Information security has become a much discussed subject all over the world in the last few years. This is because information security is no longer a luxury, but a necessity in all organisations. The securing of information is not an easy task because information security is flexible and always seems to be in a state of development. This means that information security has undergone different development changes due to new technologies in the past few years. Information security became prominent around 50 years ago and had a very strict technical approach. In this approach, industries mainly worked with mainframes, with little or no concept of management aspects such as security policies or awareness programmes. The technical approach thus included little or no management effort in terms of information security. The need to manage information security began when new technologies such as the Internet and the World Wide Web were introduced to the information security environment. This caused information security to shift from the technical to the more managerial approach. The move of information security from the technical to the managerial approach may be identified through different development trends. These development trends have occurred mainly to improve information security management in any organisation. The primary purpose of this dissertation is therefore to identify and investigate different development trends that have an influence on information security, especially from a managerial point of view. / Prof. J.H.P. Eloff

Ph.D. (Computer Science) / The introduction of new portable sensors that monitor physiological systems in the human body has allowed quality of life and medical diagnostic applications to be taken directly to the user, without the constraints of physical space or inconvenience. The potential of these sensors in the domain of authentication and identi cation is becoming more feasible each day and current research in these biometric systems show a great deal of promise. Novel biometric systems are being introduced that use biological signals (also known as biosignals) in the human body captured by these sensors (such as brain waves or heart rate) as the core unique attribute. The study builds on the proliferation of these sensors and proposes an interoperable model called CoBI, which allows individual or multi-factor authentication and identi cation to take place. The model provides a platform for any viable biosignal that can be used for the purposes of identi cation and authentication, by providing pluggable sensor and signal processing components. These components can then convert biosignals into a common format, a feature vector consisting of estimated autoregressive (AR) coe cients. Once they are in a common format they can then be merged together to form a consolidated feature vector using feature fusion. This consolidated feature vector can then be persisted during enrolment or passed further for matching using classi cation techniques, such as K-Nearest Neighbour. The results, from the comprehensive benchmark performed (called BAMBI) on an implemented version of the model (called CaNViS), have shown that biological signals that contain cardiac and neurological components (ie. from an electrocardiogram (ECG) and electroencephalogram (EEG), respectively) can be captured, processed, consolidated and classi ed using the CoBI model successfully. By utilising the correct AR model order during feature estimation for the cardiac and neurological components, along with the appropriate classi er for matching, the biometric system yields nominal results for authentication and identi cation in access control environments.

M.Comm. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

No abstract available / Dissertation (MArch (Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Architecture / unrestricted

Magister Legum - LLM

In addition to being one of the poorest countries in Africa, Tanzania is considered the 13th most vulnerable nation in the world to climate change and climate variability. Currently over 63% of Tanzanians have no access to the national power grid. Instead they rely on biomass and kerosene lamps to provide energy in their homes. In addition, rural youth in Tanzania have limited occupational pursuits other than subsistence farming (both formal and informal). Utilizing a case study approach, this research qualitatively explores the effects of energy access in the form of solar PV for those seeking to secure this public good at a household-level. Face-to-face interviews conducted in the coastal region of Tanzania concentrated on understanding rationales for adopting off-grid energy (adoption rationales), particularly respondent's 'Awareness', 'Motivation' and selected 'Pathways' (the AMP Framework). High rates of rural poverty highlight systemic lack of energy access in Tanzania. In contrast, livelihood transformations through solar PV were observed in the case to couple with energy access. Indicators of improvement in living standards were observed to have cascading influence on other adopters which, in turn, encouraged further uptake. This innovative adoption lead to decreased pressure on the surrounding ecosystems, but environmental factors did not influence initial adoption rationales. Reflecting on the findings, the author develops a framework for better understanding of the role private actors take in transitions from to off-grid energy access in Africa. Reflecting on the case observations, particularly how respondents sought shape the flow of events independent, and sometimes in spite of, the State, the framework extends current understandings of nodes of change in rural communities and provides a more extensive exploration of behavioural theories (the AMP Framework and Diffusion Theory). Novel connections are made conceptually with emerging nodes of change and decision-making theories of change to provide fresh extension of these approaches to understanding poverty arrangements in Africa and what researchers and decision makers might need to consider for targeted interventions towards universal energy access on the continent. The thesis concludes with a range of principles for energy access in Africa distilled from the observations and framework developed. They include environmental principles of sustainable resource management and socioecological balance, social principles of equality and participation, and economic principles of access and stability.

Thesis (MPA.) -- University of Limpopo,2016 / The Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) was approved by the South African Parliament in February 2000 and went into effect in March 2001. The Act has been introduced in both public and private sectors with the intention of implementing the constitutional right of access to information and further foster a culture of transparency and accountability in both public and private bodies by giving effect to the right to access to information. The purpose of this study was to examine the implementation process of PAIA in the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture in Limpopo Province. Using both the qualitative and quantitative approaches the study revealed that there are various factors that contribute towards non-adherence and compliance to PAIA. The main findings of the study are that, although access to information is regarded as the pillar of democracy in promoting transparency and accountability within the Department, PAIA, however, has not contributed to the improvement of access to information in the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture in Limpopo. One critical challenge the study identified is non-compliance with the requirements of the Act which is perpetuated by lack of seriousness on the part of management. The study recommends that the Department has to identify a Unit to be responsible for administering PAIA, capacitate the Unit with relevant skilled human resources and financial support. Furthermore, the study recommends that as mandated by the South African Human rights Commission, PAIA should be known to the public, staff members and stakeholders therefore awareness campaigns need to take place. Workshops and training sessions would also help in making this Act known, leading staff, people and stakeholders to use it for their benefit.

