366 research outputs found
Cultural heritage and sustainable development targets : a possible harmonisation? Insights from the European Perspective
The Agenda 2030 includes a set of targets that need to be achieved by 2030. Although none
of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) focuses exclusively on cultural heritage, the
resulting Agenda includes explicit reference to heritage in SDG 11.4 and indirect reference to other
Goals. Achievement of international targets shall happen at local and national level, and therefore,
it is crucial to understand how interventions on local heritage are monitored nationally, therefore
feeding into the sustainable development framework. This paper is focused on gauging the
implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals with reference to cultural heritage, by
interrogating the current way of classifying it (and consequently monitoring). In fact, there is no
common dataset associated with monitoring SDGs, and the field of heritage is extremely complex
and diversified. The purpose for the paper is to understand if the taxonomy used by different
national databases allows consistency in the classification and valuing of the different assets
categories. The European case study has been chosen as field of investigation, in order to pilot a
methodology that can be expanded in further research. A crossâcomparison of a selected sample of
publicly accessible national cultural heritage databases has been conducted. As a result, this study
confirms the existence of general harmonisation of data towards the achievement of the SDGs with
a broad agreement of the conceptualisation of cultural heritage with international frameworks, thus
confirming that consistency exists in the classification and valuing of the different assets categories.
However, diverse challenges of achieving a consistent and coherent approach to integrating culture
in sustainability remains problematic. The findings allow concluding that it could be possible to
mainstream across different databases those indicators, which could lead to depicting the overall
level of attainment of the Agenda 2030 targets on heritage. However, more research is needed in
developing a robust correlation between national datasets and international targets
Language development or language corruption? The Case of Loan-words in "Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele" *
This article discusses the loan-words in Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele (henceforth ISN), particularly looking at their acceptance and/or non-acceptance by the target users of ISN. In Zim-babwe, Ndebele shares the same linguistic environment with English, Shona and the official mi-nority languages such as Kalanga, Tonga and Nambya. A historical heritage also links it with its Nguni sister languages such as Zulu and Xhosa spoken in South Africa. In selecting headwords for ISN, the Ndebele Lexicographic Unit used the frequency-list method, lemmatising words mostly found in the corpus. This method inevitably allowed the adoption of loan-words in the ISN with resultant public protest. The article is divided into two broad sections. The first section gives a gen-eral overview of comments from users of ISN about the inclusion of loan-words in the dictionary. The attitude towards loan-words in the ISN varies with different age groups, the younger gen-eration freely accepting them as part of the Ndebele lexicon as opposed to the older generation. The second section analyses the justification by the editors of ISN for lemmatising loan-words against the views of target users. Reservations against the loan-words in ISN go beyond lexicographic prin-ciples. In the forefront is the users' attitude towards the source language. Language attitudes in Zimbabwe are mainly a result of the socio-political and economic power characterising the differ-ent tribal or ethnic groups in the country. The article concludes by discussing possible solutions to the problem of loan-words to be adopted in the forthcoming Advanced Ndebele Dictionary.
Keywords: loan-words, cultural borrowing, dialect borrowing, lexi-con, adoption, language purism, language emancipatio
The limitations of current decision-making techniques in the procurement of COTS software components
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002. The fundamentals of good decision-making are, first, a clear understanding of the decision itself and second the availability of properly focused information to support the decision. Decision-making techniques help with both these problems. However, the techniques should be thought of as aids to decision-making and not the substitutes for it. Numerous decision-making techniques have been proposed as effective methods of ranking software products for selection for use as components in large-scale systems. Many of these techniques have been developed and successfully applied in other arenas and have been either used directly or adapted to be applied to COTS product evaluation and selection. This paper will show that many of these techniques are not valid when applied in this manner. We will describe an alternate requirements-driven technique that could be more effective
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Can requirements be creative? Experiences with an enhanced air space management system
Requirements engineering is a creative process in which stakeholders work together to create ideas for new software systems that are eventually expressed as requirements. This paper reports a workshop that integrated creativity techniques with different types of use case and system context modeling to discover stakeholder requirements for EASM, a future air space management software system to enable the more effective, longer-term planning of UK and European airspace use. The workshop was successful in that it provided a range of outputs that were later assessed for their novelty and usefulness in the final specification of the EASM software. The paper describes the workshop structure, gives examples of outputs from it, and uses these results to answer 2 research questions about the utility of creativity techniques and workshops that had not been answered in previous research
Male Circumcision and Risky Sexual Behavior in Zimbabwe: Evidence from the 2010-11 Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey
In 2009, Zimbabwe adopted voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) as an additional method of HIV prevention. The promotion of VMMC has raised a major concern that it might lead to an increase in high-risk sexual behavior, a phenomenon known as risk compensation or behavioral disinhibition. This study sought to test whether circumcised men in Zimbabwe are more likely to have engaged in risky sexual behavior. The study used data collected from 7,480 men age 15-54 who were interviewed during the 2010-11 Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey (ZDHS). Logistic regression was used to assess the association between circumcision and risky sexual behaviors. The study found no statistically significant association between male circumcision and risky sexual behavior. These results suggest a need to continue monitoring the relationships between ongoing VMCC campaigns and menâs risky sexual behavior. Information dissemination on VMMC should emphasize caution in messages promoting medical male circumcision to avoid giving the impression that it provides immunity against HIV
HIV transmission in part of the US prison system: implications for Europe.
