The increasing demand for and limited supply of fresh water necessitates an understanding of how human actions affect aquatic ecosystems. Anthropogenic impacts to these ecosystems occur in many forms including eutrophication, invasive species removals, and hydrologic alterations. Ground water extraction is one such action that can dramatically impact wetland hydrology and is increasing in occurrence globally as clean surface water resources are exhausted. Despite the importance of ground water extraction to meet human demand, little information is available concerning the response of vegetation communities to chronic ground water extraction. Over extraction is known to result in reduced water levels and duration, resulting in a shift towards more upland tolerant species; however, detailed information concerning the response of the individual species comprising these communities and how wetlands shift along with pumping regime remains unavailable. The following dissertation combines historical hydrology and ground cover vegetation data with recent monitoring to describe how ground cover (herbaceous species) and canopy (tree species) vegetation respond to fluctuations in hydrology and ground water extraction. Ground cover communities were extremely diverse with a total of 103 species being sampled in the historical ground cover vegetation dataset. Juncus repens was the most widely distributed species and was observed in 36% of all samples. The 29 species most widely observed in the ground cover strata (height) displayed relatively narrow ranges of preferred water depth and duration with Amphicarpum muhlenbergianum being found in the driest areas and Pontederia cordata and Ludwigia repens the wettest. In general species found in shallower water depths also tended to be found in locations with shorter hydroperiods, although woody species tended to found in areas with relatively shallow water depths with extended hydroperiod. Ground cover vegetation is extremely useful as an indicator of recent hydrology, although the hydrologic preference of the species in the current study does not reflect the assumed ecology of the species utilized by Florida Administrative Code 62-340.450. Additional research to validate and improve the accuracy of this classification system is required. When ground water extraction volumes in well fields was significantly reduced, ground cover communities were responsive, as was indicated by Permanova results (Before After Control Impact). All ground cover at wetlands located within well fields became more indicative of wetter conditions while control wetlands responding only to climate and weather all became drier. In contrast, several well fields displayed reductions in water levels and hydroperiod following extraction reductions. The shift in ground cover community indicates that ground water extraction has not produced an alternative stable state and restoration of these ecosystems is possible through alterations in ground water extraction volumes alone. As ground water extraction volumes were increased, tree communities responded by displaying increased occurrance of non-Taxodium sp. trees, mortality of wetland tree species, and light availability. All wetlands remained dominated by mature Taxodium sp. regardless of the amount of ground water impact indicating that each wetland has not yet shifted into a new community type as a result of non-Taxodium tree encroachment; however, recruitment and mortality patterns of both Taxodium and non-Taxodium species indicate this may occur in the future. Changes in light availability at the wetland floor associated with tree species is likely providing an additional feedback mechanism on ground cover communities. Results from this dissertation indicate that vegetation communities are extremely responsive to changes in hydrology and have shown significant changes associated with ground water extraction. These changes may not be permanent; however, and alterations in extraction volumes and timing can provide changes in vegetation communities even after decades. Routine long term monitoring should be conducted, in addition to critical assessments of current extraction volumes, to assess the current status of vegetation ecosystems and allow for individuals to best manage aquatic resources for all uses.

With the recent comeback of three-dimensional (3D) movies to the cinemas, there have been increasing efforts to spread the commercial success of 3D to new markets. The possibility of a 3D experience at home, such as three-dimensional television (3DTV), has generated a great deal of interest within the research and standardization community. A central issue for 3DTV is the creation and representation of 3D content. Scene depth information plays a crucial role in all parts of the distribution chain from content capture via transmission to the actual 3D display. This depth information is transmitted in the form of depth maps and is accompanied by corresponding video frames, i.e. for Depth Image Based Rendering (DIBR) view synthesis. Nonetheless, scenarios do exist for which the original spatial resolutions of depth maps and video frames do not match, e.g. sensor driven depth capture or asymmetric 3D video coding. This resolution discrepancy is a problem, since DIBR requires accordance between the video frame and depth map. A considerable amount of research has been conducted into ways to match low-resolution depth maps to high resolution video frames. Many proposed solutions utilize corresponding texture information in the upscaling process, however they mostly fail to review this information for validity. In the strive for better 3DTV quality, this thesis presents the Edge-Weighted Optimization Concept (EWOC), a novel texture-guided depth upscaling application that addresses the lack of information validation. EWOC uses edge information from video frames as guidance in the depth upscaling process and, additionally, confirms this information based on the original low resolution depth. Over the course of four publications, EWOC is applied in 3D content creation and distribution. Various guidance sources, such as different color spaces or texture pre-processing, are investigated. An alternative depth compression scheme, based on depth map upscaling, is proposed and extensions for increased visual quality and computational performance are presented in this thesis. EWOC was evaluated and compared with competing approaches, with the main focus was consistently on the visual quality of rendered 3D views. The results show an increase in both objective and subjective visual quality to state-of-the-art depth map upscaling methods. This quality gain motivates the choice of EWOC in applications affected by low resolution depth. In the end, EWOC can improve 3D content generation and distribution, enhancing the 3D experience to boost the commercial success of 3DTV.

