Background: The rapid spread of COVID-19 infection has led countries across the globe to take various measures to contain the outbreak, including the closure of Universities. Forcing University students to stay at home has created enormous stress and uncertainty in their daily life.Objective: This study aimed to assess the perceived stress and coping strategies among undergraduate health science students of Jimma University amid the COVID-19 outbreak.Materials and methods: An online cross-sectional survey was conducted involving 337 undergraduate health science students from (...) August to September 5, 2020. The perceived stress scale -10 and Brief-COPE scale were used to assess the level of stress and coping strategies, respectively. Statistical Package for Social Science Version 22 was employed for data analysis. Logistic regression was conducted to identify predictors of high perceived stress.Results: The overall mean [±standard deviation ] age of the participants was 22.88 years. The mean PSS score was 22.16, and high perceived stress was reported in 121 participants. The overall mean coping score was 72.34, and approach coping was the predominantly used strategy for coping with stress. Personal perception of being stressed by the daily number of COVID-19 cases/deaths in Ethiopia, rare online talk/chat with friends, presence of confusion due to the inconsistent strategies developed by the health/government authorities in view of the scientific recommendations, perception of self/family members being at risk of getting sick, decreased household income following the COVID-19 pandemic, practicing denial, self-blame, planning, and religion as means of coping with stress were associated with high perceived stress.Conclusion: Over one-third of the participants had a high level of perceived stress, and the majority of them were practicing effective means of coping with stress. The authors recommend that the hosting University in collaboration with the concerned bodies develop innovative strategies to improve the psychological well-being of the students. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to assess critically the wax and gold tradition as a philosophical foundation of Ethiopian hermeneutics. In the first part, I shall analyze the wax and gold tradition as a poetic and literary tradition. After exploring how this tradition has shaped social and political interaction in the second part, in the third part I will show the implications of the wax and gold tradition for hermeneutics. I shall then make a critical assessment of the wax and (...) gold tradition as an interpretive philosophy before closing the essay with concluding remarks. (shrink)

A sociologist examines contemporary engagements of queer bodies and identities with fertility biomedicine. Drawing on social science, media culture, and the author’s own empirical research, three questions frame the analysis: 1. In what ways have queers on the gendered margins moved into the center and become implicated or central users of biomedicine’s fertility offerings? 2. In what ways is Fertility Inc. transformed by its own incorporation of various gendered and queered bodies and identities? And 3. What are the biosocial and (...) bioethical implications of expanded queer engagements and possibilities with Fertility Inc.? The author argues that “patient” activism through web 2.0 coupled with a largely unregulated free-market of assisted reproduction has included various queer identities as “parents-in-waiting.” Such inclusions raise a set of ethical tensions regarding how to be accountable to the many people implicated in this supply and demand industry. (shrink)

New pharmacological therapies, often dubbed `lifestyle drugs', demonstrate the enactment of yet another interface between technologies and bodies that promises a re-fashioning of the body with transformative, life-enhancing results. This article analyzes the emergence of one lifestyle drug, Viagra, from a technoscience studies perspective, conceptualizing Viagra as a new medical technology of the body. Through an analysis of promotional materials for Viagra, we argue that this pharmaceutical device performs ideological work through its discursive scripts that serves to reinforce and augment (...) dominant cultural narratives in relation to material bodies, particularly those of hegemonic masculinity and male (and female) sexuality. We conclude that Viagra carries the potential to reify and reinforce these dominant and hegemonic narratives, while at the same time, through ensuring an open market for heterogeneous users, it provides spaces for alternatives to these normative ideals and assumptions. (shrink)

In Ethiopia, the history of the use of modern philosophical categories in education is short. This is because the country’s modern education itself is barely 100 years old. What is not so short, however, is the history of the use of indigenous metaphysics in temehert (traditional education), which goes back as far as the introduction of Christianity to Ethiopia—to the fourth century A.D. Since its inception, education has had a close, if ambivalent, relationship with different philosophical tenets, with the advocates (...) of each tenet trying to formulate educational philosophy around its own unique metaphysical narrative. While some narratives arose from indigenous legends, others were imported (and domesticated in some cases) from abroad. The recent tendency of educational philosophy in Ethiopia has a slightly ‘(post)modernist’ philosophical flavor to it, even though it might not be self-consciously postmodernist in nature. In this essay, I intend to show how a deliberate, or unwitting, de-link with indigenous metaphysics could affect the trajectory, and also the success, of the educational system in Ethiopia. After a brief paradigmatic characterization of two metaphysical categories and their underlying narratives, I critically unravel the ethno-federalist metaphysics of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). I focus on the ethno-federalist system because it is an incumbent philosophy. After discussing a nascent remedy proposed by Maimire Mennasemay, viz., the notion of ‘nostalgic memory,’ best known as tezeta, I argue for the primacy of the notion of ‘covenant thinking,’ also known as qal-kidan, as a better alternative. (shrink)

Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirty-six lesbians, this article offers a feminist qualitative analysis of lesbian conception practices. The article examines the ways lesbian actors negotiate biomedical discourse in ways that reveal the co-constitutiveness of nature and culture, bodies and technologies, and biomedical and subjective knowledge. The article offers the concept of hybrid technologies, which are described as lesbian pragmatic negotiations of shifting control loci of technoscience. The author argues that lesbians' pathways to pregnancy are characterized by a negotiation of (...) discursive elements from alternative health discourses and biomedical knowledge, of various forms of technology, and of what is often termed the authoritative, objective, and scientific with the subjugated, subjective, and the embodied. In doing so these actors complicate through multiple agencies what is often interpreted as a totalizing force of biomedicalization. (shrink)

Review of Tibebe Eshete, Evangelical Movement in Ethiopia: Resistance and Resilience (Waco Texas: Baylor University Press, 2009), xiii + 480 pp.

