Nigeria recently became the leading economy in Sub-Saharan Africa with a total GDP of 522.64 billion of US dollars (Tradingeconomics.com). As GDP increases, population rises and food demand intensifies. Within this context it is of critical importance to achieve food security. However, Nigeria heavily relies in exportations in order to meet the growing food demand, especially of meat products, a situation which is not desirable. The livestock industry, although one of the largest in Sub-Saharan Africa, still constrained by several endemic livestock diseases which result in annual economic loses for value of 140 million of US dollars (Fadiga et al., 2013). Within this group, bovine and porcine trypasosomiasis alone has been estimated to be responsible for 50 million of US dollars in economic loses in Nigeria (Fadiga et al., 2013). However, the real epidemiological situation, and hence the possibility of developing a rational control programme, remains largely unknown across the country due to the absence of large epidemiological studies. Majority of the trypanosomiasis research studies in Nigeria employ the Haematocrit technique or the Buffy coat technique and Giemsa stain as a diagnostic method. These techniques possess a high specificity but a much lower sensitivity than the molecular method employed in this research study. In fact, better epidemiological studies employing molecular techniques have been conducted in recent times such (Majekodumni et al., 2013a; Takeet et al., 2013) and results displayed much higher trypanosomiasis prevalence than previously detected by microscopy. In many sub-Saharan countries the majority of national livestock herds are owned by mobile communities; however, the trypanosome status of cattle owned by mobile pastoralist communities have been less thoroughly studied when compared to those of sedentary livestock keepers. In this doctoral work, the epidemiology of trypanosomiasis was studied, in transhumant herds located in two different Nigerian enclaves: the Kachia grazing reserve and the Jos Plateau, both located in North-central Nigeria. Within Kachia, the ecology appears to determine the presence of infection with a spatially differentiated distribution of the detected trypanosome species being observed across the reserve that appears not to be related to the migration of livestock. While upon the Jos Plateau, the current reduction in trypanosome prevalence suggests an abrupt change in the trypanosome infection rates in this part of the country. The hypothesis established in this doctoral work is that these epidemiologically different scenarios are the result of land pressures that have ultimately resulted in the habitat destruction of the vector. Longitudinal data was also collected in order to assess the effectivity of different formulations of synthetic pyrethroids for the combined control of trypanosomiasis and tick-borne diseases. Insecticide treated cattle represents at the moment the best long-term and cost-effective method for the control of the vector responsible for the transmission of trypanosomiasis, the tsetse fly. Since no data exist about the efficacy of the insecticide or the compliance of the pastoralist population with its application under migratory conditions, its performance was assessed in this doctoral work. In addition, animal health outcomes were monitored to stablish the possible relationship between clinical symptoms and disease outcome and socio-economic data relevant for the dynamics of disease such as migration trends, husbandry practices, awareness and administered treatment has been also analysed. The compiled information of this data will establish the risk associated with contracting the disease and provide further indications for the control of African bovine trypanosomiasis in the specific context of transhumant pastoral systems of sub-humid sub-Saharan African.

The thesis investigates the deep conceptual structure of the distinction between creation and application of law. Legal philosophers either take the distinction for granted (and so do the vast majority of legal scholars in general) or, when they address it directly, it is so for the only purpose of criticising it as just another upshot of legal formalism. The latter approach suggests the distinction is either unsound or, at the very least, useless. The thesis argues that supporters of this stance do not realise the implications of their positions – which transcend legal-theoretical discourse and raise serious problems in both political and constitutional theory. The thesis’s first chapter purports to show that our models of constitutional democracy – as a complex set of institutional power-constraining mechanisms - are ultimately grounded on the distinction between creation and application of law. Hence the theoretical unsoundness of the distinction would undermine the very foundations of such democracies. The thesis argues that if judges are always creating the law, it follows that nothing like the ‘application of law’ is possible and, as a result, there is little or no justification for the practice of having statutes and other institutionalised forms of law. In this regard, Chapter 2 argues that realist theories of adjudication cannot make sense of one of law’s most important features, namely its normativity. More generally, undergirding a certain conception of our current adjudicative practices is the idea of (judicial) discretion, which is an essentially legal concept. In Chapter 3 I discuss this idea, comparing how it is conceived and used in both jurisprudence and administrative law (where such notion has been originally developed, at least in civil-law jurisdictions). The chapter aims at showing that an appropriate conception of discretion plays a pivotal role in grounding an analytical distinction between creation and application of law. Chapter 4 fleshes out the deeper philosophical assumptions of such distinction and, more specifically, it puts forward a conception of ‘law as communication’ which highlights the inescapable relation between law and language, and the parallel relation between philosophy of law and philosophy of language. In this chapter, I also argue that philosophy of language can and should play a role in understanding what law is, but that, at the same time, law is a unique communicative phenomenon, whose characteristics call for an original theoretical analysis. Finally, Chapter 5 brings together the several threads of the argument and presents the analytical model of the distinction between creation and application of law. The conclusion is that the creation/application distinction, thus conceived, is necessary not just in order to defend our liberal political practices - but more fundamentally, to account for law’s own raison d'être as a power-constraining device.

