Hiring Patterns, Firm-Level Dynamics and HIV/AIDS: A Case Study of Small Firms on the Cape Flats

This paper explores firm-level responses to HIV/AIDS. Case studies of seven small manufacturing firms on the Cape Flats failed to record any reported HIV prevalence or any perceived increases in costs due to HIV/AIDS for any of the firms interviewed. However, an interesting picture of labour practices at the bottom end of the formal job market emerged. Small firms look after their skilled workers, but take on and dismiss unskilled workers at a high rate. Small firms do not pay medical benefits and recruit using a well-developed community network to identify good workers. These companies are thus less likely to incur significant AIDS-related costs on the production side. There is anecdotal evidence that the impact of AIDS will be on the demand side with firms perceiving that customers avoid infected workers in service provision.

Animals in Science: Ethical Justifications, Regulatory Frameworks, and Political Recommendations in the Canadian Context

Global estimates suggest that more than 100 million non-human animals are used for scientific purposes each year. The nature of the research, teaching, and testing conducted on these animals can be very invasive, painful, and fatal. Should we care? To discontinue these practices in some cases may result in human suffering. Should any human benefits of research, teaching, and testing outweigh the resultant animal suffering? This paper begins with an analysis of some of the most popular theories on the moral status of animals. From this analysis it is argued that mere species membership is not a morally relevant characteristic, and that non-human animals can have moral status and moral rights. A deontological approach to adjudicating moral claims across species is presented to overcome some of the challenges typical of utilitarian and rights-based approaches. This approach is used to sketch a general framework for evaluating which types of scientific animal use ought to be permitted. It is argued further that, while some forms of scientific animal use may be permitted at present, we ought to strive for the elimination of the practice. The focus will then shift to an analysis of Canada’s regulatory system for the scientific use of animals, identifying shortcomings of this system. The Canadian approach to regulation in this area will be compared against approaches that are taken in the UK and the Netherlands which are more closely aligned with the moral arguments made in the first section. There are opportunities for Canada to learn from these countries, and remarks will be made on how and why Canada should improve the regulation of animals in research, teaching, and testing. Such changes have the potential to improve the wellbeing not only of the animals used in science, but for humans as well. Finally, expected costs and benefits that would accompany the implementation of the recommendations are considered with comments on how costs can be alleviated and why they should be incurred

Hiring Patterns, Firm-Level Dynamics and HIV/AIDS: A Case Study of Small Firms on the Cape Flats

This paper explores firm-level responses to HIV/AIDS. Case studies of seven small manufacturing firms on the Cape Flats failed to record any reported HIV prevalence or any perceived increases in costs due to HIV/AIDS for any of the firms interviewed. However, an interesting picture of labour practices at the bottom end of the formal job market emerged. Small firms look after their skilled workers, but take on and dismiss unskilled workers at a high rate. Small firms do not pay medical benefits and recruit using a well-developed community network to identify good workers. These companies are thus less likely to incur significant AIDS-related costs on the production side. There is anecdotal evidence that the impact of AIDS will be on the demand side with firms perceiving that customers avoid infected workers in service provision

From manual to makeshift: the practice of community health work in Wallacedene and Bloekombos informal settlements

Includes bibliographical references.This thesis investigates community health workers' negotiation between the prescribed 'manual' for care and the lived realities of their field, exploring how prescriptions of public health are reappropriated through the micro-politics of everyday practice. What inventiveness, agency and tactical manoeuvres are woven between abstract ideals and situational demands? And how are these shaping the content of care? Community health work has been established as the model for health service delivery in resource-poor settings, particularly those hard-hit by AIDS. While its outcomes are widely celebrated, what this success looks like in practice remains under-explored. This dissertation investigates the messy application of this abstract model of care within a specific social context, exploring the place of care in the lives of carers, and how circumstantial pressures shape care delivery in unintended ways

The potential of visual and participatory approaches to HIV literacy in South Africa

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 141-150).An estimated 18.8 % of South African adults aged 15-49 are currently living with HIV. While HIV literacy campaigns and other strategies have aimed to reduce HIV incidence, there remains a general lack of knowledge of the biomedical nature of the disease. This not only inhibits attempts to reduce HIV transmission, but also discourages voluntary counseling and testing (VCT), accessing clinic care and the uptake of antiretroviral therapy. This dissertation identifies the essential role played by community health workers and treatment activists who offer 'HIV literacy' in their communities and assist the formal health care system. The aim of this study was to complement these initiatives with the development and analysis of a visual and participatory HIV literacy workshop

The Mason-Alberta Phonetic Segmenter: A forced alignment system based on deep neural networks and interpolation

