344 research outputs found
Analyzing the Microbiome 29th to 31st March 2017 Training Material Archive
No full textThis is an archive containing training materials for the H3ABioNet course: “Analysing the Microbiome 29th to 31st March 2017”.Brief description of the course: The development of next generation sequence technology has led to rapid advances in microbiome study. The Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience with support from the Pan-African Bioinformatics Network for H3Africa will be offering a short-course on the bioinformatics of analysing the microbiome. The course will give an overview of conducting a microbiome study, present some of the most important techniques, and will include some hands-on use of some the key tools. The course will cover analysis both using both 16S RNA gene sequences and shotgun sequencingParticipation: The workshop was aimed at individuals of research groups within the University of the Witwatersrand and associated Institutions, AWI-Gen and H3Africa members that will be working on analysing microbiome data.Course trainers/authors: Ami Bhatt | Departments of Medicine and Genetics, Stanford UniversityGerrit Botha | Computational Biology Division, University of Cape TownCourse sponsor/organisers:Professor Scott Hazelhurst, Professor Nicola Mulder, Ami Bhatt, Gerrit Botha, Africa Wits-INDEPTH Partnership for Genomic Research, Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience, H3ABioNetCourse level: IntermediateThe archive contains the following items:Trainer/creator file containing the names of the person/s responsible for organising and delivering the courseCourse information file - which contains the original information about the course and includes a course scheduleGithub repositoryThis upload was performed by: Verena Ras | H3ABioNet Training and Outreach Coordinator</p
Potential socio-economic consequences of mine closure
No full textBackground: Mine closures generally reveal negligence on the part of mining houses, not only in terms of the environment, but also the surrounding mining communities.
Aim: This article reflects on the findings of research into the socio-economic consequences of mine closure. The research specifically explored how mineworkers’ dependency on their employment at a mine affects their ability to sustain their livelihood.
Setting: The research was conducted at the Orkney Mine and the Grootvlei Mine (Springs).
Methods: The research was conducted within a naturalistic domain, guided by a relativist orientation, a constructivist ontology and an interpretivist epistemology. Data were collected by means of document analysis, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussion and unstructured observation.
Results: From the research findings, it is evident that mine closures, in general, have a devastating effect on the surrounding mining communities as well as on the employees. Mine closures in the case studies gradually depleted the mining communities’ livelihood assets and resulted in the collapse of their coping strategies and livelihood outcomes. It generally affected the communities’ nutrition, health, education, food security, water, shelter, levels of community participation and personal safety.
Conclusion: If not managed efficiently and effectively, mine closures may pose significant challenges to the mining industry, government, the environment, national and local economic prosperity and communities in the peripheral areas of mines. This truly amplifies that mine closure, whether temporary or permanent, is an issue that needs to be addressed with responsibility towards all stakeholders, including the mining community and the labour force
Extreme ultraviolet emission lines of Ni xii in laboratory and solar spectra
No full textA linear force-free field solution is presented in cylindrical coordinates, formulated in terms of trigonometric and Bessel functions. A numerical exploration has revealed that this solution describes magnetic field lines that meander in Cartesian space, as well as field lines that lie on toroidal flux surfaces. These tori are in (or close to) the plane perpendicular to the cylindrical axis. Nested tori, as well as tori with shells that have finite thickness, were found. The parameter space of the solution shows that the tori exist within a bounded range of values
Failed states, fading dreams and a failing democracy : the critical role of public law academics
No full textText of inaugural address by Prof. Christoffel Botha, Department of Public Law on 17 October 2007.With reference to incidents where rule of law has been disregarded by the South African government and pointing to the danger of paraliament becoming a mere rubber stamp for the executive, the author urges legal academics - and particularly public law academics - to become involved through criticism
The Representation of Gays and Lesbians in South African Cinema 1985–2013
No full textTHE REPRESENTATION OF GAYS AND LESBIANS IN SOUTH AFRICAN CINEMA 1895-2013 Despite South Africa\u27s progressive constitution which prohibits discrimination against gays and lesbians, as well as a strong gay movement, South African cinematic images of gay men and women are limited and still at the margin of the South African film industry. One ends up with less than 20 short films, a few documentaries and less than 10 features with openly gay and lesbian characters in the past 114 years of South African cinema. Under apartheid, gay and lesbian voices in film and television were silenced. In a 20-year study of the representation of gays and lesbians in African, Asian and Latin American cinema (Botha 2003; 2012; Botha & Swinnen 2010), the author has noted that homosexual experience is unique in South Africa, precisely because of South Africa\u27s history of racial division and subsequent resistance. South African gay identities..
