Die wortels en kenmerke van die tradisionele Afrikaanse lewenstyl

In ons tydsgewrig kan dit moontlik vreemd opklink om by 'n akademiese fees te begin met ’n verwysing na ’n Bybelwoord, maar hier, vandág, waar ons die honderdste bestaansja a r feestelik gedenk van 'n hoëronderwysinrigting wat onbevange in sy naamvaandel die stempel „Christelik” dra, sal dit niemand verbaas as ek my reiaas vanmore plaas onder ’n Bybelteks nie: Matt. 7:16 — ... ’n Mens pluk tog nie druiwe van dorings of vye van distels nie? Matt. 12:33 — Julie moet of die boom goed maak en sy vrugte goed, of julle moet die boom sleg maak en sy vrugte sleg; want aan sy vrugte word die boom geken

Life Time Achievement Award by the International Society of Anaesthetic Pharmacology (ISAP): Prof Johan Coetzee

No Abstrac

Tertiary environmental changes along the south-western African coast

Main articleEvidence for major vegetation and climatic changes during the Tertiary in the south-western Cape has been obtained from a number of sites. The palynomorph assemblages indicate in general an alternation of relatively cool temperate forests with two periods of subtropical - tropical palm-dominated vegetation from the Late Oligocene/ Early Miocene to the Pliocene when many of the taxa became extinct. Subsequently, strong development of macchia vegetation took place. These changes can be correlated with some palaeogeographic data and the major temperature changes of the Southern Ocean indicated in the palaeotemperature curve of Shackleton and Kennett (1975) which reflects the longterm progressive cooling of the earth since the Eocene/Oligocene boundary. The two subtropical- tropical periods can probably be related to the respective Early and Middle Miocene pan-African faunas of Arrisdrift and Luderitz and could coincide with the two warmest periods of the Miocene at 19 My and 14 My ago. The end of the Miocene witnessed the maximum build-up of the Antarctic icesheet and the substantial increase of the upwelling in the Benguela Current. This resulted in the initiation of the aridification of the present Namib desert, the extermination of the palm vegetation and the provincialism of the coastal molluscs. The important drop in temperature which reached its maximum about 3,5 My ago in the Pliocene could have exterminated the surviving elements of the last of the temperate Tertiary forests. The progressive aridity of the continent resulted in the spread of savannas, the evolution of the Alcelaphini and Antelopini and the change to regional vertebrate faunas. The increasing summer aridity in the southwestern Cape led to the strong development of the macchia vegetation.the Director of the Geological Surve

Promoting adherence to antiretroviral therapy: the experience from a primary care setting in Khayelitsha, South Africa.

OBJECTIVE: To describe the approach used to promote adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) and to present the outcomes in the first primary care public sector ART project in South Africa. DESIGN: The study is a prospective open cohort, including all adult patients naive to previous ART who received antiretroviral treatment in Khayelitsha, from May 2001 to the end of 2002. Patients were followed until their most recent visit before 31 July 2003. METHODS: Plasma viral load was determined at 3, 6, 12, 18 and 24 months after ART was initiated, and CD4 cell counts 6-monthly. Kaplan-Meier estimates were determined for the cumulative proportions of patients surviving, and patients with viral load suppression and viral rebound. RESULTS: A total of 287 patients were initiated on triple therapy. The probability of survival was 86.3% at 24 months. The median CD4 cell count gain was 288 cells/microliters at 24 months. Viral load was less than 400 copies/ml in 89.2, 84.2 and 69.7% of patients at 6, 12 and 24 months, respectively. The cumulative probability of viral rebound (two consecutive HIV-RNA measurements above 400 copies/ml) after achieving an HIV-RNA measurement below 400 copies/ml was 13.2% at 18 months. CONCLUSION: The study shows that, with a standard approach to patient preparation and strategies to enhance adherence, a cohort of patients on ART can be retained in a resource-limited setting in a developing country. A high proportion of patients achieved suppression of viral replication. The subsequent probability of viral rebound was low

Guest EditorialIs a rethink of our approach to hypertension necessary?

No Abstract.South African Psychiatry Review Vol. 11(4) 2005: 117-12

En route to a PhD: Mapping the journey through a sensemaking lens

Doing a PhD is for most scholars a demanding and emotionally strenuous experience, frequently resulting in potentially promising researchers succumbing to despair soon after embarking on the journey. However, those who complete their doctoral studies recollect subsequently both the frustrations and exciting experiences encountered. This article describes one researcher’s ruminations to make sense of the extensive systematic analysis utilised in a quest to obtain a PhD and to understand the academic essence of the scholarly contribution of her PhD. Using the seven fundamental properties of Weick’s (1995) sensemaking theory as the theoretical lens, the researcher reflects on the experiences and observations faced en route to completing her PhD. The seven properties form the backdrop of the researcher’s qualitative sensemaking methodology in which she formulated three key phases to illustrate her sensemaking road, namely Mapping the Journey, Travelling the Road, and Reaching the Destination. This article reinforces the extent of the challenges a PhD study holds and provides detail of and insight into the application of the sensemaking theory that may be useful to postgraduate researchers and supervisors involved in qualitative inquiry

Goal-based analytic composition for on- and off-line execution at scale

Crafting scalable analytics in order to extract actionable business intelligence is a challenging endeavour, requiring multiple layers of expertise and experience. Often, this expertise is irreconcilably split between an organisation’s engineers and subject matter or domain experts. Previous approaches to this problem have relied on technically adept users with tool-specific training. These approaches have generally not targeted the levels of performance and scalability required to harness the sheer volume and velocity of large-scale data analytics. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the automated planning of scalable analytics using a semantically rich type system, the use of which requires little programming expertise from the user. This approach is the first of its kind to permit domain experts with little or no technical expertise to assemble complex and scalable analytics, for execution both on- and offline, with no lower-level engineering support. We describe in detail (i) an abstract model of analytic assembly and execution; (ii) goal-based planning and (iii) code generation using this model for both on- and off-line analytics. Our implementation of this model, MENDELEEV, is used to (iv) demonstrate the applicability of our approach through a series of case studies, in which a single interface is used to create analytics that can be run in real-time (on-line) and batch (off-line) environments. We (v) analyse the performance of the planner, and (vi) show that the performance of MENDELEEV’s generated code is comparable with that of hand-written analytics

Goal-based composition of scalable hybrid analytics for heterogeneous architectures

Crafting scalable analytics in order to extract actionable business intelligence is a challenging endeavour, requiring multiple layers of expertise and experience. Often, this expertise is irreconcilably split between an organisation’s engineers and subject matter domain experts. Previous approaches to this problem have relied on technically adept users with tool-specific training. Such an approach has a number of challenges: Expertise — There are few data-analytic subject domain experts with in-depth technical knowledge of compute architectures; Performance — Analysts do not generally make full use of the performance and scalability capabilities of the underlying architectures; Heterogeneity — calculating the most performant and scalable mix of real-time (on-line) and batch (off-line) analytics in a problem domain is difficult; Tools — Supporting frameworks will often direct several tasks, including, composition, planning, code generation, validation, performance tuning and analysis, but do not typically provide end-to-end solutions embedding all of these activities. In this paper, we present a novel semi-automated approach to the composition, planning, code generation and performance tuning of scalable hybrid analytics, using a semantically rich type system which requires little programming expertise from the user. This approach is the first of its kind to permit domain experts with little or no technical expertise to assemble complex and scalable analytics, for hybrid on- and off-line analytic environments, with no additional requirement for low-level engineering support. This paper describes (i) an abstract model of analytic assembly and execution, (ii) goal-based planning and (iii) code generation for hybrid on- and off-line analytics. An implementation, through a system which we call Mendeleev, is used to (iv) demonstrate the applicability of this technique through a series of case studies, where a single interface is used to create analytics that can be run simultaneously over on- and off-line environments. Finally, we (v) analyse the performance of the planner, and (vi) show that the performance of Mendeleev’s generated code is comparable with that of hand-written analytics