This paper focuses on the use of FLOSS to promote vendor independence/avoid lock-in in the enterprise. It looks at how FLOSS projects follow open standards, how forking prevents lock-in if a project threatens to migrate to a closed-source strategy and how FLOSS lowers the barrier to entry for SMEs wishing to implement and support software. However it also looks at how the adoption of policies mandating open standards instead of FLOSS and how the success of cloud computing threatens to erode those benefits. It discusses ways in which cloud computing can be adopted in the enterprise without forfeiting those advantages and urge corporate and government policy makers to mandate FLOSS rather than be satisfied with open standards.
This article takes a first step towards developing a resilience assessment scale for use by development organisations offering services to youth and young adults in different cultural contexts. The purpose of a resilience assessment scale would be to assess effectiveness of services in enhancing competencies of youth in managing and adapting to adversities they experience. An in‐depth conceptualisation of individual resilience and how this interacts with multi‐layered social resilience is explored: Organisations provide psychosocial services to help strengthen competencies of vulnerable young people, who in turn can help enhance resilience in the family, neighbourhood and community.
In the history of ethnographic documentary, the late Jean Rouch's film Les maîtres fous is widely regarded as initiating a new phase in the development of the genre. It concerns the hauka spirit‐possession cult of Songhay‐Zerma migrants from the middle Niger river who had come to work in Accra, then the capital of the British colony of the Gold Coast, West Africa. When released in 1955, the film was both banned by the colonial authorities and simultaneously denounced by African intellectuals and leading French anthropologists. Since then it has gone through a progressive rehabilitation and today, some fifty years on, it is hailed in many sources as a remarkable counter‐hegemonic representation of European colonialism in Africa. This article proposes a re‐interpretation of Les maîtres fous, arguing that in order to defend the film against criticism, its counter‐hegemonic features have been over‐emphasized, thereby obscuring its continuity with other forms of Songhay‐Zerma religious belief and practice. The article concludes with some brief reflections on the place of film in anthropology.
The imperativist strand of positivism derives law from an actual person or set of persons wielding a monopoly of force. The rule-based positivism of H.L.A. Hart has more subtly identified a matter-of-fact rule of recognition in place of such a sovereign one or many. But sovereignty is not a matter-of-fact of any kind, rather it is partly the product of what I call qua arguments. I reconstruct the reasoning in the extradition case of Augusto Pinochet in the British House of Lords, providing a focus for an account of the limits of legal positivism in the application of the principle par in parem non habet imperium. Sovereign power is interpreted through reasoning that is at its margin more moral than technically legal. Adapted from the source document.
the phenomenon of low population growth in pre-colonial southeast asia is often interpreted in terms of epidemic disease, internecine warfare or cultural idiosyncracies affecting the birth rate. the modern population boom, in these analyses, results from medical and public health improvements, military pacification or foreign cultural influences. this article, by contrast, argues that in indonesia and the philippines population growth has typically been a result of economic growth, and that the general sparsity of the population in early historical times reflected the low 'carrying capacity' of the environments in question under the prevailing economic conditions.
Historians of Indonesia often think of states, and especially colonial states, as predatory institutions encroaching aggressively on the territory and autonomy of freedom-loving stateless peoples. For Barbara and Leonard Andaya, early European expansion in Sumatra and the Moluccas was synonymous with the distortion or destruction of decentralized indigenous political systems based on cooperation, alliance, economic complementarity, and myths of common ancestry (B. W. Andaya 1993; L. Y. Andaya 1993). Anthony Reid (1997: 81) has described tribal societies like those of the Batak and Minangkabau in highland Sumatra as 'miracles of statelessness' which 'defended their autonomy by a mixture of guerilla warfare, diplomatic flexibility, and deliberate exaggeration of myths about their savagery' until ultimately overwhelmed by Dutch military power. Before colonialism, in this view, most Indonesians relied for security not on the protection of a powerful king, but on a 'complex web of contractual mutualities' embodying a 'robust pluralism' (Reid 1998: 29, 32). 'So persistently', concludes Reid (1997: 80-1), 'has each step towards stronger states in the archipelago arisen from trading ports, with external aid and inspiration, that one is inclined to seek the indigenous political dynamic in a genius for managing without states'. Henk Schulte Nordholt (2002: 54), for his part, cautions against any tendency to downplay the violent, repressive aspects of colonial and post-colonial government in Indonesia, expressing the hope that 'a new Indonesian historiography will succeed in liberating itself from the interests, perspective, and conceptual framework of the state'. An even more systematic attempt to demonize the (modern) state in Indonesia and elsewhere can be found in the work of James Scott (1998a, 1998b).