Numerical simulations of rotating axisymmetric sunspots
No full textA numerical model of axisymmetric convection in the presence of a vertical magnetic flux bundle and rotation about the axis is presented. The model contains a compressible plasma described by the non-linear MHD equations, with density and temperature gradients simulating the upper layer of the Sun's convection zone. The solutions exhibit a central magnetic flux tube in a cylindrical numerical domain, with convection cells forming collar flows around the tube. When the numerical domain is rotated with a constant angular velocity, the plasma forms a Rankine vortex, with the plasma rotating as a rigid body where the magnetic field is strong, as in the flux tube, while experiencing sheared azimuthal flow in the surrounding convection cells, forming a free vortex. As a result, the azimuthal velocity component has its maximum value close to the outer edge of the flux tube. The azimuthal flow inside the magnetic flux tube and the vortex flow is prograde relative to the rotating cylindrical reference frame. A retrograde flow appears at the outer wall. The most significant convection cell outside the flux tube is the location for the maximum value of the azimuthal magnetic field component. The azimuthal flow and magnetic structure are not generated spontaneously, but decay exponentially in the absence of any imposed rotation of the cylindrical domain
O poder da palavra e implícitos conversacionais no discurso político de Pieter W. Botha
No full textAbstract (English): The current research article tackles word power, taking into account talking inferences adopting Grice´s perspective (1975). Being so, for the working out of this study, a political speech analysis was needed. Thus, Pieter W. Botha´s political speech of 1985 was adopted, at the time he was South Africa´s Prime Minister and President during the Apartheid system. Methodologically, the study embraced a bibliography consulting methodology (c.f. Marconi & Lakatos, 2003, Freixo, 2011), for allowing in a descriptive study to check the analogy and the differences between the elements of a structure for its analysis. To sum up, it might be stated that the speech analysis of the selected author, can be clinched that there is a systematic saying that leads to a gossiping as a discourse strategy. It might mean that a politic man never take responsibility of his sayings, for letting the receiver check the speech deed.
Key-words: Analysis, Discourse, Inference, Conversational Implicatures.
Abstract (English): The current research article tackles word power, taking into account talking inferences adopting Grice´s perspective (1975). Being so, for the working out of this study, a political speech analysis was needed. Thus, Pieter W. Botha´s political speech of 1985 was adopted, at the time he was South Africa´s Prime Minister and President during the Apartheid system. Methodologically, the study embraced a bibliography consulting methodology (c.f. Marconi & Lakatos, 2003, Freixo, 2011), for allowing in a descriptive study to check the analogy and the differences between the elements of a structure for its analysis. To sum up, it might be stated that the speech analysis of the selected author, can be clinched that there is a systematic saying that leads to a gossiping as a discourse strategy. It might mean that a politic man never take responsibility of his sayings, for letting the receiver check the speech deed.
