Feasibility of a low-cost computing cluster in comparison to a high-performance computing cluster: A developing country perspective

In recent years, many organisations use high-performance computing clusters to, within a few days, perform complex simulations and calculations that otherwise would have taken years, even lifetimes, with a single computer. However, these high-performance computing clusters can be very expensive to purchase and maintain. For developing countries, these factors are viewed as barriers that will slow them in their quest to develop the necessary computing platforms to solve complex, real-world problems. From previous studies, it was unclear if an off-the-shelf personal computer (single computer) and low-cost computing clusters are feasible alternatives to high- performance computing clusters for smaller scientific problems. The aim of this study was to investigate this gap in literature since according to our knowledge, this kind of study has not been conducted before. The study made use of High Performance Linpack benchmark applications to collect quantitative data comparing the time-to-complete, operational costs and computational efficiency of a single computer, a low-cost computing cluster and a high-performance cluster. The benchmark used the HPL main algorithm and matrix sizes for the n x n dense linear system ranged from 10 000 to 60 0000. The costs of the low-cost computing cluster were kept to the minimum (USD4000.00) and the cluster was constructed using locally available computer hardware components. In this study for the cases we studied, we found that a low-cost computing cluster was a viable alternative to a high-performance cluster if the environment requires that costs be kept to a minimum. We concluded that for smaller scientific problems, both the single computer and low- cost computing cluster was better alternatives to a high-performance cluster. However, with large scientific problems and where performance and time are of more importance than costs, a high- performance cluster is still the best solution, offering the best efficiency for both theoretical energy consumption and computation

Employing sentiment analysis for gauging perceptions of minorities in multicultural societies: An analysis of Twitter feeds on the Afrikaner community of Orania in South Africa

South Africa is well known as a country characterised by racial and ethnic divisions, particularly for the divisions and conflicts between the white population and black population. This study uses the Twitter platform to analyse the discourse around the controversial town of Orania, a minority Afrikaner community that aims to preserve their Afrikaner culture. In doing so, we make use of sentiment analysis, a subfield of natural language processing (NLP). We follow a lexicon-based approach using four different publicly available data sets to test how the discourse around this minority community can be analysed. We show, based on the discourse on Orania on Twitter, that (1) Orania is mostly depicted in a negative light, (2) Orania is mostly seen as a racist community, and (3) Orania is often mentioned in reference to other issues that affect Afrikaners directly, such as farm attacks, first language education and land expropriation without compensation. Our study also shows that using lexicons as a sentiment analysis technique was not sufficient in the automatic detection of abusive language, but rather the sentiment of the tweet. Suggestions are made for further research that focuses on the automatic detection of abusive language online

An Approach to Design and Evaluation of eGovernment Theory for South Africa

e-Government is used to provide improved government services, greater public service efficiencies and cost containment, utilising the ever-changing possibilities offered by ICTs. The field is considered by researchers to be in urgent need of theory development. This requires a suitably rigorous research framework. The principal objective of this study is to articulate and demonstrate an integrated generic research framework for e-Government theory for South Africa and which might also be of interest internationally. Pertinent aspects of the study are described to illustrate the proposed research framework, after which the full research methodology and its phases are presented. This work contributes to e-Government theory research by establishing and applying a rigorous application of Design Science Research (DSR) process steps of suggestion, design and observational as well as analytical evaluation of design theory artifacts in the field of e-Government theory

Multilingual Cross-domain Perspectives on Online Hate Speech

In this report, we present a study of eight corpora of online hate speech, by demonstrating the NLP techniques that we used to collect and analyze the jihadist, extremist, racist, and sexist content. Analysis of the multilingual corpora shows that the different contexts share certain characteristics in their hateful rhetoric. To expose the main features, we have focused on text classification, text profiling, keyword and collocation extraction, along with manual annotation and qualitative study.Comment: 24 page

A collaborative approach for national cybersecurity incident management

Collaborative-based national cybersecurity incident management benefits from the huge size of incident information, large-scale information security devices and aggregation of security skills. However, no existing collaborative approach has been able to cater for multiple regulators, divergent incident views and incident reputation trust issues that national cybersecurity incident management presents. This paper aims to propose a collaborative approach to handle these issues cost-effectively. A collaborative-based national cybersecurity incident management architecture based on ITU-T X.1056 security incident management framework is proposed. It is composed of the cooperative regulatory unit with cooperative and third-party management strategies and an execution unit, with incident handling and response strategies. Novel collaborative incident prioritization and mitigation planning models that are fit for incident handling in national cybersecurity incident management are proposed. Use case depicting how the collaborative-based national cybersecurity incident management would function within a typical information and communication technology ecosystem is illustrated. The proposed collaborative approach is evaluated based on the performances of an experimental cyber-incident management system against two multistage attack scenarios. The results show that the proposed approach is more reliable compared to the existing ones based on descriptive statistics. The approach produces better incident impact scores and rankings than standard tools. The approach reduces the total response costs by 8.33% and false positive rate by 97.20% for the first attack scenario, while it reduces the total response costs by 26.67% and false positive rate by 78.83% for the second attack scenario.N/

