<p dir="ltr"><i>Philolithus</i> is a genus of large, charismatic darkling beetles (Tenebrionidae) with 18 species found throughout the western portion of North America. Despite many species exhibiting mass emergence events as well as the large size of many of these species, much is unknown about this genus. <i>Philolithus</i> has had a number of taxonomic changes over the last century, a comprehensive revision of the genus was not conducted. In chapter 1, I conducted a species-level revision of <i>Philolithus </i>based on a comprehensive list analysis of external adult morphological characteristics. Based on the results of the study, I proposed the following synonymies, valid names listed in parenthesis “()”<i>;</i> <i>P. pantex </i>(= <i>P. actuosus</i>),<i> P. haruspex </i>(= <i>P. actuosus</i>),<i> P. uteanus</i> (= <i>P. actuosus</i>),<i> P. rugosus </i>(= <i>P. actuosus</i>),<i> P. jageri </i>(= <i>P. actuosus</i>),<i> P. adversus </i>(= <i>P. actuosus</i>), <i>P. reflexus </i>(= <i>P. actuosus</i>),<i> P. porcatus </i>(= <i>P. actuosus</i>),<i> P. opimus </i>(= <i>P. actuosus</i>),<i> P. </i><i>quadripennis </i>(= <i>P. carinatus</i>),<i> </i>and <i>P. sophistes </i>(= <i>P. carinatus</i>). Four new species are also described: <i>Philolithus rotundus </i><b>sp. nov.</b><i>, Philolithus zukomollis </i><b>sp. nov.</b><i>, Philolithus clarki </i><b>sp. nov.</b><i>, </i>and <i>Philolithus dorsoplanus </i><b>sp. nov. </b>Revised taxonomic keys were created for the subgenera of <i>Philolithus</i><i>,</i><i> </i>the species of the subgenera <i>Glyptasida </i>and <i>Philolithus, </i>and the subspecies of the monophyletic subgenus <i>Gonasida</i> based on Dr. Kirby Brown’s unpublished dissertation (<u>Brown, 1971a)</u><i>.</i></p><p dir="ltr">In chapter 2, I performed phylogenetic analyses of <i>Philolithus </i>using targeting enrichment, and Sanger sequenced data for the following mitochondrial loci: 12S, 16S, atp6, atp8, cob, cox1, cox2, coc3, nad1, nad2, nad3, nad4, nad5, nad6 and the nuclear ribosomal 28S gene. Recovered topologies support the monophyly of <i>Philolithus </i>from outgroup Asidini genera, as well as the monophyly and species concepts of the subgenera of the genus.</p>

The knowledge and cognitive process dimensions of Technology teachers’ lesson objectives This study employs both quantitative and qualitative enquiry, which seeks to establish the nature and quality of the lesson objectives intended by Technology teachers. Technology teachers are frequently faced with the need to use technological knowledge and its methodological approaches in their development of lesson plans and in their teaching. The methodological aspect and technological knowledge of these teachers should be reflected in the framing of lesson plans containing explicit statements of lesson objectives or learning outcomes. The cognitive levels to which the objectives lead are important because of the demands placed on learners by the subject of technology. Technology inherently requires mastery of some scientific knowledge, and procedures of the technological process from needs establishment to design and fabrication of artefacts. This requires learners to achieve at the upper levels of Bloom‟s taxonomy. This is the important goal of education. The purpose of this study was to investigate the knowledge and cognitive process dimensions of the lesson objectives in lesson plans of Technology teachers. These dimensions of Technology teachers‟ lesson objectives were mapped using the Taxonomy Table adapted from the Revised Bloom‟s Taxonomy. This study used a primarily qualitative research approach, with some quantitative analysis of data. A survey research design with limited scope was used to obtain lesson plans from Technology teachers in order to establish the nature and qualities of their lesson objectives. Lesson plans were collected from 19 teachers in three districts of Mpumalanga. These lesson plans were analysed, interpreted and discussed with sampled teachers in a focus group. With regard to the knowledge and cognitive domains of the Technology teachers‟ lesson objectives, findings from this study suggest that teachers tend to focus more on factual knowledge and less towards metacognitive knowledge, and operate at low-order level in the cognitive domain. In other words, technology learners are being taught factual knowledge at the low-order level of thinking. Technology teachers tend to have lesson objectives that are known only to them. This might imply that teaching in technology occurs without proper specific objectives. Measures need to be put in place to intensify support to Technology teachers so that they realise the importance of the formulation of lesson objectives that cover all the levels in the knowledge and cognitive domains. Furthermore, Technology teachers should be encouraged to state their lesson objectives explicitly. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Science, Mathematics and Technology Education / unrestricted

