Mbhashe Local Municipality is part of eight local municipalities that make up Amathole District Municipality. The study is conducted in Mbhashe local Municipality where two co-operatives have been sampled. The purpose of the study was to investigate the challenges faced by co-operatives in achieving its intended purpose (i.e. alleviating poverty, creating employment and generating income). It is the intention of the researcher to investigate the socio-economic role played by co-operatives in this afore mentioned local municipality. For the research to be able to examine and analyse the performance and challenges faced by co-operatives around Mbhashe certain key aspects were extensively taken into consideration. These aspects are co-operative leadership, management structures, external support from different stakeholders, like different government departments, communities where co-operatives are located, and the role of NGO’s. It was the intention of the researcher to analyse the type of support given by each of the above mentioned stakeholders. It was through the study that the research was able to deduce whether the support given by these various stakeholders was enough or not in ensuring viability and sustainability of co-operatives. In conducting the research a qualitative approach was used whereby various instruments were used to collect data. It was through the variety of instruments used that the researcher managed to capture the challenges faced by co-operatives. Apart from the challenges which were the main focus of the researcher, the findings also reveal that co-operatives play a vital role in socio-economic development. This is more evident in rural areas such as those at Mbhashe Local Municipality. There is undisputed evidence shown by co-operatives that community members do benefit from the produce created by co-operatives. If co-operatives can receive the type of support they deserve, poverty in rural areas can be put to absolute minimum.

In this thesis, we consider a cooperative relay-assisted communication system that uses rateless codes. When multiple relays are present, the relay with the highest channel gain to the source is the first to successfully decode a message from the source and forward it to the destination. Thus, the unique properties of rateless codes ensure that both rate adaptation and relay selection occur without the transmitting source or relays acquiring instantaneous channel knowledge. We show that in such cooperative systems, buffering messages at relays significantly increases throughput. We develop a novel analysis of these systems that combines the communication-theoretic aspects of cooperation over fading channels with the queuing-theoretic aspects associated with buffering. Closed-form expressions are derived for the throughput and end-to-end delay for the general case in which the channels between various nodes are not statistically identical. Results are also shown for the benchmark system that does not buffer messages. Though relay selection combined with buffering of messages at the relays substantially increases the throughput of a cooperative network, it also increases the end-to-end delays due to the additional queuing delays at the relay nodes. In order to overcome this, we propose a novel method that exploits a unique property of rateless codes that enables a receiver to decode a message from non-contiguous and unordered portions of the received signal. In it, each relay, depending on its queue length, ignores its received coded bits with a given probability. We show that this substantially reduces the end-to-end delays while retaining almost all of the throughput gain achieved by buffering. In effect, the method increases the odds that the message is first decoded by a relay with a smaller queue. Thus, the queuing load is balanced across the relays and traded off with transmission times. We derive conditions for the stability of this system when the various channels undergo fading. Despite encountering analytically intractable G/GI/1 queues in our system, we also gain insights about the method by analyzing a similar system with a simpler model for the relay-to-destination transmission times. Next we combine the single relay selection scheme at the source with physical layer power control at the relays (due to the diversity provided by the rateless codes, power control at the source is not needed). We derive an optimal power control policy that minimizes the relay to destination transmission time. Due to its computational and implementation complexity, we develop another heuristic easily implementable near optimal policy. In this policy, power allocated turns out to be inversely proportional to the square root of channel gain. We also see that this policy performs better than the channel inversion policy. Our power control solution substantially decreases the mean end-to-end delays with a marginal increase in throughput also. Finally, we combine bit dropping with power control at the relays which further improves the system performance.

