 Twitter Data

The outbreak of the pandemic,caused by Coronavirus Disease 2019(COVID-19),has affected the daily activities of people across the globe.During COVID-19 outbreak and the successive lockdowns,Twitter was heavily used and the number of tweets regarding COVID-19 increased tremendously.Several studies used Sentiment Analysis(SA)to analyze the emotions expressed through tweets upon COVID-19.Therefore,in current study,a new Artificial Bee Colony(ABC)with Machine Learning-driven SA(ABCMLSA)model is developed for conducting Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19 Twitter data.The prime focus of the presented ABCML-SA model is to recognize the sentiments expressed in tweets made uponCOVID-19.It involves data pre-processing at the initial stage followed by n-gram based feature extraction to derive the feature vectors.For identification and classification of the sentiments,the Support Vector Machine(SVM)model is exploited.At last,the ABC algorithm is applied to fine tune the parameters involved in SVM.To demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed ABCML-SA model,a sequence of simulations was conducted.The comparative assessment results confirmed the effectual performance of the proposed ABCML-SA model over other approaches.

Heuristic techniques for maximum likelihood localization of radioactive sources via a sensor network

Maximum likelihood estimation(MLE)is an effective method for localizing radioactive sources in a given area.However,it requires an exhaustive search for parameter estimation,which is time-consuming.In this study,heuristic techniques were employed to search for radiation source parameters that provide the maximum likelihood by using a network of sensors.Hence,the time consumption of MLE would be effectively reduced.First,the radiation source was detected using the k-sigma method.Subsequently,the MLE was applied for parameter estimation using the readings and positions of the detectors that have detected the radiation source.A comparative study was performed in which the estimation accuracy and time consump-tion of the MLE were evaluated for traditional methods and heuristic techniques.The traditional MLE was performed via a grid search method using fixed and multiple resolutions.Additionally,four commonly used heuristic algorithms were applied:the firefly algorithm(FFA),particle swarm optimization(PSO),ant colony optimization(ACO),and artificial bee colony(ABC).The experiment was conducted using real data collected by the Low Scatter Irradiator facility at the Savannah River National Laboratory as part of the Intelligent Radiation Sensing System program.The comparative study showed that the estimation time was 3.27 s using fixed resolution MLE and 0.59 s using multi-resolution MLE.The time consumption for the heuristic-based MLE was 0.75,0.03,0.02,and 0.059 s for FFA,PSO,ACO,and ABC,respectively.The location estimation error was approximately 0.4 m using either the grid search-based MLE or the heuristic-based MLE.Hence,heuristic-based MLE can provide comparable estimation accuracy through a less time-consuming process than traditional MLE.

A Drone-Based Blood Donation Approach Using an Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

This article presents an optimized approach of mathematical techniques in themedical domain by manoeuvring the phenomenon of ant colony optimization algorithm(also known as ACO).A complete graph of blood banks and a path that covers all the blood banks without repeating any link is required by applying the Travelling Salesman Problem(often TSP).The wide use promises to accelerate and offers the opportunity to cultivate health care,particularly in remote or unmerited environments by shrinking lab testing reversal times,empowering just-in-time lifesaving medical supply.