211 research outputs found
Towards rupture or stasis? An Analysis of the 1981 South African general election
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 24 August, 1981.The results of the 1981 white general election in
South Africa seemed paradoxical to many observers. After
three decades in which white politics appeared dominated by
the unchallengeable hegemony of the ruling National Party,
white party politics seemed to have taken on a new turbulence
and uncertainty. The Sunday Times reported, "Nat Voters
Bolt to the Right", while the Transvaler headlined a "Leftwards
swing". Very few seats actually changed hands, yet
many commentators sensed that the election was a watershed.
The confusing aspects of the election resulted from
the play of contradictory political and social forces.
This paper contends that the old ethnic-based class alliances
which formed the basis of the white South African party
system are unravelling. Though power did not change hands,
the 1981 election traced the outline of a possible class
realignment of white political forces, with potentially
far-reaching consequences. In the aftermath, nothing seemed
to have changed, but nothing would ever be quite the same.
To illuminate the changes underway, we will begin with
a discussion of the background to the election, then skip
ahead to consider the patterns of change evident in the election
results. This is followed by an examination of survey
data to discern the emerging class division, and of how the
strategy of the parties promoted or retarded its expression.
The paper concludes with the implications of the new trends
in the white electorate for the future of white politics
in South Africa
A world of networks: power, political culture and collective action in black South African communities, 1945-1965.
Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 1994
Black power, white press; literacy, newspapers, and the transformation of township political culture
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 10 May, 1993Black political mobilization in South Africa has largely
been explained by factors which are either structural or external
to the communities involved: falling wages and employment, the
contradictions of school and township administration, and anticolonial
wars on the country's borders. Social and political
movements, leaders, and processes within black communities have
received short shrift. The political consciousness of different
sections of black society has frequently been neglected or read
off from class positions. The institutions, organizations, and
discourses which shape them have been ignored or treated as tools
of the status quo. In particular, the movement which did the
most to initiate the black political renaissance, the Black
Consciousness Movement (BCM), has been written off as a "group
of petit bourgeois intellectuals" without links to the masses.
Yet the resulting accounts have failed to adequately explain the
forms and gaps of the re-emergence of mass resistance over the
past two decades or to predict or periodize the development of
national political lif
Vigilantes, clientalism, and the South African State
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 30 September, 1991On the afternoon of July 22, 1990, residents of Sebokeng
watched nervously as a procession of vans and busses threaded its
way towards the African township's stadium, carrying men to a
rally called by Inkatha. Rumours of an attack by members of the
conservative Zulu movement were rife, and tension mounted during
the meeting. When it ended, several hundred local youths
confronted the Inkatha supporters as they came out. Firebombs
were hurled at an Inkatha member's house and the two groups
started fighting, but police quickly dispersed the youths with
tear gas. Then hundreds of Inkatha men surged through the dirt
streets, breaking windows and stabbing and shooting people, until
they reached and stormed a workers' hostel controlled by
political opponents... This paper argues vigilantism is the continuation of
clientelist politics by other means, to paraphrase Clausewitz's
dictum on war. Drawing on South African experience and other
cases, counter-revolutionary vigilantism is defined as the
unlicensed use of private violence to defend an oligarchic
clientelist state under popular challenge ..
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Rossby number expansions, slaving principles, and balance dynamics
We consider the problem of constructing balance dynamics for rapidly rotating fluid systems. It is argued that the conventional Rossby number expansion—namely expanding all variables in a series in Rossby number—is secular for all but the simplest flows. In particular, the higher-order terms in the expansion grow exponentially on average, and for moderate values of the Rossby number the expansion is, at best, useful only for times of the order of the doubling times of the instabilities of the underlying quasi-geostrophic dynamics. Similar arguments apply in a wide class of problems involving a small parameter and sufficiently complex zeroth-order dynamics.
A modified procedure is proposed which involves expanding only the fast modes of the system; this is equivalent to an asymptotic approximation of the slaving relation that relates the fast modes to the slow modes. The procedure is systematic and thus capable, at least in principle, of being carried to any order—unlike procedures based on truncations.
We apply the procedure to construct higher-order balance approximations of the shallow-water equations. At the lowest order quasi-geostrophy emerges. At the next order the system incorporates gradient-wind balance, although the balance relations themselves involve only linear inversions and hence are easily applied. There is a large class of reduced systems associated with various choices for the slow variables, but the simplest ones appear to be those based on potential vorticity
Enduring Mental Health Morbidity and Social Function Impairment in World Trade Center Rescue, Recovery, and Cleanup Workers: The Psychological Dimension of an Environmental Health Disaster
Background The World Trade Center (WTC) attacks exposed thousands of workers to hazardous environmental conditions and psychological trauma. In 2002, to assess the health of these workers, Congress directed the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to establish the WTC Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program. This program has established a large cohort of WTC rescue, recovery, and cleanup workers. We previously documented extensive pulmonary dysfunction in this cohort related to toxic environmental exposures. Objectives Our objective in this study was to describe mental health outcomes, social function impairment, and psychiatric comorbidity in the WTC worker cohort, as well as perceived symptomatology in workers’ children. Methods Ten to 61 months after the WTC attack, 10,132 WTC workers completed a self-administered mental health questionnaire. Results Of the workers who completd the questionnaire, 11.1% met criteria for probable post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 8.8% met criteria for probable depression, 5.0% met criteria for probable panic disorder, and 62% met criteria for substantial stress reaction. PTSD prevalence was comparable to that seen in returning Afghanistan war veterans and was much higher than in the U.S. general population. Point prevalence declined from 13.5% to 9.7% over the 5 years of observation. Comorbidity was extensive and included extremely high risks for impairment of social function. PTSD was significantly associated with loss of family members and friends, disruption of family, work, and social life, and higher rates of behavioral symptoms in children of workers. Conclusions Working in 9/11 recovery operations is associated with chronic impairment of mental health and social functioning. Psychological distress and psychopathology in WTC workers greatly exceed population norms. Surveillance and treatment programs continue to be needed
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Genome-wide association study identifies 30 loci associated with bipolar disorder.
Bipolar disorder is a highly heritable psychiatric disorder. We performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) including 20,352 cases and 31,358 controls of European descent, with follow-up analysis of 822 variants with P < 1 × 10-4 in an additional 9,412 cases and 137,760 controls. Eight of the 19 variants that were genome-wide significant (P < 5 × 10-8) in the discovery GWAS were not genome-wide significant in the combined analysis, consistent with small effect sizes and limited power but also with genetic heterogeneity. In the combined analysis, 30 loci were genome-wide significant, including 20 newly identified loci. The significant loci contain genes encoding ion channels, neurotransmitter transporters and synaptic components. Pathway analysis revealed nine significantly enriched gene sets, including regulation of insulin secretion and endocannabinoid signaling. Bipolar I disorder is strongly genetically correlated with schizophrenia, driven by psychosis, whereas bipolar II disorder is more strongly correlated with major depressive disorder. These findings address key clinical questions and provide potential biological mechanisms for bipolar disorder
Enduring Mental Health Morbidity and Social Function Impairment in World Trade Center Rescue, Recovery, and Cleanup Workers: The Psychological Dimension of an Environmental Health Disaster
Background The World Trade Center (WTC) attacks exposed thousands of workers to hazardous environmental conditions and psychological trauma. In 2002, to assess the health of these workers, Congress directed the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to establish the WTC Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program. This program has established a large cohort of WTC rescue, recovery, and cleanup workers. We previously documented extensive pulmonary dysfunction in this cohort related to toxic environmental exposures. Objectives Our objective in this study was to describe mental health outcomes, social function impairment, and psychiatric comorbidity in the WTC worker cohort, as well as perceived symptomatology in workers’ children. Methods Ten to 61 months after the WTC attack, 10,132 WTC workers completed a self-administered mental health questionnaire. Results Of the workers who completd the questionnaire, 11.1% met criteria for probable post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 8.8% met criteria for probable depression, 5.0% met criteria for probable panic disorder, and 62% met criteria for substantial stress reaction. PTSD prevalence was comparable to that seen in returning Afghanistan war veterans and was much higher than in the U.S. general population. Point prevalence declined from 13.5% to 9.7% over the 5 years of observation. Comorbidity was extensive and included extremely high risks for impairment of social function. PTSD was significantly associated with loss of family members and friends, disruption of family, work, and social life, and higher rates of behavioral symptoms in children of workers. Conclusions Working in 9/11 recovery operations is associated with chronic impairment of mental health and social functioning. Psychological distress and psychopathology in WTC workers greatly exceed population norms. Surveillance and treatment programs continue to be needed
An Approach to Parameterization of the Oceanic Turbulent Boundary Layer in the Western Pacific Warm Pool
Vertical profiles of zonal velocity and the dissipation rate ε of the turbulent kinetic energy obtained during the Tropical Ocean-Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (COARE) are analyzed in the context of planetary boundary layer relationships previously derived from atmospheric measurements. The presence of a barrier layer and the striking effect of increased dimensionless shear and ε at the bottom of the surface mixed layer of the ocean, features often observed in the western Pacific warm pool area, are consistent with the boundary layer laws. The gradient Richardson number Ri is found to be a convenient parameter for scaling the nonstationary and horizontally heterogeneous mixed layer in the warm pool area. The approach to parameterization of the turbulent eddy coefficient within the mixed layer as a function of Ri is tested as part of a one-dimensional model. A comparison between the observed and modeled upper ocean temperatures for two COARE examples shows a reasonable agreement over a wide range of wind speed conditions
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