Cooperative behaviours among individuals play a crucial role in social interactions. There is a special interest in investigating the occurrence of cooperation among apes, because this knowledge could as well shed light on evolutionary processes and help understand the origin and development of cooperation in humans and primates in general. Gibbons are phylogenetically intermediate between the great apes and monkeys, and therefore represent a unique opportunity for comparisons. The aim of the present study was to discover whether or not gibbons (Hylobates lar) show cooperative behaviours among each other. In order to test for the respective behaviours, the gibbons were presented with a commonly used experimental cooperative problem-solving task. Additionally, social behaviours were recorded during behavioural observations. The gibbons in this study did not exhibit cooperative behaviours during the problemsolving task. Behavioural observations revealed that the gibbons spent significantly more time ‘out of arm’s reach to everyone’, suggesting that they are less involved in social interactions than other, more cooperative apes. Both findings combined support the “social brain hypothesis”, which predicts that cognitive abilities are constrained by the complexity of the animals’ social life. Based on previous findings of occurrences of cooperative behaviours in two other primate lineages (i.e. New World monkeys and Old World monkeys) it was suggested that cooperation in primates was a matter of a convergent evolutionary processes rather than a homologous trait.

The aim of the work was to find out and analyse social interactions and activities of the guinea pigs (Cavia aperea var. porcellus) during 24 hours. Five groups of short-haired guinea pigs were observed. The guinea pigs were filmed. Next, video records were analysed using ethograms and description of social behaviour between group members. Data record was written down to ethograms every 1 minute for a periof of 24 hours. Observed activities were food intake, resting (including sleep), movement and comfort beahaviour (grooming). Generally, eighteen guinea pigs (in five groups) were observed. Guinea pigs are friendly animals, they create stable and well-organised groups. None aggressive behaviour was observed between group members. Besides small conflicts because of age difference, food or interruption during sleep. The oldest sows were dominant and their place was close to food. It was found out that guinea pigs rested the most (726 minutes, half-day). Food intake made up 590 minutes (41 %) and movement 84 minutes (6 %). More active were younger guinea pigs and boar who was housed with two sows. Comfort behaviour took 41 minutes, guinea pigs also took cares of each other.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to find out whether pigs exhibit laterality in social behavior, especially the laterality of rotational movements in game behavior and social interactions. We aimed also to explore how this laterality is influenced by other factors, especially the possibilities of playful behavior in ontogenesis, personality and others social and non-social factors. Alternatively, whether the degree of laterality determined varies depending on the social situation (game / aggression) and whether is influenced by the litter. I have investigated this behavior for 64 pigs in 16 litters from videotapes of their social behavior. For each pig, I recorded the playing element and the preferential side. For individual game elements I did not find any preference for rotation at the population level and only a slight tendency for individual laterality. For social game elements, I have shown a weak population tendency to prefer left side, but only for a group of more playing pigs. The main contribution of this work is the symmetry found in the implementation of individual game elements and, on the contrary, the observed laterality at the population level for social game behavior. Since the laterality of playful behavior has not yet been investigated, it is possible that this symmetry is...

This work is focusing on questions of for-social behavior and altruism of nurses. For-social behavior is an important social phenomenon, such an antipole of non-provoked agresivity and probably of all other bad behavior (asocial, antisocial) . It is such behavior that keeps social bindings and that makes us closer one another. For-social behavior is characterized by acts done in favor of others without expectation of reward (financial, material) or social approval. In the first part of the diploma paper, there is outlined question of for-social behavior at theoretical level. Here is defined the term of for-social behavior, altruism, empathy with effort to answer the question why we help others, under what conditions, circumstances and to whom. The intention of this work consists in exploration-description of for-social behavior of nurses. The work deals with scale of empathy, altruism and affiliation of nurses in comparison with women non-working in helping professions. Furthermore, there is investigated the ability of nurses to cope with stress and that is measured by means of optimism scale. I did four hypotheses, all of which proved to be right. I used a method of questionnaire in terms of quantified research. Each hypothesis was based on its own separate questionnaire in question form. It was 200 question forms in total, 100 forms for nurses and the same for women non-working in helping professions as a control group. 174 filled forms were given back. The basic group was formed by 88 nurses and the control group by 86 non-nurses. The outcome of questionnaire research is that nurses show higher measure of empathy, altruism and affiliation than women non-working in helping professions. The nurses were also proved to be less adaptable to stress than non-nurses.

