The Southern Journal for Contemporary History is published by the Faculty of Humanities, University Free State. It a national, academic and accredited journal which publishes academically outstanding articles contemporary historical or political nature. Only dealing with topics on sub-Saharan Africa in particular South since 1945 will be considered. All submitted are reviewed at least two exper...

This paper reviews over two centuries of research focusing on various issues relating to adipocere. Adipocere is a crumbly, soap-like postmortem product that forms from soft tissue in a variety of environments. The timing of the formation and degradation of adipocere depends largely on the environmental circumstances. Once formed, adipocere can persist for hundreds of years, acting as a preserv...

Methanogens are acknowledged archaeal members of modern dental calculus microbiota and dental pathogen complexes. Their repertoire in ancient dental calculus is poorly known. We therefore investigated archaea in one hundred dental calculus specimens collected from individuals recovered from six archaeological sites in France dated from the 14(th) to 19(th) centuries AD. Dental calculus was demo...

Sulabha Brahme is active in th e participatory and sustainable development movement in India . She has a PhD. in Economics from the UniversityofPoona,/ndia . She is retired from the research fa culty of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics , where she specialized in planning and policy studies on urbani zatio n , agricultural development and rural and regional planning . U y oday's C...

Epidemics of infectious disease have always played a role in American history, and such epidemics are sited in time and place and configured in terms of ecology and demography, available medical knowledge, and cultural values and collective experience. The mix of these variables has changed dramatically since the theocratic world of 17th-century New England, but the relevance of each remains. A...

This paper introduces a distributional thesaurus and sense clusters computed on the complete Google Syntactic N-grams, which is extracted from Google Books, a very large corpus of digitized books published between 1520 and 2008. We show that a thesaurus computed on such a large text basis leads to much better results than using smaller corpora like Wikipedia. We also provide distributional thes...

This paper provides a time-series analysis of recent annual estimates of real GDP and industrial output covering 1270 to 1913. We show that growth can be regarded as a segmented trend stationary process. On this basis, we find that trend growth of real GDP per person was zero prior to the 1660s but then experienced two significant accelerations, preand post-industrial revolution. We also find t...

Phosphorus has been shown to be a predictor of cardiovascular mortality in kidney disease subjects. Phosphorus was discovered in 1669 and was considered a philosophers stone, it was used as medicament but there were reported deaths after its use. High serum levels of phosphorus are associated with increased risk for cardiovascular disease in the general population in subjects free from chronic ...

Here we test Neutral models against the evolution of English word frequency and vocabulary at the population scale, as recorded in annual word frequencies from three centuries of English language books. Against these data, we test both static and dynamic predictions of two neutral models, including the relation between corpus size and vocabulary size, frequency distributions, and turnover withi...