Towards a trade policy for development : the political economy of South Africa's external trade, 1994-2014

Over the past 20 years of democracy, there has been a strategic reorientation of South Africa's trade policy. In the early 1990s, the postapartheid state undertook extensive tariff reform, driven by its multilateral and regional commitments, as well as unilateral liberalisation consistent with the austere macro-economic agenda of the time. By the second decade of democracy, an institutionalised industrial policy designed to strengthen and diversify South Africa's productive capabilities had come to determine and shape South Africa's external trade agenda and negotiations. This more strategic trade policy orientation has required the preservation and expansion of policy space in bilateral, regional and multilateral agreements, and more novel approaches to South-South economic cooperation. There was also a fundamental shift in thinking on regional integration away from a conventional market-led model premised on the European Union's experience, to a 'developmental integration' approach that concurrently prioritises market integration, infrastructure development and structural economic transformation This article critically reviews how South Africa's trade policy and negotiating agenda have been recalibrated as instruments of industrial policy over the two post-apartheid decades. The article concludes with some observations about the future direction of South Africa's trade agenda during the third decade of democracy.http://www.up.ac.za/en/political-sciences/article/19718/strategic-review-for-southern-africa/am201

Africa and the rising powers : bargaining for the ‘marginalized many’

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1468-2346hj2014gv201

The effectiveness of web-based interventions designed to decrease alcohol consumption – a systematic review

OBJECTIVE To review the published literature on the effectiveness of web-based interventions designed to decrease consumption of alcohol and/or prevent alcohol abuse. METHOD Relevant articles published up to, and including, May 2006 were identified through electronic searches of Medline, PsycInfo, Embase, Cochrane Library, ASSIA, Web of Science and Science Direct. Reference lists of all articles identified for inclusion were checked for articles of relevance. An article was included if its stated or implied purpose was to evaluate a web-based intervention designed to decrease consumption of alcohol and/or to prevent alcohol abuse. Studies were reliably selected and quality-assessed, and data were independently extracted and interpreted by two authors. RESULTS Initial searches identified 191 articles of which 10 were eligible for inclusion. Of these, five provided a process evaluation only, with the remaining five providing some pre-to post-intervention measure of effectiveness. In general the percentage quality criteria met was relatively low and only one of the 10 articles selected was a randomized control trial. CONCLUSION The current review provides inconsistent evidence on the effectiveness of eIectronic screening and brief intervention (eSBI) for alcohol use. Process research suggests that web-based interventions are generally well received. However further controlled trials are needed to fully investigate their efficacy, to determine which elements are keys to outcome and to understand if different elements are required in order to engage low- and high-risk drinkers

Reducing Legionella Colonization of Water Systems with Monochloramine

Monochloramine reduced colonization in building hot water systems

A multi-targeted approach to suppress tumor-promoting inflammation

Cancers harbor significant genetic heterogeneity and patterns of relapse following many therapies are due to evolved resistance to treatment. While efforts have been made to combine targeted therapies, significant levels of toxicity have stymied efforts to effectively treat cancer with multi-drug combinations using currently approved therapeutics. We discuss the relationship between tumor-promoting inflammation and cancer as part of a larger effort to develop a broad-spectrum therapeutic approach aimed at a wide range of targets to address this heterogeneity. Specifically, macrophage migration inhibitory factor, cyclooxygenase-2, transcription factor nuclear factor-κB, tumor necrosis factor alpha, inducible nitric oxide synthase, protein kinase B, and CXC chemokines are reviewed as important antiinflammatory targets while curcumin, resveratrol, epigallocatechin gallate, genistein, lycopene, and anthocyanins are reviewed as low-cost, low toxicity means by which these targets might all be reached simultaneously. Future translational work will need to assess the resulting synergies of rationally designed antiinflammatory mixtures (employing low-toxicity constituents), and then combine this with similar approaches targeting the most important pathways across the range of cancer hallmark phenotypes

Education for citizenship in South Australian public schools: a pilot study of senior leader and teacher perceptions

Preparing students for informed and active citizenship is a core goal of education and schooling in Australia. The ways schools educate and prepare young Australians for citizenship involves a range of processes and initiatives central to the work of schools, including school ethos, mission, extra-curricular activities and community-based participation. With regard to the formal curriculum, the recent introduction and implementation of the first ever Federal Australian curriculum includes provision for a new subject – Civics and Citizenship. Research evidence from other nations suggests that schools understand, approach and enact education for citizenship in a multitude of ways, yet how Australian schools construct this aspect of their work is currently under-researched. In this context, and drawing on data from interviews with school leaders and teachers of year six-eight (11-14 year olds) students in a small sample of South Australian primary and secondary schools, we explore perceptions and current approaches to education for citizenship. Our findings suggest (i) that while school leaders and teachers value education for citizenship, they do so for different reasons; (ii) that schools place values as central to education for citizenship; and, (iii) that community involvement is typically understood as occurring within rather than beyond the school

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Trade and climate change : constructing a multilateral agenda for Africa

Climate and trade issues lie at the intersection of two of the world's most contested multilateral negotiations--the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the World Trade Organisation's Doha Round. With their complex inter-linkages, there is still no clarity about the rules governing trade and climate change. Within the context of shifting global competitiveness from North to South and West to East, African countries are concerned about the rise of 'green protectionism' and the possibility of unilateral punitive trade measures to support domestic climate action in Europe. This article explores some of these concerns by focusing on the potential trade impact of EU climate policies on Africa, specifically border tax adjustments on commodity exports and carbon standards and labelling for consumer goods. The article provides some ideas on how Europe and Africa can cooperate in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to build better understanding of the adverse impact of these climate measures on Africa's growth and development prospects.http://web.up.ac.za/default.asp?ipkCategoryID=586