This study investigates the underlying factors of paternalism and dependency in the mission work of the Reformed Churches in South Africa by focusing on the KOSH region. The study will examine, as a case study, the missionary work done by the white Reformed Churches among the black communities and the Reformed Churches in the Klerksdorp, Orkney, Stilfontein, Hartbeesfontein (KOSH) region. Such a case study aims to lay bare the main causes of the black Reformed churches’ dependency on their white Reformed counterparts. It will examine the issues of attitude, cultural and world view prevalent among the Reformed church members in the KOSH region that may cause paternalism and dependency in missions. The possible influence of apartheid developments on mission methodology and the strategy of the GKSA churches will be examined closely. As a proposal to overcome the residue of paternalism and dependency in the black church community, this study will expound the biblical principle of partnership in missions. Thereafter the focus will fall on the biblical point of departure of a partnership model in missions. Some practical guidelines as recommendations will also be suggested in terms of which such a holistic transformational model of missions could help to overcome tendencies of paternalism and dependency in the missionary situation. Chapter 1 focuses on the formulation of the research. It states the background, problem statement, research limitation, main research question, aim and objectives as well as central argument and method of research. To conclude, the chapter division is presented. Chapter 2 studies and outlines definitions, historical development and missiological reflection on paternalism and dependency. Chapter 3 studies and outlines key biblical perspectives on mission, paternalism and dependency from the missio-Dei point of departure. Chapter 4 investigates and analyzes the attitude, cultural and worldview issues prevalent among the Reformed church members in the KOSH region that may cause paternalism and dependency in missions. Chapter 5 investigates the field work on mission, paternalism and dependency in the case of the Reformed Churches in South Africa, focusing on the KOSH region. Chapter 6 investigates key biblical and missiological perspectives on partnership and interdependency in missions by which to overcome paternalism and dependency. Chapter 7 investigates the relevant principles and possible pitfalls regarding the motives of partnership and interdependency with the aim of establishing a holistic transformational model of missions in the post-apartheid dispensation in South Africa. Chapter 8 consists of the conclusions and summary of this study. The partnership model is proposed and practical guidelines as recommendations are made finally on the transformation of mission within the Reformed Churches in South Africa in the KOSH region in post-apartheid South Africa. / PhD (Missiology), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Bakgrund: I dagens läge finns det kunskapsluckor om hur den perioperativa omvårdnadsprocessen uppfattas ur operationssjuksköterskans synvinkel. För att operationssjuksköterskan ska kunna ge god vård till patienten utifrån dennes önskningar och behov är det viktigt att operationssjuksköterskan får en bra kontakt med patienten. Får operationssjuksköterskan dela patientens värld d.v.s. om patienten både vill och är förmögen till att dela med sig av sina tankar och önskemål, då blir det lättare att ge en personcentrerad vård. Syfte: Syftet med föreliggande litteraturstudien är att undersöka hur operationssjuksköterskan uppfattar den vårdande relationen ur ett perioperativt synsätt. Metod: Det är en litteraturstudie med elva artiklar som har en kvalitativ ansats och en artikel som har en kvantitativ ansats. Föreliggande studien har en kvalitativ ansats då fokus är att beskriva och tolka operationssjuksköterskans upplevelser av omvårdnadsprocessen. Resultat: Generellt sett hade operationssjuksköterskorna en positiv inställning till den perioperativa processen. Operationssjuksköterskorna upplevde att den perioperativa processen  bidrog till ökad kontinuitet och ökad trygghet hos patienterna men framförallt också hos dem själva. Operationssjuksköterskorna utvecklades i sin yrkesroll men också som individer. De kände att deras arbete var meningsfullt och att det fanns en vårdande relation mellan patienten och operationssjuksköterskan. Slutsats: Föreliggande studie lyfter fram att arbetet för operationssjuksköterskor skulle bli effektivare, säkrare vård, få mer kontinuitet och gynna både sjuksköterskorna och patienterna om den perioperativa processen användes i större utsträckning. Det skulle bli lättare att uppnå välmående och god omvårdnad i slutändan. / Background: At present, there are gaps in the knowledge of how the perioperative process is seen from the point of view of the operating room nurse. When it comes to the operating theater nurse to provide quality care to the patient, it is important that the operating theater nurse gets a good contact with the patient. The operating room nurse has to share the patients’ world. Then, it will be easier to give a patient-centered care. Aim: The purpose of this study is to investigate how the operating theater nurse experienced the perioperative process from her/his point of view. Method: This study is a literature review of eleven articles that have a qualitative approach and one article which has a quantitative approach. This study has a more qualitative approach. Its focus is describing and interpreting the surgery nurses’ experience of the perioperative process. Result: The surgical nurses had, to a large extent, a favorable attitude to the perioperative process. Surgical nurses felt that the perioperative process contributed to increased continuity and increased safety for patients, but above all for themselves. Surgical nurses developed professionally, but also as individuals, they felt that their work was meaningful and that there was a caring relationship between the patient and the surgical nurse. Conclusion: This paper emphasizes that if the perioperative process would be used on a larger scale, the work for operative nurses would be more efficient, provide a more secure care, give more continuity and be very favourable to nurses as well as patients. The result for the patients would be a good care and well-being.

