Thesis (Ph.D. (Mathematics Education)) -- University of Limpopo, 2018 / The purpose of the study is to explore the effectiveness of Annual National Assessment (ANA) in monitoring the standard of mathematics education and to assess the mathematical proficiencies tested and exhibited by Grade 9 learners in South Africa. The research problem was premised on the dearth of data that justifies ANA as an evaluative assessment. As such, the study utilised five strands which were; procedural fluency, conceptual understanding, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning and productive dispositions as a theoretical framework to assess mathematics that was tested and exhibited by learners. To explore the research problem, the study used mixed methods in the context of exploratory sequential design. Document analysis was used first to capture mathematics content and cognitive levels examined by ANA. Second, learner responses were explored using four variables of achievement levels; no response, correctly answered, incorrectly answered and partially answered. First, the results from the analysis of ANA questions indicated that ANA mostly tested questions of low complexity. Second, the results from the learners’ responses revealed that the majority of learners were not proficient to ANA irrespective of low complexity testing. Third, the Porter’s alignment index for ANA and TIMSS was between moderate and perfect. Subsequently, content and cognitive levels were misaligned in the three consecutive years of ANA testing. It implies that learners were most likely to show a deficit of higher order problems solving skills which are a prerequisite of courses in advanced mathematics. Additionally, the results suggest that ANA had challenges of reliability and validity as an evaluative assessment due to inconsistency in the testing. As such, it is recommended that the complexity of ANA be addressed, the content areas where learners are not proficient be addressed and the alignment of ANA must be frequently calculated to monitor the standard of mathematics education in South Africa effectively. Keywords Alignment index, mean deviation, strands of mathematical proficiency, systemic assessment.

La superposition de topologies virtuelles à la topologie physique d'un réseau est un des principaux mécanismes de l'ingénierie de trafic. Soit un réseau physique d'une certaine topologie et capacité fixées et une matrice de trafic à véhiculer, il s'agit trouver une topologie logique permettant de mapper de manière optimale la matrice de trafic sur le réseau physique. Lors de l'évolution de la matrice de trafic sur des échelles de temps longues, il faudra agir sur le layout. La première contribution concerne la définition de fonctions de coût mieux adaptées à la réalité d'un opérateur, la deuxième contribution concerne la prise en compte du coût de changement du layout. Il s'avère intéressant d'un point de vue opérateur de réduire la complexité du layout, mesurée comme une fonction du nombre de chemins virtuels. Nous avons donc formulé divers problèmes de minimisation de la complexité du layout sous des contraintes de QoS. Il s'agit d'une modélisation réaliste mais qui engendre des modèles difficiles à résoudre. Nous avons développés des heuristiques qui permet de trouver des solutions approchées pour des réseaux de grande taille. Nous avons montré que la complexité des layouts peut être significativement réduite en comparaison avec celle obtenue suite à l'optimisation des fonctions de coût classiques. Le changement du layout implique d'une part un coût d'opération et d'autre part peut engendrer des coupures de service qui affecteront directement le coût d'opération. Nous avons formulé une famille de problèmes prenant en compte le coût de reconfiguration du layout. L'une des heuristiques citées a été adaptée pour analyser ces nouveaux problèmes.

This paper describes what some 9th grade students think of their sex education in school, especially when it comes to gender, sexual identity, norms and deviation. I have been using group interviews in two different schools, two groups per school. The result of the students' answers have been analysed on the basis of queer theory focusing on gender and sexual identity. The result of the study shows that the students consider their sexual education to be lacking, especially when it comes to gender, sexual identity, norms and deviation. Another conclusion of the analysis is that a sex education grounded in queer theory would be more inclusive.

The aim of the present dissertation is to investigate attitudes toward individuals suffering from functional disorders or categorized as disabled and the conditions under which they have lived. The present author applies an historical perspective and identifies three significant turning points: the end of the eighteenth century and beginnings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The terms ”care” and ”control” reflect the complexity and conflict inherent in the perception and handling of these individuals. In the first period, folklore helped both explain and shape the way people apprehended infants born with functional disabilities or whose mental or physical developmet was aberrant. The inroads made by science during the eighteenth century helped combat these notions with knowledge and information. Upon ”discovering” the handicapped, the advocates of science identified them as an untapped source of labor. All that was needed was a conscientious upbringing and education. As a consequence, and with the blessings of the state and private charitable institutes, an increasing number of experts assumed parental obligation, thereby initiating a comprehensive institutionalization. The second period is epitomized by the founding of the first special needs school in Sweden, the National Institute for the Blind and Deaf-Mute in Stockholm in 1809. The actions of individuals like the energetic Per Aron Borg and the blind woman Charlotta Seuerling´s desire to receive a better education were small events with major significance. The diverging views of politicians and teachers on the form and content of lessons, which can be boiled down to a matter of theoretical knowledge versus practical vocational training, are also discussed. In the third period I focus on the increased control to which individuals with functional disabilities, specifically the vision-impaired and blind, were subjected at the outset of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1903, a countrywide inspection tour visited the blind in their homes. The inspectors were given the dual task of offering concrete support to the blind and look into their abilities to support themselves and live socially-approved, moral lives. It was an invasion of privacy with good intentions. The accumulated results showed that only a small number of individuals were able to support themselves in the trades they had acquired at blind school. Most continued to be dependent on relatives, social services and charitable donations.

