Mama, how about a doek for Janet? The doek! God save our gracious doek! A doek is a colourful piece of cloth that the African woman wears as headgear. It is tied stylistically into various shapes from Accra to Cape Town. I do not know the history of this innocuous piece of cloth. In Afrikans, the language of those of our white masters who are of Dutch and Huguenot descent, doek meant, variously, a tablecloth, a dirty rag, or a symbol of the slave. Perhaps it was later used by African women in contact with European ideas of beauty who realised that 'they had no hair' and subconsciously hid their heads under the doek. Whatever else, the doek had come to designate the African woman. So that evening when I said, 'Mama, how about a doek for Janet', I was proposing to transform her, despite her colour and her deep blue eyes, into an African woman for the while.

Finally, we give a way of producing a number for each matroid variety called its expected codimension that can be computed combinatorially solely from the matroid itself and show that it agrees with the actual codimension in the case of a positroid variety.

Ever since, philosophical students, not always indeed with the Socratic modesty of self-confession, have loved to point out this or that gap in human knowledge, this or that needed and unaccomplished task, which the presumably wider outlook of their own professional studes, has, as they pretende, enabled them to see in the province of some special pursuit.

In today’s interconnected economies and societies, a formal independence is the opposite of gaining real sovereignty and control. This is because the excluded party would be absent from the table when decisions are made, unable to participate as choices are taken that, sooner or later, will affect them.