Despite Vision Zero’s moral appeal and its expansion throughout the world, it has been criticized on different grounds. This chapter is based on an extensive literature search for criticism of Vision Zero, using the bibliographic databases Philosopher’s Index, Web of Science, Science Direct, Scopus, Google Scholar, PubMed, and Phil Papers, and by following the references in the collected documents. Even if the primary emphasis was on Vision Zero in road traffic, our search also included documents criticizing Vision Zero policies in (...) other safety areas, such as public health, the construction and mining industries, and workplaces in general. Based on the findings, we identify and systematically characterize and classify the major arguments that have been put forward against Vision Zero. The most important arguments against Vision Zero can be divided into three major categories: moral arguments, arguments concerning the rationality of Vision Zero, and arguments aimed at the practical implementation of the goals. We also assess the arguments. Of the 13 identified main arguments, 6 were found to be useful for a constructive discussion on safety improvements. (shrink)

This special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values assembles papers that consider relations among science, ethics, and justice. The papers are drawn from a 2011 National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop that brought together interdisciplinary scholars to consider, incorporate, and attend to the meanings, uses, and social consequences of ethical questions and justice ideals in technoscientific projects. The papers included in this special issue examine key areas that emerged from this workshop, including public participation, the production of knowledge, what counts as (...) consent, ownership of biomaterials, and others. Together, the papers raise questions about new directions and articulations of power, justice, and inequalities in science and technology studies. (shrink)

We present the design of a secure and privacy preserving e-petition system that we have implemented as a proof-of-concept demonstrator. We use the Belgian e-ID card as source of authentication, and then proceed to issue an anonymous credential that is used to sign petitions. Our system ensures that duplicate signatures are detectable, while preserving the anonymity of petition signers. We analyze the privacy and security requirements of our application, present an overview of its architecture, and discuss the applicability of data (...) protection legislation to our system. (shrink)

Memristor-based oscillators are of recent interest, and hence, in this paper, we introduce a new Wien bridge oscillator with a fractional-order memristor. The novelty of the proposed oscillator is the multistability feature and the wide range of fractional orders for which the system shows chaos. We have investigated the various dynamical properties of the proposed oscillator and have presented them in detail. The oscillator is then realized using off-the-shelf components, and the results are compared with that of the numerical results. (...) A combination synchronization scheme is proposed which uses more than one driver systems to synchronize with one response system. Indeed, we use two different techniques where the first one consists of splitting the transmitted signals into two parts where each part is loaded in different drive systems, while the second one consists of dividing time into different intervals and loading the signals in different drive systems. Such techniques improve the antiattack capability of the systems when used for secure communication. (shrink)

Mohammed Girma, Understanding Religion and Social Change in Ethiopia. Toward a Hermeneutic of Covenant.Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012. 240 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-269416.

Cuand o l a edició n d e est e númer o d e lo s Anale s d e l a Cáted r a F r ancisc o Suá r ez estab a a punt o d e ce r rars e no s so r prendi ó e l f allecimient o d e fo r m a repentin a e inesperad a d e Nicolá s Lópe z Calera , Directo r d e est a pu b (...) licació n durant e má s de cuarent a años . P ar a e l equip o editoria l qu e fo r mamo s pa r t e d e lo s A CF S s u mue r te h a significad o un a pérdid a i r repara b l e po r l a huell a imbo r ra b l e qu e s u labo r aca- démic a y dedicació n un i v ersitari a h a dejad o entr e nosotros . Est e númer o adquiere u n significad o especia l po r qu e e l aza r quis o qu e e l Prof . Lópe z Caler a no s e n viase par a s u pu b licació n e n l a secció n abie r t a e l últim o trabaj o qu e habí a te r minado a f inale s de l pasad o v erano , un a i n v estigació n sobr e “Guille r m o d e Ockha m y el laicism o mode r no” . T ra s s u f allecimiento , e l Consej o d e Redacció n consider ó más apropiad o pu b lica r dich o trabaj o com o l o qu e s u mue r t e l o habí a acabad o con- vi r tiendo : u n document o póstumo . U n document o ademá s especialment e emot iv o par a todo s lo s qu e l o conocimo s y trabajamo s co n él . E n l a secció n habitua l d e la r e vist a podr á disf r uta r e l lecto r d e est e trabaj o de l Prof . Lópe z Caler a e n e l que v olví a a mostra r un a d e su s pasione s intelectuale s preferida s com o er a l a lectur a y l a constant e vuelt a a l pensamient o d e lo s clásico s desd e lo s qu e afronta r lo s temas má s contemporáneos. (shrink)

Cuand o l a edició n d e est e númer o d e lo s Anale s d e l a Cáted r a F r ancisc o Suá r e z estab a a punt o d e ce r rars e no s so r prendi ó e l f allecimient o d e fo r m a repentina e inesperad a d e Nicolá s Lópe z Calera , Directo r d e est a pu b (...) licació n durant e más d e cuarent a años . P ar a tod o e l equip o editoria l qu e fo r mamo s pa r t e d e lo s A CFS s u mue r t e h a signi f icad o un a pérdid a i r repara b l e po r l a huell a imbo r ra b l e qu e su labo r académic a y dedicació n un i v ersitari a h a dejad o entr e todo s nosotros. (shrink)