Problems of family planning amongst Africans in Rhodesia

A RJE article on family planning challenges amongst Africans in the then racially segregated ruled Rhodesia.Amongst current development problems facing Rhodesia that of a high rate of population growth must be regarded as one of the most fundamental in its effects on the immediate short-term and long-term economic and social welfare of a large proportion of the country’s population. Whereas most of the country’s other problems can be solved by means of judicious planning and institutional and political adjustment, the disabilities and strains imposed upon the economy by the prevailing demographic structure cannot be easily negotiated towards a rapid solution. Instead, demographic influences will retain a permanence, for the purposes of prospective economic policy, irrespective of the prevailing political order. For this reason the relative lack of effective attention that the population problem has received from policy makers is not only alarming for the country’s future economic prosperity but also requires some explanation. The purpose of this paper, therefore, will be to draw attention to Rhodesia’s present demographic structure, to relate its significance to the economic problems of unemployment and income distribution and to highlight a number of the factors that impede the promotion, adoption and effectiveness of a comprehensive family planning programme

Settler Ideology and African Underdevelopment in Postwar Rhodesia

A RJE on causes of African underdevelopment in post- WW2 Rhodesia.A largely ignored aspect of underdevelopment in Rhodesia, which plays a crucial role in legitimating the dominance, policies and status of the ruling group in the economic structure, is the conception, construction and transformation of ideology. By ideology is meant what Plamenatz has called the ‘sets of ideas or beliefs or attitudes characteristic of a group’.' The group whose ideology is being examined here is essentially, though not exclusively, the white community’s whose ideas, beliefs about and attitudes towards black economic structures, enterprise and labour have created an ideology, sometimes unsophisticated and in other instances sophisticated, which has been readily expounded to ‘explain’ African underdevelopment in Rhodesian society

Reasoning about connector reconfiguration II: basic reconfiguration logic

Software systems evolve over time. To facilitate this, the coordination language Reo offers operations to dynamically reconfigure the topology of component connectors. We present a semantics of Reo in the presence of reconfiguration, and a logic, and its model checking algorithm, for reasoning about connector behaviour in this setting

A mathematical framework for active circuits based on port equivalence using limit variables

Published versio

Linearizability with Ownership Transfer

Linearizability is a commonly accepted notion of correctness for libraries of concurrent algorithms. Unfortunately, it assumes a complete isolation between a library and its client, with interactions limited to passing values of a given data type. This is inappropriate for common programming languages, where libraries and their clients can communicate via the heap, transferring the ownership of data structures, and can even run in a shared address space without any memory protection. In this paper, we present the first definition of linearizability that lifts this limitation and establish an Abstraction Theorem: while proving a property of a client of a concurrent library, we can soundly replace the library by its abstract implementation related to the original one by our generalisation of linearizability. This allows abstracting from the details of the library implementation while reasoning about the client. We also prove that linearizability with ownership transfer can be derived from the classical one if the library does not access some of data structures transferred to it by the client

Coordination models Orc and Reo compared

Orc and Reo are two complementary approaches to the problem of coordinating components or services. On one hand, Orc is highly asynchronous, dynamic, and based on ephemeral connections to services. On the other hand, Reo is based on the interplay between synchronization and mutual exclusion, is more static, and establishes more continuous connections between components or services. The question of how Orc and Reo relate to each other naturally arises. In this paper, we present a detailed comparison of the two models. We demonstrate that embedding non-recursive Orc expressions into Reo connectors is straightforward, whereas recursive Orc expressions require an extension to the Reo model. For the other direction, we argue that embedding Reo into Orc would require, based on expressiveness results of Palamidessi, signifficantly more effort. We conclude with some general observations and comparisons between the two approaches