Legislative and other measures taken by government to realise the right of children to shelter

The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa , 1996 entrenches numerous socio-economic rights. One of these socio-economic rights is contained in section 26 that grants everyone the right to have access to adequate housing and section 28 that grants every child the additional right to basic shelter among others. This article aims to examine the legislative and other measures taken by the state to realise the right to shelter of children. Firstly, the legislative measures taken specifically for the realisation of children's right to basic shelter as envisaged by section 28(1)(c) will be discussed. Thereafter attention will be drawn to those measures taken to ensure the progressive realisation of section 26. Section 26 provides everyone, including children, the right of access to adequate housing. Therefore, every measure taken to realise section 26 is indirectly applicable to the realisation of section 28(1)(c) and children's right to basic shelter.The conclusion may be drawn that most of the discussed legislative and other measures are aimed at realising everyone's right of access to adequate housing, this includes children. However, most of these measures make little mention of the specific right of children to basic shelter. It is regarded as inclusive in the overall application of the legislation. Once again, it must be stressed that these legislative and other measures, in order to comply with the standard of reasonableness, must regard the interest of children to be paramount. If such legislation does not provide for the interest of children as a vulnerable group, it can be argued that the relevant legislative measure is not constitutionally valid.It is submitted that national government must recognise the importance of the role of local government, and local government should increasingly assume policy-making and implementation powers in their area. This will go a long way to building local capacity to function as effective development facilitators. As far as the resource problem is concerned, corruption in municipalities should be eradicated, while municipal capacity to manage and mobilise resources must be enhanced. The importance of co-operative government cannot be over emphasised. Without an effective integrated plan of action, which includes cooperation between all three spheres of government, as well as the participation of civil society, especially people who are directly affected by the implementation of socio-economic rights, realising the right of children to shelter will only exist on paper

Legislative and other measures taken by government to realise the right of children to shelter

The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa , 1996 entrenches numerous socioeconomic rights. One of these socio-economic rights is contained in section 26 that grants everyone the right to have access to adequate housing and section 28 that grants every child the additional right to basic shelter among others. This article aims to examine the legislative and other measures taken by the state to realise the right to shelter of children. Firstly, the legislative measures taken specifically for the realisation of children's right to basic shelter as envisaged by section 28(1)(c) will be discussed. Thereafter attention will be drawn to those measures taken to ensure the progressive realisation of section 26. Section 26 provides everyone, including children, the right of access to adequate housing. Therefore, every measure taken to realise section 26 is indirectly applicable to the realisation of section 28(1)(c) and children's right to basic shelter.  The conclusion may be drawn that most of the discussed legislative and other measures are aimed at realising everyone's right of access to adequate housing, this includes children. However, most of these measures make little mention of the specific right of children to basic shelter. It is regarded as inclusive in the overall application of the legislation. Once again, it must be stressed that these legislative and other measures, in order to comply with the standard of reasonableness, must regard the interest of children to be paramount. If such legislation does not provide for the interest of children as a vulnerable group, it can be argued that the relevant legislative measure is not constitutionally valid.  It is submitted that national government must recognise the importance of the role of local government, and local government should increasingly assume policy-making and implementation powers in their area. This will go a long way to building local capacity to function as effective development facilitators. As far as the resource problem is concerned, corruption in municipalities should be eradicated, while municipal capacity to manage and mobilise resources must be enhanced.   The importance of co-operative government cannot be over emphasised. Without an effective integrated plan of action, which includes cooperation between all three spheres of government, as well as the participation of civil society, especially people who are directly affected by the implementation of socio-economic rights, realising the right of children to shelter will only exist on paper.   &nbsp

The utilisation of the right of children to shelter to alleviate poverty in South Africa

Children being the most vulnerable members of society are the one's most affected by living in poverty. This unacceptable situation can inter alia be attributed to the disastrous effects of Apartheid. During this unfortunate period in our nation's history millions of people were unjustly evicted from their homes and forced to live in deplorable conditions. Moreover, many of these people were left homeless or without the necessary adequate shelter. Children who were born into these circumstances were denied basic resources such as proper shelter, food, water and health care services.  These unfortunate circumstances existed at the adoption of South Africa 's democratic Constitution. The preamble of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa , 1996 reaffirms government's commitment to heal the inequalities of the past and improve the quality of life of all citizens. The Constitution is based on certain fundamental values, most importantly, human dignity, freedom and equality. The fact that these values are denied to those people living without access to basic resources such as adequate housing/shelter, food, water or health care services cannot be dismissed. To facilitate South Africa 's development as a democratic state based on human dignity, freedom and equality, the problem of poverty must be addressed. The Constitutional Court , in Government of the Republic of South Africa and Others v Grootboom and Others 2000 11 BCLR 1169 (CC), has recently stated that the effective realisation of socio-economic rights is key to the advancement of a value based democratic South Africa .  Section 26 of the Constitution grants everyone the right to have access to adequate housing and section 28 that grants every child the additional right to basic shelter among others. By virtue of section 28(1)(b) the primary responsibility to provide children with the necessary adequate housing/shelter is vested in their parents, unless the parents are unable to fulfil their duty or the children are removed from their care. This does not in the least mean that the state has no responsibilities to children living with their parents. The state must still provide the framework in which parents can facilitate the realisation of their children's rights. The state can fulfil this obligation by taking reasonable legislative and other measures within its available resources to realise everyone's right of access to adequate housing progressively.  Therefore, it is submitted that the measures taken to realise section 26 also indirectly ensures the realisation of children's right to basic shelter (section 28(1)(c)).  It has been largely accepted by the courts and academics alike that all fundamental human rights are indivisible and interrelated. Clearly then, the state's obligations in terms of section 28(1)(c) cannot be properly interpreted without referring to the interpretation of those obligations conferred upon it by section 26(2) and the other socio-economic rights in the Constitution. Hence, section 28(1)(c) must be seen in the context of the Constitution as a whole. Put simply, the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures within its available resources to realise children's right to basic housing/shelter progressively.  This article will focus on the utilisation of the right to shelter of the child to alleviate poverty. Essential to this discussion is an effective understanding of the right to basic shelter as entrenched by section 28 of the Constitution in conjunction with the right of access to adequate housing conferred on everyone by virtue of section 26. This will be achieved by studying the general working of such rights including their limitations and enforcement.   &nbsp

