ETD Collection

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    Social capital, civil society, and good governance: civic traditions in Johannesburg's shack settlements and Greater Pietermaritzburg's villages under chiefly rule
    (2013-05-15) Hlela, Kenneth Siphelelo
    This thesis explores the relationship between social capital/civil society and good governance/economic development both conceptually and empirically through case studies in the urban, rural, and peri-urban South Africa. As a starting point, this thesis attempts to answer the following six questions: How is social capital identifiable? Is its production exclusively confined to horizontally structured forms of associational life? Can peasant societies generate social capital? Do social capital networks accentuate divisions within communities between those who have access to authority and those without? Can political institutions play a role in producing social capital or does the enlargement of state authority take place at the expense of the associational networks which do produce social capital? And what kind of organisations in rural settings can best bridge sectional concerns and promote wider communities of trust? Can traditional existing political institutions be adapted to modern democratic requirements? I believe that in answering these questions I have gone some way in resolving some of the conceptual dilemmas identified by critics of the concept of social capital. I was then in a position to test and explore two hypotheses. Firstly, I argue that there is a relationship between social capital (a product of civil society) and good governance as well as economic and democratic development. Secondly, I argue that positive social capital will be under-produced in societies in which there is a weak market economy, that is, where members of civil society do not have independent sources of income. I demonstrate that civil society, the state, and markets have a symbiotic relationship and that they all have a role to play in the production of positive social capital. This thesis employed various data collection methods in order to navigate around the case studies chosen for the purposes of this study, viz. individual and group interviews, focus groups, direct observations, research surveys, secondary literature, and local newspapers. Evidence emanating from this thesis suggests that there is a vibrant civil society and, by implication, social capital in poorly resourced areas found in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas of South Africa, which has to some extent contributed to good governance as well as economic and democratic development. However, I conclude by arguing that the informalisation of the economy as well as high levels of unemployment in these areas certainly inhibit civil society from playing its important democratising and governance role since the production of positive social capital is constrained by this new reality.
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    Design and implementation of a fault management service for heterogeneous networks using Tina Network Resource architecture
    (2006-03-22) Parshotam, Chiba Chetan
    Faults are unavoidable and cause network downtime and degradation of large and complex communication networks. The need for fault management capabilities for improving network reliability is critical to rectify these faults. Current communication networks are moving towards the distributed computing environment enabling these networks to transport heterogeneous multimedia information across end to end connections. An advanced fault management system is thus required for such communication networks. Fault Management provides information on the status of the network by locating, detecting, identifying, isolating, and correcting network problems thereby increasing network reliability. The TINA (Telecommunication Information Networking Architecture) standards define a Network Resource Architecture (NRA) that provides a framework of a transport network that is capable of transporting heterogeneous multimedia media information across heterogeneous networks. TINA also defines a Management Architecture that follows the functional area organization defined in the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) Management Framework, namely fault, configuration, accounting, performance, and security management (FCAPS). The aim of this project is to utilise the TINA NRA and Management Architecture concepts and principles to design and implement a distributed Fault Management Service for heterogeneous networks. The design presented here utilises TINA’s fault management specifi- cations, together with UML modelling tools to developed this Fault Management Service. The design incorporates the use of CORBA and SNMP to provide a distributed management functionality capable of providing fault management support across heterogeneous networks. The generic nature of the fault management service is tested on the SATINA Trial platform which consists of both an ATM network as well as an IP MPLS network. The report concludes that the Fault Management Service is applicable to any connectionoriented network that is modeled using the TINA NRA specification and principles.
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    Implementation of Tina service subscription information management using OBDMS
    (2006-03-13) Lee, Jimmy
    The next generation telecommunication networks will offer users a range of services. These future telecommunication services are envisaged to be tailored services that are customizable in order to satisfy specific requirements of a variety of customers. Service subscribers and users should be offered some direct control in managing their services. Customization in a multi-service environment introduces the requirement for multiple service profiles for each user. Having user service profiles enable universal service access. The current telecommunication service subscription model is no longer viable for the next generation or TINA-based services. This work proposes a subscription and service information management system that is integrated into the existing TINA-structured platform in the South African TINA (SATINA) Trial. The system developed here realizes the object-oriented TINA subscription information management model. The information model defines all the information and relationships required to handle users, subscribers and the subscription life cycle. The project employs the emerging Object Database Management System (ODBMS) to manage the object oriented telecommunication subscription data. ODBMS provides a powerful and efficient way to managed these object oriented information as information and the relationships are stored as they are used in the application. The proposed subscription and service information management system is a distributed application based on the widely used three-tier architecture model. The three-tier model enables distributed access to the centrally managed subscription and service information regardless of the implementation adopted. Visual modeling technique is used to develop the application and convey the design principles. Application of the subscription and service information management system in the service provider domain is demonstrated by the domain administrator’s usage of the system’s graphical management console. The integration of the information management system and the SATINA Trial’s service platform is indicated through the usage of the TINA compliant Online Subscription service.
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    Artificial neural networks applied to option pricing
    (2006-02-10) Dindar, Zaheer Ahmed
    Artificial Neural Networks has seen tremendous growth in recent years. It has been applied to various sciences, including applied mathematics, chemistry, physics, and engineering and has also been implemented in various areas of finance. Many researchers have applied them to forecasting of stock prices and other fields of finance. In this study we focus on option pricing. An option is a contract giving the buyer of the contract the right but not the obligation to purchase stock on or before a certain expiration date. Options have become a multi-billion dollar industry in modern times, and there has been a lot of focus on pricing these option contracts. Option pricing data is highly non-linear and its pricing has its basis in stochastic calculus. Since neural networks have excellent non-linear modeling capabilities, it seems obvious to apply neural networks to option pricing. In this thesis, many different methodologies are developed to model the data. The multilayer perceptron and radial basis functions are used in the stand-alone neural networks. Then, the architectures of the stand-alone networks are optimized using particle swarm optimization, which leads to excellent results. Thereafter, a committee of neural networks is investigated. A committee network is an average of a combination of stand-alone neural networks. In contrast to stand-alone networks, a committee network has great generalization capabilities. Many different methods are developed for attaining optimal results from these committee networks. The methods included different forms of weighting the stand-alone networks, a non-linear combination of the committee members using another stand-alone neural network, a two layer committee network where the second layer was used for smoothing the output and a circular committee network. Lastly, genetic algorithm, with the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, was used to optimize the committee of neural networks. Finally all these methods were analyzed.