| |
|
Professor Thomas Afullo
| | Pr.Eng., SMSAIEE, R.Eng., Ph.D. |
Trunk Network Evolution in Telecommunication Transmission Systems
by
Professor Thomas Afullo
on
Tues, 11 September 2012 at 17:30
at
Howard College Theatre,
University of KwaZulu-Natal,
Howard College Campus
RSVP | In the early days of telephony, a separate transmission wire was required for each voice communication channel. With the rapid development and growth of telephony, the need arose for a more efficient means of utilizing the existing telephone plant – particularly in large urban areas and in long-distance trunk routes, where enormous number of wires and cables had to be installed to provide sufficient voice channels.
In this presentation, we explore the evolution of carrier telephony over a century ago, the introduction of line carrier systems as well as coaxial cable systems, and then the adoption of wireless carrier systems for trunk communication networks. Finally, we present the transmission impediments faced within the trunk routes by wireless transmission systems, and how they are addressed in the South African context. | Professor Michael Samuel
| | BA (Natal), HDE, BEdHons (UDW), MA (Durham), DEd (UDW) | Doctoral Career Path Studies: Exchanging Paradigms Across International Borders
by
Professor Michael Samuel
on
Tues, 09 October 2012 at 17:30
at
LT7, Edgewood College Campus, University of
KwaZulu-Natal
RSVP | This paper explores the interest in doctoral graduate career path studies as a research enterprise. It focuses on five key doctoral education studies across international contexts in the United States of America, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Kingdom and France. These studies formed the backdrop to a European Science Foundation (ESF) sponsored workshop (prepared by the ESF Forum ”European Alliance on Research Career Development) assembling national research funding agencies in their effort towards elaborating new theoretical and practical insights in this emerging field of study for the European context.
The paper identifies the findings of these studies, and reveals how the underlying discourses of their methodologies and epistemological interests display their paradigmatic perspectives. This paper generates the kinds of questions that doctoral career path studies have come to ask, but also challenges that these discourses are generally silent about matters of power, hierarchy and marginalisation of other more critical discourses that should be asked when viewed from the perspective of a context outside the patterns of privilege or in developing world contexts. The paper concludes with generating a set of questions to ask about how the agendas of doctoral career path studies are being constructed and in whose interests they are designed and supported. The paper also offers alternate conceptions of the notion of development, freedoms and significance when evaluating such research agendas.
Key words: doctoral career path studies, career tracking, career outcomes studies, paradigms of research
| Professor Hongjun Xu
| | BSc (Guilin), MSc (Shijiazhuang), PhD (Beijing) | Detection Schemes for M-QAM Spatial Modulation
by
Professor Hongjun Xu
on
Wed, 31 October 2012 at 17:30
at
Howard College Theatre, University of KwaZulu-Natal,
Howard College Campus
RSVP
| Spatial modulation (SM) is a new MIMO transmission scheme proposed recently. The basic idea behind SM is to map a block of information bits to both a modulated M-QAM/M-ary Phase Shift Keying (M-PSK) symbol and transmit antenna index. In this talk, we will present detection schemes for M-QAM spatial modulation. These detection schemes are the maximum likelihood (ML) based optimal detection scheme, suboptimal detection scheme, signal vector based detection scheme, multistage detection scheme, and simplified ML based optimal detection scheme.
|
|