Smoke and Mirrors: The National Lottery and the Non-Profit Sector

In a context of massive reductions in government consumption spending, the National Lottery is intended to provide a sustainable source of funding for non-profit organisations providing much needed sporting, arts, cultural, social and environmental services to the South African public. This funding, it is hoped, will help secure a better life for all citizens

Kajian Corporate Governance Dan Likuiditas Terhadap Kinerja Keuangan Pada Sektor Property & Real Estate

The development started from the perspective of corporate governance agency theory, where the agency theory, which acts as the principal owner of the company hand over authority to the agent. With the separation between ownership and management of the company will bring up the difference between agent and principal interests that could pose a potential conflict of interest. Corporate governance appears to control the behavior and resolve conflicts between parties within the company. Research on corporate governance on performance, has become a common focus, but the results of previous studies showed inconsistent results. To reconcile differences in the results of the study, carried out similar studies with different objects. The study was done in order to find empirical evidence of the influence of the elements in the application of good corporate governance on the performance of property companies and real estate sector in Indonesia. Population used in this study is a property companies and real estate sector registered in Indonesia Stock Exchange (BEI), while the sample is a company during the period 2007-2010. Sampling was done by purposive sampling method. Hypothesis testing is done by multiple regression analysis. From the results of testing the hypothesis, suggesting that the influence of corporate governance by institutional ownership ,independent commissioners, audit committee and the level of liquidity has a negative relationship and do not significantly affect the company's financial performance. The results also indicate that the size of the board of directors has a positive and significant impact on performance .In general, the results of this study indicate that the company's property and real estate sector in Indonesia has begin to implement good corporate governance in an effort to improve company performance and to protect the interests of the principal

Land as production factor

To justify industrial land development, municipal planning officials frequently use the argument that unrestricted availability of business sites will foster economic development and employment growth. However, to date convincing evidence to support this claim does not exist. So empirical research into this subject is warranted. Furthermore, this relationship implicitly assumes that the acreage of land, necessary for firms to be able to conduct their business, is a production factor like labour and capital. Unfortunately, research on land use from this perspective has since long disappeared from mainstream economic theory. Ample research is done on land use in relation to firm location, both empirically and theoretically. However, the amount of land as a production factor for firms is generally disregarded. This lack of theory may hinder research into the claim made by planning officials. Therefore, present paper seeks to reintroduce land as a production factor in economic theory. In this article we explore to what extent land can be regarded as a production factor. We aim to integrate this view into established economic models from urban land economics and real estate theory. We do so at the macro and at the micro economic level. At the macro level, the available amount of industrial land could be a factor in national economic growth, just like growth of the labour force. At the micro level we consider whether the theory of individual firms’ production function is able to incorporate the amount of land as production factor. We commence this paper with a historical overview of the treatment of land in economic theory, before we pursue a theoretical framework that incorporates land as a factor of production. The paper concludes with a comparison between land and the established production factors labour and capital.

Fourier spectra of measures associated with algorithmically random Brownian motion

In this paper we study the behaviour at infinity of the Fourier transform of Radon measures supported by the images of fractal sets under an algorithmically random Brownian motion. We show that, under some computability conditions on these sets, the Fourier transform of the associated measures have, relative to the Hausdorff dimensions of these sets, optimal asymptotic decay at infinity. The argument relies heavily on a direct characterisation, due to Asarin and Pokrovskii, of algorithmically random Brownian motion in terms of the prefix free Kolmogorov complexity of finite binary sequences. The study also necessitates a closer look at the potential theory over fractals from a computable point of view.Comment: 24 page

Importance of Sustainability on Agriculture in Southern Africa

This paper seeks to describe and discuss the impact that climate changes, and other challenges in terms of sustainability, have had on Africa and particularly on South Africa. It seeks to discuss the extent to which these changes directly and indirectly impact agriculture and the measures that are currently underway, with particular reference to South Africa, as well as suggest other strategies that could be implemented to attenuate the effects of climate change, thereby advancing the global shift towards sustainability. The paper discusses environmental and other changes that have taken place in Africa and asserts that the continent is in a particularly difficult situation in light of the debate on sustainability versus productivity. The fact that most of the world’s rural poor depend on agriculture and that climatic changes have created new complications makes it more difficult to meet the MDGs and impedes economic development. This is especially relevant in light of the financial crisis and the drop in aid from the developed world. However, although more still needs to be done, it should be noted that significant progress has been made and projects and strategies are currently underway to utilize the region’s natural advantages.sustainability, agriculture, South Africa, climate change, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management,

Mobile phone technology and reading behaviour: Commentary on the FunDza programme

South African learners generally perform badly on external tests of reading literacy. In the 2011 international Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), South African Grade 4 learners performed poorly in comparison with their international counterparts, especially on higher order comprehension (Howie, van Staden, Tshele, Dowse, & Zimmerman, 2012). The 2013 Annual National Assessments reported a national average percentage of 43% for Grade 9 learners in their home language and 35% in a first additional language, which often is English (Department of Basic Education, 2013). The Department’s report recommended that learners be encouraged to read additional books, and more widely, to improve their scholastic attainment. There is much evidence to support the argument that reading for pleasure has a positive effect on both personal and educational development (e.g. Clark, 2011). Encouraging learners to engage in self-initiated reading as a leisure activity therefore may be positively related to reading literacy. Unfortunately, many South African learners attend schools with no libraries, and come from households without resources, including books, to promote reading (Howie et al., 2012). The question then is how to fill this gap, to provide reading content to young people who are interested in reading,but who find it difficult to access reading material that would interest them. For a number of years now, mobile phone technology has been seen increasingly as a promising platform to deliver educational services, including literacy development (Lee & Wu, 2012). UNESCO, for example, organises mobile learning weeks. At the second such week,it specifically addressed the question of mobile technology and literacy development for young people and adults(UNESCO, 2013). In South Africa at least two non-profit organisations have developed projects to deliver reading materials to young people via this medium. One is the m4Lit project, funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, which gives young readers access to novels via the mobile phone. Vosloo (2010) found that these novels attracted over 60,000 reads, suggesting that mobile phone-based reading is a viable strategy to encourage reading. Our researchers have been working with the second organisation, the FunDza Literacy Trust, to provide an assessment of the viability of mobile phones to attract readers. The Trust has been in existence since 2011 and provides readers with locally-written material in a number of South African languages through the mobile social application Mxit or FunDza’s website, http://www.FunDza.co.za This research note offers an overview of work on FunDza reported in three, separate, scholarly publications

Thermalization of a Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model coupled to a bosonic bath

We derive a Lindblad master equation that approximates the dynamics of a Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model weakly coupled to a bosonic bath. By studying the time evolution of operators under the adjoint master equation we prove that, for large system sizes, these operators attain their thermal equilibrium expectation values in the long-time limit, and we calculate the rate at which these values are approached. Integrability of the LMG model prevents thermalization in the absence of a bath, and our work provides an explicit proof that the bath indeed restores thermalization. Imposing thermalization on this otherwise non-thermalizing model outlines an avenue towards probing the unconventional thermodynamic properties predicted to occur in ultracold-atom-based realizations of the LMG model.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure