The demand for forensic social work as a specialist field is increasing rapidly, due to the increasing moral decline of the community and consequent higher demands set to generic social workers. Amendments to existing acts as well as the development of new legislation, lead to more opportunity for the prosecution of the perpetrator, and therefore a higher utilization of the forensic social worker. A need was experienced to do research regarding the gaps experienced by social workers or any other workers who are currently executing forensic assessments with the sexually traumatised child. The aim of the investigation was to determine which gaps social workers experience in the field when assessing a child forensically. A recording procedure was used to obtain qualitative as well as quantitative data. A purposive sampling was used were interviews were held with five participants to obtain the data. A selfdeveloped questionnaire was used as measuring instrument. It is clear from the findings that there are definite gaps within the field of forensic social work and the need of further research within the field of forensic social work in South Africa is highlighted. / Thesis (MIng (Mechanical Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.

Today, mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets have become ubiquitous and are used everywhere. Millions of software applications can be purchased and installed on these devices, customizing them to personal interests and needs. However, the frequent use of mobile devices has let a new problem become omnipresent: their limited operation time, due to their limited energy capacities. Although energy consumption can be considered as being a hardware problem, the amount of energy required by today’s mobile devices highly depends on their current workloads, being highly influenced by the software running on them. Thus, although only hardware modules are consuming energy, operating systems, middleware services, and mobile applications highly influence the energy consumption of mobile devices, depending on how efficient they use and control hardware modules. Nevertheless, most of today’s mobile applications totally ignore their influence on the devices’ energy consumption, leading to energy wastes, shorter operation times, and thus, frustrated application users. A major reason for this energy-unawareness is the lack for appropriate tooling for the development of energy-aware mobile applications. As many mobile applications are today behaving energy-unaware and various mobile applications providing similar services exist, mobile application users aim to optimize their devices by installing applications being known as energy-saving or energy-aware; meaning that they consume less energy while providing the same services as their competitors. However, scarce information on the applications’ energy usage is available and, thus, users are forced to install and try many applications manually, before finding the applications fulfilling their personal functional, non-functional, and energy requirements. This thesis addresses the lack of tooling for the development of energy-aware mobile applications and the lack of comparability of mobile applications in terms of energy-awareness with the following two contributions: First, it proposes JouleUnit, an energy profiling and testing framework using unit-tests for the execution of application workloads while profiling their energy consumption in parallel. By extending a well-known testing concept and providing tooling integrated into the development environment Eclipse, JouleUnit requires a low learning curve for the integration into existing development and testing processes. Second, for the comparability of mobile applications in terms of energy efficiency, this thesis proposes an energy benchmarking and labeling service. Mobile applications belonging to the same usage domain are energy-profiled while executing a usage-domain specific benchmark in parallel. Thus, their energy consumption for specific use cases can be evaluated and compared afterwards. To abstract and summarize the profiling results, energy labels are derived that summarize the applications’ energy consumption over all evaluated use cases as a simple energy grade, ranging from A to G. Besides, users can decide how to weigh specific use cases for the computation of energy grades, as it is likely that different users use the same applications differently. The energy labeling service has been implemented for Android applications and evaluated for three different usage domains (being web browsers, email clients, and live wallpapers), showing that different mobile applications indeed differ in their energy consumption for the same services and, thus, their comparison is both possible and sensible. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first approach providing mobile application users comparable energy consumption information on mobile applications without installing and testing them on their own mobile devices.

Allt hårdare lagkrav gör att det är svårt att energieffektivisera befintliga byggnader utan att förändra deras utseende. Syftet med examensarbetet är att utreda hur stor energieffektivisering, för tre befintliga småhus uppförda under 1900-talet, som är möjlig att uppnå genom förbättring av byggnadernas klimatskal, det vill säga tak, väggar, golv, fönster och dörrar, utan att förvanska byggnadernas utseende och samtidigt bevara deras kulturhistoriska värden. Arbetet bestod av en förstudie där tre byggnader identifierades, ett undersökningsskede där information om byggnaderna togs fram och ett slutsatsskede där energibesparande åtgärdsförslag togs fram och utvärderades. Byggnader som var goda representanter för sin tid och stil söktes. Byggnader från 1910-talet, 1930-talet och 1970-talet, lokaliserades. Sedan gjordes det fallstudier med intervjuer och inventeringar. För att utreda byggnadens klimatskal utfördes u-värdesberäkningar och energiberäkningar av befintliga byggander och byggnader baserade på föreslagna åtgärdsförslag. Ingen av byggnaderna nådde efter föreslagna åtgärder ner till passivhuskravet 59 kWh/år/m2 Atemp eller BBR-kravet 110 kWh/år/m2 Atemp för en byggnads specifika energianvändning. Den största möjliga energieffektivisering för de tre byggnaderna uppförda under 1900-talet, som är möjlig att uppnå utan att förvanska byggnadernas utseende och samtidigt bevara deras kulturhistoriska värden är 13,0 kWh/år/m2 Atemp, 49,7 kWh/år/m2 Atemp respektive 64,8 kWh/år/m2 Atemp. Slutsatser från arbetet är att byggnader från 1910-tal kan åtgärdas genom att isolera fönstren, sätta dit en extra dörr på insidan av ytterdörren samt tilläggsisolera snedtaket. Byggnader från 1930-tal kan åtgärdas genom att isolera fönstren med en isolerruta på insidan av fönstret och dörrarna med en extra dörr på insidan av ytterdörren. Byggnader från 1970-tal kan åtgärda fönstren genom att byta ut dem till energifönster, ingen åtgärd för golvet men fasaden isoleras utvändigt med vakuumisolering. Byggnaden från 1970-talet klarade sig bäst i jämförelsen eftersom den var i autentiskt skick från början vilket gjorde att förbättringen blev större än för till exempel byggnaden från 1910-talet som redan var ombyggd innan åtgärder föreslogs. / Increasingly stringent legal requirements make it difficult to energy efficiency in existing buildings without changing their appearance. The purpose of the study is to investigate how much energy, for three existing single-family homes built in the 1900s, which is achievable by improving the building envelope, ie, ceilings, walls, floors, windows and doors, without distorting the building's appearance and while maintaining their cultural values. The work consisted of a pilot study where three buildings were identified, a research stage where information about the buildings were developed and an inference stage where energy saving measures proposed were developed and evaluated. Buildings that were good representatives of their time and style sought. Buildings from the 1910s, 1930s and 1970s, was located. Since it was done case studies, interviews and surveys. To investigate the building envelope was conducted U-value calculations and energy calculations of the existing building commitment and buildings based on the proposed policy proposals. None of the buildings reached after the proposed action down to the passive house requirement 59 kWh/year/m2 Atemp or BBR requirement 110 kWh/year/m2 Atemp for a building-specific energy consumption. The maximum possible energy efficiency for the three buildings erected during the 1900s, which is achievable without corrupting the buildings' appearance while preserving their cultural values is 13.0 kWh/year/m2 Atemp, 49.7 kWh/year/m2 Atemp respectively 64.8 kWh/year/m2 Atemp. Conclusions of the work is that buildings from the 1910's can be addressed by isolating the windows, put one extra door on the inside of the front door and additional insulation in sloping roof. Buildings from the 1930s can be addressed by isolating windows with insulating glass on the inside of the windows and doors with an extra door on the inside of the front door. Buildings from the 1970s can fix the windows by changing them into energy windows, no action on the floor but the facade insulated externally with vacuum insulation. The building from the 1970s fared best in the comparison because it was the authentic condition from the beginning, which meant that the improvement was greater than for example the building from the 1910s that was already rebuilt before action was proposed.

New district heating systems in Toronto have the potential for significant financial and environmental gains. Through the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and the data required to estimate heating loads, heat maps were generated on a building-by-building basis for over 4400 buildings at nine different intersections in Toronto. School locations and planned construction maps were used to enhance the data and demonstrate the benefit of considering factors beyond finance and the environment. Out of the intersections studied, Yonge and Eglinton; Yonge and Sheppard; and Yonge and Empress held the largest heating loads. Individual building data allowed for plant locations to be suggested based on their proportional distance to the highest loads. GIS allowed for the visualization of the vast quantity of data. The opportunities for improvement include increasing the availability of location-based data and the application of the methodology to other areas of infrastructure planning and decision making.

New district heating systems in Toronto have the potential for significant financial and environmental gains. Through the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and the data required to estimate heating loads, heat maps were generated on a building-by-building basis for over 4400 buildings at nine different intersections in Toronto. School locations and planned construction maps were used to enhance the data and demonstrate the benefit of considering factors beyond finance and the environment. Out of the intersections studied, Yonge and Eglinton; Yonge and Sheppard; and Yonge and Empress held the largest heating loads. Individual building data allowed for plant locations to be suggested based on their proportional distance to the highest loads. GIS allowed for the visualization of the vast quantity of data. The opportunities for improvement include increasing the availability of location-based data and the application of the methodology to other areas of infrastructure planning and decision making.

The delay tolerant networks (DTNs) is characterized by frequent disconnections and long delays of links among devices due to mobility, sparse deployment of devices, attacks, and noise, etc. Considerable research efforts have been devoted recently to DTNs enabling communications between network entities with intermittent connectivity. Unfortunately, mobile devices have limited energy capacity, and the fundamental problem is that traditional power-saving mechanisms are designed assuming well connected networks. Due to much larger inter-contact durations than contact durations, devices spend most of their life time in the neighbor discovery, and centralized power-saving strategies are difficult. Consequently, mobile devices consume a significant amount of energy in the neighbor discovery, rather than in infrequent data transfers. Therefore, distributed energy efficient neighbor discovery protocols for DTNs are essential to minimize the degradation of network connectivity and maximize the benefits from mobility. In this thesis, we develop sleep scheduling protocols in the medium access control (MAC) layer that are adaptive and distributed under different clock synchronization conditions: synchronous, asynchronous, and semi-asynchronous. In addition, we propose a distributed clock synchronization protocol to mitigate the clock synchronization problem in DTNs. Our research accomplishments are briefly outlined as follows: Firstly, we design an adaptive exponential beacon (AEB) protocol. By exploiting the trend of contact availability, beacon periods are independently adjusted by each device and optimized using the distribution of contact durations. The AEB protocol significantly reduces energy consumption while maintaining comparable packet delivery delay and delivery ratio. Secondly, we design two asynchronous clock based sleep scheduling (ACDS) protocols. Based on the fact that global clock synchronization is difficult to achieve in general, predetermined patterns of sleep schedules are constructed using hierarchical arrangements of cyclic difference sets such that devices independently selecting different duty cycle lengths are still guaranteed to have overlapping awake intervals with other devices within the communication range. Thirdly, we design a distributed semi-asynchronous sleep scheduling (DSA) protocol. Although the synchronization error is unavoidable, some level of clock accuracy may be possible for many practical scenarios. The sleep schedules are constructed to guarantee contacts among devices having loosely synchronized clocks, and parameters are optimized using the distribution of synchronization error. We also define conditions for which the proposed semi-asynchronous protocol outperforms existing asynchronous sleep scheduling protocols. Lastly, we design a distributed clock synchronization (DCS) protocol. The proposed protocol considers asynchronous and long delayed connections when exchanging relative clock information among nodes. As a result, smaller synchronization error achieved by the proposed protocol allows more accurate timing information and renders neighbor discovery more energy efficient. The designed protocols improve the lifetime of mobile devices in DTNs by means of energy efficient neighbor discoveries that reduce the energy waste caused by idle listening problems.

With advances in hardware miniaturization and wireless communication technologies even small portable wireless devices have much communication bandwidth and computing power. These devices include smartphones, tablet computers, and personal digital assistants. Users of these devices expect to run software applications that they usually have on their desktop computers as well as the new applications that are being developed for mobile devices. Web browsing, social networking, gaming, online multimedia playing, global positioning system based navigation, and accessing emails are examples of a few popular applications. Mobile versions of thousands of desktop applications are already available in mobile application markets, and consequently, the expected operational time of smartphones is rising rapidly. At the same time, the complexity of these applications is growing in terms of computation and communication needs, and there is a growing demand for energy in smartphones. However, unlike the exponential growth in computing and communication technologies, in terms of speed and packaging density, battery technology has not kept pace with the rapidly growing energy demand of these devices. Therefore, designers are faced with the need to enhance the battery life of smartphones. Knowledge of how energy is used and lost in the system components of the devices is vital to this end. With this view, we focus on modeling and evaluating the energy performance of smartphones in this thesis. We also propose techniques for enhancing the energy efficiency and functionality of smartphones. The detailed contributions of the thesis are as follows: (i) we present a nite state machine based model to estimate the energy cost of an application running on a smartphone, and provide practical approaches to extract model parameters; (ii) the concept of energy cost pro le is introduced to assess the impact of design decisions on energy cost at an early stage of software design; (iii) a generic architecture is proposed and implemented for enhancing the capabilities of smartphones by sharing resources; (iv) we have analyzed the Internet tra c of smartphones to observe the energy saving potentials, and have studied the implications on the existing energy saving techniques; and nally, (v) we have provided a methodology to select user level test cases for performing energy cost evaluation of applications. All of our concepts and proposed methodology have been validated with extensive measurements on a real test bench. Our work contributes to both theoretical understanding of energy e ciency of software applications and practical methodologies for evaluating energy e ciency. In summary, the results of this work can be used by application developers to make implementation level decisions that affect the energy efficiency of software applications on smartphones. In addition, this work leads to the design and implementation of energy e cient smartphones.

The aim of this thesis is to suggest the ways of promoting energy efficiency in Turkey in the light of best practices at the level of European Union and most energy efficient Member States, Denmark and Gremany. This thesis provides a critical evaluation of Turkish energy efficiency policies in transmission, distribution and consumption stages of energy by pointing out their weaknesses. The evaluations highlight the fact that Turkey has substantial energy saving potential in electricity distribution grids and end-use sectors. The EU, Danish and German experiences demonstrate that the greatest energy efficiency improvement could be achieved in industry sector. By taking these experiences and the problems of Turkey into consideration, this thesis recommends possible measures. It is concluded that, when the energy efficiency potential is evaluated, primarily attention could be paid to industry sector.

Mit dem Spitzentechnologiecluster „Energieeffiziente Produkt- und Prozessinnovationen in der Produktionstechnik“ (eniPROD®) werden die am Wissenschaftsstandort Chemnitz vorhandenen exzellenten Forschungsbereiche gebündelt, um einen national und international sichtbaren Beitrag zur Umsetzung der Vision einer nahezu emissionsfreien Produktion bei gleichzeitiger Erhöhung der Ressourceneffizienz zu leisten. Um dieses Ziel erreichen zu können, sind Methoden erforderlich, mit denen Energieverbräuche unter Einbeziehung technischer, ökonomischer und ökologischer Kriterien erfasst und bewertet werden können. Die im Rahmen von eniPROD® gebildete Querschnittsarbeitsgruppe 1 „Energetisch-wirtschaftliche Bilanzierung“ setzt sich intensiv mit solchen Bilanzierungs- und Bewertungsmethoden auseinander. Der vorliegende Band enthält die Beiträge eines von der Querschnittsarbeitsgruppe initiierten Workshops, in dem verschiedene Facetten des Themenkomplexes der energetisch-wirtschaftlichen Bilanzierung und Bewertung von Wissenschaftlern verschiedener Disziplinen aufgegriffen und diskutiert wurden.

Computing systems are experiencing a significant evolution triggered by the convergence of multiple technologies including multicore processor architectures, expanding I/O capabilities (e.g., storage and wireless communication), and virtualization solutions. The integration of these technologies has been driven by the need to deliver performance and functionality for applications being developed in emerging mobile and enterprise systems. These accomplishments, though, have come at the cost of increased power and thermal signatures of computing platforms. In response to the resulting power issues, power centric policies have been deployed across all layers of the stack including platform hardware, operating systems, application middleware, and virtualization components. Effective active power management requires that these independent layers or components behave constructively to attain globally desirable benefits. Two choices are (1) to tightly integrate different policies using negotiated management decisions, and (2) to coordinate their use based on the localized policy decisions that are already part of modern computer architectures and software systems. Recognizing the realities of (2), the goal of this thesis is to identify, define, and evaluate novel system-level coordination mechanisms between diverse management components that exist across system layers. The end goal of these mechanisms, then, is to enable synergistic behaviors between management entities, across different levels of abstraction, and across different physical platforms to improve power management functionality. Contributions from this work include operating system level mechanisms that dynamically capture workload behavior thereby enabling power efficient scheduling, and system descriptor mechanisms that allow for improved workload allocation and resource management schemes. Finally, observing the strong need for coordination in managing virtualized systems due to the existence of multiple, independent system layers, a set of extensions to virtualization architectures for effectively coordinating VM management in datacenters are developed.