In modern educational technology we have the ability to capture click-stream interaction data from a student as they work on educational problems within an online environment. This provides us with an opportunity to identify student behaviours within the data (captured by the online environment) that are predictive of student success or failure. The constraints that exist within an educational setting provide the ability to associate these student behaviours to specific educational outcomes. This information could be then used to inform environments that support student learning while improving a student’s metacognitive skills. In this dissertation, we describe how reading behaviour clusters were extracted in an experiment in which students were embedded in a learning environment where they read documents and answered questions. We tracked their keystroke level behaviour and then applied clustering techniques to find pedagogically meaningful clusters. The key to finding these clusters were categorizing the questions as to their level in Bloom’s educational taxonomy: different behaviour patterns predicted success and failure in answering questions at various levels of Bloom. The clusters found in the first experiment were confirmed through two further experiments that explored variations in the number, type, and length of documents and the kinds of questions asked. In the final experiment, we also went beyond the actual keystrokes and explored how the pauses between keystrokes as a student answers a question can be utilized in the process of determining student success. This research suggests that it should be possible to diagnose learner behaviour even in “ill-defined” domains like reading. It also suggests that Bloom’s taxonomy can be an important (even necessary) input to such diagnosis.

BACKGROUND:Scientists rarely reuse expert knowledge of phylogeny, in spite of years of effort to assemble a great "Tree of Life" (ToL). A notable exception involves the use of Phylomatic, which provides tools to generate custom phylogenies from a large, pre-computed, expert phylogeny of plant taxa. This suggests great potential for a more generalized system that, starting with a query consisting of a list of any known species, would rectify non-standard names, identify expert phylogenies containing the implicated taxa, prune away unneeded parts, and supply branch lengths and annotations, resulting in a custom phylogeny suited to the user's needs. Such a system could become a sustainable community resource if implemented as a distributed system of loosely coupled parts that interact through clearly defined interfaces.RESULTS:With the aim of building such a "phylotastic" system, the NESCent Hackathons, Interoperability, Phylogenies (HIP) working group recruited 2 dozen scientist-programmers to a weeklong programming hackathon in June 2012. During the hackathon (and a three-month follow-up period), 5 teams produced designs, implementations, documentation, presentations, and tests including: (1) a generalized scheme for integrating components / (2) proof-of-concept pruners and controllers / (3) a meta-API for taxonomic name resolution services / (4) a system for storing, finding, and retrieving phylogenies using semantic web technologies for data exchange, storage, and querying / (5) an innovative new service, DateLife.org, which synthesizes pre-computed, time-calibrated phylogenies to assign ages to nodes / and (6) demonstration projects. These outcomes are accessible via a public code repository (GitHub.com), a website (http://www.phylotastic.org webcite), and a server image.CONCLUSIONS:Approximately 9 person-months of effort (centered on a software development hackathon) resulted in the design and implementation of proof-of-concept software for 4 core phylotastic components, 3 controllers, and 3 end-user demonstration tools. While these products have substantial limitations, they suggest considerable potential for a distributed system that makes phylogenetic knowledge readily accessible in computable form. Widespread use of phylotastic systems will create an electronic marketplace for sharing phylogenetic knowledge that will spur innovation in other areas of the ToL enterprise, such as annotation of sources and methods and third-party methods of quality assessment.