This study is motivated by the numerous reforms to strengthen the efficacy of corporate boards and their oversight committees, in the wake of high profile corporate failures. The empirical question, however, is whether recent proposals would enhance board and their committee effectiveness and in this way, reduce the likelihood of firm`s failure. This study examines whether the composition, structure and functions of corporate boards and their interactions are related to the probability of corporate failure. Prior studies employ agency and resource dependency theories in isolation as theoretical lenses. This study, however, employs these aforementioned theories as theoretical lenses and argues that the board control and resource function affects the relationship between corporate board attributes and corporate failure. This study examines a sample of 358 UK listed firms, consisting of 95 failed firms and 263 non-failed firms during the period 1999-2011. This study also uses a unique hand-collected data set that measures the corporate governance attributes and functions of these 358 firms over a period of five years preceding failure or otherwise, resulting in 1748 firm-years observations. This study reveals that the probability of failure is lower in firms with large board size, former government officials, independent remuneration committee chairman and greater proportion of outside directors as well as effective audit and remuneration committees. This study also finds that the prospect of corporate failure is higher in firms with less than three independent NEDs on both the audit and nomination committees, without audit committee and where audit committee has no one with financial expertise. The results, however, suggest that the possibility of corporate failure is higher in firms whose boards have a female director and where the nomination committee meets often or where its membership is exclusively preserved for independent NEDs. On the interaction effects, the results show that frequency of board meetings as well as its interactions with presence of female directors, audit and remuneration committees effectiveness are positively related to the probability of corporate failure. The results also indicate that a number of interactions between corporate board attributes and functions are unrelated to the likelihood of corporate failure. These include the interactions between board composition measures (i.e. proportion of outside directors, presence of female directors and board size) and the board resource proxy (i.e. former government official). These associations, especially remuneration committee effectiveness, remuneration committee chairman independence, firm size and profitability, are not only statistically and economically significant but also robust to different specifications. Further, the Receiver Operating Curves indicate that the impact of corporate governance measures after controlling for firm size, liquidity, profitability, age, industry effects, and leverage is more profound in two years preceding failure. The implication of this is that corporate governance mechanisms alone are insufficient to rescue the firm on the verge of collapse. The findings are consistent with the idea that failing firms decline in size, managerial performance, corporate board attributes as well as their board`s ability to discharge it`s monitoring and resource roles. This study adds to the debate on the impact of corporate governance on corporate failure by developing, analysing and testing a robust UK corporate failure prediction model which is underpinned by a multi-theoretical framework: agency and resource dependency theories. This study also offers several recommendations for policy makers and firm-level corporate governance strategies in the mix of the numerous corporate governance reforms worldwide, this in particular makes this study unique.

