Peaceful giant ground beetles: The genus Tefflus Latreille (Coleoptera: Carabidae) in the Republic of South Africa

Two species of the genus Tefflus Latreille (Coleoptera: Carabidae), commonly known as “peaceful giant ground beetles,” are recorded from the Republic of South Africa: T. carinatus carinatus Klug and T. meyerlei delagorguei Guérin-Méneville. Distribution records from the Republic of South Africa are summarized and mapped for both species. Tefflus c. carinatus has been collected in KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga Provinces, while T. m. delagorguei has been recorded from Free State, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, and Mpumalanga Provinces. Adults of both species are illustrated. Seasonal and temporal activity patterns and defensive and foraging behaviors are characterized for T. m. delagorguei based on recent field studies in the Kruger National Park, Republic of South Africa

The impact of prison circumstances in perpetuating re-offending at Glencoe correctional centre

The issue of overcrowding has become one of the major concerns within the Department of Correctional Services in S.A. According to Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons quoted in Annual Report (2002/2003:4) in 2002 the South African offender population has been overpopulated by 72 000. The 236 correctional centres designed to accommodate 100 668 offenders were accommodating 172 071. The focus of this study is to explore the impact of prison circumstances in perpetuating recidivism. Glencoe correctional center is identified as the target centre. The total offender population has been estimated at 950 with 650 offenders being categorised as recidivists. The conclusions were drawn and presented as follows: • Peers have been found to be exercising a crucial role in influencing the behaviour of the offenders. The impact of this influence has been found to be posing a challenge on both individual and family values. • The impact of prison life manifested through processes like the use of drugs, involvement in gangs and identification with the prison life. • The prison system has not been able to convince the iii offenders in terms of fighting crime. Lack of proper security measures, lack of skills training interventions, unemployability of the offender and lack of job opportunities have been identified as challenges that disqualify the prison system as an effective crime prevention institution. • Lack of personnel and lack of policy implementation knowledge are some of the challenges associated with the difficulty in evaluating the appropriateness of rehabilitation programmes. • Sustaining the prison subculture manifested through processes such as identification with the negative role models, purposeful alienation from the community and condoning of violence. • The family system has been identified as another institution that contributes to the development of the prison subculture. • Family-related aspects were identified by the respondents as an area affected by imprisonment. • As indicated in by the theory of Kohlberg in Glick iv (1995:110), high levels of moral development would serve to keep offenders from committing further crime. • To promote offender’s readiness to face the societal life from a positive point of view, there is a need for assistance in drafting individual plans and strategies. • The expectations of the respondents on effective offender reintegration were shared and the relevant role-players were identified. Having drawn the conclusions, the following recommendations were made: • The research focused on sociologically related factors and as a result the need for further research, especially on biologically related factors, emerged. • The scope of the research widened to such an extent that the contributory factors of recidivism were covered at a more general level. Further research to cover the individual factors in more depth is recommended. • There is a need for structures to exercise advocacy intervention on behalf of the offenders in such a manner that they would have a say in issues affecting them. v • Attendance of rehabilitation programmes and demonstration of behavioural change should be awarded in order to serve as a motivation for positive behaviour change. • The need for equipping prison officials to be effective rehabilitators has been identified as a challenge to the prison system. • Integrated functioning of different role-players would serve to promote effective offender reintegration. • The offender needs to be assisted to envision and plan for the future.Mrs. H.F. Elli

Labour Problems in Rhodesia: A Trade Union Viewpoint

A symposium paper on the problems of black trade unionist activism in the then Rhodesia.. Paper originally presented at Symposium on: Current Economic Problems in Rhodesia, 2nd November 1972.I have been invited to address this symposium on labour problems in Rhodesia from the point of view of an African trade unionist, but although my primary concern is with the well-being of the members of our trade unions, I find it impossible to divorce the problems that trade union members face from those faced by the whole of Rhodesia’s African population. Labour problems originate out of the entire economic structure of the country, and cannot be adequately discussed on a sectional or piecemeal level. My paper will therefore attempt to survey the problems insofar as they affect all African workers in the country, and suggest ways and means by which we can mount a comprehensive offensive against these serious and urgent problems

Remote sensing-based fire frequency mapping in a savannah rangeland

Burnt area mapping and fire frequency analysis were carried out in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. Hwange National Park typifies a savannah ecosystem which is semi-arid and fire-prone. This paper presents a geospatial analysis to quantify the spatial distribution and fire frequency from 2000 to 2006. Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) images from 2000 to 2006 were obtained and classified for burnt area mapping. Linear pixel unmixing was used for image classification and subsequent mapping of burnt areas. The results showed that it was feasible to have discrimination of burnt areas and ‘un-burnt’ areas as well as generating a six year fire frequency map of the study area. Accuracy assessment of the classified images was carried out using field obtained information on fire occurrence to validate the classification results. An error matrix quantified accuracy of classified maps through producer's accuracy, user's accuracy and overall accuracy. High overall accuracy rates of appromately 96%, in turne, justify use of linear pixel unmixing in identifying and mapping burnt areas. Thus pixel unmixing offers a viable mapping tool for fire monitoring and management in protected areas

Traffic Control Recognition with AN Attention Mechanism Using Speed-Profile and Satellite Imagery Data