This work explores the relation between the body and garments by illustrating the cycle of dressing, wearing and undressing in woven images. Based on experimental methods, such as scanning and photographing, images of garments are generated capturing garment details, surface qualities, movement, folds and volume. These demonstrate the constantly changing relation between the body and garments within the cycle of dressing, wearing and undressing. In translating the photographs and scans of the garments into weaves, a shading technique for jacquardweaving is applied that enables a translation of an image of a 3D-garment into a flat weave keeping the 3D qualities present in the picture. Through a gradation of satin weaves, different hues are created in order to define shadows and other surface qualities.  The changing relation between the body and garments is interpreted in different ways including the body’s presence as well as its absence which results in immediate material responses of the garments and demonstrates the various appearances of the body within this relation. This work results in a variety of woven images pointing out the different stages within the cycle of dressing, wearing and undressing. By using the image as a tool, its pictorial value of capturing moments of change and succession is emphasized. With this work, a new perception of bodily shapes in textiles is provided. Instead of imitating the body’s presence in garments through 3D – forms, alternative ways are shown in how to achieve a corporal illusion in flat weaving-constructions.

Magister Curationis - MCur (Dept. of Nursing) / This phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of undergraduate community health nursing students at the University of the Western Cape who conducted a family health assessment learning task in communities during their clinical fieldwork placement.The population included the 2008 semester two, third year undergraduate baccalaureus nursing students. These students completed their community health nursing modules at the end of the first semester. A total of nine (9) out of the eighty- nine (89) semester two students participated in this qualitative research study. The purposive and convenient sample consisted of those students who agreed to voluntarily participate in the research study. In-depth interviews were conducted with seven (7) female and two (2) male students to collect data. Field notes were taken and utilized to capture non-verbal communication of the participants. The focus f the researcher was to explore the lived experiences of students and not that of the family whom they interviewed. All interviews were audio recorded nd validated by participants after transcription, before any of the data was used for the data analysis process. The data collected was categorized into themes as guided by the systematic data analyses process according to Tesch’s (1990) method, as cited in Creswell (2003). Saturation was tested after nine interviews and the researcher found that no new data emerged. The importance of the research study was to reflect on the exploration of the self-reported lived experiences of the third year community ealth nursing students while conducting the family health assessment learning task. / South Africa

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3D representation nowadays has attracted much more public attention than ever before. One of the most important techniques in this field is depth extraction. In this thesis, we first introduce a well-known stereo matching method using color segmentation and belief propagation, and make an implementation of this framework. The color-segmentation based stereo matching method performs well recently, since this method can keep the object boundaries accurate, which is very important to depth map. Based on the implemented framework of segmentation based stereo matching, we proposed a color segmentation based 2D-to-3D video conversion method using high quality motion information. In our proposed scheme, the original depth map is generated from motion parallax by optical flow calculation. After that we employ color segmentation and plane estimation to optimize the original depth map to get an improved depth map with sharp object boundaries. We also make some adjustments for optical flow calculation to improve its efficiency and accuracy. By using the motion vectors extracted from compressed video as initial values for optical flow calculation, the calculated motion vectors are more accurate within a shorter time compared with the same process without initial values. The experimental results shows that our proposed method indeed gives much more accurate depth maps with high quality edge information. Optical flow with initial values provides good original depth map, and color segmentation with plane estimation further improves the depth map by sharpening its boundaries.

Motion capture technology has been applied in many fields such as animation, medicine, military, etc. since it was first proposed in the 1970s. Based on the principles applied, motion capture technology is generally classified into six categories: 1) Optical; 2) Inertial; 3) Magnetic; 4) Mechanical; 5) Acoustic and 6) Markerless. Different from the other five kinds of motion capture technologies which try to track path of specific points with different equipment, markerless systems recognize human or non-human body's motion with vision-based technology which focuses on analyzing and processing the captured images for motion capture. The user doed not need to wear any equipment and is free to do any action in an extensible measurement area while a markerless motion capture system is working. Though this kind of system is considered as the preferred solution for motion capture, the difficulty for realizing an effective and high accuracy markerless system is much higher than the other technologies mentioned, which makes markerless motion capture development a popular research direction. Microsoft Kinect sensor has attracted lots of attention since the launch of its first version with its depth sensing feature which gives the sensor the ability to do motion capture without any extra devices. Recently, Microsoft released a new version of Kinect sensor with improved hardware and and targeted at the consumer market. However, to the best of our knowlege, the accuracy assessment of the sensor remains to be answered since it was released. In this thesis, we measure the depth accuracy of the newly released Kinect v2 depth sensor from different aspects and propose a trilateration method to improve the depth accuracy with multiple Kinects simultaneously. Based on the trilateration method, a low-cost, no wearable equipment requirement and easy setup human gait tracking system is realized.

