This paper examines the implications of language in education policy in post apartheid South Africa, for both schools and universities. Particular attention is paid to the recommendations of the Language Task Action Group (LANGTAG), delegated by the Minister of Education in 1995, to establish South Africa's language-related needs and policies across different domains in the society. The LANGTAG document, Towards a National Language Plan for South Africa, proposed a national language policy designed to promote the development and status of the historically disadvantaged African languages; and to counter the hegemony of English. This paper supports the general policy but challenges LANGTAG's implementation strategies. It makes the following recommendations: (a) All students should have the right of access to the language of power (English at present). Planned and effective provision for its delivery must be made an explicit part of language policy; (b) All students must learn at least one African language as subject throughout the years of compulsory schooling; (c) An African language as a language of learning and teaching should be a long term goal. These recommendations should lead to effective implementation of LANGTAG's multilingual policy.

This paper demonstrates how image content can be used to realize a location-based shopping recommender system for intuitively supporting mobile users in decision making. Generic Fourier Descriptors (GFD) image content of an item was extracted to exploit knowledge contained in item and user profile databases for learning to rank recommendations. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to automatically select a query item from a user profile. Single Criterion Decision Ranking (SCDR) and Multiple-Criteria Decision-Ranking (MCDR) techniques were compared to study the effect of multidimensional ratings of items on recommendations effectiveness. The SCDR and MCDR techniques are, respectively, based on Image Content Similarity Score (ICSS) and Relative Ratio (RR) aggregating function. Experimental results of a real user study showed that an MCDR system increases user satisfaction and improves recommendations effectiveness better than an SCDR system.

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Internet of Things (IoT) has been seen playing a tremendous change in the Information Technology (IT) environments, and thus its importance has also been realized and played a vital role within Intelligent Home Networks (IHNs). This is because IoT establishes a connection between things and the Internet by utilizing different sensing devices to implement the intelligence to deal with the identification and management of the connected things. IHNs use intelligent systems to perform their daily operations. Meanwhile, these networks ensure comfort, safety, healthcare, automation, energy conservation, and remote management to devices and users. Apart from that, these networks provide assistance in self-healing for faults, power outages, reconfigurations, and more. However, we have realized that more and advanced devices and services continue to be introduced and used in these networks. This has led to competitions of the limited available network resources, services, and bandwidth. In this paper, therefore, we present the design and implementation of a Novel Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (NoDBA) algorithm to solve the performance bottleneck incurred with IHNs. The proposed algorithm deals with the management of bandwidth and its allocation. In the proposed algorithm, this study integrates two algorithms, namely; Offline Cooperative Algorithm (OCA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to improve Quality of Service (QoS). PSO defines the priority limits for subnets and nodes in the network. Meanwhile, OCA facilitates dynamic bandwidth allocation in the network. The Network Simulator-2 (NS-2) was used to simulate and evaluate the NoDBA and it showed improved results compared to the traditional bandwidth allocation algorithms. The obtained results show an average throughput of 92%, average delay of 0.8 seconds, and saves energy consumption of 95% compared to Dynamic QoS-aware Bandwidth Allocation (DQBA) and Data-Driven Allocation (DDA).   Keywords: IHNs, Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation, PSO, OCA, QoS

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