An assessment of service quality at a selected restaurant in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Scholars’ interest in service quality in the fast food industry is growing. Fast food restaurants are aiming at meeting customers’ expectations of service quality. There is therefore need to assess customers’ expectations and experiences of service at the restaurant under study. The aim of the study was to ascertain the service quality gap between customers’ expectations and experiences of service quality. Quantitative research methodology was used to underpin the study. Convenience sampling was used to select respondents. Two hundred and sixty four questionnaires were collected. Data was analysed using descriptive and inferential statistical methods. Findings indicate that customers’ expectations surpassed their experiences of service quality on the five dimensions of the RATER Model. The largest service quality gap scores were reliability and responsiveness in this order. The smallest service quality gap score was tangibility. There is need for the restaurant to improve the reliability and responsiveness of the service quality because customers’ needs are not met. On the other hand, there is need to further reduce the small service quality gap score of tangibility at the restaurant

Institutional capacity for water conservation: a case study of Sedibeng District Municipality

A research report submitted to the Faculty of the Built Environment and Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Science in the field of Development Planning (MSc DP) August 2015Since the democratic transition in 1994, the role of local government has changed dramatically. Local governments are now expected to play a far more active role in their constituencies. As such, municipalities are expected to implement broader national policies and legislatures. The literature reviewed as part of the research indicated that most municipalities are faced with inadequate performance skills to manage and sustain their projects. This particular study seeks to understand the institutional and human resources strengths and weaknesses that help or hinder Sedibeng municipality to actively pursue water conservation through implementing Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) principles. In pursuit of this purpose, a qualitative research approach was adopted with interviews conducted with Sedibeng Municipality’s seven senior officials and community members. The main findings of this study revealed that the key technical department of the water sector in Sedibeng has capacity challenges at individual and organizational level. Of special concern is the failure of the municipality to give ongoing training to staff, so as to pass on modern advanced knowledge and new technological innovation skills. This is further compounded by the mismatch between the qualifications and job descriptions of some staff members. The study also finds that public-private partnership between the municipalities and private companies is needed in the water sector to promote water conservation and thus provide a better level of service delivery. The research concludes that institutional capacity is a prerequisite for the implementation of IWRM principles. In regard to this study, it has been established that to some extent Sedibeng District Municipality has the required institutional capacity in terms of organizational arrangement to harness the principles of IWRM. The accomplishment of IWRM depends profoundly on financial and human capacity of each municipality. Therefore, the key recommendation is that the municipalities should employ individuals based on merit and work experience to ensure efficient management of funds and effective execution of water related projects. Key words: Water Conservation, IWRM, Institutional capacity, Sedibeng, Emfulen

Seaman’s lien: a South African perspective on seaman’s lien post the Supreme court of appeals decision in the Asphalt Venture Windrush Intercontinental SA v UACC Bergshav Tankers as 2017 (3) SA 1 (SCA)

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.The seaman’s lien is a well-recognised maritime lien. The advancement of the lien may have been swayed by public policy and the need to protect the seaman. The premise of the lien is that a service was rendered to the ship rather than acknowledging the seaman’s contract of employment. Affording seamen the right to approach the courts based on an action in rem, affords seamen the opportunity to speedily recover their claims. Of importance to us in this thesis will be the discussion around the seaman’s wages lien with a focus on the case that came before the Supreme Court of Appeals namely The Asphalt Venture Windrush Intercontinental SA and Another v UACC Bergshav Tankers AS (“Windrush”) 2017 (3) SA 1 (SCA). In this case the second appellant, the Asphalt Venture, was arrested at the Durban port by the respondent for wages that had been ceded and assigned to the respondent by the seamen’s families who had not had the seamen’s wages paid out by the previous owners of the Asphalt Venture. During the employment contracts between the previous owners and the seamen, the Asphalt Venture and her crew were held hostage by Somali pirates which caused great financial difficulties for the previous owners. Although the employment contracts terminated whilst the crew were held hostage, the previous owners continued to pay the hostages families the wages until they could no longer afford to. The crisp issue facing the court was whether a seaman’s lien existed in terms of the employment contracts between the seamen and the Asphalt Venture. Secondly whether a maritime lien can be ceded or assigned to another person. Further, whether the attack by the Somali pirates constituted a supervening impossibility with regards to the employment contracts. This research paper will focus provide on maritime liens, providing the historical background on liens and the seaman’s lien internationally in South Africa. Thereafter our focus will be the decision of the court a quo and the Supreme Court of Appeal in the Windrush decision. Finally, a discussion on piracy and the applicability of the doctrine of impossibility in contracts of employment for seamen, and the findings and recommendations of the writer

An E7 Surprise

We explore some curious implications of Seiberg duality for an SU(2) four-dimensional gauge theory with eight chiral doublets. We argue that two copies of the theory can be deformed by an exactly marginal quartic superpotential so that they acquire an enhanced E7 flavor symmetry. We argue that a single copy of the theory can be used to define an E7-invariant superconformal boundary condition for a theory of 28 five-dimensional free hypermultiplets. Finally, we derive similar statements for three-dimensional gauge theories such as an SU(2) gauge theory with six chiral doublets or Nf=4 SQED.Comment: 27 page

Detecting communities using asymptotical Surprise

Nodes in real-world networks are repeatedly observed to form dense clusters, often referred to as communities. Methods to detect these groups of nodes usually maximize an objective function, which implicitly contains the definition of a community. We here analyze a recently proposed measure called surprise, which assesses the quality of the partition of a network into communities. In its current form, the formulation of surprise is rather difficult to analyze. We here therefore develop an accurate asymptotic approximation. This allows for the development of an efficient algorithm for optimizing surprise. Incidentally, this leads to a straightforward extension of surprise to weighted graphs. Additionally, the approximation makes it possible to analyze surprise more closely and compare it to other methods, especially modularity. We show that surprise is (nearly) unaffected by the well known resolution limit, a particular problem for modularity. However, surprise may tend to overestimate the number of communities, whereas they may be underestimated by modularity. In short, surprise works well in the limit of many small communities, whereas modularity works better in the limit of few large communities. In this sense, surprise is more discriminative than modularity, and may find communities where modularity fails to discern any structure