2008-10-27

Malema's matric and Home Affairs


The matric (school-leaving exam in SA) results of Mr Julius Malema, leader of the ANC Youth League, have been circulating in the country over the past week or so. This gentelman, who is famously prepared to "kill" to support "the revolution" managed to get 4% (an H symbol) in the exam in Standard Grade Mathematics. He did manage 57% in History (also on Standard Grade) which is, presumably, more important for a politician. Now, I do not doubt that there were not many opportunities for academic advancement where Mr Malema grew up and although he should perhaps have tried better nevertheless, I am most surprised that no-one has commented about the spelling of "mother tongue" with a Q on the, apparently, official print-out.

Lest anyone believe that the spelling mistake or typo indicates the Malema document not to be genuine, I present the image on the left from an official receipt from the Department of Home Affairs (for a passport application), dated earlier this month. Somehow they got the Afrikaans for "affairs" as "sakke" (meaning "bags") instead of "sake". I have to wonder whether this is the case at every office of Home Affairs or whether it is only at this office and - in that case - whether all the offices set up their cash registers or printers manually.


Also see

  1. "Malema’s (lacklustre) matric results", The Sowetan, 2008-10-24, http://www.sowetan.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=870114
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2008-10-05

Prime number formulae

Last week, I was interviewed on ClassicFM in the show The Internet Economy about GIMPS - the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. During the interview, I said that there was no formula for generating prime numbers, by which I meant - of course - that there is no easy formula. As Eric Weisstein writes in the authoritative MathWorld,
"all such formulas require either extremely accurate knowledge of some unknown constant, or effectively require knowledge of the primes ahead of time in order to use the formula."

He is writing about formulae that are known to produce the n-th prime p(n) on input n. There are other kinds of prime-generating formulae. Consider, for example, the formula described by Eric Rowland in a recent issue of the Journal of Integer Sequences. Rowland's sequence is defined by

a(n) = a(n-1) + gcd(n, a(n-1))

and a(1) = 7. He shows that the values taken on by a(n)-a(n-1) are always either one or prime. However, it is not known whether all primes are produced by this sequence, and I expect it not to be the case! Another approach is to consider the values taken on by a polynomial with integer coefficients and in several unknowns. There exist polynomials for which all the positive values are all prime and in fact there exist such polynomials for which all prime numbers are found among the positive values. These prime-generating polynomials (about which more in the MathWorld article cited below) are, however, not a particularly efficient way of generating prime numbers.


Sources

  1. Podcast of the 3 October 2008 edition of The Internet Economy on ClassicFM http://tinyurl.com/3m2gug

  2. Weisstein, Eric W. "Prime Formulas." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrimeFormulas.html

  3. Rowland, Eric S. "A Natural Prime-Generating Recurrence." Journal of Integer Sequences, Vol. 11 (2008), Article 08.2.8 http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL11/Rowland/rowland21.html

  4. Weisstein, Eric W. "Prime-Generating Polynomial." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Prime-GeneratingPolynomial.html

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2008-09-27

Upcoming tech events in sub-Sahara Africa

The postings of a fellow blogger - over at WhiteAfrican.com - has alerted me to a number of upcoming ICT events in Southern Africa, some of which had escaped my attention. I am listing them here for the convenience of the casual reader, together with one or two that I happened to have come accross myself.


This list is not exhaustive and will not be updated.
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2008-09-19

Minister scratches back

The previous posting in this blog celebrated the court victory of Altech against ICASA and the Department of Communications (DoC). The ruling was viewed as the closest thing to a big bang liberalisation of the telecommunications industry in South Africa, especially since ICASA had announced that the ruling would not be appealed. Today, however, the DoC announced that the minister intends to lodge an appeal against the ruling and to issue a directive to ICASA (where the I used to stand for "independent") in this regard. The purported justification for this peevish obstructivism is that if it implemented,
"government’s managed liberalisation policy will be seriously undermined to the detriment of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) industry."
Now, since when is the DoC supposed to act in the interest of the ICT industry?!

The idea is preposterous but not new: it is called regulatory capture and happens when a government agency starts acting in the interest of the commercial groups that it had been expected to regulate. If you have difficulty distinguishing between regulatory capture and corruption, just remember that the one is legal and enduring whereas the other is illegal but usually done quite quickly. The South African innovation is that the DoC is no longer pretendingto be doing anything else.

Earlier this year, the prestigious Rutgers University in the USA conferred on DoC Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri an honorary doctorate in law (she had done her doctorate in sociology there in the 1980s), so perhaps she knows better than I what she is doing. According to the DoC website, she is "one of the most successful, visible, and accomplished women in Africa", after all.

Sources
  1. Communications Minister to appeal court ruling http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Telecoms/5293.html
  2. Minister to Appeal the Altech Judgment http://www.doc.gov.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=280&Itemid=457
  3. Rutgers University honors Minister of Communications http://www.doc.gov.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=230&Itemid=457
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2008-08-31

Hof raps OKOSA en Matsepe-Casaburri

Die Pretoria Hooggeregshof het verlede week beslis ten gunste van Altech en teen OKOSA en die Departement Kommunikasie in 'n uitgerekte saak oor die selfverskaffing van netwerkinfrastruktuur deur houers van sogenaamde VANS-lisensie wat vroeër deur OKOSA uitgereik is. Dít beteken dat dié - volgens berigte sowat 300 maatskappye - nie gedwing gaan word om die fasiliteite van Telkom, Neotel e.d.m. te gebruik om dienste te verskaf nie. Sover ek dit verstaan gee dit alle VANS-lisensiehouers die reg om, byvoorbeeld, 'n kabel tussen Pretoria en Johannesburg te lê.

Altech se hofoorwinning kom na verwarrende en teenstrydige uitlatings deur die SA-regering in hierdie verband. Oënskynlik het regulasies wat in 2004 uitgevaardig is en in 2005 "herroep" is, dié reg reeds toegestaan. Met ander woorde, die gesloer en halsstarrigheid van die minister het die industrie en die publiek vier jaar gekos.

Terloops, die onderbreking van vier maande in dié webjoernaal was te wyte aan 'n besonder druk navorsing- en kongresskedule en ek gaan dit van nou af weer meer dikwels opdateer.

Leesstof:
  1. Altech mag eie telekomnetwerk bou, beslis hof (Beeld) http://www.news24.com/Sake/Algemene_nuus/0,,6-1607_2385933,00.html
  2. Court ruling opens doors for telecoms competition (Business Day) http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=3308054
  3. VANS can self provide (MyBroadband) http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Telecoms/5023.html
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