Nearly a third of all emergency department (ED) visits are for non-emergent conditions. Several factors contribute to non-emergent ED use, though the relative importance of these factors and how non-emergent ED users differ from those seeking similar care in primary care (PC) settings are less clear. Surveys were administered to adult, English-speaking, primary care patients seeking same-day, non-emergent care in the ED and PC clinic at an urban, safety-net hospital during normal clinic hours. ED patients were eligible if they had a primary care physician (PCP) located at the hospital and thus the ability to seek same-day care in the PC clinic. Surveys assessed sociodemographics and six major care-seeking factors (perceived urgency, cost, convenience, beliefs about alternative sites, access, and referral). Patient characteristics were compared between sites using t-tests and Fisher’s exact test, and multivariable logistic regression identified predictors of ED use. Compared to PC patients (n=61), ED patients (n=59) were significantly more likely to be male, middle-aged, homeless, Medicaid-insured, and unmarried with a trend toward being non-White and less educated. ED patients were significantly more likely to perceive the cost of an ED and PC visit to be the same/free (69.1% vs. 37.1%; p<0.01) and to believe the ED would provide higher quality care (24.6% vs. 3.6%; p<0.001). PC patients were more likely to consider their doctor’s office as their usual source of care (83.1% vs. 37.9%; p<0.0001) and believe it is easy to make PCP appointments on short notice (74.5% vs. 54.2%; p=0.04). In the adjusted model, patients whose usual source of care was not the doctor’s office had the highest odds of non-emergent ED use (aOR 4.25, 95% CI 1.28–15.20), and patients reporting ease of scheduling PCP appointments on short notice had significantly lower odds of ED use (aOR 0.19, 95% CI 0.04–0.67). Non-emergent patients in the ED and primary care clinic differed by sociodemographics, usual source of care, and perceptions of cost, care quality, and ease of scheduling appointments. Opportunities exist to reduce unnecessary ED use in similar populations by promoting the primary care clinic as a routine and easily accessible source of high-quality care. / 2019-11-08T00:00:00Z

The traditional security systems that verify the identity of users based on password usually face the risk of leaking the password contents. To solve this problem, biometrics such as the face, iris, and fingerprint, begin to be widely used in verifying the identity of people. However, these biometrics cannot be changed if the database is hacked. What's more, verification systems based on the traditional biometrics might be cheated by fake fingerprint or the photo.;Liu and Cheung (Liu and Cheung 2014) have recently initiated the concept of lip password, which is composed of a password embedded in the lip movement and the underlying characteristics of lip motion [26]. Subsequently, a lip password-based system for visual speaker verification has been developed. Such a system is able to detect a target speaker saying the wrong password or an impostor who knows the correct password. That is, only a target user speaking correct password can be accepted by the system. Nevertheless, it recognizes the lip password based on a lip-reading algorithm, which needs to know the language alphabet of the password in advance, which may limit its applications.;To tackle this problem, in this thesis, we study the lip password-based visual speaker verification system with unknown language alphabet. First, we propose a method to verify the lip password based on the key frames of lip movement instead of recognizing the individual password elements, such that the lip password verification process can be made without knowing the password alphabet beforehand. To detect these key frames, we extract the lip contours and detect the interest intervals where the lip contours have significant variations. Moreover, in order to avoid accurate alignment of feature sequences or detection on mouth status which is computationally expensive, we design a novel overlapping subsequence matching approach to encode the information in lip passwords in the system. This technique works by sampling the feature sequences extracted from lip videos into overlapping subsequences and matching them individually. All the log-likelihood of each subsequence form the final feature of the sequence and are verified by the Euclidean distance to positive sample centers. We evaluate the proposed two methods on a database that contains totally 8 kinds of lip passwords including English digits and Chinese phrases. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed methods for visual speaker verification.;Next, we propose a novel visual speaker verification approach based on diagonal-like pooling and pyramid structure of lips. We take advantage of the diagonal structure of sparse representation to preserve the temporal order of lip sequences by employ a diagonal-like mask in pooling stage and build a pyramid spatiotemporal features containing the structural characteristic under lip password. This approach eliminates the requirement of segmenting the lip-password into words or visemes. Consequently, the lip password with any language can be used for visual speaker verification. Experiments show the efficacy of the proposed approach compared with the state-of-the-art ones.;Additionally, to further evaluate the system, we also develop a prototype of the lip password-based visual speaker verification. The prototype has a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that make users easy to access.

In this thesis, we consider maximized power allocation of non-orthogonal multiple ac- cess (NOMA) schemes since it outperforms than orthogonal multiple access (OMA) for the high altitude platform networks (HAPNETs) both in the back- haul and access links. Secondly, we propose a cluster formation (CF) algorithm and power-bandwidth resource allocation (PB-RA) for solving the resource management of HAPNETs. We adopt the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to explore the optimal de- ployment of high altitude platforms (HAPs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) iteratively by a given swarm size. By PSO, we provide the best deployment under a given iteration number. Besides that, numerical results show that the NOMA schemes have better performance than OMA ones concerning different network control factors like the number of BSs, HAPs, and UAVs.