Creativity plays an important part in design and problem-solving. While the role of play has enjoyed a great deal of attention in the study of both creativity and problem-solving alike, the overlap between games and the creative problem-solving process has not enjoyed much scholarly attention. This dissertation therefore focuses on exploring the overlap between games and the creative problem-solving process. This exploration seeks to enhance the manner in which the role and function of gameplay within the creative problem-solving process is understood. This study is approached from the viewpoint of a thorough literature review and synthesises insights from design discourse, creativity studies and game design literature. Firstly, this study demonstrates the systemic similarities between games and creative problems. These similarities prove that both systems are capable of generating or allowing the emergence of gameplay. The second aspect focused on is the manner in which gameplay emerges from creative problem-solving and the value that it holds for that process. The third aspect focused on is the role and function of rules in both games and problem-solving in eliciting gameplay. These explorations culminate in a rudimentary framework that describes the manner in which the rules and limitations in a creative problem become established in order to allow gameplay to emerge. Lastly, the paper explores the psychological factors inherent in eliciting gameplay from a creative problem in the form of adopting a lusory attitude. The study ultimately demonstrates the crucial role of gameplay in creative problem-solving and the aspects that influence its emergence. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Visual Arts / MA / Unrestricted

The element of fairness in a performance appraisal system is essential for an organisation. If the system of an organisation is not fair, it may result in an employee being dissatisfied with the appraisal system and this may lead to extremes such as employee attrition. The purpose of the study was to examine educators’ perspectives of fair performance appraisal practices in selected independent schools in Gauteng Province, South Africa. The research approach adopted for the study was qualitative while the research design used was case study. Purposive sampling technique was used in the selection of the sample for this study. The findings of the study revealed that teachers think performance appraisal was conducted properly and the process helps to improve individual teaching output. The HODs believed performance appraisal was conducted in a positive and encouraging manner. The school principals also viewed the appraisal process positively, indicating that the competence of teachers and the quality of teaching and learning taking place in the school are assessed by doing performance appraisals. The different categories of the participants namely, teachers, HODs and principals believed that the process of performance appraisal was quite fair and recommended that there should be other tools for assessing the teachers’ ability. Furthermore, the teachers did not see the appraisal system as unfair, but proposed other effective ways of conducting the appraisal system. According to the HODs, the process is time-consuming and the principals were satisfied with the appraisal process but cautioned that the process would become unfair if bonuses are given to the teachers. In addition, the teachers submitted that the exercise can be unfair if assessment is based on incorrect or inaccurate information. A fair appraisal process is when all parties are open and communicate with one another, constructive and honest feedback is given as well as the use of agreed upon procedures consistently. In conclusion, to improve the effectiveness of performance appraisal practices, fair performance appraisal practices should be given utmost priority. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Education Management and Policy Studies / MEd / Unrestricted

Controlled foreign company (CFC) rules are anti-avoidance provisions designed to deter taxpayers from shifting their capital (and resultant income) to low-tax jurisdictions. Adoption of these rules in South Africa coincided with the relaxation of exchange control laws which opened up borders to inward and outward capital flows. South Africa's CFC regime has been amended over the years to become one of the most sophisticated amongst the G20 and aligned with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Action 3 recommendations (per the OECD's Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Action Project). Abusive profit-shifting tactics committed by multinational enterprises (MNEs) have caused the OECD to recommend that CFC rules be strengthened globally to combat this behaviour. However, in the United States and the United Kingdom, recent reforms appear to have weakened these countries' CFC (or CFC-equivalent) legislation, countering the OECD's recommendations. Such manoeuvres improve the profitability of these nations' MNEs by allowing their tax bills to remain lower than their international competitors'. As such, there is a danger of starting a race to the corporate tax-rate bottom where developing nations will be the losers, considering their greater reliance on corporate tax revenues than their developed counterparts. India and Brazil, both developing nations and BRICS members like South Africa, also aren't prioritising the strengthening of their CFC regulations – their focus is rather on improving transfer pricing (TP) legislation and enforcement to combat the damaging effects MNEs' avoidance practices are having on tax revenue collections in those countries. The existence of South Africa's advanced CFC legislation amongst a global trend of a weakening in, or the non-adoption of, CFC rules may hinder the competitiveness of South African MNEs. The current CFC regime could thus serve the purpose of stifling growth and foreign direct investment, instead of only deterring profitshifting behaviour. TP legislation targeted at MNEs (the biggest profit-shifting culprits) may yield the most effective anti-avoidance results. South Africa's recently enhanced TP reporting requirements are key to solving the offshore profit-shifting puzzle, as these reports will reveal information about an MNE's global operations and resultant profit-shifting activities. In addition, the revision to the TP arm's length principle to align compensation and value creation, will see profit-shifting MNEs bear the tax they were trying to avoid. It appears that the anti-avoidance purpose embodied within CFC regulations overlaps with the anti-avoidance mechanisms that these enhanced TP rules are designed to achieve. Thus, in a South African context, the most efficient way to curb tax avoidance may be to rely on TP, rather than CFC, legislation. As such, it is recommended that South Africa's CFC regulations be repealed.

