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Since Eritrea became independent in 1993, efforts have been underway to revise and update the conventional education curriculum. With a determination to quickly bridge the growing knowledge gap between Eritrea and the rest of the world, the Eritrean Government has decided on media education as a sustainable alternative. This choice is in line with developments emerging from many African, Asian and Latin American countries as the only option in line with the philosophy of UNESCO and the Association for Development of Education in Africa (ADEA). It is against this backdrop that a strategy paper "Media education in Eritrean education" was developed. This paper formed the basis of the developments discussed in this article. (Contains 1 figure.)

Designing media and ICT strategies for a newly formed country like Eritrea, which has endured 30 years of armed struggle, leading to massive destruction followed by serial drought, is fraught with numerous constraints: limitation of human resources (e.g. qualified personnel), infrastructure and financial constraints. At the same time, though it may seem paradoxical, there is an inescapable urgency to generate media and ICT strategies, limitations notwithstanding, to turn out larger groups of people capable of leading the nation from illiteracy and poverty to literacy and greener pastures of a developed economy. A three-pronged effort is directed to cover all target groups and key players--one each towards categorised target groups and the other towards the training of radio and television personnel. It has to be followed by sensitising the government, another major key player in the whole process, to lay down required media education policy and to see to its sustainability. Conceived as the first-ever original and creative document, subject to further refinements as experience of its implementation pours in, what follows is the presentation of major principles that went into development of media education, facilitating direct teaching and enrichment, and quicker and low cost curricular reforms, in order to achieve rapid transformation and poverty reduction in Eritrea.

The psychological autopsy is thought to be the cornerstone of suicide research, providing more detailed knowledge than other methods. Its prime objective is to retrieve comprehensive information about suicide. Information is collected from key informants, available medical records and personnel and it consists of reconstructing the life style and personality of deceased along with details of circumstances, behaviors and events that led to the death of that individual.

Soybean mapping in Indian context is challenging owing to its short growing period coinciding with the monsoon clouds, inter-cropping and smallholders' land. This study proposes an approach for mapping soybean by integrating object-based image analysis with machine learning (ML) based classification using temporal Sentinel-1 SAR (S-1) and Sentinel-2 optical (S-2) data. Field objects were delineated with scale-optimized multi-resolution segmentation using historical S-2 data. Object-based temporal VH-backscatter and NDVI were extracted for training, validation and testing of the three ML models. Validation results showed the outperformance of Extreme gradient boosting (OB-XGBoost) over Random Forest (OB-RF) and Support vector machine (OB-SVM) with an overall accuracy (OA) of 92.50, 91.08 and 90.1, respectively. Testing of OB-XGBoost model resulted in OA, kappa statistics, and F-score (soybean) of 86.12%, 0.82, and 87.23%, respectively. The soybean map produced by the proposed methodology has shown better representation in terms of homogeneity and uniformity than the pixel-based classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]