Forced alignment systems automatically determine boundaries between segments in speech data, given an orthographic transcription. These tools are commonplace in phonetics to facilitate the use of speech data that would be infeasible to manually transcribe and segment. In the present paper, we describe a new neural network-based forced alignment system, the Mason-Alberta Phonetic Segmenter (MAPS). The MAPS aligner serves as a testbed for two possible improvements we pursue for forced alignment systems. The first is treating the acoustic model in a forced aligner as a tagging task, rather than a classification task, motivated by the common understanding that segments in speech are not truly discrete and commonly overlap. The second is an interpolation technique to allow boundaries more precise than the common 10 ms limit in modern forced alignment systems. We compare configurations of our system to a state-of-the-art system, the Montreal Forced Aligner. The tagging approach did not generally yield improved results over the Montreal Forced Aligner. However, a system with the interpolation technique had a 27.92% increase relative to the Montreal Forced Aligner in the amount of boundaries within 10 ms of the target on the test set. We also reflect on the task and training process for acoustic modeling in forced alignment, highlighting how the output targets for these models do not match phoneticians' conception of similarity between phones and that reconciliation of this tension may require rethinking the task and output targets or how speech itself should be segmented.Comment: submitted for publicatio

Civil society leadership in the struggle for AIDS treatment in South Africa and Uganda

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis is an attempt to theorise and operationalise empirically the notion of ‘civil society leadership’ in Sub-Saharan Africa. ‘AIDS leadership,’ which is associated with the intergovernmental institutions charged with coordinating the global response to HIV/AIDS, is both under-theorised and highly context-specific. In this study I therefore opt for an inclusive framework that draws on a range of approaches, including the literature on ‘leadership’, institutions, social movements and the ‘network’ perspective on civil society mobilisation. This framework is employed in rich and detailed empirical descriptions (‘thick description’) of civil society mobilisation around AIDS, including contentious AIDS activism, in the key case studies of South Africa and Uganda. South Africa and Uganda are widely considered key examples of poor and good leadership (from national political leaders) respectively, while the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and The AIDS Support Organisation (TASO) are both seen as highly effective civil society movements. These descriptions emphasise ‘transnational networks of influence’ in which civil society leaders participated (and at times actively constructed) in order to mobilise both symbolic and material resources aimed at exerting influence at the transnational, national and local levels

The Public Sector HIV/AIDS Treatment Roll-out Campaign in the Western Cape: A case study highlighting success factors and challenges

Word processed copy.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-98).Until recently, the national implementation of a public sector Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) programme in South Africa seemed financially impossible. Drastically reduced prices for Antiretrovirals (ARVs) combined with substantial donor funding and the long-awaited adoption of a national treatment plan, have, however, shifted the debate. Now the question is not so much should universal ART be provided by government but, rather, is it possible to implement in severely resource-constrained environments and, if so, what are the best ways to deliver these services

Semantic Communications for Speech Transmission

Wireless communication systems have undergone vigorous advancements from the first generation (1G) to the fifth generation (5G) over the past few decades by developing numerous coding algorithms and channel models to recover accurate sources at the bit level. However, in recent years, the flourishing of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionised various industries and incubated multifarious intelligent tasks, which increases the amount of data transmission to the zetta-byte level and requires massive machine connectivity with low transmission latency and energy consumption. In this context, conventional communication systems are facing severe challenges imposed by ubiquitous AI tasks. Therefore, it is inevitable to develop a new communication paradigm. Semantic communications have been proposed to address the challenges by extracting semantic information inherent in source data while omitting irrelative redundant information to reduce the transmission data, thereby lowering communication resources and facilitating high semantic fidelity transmission. Nevertheless, the exploration of semantic communications has gone through decades of stagnation since it was first identified because of the inadequacy of mathematical models for semantic information. Inspired by the thriving of AI, deep learning (DL)-enabled semantic communications have been scrutinised as promising solutions to the bottlenecks in conventional communications by leveraging the learning and fitting capabilities of neural networks to bypass mathematical models for semantic extraction and representation. To this end, this thesis explores DL-enabled semantic communications for speech transmission to tackle technical problems in conventional speech communication networks, including semantic-agnostic coding algorithms, unreliable speech transmission in complicated channel environments, single system output limited to the speech modality, and speech quality susceptible to external interferences. Specifically, a general semantic communication system for speech transmission over single-input single-output (SISO) channels, named DeepSC-S, is first developed to reconstruct speech information by transmitting global semantic features. In addition, the system output is extended to multimodal data across different languages by introducing a task-oriented semantic communication framework for speech transmission, named DeepSC-ST, to perform various downstream intelligent tasks, including speech recognition, speech synthesis, speech-to-text translation (S2TT), and speech-to-speech translation (S2ST). Moreover, the endeavours towards semantic communications for speech transmission over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels are carried out to contend with practical communication scenarios, and a semantic-aware network is devised to improve the performance of intelligent tasks. Furthermore, the realistic scenarios involving corrupted speech input due to external inferences are further considered by establishing a semantic impairment suppression mechanism to compensate for impaired semantics in the corrupted speech and to facilitate robust end-to-end (E2E) semantic communications for speech-to-text translation. The proposed DeepSC-S and its variants investigated in this thesis demonstrate high proficiency in semantic communications for speech transmission by reducing substantial transmission data, performing diverse semantic tasks, providing superior system performance, and tolerating dynamic channel effects