Truecaller is a mobile application with over 200 million unique users worldwide. Every day truecaller stores over 1 billion rows of data that they use to analyse for improving their product. The data is stored in Hadoop, which is a framework for storing and analysing large amounts of data on a distributed file system. In order to be able to analyse these large amounts of data the analytics team needs a new solution for more lightweight, ad-hoc analysis. This thesis evaluates the performance of the query engine Presto to see if it meets the requirements to help the data analytics team at truecaller gain efficiency. By using a design-science methodology, Presto’s pros and cons are presented. Presto is recommended as a solution to be used together with the tools today for specific lightweight use cases for users that are familiar with the data sets used by the analytics team. Other solutions for future evaluation are also recommended before taking a final decision.Keywords: Hadoop, Big Data, Presto, Hive, SQL on Hadoop / <p>Validerat; 20160819 (global_studentproject_submitter)</p>

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Zoology and Entomology / unrestricted

The evolution of social behaviour has been studied using different frameworks based on game theory and quantitative genetics. While both approaches provide a conceptually clear explanation of evolution of social behaviour, both have been limited in their applicability to empirical systems, mainly due to difficulties in measuring model parameters. Here, I develop a new quantitative genetics approach to the study of the evolution of social behaviours based on indirect genetic effects (IGEs), which parameters can be readily determined by empirical studies. IGEs describe effects of an individual's genotype on phenotypes of social partners, which may indirectly affect their fitness. Unlike traditional quantitative genetics assuming a non-genetical, non-heritable environment, IGE models assume that part of the environment is social, provided by parents and other interacting partners, thus has a genetic basic and can be heritable. In this study I explore the effects of IGEs on the magnitude and range of phenotypic values in a focal individual. I show that social interactions may not only cause indirect genetic effects but can also modify direct genetic effects. I demonstrate that interactions can substantially alter group mean phenotype and variance. This may lead to scenarios in which between group phenotypic variation is much higher than within group variation despite similar underlying genetic properties of different groups. Further, I analyse how IGEs influence levels of selection and predictions about evolutionary trajectories. I show that IGEs can create selection pressure at the group level, leading to evolution of behaviours that would not evolve otherwise. Moreover, I demonstrate that IGEs may lead to differences in the direction of evolutionary response between genotypes and phenotypes. Building on these results, I show that IGE models can be translated to and are fully compatible with traditional kin and multilevel selection models. I express costs and benefits in IGE parameters and determine the conditions under which social interactions lead to the evolution of cooperative or harmful behaviours. Therefore, the model I propose combines the conceptual clarity of kin and multilevel selection models with the applicability of IGE models, which parameters can be empirically determined, facilitating the testing of model predictions. Finally, I show that the use of IGE models is strongly limited by the underlying assumption of linearity. I prove that the modelling of interaction dynamics leads to steady state solutions found by IGE models only under limited conditions. In this light, I discuss the relevance of results published previously and propose a solution of how this problem can be addressed.

To find out how information technology, also known as IT, effect the human’s health in a negative way I have done a research on it. The research area is in an office working environment where employees use mainly software to solve their work assignments. The reason behind this is because it becomes more common for people’s mental health to become worse than better because of software was not made in the right way in order for human’s to use it. In the beginning it was made to make people’s life better, in this thesis’ case - manage work assignments. Unfortunately, the idea of a better way to handle work tasks did not always fulfill its goal. Software did not fulfill its task to improve how people work and instead everyone spend time to understand how software function. Time limitation, education and economy are some of the factors behind people’s mental health become worse. Even if research on this subject has been done, and will be done again, the problem still stands. For a better working environment in the future there is still the need of more research before researchers can determine what needs to be done to help people avoid mental health, such as stress, from IT. / <p>Validerat; 20160621 (global_studentproject_submitter)</p>

What kind of software documentation a systems needs and how much documentation that is necessary are questions that has a lot of different answers depending on a number of variables. Traditional software development methodologies claims that software needs a lot of documentation and more agile approaches claims that it is better to write less documentation since most documentation is never used. According to studies a ratio of 11% of software projects costs are spent on documentation alone. The purpose of this study is to create a cost efficient software documentation strategy for an existing web system with a focus on deciding what information are relevant to document in order to keep a high ROI. This study was conducted as a single case study and made in collaboration with a company. The data collection was done by interviewing key people working in the system and doing participants observations. The result shows that information documented in a high level is what is most needed. Artifacts relevant to document are the source code, requirements of updates, functional tests, high-level architecture, reference manual and an end-user manual. The result also shows that new processes need to be implemented for the documentation strategy to be efficient. Recommendation for further research is to create a method of how to calculate the ROI for software documentation based on a number of organizational variables. / <p>Validerat; 20160615 (global_studentproject_submitter)</p>

With businesses’ and organizations’ steadily growing dependence on IT, the infrastructure of Information Systems has become a lot more complex. Reasons such as company mergers and continuously changing markets have made system integration an increasingly important factor for companies today. This was the background for the following study which sought to solve a company’s system integration problem through the use of a more modern, service-oriented approach. A need for systems to communicate and exchange information in a more reliable and efficient manner had yielded demands for an improved integration. Therefore, the objective was to design a robust and flexible architecture that would handle all of the current systems integration needs while the purpose was to find evidence of whether the use of service-orientation along with the introduction of an Enterprise Service Bus would deliver project value.The resulting prototype makes use of a web service and an Enterprise Service Bus to deliver the functions necessary to satisfy the requirements. Several of the requirements were met through the very use of service-orientation which played a small but nonetheless instrumental part in the construction and development process of the integration solution. / <p>Validerat; 20160616 (global_studentproject_submitter)</p>