Traffic regulators at intersections act as an essential factor that influences traffic flow and, subsequently, the route choices of commuters. A digital map that provides up-to-date traffic control information is beneficial not only for facilitating the commuters’ trips, but also for energy-saving and environmental protection. In this paper, instead of using expensive surveying methods, we propose an automatic way based on a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) to recognize traffic regulators, i. e., arm rules at intersections, by leveraging the GPS data collected from vehicles and the satellite imagery retrieved from digital maps, i. e., Google Maps. We apply a Long Short-Term Memory to extract the motion dynamics over a GPS sequence traversed through the intersection. Simultaneously, we build a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract the grid-based local imagery information associated with each step of the GPS positions. Moreover, a self-attention mechanism is adopted to extract the spatial and temporal features over both the GPS and grid sequences. The extracted temporal and spatial features are then combined for detecting the traffic arm rules. To analyze the performance of our method, we tested it on a GPS dataset collected by driving vehicles in Hannover, a medium-sized German city. Compared to a Random Forest model and an Encoder-Decoder model, our proposed model achieved better results with both accuracy and F1-score of 0.90 for the three-class (arm rules of uncontrolled, traffic light, and priority sign) task. We also carried out ablation studies to further investigate the effectiveness of the GPS input branch, the image input branch, and the self-attention mechanism in our model

Improving 3d pedestrian detection for wearable sensor data with 2d human pose

Collisions and safety are important concepts when dealing with urban designs like shared spaces. As pedestrians (especially the elderly and disabled people) are more vulnerable to accidents, realising an intelligent mobility aid to avoid collisions is a direction of research that could improve safety using a wearable device. Also, with the improvements in technologies for visualisation and their capabilities to render 3D virtual content, AR devices could be used to realise virtual infrastructure and virtual traffic systems. Such devices (e.g., Hololens) scan the environment using stereo and ToF (Time-of-Flight) sensors, which in principle can be used to detect surrounding objects, including dynamic agents such as pedestrians. This can be used as basis to predict collisions. To envision an AR device as a safety aid and demonstrate its 3D object detection capability (in particular: pedestrian detection), we propose an improvement to the 3D object detection framework Frustum Pointnet with human pose and apply it on the data from an AR device. Using the data from such a device in an indoor setting, we conducted a comparative study to investigate how high level 2D human pose features in our approach could help to improve the detection performance of orientated 3D pedestrian instances over Frustum Pointnet

Are HIV-positive presumptive tuberculosis patients without tuberculosis getting the care they need in Zimbabwe?

SETTING: Emakhandeni Clinic provides decentralised and integrated tuberculosis (TB) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) care in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. OBJECTIVES: To compare HIV care for presumptive TB patients with and without TB registered in 2013. DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study using routine programme data. RESULTS: Of 422 registered presumptive TB patients, 26% were already known to be HIV-positive. Among the remaining 315 patients, 255 (81%) were tested for HIV, of whom 190 (75%) tested HIV-positive. Of these, 26% were diagnosed with TB and 71% without TB (3% had no TB result recorded). For the 134 patients without TB, antiretroviral treatment (ART) eligibility data were recorded for 42 (31%); 95% of these were ART eligible. Initiation of cotrimoxazole preventive therapy (CPT) and ART was recorded for respectively 88% and 90% of HIV-positive patients with TB compared with respectively 40% and 38% of HIV-positive patients without TB (P < 0.001). CONCLUSION: Presumptive TB patients without TB had a high HIV positivity rate and, for those with available data, most were ART eligible. Unlike HIV-positive patients diagnosed with TB, CPT and ART uptake for these patients was poor. A 'test and treat' approach and better service linkages could be life-saving for these patients, especially in southern Africa, where there are high burdens of HIV and TB

Kinetic study on the removal of iron from gold mine tailings by citric acid

Abstract: The Gold mining generates large volumes of tailings, with consequent disposal and environmental problems. Iron tends to react with sulphur to form pyrite and pyrrhotite which then react with rain water forming acid rain. The study focuses on the removal of iron (Fe) from Gold Mine tailings; Fe was leached using citric acid as a leaching reagent. Three parameters which have an effect on the removal of Fe from the gold mine tailings, namely; temperature (25 ºC and 50 ºC), reagent concentration (0.25 M, 0.5 M, 0.75 M and 1 M) and solid loading ratio (20 %, 30 % and 40 %) were investigated. It was found that the recovery of Fe from gold mine tailings increased with increasing temperature and reagent concentration, but decreased with increasing solid loading ratio. The optimum conditions for the recovery of Fe from gold mine tailings was found to be at a temperature of 50 ºC, reagent concentration of 1 M and solid loading of 20 %. Three linear kinetic models were investigated and Prout- Tompkins kinetic model was the best fit yielding linear graphs with the highest R2 values

Contribution of Baobab Production Activities to Household Livelihoods.

IES Working paper.Baobab production activities play a crucial role in contributing to the livelihoods of rural households. In the face of increasing village populations, commercial use of baobab has been steadily increasing to the point where currently, 43% of sampled households participate in baobab production activities. Commercial use of baobab products is especially important to the poorer households arid women. In terms of contributing to household livelihoods, baobab activities are ranked second only to some kinds of agricultural production. Numerical estimates of contribution to livelihoods bear out this result with cash income of approximately Z$5000 per annum received for each participating person, well above the official minimum wage. Opportunity costs of labour make up about four-fifths of this value, leaving one-fifth of the cash income accruing as economic rent. The rent available to households seems to vary widely, as there are households that are well located close to baobab trees, which greatly reduces production costs and increases economic rents captured. The importance of baobabs to livelihoods, combined with the potential ecological importance of these trees in contributing to biodiversity, makes the sustainability of this resource vital. Accordingly, if current use rates are not sustainable (see Romero et al., (in prep) there is scope for investigations into policies and management options that could foster sustainable use