In this modern era many educational institutes and business organisations are adopting the e-Learning approach as it provides an effective method for educating and testing their students and staff. The continuous development in the area of information technology and increasing use of the internet has resulted in a huge global market and rapid growth for e-Learning. Multiple Choice Tests (MCTs) are a popular form of assessment and are quite frequently used by many e-Learning applications as they are well adapted to assessing factual, conceptual and procedural information. In this thesis, we present an alternative to the lengthy and time-consuming activity of developing MCTs by proposing a Natural Language Processing (NLP) based approach that relies on semantic relations extracted using Information Extraction to automatically generate MCTs. Information Extraction (IE) is an NLP field used to recognise the most important entities present in a text, and the relations between those concepts, regardless of their surface realisations. In IE, text is processed at a semantic level that allows the partial representation of the meaning of a sentence to be produced. IE has two major subtasks: Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE). In this work, we present two unsupervised RE approaches (surface-based and dependency-based). The aim of both approaches is to identify the most important semantic relations in a document without assigning explicit labels to them in order to ensure broad coverage, unrestricted to predefined types of relations. In the surface-based approach, we examined different surface pattern types, each implementing different assumptions about the linguistic expression of semantic relations between named entities while in the dependency-based approach we explored how dependency relations based on dependency trees can be helpful in extracting relations between named entities. Our findings indicate that the presented approaches are capable of achieving high precision rates. Our experiments make use of traditional, manually compiled corpora along with similar corpora automatically collected from the Web. We found that an automatically collected web corpus is still unable to ensure the same level of topic relevance as attained in manually compiled traditional corpora. Comparison between the surface-based and the dependency-based approaches revealed that the dependency-based approach performs better. Our research enabled us to automatically generate questions regarding the important concepts present in a domain by relying on unsupervised relation extraction approaches as extracted semantic relations allow us to identify key information in a sentence. The extracted patterns (semantic relations) are then automatically transformed into questions. In the surface-based approach, questions are automatically generated from sentences matched by the extracted surface-based semantic pattern which relies on a certain set of rules. Conversely, in the dependency-based approach questions are automatically generated by traversing the dependency tree of extracted sentence matched by the dependency-based semantic patterns. The MCQ systems produced from these surface-based and dependency-based semantic patterns were extrinsically evaluated by two domain experts in terms of questions and distractors readability, usefulness of semantic relations, relevance, acceptability of questions and distractors and overall MCQ usability. The evaluation results revealed that the MCQ system based on dependency-based semantic relations performed better than the surface-based one. A major outcome of this work is an integrated system for MCQ generation that has been evaluated by potential end users.

This case study uses post-colonial and dependency theoretical lenses to investigate the forces influencing policy, procedures, and participation in international activity in the post-colonial African university environment of Kenya’s first national public university—the University of Nairobi (UoN). The research addresses (1) the approaches and strategies adopted by UoN to engage in international activity; (2) the changes that have taken place over time in international activity engagement at UoN since the attainment of political independence by the Republic of Kenya; and (3) the rationales driving participation in international activity. This investigation included library research, document analysis, multiple campus visits, and 20 formal interviews with the faculty and administrators of the University of Nairobi, Kenya. I argue that even though the University of Nairobi now exhibits some degree of agency in her international engagement as an independent post-colonial African University, limitations to this agency are evident given her colonial genesis as a university college linked to the University of London. Despite the fact that greater control has been realized in curricula issues, institutional level governance, income generating projects, and joint research collaboration and international partnerships, the road to independence in international engagement in a post-colonial university environment is still under construction. The University of Nairobi faces many challenges in her efforts to find a place in the global community of higher education. These challenges include, but are not limited to, lack of resources for human capacity building, shortage of faculty and staff, heavy teaching load, bureaucracy, loss of faculty control in setting their research agendas, commercialization of higher education, intellectual property rights violations, and brain drain. Rationales driving internationalization at the University of Nairobi are a consequence of contextual factors, some of which are external to the university and others internal and individual in nature. For example, whereas the academic rationales for participation, including research outlet, professional development, and networking are commonly cited as key motivators for international engagement, equally powerful economic motivators drive participation. I conclude this investigation by questioning the assumption that there can be balanced interdependence between marginalized African institutions of higher education (IHEs) and the developed world, as internationalization proponents suggest, arguing that these institutions are yet to break away from the colonial mold that led to their creation. KEYWORDS: African Higher Education, Internationalization, Post-colonialism, Dependency, Agency