Master of Music / Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance / Ruth Gurgel / This lesson plan was based on my music education philosophy including the aspects of experience, socialization, application, and relevance. Students used aural skills while sight reading new music and singing dominant to tonic chords during warm up exercises. They created movement emphasizing different musical concepts and analyzed new music. I have grown exponentially as a teacher since I started the Masters’ program at Kansas State University. The two major developments in my teaching have been the paradigm switch from product to process and the cultivation of an environment where students take ownership of learning. My students have become independent musicians due to practicing aural skills, learning music theory, and activating higher-order thinking.

Dans le cadre de la gestion du cycle de vie d’une application, la création de correctifs de bugs est une des tâches les plus importantes. Or celle-ci prend aussi le plus de temps, non seulement parce qu'il est difficile de créer un bon correctif, mais également parce qu'elle nécessite des interventions humaines. Un utilisateur doit en effet signaler le bug et le développeur doit le reproduire et le corriger, processus long et fastidieux. Il existe des techniques qui automatisent cette tâche mais elles exigent toujours l’intervention humaine à savoir qu'un développeur crée un test reproduisant le bug, exigence qui réduit considérablement leur applicabilité. Dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous proposons une nouvelle approche qui supprime cette exigence en créant de nouvelles techniques de génération de correctifs. Notre approche repose sur l'idée de rapprocher le plus possible la génération de correctifs de l'environnement de production. En effet c’est celui-ci qui contient toutes les données et toutes les interactions humaines qui mènent aux bugs. Au cours de cette thèse, nous présentons comment exploiter ces données pour détecter les bugs, comment générer les correctifs et comment les valider, le tout sans l'intervention d'un développeur. Nous évaluons notre approche sur sept jeux différents de correctifs réels provenant de projets open-sources en veillant, entre autres, à être particulièrement attentifs au nombre de correctifs générés, à leur validité ainsi qu’au temps requis pour leur génération. Ces évaluations démontrent l'applicabilité et la faisabilité de notre approche dans la génération de correctifs en production sans l'intervention d'un développeur. / Patch creation is one of the most important actions in the life cycle of an application. Creating patches is a really time-consuming task. Not only because it is difficult to create a good and valid patch, but also because it requires the intervention of humans. Indeed, a user must report the bug and a developer must reproduce it and fix it, which takes a lot of time. To address this problem, techniques that automate this task have been created but those techniques still require a developer to create a test that reproduces the bug. This requirement drastically reduces the applicability of the approach since it still relies on the human. This thesis proposes new patch generation techniques that remove the human intervention for the generation of patches. Our idea is to put as close as possible the generation of patches to the production environment. We adopt this approach because the production environment contains all the data and human interactions that lead to the bug. During this thesis, we present how to exploit this data to detect bugs, generate and validate patches without the intervention of developers. We evaluate this approach on seven different benchmarks of real bugs collected from open-source projects. During the evaluation, we are particularly attentive to the number of generated patches, the correctness and the readability of the generated patches and the time required for generating them. Our evaluation shows the applicability and feasibility of our approach to generate patches in the production environment without the intervention of a developer.

Master of Science in Engineering - Engineering / Any software project goes through the different stages of a Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Like any other commercial product, software has a design stage but this stage is unique and critical to software due to its soft nature. A system that is given careful thought at the design phase results in a correct and complete system and adheres to software design principle. The “Unified Modelling Language” (UML) is a standard modelling language for object-oriented systems. Many tools are currently available to support the design and implementation of software. Generating skeletal code from a design brings down the implementation time considerably. This research report presents a list of criteria against which one can compare different UML tools, and puts forward a rating system where decisions can be made on them. It presents a comparison between four UML tools: ArgoUML, Rational Rose, Together Control Centre, and MasterCraft. An end-to-end application was developed on each of these tools as part of the evaluation process. During the design phase a detailed design was done using the ICONIX process. The different features of an ideal UML tool is analysed and used to evaluate the four selected tools. Of the four tools, Rational Rose, Together Control Centre, MasterCraft are offthe-shelf modelling softwares whereas ArgoUML is an open source modelling software. From the evaluation it is observed that Together Control Centre attains a high score with Rational Rose following just behind. MasterCraft comes third. Argo UML has the least score but it has the advantage of being an open source software.

Estágio realizado na OPT-Optimização e Planeamento de Transportes, S.A / Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2009

The use and application of geometric transformations is a fundamental standard for the Common Core State Standards. This study was developed to determine current high school teachers’ prior mathematical content knowledge and develop their content knowledge of transformations and their applications. The design of this study was guided by the questions: “Why is there a level of reluctance amongst secondary teachers when it comes to teaching geometric transformations?” and “How can their content knowledge become deepened to apply geometric transformations to prove that two figures are congruent?” The study provided teachers a chance to gain experience with transformations and use transformations to develop an understanding of congruence and similarity. The teachers’ work with transformations also enhanced their understanding of how transformations are the foundation for Euclidean geometry and begin to lay a foundation for the basics of rigid motion in the plane, with or without the use of coordinates. The results supported the claim that teachers’ transformation content knowledge needs to be deepened overall and in particular with respect to the application of transformations to prove that two figures are congruent. The results also showed that, with an increase of understanding of the mathematical properties of transformations, teachers are better prepared to teach them in their classrooms.

Mobile Attendance Application is a cross platform mobile application where students can mark attendance from their smartphones. This application takes multiple parameters into consideration to determine if the student is physically present in the class or not. i.e. the GPS location, Coyote login ID. This application also has the functionality to generate the attendance sheets in excel format to the instructor. The application is aimed to save class time at no extra cost of purchasing any special peripheral devices. User authentication is one of the important factors in this proposed system. Every student is authenticated based on his/her unique user identification number. If a student does not have access to a mobile device or if the device battery is dead, then he/she can indicate to the instructor who can mark the attendance in the instructor’s smartphone.

This thesis focuses on the shape-controlled metal nanoparticles for functional applications, covering the synthesis, characterization and optical properties. Three parts are mainly involved in this work, including, gold worm-like nanoparticles, silver nanoplates, and silver induced selenium nanowires. The first part focuses on a facile synthesis method for shape control of gold nanoparticles by treating an aqueous solution of chloroauric acid with sodium citrate and poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) (PVP), in which those worm-like nanoparticles were investigated by various advanced experimental characterizations combining density function theory (DFT) calculation. These nanoparticles can be used for optical sensing detection of ions in aqueous system. The second part involves the synthesis, growth, and optical properties of silver nanoplates (triangles and circular discs). Such nanoplates could be synthesized by a self-seeding co-reduction method at ambient conditions. In particular, molecular dynamics simulation is used to quantify the interaction energies between surfactant molecules and different facets of silver crystal. Such molecular information, together with measurements using x-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM) and ultraviolet??visible (UV??vis) spectroscopy, has proven to be useful for understanding the growth mechanisms of silver nanoplates. The third part focuses on the template of silver nanoparticles for generating trigonal selenium (t-Se) nanowires. This technique exhibits some advantages in fabricating t-Se nanostructures, including no need to use stabilizers and sonichemical process and all operations being proceeded in aqueous media and at room temperature. Particularly it can successfully achieve the transformation from amorphous α-Se to crystalline t-Se in aqueous solution and this method would be useful for generating one-dimensional nanostructures with similar lattice parameter(s). It is considered that the technique for the shape-controlled metal nanoparticles can at least partially, be extended to other nanomaterials for functional applications.

<h1>Fördomar och diskriminering existerar ännu i dagens samhälle. Rasfördomar förekommer dagligen i olika arbetsmiljöer och även under anställningsprocesser. Denna undersökning syftar till att studera och utforska om namn spelar en avgörande roll vid bedömning av en arbetsansökan. För att besvara syftet med denna undersökning utfördes en undersökning där studenter vid Mälardalens Högskola fick läsa en arbetsannons och en arbetsansökan med olika namn. Därefter fick deltagarna skatta och bedöma de arbetssökande utifrån tolv egenskaper samt finna om de sökande var lämpliga för arbetstjänsten som civilingenjör. Undersökningen påvisade att namn inte har betydelse för hur man bedömer en arbetssökande då det inte fanns en signifkant skillnad mellan namn och hur man bedömde en arbetssökande.</h1>