As firearms continuously become more sophisticated, there have been commensurate efforts to optimize the ballistic performance of armours, with ceramic materials currently at the forefront of such studies. These efforts have focused on improving processing and microstructural design with reinforcements using dispersion particles, carbon nanotubes (CNT) and boron nitride nanotubes (BNNT). In most studies, ballistic testing has been used to identify parameters affecting the performance. The research documented here focuses on: (1) the investigation of two commercial ceramics, namely silicon carbide (SiC) and zirconia toughened alumina (ZTA). The primary material properties evaluated for the characterization included: hardness, fracture toughness, flexural strength and Young’s modulus. Other properties investigated included the microstructure, porosity/density, and mode of failure or fracture. (2) Ballistic depth of penetration (DOP) testing for six candidate ceramic armour systems including three monolithic ceramics (Al2O3, SiC and B4C) and three nanotube toughened ceramic composites (Al2O3-BNNT, Al2O3-single walled CNT and SiC-BNNT). SiC showed a hardness of 2413 HV, which is far beyond the requirements for armour ceramic. In contrast, ZTA barely met the hardness requirement of 1500 HV, but showed improved toughness of 4.90 MPa m1/2 beyond values reported for monolithic alumina. SiC and ZTA showed that microstructural design improves fracture toughness but processing introduces defects that can substantially reduce other armour related properties such as the strength. The results of the Charpy and drop tower impact tests are in agreement with indentation fracture toughness results suggesting a great degree of reliability of this cost efficient method. The addition of nanotubes produced an increase in toughness and a decrease in hardness in the ceramics, which resulted in an overall drop in performance during ballistic depth of penetration (DOP) tests. A microstructure-quasi-static mechanical properties-ballistic performance relationship was established which led to the development of a novel ballistic performance index and a new DOP model. The proposed ballistic performance index yielded a ranking, which agrees better with experimental observations than the currently published indices. The developed semi-empirical model suggests that the ballistic performance of ceramics is improved with increased fracture toughness, reduced flaw size and higher density.

Focusing on the potential use of telemedicine among other efforts for better treatment of stroke patients, this study explored the role of telemedicine in the management of stroke patients and knowledge sharing among health care providers in Afghanistan. To this end, fourteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with physicians, specialists, neurologists, and decision makers from the Afghan Ministry of Public Health (MoPH). Actor-network and diffusion of innovations theories provided a theoretical framework for this exploratory qualitative study. The study was intended: 1) to find out about the major challenges and problems associated with managing stroke patients in Afghanistan; 2) to explore the perceptions of Afghan health professionals about the application of telemedicine as a means of improving the delivery of health services for stroke patients in Afghanistan; and 3) to understand the perceived barriers to knowledge sharing and to ascertain the potential role of telemedicine in knowledge sharing among health care providers in Afghanistan. The findings of this study demonstrated that almost all of the participants were optimistic about the potential positive role telemedicine could play in the management of stroke patients and knowledge sharing among health care providers in Afghanistan. Some important existing organisational, socio-economic, geographical, security, and cultural barriers to the management of stroke patients and knowledge sharing among health care providers in Afghanistan were revealed. To the best knowledge of the researcher, there has been no study of this kind conducted in Afghanistan yet; thus, the findings of this study will likely contribute to the development of health communication in the context of Afghanistan, and could likely be used as a resource for future research about the applications of telemedicine in various medical specialities.

The Master's thesis focuses on customer satisfaction and its relationship to profitability, which is becoming an increasingly more relevant topic of daily discussion among the managers across all industries. The search for an optimal strategy that would lead to a consequent increase of both could be compared to a search for the "holy grail" or to an invention of the "perpetuum mobile" of business. The overall goal of my thesis is to design a strategy that would have the abovementioned attributes and would lead to an increase of profitability and customer satisfaction for the Hilti Czech republic and its after-market service. The theoretical part reviews the general academic literature connected with the topic. The practical part focuses on the company Hilti AG - a global premium provider of building construction tools and consumables in B2B segment, and examines especially its after-market service department. The first section of the practical part analyses the outcomes of the qualitative expert in-depth interviews with managers across different business units and departments and with real customers. The second part of the practical part proposes concrete steps that will lead to an increase of profitability and customer satisfaction.