Good Governance in Public Procurement: A South African Case Study

In this article good governance in public procurement, with particular reference to accountability is discussed. The principle of providing adequate remedies in public procurement is put under the spotlight. This is done with reference to the decision in Steenkamp NO v Provincial Tender Board, Eastern Cape. In this case the Constitutional Court had to consider whether an initially successful tenderer could lodge a delictual claim for damages to compensate for expenses incurred after conclusion of a contract, which was subsequently rendered void on an application for review of the tender award. The applicable principles of good governance and the applicable provisions of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Public Procurement and the WTO plurilateral Government Procurement Agreement are analysed. This is done to enable an evaluation of the decision by the Constitutional Court in the above case. It is concluded that the South African public procurement system does in this instance comply with the basic principles of good governance with regard to accountability.PER/PELJ Vol. 2 2008: pp. 1-4

A Svarc-Milnor lemma for monoids acting by isometric embeddings

We continue our programme of extending key techniques from geometric group theory to semigroup theory, by studying monoids acting by isometric embeddings on spaces equipped with asymmetric, partially-defined distance functions. The canonical example of such an action is a cancellative monoid acting by translation on its Cayley graph. Our main result is an extension of the Svarc-Milnor Lemma to this setting.Comment: 11 page

Good Governance

This issue of the Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal (PELJ) is entirely dedicated to the concept of good governance. It is the outcome of the first Summer/Winter school on Good Governance which was held at North-West University, Potchefstroom (SA) in January 2006 and at Tilburg University, Tilburg (NL) in January 2007. This Summer/Winter school has now become a yearly event with a bi-annual theme. Academic staff from both universities collaborate in teaching this course. Students from the two universities who participate in the Summer/Winter school have the unique possibility to deepen their knowledge on a particular subject while enjoying a cross-cultural learning environment. The subject of good governance was not selected by chance but was chosen because of its impact in many fields and the many ways in which the concept is used. It was time for a deeper insight into this multiple role of the concept of good governance. The contributions to this journal are the analytical outcome of the research done in preparation for the lectures given during the Summer/Winter school. As the contributions directly apply the good governance concept to various specific fields of expertise, this introduction will be used to give a short reflection on the concept as such.  &nbsp

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Using good and Cooperative Governance to improve Environmental Governance of South African World Heritage sites: A Case Study of the Vredefort Dome

South Africa became a signatory to and ratified the World Heritage Convention, 1972 (WHC) in 1997. It thereby voluntarily agreed to identify and conserve world heritage areas of universal value for the benefit of mankind. This article presents a case study of the Vredefort Dome, one of South Africa's World Heritage Sites (WHS) and specifically its governance strategies to ensure proper and sustainable governance. Firstly, the issue of fragmentation of the environmental governance regime applicable to WHS is discussed, and in doing so, refers to the various legislative and common law responsibilities and institutional structures related to environmental governance of WHS. Secondly, it briefly discusses the concept of good governance and the concept of cooperative governance as a sub-component of good governance. Finally it comprehensively proposes various strategies to ameliorate the current fragmented and unsustainable environmental governance effort relating to WHS.  &nbsp

Strongly bounded groups and infinite powers of finite groups

We define a group as strongly bounded if every isometric action on a metric space has bounded orbits. This latter property is equivalent to the so-called uncountable strong cofinality, recently introduced by G. Bergman. Our main result is that G^I is strongly bounded when G is a finite, perfect group and I is any set. This strengthens a result of Koppelberg and Tits. We also prove that omega_1-existentially closed groups are strongly bounded.Comment: 10 pages, no figure. Versions 1-3 were entitled "Uncountable groups with Property (FH)". To appear in Comm. Algebr

Profinite completion of Grigorchuk's group is not finitely presented

In this paper we prove that the profinite completion $\mathcal{\hat G}$ of the Grigorchuk group $\mathcal{G}$ is not finitely presented as a profinite group. We obtain this result by showing that H^2(\mathcal{\hat G},\field{F}_2) is infinite dimensional. Also several results are proven about the finite quotients $\mathcal{G}/ St_{\mathcal{G}}(n)$ including minimal presentations and Schur Multipliers

Topological BF Theories in 3 and 4 Dimensions

In this paper we discuss topological BF theories in 3 and 4 dimensions. Observables are associated to ordinary knots and links (in 3 dimensions) and to 2-knots (in 4 dimensions). The vacuum expectation values of such observables give a wide range of invariants. Here we consider mainly the 3-dimensional case, where these invariants include Alexander polynomials, HOMFLY polynomials and Kontsevich integrals.Comment: 25 pages, latex, no figures. Transmission problems have been solve

Thirty Years of Kawasaki Disease: A Single-Center Study at the University Hospital of Lausanne.

Kawasaki disease is an acute vasculitis with a particular involvement of the coronary arteries. Coronary artery aneurysms develop in 20% of untreated children. It has been shown that early treatment with intravenous immunoglobulins and aspirin decreases this risk to 5%, but the medium to long term prognosis of children with Kawasaki disease is still unclear. To determine the outcome of the disease and risk factors for poor evolution, we reviewed retrospectively the medical records of all patients with a diagnosis of Kawasaki disease at our Institution between 1981 and 2014. Among the 207 patients included in the study, 96 patients had coronary diameter anomalies (46.4%) at diagnosis and children with atypical ages for Kawasaki disease (<1 year or >10 year of age) were more often affected with aneurysms or dilatations. Eighty-four of them had complete regression of coronary aneurysms during the follow-up (87.5%) Absence of immunoglobulins in the acute phase was associated with less regression rate (57.1 vs. 92.2%), and boys had greater z-scores at last echocardiography, statistically significant for the left anterior descending artery. We found rare complications after the acute phase documented in our patient charts (only 3.8%). Recurrence of the disease occurred in 5 children (2.4%) and myocardial ischemia in 3 patients (1.4%), all with initial coronary aneurysm. Conclusion: Medium to long term prognosis after Kawasaki disease is excellent. Boys, patients not treated with immunoglobulins or outside the usual age range are more at risk for an unfavorable outcome

Exotic complex Hadamard matrices, and their equivalence

In this paper we use a design theoretical approach to construct new, previously unknown complex Hadamard matrices. Our methods generalize and extend the earlier results of de la Harpe--Jones and Munemasa--Watatani and offer a theoretical explanation for the existence of some sporadic examples of complex Hadamard matrices in the existing literature. As it is increasingly difficult to distinguish inequivalent matrices from each other, we propose a new invariant, the fingerprint of complex Hadamard matrices. As a side result, we refute a conjecture of Koukouvinos et al. on (n-8)x(n-8) minors of real Hadamard matrices.Comment: 10 pages. To appear in Cryptography and Communications: Discrete Structures, Boolean Functions and Sequence

Applications of p-deficiency and p-largeness

We use Schlage-Puchta's concept of p-deficiency and Lackenby's property of p-largeness to show that a group having a finite presentation with p-deficiency greater than 1 is large, which implies that Schlage-Puchta's infinite finitely generated p-groups are not finitely presented. We also show that for all primes p at least 7, any group having a presentation of p-deficiency greater than 1 is Golod-Shafarevich, and has a finite index subgroup which is Golod-Shafarevich for the remaining primes. We also generalise a result of Grigorchuk on Coxeter groups to odd primes.Comment: 23 page