Science Publications

The Australian accounting standard AAS 25, Financial Reporting by Superannuation Plans, was the first pension accounting standard internationally to apply established conceptual framework (CF) principles. In Australia those principles have guided standard setting for more than a decade. However, AAS 25 has been criticized for failing to provide useful financial information. The analysis provided in this article addresses this paradox. The findings reveal major anomalies in AAS 25 associated with the treatment of accrued benefits that distort financial position and performance measures. The conceptual flaws in the standard are attributed to the misapplication of CF principles and an absence of adequate guidance in the CF for non-corporate entities such as superannuation funds. (more…)

This paper argues that warlord or ‘non-state’ politics have not brought about as fundamental a political transformation as recent discourses about violent ’state collapse’ in Africa seem to suggest. In the context of the territorial break-up of the central state in the DR Congo, it examines the reconfiguration of political power in North Kivu (more…)

Events or occurrences perceived as miracles are a feature of all religious traditions, although not to the same degree. The perception of a miracle is closely connected to ideas that are extant concerning the relations between the material world and the invisible world. Recent decades appear - at least from fragmentary evidence - to have seen an increase in the number of occurrences perceived as miracles in Africa, in Christian, Muslim and indigenous traditions. (more…)

Postcolonial theory is frequently dismissed as too theoretical and esoteric, and hence irrelevant to the study of contemporary African politics and society. This article challenges this dismissal of postcolonialism, and argues for a more constructive dialogue between African studies and postcolonial approaches. (more…)

The domestic political situation in South Africa was an issue of concern for US policymakers, and thus for the American intelligence community, from 1948 to 1994. This paper uses recently declassified intelligence assessments of South Africa to evaluate how successful American analysts were in predicting the evolution of apartheid in the uncertain mediumterm. I find that, contrary to much of the literature on US–South Africa relations specifically and American foreign policy more generally, the global superpower struggle (more…)

This article presents a test case of a new technology using artificially enhanced anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (referred to here as EAMS) for the characterization of microfractured reservoirs. These are reservoirs in which microfractures are essential to porosity and/or permeability. A conventional geological characterization is costly, time consuming, and difficult to quantify in terms of assessing fracture impact on porosity and permeability. (more…)

In this article, we review the algorithms for rotation, scaling andtranslation (RST) invariant image watermarking. There are mainly two categories of RST invariantimage watermarking algorithms. One is to rectify the RST transformed image before conductingwatermark detection. Another is to embed and detect watermark in an RST invariant or semi-invariantdomain. (more…)

In 1990, Manber and Myers proposed suffix arrays as a space-savingalternative to suffix trees and described the first algorithms for suffix array construction anduse. Since that time, and especially in the last few years, suffix array construction algorithmshave proliferated in bewildering abundance. (more…)