Tax and other incentives to small, medium, micro enterprises in South Africa.

Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2004.The promotion of Small, Medium and Micro enterprises (SMMEs) has been identified as key strategy of government for employment creation and income generation. For some time now small business owners had to fend for themselves. Small business was neglected and was in the main ignored by government. Since the 1994 democratic process the challenge for the new order has been to create an enabling environment for the small business sector of the economy. The historical neglect and the consequent policy vacuum has had to be re assessed. To this end the 1995 White Paper on a National Strategy for the development and Promotion of Small Business in South Africa was the first major effort by government to design a policy framework targeting the small business sector. The promulgation of the Small Business Act in 1996 and the establishment of the Ntsika Enterprise Promotion agency under the aegis of the Department of Trade and Industry has attempted to provide direction and facilitate the provision of Non Financial support to the Small Business Sector. Various incentive schemes have been developed and put into operation together with a range of tax incentives to help promote Small Business. Eight years have passed since the promulgation of the Small Business Act and the perception that finance for SMMEs has been the greatest stumbling block to development. However the failure of the vast numbers of micro lending agencies have revealed that low levels of entrepreneurship has led to their demise. The provision of meaningful positive incentives need to be measured and their effectiveness needs to be tested. This study will try and identify the incentives available

A Dynamic Model for Load Balancing in Cloud Infrastructure

This paper analysis various challenges faced in optimizing computing resource utilization via load balancing and presents a platform-independent model for load balancing which targets high availability of resources, low SLA (Service Level agreement) violations and saves power. To achieve this, incoming requests are monitored for sudden burst, a prediction model is employed to maintain high availability and a power-aware algorithm is applied for choosing a suitable physical node for a virtual host. The proposed dynamic load balancing model provides a way to conflicting goals of saving power and maintaining high resource availability.For anyone building a private, public or hybrid IaaS cloud infrastructure, load balancing of virtual hosts on a limited number of physical nodes, becomes a crucial aspect. This paper analysis various challenges faced in optimizing computing resource utilization via load balancing and presents a platform independent model for load balancing which targets high availability of resources, low SLA (Service Level agreement) violations and saves power. To achieve this, incoming requests are monitored for sudden burst, prediction model is employed to maintain high availability and power aware algorithm is applied for choosing a suitable physical node for virtual host. The proposed dynamic load balancing model provides a way to conflicting goals of saving power and maintaining high resource availability.

Aplicación de nuevas tecnologías en los sistemas de alumbrado

A medida que transcurre el tiempo la sociedad evoluciona, las ciudades crecen, se modernizan, mejoran su infraestructura y se ofrecen más y mejores servicios a sus ciudadanos. Esto ha hecho que durante muchos años las ciudades se hayan desarrollado sin pensar en lo que vendrá más adelante, contaminando el medio ambiente y consumiendo mucha energía y de forma ineficiente. Ante esta situación, y gracias a las innovaciones tecnológicas en materia de comunicaciones, se están adoptando medidas para dirigir la evolución de las ciudades hacia un modelo de ciudad inteligente y sostenible. Las redes de comunicaciones constituyen uno de los pilares sobre los que se asienta la sociedad, que se encuentra siempre en contacto con su entorno. Cada vez más, se tiene una mayor necesidad de conocer lo que ocurre en el entorno en tiempo real solicitando información climatológica en una determinada ubicación, permitiendo conocer el estado del tráfico para elegir la ruta hacia el trabajo, saber el tiempo que tardará el autobús en llegar a la parada, etc. Como éstos, se podrían citar muchos más ejemplos de necesidades y servicios que demandan hoy día la sociedad y que, seguramente, nadie pensaba que las iba a necesitar hace unos años. Muchos de estos servicios en tiempo real se consiguen gracias a las redes de sensores inalámbricas. Consiste en desplegar una serie de diminutos sensores en una zona determinada con el objetivo de recoger la información del medio, procesarla y modelarla para que esté disponible para los usuarios. Observando la tendencia seguida por las Tecnologías de la Información y de las Comunicaciones (TIC) se puede constatar una continua evolución hacia los dispositivos embedidos, de cada vez más pequeño tamaño y menor consumo y, al mismo tiempo, con mayor capacidad de proceso y memoria y facilidad para las comunicaciones. Siguiendo esta línea, se está construyendo la ciudad inteligente con capacidad para pensar y tomar decisiones, pero hay que dotarla de cierto grado de eficiencia. Se trata de aprovechar los recursos de la naturaleza para crear fuentes de energías limpias e ilimitadas. Empleando las tecnologías oportunas para transformar, por ejemplo, la energía del Sol o la energía del viento en electricidad, se puede alcanzar el modelo de ciudad que se pretende. ABSTRACT. As time passes society evolves, cities grow, modernize, improve their infrastructure and offer more and better services to their citizens. This has made for many years cities have developed without thinking about what will come later , polluting the environment and high energy consuming and inefficient . Given this situation, and thanks to the Technological innovations in communications, is being taken to direct the evolution of cities towards a smart city model sustainable. Communication networks are one of the pillars on which society rests, which is always in contact with their environment. Increasingly, there is a greater need to know what happens in the real-time environment requesting weather information in a certain location , allowing know the traffic to choose the route to work , namely the time take the bus to get to the bus stop, etc. . As these, you could cite many more Examples of needs and services that society demands today and, surely, no one thought that was going to need a few years ago. Many of these real-time services are achieved through networks wireless sensors. Is to deploy a series of sensors in a tiny given area in order to collect information from the environment, process and shape it to make it available to users. Observing the trend followed by the Information Technology and Communications (ICT ) can finding an evolving toward embeded devices of increasingly small size and lower power consumption and at the same time, higher capacity process and memory ease communications. Following this line, is under construction with capacity smart city to think and make decisions, but you have to give it some degree of efficiency. It seeks to harness the resources of nature to create clean energy sources and unlimited. Using appropriate technologies to transform, for example, energy from the sun or wind energy into electricity, it can achieve the model city intended

