An Employer's Recourse to Lock-Out and Replacement Labour: An Evaluation of Recent Case Law

South African labour affairs are in a volatile state. Conflicting rights and interests as well as the balancing of these rights and interests are contributing to this state of affairs. In recent years, the contentious issues of workers' right to use their economic power to put pressure on employers and employers' recourse to lock-out and replacement labour have come under the spotlight again. Prolonged, violent and unprotected strikes have raised the question whether our industrial relations framework should be revisited, and have complicated matters even further. The question whether employers may use replacement labour and have recourse to lock-outs when an impasse exists during wage negotiations is considered in the context of the adversarial collective bargaining framework in South Africa

Linguistics and HLT for Countries with Minimal ICT Infrastructure

This paper presents a visionary Human Language Technologies (HLT) model aimed at enabling the Basotho, who are computer illiterate, and thus unable to access internet but have access to either a landline handset or a cellular phone, to browse and access electronic government information service in their language, Sesotho. This requires various speech-based HLT components such as pronunciation modelling, speech recognition, text-to-speech (TTS) and language identification. For purposes of this presentation, we concentrate on speech recognition and TTS. The paper also provides a preliminary experimental setup necessary for the proposed model. The proposed model is specifically intended to empower the illiterate and the underprivileged members of the society

First report of the isolation of entomopathogenic nematode Steinernema australe (Rhabditida: Steinernematidae) from South Africa

A survey was conducted in Walkerville, south of Johannesburg (Gauteng, South Africa) between 2012 and 2016 to ascertain the diversity of entomopathogenic nematodes in the area. Entomopathogenic nematodes are soil-dwelling microscopic worms with the ability to infect and kill insects, and thus serve as eco-friendly control agents for problem insects in agriculture. Steinernematids were recovered in 1 out of 80 soil samples from uncultivated grassland; soil was characterised as loamy. The entomopathogenic nematodes were identified using molecular and morphological techniques. The isolate was identified as Steinernema australe. This report is the first of Steinernema australe in South Africa. S. australe was first isolated worldwide from a soil sample obtained from the beach on Isla Magdalena – an island in the Pacific Ocean, 2 km from mainland Chile. Significance: Entomopathogenic nematodes are only parasitic to insects and are therefore important in agriculture as they can serve as eco-friendly biopesticides to control problem insects without effects on the environment, humans and other animals, unlike chemical pesticides. Open data set:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MH453881.

Genome sequencing and annotation of Serratia sp. strain TEL

We present the annotation of the draft genome sequence of Serratia sp. strain TEL (GenBank accession number KP711410). This organism was isolated from entomopathogenic nematode Oscheius sp. strain TEL (GenBank accession number KM492926) collected from grassland soil and has a genome size of 5,000,541 bp and 542 subsystems. The genome sequence can be accessed at DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the accession number LDEG00000000

Whole genome sequence of Oscheius sp. TEL-2014 entomopathogenic nematodes isolated from South Africa

We present the annotation of the draft genome sequence of Oscheius sp. TEL-2014 (Genbank accession number KM492926). This entomopathogenic nematode was isolated from grassland in Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve near Johannesburg in South Africa. Oscheius sp. Strain TEL has a genome size of 110,599,558 bp and a GC content of 42.24%. The genome sequence can be accessed at DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the accession number LNBV00000000. Keywords: Oscheius, Entomopathogenic nematodes, Whole-genome sequencing, Genome assembly, Genome annotatio

Taxation (Module A)

Exam paper for first semester Taxation (Module A