Masters of Commerce / Diplomatic protocol may come across as entailing red carpets, table settings and dress codes when diplomats come together. However, there is much more to it. This research study explores the role of diplomatic protocol in constructing a foreign policy identity in the case study of South Africa. Protocol, along with the actions and politics of a country, shapes the perception that foreign powers have of a state, in turn impacting on their relations politically, economically and culturally. The study will be focused on diplomatic protocol during the administrations of three South African presidents since 1994: Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma.

The purpose of this study was to gather and analyze information concerning the establishment and administration of specific team rules and regulations used by the football and basketball coaches in Utah High schools. Sub-objectives of this study were: (a) to compare the opinions of coaches according to school classification - class AA, class A, and class B; (b) to compare the opinions of less experienced coaches with those of more experienced coaches; (c) to compare the opinions of basketball coaches with those of football coaches. One-hundred and thirty-nine coaches responded to a questionnaire that included statements asking for information concerning the establishment and administration of team rules, regulations, and penalties applying to the areas of alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs, curfew, attendance at practices and games, dress and appearance standards, and participation in recreational activities. It was found that the coaches were of the opinion that team rules and regulations were important in high school athletics. It was also found that regardless of the classification of the school, the sport, or the number of years of experience that the coaches had, the responses of the coaches were very much similar, with only minor degrees of variation in responses to some of the questions.

Research indicates that school officials fail to identify a relatively high proportion of school-aged children with behavioral or emotional handicaps. As a result, these children may not be receiving the special education services to which they are entitled. Multidisciplinary team members may be failing to identify these children because they lack understanding of special education rules and regulations. The purpose of this project was to combine the technologies of expert systems and mastery-based instruction to develop an inservice and preservice training program capable of producing mastery-level performance of the skills required to identify children with behavioral or emotional handicaps. Borg and Gall's ( 983) research and development cycle provided the model for developing, testing, and revising the program. Prototype evaluations and large-scale field tests revealed that the program met its performance and user satisfaction objectives when administered under conditions of independent administration. However, a failure on the use and part of remote remote administrators to comply with prescribed program administration procedures allowed an unacceptable number of subjects to end training without completing all computer exercises. Attention to administration procedures contributed to the success of the project in meeting its performance and user satisfaction objectives in the final operational field test. The positive findings of the project have implications on two levels. First, the findings are important for the positive effect they may have on the lives of children. Decision-making errors on the part of multidisciplinary team members can be costly to children with behavioral or emotional handicaps, as well as to other children. The evidence obtained in this project suggests that multidisciplinary team members can be trained to accurately identify children with behavioral or emotional handicaps. On another, and perhaps more important, level, the findings have implications for the design of effective inservice and preservice training programs. The application of innovative technologies to inservice and preservice training problems does not necessarily result in the development of products capable of producing mastery-level decision-making performance. The positive results achieved in the present project suggest that those seeking to apply innovative technologies to inservice and preservice training problems take into account basic instructional design principles.

