Towards environmentally sound health-care waste management in the central district municipality of North West province

Student Number : 0318613G - MSc research report - School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Studies - Faculty of ScienceThis report presents an analysis of health-care waste management in selected hospitals in the Central District Municipality of the North West Province, with a view of making recommendations that will ensure environmentally sound and sustainable health-care waste management in the study area. In contributing to the promotion of sustainable management of health-care waste (HCW), the study aimed to minimize waste generation and environmental impact of waste treatment and disposal, to enhance public health and safety, and to provide a safer working environment around hospitals. An assessment was carried out which involved a review of relevant literature, site visits, and interviews with key stakeholders in health-care waste management in the study area, to generate data and information on health-care waste management trends and issues. The major findings of the study include identified gaps in terms of the policy and legislative framework for the actual management of HCW, and issues relating to the mishandling of health-care waste, poor segregation, inappropriate storage rooms, and insufficient training on health-care waste management. Sustainable health-care waste management measures are proposed to improve the current situation at the health-care facilities in the Central District Municipality of the North West Province

ANN-MIND : dropout for neural network training with missing data

M.Sc. (Computer Science)Abstract: It is a well-known fact that the quality of the dataset plays a central role in the results and conclusions drawn from the analysis of such a dataset. As the saying goes, ”garbage in, garbage out”. In recent years, neural networks have displayed good performance in solving a diverse number of problems. Unfortunately, neural networks are not immune to this misfortune presented by missing values. Furthermore, in most real-world settings, it is often the case that, the only data available for training neural networks consists of missing values. In such cases, we are left with little choice but to use this data for the purposes of training neural networks, although doing so may result in a poorly trained neural network. Most systems currently in use- merely discard the missing observation from the training datasets, while others just proceed to use this data and ignore the problems presented by the missing values. Still other approaches choose to impute these missing values with fixed constants such as means and mode. Most neural network models work under the assumption that the supplied data contains no missing values. This dissertation explores a method for training neural networks in the event where the training dataset consists of missing values..

Building social capital? The case of Afesis-corplan in the Eastern Cape Province.

There has been a belief that conventional approaches to development failed for many years to reverse the trends of poverty in rural communities. As a result, the focus shifted to the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach that many development practitioners, policy developers and other players in rural development see as an alternative. However, it appears that there is agreement from supporters of SLA that sustainable livelihoods in rural communities can be more realistically supported when social capital is built or/and strengthened from within. As a result, many livelihoods support programmes have been implemented across the world since 1992. Most of these projects were in rural areas of developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America (such as Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Gambia, Indonesia, Bolivia, Zambia, and Nepal as well as in South Africa). In light of the above, the researcher has been prompted to investigate the relationship between Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches and social capital to find out if indeed the application of SLA in development programmes can facilitate building and/or strengthening of social capital in rural communities. Further, the research investigates to what extent the building of social capital contributes to the reduction of poverty and vulnerability in rural communities and households. The research was undertaken in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Two different rural villages were chosen as case studies because of their poverty levels and also because livelihood programmes had been implemented in the areas by the organization called Afesis-corplan. The research concludes that Afesis-corplan has facilitated the strengthening of some social capital that existed and also built new networks. However, it is still to be seen if the work of Afesis-corplan will translate into an improved standard of living for those communities

An Exploratory study of the relationship between psychological support and resilience in adolescent orphans

This research report is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for a Master’s Degree in Research Psychology by Coursework and Research Report in the Department of Psychology Faculty of Humanities, School of Human and Community Development at the University of the Witwatersrand. Johannesburg. 2018This study aimed to explore the relationship between psychosocial support and resilience in adolescent orphans residing in a rural area of the Vhembe District, Limpopo province, South Africa. The study explored this relationship by adopting a qualitative research design and employed a hermeneutic method of phenomenology as an epistemology for understanding the participants’ different subjective experiences and realities. The study utilised semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions written in both English and Tshivenda. The interview questions, participant information letter, assent and consent forms were all translated from English to Tshivenda to ensure comprehension and voluntary participation. To recruit participants purposive and convenience sampling procedures were utilised. The participants were selected on a single and double orphan criteria; the process entailed approaching the social worker to select participants who met the criteria. Thereafter, the sample consisted of 11 participants, male (n=4) and female (n=7) between the ages of 13 and 18. To understand the relationship between psychosocial support and resilience, this research draws upon the Social-Ecological Resilience Framework (Ungar, 2011). Social-Ecological Resilience Framework paves a way of understanding an individual in their own context, by focusing on their social relations, societal discourses and ideological positions. From Thematic Analysis the themes of support such as caregiver support, educational support, environmental safety, health support, spiritual support and peer relationships were themes associated with resilience. Thematic analysis has shown that psychosocial support plays an important role in the promotion of adolescent orphans’ resilience.MC201