Key-words: Analysis, Discourse, Inference, Conversational Implicatures.O presente artigo reflete sobre o poder da palavra, tendo em conta as implicaturas conversacionais e visa analisar os efeitos pragmáticos e retóricos da linguagem utilizada por Pieter W. Botha no seu discurso de 1985, considerando os implícitos conversacionais, com o intuito de compreender como esses recursos linguísticos contribuíram para a sustentação ideológica do apartheid e para a perpetuação de um regime baseado na exclusão e no silenciamento do outro, bem como identificar os tipos de implícitos conversacionais presentes no discurso no seu discurso. O trabalho adotou a perspectiva de Grice (1975). A escolha desse discurso resulta do facto de que, apesar de o mesmo ter mais de 30 anos ainda é atual, na medida em que as estratégias discursivas usadas na época, ainda hoje fazem ecos nos nos discursos políticos. Por ser de natureza descritiva e interpretativa, o trabalho adotou uma metodologia baseada em consulta bibliográfica, recorrendo as principais obras que abordam sobre o tema. Os dados analisados foram constituidos a partir do discurso de 1985 de Botha. A análise foi feita mediante trechos de falas retirados no referido discurso. a seleção baseou-se no objetivo do estudo. Análise revelou que a linguagem desempenhou um papel central na sustentação ideológica do regime do apartheid. Por meio de implicaturas conversacionais, insinuações, ironia, eufemismos e omissões estratégicas, Botha construiu enunciados que ocultavam a violência institucional, ao mesmo tempo em que legitimavam a repressão e a exclusão racial. A análise permitiu também verificar a violação sistemática das máximas conversacionais, ao recorrer a metáfora, a ironia, a insinuação. Contudo, pode dizer-se a perspectiva de análise adotada permitiu fazer generalizações ao discurso selecionado, denotando que o mesmo é ideológicamente carregad
Narratives of adolescent girls journeying via feminist participatory action research through the aftermath of divorce
No full textThis article documents the (often counter-normative) narrative journey of four South African adolescent girls whose biological parents had divorced - and one (or both) parent(s) remarried. Through purposive sampling within a qualitative research paradigm of feminist participatory action research, they were supported in group context by the primary researcher to voice their narratives; within a world where they are mostly inundated with (normative) discourses on what they are supposed to be experiencing. The ways in which their lives were influenced by parental divorce and subsequent remarriage were explored, and normative prescriptive discourses about divorce, remarriage and parentchild relationships deconstructed. This offered participants the opportunity to re-author their stories about their families and to explore the problem-saturated narratives that these four participants had with their biological, non-residential fathers - and the novel relations with their stepfathers. Sharing the narratives of these relationships led to significant discoveries about alternative postdivorce dynamics. The participants also initiated social action in their school by advocating for the cause of divorce and the plight of teenagers living with the reality of post-divorce dynamics
Text-based language identification for the South African languages
No full textDissertation (MEng)--University of Pretoria, 2008.We investigate the factors that determine the performance of text-based language identification, with a particular focus on the 11 official languages of South Africa. Our study uses n-gram statistics as features for classification. In particular, we compare support vector machines, Naïve Bayesian and difference-in-frequency classifiers on different amounts of input text and various values of n, for different amounts of training data. For a fixed value of n the support vector machines generally outperforms the other classifiers, but the simpler classifiers are able to handle larger values of n. The additional computational complexity of training the support vector machine classifier may not be justified in light of importance of using a large value of n, except possibly for small sizes of the input window when limited training data is available. We find that it is more difficult to discriminate languages within language families then those across families. The accuracy on small input strings is low due to this reason, but for input strings of 100 characters or more there is only a slight confusion within families and accuracies as high as 99.4% are achieved. For the smallest input strings studied here, which consist of 15 characters, the best accuracy achieved is only 83%, but when the languages in different families are grouped together, this corresponds to a usable 95.1% accuracy. The relationship between the amount of training data and the accuracy achieved is found to depend on the window size – for the largest window (300 characters) about 400 000 characters are sufficient to achieve close-to-optimal accuracy, whereas improvements in accuracy are found even beyond 1.6 million characters of training data. Finally, we show that the confusions between the different languages in our set can be used to derive informative graphical representations of the relationships between the languages.Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineeringunrestricte
Bioinformatics analysis and annotation of variants in NGS data 2016 Training Material Archive
No full textThis is an archive containing training materials for the H3ABioNet course: “Bioinformatics analysis and annotation of variants in NGS data”.Brief description of the course: This workshop provides an introduction to the computational analyses of NGS data from pre-processing to the identification and annotation of genomic variants and the functional effects of those variants, as well as the use of pharmocogenomic databases.Intended Audience: This workshop is aimed at attendees of the 3rd Pharmacogenetics and Precision Medicine Conference in Africa, geneticists, genetic counselling students/researchers, clinicians and healthcare professionals interested in the use of genomic data for personalising treatment.Course trainers/authors: Amel Ghouila, Gerrit Botha, Colleen Saunders, Luiz Olavo Bonino, Nyarai Soko, Suresh Maslamoney, Sumir Panji, Collet Dandara and Nicola Mulder.Course sponsor/organisers:H3ABioNetCourse level: advancedThe archive contains the following items:Trainer/creator file containing the names of the person/s responsible for organising and delivering the courseCourse information file - which contains the original information about the course and includes a course scheduleLecture materials which include lecture slides, tutorials and datasetsThis upload was performed by: Verena Ras | H3ABioNet Training and Outreach Coordinator</p
- …