Ht 2007

Worldwide energy policies are built on three pillars: ‘cost competitiveness’, ‘security of energy supply’, and ‘environmental responsibility.’ This has brought about the integration of renewable energy sources into national systems with the deployment of policy instruments to make renewable energy sources electricity (RES-E) capable of nearly competing on a commercial basis with traditional forms of electricity generation. At the national level within the EU, there has been much experimentation with different policy instruments with varying levels of success. Nevertheless the EU as a whole will not meet its stipulated renewable energy target. This study challenges the theoretical and abstract evaluation presented in the literature about EU wind power delivery systems and has developed an integrative evaluation framework. This evaluation framework is used in this study to present the views of key stakeholders on their experiences with the performance of key policy instruments (feed-in tariff, and renewables obligation) implemented in three EU Member States namely: Germany, The Netherlands, and United Kingdom. It also challenges the EU-wide harmonised renewable energy policy agenda as proposed in Directive 2001/77/EC. The concept of path dependency of the historical institutional approach was adopted in order to explore the diversity of the wind power industry across the three country cases. An indepth semi-structured interview with fifty-five senior wind power policy makers and experts was conducted to explore the historical emergence, the architect, and the outcome of the support and implementation of the policy instruments. Findings showed that the approach to wind power deployment in the three country cases differs significantly and this has affected the pattern of each country’s wind power policy instrument. Also, the role and contribution of the stakeholder groups to the success of the wind power policy instruments differ significantly in each of the country cases. This helps to explain the performance of the different policy instruments adopted. Concerning the harmonisation of EU renewable energy policy instruments which have received much attention in recent times, this study found that harmonisation based on a single policy instrument is not feasible and may ultimately inhibit the growth of the European wind power market. A harmonised system may cause uncertainties amongst willing investors, thereby causing a withdrawal of further investment in the wind power market. If this happens, Europe may also lose its position as the world leader in the wind power market. Furthermore, national histories demonstrates that Member States have different culture, stakeholder groups, political, and business practices that will influence policy instruments and the likelihood of any policy succeeding. Thus, rather than promoting harmonisation and political market for wind power, it is important that Member States adopt and implement, stable, flexible, and transparent policy instruments that enable wind power and other renewable energy sources to emerge, develop, and go through the R&D stage to a point of maturity where they can compete with other energy sources with limited financial support.

The Depressive Experiences Questionnaire Dependency scale has been used extensively by researchers to measure a personality style vulnerable to depression. However, subsequent studies have demonstrated that the DEQ-Dependency is composed of two distinct forms of dependency, "Connectedness" and "Neediness", which may have different implications for mental health. While Connectedness may represent a more mature form of dependency than Neediness, it may not represent an entirely "healthy" form of relatedness as previously suggested. Although these scales are being used in current research, it is not yet clear what they represent. One goal of the present study was to further examine the construct validity of Connectedness and Neediness in order to differentiate these constructs. Gender, self-efficacy, relationship quality, and interpersonal behavior were chosen because of their proposed significance in differentiating forms of dependency. 265 undergraduates completed the DEQ, Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Mutual Psychological Development Questionnaire (MPDQ), and the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP). Overall, results supported the importance of distinguishing between these two factors of dependency. Neediness was associated with more maladaptive correlates for both genders. The picture is more complex for Connectedness, however, and it appears that Connectedness is less healthy for women than for men.

The foreign policy decisions of small, weak states often go overlooked in the international system. Most understandings of small states emphasize their limited foreign policy choices under the influence of larger, global powers. Yet, there are numerous examples of small states selecting their own foreign policies unencumbered by the international system. This study seeks out those examples and argues that weak states often have the freedom to form their own policies and positions uninfluenced by global powers. To explain the foreign policy decision-making process of small, weak states and explore the relationship between small and large powers, this paper asks when and how do small, weak client states choose to not comply with the demands of large patron states in patron-client relationships? The use of the patron-client framework is a valuable tool for analyzing the foreign policy selection process of small and large states interacting in dyadic relationships. To answer the question, the study examines three separate cases involving patron-client relationships. In each case, the United States serves as the patron state while El Salvador, Pakistan, and Thailand represent the separate client states. The case studies examine moments of client-driven noncompliance to reveal how small states form foreign policy decisions. Ultimately, small states not only wield significant control of their own foreign policy decisions, choosing not to comply with the demands of a stronger patron state, but they also form policy based off diverse considerations—including domestic factors, self-interest, and capacity to comply. Findings suggest that clients in international patron-client relationship have more influence over stronger states than current theories would suggest.

Les applications vidéo rencontrent un franc succes dans les nouveaux réseaux de communication. Leur utilisation dans des contextes de plus en plus difficiles : réseaux de paquets non fiables (internet), diffusion vers des récepteurs mobiles via des canaux sans fil, ont requis le développement de nouvelles solutions plus efficaces et mieux adaptées. Les travaux de cette thèse sont une tentative de réponse à ces besoins. Les solutions qui ont été développées peuvent être regroupées en deux ensembles : des solutions issues de travaux nouveaux développés dans un contexte d'utilisation ordinaire et des solutions issues de l'amélioration et l'optimisation de travaux existants développés pour des contextes extrêmes.Le canal de Bernoulli a représenté pour nous le cadre de travail pour le développement des nouvelles solutions. Ainsi pour les applications de diffusion vidéo, nous avons ciblé la protection inégale et avons développé un mécanisme à protection inégale des données vidéo (DA-UEP). Ce mécanisme se situe à proximité de la source vidéo et adapte le niveau de protection des données à leur degré d'importance. Son originalité réside dans sa manière d'intégrer la particularité d'interdépendances des données vidéo dans le générateur de la protection inégale. Dans un travail d'approfondissement et d'exploration, nous avons combiné la protection inégale des couches hautes produite par DA-UEP avec de la protection inégale de la couche physique produite par de la modulation hiérarchique. L'optimisation de ce système a permis d'obtenir des gains significatifs et a validé le bien fondé de cette piste de recherche. Pour les communications vidéo interactives, nous avons évalué les performances du mécanisme Tetrys pour les communications vidéo. Ce mécanisme de codage à la volée avec intégration des acquittements a permis d'obtenir des résultats à la hauteur de ceux obtenus par la protection inégale dans un cadre de diffusion. Ces résultats ont aussi permis de mettre en avant tout le potentiel de ce mécanisme.Pour les canaux satellites mobiles, nous nous sommes intéressés à la diffusion vidéo vers des récepteurs mobiles. Dans ce cadre, nous avons évalué des mécanismes tels que les codes correcteurs d'erreurs, les entrelaceurs de la couche physique et de la couche liaison et les codes à effacement de niveau intermédiaire. Nous avons travaillé sur un canal réaliste en prenant en compte les contraintes pratiques telles que les temps de zapping et la vitesse de déplacement des récepteurs. Nous avons révélé les relations qui existent entre vitesse de déplacement, étalement spatial et qualité de réception. Ainsi, nous avons pu mettre en évidence les combinaisons de mécanismes qui permettent d'obtenir les meilleurs résultats en termes de fiabilité et de temps de zapping dans ce contexte particulier. / Video applications are growing more and more successful in the new communication networks. Their utilization in growing harder context as lossy packet network (Interne), satellitemobile broadcasting wireless channel, call for the developments of more ecient and well adapted solutions. The work done in this thesis is an attempt to answer those new needs. The proposed solutions can be grouped into two sets : solutions based on new works developed for medium context and solutions based on the improvement and optimization of existing works developed for extremes contexts. The Bernoulli channel represented the working environment to develop new solutions. So for video streaming application, we targeted unequal protection mechanisms and developed dependency-aware unequal protection codes (DA-UEP). This mechanism is located near the source application and adapt the protection level to the importance of the data. Its originality comes from its ability to integrate video data dependencies into the protection generator. In a forward work of improvement and exploration, we combined DA-UEP unequal protection from high layers with hierarchical-modulation unequal protection from lower layer. The system optimization achieves substantial gains and validate the righteous of this research area. For conversational video applications, we evaluated the performances of Tetrys in the video communication context. This On-the-y coding mechanism with acknowledgment integration achieves performances as high as those obtained by unequal protection in streaming context. Those performances also advances the high potential of this mechanism. The land mobile satellite channels represented the working environment to improve and optimize existing solutions. We particulary focus on satellite to mobile video broadcasting applications. In this context, we evaluated mechanisms such as forward errors correcting codes (FEC), data interleaving at physical or link layers and forward erasures correcting codes at intermediates layers. The evaluation is made on a realistic satellite channel and takes into account practical constraints such as the maximum zapping time and the user mobility at several speeds. We reveal the existing relations between user velocity, data spreading and reception quality. Consequently, We identied the combinations of mechanisms that give the best performance in terms of reliability and zapping time in this particular framework.