Women students as political activists

Masters of Arts in Psychology Research Thesis University of the Witwatersrand, 2018The #FeesMustFall movement introduced a new era of youth uprising in South Africa; it is another example of the many social action movements wherein youth are the driving force and main voice for social change. An interest of this research project was to understand the ways throughout history that social action platforms have been utilized by those involved to assert their values and desires for social change. Social action platforms can be seen as one of the spaces in which humanity asserts its identity. Even during the #FeesMustFall protests in 2015 and 2016, it was evident that a number of identities were being mobilized; the black students’ identities are examples of such and even more was the insertion of black women students during the protests. The heightened role of women students in leadership positions during the protests was explored, especially because women had previously been seen to occupy secondary supporting roles in movements of political change. The project investigated the ways in which these women students inserted their multiple identities that had previously been seen as non-complementary; these identities became a means to address the political agenda of the #FeesMustFall movement. The methodology took a narrative approach to understanding the Experience-Centred narratives told by participants. Application of thematic analysis method produced recurrent narration of events; these particular incident narratives (PINS) (Wengraf, 2006) became important as focal points of analysis. The analysis of participants also revealed the impact of students’ individual upbringing. The family, school and other important influences played key roles in the extent of politicization of participants; from these experiences, leadership qualities were also instilled. Hence during the #FeesMustFall protest, participants were able to engage the movement in the ways they did. Due to their particular background influences, these students were not afraid to lead; neither were they timid about resisting unjust systemic measures on campus or within the movement structures. In the end it was their bodies that curbed police violence on campus.XL201

Comparison of three power system software packages for small-signal stability analysis

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-133).Many power system simulation tools exist for small-signal stability analysis. This is due to the rapid development of computer systems, higher industrial growth and the need for reliable power system simulation tools for efficient planning and control of electric power systems. Three power system small-signal stability simulation tools have been selected for comparison and these are: PSAT 2.1.2, MatNetEig and PacDyn 8.1.1. These combine both open and closed source code industrial-grade power system analysis tools. The objective of this thesis is to compare three simulation tools on power system small-signal stability analysis. Input formats, data output flexibility, dynamic components and synchronous machine saturation modelling in all three simulation tools were amongst other features investigated for comparative studies

Extraction of low cost houses from a high spatial resolution satellite imagery using Canny edge detection filter

Since its democratic dispensation in 1994, the South African government enacted a number of legislative and policy interventions aimed at availing equal housing opportunities to the previously marginalized citizens. Mismanagement and unreliable reporting has been widely reported in publicly funded housing programmes which necessitated the government to audit and monitor housing development projects in municipalities using more robust and independent methodologies. The objective of this study was therefore to test and demonstrate the effectiveness of high spatial resolution satellite imagery in validating the presence of government funded houses using an object-oriented classification technique that applies a Canny edge detection filter. The results of this study demonstrate that object-orientated classification applied on pan-sharpened SPOT 6 satellite imagery can be used to conduct a reliable inventory and validate the number of houses. The application of the multi-resolution segmentation and Canny edge detection filtering technique proved to be an effective means of mapping individual houses as shown by the high detection accuracy of 99% and quality percentage of 96%.Keywords: Houses, Remote Sensing, SPOT 6, Canny edge detection, Multi-resolution Segmentation, Object-Oriented Classificatio

National and provincial officials’ knowledge on phytosanitary matters for food security in South Africa

The goal of this study was to investigate and identify the existing knowledge gaps on plant health systems of the national and provincial officials responsible for biosecurity issues and plant health matters at the Departments of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) in South Africa. In this study, stratified random sampling was used and a semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 60 participants (30 each from national and provincial) from DAFF (scientists and inspectors), Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) (biodiversity officers) and Provincial Departments of Agriculture (PDAs) (extension officers or agricultural advisors). The data was analysed statistically using the one-way frequency and Spearman’s Rank correlation coefficients. The study revealed that 76.7% of the respondents at the national level have knowledge and understanding on plant health systems and only 36.7% of the PDAs respondents have such a level of knowledge. In terms of the relevant training on plant health matters, the majority of the respondents at the PDAs (80%) revealed that they were not receiving basic training on quarantine pests (pest identification and control), while only 20% of the respondents at the national authority indicated a lack of regular trainings. Thus, intensifying awareness and basic training on plant health matters, specifically for the extension officers and/or agricultural advisors, was found to be an effective tool to enhance knowledge capacity.Keywords: Extension officers, legislation, knowledge, pest, plant health syste

Analysis of femtocell for better reliability and high throughput

Abstract: An unrelenting need for mobile broadband data has become the norm for end users. Mobile operators are now faced with a challenge to deliver higher data rates thus has prompted developments for new innovations in mobile technology to satisfy this data hungry generation. Poor indoor building penetration have been a major stumbling block in achieving higher data rates as good signal strength of better quality influences higher data rates. Methods to solve indoor penetration problems such as cranking up power on existing base stations can be an alternate but this can potentially introduce high interference to the system and effectively decrease system capacity. Like in any other wireless communication environment, having a transmitter and receiver closer to each other will potentially increase signal strength thus effectively increasing signal quality and potentially higher data rates. This inevitably means more base stations need to be installed to improve coverage. This idea is not feasible ! in practice based on financial constraints using traditional macro and micro sites thus the emergence of FemtoCell seems to be a feasible endeavour. A FemtoCell BS is a self-installed low powered base station connected to the mobile operator via backhaul using IP connection. This device brings a lot of benefits such as Opex savings, increased spectral efficiency, improved battery life and higher data rates for customers resulting from increased signal Strength. In this paper an overview of advancement of cellular networks from legacy standards 2G to 4G-LTE/LTE-A and benefits/challenges of FemtoCell are analysed