Potatoes are a capital-intensive crop. A farmer who is considering expanding his potato acreage must carefully consider revenue requirements to offset the high costs of raising the crop. A method to forecast annual farm potato prices would be useful not only to the farmer, who is considering potato acreage expansion (or contraction), but also to the potato buyers. Seven forecasting models were considered: (1) a simultaneous equation model (with five equations); (2) a Box-Jenkins type ARIMA model; (3) an exponential smoothing model; (4) a moving-ave rage model; (5) a trend model; (6) an "opposite" model; and (7) a current. or naive, model. The results reveal the following three things: (I) The "best" model was the trend model. This model gave the most accurate one-period out-of-sample forecasts of the models tested (as measured by the mean absolute error (MAE), the root mean squared error (RMSE), and Theil's U2 statistics). The simultaneous equation model could be considered as the next best model. (2) The forecast for the average Utah farm potato price for 1992 was about $5.40 per cwt. (3) The average Utah farm potato price for 1993 should be in the $5.51 to $5.95 range (the forecasts from the trend and simultaneous equation models, respectively).

South Africa since the liberation in 1994 has faced a lot of changes. The changes include being a member of the international community. As part of the international community, South Africa is finding itself largely faced by the challenges associated with this position. Looking at other countries South Africa is realizing that the world is looking at better ways of educating their people and organizing their education and training systems so that they might gain the edge in an increasingly competitive economic global environment. Success and survival in such a world demands that South Africa has a national education and training system that provides quality learning and promotes the development of a nation that is committed to life-long learning. Institutions of higher education in South Africa are currently changing their present education system to conform to a Competency-Based Training (CBT) system. This system has only been planned but not implemented yet and it is not clear how CBT will be implemented, especially how the learners are going to be assessed. Competency-Based Assessment (CBA) is an integral part of CBT that needs particular attention if the new system is to succeed. The key aims of this thesis are to investigate the current assessment policy and practice at the Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT) underpinned by Competency- Based Training system. The project will describe and analyze the Competency-Based Assessment system used within CIT's CBT system. The project will focus on: Observing classroom practice of CBA, analyzing students' and teachers' perceptions of their involvement with CBA, and analyzing employers' perceptions of the effectiveness of CBA. The main aim of this thesis is to suggest recommendations for an assessment model that will be suitable to implement within hospitality training institutions in South Africa.

As a result of increase in global average surface temperature, abnormalities in different hydroclimatic components such as evapotranspiration, stream flow and precipitation have been experienced. So investigation has to be carried out to assess the hidden abnormality subsisting in the hydroclimatological time series in the form of trend. This thesis broadly consists of following four parts. The first part comprises of a detailed review of various trend detection approaches. Approaches incorporating the effect of serial correlation for trend detection and interesting developments concerning various non parametric approaches are focused explicitly. Recent trends in annual, monthly, and seasonl (winter, pre-monsoon, monsoon and post-monsoon) Tmax and Tmin have been analyzed considering three time slots viz. 1901-2003, 1948-2003 and 1970-2003. For this purpose, time series of Tmax and Tmin of India as a whole and for seven homogeneous regions, viz. Western Himalaya (WH), Northwest (NW), Northeast (NE), North Central (NC), East coast (EC), West coast (WC) and Interior Peninsula (IP) were originally considered. During the last three decades significant upward trend in Tmin is found to be present in all regions considered either at annual or seasonal level. Sequential Mann Kendall test revealed that most of the significant upward trends both in Tmax and Tmin began after 1970. The second part discusses about numerous climate models from both Coupled Model Inter comparison Project-5 and 3 (i.e. CMIP5, CMIP3) and their skills in simulating Indian climate and assessing their performance using various evaluation measures. Performances of climate models were evaluated for whole of India and over all the individual grid points covering India. The newly defined metric symbolized as Skill_All is an intersection of the three metrics i.e. Skill_r, Skill_s and Skill_rmse, is used for overall model evaluation analysis. A notable enhancement of Skill_All for CMIP5 over CMIP3 was found. After overall model evaluation study, Compromise Programming, a distance based decision making technique, was employed to rank the GCMs gridwise. Entropy method was employed to obtain weights of the chosen indicators. Group decision making methodology was used to arrive at a consensus based on the ranking pattern obtained by individual grid points. In the third part, a detailed detection and attribution (D&A) analysis is performed to determine the causes of changes in seasonal Tmax and Tmin during the period 1950-2005. This formal D&A exercise helps in providing better insight (than trend detection analysis) into the nature of the observed seasonal temperature changes. It was noticed that the emergence of observed trend was more pronounced in Tmin compared to Tmax. Although observed changes were not solely associated with one specific causative factor, most of the changes in Tmin are above the bounds of natural internal climate variability. Finally in the fourth part, to understand the climate change impact on the hydrological cycle, a spatiotemporal change detection study of potential evapotranspiration (PET) along with Tmax and Tmin over India has been performed. Climatology patterns for PET confirmed a greater PET rate during the month of March, April, May and June. A significant increasing trend in both Tmax and Tmin (Tmin being more) was observed in more number of grid points compared to PET. Significant positive trends in Tmax, Tmin and PET were observed over most of the grid points in the IP region. Heterogeneities existed in the spatiotemporal variability of PET over all India. This spatio-temporal change detection study would be helpful for present and future water resources management.