Die vermeldingsnetwerk van gekanoniseerde Afrikaanse skrywers in die Afrikaanse literatuurstudie (2000–2020)

From the point of view of systems and field theory, the value attached to a work of art, for example a literary text, is not only the result of the intrinsic characteristics of the text but also includes connections with institutions such as publishers, and factors like literary prizes, the value judgments of literary historians, of reviewers, and of literary critics. The current study examines the mentions of canonized Afrikaans writers in nine academic journals over the past two decades, taking into account more than 5 000 publications and more than 70 000 pages. It is shown which authors are mentioned most, but also which authors are mentioned most often together, and it is shown that authors are mostly mentioned together in the terms of genre. Although the current study represents a large study of the visibility of authors in the study of Afrikaans literature, suggestions for further research are also made

Automatic classification of social media reports on violent incidents in South Africa using machine learning

With the growing amount of data available in the digital age, it has become increasingly important to use automated methods to extract useful information from data. One such application is the extraction of events from news sources for the purpose of a quantitative analysis that does not rely on someone needing to read through thousands of news articles. Overseas, projects such as the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) monitor news stories and extract events using automated coding. However, not all violent events are reported in the news, and while monitoring only news agencies is sufficient for projects such as ICEWS which have a global focus, more news sources are required when assessing a local situation. We used WhatsApp as a news source to identify the occurrence of violent incidents in South Africa. Using machine learning, we have shown how violent incidents can be coded and recorded, allowing for a local level recording of these events over time. Our experimental results show good performance on both training and testing data sets using a logistic regression classifier with unigrams and Word2vec feature models. Future work will evaluate the inclusion of pre-trained word embedding for both Afrikaans and English words to improve the performance of the machine learning classifier. Significance: The logistic regression classifier using TFIDF unigram, CBOW and skip-gram Word2Vec models were successfully implemented to automatically analyse and classify WhatsApp messages from groups that share information on protests and mass violence in South Africa. At the time of publishing, messages were collected from 26 WhatsApp groups across South Africa and automatically classified on an hourly basis

Stellenbosch Media Forum 2005

Stellenbosch Media Forum is an annual publication written and produced by the BPhil (Journalism) class of that specific year in the Department of Journalism, Stellenbosch University."Journalists see change nowhere as evident as in journalism itself," skryf Mitchell Stephens in A History of News (1988). Dit het ons ook vanjaar in die Suid-Afrikaanse media-landskap gesien. Die "wulpse sussie" het 'n nuwe fase van haar lewe bereik en is nou die flavour of the week. Sy's juicy, sexy, toeganklik en tog so provocative. Baie wil haar koop, want sy's hot property, my bru. Ja, die onderwerp is tabloids - vanjaar die vuurwarm besprekingspunt, nie net in mediakringe nie - oral. Veral onder sekere sedebewakers. Ook in Stellenbosch se joernalistiekklas was daar besondere belangstelling in hierdie nuwe medium. Gassprekers en dosente is dikwels - nog voor daar geleentheid vir vrae gegee is - hieroor gekonfronteer. Koos Bekker, besturende direkteur van Naspers, wou weet of ons dan nie vrae oor werksmoontlikhede het nie. Die antwoord: "ons wil eintlik meer van die tabloids weet!" Langenhoven sou trots wees op hierdie klas. Hy het nie verniet gese 'n mens moet weet waar jy vandaan kom om te weet waarheen jy oppad is nie. Dit is presies wat ons met die publikasie wil doen. Ons kyk na waar tabloids vandaan kom. En uiteraard waarheen hulle oppad is. Hoe word die huidige medialandskap beinvloed? En seker die belangrikste: watter kwessies ontstaan in die proses? We spoke to the people, got their opinions and ironically, let the facts not stand in the way of a good story. It is no rumour that tabloids have made an enormous impact on the market and are even outselling established traditional daily broadsheets by the thousands. And they have readers by the millions. It is also no rumour that the journalistic approach and principles, or lack thereof, that some of these tabloids follow, have an impact on journalism and its development. Our SMF team found strong arguments against this latest addition to our newsstands, but also strong arguments in support of the valuable role that these papers play in some communities. Ek dink die antwoord le nie daarin om die groeiende tabloid-bedryf te stuit nie, maar eerder om plek te maak vir 'n meer diverse medialandskap. Dr. Jakes Gerwel, voorsitter van die Raad vir Geesteswetenskaplike Navorsing, skryf in sy voorwoord tot redakteur Adrian Hadland se Changing the Fourth Estate - Essays on South African Journalism, gepubliseer deur HSRC Press: "Kwaliteitjoernalistiek verwys egter nie net meer na die gewone kenmerke van knap skryfwerk en evokatiewe klankgrepe nie." Dit "vereis 'n media wat divers is, die verhale vertel van mense wat op 'n miljoen verskillende maniere bydra tot die opbou van 'n nuwe land". So, wie weet, met 'n bietjie leiding kan die "wulpse sussie" dalk gou volwasse raak en haar plek volstaan in 'n opwindende medialandskap wat in alle opsigte inlig, opvoed en vermaak