The diploma thesis deals with the topic of liquidation as a form of economic decline of companies. In the theoretical part of the thesis economic decline is outlined and the legal regulations related to the process of liquidation are elaborated. The practical part of the thesis provides the reader with the analysis of statistical data regarding the insolvency and liquidation processes in the Czech Republic and with the further description of the particular case of liquidation on the example of Cooperative G 19.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the satisfaction which co-operative housing members experience during the process of obtaining and living in their dwellings. With the recent surge of growth of housing co-operatives in British Columbia, an evaluation of this form of tenure seems timely. Traditionally evaluation studies have assessed a program or agency by relying on the input of the administrators. Although several government studies have investigated co-operative housing, little work has been completed which assesses this type of tenure from the user point of view. A distinctive characteristic of co-operative housing is the opportunity for the members to be totally involved in the planning and management of the project. This study therefore evaluates co-operative housing by investigating the satisfaction which users derive from their living environment. Members of co-operatives in the Greater Vancouver Regional District whose projects were completed or in the planning stages were personally interviewed and factors relating to satisfaction were discussed. From this survey, it became clear that the majority of people are very satisfied with their housing and the process they experienced to obtain it. In the case of completed projects, satisfaction was strongly linked with co-operators' perceptions of a strong sense of community, attendance at recent co-operative housing meetings, understanding of co-operative ownership, the kind's of-expectations of co-operative living which members have, and previous co-operative experience. For members of projects in the planning stages satisfaction was linked with understanding of co-operative ownership, ability to contact the co-operative's Board of Directors and desire to join other co-operative activities. Recommendations for improving or influencing those factors which are related to satisfaction are suggested. Two major issues emerged that relate to the co-operative housing movement in general. These are: user participation in the planning and management of the project, and member education. It is suggested that by enlarging and improving the education program the financial and social responsibilities of co-operative housing will be better understood and more people will take advantage of the opportunity to participate. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

No description available.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(地域研究) / 甲第21897号 / 地博第243号 / 新制||地||90(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院アジア・アフリカ地域研究研究科東南アジア地域研究専攻 / (主査)教授 水野 広祐, 教授 岡本 正明, 教授 高橋 基樹 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Area Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM

Avec l’émergence et la prolifération des applications du Web sémantique, de nombreuses et récentes larges bases de connaissances (BC) sont disponibles sur le Web. Ces BC contiennent des entités (nommées) et des faits sur ces entités. Elles contiennent également les classes sémantiques de ces entités et leurs liens mutuels.De plus, plusieurs BC peuvent être interconnectées au niveau entités, formant ainsi le noyau du Web des données liées (ou ouvertes). Une caractérisation essentielle de ces BC est qu’elles contiennent des millions à des billions de triplets RDF incertains. Les causes de cette incertitude sont diverses et multiples. Elle peut résulter de l’intégration de sources de données de différents niveaux de fiabilité ou elle peut être causée par des considérations de préservation de la confidentialité. Aussi, elle peut être due à des facteurs li´es au manque d’informations, à la limitation des équipements de mesures ou à l’évolution d’informations. L’objectif de ce travail de thèse est d’améliorer l’ergonomie et la convivialité des systèmes modernes visant à exploiter des BC entachées d’incertitude. En particulier, ce travail propose des techniques coopératives et intelligentes aidant l’utilisateur dans ses prises de décisions quand ses recherches retournent des résultats insatisfaisants en termes de quantité ou de fiabilité.Dans un premier temps, nous nous sommes intéressés au problème des requêtes RDF retournant un ensemble vide de réponses. Ce type de réponse est frustrant et ne sert pas les attentes de l’utilisateur. L’approche proposée pour le traitement de ce problème est guidée par la requête initiale et offre un double avantage :(i) elle permet de fournir une explication sur l’échec de la requête en identifiant les MFS (Minimal Failing Sub-queries) et, (ii) elle permet de calculer des requêtes alternatives appelées XSS (maXimal Succeeding Subqueries),sémantiquement proches de la requête initiale et dont les réponses sont non-vides. Par ailleurs, d’un point de vue utilisateur, cette solution présente un niveau élevé de flexibilité dans le sens o`u plusieurs degrés d‘incertitude peuvent être simultanément considérés. Dans une seconde contribution, nous avons abord´e l’étude du problème dual au problème cité ci-dessus,c’est-`a-dire le cas des requêtes retournant un nombre trop élevé de réponses dans le contexte des données RDF.La solution préconisée vise `a réduire cet ensemble de réponses pour permettre à l’utilisateur de les examiner.Des contreparties des MFS et des XSS ont été établies, ce qui a permis d’identifier, d’une part, les causes du problème et, d’autre part, des requêtes alternatives dont les résultats peuvent être directement et facilement exploitables à des fins de décision.L’ensemble de nos propositions ont été validées par une série d’expérimentations portant sur différentes larges bases de connaissances en présence d’incertitude (WatDiv et LUBM). Nous avons aussi utilisé plusieurs Triplestores pour mener nos tests. / In the era of digitilization, and with the emergence of several semantic Web applications, many new knowledge bases (KBs) are available on the Web. These KBs contain (named) entities and facts about these entities. They also contain the semantic classes of these entities and their mutual links. In addition, multiple KBs could be interconnected by their entities, forming the core of the linked data web. A distinctive feature of these KBs is that they contain millions to trillions of unreliable RDF triples. This uncertainty has multiple causes. It can result from the integration of data sources with various levels of intrinsic reliability or it can be caused by some considerations to preserve confidentiality. Furthermore, it may be due to factors related to the lack of information, the limits of measuring equipment or the evolution of information. The goal of this thesis is to improve the usability of modern systems aiming at exploiting uncertain KBs. In particular, this work proposes cooperative and intelligent techniques that could help the user in his decision-making when his query returns unsatisfactory results in terms of quantity or reliability. First, we address the problem of failing RDF queries (i.e., queries that result in an empty set of responses).This type of response is frustrating and does not meet the user’s expectations. The approach proposed to handle this problem is query-driven and offers a two fold advantage: (i) it provides the user with a rich explanation of the failure of his query by identifying the MFS (Minimal Failing Sub-queries) and (ii) it allows the computation of alternative queries called XSS (maXimal Succeeding Sub-queries), semantically close to the initial query, with non-empty answers. Moreover, from a user’s point of view, this solution offers a high level of flexibility given that several degrees of uncertainty can be simultaneously considered.In the second contribution, we study the dual problem to the above problem (i.e., queries whose execution results in a very large set of responses). Our solution aims at reducing this set of responses to enable their analysis by the user. Counterparts of MFS and XSS have been defined. They allow the identification, on the one hand, of the causes of the problem and, on the other hand, of alternative queries whose results are of reasonable size and therefore can be directly and easily used in the decision making process.All our propositions have been validated with a set of experiments on different uncertain and large-scale knowledge bases (WatDiv and LUBM). We have also used several Triplestores to conduct our tests.

