Marikana and Beyond: New Dynamics in Strikes in South Africa

Political and social change in South Africa has been crucially shaped by large-scale strikes that have often taken a violent form. In spite of South Africa establishing a constitutional democracy in 1994 – and a new vision of industrial relations – violence has become so entangled in institutional life that South Africa has been described as a “violent democracy”. The massacre of thirty-four striking workers by heavily-armed police at Marikana in August 2012 was a culmination of this trajectory. The article explores the possibility of a nonviolent resolution of industrial disputes. This would require the capability of unions to recognise and strategically use the four dimensions of union power: structural, institutional, associational and societal. Without such capabilities, power resources may go unutilised, or be strategically ineffective. The article argues that in post-apartheid South Africa, associational power has become disconnected from institutional power. Instead of a vital interaction between the two, the institutions created by the new labour regime have become disconnected from the organisations that created them

An Autoradiographic Study of Invertebrate Uptake of DDT-CL36

Author Institution: The Department of Zoology and Entomology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OhioThis research sought to locate autoradiographically DDT-C136 in tissues of leeches, amphipods, and copepods three months after their marsh habitat was treated with the amount of insecticide routinely used for mosquito control. Isotope DDT or its metabolite was found in cytoplasm of nerve cell bodies, gut mucosa, and vascular tissue of leeches. No isotope DDT was detected in the tissue of amphipods and copepods

Realising context-oriented information filtering.

The notion of information overload is an increasing factor in modern information service environments where information is ‘pushed’ to the user. As increasing volumes of information are presented to computing users in the form of email, web sites, instant messaging and news feeds, there is a growing need to filter and prioritise the importance of this information. ‘Information management’ needs to be undertaken in a manner that not only prioritises what information we do need, but to also dispose of information that is sent, which is of no (or little) use to us.The development of a model to aid information filtering in a context-aware way is developed as an objective for this thesis. A key concern in the conceptualisation of a single concept is understanding the context under which that concept exists (or can exist). An example of a concept is a concrete object, for instance a book. This contextual understanding should provide us with clear conceptual identification of a concept including implicit situational information and detail of surrounding concepts.Existing solutions to filtering information suffer from their own unique flaws: textbased filtering suffers from problems of inaccuracy; ontology-based solutions suffer from scalability challenges; taxonomies suffer from problems with collaboration. A major objective of this thesis is to explore the use of an evolving community maintained knowledge-base (that of Wikipedia) in order to populate the context model from prioritise concepts that are semantically relevant to the user’s interest space. Wikipedia can be classified as a weak knowledge-base due to its simple TBox schema and implicit predicates, therefore, part of this objective is to validate the claim that a weak knowledge-base is fit for this purpose. The proposed and developed solution, therefore, provides the benefits of high recall filtering with low fallout and a dependancy on a scalable and collaborative knowledge-base.A simple web feed aggregator has been built using the Java programming language that we call DAVe’s Rss Organisation System (DAVROS-2) as a testbed environment to demonstrate specific tests used within this investigation. The motivation behind the experiments is to demonstrate that the combination of the concept framework instantiated through Wikipedia can provide a framework to aid in concept comparison, and therefore be used in news filtering scenario as an example of information overload. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the method well understood measures of information retrieval are used. This thesis demonstrates that the utilisation of the developed contextual concept expansion framework (instantiated using Wikipedia) improved the quality of concept filtering over a baseline based on string matching. This has been demonstrated through the analysis of recall and fallout measures

Contesting Digital Technology through New Forms of Transnational Activism

While the tech giants are using privatisation to present themselves as providers of solutions to global problems, digitalisation is creating new forms of transnational activism. Global unions are emerging as players in this contest, helping to build counter power at both the local and global level. Through a comparison of the use of digital technology in two case studies in Africa involving two different global unions the article demonstrates how global unions can, through their intermediary coordinating role at the supranational level, deepen worker power. KEYWORDS: Global unions; digital technology; informal work; power resources; union revitalisatio