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South Africa’s mobile telecom industry serves a highly saturated market that is challenged by factors such as fierce competition, high inflation rates, and the detrimental effects of load shedding. Against this backdrop of intensifying challenges, it is concerning to note that customer service experience and satisfaction within the industry are also declining. Consequently, mobile telecom providers should adopt a value-added approach to customer service in an effort to differentiate them from other industry rivals. This research, therefore, focuses on investigating mobile telecom customers’ service quality experiences and satisfaction, with the goal of gauging the extent to which service quality influences customer satisfaction insofar as to propose effective approaches for amelioration. The research utilised a quantitative descriptive research design to collect the empirical data using computer and self-administered questionnaires from 300 South African mobile telecom users. Non-probability convenience sampling was used to select respondents. A standard multiple regression analysis was conducted to uncover the influence of respondents’ service quality experience on their satisfaction with their mobile telecom provider. Based upon the results, it can be advised that to achieve customer satisfaction, mobile telecom providers should focus on providing reliable customer service, by ensuring that they fulfil their customer service promises, follow up with their customers, improve their complaints handling procedures, and ensure that customers’ expectations are met. Mobile telecom providers should also be empathetic in their service delivery process, which can be achieved by offering personalised and/or customised services, informing customers of potential service interruptions, having employees available to assist customers (considering the customer’s working and socialising hours), and keeping ustomers informed of their operating hours.

In recent years, the Western discourse on distributed leadership has attracted increased attention in Chinese societies that have traditionally relied on highly centralized administrative systems in which power is located in the person of the school principal or other unit leader. This article explores the implications of applying the concept of distributed leadership in a Chinese context and outlines a research agenda for future work in this area. The article focuses specifically on teacher leadership in early childhood education in Hong Kong as an illustrative case. It suggests that change agentry, collaboration, collegiality, power, and authority are key aspects of discourse on teacher leadership in a Chinese, policy-driven context. It is argued that existing studies of leadership have failed to recognize the complexity of employing teacher leadership in hierarchical, policy-driven, high power distance, collectivist cultural contexts.

The article identifies key dimensions of effective leadership for change in historically disadvantaged, township and rural schools in South Africa. It is based on original case study research in 13 schools in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Although the sample included mainly township and rural primary and secondary schools it also included a smaller sample of historically advantaged formerly White, Indian and "Coloured" schools. All schools were selected on the basis of high academic achievement and success in implementing change. Effective leadership styles were found to be contingent on context. Rather than providing a fixed set of characteristics the dimensions provide a framework against which the nature of effective leadership in the sample schools is analysed and compared. It is argued that although many aspects of effective leadership are similar to those reported in the wider international literature, they assume a specific form and emphasis related to contexts of disadvantage in South Africa. (Contains 1 table and 7 notes.)

The emergence and seasonal persistence of pathogenic H7N9 influenza viruses in China have raised concerns about the pandemic potential of this strain, which, if realized, would have a substantial effect on global health and economies. H7N9 viruses are able to bind to human sialic acid receptors and are also able to develop resistance to neuraminidase inhibitors without a loss in fitness. It is not clear whether prior exposure to circulating human influenza viruses or influenza vaccination confers immunity to H7N9 strains. Here, we demonstrate that 3 of 83 H3 HA-reactive monoclonal antibodies generated by individuals that had previously undergone influenza A virus vaccination were able to neutralize H7N9 viruses and protect mice against homologous challenge. The H7N9-neutralizing antibodies bound to the HA stalk domain but exhibited a difference in their breadth of reactivity to different H7 influenza subtypes. Mapping viral escape mutations suggested that these antibodies bind at least two different epitopes on the stalk region. Together, these results indicate that these broadly neutralizing antibodies may contribute to the development of therapies against H7N9 strains and may also be effective against pathogenic H7 strains that emerge in the future., Introduction Influenza A viruses evade the human immune system by changing the antigenic regions of their surface glycoproteins using two mechanisms: antigenic drift (point mutations) and antigenic shift (gene segment [...]

To determine risk for drug-resistant malaria parasites entering Madagascar from Comoros Islands, we screened travelers. For the 141 Plasmodium falciparum isolates detected by real-time PCR, frequency of mutant alleles of [...]

Waste cooking oil (WCO) has been an environmental problem in different cities around the world. It has been reported that 1 liter of WCO could contaminate 1,000 liters of water. A possible solution is collection for recycling and integration into different chemical processes, although, due to related logistical aspects, collection in large cities is difficult. In this work, a combinatorial optimization model based on the Vehicle Routing Problem is proposed that seeks to obtain the optimal cost of the WCO in the city of Bogotá produced in restaurants, shopping centers and food services. It was determined that in this city there are 17,008 commercial establishments located in 19 localities that produce 720,000 liters per month. This oil could be collected for the production of biodiesel, for which a representative sample of each locality was taken and a total of 289 collection points were used. For the programming of the model, an adaptation of the VRP Solver application was carried out, which allowed obtaining the optimal collection routes from which a value of US $ 0.22-0.25 was determined as the optimal cost of collection in the city of Bogotá. The results have shown that by applying route optimization, WCO could be collected in Bogotá at a competitive cost compared to virgin palm oil and under the results it is considered a very convenient option for the partial substitution of oil as a raw material in the biodiesel production process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]