This thesis introduces the concept of living exhibitions:continuously evolving museum exhibitions that are cooperativelydeveloped and evaluated by teams of museum professionals andvisitor representatives. The author argues that the livingexhibition design process should draw its inspiration frommultiple resources, including current research on museumlearning, interaction principles and technology. As acase-in-point, the thesis provides a description of how suchresults have inspired the design of The Well of Inventions, apublic installation at the Museum of Science and Technology inStockholm. Furthermore, the thesis describes how an evaluationmethodology from cooperative design was adopted andsuccessfully applied within the museum domain. The ultimate aimof the work is to increase the opportunities for communicationbetween museum professionals and their audiences. / NR 20140805

Magister Educationis - MEd / Euclidean geometry was recently re-introduced as a compulsory topic in the Mathematics Curriculum for learners in the Further Education and Training (FET) band in 2012. The diagnostic analysis reports on the National Senior Certificate (NSC) Mathematics Paper 2 examinations since 2014 has repeatedly expressed concern of the poor performance of leaners in proof and reasoning items linked to circle geometry. Various efforts have been made to examine the composition of the curriculum to find ways of motivating learners in the study of circle geometry and enhancing their performance but not much has been realized. The use of technology or cooperative learning approaches for the teaching of geometry is beneficial for pedagogical purposes, particularly for improving learners’ performance in geometry. Hence, this study investigated the impact of using technology through cooperative learning on learners’ performance on grade circle 11 geometry. It was thus an attempt to focus on blending these two teaching methods with an emphasis on the use of technology. The research took place at a Khayelitsha school and the scope of technology was limited to using a mathematical computer programme called Heymath. This research was grounded on the cognitive level framework that is used by the Department of Basic Education (DBE) in the setting of National Senior examination mathematics papers, as well as the set of social constructivist views of mathematics teaching and learning. In the case of the latter, both social constructivism and cognitive constructivism views were considered and applied for the purposes of this study. Using a positivist paradigm, this convergent parallel mixed methods study employed a quasi-empirical design, where the control group consisted of a group 26 grade 11 learners who were comparable to the group of 27 grade learners that made up the experimental group.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第19120号 / 情博第566号 / 新制||情||99(附属図書館) / 32071 / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)准教授 松原 繁夫, 教授 田島 敬史, 教授 鹿島 久嗣 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM