A study of some of the combined tax effects of capital gains tax and estate duty and a comparison with similar legislation in the United States of America and the United Kingdom

Includes bibliographical references.This paper presents a study of some of the combined effects of capital gains tax and estate duty. In addition, the current estate tax and inheritance tax situations in the United States of America and United Kingdom, respectively, are discussed in this paper for comparative purposes. The tax regimes in the United States of America and the United Kingdom are relevant to this investigation due to their ability to avoid imposing both capital gains tax and estate tax upon the same assets on the death of an individual. The generation-skipping transfer tax in the United States of America and the United Kingdom inheritance tax generation-skipping provisions are also examined as they may assist to close some of the loopholes in the existing South African estate duty legislation. By closing these loopholes, the need to subject the estate assets to both capital gains tax and estate duty on the death of a person may be negated

The effects and influences of South African taxation on the valuation of company shares, business interests and other assets

This document has been prepared in two parts. The first part deals with some basic aspects of valuations and the major aspects of taxation which should be borne in mind by a valuer. The second part, which commences on page 102, is a compendium of brief comment on tax matters and tax cases which may be of interest to a valuer. The document is based on research carried out in relation to: The Income Tax Act No. 58 of 1962, as amended, inclusive of the 1989 Amending Act; The Sales Tax Act No. 103 of 1978, as amended; and The Estate Duty Act No. 45 of 1955, as amended. Due to subsequent amendments to the legislation certain aspects of taxation dealt with in this document may no longer apply, but there has been comment and expectations in many instances that some of the changes are likely to be reintroduced. I have accordingly included my findings from the research carried out as this could be helpful in the event of a reintroduction of the affected legislation. Since preparing this document, The Sales Tax Act is no longer of force or effect and has been replaced with The Value Added Tax Act of 1991. There are many aspects of this new legislation which also require the consideration and attention of a valuer. I have not dealt with these aspects in detail in this document

Kernel Density Estimation with Linked Boundary Conditions

Kernel density estimation on a finite interval poses an outstanding challenge because of the well-recognized bias at the boundaries of the interval. Motivated by an application in cancer research, we consider a boundary constraint linking the values of the unknown target density function at the boundaries. We provide a kernel density estimator (KDE) that successfully incorporates this linked boundary condition, leading to a non-self-adjoint diffusion process and expansions in non-separable generalized eigenfunctions. The solution is rigorously analyzed through an integral representation given by the unified transform (or Fokas method). The new KDE possesses many desirable properties, such as consistency, asymptotically negligible bias at the boundaries, and an increased rate of approximation, as measured by the AMISE. We apply our method to the motivating example in biology and provide numerical experiments with synthetic data, including comparisons with state-of-the-art KDEs (which currently cannot handle linked boundary constraints). Results suggest that the new method is fast and accurate. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to build statistical estimators of the boundary conditions satisfied by the target function without apriori knowledge. Our analysis can also be extended to more general boundary conditions that may be encountered in applications

Positivity-preserving methods for ordinary differential equations

[EN] Many important applications are modelled by differential equations with positive solutions. However, it remains an outstanding open problem to develop numerical methods that are both (i) of a high order of accuracy and (ii) capable of preserving positivity. It is known that the two main families of numerical methods, Runge-Kutta methods and multistep methods, face an order barrier. If they preserve positivity, then they are constrained to low accuracy: they cannot be better than first order. We propose novel methods that overcome this barrier: second order methods that preserve positivity unconditionally and a third order method that preserves positivity under very mild conditions. Our methods apply to a large class of differential equations that have a special graph Laplacian structure, which we elucidate. The equations need be neither linear nor autonomous and the graph Laplacian need not be symmetric. This algebraic structure arises naturally in many important applications where positivity is required. We showcase our new methods on applications where standard high order methods fail to preserve positivity, including infectious diseases, Markov processes, master equations and chemical reactions.The authors thank the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences for support and hospitality during the programme "Geometry, compatibility and structure preservation in computational differential equations" when work on this paper was undertaken. This work was supported by EPSRC grant EP/R014604/1. S.B. has been supported by project PID2019-104927GB-C21 (AEI/FEDER, UE).Blanes Zamora, S.; Iserles, A.; Macnamara, S. (2022). Positivity-preserving methods for ordinary differential equations. ESAIM Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Analysis. 56(6):1843-1870. https://doi.org/10.1051/m2an/20220421843187056