Les Règles Métiers (Business Rules en anglais, ou BRs) sont un outil communément utilisé dans l’industrie pour automatiser des prises de décisions répétitives. Le problème de l’adaptation de bases de règles existantes à un environnement en constante évolution est celui qui motive cette thèse. Des techniques existantes d’Apprentissage Automatique Supervisé peuvent être utilisées lorsque cette adaptation se fait en toute connaissance de la décision correcte à prendre en toute circonstance. En revanche, il n’existe actuellement aucun algorithme, qu’il soit théorique ou pratique, qui puisse résoudre ce problème lorsque l’information connue est de nature statistique, comme c’est le cas pour une banque qui souhaite contrôler la proportion de demandes de prêt que son service de décision automatique fait passer à des experts humains. Nous étudions spécifiquement le problème d’apprentissage qui a pour objectif d’ajuster les BRs de façon à ce que les décisions prises aient une valeur moyenne donnée.Pour ce faire, nous considérons les bases de Règles Métiers en tant que programmes. Après avoir formalisé quelques définitions et notations dans le Chapitre 2, le langage de programmation BR ainsi défini est étudié dans le Chapitre 4, qui prouve qu’il n’existe pas d’algorithme pour apprendre des Règles Métiers avec un objectif statistique dans le cas général. Nous limitons ensuite le champ d’étude à deux cas communs où les BRs sont limités d’une certaine façon : le cas Borné en Itérations dans lequel, quelles que soit les données d’entrée, le nombre de règles exécutées en prenant la décision est inférieur à une borne donnée ; et le cas Linéaire Borné en Itérations dans lequel les règles sont de plus écrite sous forme Linéaire. Dans ces deux cas, nous produisons par la suite un algorithme d’apprentissage basé sur la Programmation Mathématique qui peut résoudre ce problème. Nous étendons brièvement cette formalisation et cet algorithme à d’autres problèmes d’apprentissage à objectif statistique dans le Chapitre 5, avant de présenter les résultats expérimentaux de cette thèse dans le Chapitre 6. / Business Rules (BRs) are a commonly used tool in industry for the automation of repetitive decisions. The emerging problem of adapting existing sets of BRs to an ever-changing environment is the motivation for this thesis. Existing Supervised Machine Learning techniques can be used when the adaptation is done knowing in detail which is the correct decision for each circumstance. However, there is currently no algorithm, theoretical or practical, which can solve this problem when the known information is statistical in nature, as is the case for a bank wishing to control the proportion of loan requests its automated decision service forwards to human experts. We study the specific learning problem where the aim is to adjust the BRs so that the decisions are close to a given average value.To do so, we consider sets of Business Rules as programs. After formalizing some definitions and notations in Chapter 2, the BR programming language defined this way is studied in Chapter 3, which proves that there exists no algorithm to learn Business Rules with a statistical goal in the general case. We then restrain the scope to two common cases where BRs are limited in some way: the Iteration Bounded case in which no matter the input, the number of rules executed when taking the decision is less than a given bound; and the Linear Iteration Bounded case in which rules are also all written in Linear form. In those two cases, we later produce a learning algorithm based on Mathematical Programming which can solve this problem. We briefly extend this theory and algorithm to other statistical goal learning problems in Chapter 5, before presenting the experimental results of this thesis in Chapter 6. The last includes a proof of concept to automate the main part of the learning algorithm which does not consist in solving a Mathematical Programming problem, as well as some experimental evidence of the computational complexity of the algorithm.

In this dissertation we consider the problem of cooperative sensing for secondary user access to primary user spectrum in cognitive radio systems. Using a fusion center or an access point, the cooperative users decide on the availability of spectrum for their use. Both Neyman-Pearson and Bayes criterion are considered for performance assessment. Our work on the asymptotic performance of counting rules with a very large number of sensors in decentralized detection problem shows that majority logic fusion rule has the same order of performance when compared to the best fusion rule based on the binary decisions received from the observing sensors in a network. In cognitive radio context, very large number of sensors may not be realistic and hence we would like to examine the performance of majority logic and counting rules involving a finite and small number of sensors. Uniformly most powerful test for decentralized detection for testing parameter θ when the observation is a sample from uniform (0,θ) distribution is investigated and it is shown that OR rule has the best performance among all counting rules in error free channel. The numerical study for reporting channel as a binary symmetric channel (BSC) with probability of bit error is also investigated and the results show that 2-out-of-5 or 2-out-of-10 has better performance among other k-out-of-n rules, whenever OR rule is not able to provide a probability of false alarm at the sensor, that lies over (0,1) at a given probability of bit error.

no / No / Scheduling systems based on traditional heuristic rules, which deal with the complexities of manufacturing systems, have been used by researchers for the past six decades. These heuristics rules prioritise all jobs that are waiting to be processed on a resource. In this paper, a novel Index Based Heuristic (IBH) solution for the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) is presented with the objective of minimising the overall Makespan (Cmax). The JSSP is still a challenge to researchers and is far from being completely solved due to its combinatorial nature. JSSP suits the challenges of current manufacturing environments. The proposed IBH calculates the indices of candidate jobs and assigns the job with the lower index value to the available machine. To minimise the gap between jobs, a swap technique is introduced. The swap technique takes candidate jobs for a machine and swaps them without violating the precedence constraint. Several benchmark problems are solved from the literature to test the validity and effectiveness of the proposed heuristic. The results show that the proposed IBH based algorithm outperforms the traditional heuristics and is a valid methodology for JSSP optimization.

Studiens syfte är att undersöka hur lärare i årskurs 4–6 arbetar med läsning och läsmotivation i undervisningen och hur deras arbetssätt förhåller sig till det forskningen säger. Teorin som ligger till grund för arbetet är Gambrells sju regler för läsmotivation. För att uppnå syftet genomfördes semistrukturerade intervjuer med sex verksamma lärare från olika skolor om deras arbete med skönlitteratur i skolan. Materialet har därefter bearbetats och analyserats utifrån teorin och aktuell forskning. Studien visar att lärarnas arbetssätt inom vissa områden har hög överensstämmelse med det forskningen visar är främjande för läsmotivation, men att det också finns brister inom vissa områden. Det som fungerar bra är områden där lärarna har kontroll och kan påverka själva, medan de områden som har brister snarare är sådant som ligger utanför lärarnas påverkan. För att stärka barns läsmotivation ännu mer behöver detta arbete även ske i större utsträckning på skolorna och i hemmen.