Skills development and structural change: possibilities for and limitations of redressing structural racial inequalities in South Africa

Improving structural racial equality for historically-disadvantaged Black South Africans, including low-skilled and unemployed adults and youths, is a pertinent challenge for the South African government during the ongoing transition from apartheid capitalism to post-apartheid capitalism. Within the framework of the National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS), the introduction of ‘‘learnerships’’ and ‘‘learning programmes’’, which include structured learning programmes, learnerships, apprenticeships and skills programmes, has had some impact. But emerging theoretical perspectives assert that apartheid structural racial inequalities persist and that structural reform is imperative. Opposing positions translate into two perspectives on social transition: either capitalism can be de-racialised, or capitalism in South Africa should be dismantled in order to de-racialise it. After a review of relevant literature and governmental documents, the author identifies five structural and pedagogical barriers as likely causes for low completion rates of skills development courses and concludes that structural reform needs more favourable political and economic conditions in order to be successful.International Bibliography of Social Science

Adult education, globalisation and inequality in South Africa. Searching for new analytical frameworks

Researchers have reported recently that inequalities emerging under conditions of globalisation are creating barriers to participation in adult learning. According to some studies, South Africa has become the most unequal society in the world. Structural inequalities in South African present an opportunity to develop a socio-political perspective to explain how structural inequalities create structural institutional barriers which prohibit black people from participating in adult learning, and to analyse the extent to which these barriers have been addressed. The South African state faces the challenge of creating more fundamental change to address persisting inequalities and barriers to participation in adult learning

Articulations between global and local development agendas in South African adult education and training policies. Whither social transformation?

Convergences, tensions and contradictions between global and local development agendas in South African adult education and training policies undermine initiatives to redress the adult education and training inequalities which plague the lives of 13 million black adults

The role of intrinsic foot muscles in three running footwear conditions

Running has grown tremendously in popularity and so has running with minimalist shoes. Injuries such as plantar fasciitis (pain and inflammation of a thick band of tissue that runs across the bottom of the foot) are prevalent in runners despite efforts to design footwear to alleviate the impact of running and to reduce the number of injuries. In the past decade, minimalist running shoes have received considerable attention, causing debate amongst runners and scientists as to their utility in injury prevention. While running barefoot or in minimalist shoes reduces initial impact forces, the claim that they lower injury rates remains inconclusive. It is speculated that the intrinsic muscles of the foot have an increased workload in minimalist running due to the forefoot strike that usually accompanies the use of minimalist rather than traditional shoes. These muscles may be important in supporting the bony and soft tissue structures of the foot and may help prevent inflammatory conditions such as plantar fasciitis. It is the aim of this study to design an experiment to determine how minimalist runners, in contrast to traditional and barefoot runners, use mechanisms (e.g. foot kinematics and intrinsic muscles) that influence load on the plantar fascia and therefore the acquisition or prevention of plantar fasciitis. The experiment involves participants running on a treadmill for five minute intervals barefoot and wearing traditional and minimalist running shoes. Participants were equipped with electromyography (EMG) electrodes to measure muscle activity and pressure mapping insoles to measure the force exerted over the contact area. A motion camera system was used to capture foot and ankle kinematic data. Analysis of the results were used to suggest the changes taking place in each type of footwear

Confirming the Effectiveness of the Requirements Generation Model

Product quality is directly related to how well that product meets the customer’s needs and intents. It is paramount, therefore, to capture customer requirements correctly and succinctly. Unfortunately, most development models tend to avoid, or only vaguely define the process by which requirements are generated. Other models rely on formalistic characterizations that require specialized training to understand. To address such drawbacks we introduce the Requirements Generation Model (RGM) that (a) decomposes the conventional “requirements analysis” phase into sub-phases which focus and refine requirements generation activities, (b) constrains and structures those activities, and (c) incorporates a monitoring methodology to assist in detecting and resolving deviations from process activities defined by the RGM. The results of an industry-based study are also presented and substantiate the effectiveness of the RGM in producing a better set of requirements

Detecting the Presence of Vehicles and Equipment in SAR Imagery Using Image Texture Features

In this work, we present a methodology for monitoring man-made, construction-like activities in low-resolution SAR imagery. Our source of data is the European Space Agency Sentinel-l satellite which provides global coverage at a 12-day revisit rate. Despite limitations in resolution, our methodology enables us to monitor activity levels (i.e. presence of vehicles, equipment) of a pre-defined location by analyzing the texture of detected SAR imagery. Using an exploratory dataset, we trained a support vector machine (SVM), a random binary forest, and a fully-connected neural network for classification. We use Haralick texture features in the VV and VH polarization channels as the input features to our classifiers. Each classifier showed promising results in being able to distinguish between two possible types of construction-site activity levels. This paper documents a case study that is centered around monitoring the construction process for oil and gas fracking wells.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, 2019 IEEE Applied Imagery Pattern Recognition Workshop (AIPR

Access and barriers to post-school education and success for disadvantaged black adults in South Africa: Rethinking equity and social justice

Widespread national higher education student protests against proposed fee increases and demands for free higher education in South Africa that arose towards the end of 2015 drew international attention to disadvantaged students’ socio-economic conditions and the barriers that deter access to higher education. Adults’ experiences of socio-economic barriers to accessing post-school education are similar. Drawing on theoretical frameworks and secondary data, I conceptualise a distributive justice perspective on access for disadvantaged black adults premised on the relationships between interrelated equality rights and socio-economic rights, principles of social and economic justice, and redistributive policies

SMEs entry mode decision making process: Rational or cybernetic?

Entry mode choice is a critical decision when a firm expends its business to foreign markets. By applying rational and cybernetic strategies to international strategic decision-making process, this paper investigates how small and medium sized firms (SMEs) decision makers decide their entry mode choices. By focusing on the entry decision making process, this research distinguishes the prior entry mode studies that emphasize the relationship between influencing factors and their impacts on entry mode choices. The results of this study show that SME managers normally adapt a combination of rational and cybernetic strategies in their international entry decision making process. This highlights that SMEs’ international entry decision making process is dynamic and complex

Информационные принципы и законы ноосферы

The principles and rules of Nonospaces is discussed within the framework mathematics and physics models. Nonospaces (Nonouniverses in strongly) model are finite topological spaces, which are the combinatorial structures that can serve as replacement, or approximations to, bounded regions within continuous spaces, such as combinatorial manifolds. In the spirit, the present paper studies the finite approximation of Nonouniverses. It has been proposed the mathematical model confirming completely with known experimental data of information properties and the gravity space construction.На основе математических и физических моделей рассматриваются принципы и правила существования ноопространства. Предлагается модель ноопространства (более строго — нооуниверсума), как конечных топологических пространств. Эти топологические пространства являются комбинаторными структурами, которые могут применяться для моделирования или аппроксимации ограниченных областей в непрерывных пространствах, таких, как комбинаторные многообразия. По нашему мнению, в этой статье исследуется конечная аппроксимация нооуниверсума. Предложенная математическая модель полностью подтверждается известными в настоящее время экспериментальными данными об информационных свойствах и строении гравитационных пространств