Indigenous animal management practices on the eve of Columbus' landfall: Isotopic and zooarchaeological investigations in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica

This dissertation investigates the functioning of human-animal interactions at precolumbian Indigenous sites located in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. The five case studies that comprise this work investigate the mortality ages and morphologies of animals, and the dietary linkages between humans and several animal species commonly found in archaeological sites throughout the Greater Antilles such as domesticated dogs and possibly managed endemic rodents known as hutias. Isotopic analysis of animal remains was conducted to determine the consumption of maize as a proxy for investigating closeness in human-animal interactions. In the frame of niche construction theory, the evidence presented in this dissertation relates to the environmental practices of Indigenous peoples. Slash-and-burn farming was a widely practiced environmental management strategy throughout the region which likely created mosaiced plant communities consisting of garden plots and old-growth forest. These mixed anthropogenic and natural environments have been shown to be beneficial to some dietary generalists, and the abundance of hutias in archaeological sites might be the result of ‘garden hunting’ of species that benefited from horticultural practices. This may have constituted a form of animal management that is tied to plant food production, and therefore represents an arguably sustainable form of low-level food production. Archaeology of the America

Paleodietary reconstruction of endemic rodents from the precolumbian Dominican Republic: discriminating wild feeding behavior from diets linked to human niche construction activities

In the Greater Antilles, certain animal taxa that have long been theorized to have been managed by indigenous peoples prior to AD1492, the main candidates being a group of endemic caviomorph rodents known as hutias (Capromyinae). This isotopic study investigates the paleodiets of several species of endemic rodents from three late precolonial sites in the northern Dominican Republic: El Flaco (cal. ad 990–1452), El Carril (cal. ad 1030–1262), and La Entrada (cal. ad 840–900) to assess whether human influence over animal diets can be determined. We examined bone collagen carbon (δ13Cco) and nitrogen (δ15N) and tooth enamel carbon (δ13Cen) isotope values of three species of hutias, Isolobodon portoricensis, Isolobodon montanus, and Plagiodontia aedium, alongside edible rat (Brotomys sp.), and domestic guinea pig (Cavia porcellus). To estimate dietary source contributions, we employed a Bayesian dietary mixing model (FRUITS v.3.0) and ran three different permutations to assess the relative contributions of C3 or C4/CAM plants. The addition of an extra 79 wild C3 and 40 wild C4/CAM plant species' isotope values from published sources to an established isotopic foodweb for the Caribbean region enabled us to discriminate between wild and domestic C3 and C4/CAM plant food sources in two of these models. Our results provide evidence of the significant consumption of domestic C4/CAM plants by some animals. This likely represents maize (Zea mays) consumption, which is known to have been ubiquitously cultivated by indigenous peoples in the region. This is particularly the case for I. portoricensis, as FRUITS modeling suggests that a few individuals consumed C4/CAM plants well beyond their expected natural diets as determined from feeding studies of extant hutia species. This may indicate human influence over endemic rodent diets due to niche construction activities such as horticultural practices and may reflect either opportunistic feeding on human produce or the purposeful supplementation of hutia diets by humans.Archaeology of indigenous Americ

"Men du inser att folk som ser dig och dina kompisar tänker "emo"?"- om hur media målar upp bilden av en ungdomsgrupp

ABSTRACT Author: Lisa Myrefelt & Rebecka Shev Title: “But you realise that when people see you and your friends they think “emo”?” – about how media describes a teenage group (translated title) Supervisor: Olle Frödin Assessor: The purpose of this essay was to study how the Swedish newspapers presented a subculture that they called “emo” between January 1, 2007 and March 31, 2009. In particular we studied the attributes that the articles depicted as typical for the subculture (music, appearance and mental health). We also studied the articles’ description of the surroundings’ reactions to the subculture and the way the articles related how the teenagers in the subculture wanted to define themselves. The essay was based on a CDA (critical discourse analyse) of 33 articles. To analyse the result we used Becker’s (2006) theory about outsiders. In the primary information we found five discourses: music, appearance, mental health, harassment and how the teenagers defined themselves. The conclusion was that the articles’ starting point was that the subculture had some specific properties (clothes, appearance and mental health) that characterized the group in general. The articles describe the subculture as a group that is exposed to bulling and harassment from their surroundings. In general the articles do not take into consideration the teenagers protests against misconceptions (especially mental health) that the group was associated with