Political communication involves symbolic practices that make institutional statuses visible and structure relationships between actors. This article examines, in the Beninese context, the semiotic and interactional functions of the title "Honorable", commonly associated with parliamentary office, as well as those of the designation appointed MPs, used in discourses of political contestation. The theoretical framework draws on the approaches of Goffman, Saussure, Peirce, Austin, and Bourdieu. The study adopts a qualitative, document-based approach involving an analysis of eight press articles published between 2019 and 2022 and four journalistic interviews published between 2023 and 2026. The findings reveal two distinct phenomena: forms of address expressing institutional recognition and polemical designations that discursively challenge the representativeness of certain elected officials. However, neither the use nor the omission of Honorable is sufficient to establish political support or opposition. The conclusions remain exploratory and cannot be generalized.
Road traffic accidents are a major public - safety concern, and identifying accident-prone locations is essential for effective road-safety planning. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide an integrated platform for mapping accident locations, analysing spatial patterns, and supporting the prioritisation of road-safety interventions. Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) is widely used to transform individual accident locations into continuous density surfaces, enabling the visual identification of areas with high concentrations of crashes. This review examines the applications of GIS and KDE in road accident analysis, with particular attention to conventional KDE, network KDE, hotspot validation, and integration with statistical and machine-learning techniques. Anderson (2009) demonstrated the use of GIS-based KDE and K-means clustering to identify and characterise injury-accident hotspots in London. Xie and Yan (2008) developed a network-based KDE approach to account for the fact that traffic accidents occur along road networks. Thakali et al. (2015) compared KDE and kriging for crash hotspot identification, while Harirforoush and Bellalite (2019) combined network KDE with crash-rate screening to improve hotspot assessment. These studies show that KDE is useful for exploratory spatial analysis, but a high density of recorded crashes does not necessarily establish a statistically significant hotspot or a high exposure-adjusted risk.
The Kalamon area, located within the Bouna mining district in northeastern Cote d Ivoire, forms part of the Paleoproterozoic domain of the Man Shield (West African Craton). In this sector, the presence of a subcontinuous and particularly thick lateritic cover (30 to 90 m) represents a major obstacle to direct geological mapping. This study combines high resolution airborne geophysical data processing (aeromagnetics and gamma ray spectrometry) with detailed petrographic examination of core drill samples to map and characterize the dolerite dyke swarms traversing the Kalamon mining permit. Filtered analysis of the total magnetic field (reduction to the pole, analytic signal, and first vertical derivative) reveals narrow, highly magnetic linear anomalies with preferential N-S to NNE-SSW and NW-SE trends. Microscopic examination demonstrates that these basic intrusions exhibit a typical ophitic to subophitic texture, dominated by interlocking plagioclase laths (labradorite to bytownite) and augite, accompanied by a significant proportion of iron titanium oxides (titaniferous magnetite and ilmenite), which account for the high aeromagnetic response. Low-grade deuteric alterations are marked by partial uralitization of pyroxenes and sericitization of plagioclases. This integrated geophysical and petrographic approach proves highly effective in reconstructing subvolcanic magmatic conduits and refining the regional geodynamic framework.
Neural style transfer involves representing the content of one image in the visual style of another. This paper presents a comprehensive and reproducible formulation of style transfer via optimisation, based on a pre-trained VGG16 network, in line with the work of Gatys et al. The content is represented by the activations of the relu4-2 layer and the style by the normalised Gram matrices of five layers (relu1_1 to relu5-1). The generated image is initialised using the content image and optimised using the Adam optimiser. We justify the choice of VGG16 based on its architecture and a controlled comparison with VGG19, ResNet-50 and the fast AdaIN method across 16 content style pairs. Evaluation uses SSIM, PSNR, style distances (Gram matrices and colours) and computation time. Across the 16 pairs, the method preserves the content structure (average SSIM of 0.319) whilst transferring the style, and converges within a few hundred iterations. VGG16 matches VGG19 in terms of quality at a lower cost and significantly outperforms ResNet-50; it preserves the structure better than AdaIN without any training, albeit at the cost of increased computation time. All parameters are specified and the code is provided.
Background: Autoimmunity develops when the mechanisms that maintain immunological self-tolerance become dysregulated, allowing immune responses to be directed against endogenous tissues. Autoimmune diseases are heterogeneous: patients with the same diagnosis differ in symptom pattern, disease activity, progression and treatment response, which raises the question of whether individualized therapeutic approaches have a role in disorders of immune dysregulation. Homoeopathy is based on the principle of individualization, in which treatment is selected according to the totality of the patient’s characteristic symptoms rather than the diagnostic label alone. Methods: Narrative review and conceptual analysis of the immunological literature on central and peripheral tolerance, regulatory T cells and the breakdown of self-tolerance, together with the published evidence on individualized homoeopathy, including a systematic review and meta-analysis of individualized homoeopathic trials, a systematic review of homoeopathy in rheumatological diseases and a randomized trial in rheumatoid arthritis.
