Challenges of postgraduate students at the University of the Western Cape 2009 - 2013

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDIn South Africa, postgraduate education is a catalyst in national development and poverty alleviation that is widely acknowledged by the state and higher education institutions, such as the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Previously disadvantaged universities in South Africa were systematically moulded by apartheid planning and the prevailing social-economic-political order of the time. The structural legalised differences between historically white and historically black institutions created the key inequities between them. Unjust laws and institutionalised racism caused historical black universities (HBUs), such as the University of the Western Cape, also known as the University for the left, to lag behind with the intake of postgraduate students. Prior to 1994, students, who were fortunate enough to attend university, were mostly limited to studying towards an undergraduate degree, diploma or a certificate course, in the fields of teaching, nursing or law enforcement. The dawn of democracy opened up new possibilities; however, a major sphere of concern, was the need to speedily transform the education system, to make it inclusive for all. Systematically, institutions of higher learning focussed more on postgraduate education, as it was a stepping stone to improve enrolment growth research output, and collaborative partnerships, at national and international level. However, socio-economic factors, such as the lack of funding, were major constraints, as most postgraduate students were challenged to pay registration fees, or accommodation deposits, upon registration

Gender equity and change management in the diversity equity department at the City of Cape Town.

Magister Administrationis - MAdminThe problem investigated in this study is that gender equity and change management in the City of Cape Town and in particularly the Diversity Equity and Change Management Department, has not been adequately assessed and a coherent set of options to address this problem has not yet been adequately researched. In particular, the situation is that senior management is not representative and that recruitment and appointment procedures as well as the change management process are not conducive to gender equity. The nature of this study is qualitative and the case study method has been utilized. The scope of the study is on gender equity and the change management process followed by management and staff at the City of Cape Town, in particular the Diversity Equity and Change Management Department since 2000 to 2007, with the view of proposing options for improvement. In 2006 the City of Cape Town Employment Statistics indicated that 80% of top management within departments across the City is still white males. At professional and middle management level white males and females dominated this level with 69.5%. In the technical and associate professions, the tally for whites is 38% and at elementary level 6.5% (Department Human Resources HRD IT System, July 2006). In order to equalize employment statistics in the COCT drastic steps should be taken to eliminate imbalances between both Black and white employees in terms of occupational levels. Disadvantaged Black women and men should benefit from employment, recruitment and selection, appointments and training and development processes and the acquisition of knowledge and skills beyond those acquired within the realm of empowerment. However, women should be adequately represented not nearly in the workplace but overall to enable them to participate in the decision-making of important work related and home related issues. Women should keep on addressing inequality and gender equity to enhance change processes and gender awareness amongst themselves and in the workplace. The gender institutional framework within the COCT as a whole in particularly the Diversity Equity department and the active participation in decision-making in the various structures of the City combines with their history of politics in the women's movement to augur well for continued gender sensitivity in policy formulation and outcome.South Afric

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements