Despite conflicting evidence regarding advanced motor behaviour in black African infants, very few comparative studies have been published. Reliable developmental norms for local populations are essential for the early identification of developmental disabilities. In this study the sample consisted of 681 black and 741 white infants drawn proportionally from the Child Health Care Clinics in the northern areas of greater Cape Town. Babies were sampled in specified age-intervals between the ages of 16 and 1170 days. Variables studied were sex, birth-ranking, weight-percentile at the time of testing, marital status of the mother, parents' education and occupation, family size and family income. The demographic characteristics of the sample were compared with those of the population as a whole, based upon the 1980 census. The testing instruments were the gross and fine motor-adaptive sections of the Denver Developmental Screening Test, supplemented by another 21 items representing reflex reactions or specific components of movement. These supplementary items were pre-tested for inter- and intra-observer reliability. The percentage of children responding to the different tests at different ages was determined by probit analysis or, where more appropriate, by non-parametric logistic regression. Differences between the black and white South African infants were subjected to further statistical analysis, as was the contribution of the different variables to the attainment age. Comparison of the performance of the South African infants with the Denver norms showed that both black and white babies were in advance of the Denver children on the majority of fine motor items. The black infants were also considerably advanced in gross motor behaviour; the white infants less markedly so. In the very few (3) items in which the Denver children excelled, doubts exist regarding either scoring criteria or cultural suitability. Comparative analysis of the two South African samples identified certain consistent developmental trends. The black infants performed better on basic grasping patterns whereas the white infants were advanced in manipulative skills. The black infants were advanced on gross motor behaviour in the first year but were overtaken by the white group on learned gross motor skills in the second and third year, with the exception of items requiring physical strength. Very little correlation could be shown between motor achievement and socio- economic factors. Differences appear to be largely due to child-handling practices and experiential learning, but ethnic characteristics may well play a role in the advanced early gross motor development of the black infant. Heavier infants also performed better in both groups, indicating nutritional influences. The clinical implications of the findings are discussed and recommendations made for implementation and for further research.

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Students tend to choose a field of study in which they believe they possess the most skills by comparing their performance across different domains, such as math and English. These intraindividual comparisons between domains are known as dimensional comparisons (Möller & Marsh, 2013). There are individual differences in dimensional comparisons, such that some students engage in stronger comparisons than others do, yet few studies have examined the sources of these individual differences. In addition to objective performance, students sometimes also receive subjective feedback (e.g., praise) from parents and teachers. However, it is unknown whether and how this feedback influences dimensional comparisons to shape students’ domain-specific motivational beliefs. Therefore, we first examined whether theories of intelligence (TOIs) moderated dimensional comparison processes in different age groups in two studies. We then investigated whether receiving disproportionate praise in different domains affected students’ domain-specific motivational beliefs. Results showed that incremental TOI moderated math grades’ relation to verbal competence self-concepts in 10th and 11th graders (N = 140). It also moderated verbal grades’ relation to verbal intrinsic values in 1st- to 5th-year college students (N = 136). However, we did not find such moderations in other age groups. Regarding the praise manipulation, 7th to 9th graders (N = 108) showed heightened verbal competence self-concepts after receiving praise on either math or verbal performance. First- to fifth-year college students also showed increased verbal intrinsic values after receiving praise on verbal performance. TOI moderated students’ responses to praise manipulations. These studies shed light on students’ development of domain-specific motivational beliefs and inspire future research. / Psychology

The problem of testing multiple hypotheses at once is called the problem of multiple testing. We focused on comparing more than two means in one- way analysis of variance, also known as ANOVA. We dealt with the Tukey me- thod, the Hothorn-Bretz-Westfall method, the bootstrap-based methods and also the Bonferroni method and its modification by the Holm method, the last two methods being popular mainly for their simplicity. We focused in detail on the asymptotic behavior of these methods and then compared them using si- mulations in terms of compliance with the prescribed level and in terms of average strength. Bonferroni's method, which is conservative, is known to lose strength compared to other methods. However, its modification of Holm's method, which is also conservative, in some cases by its strength equates to other more complex methods. 1

Recent technological advances in fields like medicine and genomics have produced high-dimensional data sets and a challenge to correctly interpret experimental results. The Optimal Discovery Procedure (ODP) (Storey 2005) builds on the framework of Neyman-Pearson hypothesis testing to optimally test thousands of hypotheses simultaneously. The method relies on the assumption of normally distributed data; however, many applications of this method will violate this assumption. This thesis investigates the sensitivity of this method to detection of significant but nonnormal data. Overall, estimation of the ODP with the method described in this thesis is satisfactory, except when the nonnormal alternative distribution has high variance and expectation only one standard deviation away from the null distribution.

Clinical Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) practices seek to make improvements in embryo quality and resultant procedural success rates. There is a significant variance in live birth rates among clinics nationwide. The goal of this thesis is make comparisons of embryo quality among clinics and understand these differences. This analysis focuses on the stage between egg retrieval and embryo transfer. Because the currently accepted embryo scoring methods are not directly proportional to performance, a new scoring methodology is proposed and applied. Data provided by the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) consisting of 36,836 patient cycles from 40 anonymous clinics nationwide is considered. After necessary reductions are made, the data is anatomized to link each embryo transferred to an implantation probability. A score is generated for each morphology grouping based on the average implantation rate of that group. This score is used as the basis for clinic comparisons. Top-performing clinics (in terms of live birth rates in patients agedold) are then shown to both produce embryos of higher score and achieve better results from embryos of identical morphology.

Pairwise comparison matrices (PCMs) play a key role in multi-criteria decision making, especially in the analytic hierarchy process. It could be necessary for an expert to compare alternatives based on various criteria. However, for a variety of reasons, such as lack of time or insufficient knowledge, it may happen that the expert cannot provide judgments on all pairs of alternatives. In this case, an incomplete pairwise comparison matrix is formed. In the first research part, an optimization algorithm is proposed for the optimal completion of an incomplete PCM. It is intended to numerically minimize a constrained eigenvalue problem, in which the objective function is difficult to write explicitly in terms of variables. Numerical simulations are carried out to examine the performance of the algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is capable of solving the minimization of the constrained eigenvalue problem. In the second part, a comparative analysis of eleven completion methods is studied. The similarity of the eleven completion methods is analyzed on the basis of numerical simulations and hierarchical clustering. Numerical simulations are performed for PCMs of different orders considering various numbers of missing comparisons. The results suggest the existence of a cluster of five extremely similar methods, and a method significantly dissimilar from all the others. In the third part, the filling in patterns (arrangements of known comparisons) of incomplete PCMs based on their graph representation are investigated under given conditions: regularity, diameter and number of vertices, but without prior information. Regular and quasi-regular graphs with minimal diameter are proposed. Finally, the simulation results indicate that the proposed graphs indeed provide better weight vectors than alternative graphs with the same number of comparisons. This research problem’s contributions include a list of (quasi-)regular graphs with diameters of 2 and 3, and vertices from 5 up to 24.

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