South African small business growth through interfirm linkages

Economic stagnation in sub-Saharan Africa since 1970 is well documented. While the causes are varied, the paradigm of nationalistic state-led economic development has changed. Economic development occurs in a global marketplace. Manufacturing has shifted from developed to less developed countries, an opportunity that was seized in Asia and Latin America. South Africa’s labour, unskilled and costly by world standards, is at a disadvantage as an agile and competitive world market seeks skilled labour at the lowest cost. South Africa’s Gear economic policy suggests that 300 000 new jobs need to be created annually until 2004 in order to reduce unemployment. Small, medium and microenterprise growth is central to meeting this target. Numerous government structures to assist small enterprises have been created. Few, however, assist small business with the demands of the marketplace. Most focus on generic skills training and questionable small business finance. This thesis suggests that interfirm linkages between large and small enterprises is one strategy that can assist the growth of small business, create employment and, increase labour skills. International experience shows that generic training is less effective in promoting small business than linking business training to actual market-demands. Interfirm linkages, most often through subcontracting, is a strategy used successfully in Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil. Such linkages are usually government supported and provide incentives for both large and small businesses to work together productively. Three South African interfirm linkage case studies are critiqued. Case study findings indicate that interfirm linkages expose emerging businesses to market conditions, and can provide access to process technology training, low cost raw materials, creative finance, and new markets. Small business ‘learns by doing’ and also ‘learns while earning’. The state has a role in the development of a vibrant small, medium and microenterprise sector in South Africa. Current support strategies are largely unrelated to market conditions. Interfirm linkages are an approach that applies market forces in the development of small business. Government policy would be wisely directed to support such business interactions

Evaluation of Stormwater Filters at Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky, 2011-12

Studies in the 1970s found potentially toxic levels of metals entering Mammoth Cave’s underground streams through storm recharge. Additional studies confirmed that stormwater from parking lots and buildings fl owed rapidly into critical cave habitats. The Park’s management responded to these findings by installing storm runoff filter systems on the most heavily used parking lots in 2001. The Park entered an agreement (2010-12) with Tennessee State University, the USGS, and WKU-Mammoth Cave International Center for Science and Learning to evaluate the filter systems to determine if they were removing hazardous compounds from stormwater runoff . The objective of this study was to evaluate stormwater filters before and after replacing 2-year-old ZPG cartridge filters. The study focused on the first-flush runoff waters during the storms. The filters were not effective at removing quaternary ammonia compounds (QACs), and moderately eff ective at removing zinc and copper. The filters were very effective at removing diesel-range aromatic ring compounds (fuels). Regression analyses were used to evaluate trends between parking lot size and filter efficiency. The efficiency of the filters to remove fuels improved with basin size. The efficiency to remove QACs decreased with basin size. Basin size did not appear to have any correlation to zinc or copper removal efficiency. Human activity, such as construction, probably played a role in the storm-water chemistry and the efficacy of the filters to remove certain contaminants

Antibiotic Resistance and Substrate Utilization by Bacteria Affi liated with Cave Streams at Diff erent Levels of Mammoth Cave

Located in south-central Kentucky, Mammoth Cave is one of the most unique National Parks in the United States. The surface landscape includes complex relationships between the flora and fauna along with human influences. However, the primary ecological focus is concealed below ground. Over four-hundred miles of cave passages, created by fl owing groundwater over millions of years, host a variety of macro and micro organisms. The Green River has cut into the limestone formation over geologic time, creating a complex network of passages that are stacked, one below the other, with the newer levels of cave lying near the bottom. Palmer (2007, 1987) describes 4 main levels of cave passages in the Mammoth Cave system. A detailed discussion of the geology and conditions that formed the cave levels can be found in several reports (Palmer, 1987; Palmer 1989; White and White, 1989; Granger, et al, 2001). Precipitation continues to provide water that traverses from the surface, through the unsaturated vadose levels of the cave, and down to the water table in the lower level. Water enters the cave system through direct recharge at sinkholes and through diff use percolation. The rapid infiltration of stormwater often exceeds the carrying capacity of the upper cave passages and excess water is pushed into void pore-spaces near the top of bedrock. This stored water is slowly released and provides base-fl ow to cave streams that replenish the pools and streams in the lowest level of the cave (Ryan and Meimen, 1996). These perennial cave streams carry many of the organic compounds that provide energy to the cave ecosystem (Barr, 1976)

Visual Advantage in Deaf Adults Linked to Retinal Changes

The altered sensory experience of profound early onset deafness provokes sometimes large scale neural reorganisations. In particular, auditory-visual cross-modal plasticity occurs, wherein redundant auditory cortex becomes recruited to vision. However, the effect of human deafness on neural structures involved in visual processing prior to the visual cortex has never been investigated, either in humans or animals. We investigated neural changes at the retina and optic nerve head in profoundly deaf (N = 14) and hearing (N = 15) adults using Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), an in-vivo light interference method of quantifying retinal micro-structure. We compared retinal changes with behavioural results from the same deaf and hearing adults, measuring sensitivity in the peripheral visual field using Goldmann perimetry. Deaf adults had significantly larger neural rim areas, within the optic nerve head in comparison to hearing controls suggesting greater retinal ganglion cell number. Deaf adults also demonstrated significantly larger visual field areas (indicating greater peripheral sensitivity) than controls. Furthermore, neural rim area was significantly correlated with visual field area in both deaf and hearing adults. Deaf adults also showed a significantly different pattern of retinal nerve fibre layer (RNFL) distribution compared to controls. Significant correlations between the depth of the RNFL at the inferior-nasal peripapillary retina and the corresponding far temporal and superior temporal visual field areas (sensitivity) were found. Our results show that cross-modal plasticity after early onset deafness may not be limited to the sensory cortices, noting specific retinal adaptations in early onset deaf adults which are significantly correlated with peripheral vision sensitivity

Community-University Partnerships: Achieving continuity in the face of change

A challenge that community-university partnerships everywhere will face is how to maintain continuity in the face of change. The problems besetting communities continually shift and the goals of the university partners often fluctuate. This article describes a decade-long strategy one university has successfully used to address this problem. Over the past ten years, a community-university partnership at the University of Massachusetts Lowell has used summer content funding to respond creativity to shifting priorities. Each summer a research-action project is developed that targets a different content issue that has emerged with unexpected urgency. Teams of graduate students and high school students are charged with investigating this issue under the auspices of the partnership. These highly varied topics have included immigrant businesses, youth asset mapping, women owned businesses, the housing crisis, social program cutbacks, sustainability, and economic development and the arts. Despite their obvious differences, these topics share underlying features that further partnership commitment and continuity. Each has an urgency: the information is needed quickly, often because some immediate policy change is under consideration. Each topic has the advantage of drawing on multiple domains: the topics are inherently interdisciplinary and because they do not “belong” to any single field, they lend themselves to disciplines pooling their efforts to achieve greater understanding. Each also has high visibility: their salience has meant that people were often willing to devote scarce resources to the issues and also that media attention could easily be gained to highlight the advantages of students, partners, and the university working together. And the topics themselves are generative: they have the potential to contribute in many different ways to teaching, research, and outreach. This paper ends with a broader consideration of how partnerships can implement this model for establishing continuity in the face of rapidly shifting priorities and needs