What guidance are researchers given on how to present network meta-analyses to end-users such as policymakers and clinicians? A systematic review

© 2014 Sullivan et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Introduction: Network meta-analyses (NMAs) are complex methodological approaches that may be challenging for non-technical end-users, such as policymakers and clinicians, to understand. Consideration should be given to identifying optimal approaches to presenting NMAs that help clarify analyses. It is unclear what guidance researchers currently have on how to present and tailor NMAs to different end-users. Methods: A systematic review of NMA guidelines was conducted to identify guidance on how to present NMAs. Electronic databases and supplementary sources were searched for NMA guidelines. Presentation format details related to sample formats, target audiences, data sources, analysis methods and results were extracted and frequencies tabulated. Guideline quality was assessed following criteria developed for clinical practice guidelines. Results: Seven guidelines were included. Current guidelines focus on how to conduct NMAs but provide limited guidance to researchers on how to best present analyses to different end-users. None of the guidelines provided reporting templates. Few guidelines provided advice on tailoring presentations to different end-users, such as policymakers. Available guidance on presentation formats focused on evidence networks, characteristics of individual trials, comparisons between direct and indirect estimates and assumptions of heterogeneity and/or inconsistency. Some guidelines also provided examples of figures and tables that could be used to present information. Conclusions: Limited guidance exists for researchers on how best to present NMAs in an accessible format, especially for non-technical end-users such as policymakers and clinicians. NMA guidelines may require further integration with end-users' needs, when NMAs are used to support healthcare policy and practice decisions. Developing presentation formats that enhance understanding and accessibility of NMAs could also enhance the transparency and legitimacy of decisions informed by NMAs.The Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) Drug Safety and Effectiveness Network (Funding reference number – 116573)

Subitizing with Variational Autoencoders

Numerosity, the number of objects in a set, is a basic property of a given visual scene. Many animals develop the perceptual ability to subitize: the near-instantaneous identification of the numerosity in small sets of visual items. In computer vision, it has been shown that numerosity emerges as a statistical property in neural networks during unsupervised learning from simple synthetic images. In this work, we focus on more complex natural images using unsupervised hierarchical neural networks. Specifically, we show that variational autoencoders are able to spontaneously perform subitizing after training without supervision on a large amount images from the Salient Object Subitizing dataset. While our method is unable to outperform supervised convolutional networks for subitizing, we observe that the networks learn to encode numerosity as basic visual property. Moreover, we find that the learned representations are likely invariant to object area; an observation in alignment with studies on biological neural networks in cognitive neuroscience

VERTOS II: Percutaneous vertebroplasty versus conservative therapy in patients with painful osteoporotic vertebral compression fractures; rationale, objectives and design of a multicenter randomized controlled trial

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: The standard care in patients with a painful osteoporotic vertebral compression fracture (VCF) is conservative therapy. Percutaneous vertebroplasty (PV), a minimally invasive technique, is gaining popularity as a new treatment option. Many prospective and retrospective studies have reported on the effectiveness and safety of PV, but no large randomized controlled trial (RCT) has been published. OBJECTIVE: To estimate cost-effectiveness of PV compared to conservative therapy in terms of: pain reduction, quality of life, complications, secondary fractures and mortality. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The VERTOS II study is designed as a prospective, multicenter RCT. Patients with a painful VCF with bone edema on MR imaging, local back pain for 6 weeks or less, osteopenia and aged 50 years or older, after obtaining informed consent are included and randomized for PV or conservative therapy. In total 200 patients will be enrolled. Follow-up is at regular intervals during a 1-year period with standard questionnaires, addressing: clinical symptoms, pain medication, Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) score, quality of life and cost-effectiveness. Secondary fractures, necessary additional therapies and complications are recorded. CONCLUSION: The VERTOS II study is the first methodologically sound RCT designed to assess the cost-effectiveness of PV compared to conservative therapy in patients with an acute osteoporotic VCF. TRIAL REGISTRATION: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov, NCT00232466