Rhetoric, ritual and reality: understanding the relationship between ex-combatants and the TRC in Sierra Leone

This thesis explores the relationship between ex-combatants and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Sierra Leone. It fills important empirical and conceptual lacunae in foregrounding the transitional justice experiences of ex-combatants, a population that is both necessary to, but neglected within, the broader study and practice of transitional justice. Using qualitative research methods, it develops a multi-level and nuanced understanding of the relationship between ex-combatants and the TRC. On the institutional level this thesis critically examines the rhetoric, ritual and reality of transitional justice, and of post-conflict truth commissions in particular. On the micro-level, it unearths ex-combatant expectations, experiences and impacts in relation to Sierra Leone’s TRC. Along its institutional axis, a critique of the rhetoric of transitional justice addresses the normative foundations of this discourse. The dimension of ritual addresses the question of whose justice was formally captured within the TRC in Sierra Leone. The problematic binary identity model of transitional justice, that simplifies, dichotomises and pits pure victims against evil perpetrators is exposed. The reality of transitional justice empirically explores the practice of justice-seeking on the ground. This highlights the translation of the normative production, and institutional practices of, privilege, onto local transitional justice participant populations, and the deleterious effects thereof. Along its micro-level axis, this thesis develops an in-depth localised understanding of the relationship between ex-combatants and the TRC in Sierra Leone. This thesis illuminates ex-combatant expectations held towards the TRC, and in so doing reveals their justice needs. It assesses their experiences of the TRC, and in particular analyses participation deterrents. A localised framework for evaluating TRC impact is used to analyse the effects of the TRC on this population. The complex lived experiences of war, among ex-combatants, do not conform to the neat binary identity framework provided by transitional justice. Their relegation to the fringes of this discourse and practice has significant effects on the overall contributions and effectiveness of transitional justice moreover, which must break these binaries if the truth-telling, reconciliation and prevention aims of truth commissions are to be meaningfully achieved

Sustainable hunting and the conservation of the threatened houbara bustards

African houbara (Chlamydotis undulata) and Asian houbara (C. macqueenii), classified as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, have been over-exploited across their global ranges. The highest-profile conservation response has been large-scale releases of captive-bred birds, potentially threatening wild populations through introgression. Options for increasing numbers of the species are habitat management to counter overgrazing (in North Africa and the Middle East), mitigation of powerline collisions, predator control (ethically questionable and impractical), reduction of poaching and trapping, limited captive breeding, and hunting controls. Assuming hunting continues, the best model for conserving both species is a system of sustainable hunting that incorporates stakeholder observance, involvement of stakeholders and local communities in decisions and monitoring, protection of no-hunting areas, scientifically-determined quotas, small-scale use of captive-bred birds, and—if numbers still fail to respond, as a last resort—moratoria. These measures provide the only realistic guarantee for the long-term survival of Arab falconry, a part of humanity’s intangible cultural heritage

Low temperature resistivity of germanium semiconductor

A theoretical expression for the low temperature resistivity of germanium semiconductor as a function of impurity concentration and temperature is reported. Fritzsche's data in the intermediate concentration range was used to optimize the energy constants in his equation for the resistivity. The coefficients in the three terms of his expression were calculated for different impurity concentration and an expression was developed for each coefficient with the impurity concentration as variable. Resistivity was determined from this modified equation for each of his samples in the temperature range between 0.1 K and 200 K. An agreement is found between the calculated curves and his experimental curves for the samples with impurity contents between 4.5 X 10^16 and 7.4 X 10^16 acceptors/cc. However, the data for the samples with impurity contents other than the so-called Intermediate Concentration does not fit experimental data. Fritzsche's model of impurity band conduction has to be refined or altered to account for this complicated behavior.Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department o