Background Mathematical modeling combined with prior knowledge of the pharmacokinetics of the liver specific contrast agent Gd-EOB-DTPA has the potential to extract more information from Dynamic Contrast Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI) data than previously possible. The ultimate goal of that work is to create a liver model that can describe DCE-MRI data well enough to be used as a diagnostic tool in liver function evaluation. Thus far this goal has not been fully reached and there is still some work to be done in this area. In this thesis, an already existing liver model will be implemented in the software Wolfram SystemModeler (WSM), the corresponding modeling framework will be further developed to better handle the temporally irregular sampling of DCE-MRI data and finally an attempt will be made to determine an optimal sampling design in terms of when and how often to collect images. In addition to these original goals, the work done during this project revealed two more issues that needed to be dealt with. Firstly, new standard deviation (SD) estimation methods regarding non-averaged DCE-MRI data were required in order to statistically evaluate the models. Secondly, the original model’s poor capability of describing the early dynamics of the system led to the creation of an additional liver model in attempt to model the bolus effect. Results The model was successfully implemented in WSM whereafter regional optimization was implemented as an attempt to handle clustered data. Tests on the available data did not result in any substantial difference in optimization outcome, but since the analyses were performed on only three patient data sets this is not enough to disregard the method. As a means of determining optimal sampling times, the determinant of the inverse Fisher Information Matrix was minimized, which revealed that frequent sampling is most important during the initial phase (~50-300 s post injection) and at the very end (~1500-1800 s). Three new means of estimating the SD were proposed. Of these three, a spatio-temporal SD was deemed most reasonable under the current circumstances. If a better initial fit is achieved, yet another method of estimating the variance as an optimization parameter might be implemented.    As a result of the new standard deviation the model failed to be statistically accepted during optimizations. The additional model that was created to include the bolus effect, and therefore be better able to fit the initial phase data, was also rejected. Conclusions The value of regional optimization is uncertain at this time and additional tests must be made on a large number of patient data sets in order to determine its value. The Fisher Information Matrix will be of great use in determining when and how often to sample once the model has achieved a more acceptable model fit in both the early and the late phase of the system. Even though the indications that it is important to sample densely in the early phase is rather intuitive due to a poor model fit in that region, the analyses also revealed that the final observations have a relatively high impact on the model prediction error. This was not previously known. Hence, an important measurement of how suitable the sampling design is in terms of the resulting model accuracy has been suggested. The original model was rejected due to its inability to fit the data during the early phase. This poor initial fit could not be improved enough by modelling the bolus effect and so the new implementation of the model was also rejected. Recommendations have been made in this thesis that might assist in the further development the liver model so that it can describe the true physiology and behaviour of the system in all phases. Such recommendations include, but are not limited to, the addition of an extra blood plasma compartment, a more thorough modelling of the spleen’s uptake of the contrast agent and a separation of certain differing signals that are now averaged.

Syfte: Syftet med uppsatsen är att utreda huruvida avkastningar mellan etiska aktiefonder och traditionella aktiefonder är likvärdiga. Vidare avser uppsatsen att klargöra hur etiska fonder definieras ur ett teoretiskt perspektiv med utgångspunkt i rådande forskning.  Metod: Studien är av kvantitativ karaktär och utfördes med hjälp av fonddata inhämtad från respektive storbank och Morningstar. Det kvantitativa innehållet består av fondernas årliga avkastningar. Undersökningsperioden sträcker sig från december 2008 till december 2012.  Teori: Beta, Sharpekvot och Modern Portföljteori.  Slutsats: Studiens slutsats påvisar inga större skillnader mellan de etiska och de traditionella fonderna sett till avkastning. Den traditionella fondgruppen var den som hade marginellt bättre avkastning.

Normal children acquire the necessary social habits without being consciously aware of this, they learn instinctively. (Author’s translation from Swedish to English) (Asperger & Frith, 1998, s. 21)   This essay is about people who do not learn to socialize, the social habits, instinctively but through conscious learning. We have interviewed three adults with the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome with the aim to let them tell us about what it means to have a neuropsychiatric disability. We will briefly describe how the Asperger syndrome is described in the literature and what facilities are offered within the Swedish health care system. A diagnosis refer to a deviation from what is assumed to be the normal, therefore we will put forward theories concerning the norm of normality and normativity. We have tried through a theoretical discussion to deepen our understanding of identity formation and found the following arguments are reliable individual identity is shaped by three sub-aspects of identity; the identity of biological, psychological identity and social identity. Based on these theoretical arguments, a reasoning regarding how this affects what people with Asperger syndrome will and can tell us about when they talk about how they perceive their life before and after they have been diagnosed. Our intention is to critically discuss how identity formation is affected and how normality are handled and experienced by a group people with this diagnosis. / Normala barn tillägnar sig nödvändiga sociala vanor utan att vara medvetet uppmärksamma på detta, de lär sig instinktivt. (Asperger & Frith, 1998, s. 21) Denna uppsats handlar om människor som inte lär sig sociala vanor instinktivt utan att säger sig att göra det genom medveten intellektuell inlärning. I den här uppsatsen har vi intervjuat tre vuxna med diagnosen Asperger syndrom för att kunna belysa vad det kan innebära att ha en neuropsykiatrisk funktionsnedsättning. Vi kommer kortfattat att beskriva hur Asperger syndrom beskrivs i litteraturen och vilka hjälpmedel som erbjuds inom svensk sjukvård. En diagnos refererar till en avvikelse från vad som antas vara normalt och därför kommer vi att resonera kring det normala och normativitet. Varje individ skapar sig en identitet och i den här studien har vi utgått från förklaringar baserade på tre delaspekter; biologisk, psykologisk och social identitet. Vi har också sökt teoretiska resonemang för att fördjupa förståelsen kring identitetskapande. Med utgångspunkt i dessa teoretiska resonemang har vi resonerat kring hur detta kan påverka vad människor med Asperger syndrom berättar om när de talar om hur de upplever sitt liv före och efter att de har fått diagnosen. Vår avsikt är att kritiskt resonera kring hur identitetskapande påverkas och hur normalitet kan hanteras och upplevas av några människor med denna diagnos.  Studien har resulterat i ett resonemang kring hur diagnosen kan förstås dels som en förutsättning för att få de hjälpmedel dessa människor behöver för att leva ett normalt liv, dels vad just normalitet innebär och hur detta kan förstås påverka dessa människor utifrån de tre normativa aspekterna för identitetskapande. Vi menar att det är viktigt att kritiskt förhålla sig till vad som betraktas som normalt. Vidare att det behövs en förståelse för vad denna normalitet innebär och upplevs som av människor som avviker eller inte uppfyller de normativa kraven i det samhälle som de lever i.

When multiple cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs) are set up in a backlight module, parasitic capacitances are inevitably existent between the lamps and the aluminum back-plank. These parasitic capacitances are different from each other in introducing different leakage currents, and in turn cause current imbalance between lamps with undesired unequal brightness of the backlight module. In order to tackle this current imbalance problem, it relies critically upon a balance driving scheme. This thesis adopts the impedance-matching principle for a uniform light output. A detailed analysis and design of the balance circuit is implemented in a direct-type backlight module, which employs a series resonant parallel-loaded inverter with a transformer to generate a high AC voltage to drive multiple lamps. Adding appropriate capacitors on the load resonant circuits helps alleviate the discrepancy among lamp currents. Based on the experimental results, the maximum total current deviation is defined as an index of the current imbalance for multiple lamps system. Accordingly, the minimum impedance ratio can be provided for the designers to achieve balance driving. A prototype of the multi-lamp driving circuit with balance capacitors is designed and built for a backlight module with 16 lamps in a 32-inch liquid crystal display (LCD). Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the current balance scheme.

In the thesis, the Wilcoxon approach to linear regression problems is combined with the fractal image compression to form a novel Wilcoxon fractal image compression. When the original image is corrupted by noise, we argue that the fractal image compression scheme should be insensitive to those outliers present in the corrupted image. This leads to the new concept of robust fractal image compression. The proposed Wilcoxon fractal image compression is the first attempt toward the design of robust fractal image compression. Four different numerical methods, i.e., steepest decent, line minimization based on quadratic interpolation, line minimization based on cubic interpolation, and least absolute deviation, will be proposed to solve the associated linear Wilcoxon regression problem. From the simulation results, it will be seen that, compared with the traditional fractal image compression, Wilcoxon fractal image compression has very good robustness against outliers caused by salt-and-pepper noise. However, it does not show great improvement of the robustness against outliers caused by Gaussian noise.

This thesis focuses on mining user access patterns from netflow database collected from the core router of a regional network center. We use the attributed relational graph representation to formulate user access patterns on the Internet, and then propose a procedure to generalize common connection patterns and detect deviation patterns with such methods as large graph generalization, error correcting graph matching, frontier identification and pattern base recognition. The major contributions of this thesis are on represeting the network connection with attributed relational graph and developing data mining tehcniques for identifying access paterns and detecting deviation. The results can be used for better managing regional network in order to improve user satification in using regional netwrok netwrok services.