Witchcraft and African development

Impressive investment and growth figures and commercial write-ups enthusing about ‘Africa rising up’, ‘the continent of the future’, and so on, obscure the poverty, illiteracy, poor health and other hardships afflicting the vast majority of African people. Why has massive so-called development and technical ‘aid’ not created the expected dynamic, autonomous economic progress? A blind eye is delicately being turned to the decisive role of people – more specifically, the cultural element. Notwithstanding good intentions, outsiders seeking to promote development assume that black Africans think and act like they only need more education, training and finance in order to ‘catch up’. Outsiders easily forget that since time immemorial, Africans have developed and cherished worldviews and cultures of their own. While these are by no means immutable and do adapt to changing needs and outside influences, Africans refuse to cast off overnight the heritage that makes them the people they are. This paper examines the impact of witchcraft as an integral feature of traditional culture on African existence, notably community life, religion, politics, the law, and economic practice. It stresses the significance of traditional society's powerful egalitarian impulses as well as its profound conviction that all things – goods, wealth, well-being and life force – are in a strictly limited supply that cannot be increased, but can only be redistributed by force or through magical manipulation. While modern life gradually weakens the influence of witchcraft beliefs – in Europe these flourished well into the 18th century – the exasperation associated with Africa's headlong urbanisation actually bolsters these beliefs.     

Unemployed youth: ‘time bombs’ or engines for growth?

While popular narratives about success in South Africa focus on individual effort, accidents of birth continue to determine life prospects. Inequalities in early childhood development, health, and education narrow the range of possibilities that young people have available to them, and this impacts on their risk appetite, including, through the workings of the maturing brain, a propensity to violence, substance abuse, and unsafe sex. New technology offers young people an unprecedented ability to organise and network. This fact, combined with high levels of youth dissatisfaction, unemployment, and marginalisation, leads many to worry that the young are “ticking time bombs”. While there certainly are risks, great unused pools of youth labour also present an opportunity for engaging them in social advancement programmes. Structured youth service is a tried and tested policy option that, when implemented as part of an integrated youth development strategy, can enlist thousands of young people in devoting their considerable energies to leadership for the public good.     

Guns–butter tradeoff in contemporary China

This study offers an investigation of the relationship between defense and social spending in the People's Republic of China. In particular, three consecutive questions are answered here. Does a warfare–welfare tradeoff exist in China's budgetary allocation? Is it positive or negative? What is the causal direction involved? By applying a vector autoregression analysis for the period of 1952–2006, this study finds a unidirectional crowd-out effect going from defense to social spending.     

Designing acceptance sampling schemes for life testing with mixed censoring

Mixed censoring is useful extension of Type I and Type II censoring and combines some advantages of both types of censoring. This paper proposes a general Bayesian framework for designing a variable acceptance sampling scheme with mixed censoring. A general loss function which includes the sampling cost, the time‐consuming cost, the salvage value, and the decision loss is employed to determine the Bayes risk and the corresponding optimal sampling plan. An explicit expression of the Bayes risk is derived. The new model can easily be adapted to create life testing models for different distributions. Specifically, two commonly used distributions including the exponential distribution and the Weibull distribution are considered with a special decision loss function. We demonstrate that the proposed model is superior to models with Type I or Type II censoring. Numerical examples are reported to illustrate the effectiveness of the method proposed. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004     

以军民融合式发展思想为指导完善文职人员制度

分析了非现役文职人员制度实行的时代背景、目前存在的主要问题以及解决对策,指出文职人员制度是我军顺应整体社会转型而实行的重大改革,是军民融合式发展思想的重要体现,完善的政策和军地双方的协调沟通,直接关系到这一改革的成败。     

从《孙子兵法》管理思想看密切官兵关系的重要性

《孙子兵法》作为兵学圣典,对当前部队的日常管理具有重要的指导作用。从《孙子兵法》对自古以来官兵紧张关系的具体描述,剖析当前官兵关系紧张的成因,探讨科学解决官兵紧张关系的方法。     

《人民武装警察法》“社会安全事件”概念及特点分析

《中华人民共和国人民武装警察法》颁布之前,武警部队虽然已经担负着执行处置社会安全事件的任务,但对于社会安全事件的概念及其特点的分析较为模糊。2009年8月颁布的《人民武装警察法》第2章第7条,明确将社会安全事件纳入武警部队的任务范围。鉴于武警部队执行任务种类的多样性,有必要对这一概念的内涵、外延及其特点进行界定。     

加强部队资金安全管理之我见

为提高资金安全管理与防范能力,必须从加强人员管理、实行合理分工、加强银行账户管理、严格库存现金限额、管好财务印鉴及严格票据管理等方面采取相应措施,以确保部队资金安全、规范有序运行。     

2-一致光滑Banach空间中k-严格伪压缩半群公共不动点的隐格式迭代算法

对于Banach空间中女一严格伪压缩半群的公共不动点给出了隐格式迭代算法,证明了一个强收敛定理,推广并扩展了相关结论。     

试论“以德治国”的基本方略

江泽民总书记提出了"以德治国"的重要思想."以德治国"有利于全社会正确估量道德的社会作用,进一步增强全党全国重视道德建设的自觉意识;有利于加强科学正确的人生观、价值观、道德观的教育和塑造;有利于改善党风和社会风气,清除消极腐败现象,有利于塑造正确的人生观、价值观、道德观.