A study in the United States has shown that HIV transmission has been occurring within the prison system in the state of Georgia.</jats:p
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A requirements engineering method for COTS-based systems development
An increasing number of organisations are procuring off-the-shelf software products from commercial suppliers. However, there has been a lack of methods and software tools for such requirements acquisition, product selection and product procurement. This thesis proposes a new method called PORE (Procurement-Oriented Requirements Engineering) which integrates existing requirements engineering techniques with those from knowledge engineering, feature analysis, multi-criteria decision-making and argumentation approaches to address the lack of guidance for acquiring requirements to enable evaluation and selection of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software. PORE is designed in part from conclusions drawn from real-world case studies of requirements acquisition for complex software product selection. Such studies are reported in this thesis. The PORE method is part goal-driven and part context-driven, in that it exploits models of the candidate COTS software and customer requirements as well as process goals to guide a requirements engineering team. The method's approach and mechanisms is demonstrated using a well-known commercial electronic-mail system. A number of studies are presented to provide validation for the method. These include three studies in three different organisations to select COTS software products and one study of requirements engineering experts to elicit their knowledge. The results from these studies demonstrated that the method is usable and effective. The thesis concludes with a discussion of future work to improve the PORE method and future research directions on requirements engineering for COTS-based systems development
Identifying growth opportunities in the Southern African Development Community through regional value chains: The case of the animal feed to poultry value chain
This paper considers findings of studies analysing the development of a regional animal feed to poultry value chain in southern Africa (Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe). The southern African regional poultry value chain is underdeveloped, although important changes include investments by South Africa-based multinational firms and strong growth in Zambia. Building on this growth requires coherent trade and industrial policies supporting investments across countries and practical measures to reduce barriers to intra-regional trade and transport costs. The potential to develop a regional poultry value chain is substantial, considering that the South African deep-sea trade deficit in poultry is larger in size than the Zambian industry
On systems of systems engineering: A requirements engineering perspective and research agenda
The emergence of Systems of Systems (SoSs) and Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) is largely driven by global societal needs including energy-water-food nexus, population demographics, global climate, integrated transport, security and social activity. However, due to their scale, structural and functional complexity and emergent properties, these global spanning Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems are becoming increasingly complex and more difficult for current requirements engineering (RE) practices to handle. In this paper, we firstly introduce SoSE as an emerging discipline and key characteristics of SoSs. We then highlight the challenges that the RE discipline must respond to. We discuss some weaknesses of current RE techniques and approaches to cope with the complexity of SoSs. We then argue that there is a need for the global RE community to evolve current RE approaches and to develop new ways of thinking, new RE capabilities and possibly a new RE science as a key mechanism for addressing requirements engineering complexities posed by Systems of Systems. We then outline a requirements engineering perspective and research agenda that identifies 'top-10' research themes informed by a cluster of four Systems of Systems Engineering projects funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 research programme
The Effect of Black Tax on Employee Engagement: The Mediating Role of Idiocentrism-Allocentrism-A Case of Pharmaceutical Industry in Zimbabwe
Employees in the Pharmaceutical industry are coming late to work and knocking off early. These actions unveiled by the employees are likely to incur economic costs on the employer, occasioned by low employee productivity. Owners of production have expressed concern over the general low staff morale in the pharmaceutical sector. While most studies have concentrated on internal job-related factors as drivers of employee engagement, this study seeks to assess employee engagement as being influenced by black tax, an external factor. The main aim of the research was to establish the influence of black tax on employee engagement, being mediated by idiocentrism-allocentrism, particularly focussing on the pharmaceutical manufacturing and retailing industry in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. The study employed the philosophical approach of pragmatism to guide the whole research. The researcher adopted a multi-stage sampling technique supported by the census technique to pick participants from the population. Closed and open-ended questionnaires were used to collect data from qualified pharmacists who are working in both the manufacturing and retailing industry in Bulawayo. Statistical Package for Social Sciences v23 (Process v3.5 by Andrew F. Hayes) was used to test the hypothesized relationship among variables. Qualitative data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The results suggest that black tax directly influence employee engagement in the presence of a mediator (idiocentrism-allocentrism). Furthermore, the results indicate that the indirect coefficient was partially significant, which means that idiocentrism-allocentrism has a partial influence on employee engagement. The researchers recommend that management should ensure that employees are motivated all the time. They should implement an open-door policy so that employees can share their issues that affect their engagement level at work
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