Commercial agriculture in South Africa has been subject to accelerated regulatory and economic change in the time since the country’s democratization. This dissertation focusses on some of the interactions of these changes with the prospects of low-income farmworkers and farm dwellers through exploring two interlinked questions. The first of these asks whether consolidation in the industry has extended to growing firm size and in-turn, whether farmworkers in larger firms earn higher wages than those in small firms. An analysis of the firm-size earnings relationship using long run labour survey data is discussed in the context of current debates on agrarian policy. The second question relates to the process of rural-urban migration off commercial farms and into urban areas in the post-apartheid period. Using a panel of individuals and in so doing, controlling for unobserved individual heterogeneity and initial household fixed effects, a difference in differences approach is used to estimate the impacts of migration on various measures of individual living standards. Together these two questions attempt to characterise aspects of the changing nature of life on farms. The results suggest that there exists a significant firm-size earnings premium for farmworkers and that this may be increasing over time. In addition the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) data suggests that migration off farms has mixed implications for living standards, but is associated with significant gains in per-capita income, electricity and sanitation access.

Includes bibliographical references. / This model attempts to trace a blue-print of personnel development and training from grass roots to successful operation. To best illustrate this transition, I have divided the thesis into three major parts. In chapters one to three, I introduce the personnel administrator, his position in the South African economy and the problems he faces at grass roots level. In chapters four and five, I deal with the establishment of a personnel development programme to deal with the problems confronting the personnel administrator. Chapters six to ten deal with the training model, the use of educational television, specific training programmes and the results obtained from such training programmes.

University graduation rates have become increasingly important for institutions and policymakers alike. Academic exclusion, or other forms of withdrawal from university, represents a substantial loss to the individual, the institution and broader society. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of graduation and academic exclusion in UCT's Commerce, Engineering and Built Environment and Science faculties using survival analysis. The data consisted of 11 959 students who registered for a degree in one of the three faculties between 2006 and 2013. The results suggest that there are large differences in graduation and academic exclusion rates between different groups of students. Factors which increased the likelihood of graduating were being female, white, ineligible for financial aid, proficient in English, attending a Quintile 5 or independent school and obtained good high school grades. On the other hand, males who are on financial aid, non English-speaking, attend poorly resourced schools and achieved low school grades are more likely to be academically excluded. Further findings indicate that, relative to the Commerce faculty, the Science and EBE faculties exclude a substantially greater proportion of poorly performing students in the first and second years. The Commerce Faculty excludes relatively few poorly performing students in the first two years, but the exclusion rate increases sharply in the third and subsequent years. The main policy implication of these results is that the secondary schooling system needs to improve greatly in order for a larger proportion of students to graduate at university.

This thesis presents a study of potential calibrators observed by the Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7). The KAT-7 is an engineering prototype for the coming sensitive array, the MeerKAT, one of the pathfinders for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). This thesis plays a supporting role in the ongoing commissioning activities of the KAT-7, whose construction started in early 2008, and which has been undergoing engineering and science verifications since late 2010. This thesis has achieved the first steps towards identifying possible flux-density standards for short baseline interferometers such as the KAT-7. The systematic error for flux-density calibration at KAT-7 was estimated relative to 3C123, and it was found to be ~5% of the measured flux density. 18 (~47%) of the 38 sources were identified as good flux density calibrator candidates, for their Modulation Index (MI) and Variability Index (VI) values were less than 0.05 and all the sources in the field had less than 10% of the peak flux density of the calibrator candidate. One source (PKS J0837-1951), which showed low variability and hence appeared to be a good flux-density calibrator candidate (class A), was deemed to be not a good flux-density calibrator candidate because a strong confusing source was found within its primary beam. Eight sources had MI or VI values between 0.05 and 0.09 and may deserve further study as potential flux calibrator candidates. Five sources had MI or VI values greater than 0.09 suggesting significant variability while 17 sources had only one or two observations so their suitability as potential flux calibrator candidates could not be evaluated. In addition, we used another measure of variability, the de-biased modulation index, for our sources comparing the observed modulation indices against Monte Carlo simulations. The result showed that the values of Md are largely as expected and the uncertainties therefore not substantially underestimated.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-70). / This study examines the influence of socio-economic inequalities on the probability of conflict in Kenya and aims to synthesise various causal hypotheses in the literature. This research extends to a regional analysis of a cross-national sample to understand the extent to which structural cleavages account for a cause of potential conflict in Kenya. The post-election violence that emerged in 2008 shed light on the urgency for policy reforms to address the root causes of what was viewed as an imminent outbreak of violence. Various analysts trace the origin of conflict to nepotism, ethnic stratification, historical injustices, poor governance and disparities in resource allocation. Given these sources of dissent, this study proposes that the most fundamental factors that considerably influence the probability of conflict in Kenya are pervasive poverty and extreme inequality, intensified by ethnic divisions. Based on Kuznets theory, we argue that the booms of economic growth experienced from 2003 perpetuated the stark economic and social inequalities prevalent in Kenya. As a result, there is strong evidence that suggests that these sharp inequalities fuelled the post-election violence and deeply influence the probability of conflict in Kenyan society. Another key contribution from the study is the conclusion that the existence of sharp horizontal inequalities result in a bias towards ethnic conflict. It is imperative to identify the underlying causes of conflict so as to neutralise polarisation which exacerbates tension and breeds further conflict. In light of this view, the probability of conflict in Kenya can be minimised effectively and such mitigation can be used as a mechanism for future growth and economic development in Kenya.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / The paper investigates whether the spatial distribution of economic activity in South Africa is static or evolving. Testing Gibrat’s Law to determine this, results suggest growth patterns in South Africa have been divergent over the period 1996-2010. The share of population, employment and GVA in the largest municipalities has been increasing relative to the shares in smaller municipalities.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / This study was designed to assess the potential role of PCT, and to better understand the public's response to mitigation policy, within the context of South Africa. An experiment was conducted that simulated a personal emissions trading scheme.

Bibliography: leaves 72-75. / This dissertation explores the extent to which language and genre can be used to facilitate access for a group of first year students who have English as an additional language in the Humanities at the University of Cape Town enrolled in a foundation course. The use of the genre of the praise poem in the curriculum is used as a case study to address how the cultural capital that this group of students bring with them can be validated, the main aim being to facilitate access to the curriculum. In exploring students' attitudes to language and genre, data were collected mainly through the use of two questionnaires and interviews, where a qualitative analysis was done by drawing up the main themes which emerged and exploring the implications of these themes for the research question. The questionnaires aimed at identifying students' language preferences for academic writing (the choice being between their respective primary languages and English). The second questionnaire addresses the genre issue more closely by extending the question to include students' attitudes towards praise poetry while the first questionnaire asks about language preference in general. The second part of the research process deals with interviews, which I conducted with three of the students. The interviews were conducted with the aim of addressing the issues that emerged from the questionnaires; issues that I felt needed to be explored further in an interview context.

In this project we study the three fundamental theories that explain the phenomenon of superconductivity: The London theory, the Ginzburg-Landau theory and the BCS theory. We review works by several authors who utilized these theories as the basis for their investigation. In our literature review we study the behavior of single and multivortex states in mesoscopic thin superconducting discs whose dimensions are comparable to the penetration depth λ and the coherence length ξ of a superconductor. We learn about the types of phase transitions that the vortex configurations undergo and the stability of the resulting states. Our aim is to investigate how vortex configurations reorganize after phase transitions and whether their reorganization releases any energy into the system of vortices in the disc. If so, then what is the precise mechanism through which the released energy is transferred into the disc? We aim to answer this question and generalize the results to neutron star interiors in order to explain and predict the behavior of pulsar glitches.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 134-176) / Given that South Africa is an emerging space nation, in a continent of emerging space nations and economies, several technologies need to be developed to progress the space program into a viable and sustainable endeavour. The three main areas of space technology are communications, navigation and remote sensing. Earth science is strongly reliant on the third of these areas for obtaining global scientific data, on a suitable temporal/spatial scale. One of the forms of electro-magnetic remote sensing is microwave radiometry. This dissertation presents a short review of currently available space-faring radiometer technologies and applications, which are then discussed in the context of today's South Africa. For instance Passive Microwave Radiometers (PMR) in the L-Band have huge implications in Soil Moisture (SM) and Sea Salinity (SSS), which in turn affect the global climate, and are being investigated by current and soon to launch missions such as Aquarius, SMOS and SMAP. Multi-frequency radiometers are used to classify various other aspects of Earth's surface-atmosphere system. The structure of this dissertation is to introduce the concepts of radiometry with a review of current and future radiometers from literature (up to November 2011). The user communities, current and possible, are also analysed. There is a discussion of South Africa's history, needs and presence in space, along with possible constraints on a future South African instrument going to space. A technology demonstrator passive microwave radiometer, for SM and Sea Surface Temperature (SST) along with some atmospheric correction channels, is presented. Synergy with data obtained from other instruments, such as an Infra-Red (IR) sounder, is also discussed.