With the passing of the MAP-21 (Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century) Act in 2012, the United States bridge industry has had a significant push for the use of innovative technologies to advance the highway transportation system. Bridge Information Modeling (BrIM) is emerging as an important trend in the industry, in which various technologies and software are being used in all phases of the bridge lifecycle and have been shown to have a variety of benefits. However, most software are stand alone applications and do not efficiently exchange data among other software. This lack of interoperability creates impediments for the efficient and seamless transfer of information across the bridge lifecycle. In recent years, the building industry developed standards to promote interoperability for Building Information Models (BIM). Unfortunately, these standards lack the ability to incorporate bridges. Therefore, there major need for a standard for Bridge Information Modeling (BrIM). Moreover, as technology and modeling software have been coming more prevalent in other domains (roads, geotechnical, environment systems, etc.) there is an even larger need to expand interoperability standards across multi-disciplinary domains. The purpose of this research is to develop a methodology that would enable the interoperability of multi-disciplinary information models. The scope of the methodology is for Bridge Information Models, but the approach is extendable to other domains. This research is motivated by the fundamental issues of interoperability, such as semantic, logic, and software issues. In this research, the fundamental issues of interoperability are investigated as well as an in-depth review of literature proposing solutions. Additionally, current standards for interoperability of information models are reviewed. Based on the findings of the literature review, this research develops, evaluates, and validates a novel methodology for interoperability of information models. The fundamental issues of interoperability are addressed by the use of a taxonomy and ontology. A new standardization process to capture domain knowledge, called in “Information Exchange Standard” is outlined along with a novel method of developing an ontology based on industry workflows. This methodology has been used and validated by an industry domain case study. A software tool to automate the capturing of domain knowledge and development of a taxonomy is presented.

Parasitoid wasps are hyperdiverse, with current estimates suggesting that they may account for up to 20% of all insect species. Though their ecological significance and their importance in integrated pest management cannot be denied, these taxa remain understudied and, due to their small size, are often overlooked. However, recent advances in molecular techniques are helping to reverse this trend by providing tools which scientists can use to better understand species limits and host interactions. Parasitoid wasps are often morphologically cryptic and their accurate delimitation requires the analysis of DNA sequence data from fast-evolving genes in addition to morphological characters. The research presented here demonstrates the utility of a new molecular locus in species delimitation. Also, a morphological key to the species of a genus occurring in America, north of Mexico is presented. The interactions between parasitoid wasps and their hosts are highly complex. On the wasp side, it involves the production venom, which likely contains bountiful natural resources. In this study, the venom proteins of wasps of the genus Megarhyssa (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae) are identified. Putative functions are assigned to these proteins and possible applications are discussed. One of the proteins identified is the enzyme, laccase, which is associated with the degradation and digestion of wood. The sequence of the gene coding for this laccase was analyzed and used to create recombinant proteins in a baculovirus-insect cell expression system. Future work investigating this enzyme is necessary to determine its activity against the plant cell wall. The research presented here provides insight into the identification and venom composition of ichneumonid wasps. The results contribute to our knowledge of this understudied taxon and indicate that there is much to be gained from further research in this field which will become increasingly practicable as molecular techniques advance and become more affordable.

Databases are a critical part of Information Technology. Following a rigorous methodology in the database lifecycle ensures the development of an effective and efficient database. Conceptual data modeling is a critical stage in the database lifecycle. However, modeling is hard and error prone. An error could be caused by multiple reasons. Finding the reasons behind errors helps explain why the error was made and thus facilitates corrective action to prevent recurrence of that type of error in the future. We examine what errors are made during conceptual data modeling and why. In particular, this research looks at expertise-related reasons behind errors. We use a theoretical approach, grounded in work from educational psychology, followed up by a survey study to validate the model. Our research approach includes the following steps: (1) measure expertise level, (2) classify kinds of errors made, (3) evaluate significance of errors, (4) predict types of errors that will be made based on expertise level, and (5) evaluate significance of each expertise level. Hypotheses testing revealed what aspects of expertise influence different types of errors. Once we better understand why expertise related errors are made, future research can design tailored training to eliminate the errors.

The World Wide Web is transitioning from being a mere collection of documents that contain useful information toward providing a collection of services that perform useful tasks. The emerging Web service technology has been envisioned as the next technological wave and is expected to play an important role in this recent transformation of the Web. By providing interoperable interface standards for application-to-application communication, Web services can be combined with component-based software development to promote application interaction and integration within and across enterprises. To make Web services for service-oriented computing operational, it is important that Web services repositories not only be well-structured but also provide efficient tools for an environment supporting reusable software components for both service providers and consumers. As the potential of Web services for service-oriented computing is becoming widely recognized, the demand for an integrated framework that facilitates service discovery and publishing is concomitantly growing.In our research, we propose a framework that facilitates Web service discovery and publishing by combining clustering techniques and leveraging the semantics of the XML-based service specification in WSDL files. We believe that this is one of the first attempts at applying unsupervised artificial neural network-based machine-learning techniques in the Web service domain. Our proposed approach has several appealing features: (1) It minimizes the requirements of prior knowledge from both service providers and consumers, (2) It avoids exploiting domain-dependent ontologies,(3) It is able to visualize the information space of Web services by providing a category map that depicts the semantic relationships among them,(4) It is able to semi-automatically generate Web service taxonomies that reflect both capability and geographic context, and(5) It allows service consumers to combine multiple search strategies in a flexible manner.We have developed a Web service discovery tool based on the proposed approach using an unsupervised artificial neural network and empirically evaluated the proposed approach and tool using real Web service descriptions drawn from operational Web services repositories. We believe that both service providers and consumers in a service-oriented computing environment can benefit from our Web service discovery approach.

Today there is no agreement as to how developing countries can achieve sustained economic growth and wellbeing. Over the last 50 years many suggested policy panaceas have failed. Policy makers are now faced with growing economic challenges and confusing policy prescriptions. Against this background, the re-emerging study of institutions now offers new promise in explaining why development has so far eluded so many countries, and consequently, what can be done about it. This thesis deals with questions which to date have only received partial or cursory attention. The study asks: What really are institutions? Why do they matter? What can we learn about them that can help us deal with the current challenging development debacle? This study starts by reaffirming what institutions are. It shows that institutions are inescapable influencers of the way we relate to each other, and the effects we have on our societies’ economic development. Yet so far, scholars and policy makers have not yet fully taken up the opportunity of identifying and utilising the insights that the institutional perspective offers. This study deliberately picks up the challenge. Using the experience of the Uganda coffee sector, it shows that the nature of institutions can be better understood, and their role and impact, better addressed towards pressing development questions. The study shows that by integrating old and new institutionalist perspectives and theories of institutions and institutional change, it is possible to make much more progress towards understanding, explaining and addressing the role and influence of institutions in the development of an economic sector. In so doing this study goes beyond existing works on definition, taxonomy and explanation of institutional influence. It raises new insights to be considered as we face today’s contemporary development challenges. This research should therefore be of interest and value to researchers, students, policy makers and entrepreneurs concerned with economic development and the factors that shape and influence it in practice.

The Late Permian mass extinction occurring at 252.6 ± 0.2 Ma is the most severe Phanerozoic extinction event and was preceded and followed by additional disturbances. Patterns and processes of extinction and recovery of marine vertebrates have been little studied compared to marine invertebrates. This project focuses on Chondrichthyes, which, together with other marine fish, appeared to have been relatively unaffected by the extinction, while most of their supporting ecosystem collapsed. This study explores the authenticity of extinction among chondrichthyans and possible explanations for the observed patterns, because extinction severities on the taxonomic and ecological levels may be decoupled or the quality of the fossil record may be variable. The presented analyses are based on a newly compiled database that supercedes older compilations. It is supplemented by material obtained from numerous localities globally, which includes newly described taxa. Hence, this study attempts to be the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of patterns and trends in chondrichthyan diversity and distribution that is currently available. The data demonstrate that, despite some variability in the Permian–Triassic chondrichthyan fossil record, the Lopingian record is shown to be of adequate completeness and, furthermore, range-through genus diversity is not significantly correlated with the number of taxonomic occurrences. Genus diversity declined from the mid-Guadalupian following an increasing extinction rate, which intensified throughout the Lopingian and thus supports a combined overall extinction as a result of the end-Guadalupian and Late Permian events. Furthermore, global distribution of chondrichthyan diversity shifted away from tropical regions and particularly the Boreal Sea gained in diversity, tracking extinction and recovery in marine benthic invertebrates in both time and space. No significant dependence of extinction on taxonomic structure or palaeoecological traits exists, which suggests proportional losses, except during the end-Smithian crisis. Also, a significant size decrease is absent among Permian/Triassic boundary-crossing taxa, suggesting selective loss of large-sized chondrichthyans rather than adaptive size decrease. Ultimately, the Hybodontiformes, Neoselachii, Xenacanthiformes and Holocephali are identified as the survivors, which possessed a varying combination of characteristics such as moderate body-size, adaptation to brackish/freshwater environments, benthic or generalist littoral (clutching) feeding behaviour, and a wide palaeogeographic range.