Building Bridges: Linking universities with the manufacturing industry

This article explores ideas for linking university research entities with small- and medium-sized manufacturing industries. In an environment such as the Western Cape, South Africa, where well established teaching and research activities in science and engineering exist at several universities and research institutions, it is astonishing to realize that the local manufacturing industry struggles to obtain assistance with research and development in order to remain competitive locally and globally. Some of the reasons for this situation are outlined and solutions are proposed. In particular, the role of a gateway organization which aims to build networks between universities, research institutions and industry is described

A history of garment and tailoring workers in Cape Town, 1900-1939.

Bibliography: leaves 411-427.The large scale production of clothing started relatively late in South Africa because of the inability of local manufacturers to compete with cheap imports. The industry's tendency to draw the most exploitable workers into a system of "sweated labour" emerged clearly during World War I, when military uniforms were produced in Cape Town under appalling conditions. But the clothing industry did not become firmly established until after 1925 when a protective tariff was imposed on clothing imports. Industrial laws then assisted to ensure that South African clothing production was based on factories not outwork and that the extremes of sweating were prevented from establishing a hold on the trade. From 1925 to 1939 the Cape Town clothing industry grew impressively. The foundations were laid for the rapid expansion of the industry after 1939 and for the emergence of the clothing industry as the leading employer of labour in Cape Town and of the Western Cape as the leading centre of clothing manufacturing in South Africa. Garment workers in Cape Town have a history starkly different from that of garment workers in the Transvaal. While the latter were strongly organized into a successful, militant union (under the leadership of E.S. Sachs) and were a leading force in economic and political battles in the Transvaal, the former were press-ganged into membership of an employer-sympathetic union created by Robert Stuart of the Cape Federation of Labour Unions. While the Garment Workers' Union of the Cape Peninsula maintained a strict non-racialism at all times, the Transvaal union excluded African workers and organized coloured workers into a separate branch. While very few Cape garment workers were ever involved in strikes and the Cape Union never once called a strike, the Transvaal garment workers participated in two union-called general strikes and in over one hundred more limited strike actions. Cape garment workers' wages were between ten and forty per cent below those in the Transvaal. The distinctiveness of the Cape garment workers' history derives from the peculiarities of the class struggle in Cape Town. The slow growth of the city over 250 years; its economic base in commerce rather than in the exploitation of natural resources; the relative backwardness of Cape Town capitalism - with a dominant merchant class challenging the development of precarious manufacturing enterprises which operated in a highly competitive environment and remained almost entirely confined to consumer goods production; and the absence of primary racial division in the working class, all contributed to a process of class struggle that was more muted than that in the North. Cape Town was infertile ground for the growth of an organized working class movement. Apart from sporadic but intense worker action briefly after World War I, few workers were drawn into either trade union or political organization. On the other hand, Cape manufacturers, despite their differences, were united in the Cape Chamber of Industries (by W.J. Laite) to promote protection for their industries and to build a cornmon front to resist labour initiatives and government interference

The Power of Personal Experiences : Post-Publication Experiences of Researchers Using Autobiographical Data

Although much has been written about the challenging writing process associated with autobiographical research, little is known about the post-publications consequences of using personal experience as a primary source of data. This psychology honour’s project used an online survey to investigate the question: What are researchers’ experiences and perspectives after publishing research that used autobiographical materials as the primary source of data? The participants were 13 individuals who had published at least two autobiographical peer-reviewed articles and the method was qualitative description using content analysis. Primarily positive findings were identified (e.g., career advancement, professional and personal validation, perceived strengthened relationships with others) although some participants continued to wonder about decisions related to their autobiographical publications (e.g., privacy of third parties, what content to include or exclude) and about the reactions of others (e.g., readers, loved ones). Findings underscore how using personal experience as data blurs the borders of scholarship and personal growth, and directly impacts audiences. Implications include tips for those interesting in doing autobiographical research

Early detection of drought stress in Arabidopsis thaliana utilsing a portable hyperspectral imaging setup

Close-range hyperspectral imaging (HSI) of plants is now a potential tool for non-destructive extraction of plant functional traits. A major motivation is the plant phenotyping related applications where different plant genotypes are explored for different environmental conditions. HSI of Arabidopsis thaliana is of particular importance as it is a model organism in plant biology. In the present work, a portable HSI setup has been used for the monitoring of a set of 6 Arabidopsis thaliana plants. The plants were monitored under controlled watering conditions where 3 plants were watered as normal and the other 3 plants were given 50% of the normal volume of water. The images were pre-processed utilising the standard normal variate (SNV) and changes over time were evaluated using unsupervised clustering over the time series. The results showed an early detection of stress from day 4 onwards compared to the commonly used normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), which provided detection from day 9

Homogenising and segmenting hyperspectral images of plants and testing chemicals in a high-throughput plant phenotyping setup

Use of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) for automated characterisation of plants in a high-throughput plant phenotyping setup (HTPPS) is a challenging task. A challenge arises when the same plant is being monitored automatically during the experiment as it might not be in the same orientation as it was imaged last time. Such changes in orientation result in variations in illumination, which affects the signals recorded by the HSI setup. In addition, there are challenges with the use of threshold-based segmentation approaches such as normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) for distinguishing between old and dead leaves, which might be observed in the later stages of experiments, from the soil background. Therefore, the potential of spectral normalisation for homogenising HS images and the use of supervised spectral set for plant segmentation is presented. Further, the effects of testing chemicals on plants were visualised using PCA of the HS images